Without customers, there cannot be cash inflow, and without cash inflow, we cannot stay in business. Business growth is one of the major focus areas of every business out there and for a small, young business like us, growth is crucial. If we do not acquire new customers, we will die.
We spent a great deal of April solely focused on growth. Just like Elon Musk who moved all his staff at Tesla into sales temporarily, we also actually deployed everyone into sales. The mission: growing our customer base.
It has really been an interesting endeavour, working like that, talking to prospective customers and getting them to patronise us. We are a stage whereby I cannot really say if we have found our product-market fit yet, one cannot rule out making another pivot on the things we do, to these end, our conversations center around the problems our target market are currently having, and what is wrong with the current solutions they have. We actually spend less time pitching and more time trying to understand our target market.
Focus on solving a problem, not selling your solution
First of all, I have been trained that as an Entrepreneur, I should focus on the problems I want to solve and not on the solutions I am building. If the solutions I propose do not resonate with the target market, it will lead to a failure. So rather than fail, I believe in pivoting to suit the target market.
Talking about the target market…
Deciding on a target market is quite a tricky affair, for starters, it has to be big enough to make a profit from, yet small enough to make it possible to reach them with available resources. We are building out interconnected products and services to help businesses come online and make more money and enjoy the convenience digital technology brings.
Such a big mission that somehow finding the small niche to use as a starting place is a daunting task in itself. Jamsa is starting off with laptop advisory services, CloudPitcher is taking off with managed WordPress hosting, bulk messaging services and ecommerce and these are services needed by any business you can ever think of. We do not have the resources to reach every business in our target Nigerian market as at now, but we are now focused on a few places.
The art of selling
Going from the first hello to the first exchange of services for cash is the real thing. We are having our arms and legs everywhere and also looking into all sorts of partnerships that will help move to the next level.
We are hunting for customers. Big time!
This post originally appeared on the Omnific Works blog: http://omnificworks.com/general/in-hunt-of-customers/
