I wanted to share a concept I have around the realms of potential customers organisations could focus on for future growth. In my experience working with product teams, I have built a certain level of awareness regarding what I consider to be 4 most important realms of potential customers…

These are the 4 I believe key to be key to explore and understand in order to grow the product to its true potential. Let’s dive into each realm and explore a little bit…

In this realm customers are not satisfied with the current product they are consuming. They are customers who are on the edge of leaving and will soon move into the ‘Just Left’ Realm. For these customer it’s key we understand their current realm and how they perceive it. It’s important we ask powerful questions to help us evolve the product to retain these customers as the cost for getting them back is far greater. Some of the powerful questions I suggest are below:

In this space we want to do as much as possible to keep these customers in a sustainable way, that is not by offering them a discount or monetary offering. The issues with the product will go much deeper than this and if we don’t get to that deeper level we will lose them anyway at some point.

Now lets look at the realm of customers who have just left..

In this realm customers have just left the product as it wasn’t meeting their needs. These could be customers who have been very unsatisfied with the product or simply attracted to another product in the market. Again for us it’s key to understand this realm and what led our customer to move into it. Asking powerful questions will help us build a clearer picture of this. Some of the powerful questions I suggest are below:

It’s really important to understand what led to these customers leaving and the sooner we engage them the better, as the quality of the feedback will be far greater as it will still be fresh and alive for them. We can get some really useful information here to reduce the attrition from our products and thus reduce expenditure of trying to attract them back. I have seen this be very costly indeed and is a short lived gain as once the reward wears off they leave again.

Now let’s look at the realm of customers who are just not interested in the product itself.

These customers are the ones who are currently using products in the market we are in, however are just not interested in our product. This is untapped potential for us as this is a part of the market we haven’t been able to attract to date. If successful it increases our market share and overall success of the product. Let’s get close to the customers and explore their realm, asking them powerful questions to go deeper. Some of the powerful questions I suggest are below:

It’s important we discover the drivers for the customers to be using the products they are and what keeps them using. This will give us insight into not only the attractor points but also the reason for customers being loyal to the product they are with. We can then use this to find new ways to attract those customers to our product and increase market share.

Now let’s explore the final realm of Not Considered customers..

These are the customers who we have assumed would never use our product as its not a suitable market for them. Here we can look to identify the markets these customer do currently operate in and what attracts them to it. Once we have identified them we can then ask them powerful questions to explore their realm. Some of the powerful questions I suggest are below:

If we are able to identify the ways in which we can attract customers from other markets this would open up a whole sea of possibilities for growth.

At the heart of this whole model is Customer Intimacy; this is the magic ingredient to deeply understand our customers and how we can better serve them. I share this as it’s something I have created that I believe would be greatly beneficial for organisations to explore 😊

Thanks for reading