CSI: Customer Triggers
How do you figure out your customers' triggers?
If you’re building a real business, this newsletter is for you. I write about the most important business-building topics while building a software startup of my own.
PS - my company has more than doubled in the past 3 weeks and are hiring... If you know any great account managers, customer success leaders, or account executives who are looking for a place to do the best & most impactful work of their lives, please let me know!
Last week, I wrote about triggers that cause people to turn into buyers. Re-read that here.
The root of all waste and evil in B2B marketing and sales:
Today, we target personas based on WHO PEOPLE ARE, not buyers based on SPECIFIC THINGS THAT HAPPEN IN THESE PEOPLE’S LIVES THAT CAUSE THEM TO NEED TO CHANGE.
To paraphrase Bob Moesta, author of Demand-Side Sales 101: Without a trigger, there is no demand.
Your ideal customers don’t want to hear from you most days of their lives. On the average day, you are annoying to them. But something happens in their world - maybe once in their career, maybe once a year - that causes them to turn into a buyer. That something is called a trigger, and building your go-to-market engine around triggers is THE way to grow efficiently.
Fortunately for you, almost nobody builds their go-to-market engine around triggers. This is a massive opportunity for your business.
This week, I’ll answer the #1 question I’ve gotten after last week’s post: “This sounds great. But how do I figure out what my customers’ triggers are?”
CSI: Customer Triggers
Here’s the question you want to answer: What sequence of events happened in your BEST customers’ worlds that caused them to buy your software?
Remember, your customers are all busy people. They have to-do lists, back-to-back Zoom meetings, fires to put out, and home lives to attend to.
But something happened in their world that caused them to open your email. Fill out your form online. Put YOU on their to-do list. Buy and become your best customers.
My recommended exercise:
List your 5-10 best customers.
For each of them, try to remember what was going on in their world when they entered your sales process. Write each story down in as much detail as possible. Reference your deal notes, reach out to your customers and interview them.
Walk through each customer’s findings with a friend who can help sharpen your thinking and find connections across each story.
Generate a few hypotheses for triggers - what caused someone to be open to buying - and signals - how you can tell a company is experiencing a trigger.
Set up lightweight “trigger tests” to see if they are real. For example, if one hypothesis is, “They bought because they just hired a Customer Success Director,” do a few weeks of LinkedIn outreach to companies hiring for a Customer Success Director. Or test different LinkedIn ads for different triggers (“Hiring for a Customer Success Leader?”) and compare the click rates & conversion rates for them.
Double down on the triggers that are working - what other signals can you find that they’ve experienced the trigger? What else can you do to “own” the trigger?
QC the triggers that are working - are they resulting in long-term, satisfied customers?
Note that if all your customers came via your VCs’ referrals, or your friends took a bet on your product through sheer goodwill… start with step 4 and proceed!