Positioning your ideas towards customer pain points

No idea (or) business can become successful unless you know what your customer pain points are. Once you start visualizing your idea as business, you must prepare a road map on how to start a business. This will help you build strong confidence about you own your idea and how to position it as a business. The biggest challenge is always, it doesn’t matter how strong your idea/solution is, it only matters how good you are at positioning it to your customers.

The art of positioning is the most creative art in selling and this is exactly the kind of skill you should look at any sales person. Now, as an owner of your idea/solution/business, the responsibility lies with you. Positioning needs to create a strong impact unless it creates impact, you are least known or accepted by your customers. Here is where the pain points play a main role.

The easiest way to get any customers attention is to talk about their problem and then position your solution against their problem. If you are able to successfully do this well, then you have covered most part of the sales negotiations. If you could define their pain points into bullet points and if you could keep your solution short and precise, you are almost done with successful selling. This needs an enormous amount of research. Understanding of your own business well will help to ease this research.

Most business fails because the business owners were not able to create faith in customer towards a clear understanding about their problems. When you have a clear understanding about your business, you will be able to easily chart down the benefits, and how can it address the pain points and when the same solution qualify to address many customers pain points, then it becomes a successful business

Let me quote one of the most revolutionary examples, the Amazon Kindle, and idea which then turned into one of the most successful business solving the pain points of million customers

• What is your idea (or) business? 

Answer: The idea is a digital book (or) digital paper which saves paper made of trees

• What are the benefits of your idea?

Answer: Easy to carry, easy to handle and easy access to huge number of news, papers, books, blogs and articles available in the internet, anytime and anywhere access and E-library

• How does it help your customers?

Answer: Kindle is a paper feel digital device. Customers get access to millions of e-books, through e-library, so accessing and maintain your e-books become so easy and you can choose your likes from millions of choices.

I know there are still lots of benefits but let me focus on examples of arriving at pain points. When your idea has benefits then it is easy to list out the pain points. There is no solution without pain. For the given example, the few of the pain points that I can easily think of are:

1.      Accessing and maintaining library becomes time consuming and non-affordable, huge investment required for space, furniture, and maintenance
2.      Too difficult to find the choices of likes and interest, very limited book retail outlets available
3.      Stock management and cost is additional risk and headache

If one could articulate the below three questions well, then the chances of winning any deal become very easy.

1.      What is your idea?
2.      What are the customer pain points that your solution addresses?
3.      How does it help your customers?

But if you think this is it, then you are wrong. When you think your ideas as an individual solution, then may be yes, but when you visualize your idea as a business to address multiple customers, then you have expand your understanding from market and competition perspective.

It is the duty of every successful business person to know, if there are similar solutions available in the market, are you a pioneer? Are there any competitors? And if yes, how are you different from your competitions. SWOT Analysis and QQBPI - Competition Analysis will help you to identify your Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats and to win over the competition

IVGVI Analysis

I-V-G-V-I Analysis:

The I-V-G-V-I Analysis will help you to understand and position your business well. This analysis will help any business to build a sound business strategy. This analysis will help businesses to understand how to relate the idea or the business into market standards

This analysis is usually performed by owner of the idea (or) entrepreneurs (or) the head of sales, business development and business strategy

Industry: The term Industry refers to the line of business or categorization of business. For example: Healthcare, Retail, Manufacturing, High-Tech, Information Technology and etc are the different industry categories. It is very much important to understand to which Industry does your business belongs to, this is very critical exercise.

Vertical: The term Vertical here refers to the Industry sub-set. Most businesses share the shadow of other industries, it is very important to clearly understand what their parent industry and their subset. For example: Med Plus is a medical retail outlet, it is very important to understand the parent industry and the subset here. Since the business is retail, the parent industry is Retail and the subset is Healthcare because of its nature.

Again understanding your own business is very important at-least to communicate others what your business is

Geography: The term Geography here refers to the location of business. The manufacturing location has lot of strategic reasons. Multiple factors should be kept under consideration before identifying the right geographic location that includes resources, skills, infrastructure and etc. For example: Most car manufacturers manufacture cars in India and supply it to other Asian countries.

Vision: The above three analysis would give you enough idea on what and where to start your business. Now it is time to articulate to yourself on the vision of your idea. The term vision here refers to the difference between your current situation and your future. How would you like your business to grow in the next one year? The growth can be either qualitative (or) Quantitative. It can be anything like size, revenue, goodwill, infrastructure and etc. For example: Facebook had a vision on X number of users before they got into revenue model. Most start-ups would prefer to have short term vision; it can be either Half-yearly (or) Yearly.  The vision statement would help you to evaluate on the right investment figures.

Investment: The term Investment here refers to investment for manufacturing or production or to start the business. With the above 4 analysis, you will be able to evaluate the cost of investment considering the industry, vertical, geography and vision

This exercise is very important because this helps you to

1. Deeper understanding of your own business
2. Creates the ability to confidently communicate others about your business
3. Helps you to easily relate your business to the market standards
4. Helps everybody to map what you do
5. And very importantly helps you to identify your customers

You may easily find more references on SWOT analysis in Google, I will cover the SWOT Analysis for business in my next blog.