Purchasing drivers - the most overlooked step in fixing your Product-Market fit problem.
This basic market research technique determines whether your product eventually morphs into the baby that wails or the monster that howls.
Many of us have been part of failed product launches in our careers or will be in the future.
And one aspect that has always caught my attention is how poorly teams post-mortem their failures.
We mostly blame parameters that manifest as a tangible output - shoddy product, undifferentiated positioning, exorbitant pricing, poor packaging, and flawed go-to-market execution. And sometimes even that awesome competition.
How often have we gone back and dissected the inputs that led to that failure?
My favorite one is going back to how well we really understood the buyer in the first place.
Let’s start from the start.
It’s not uncommon across organizations to lead with the product (aka solution to a buyer’s problem) and then figure out a problem that it could solve. Wrong approach.
Savvy Startup founders and marketers start with a market-first, research-based approach. In fact, they understand the category in which their product operates well enough to even sometimes envision a new category.
Think of Purchasing drivers research as a guide that you keep referring to when you develop your product capabilities, and eventually positioning.
The objective of this research is to understand the motivations your buyers have when evaluating products within a specific category.
Category drivers are those expectations that your buyers carry from any product that dares to position itself as part of a category.
Understand it. Very well. Because you don’t want them to go……………after you launch the product.
It is a simple concept - if your product belongs to the Cola category, you need to look (dark), taste (sweet), and be priced in a similar range as other products in that category.
It gets a lot more complex when you sell B2B tech.
Buyers choose a product based on a bunch of parameters. Their active memory has about 5-6 criteria that they use to shortlist and select a product. And if you prod them enough, you realize that they also assign an Importance score to each parameter.
Okay. So you have conducted this short, online survey and have the results back with you.
What does the output look like?
A bit simplistic but this is the kind of first-level output you should aim for from this buyer immersion exercise.
Sample: B2B Tech
At this stage, it is important to complement this quantitative survey with in-person interviews with your buyer group. In-person interviews provide valuable context on why and how your buyer thinks about these parameters. Your product UX, positioning, and demand-gen messaging will lean on these insights.
But hold on.
This is also what you need to know when you analyze the results -
The market leader in your category is the one that established these category drivers
The market leader in your category, via marketing, is the one that oriented your buyers to prioritize and assign the importance to these different drivers
So let’s say you are this new player in this super-crowded category. Player Z.
And like a baby lost in a shopping mall, you believe you don’t have too many options except to wail. But some babies? They howl. And some others howl like monsters. And they get attention.
And therein lies the difference.
The Wailing Baby
You go by what the market tells you and introduce your product in that wolf-infested jungle. You rely on your product team to hit the market with marginal feature improvements based on these drivers. You try to keep up with everyone else. And if you have money, you spend Ad dollars to create a ‘perceptible’ product differentiation (real differentiation is not possible because you are just keeping up with the competition). But unless you are in an oligopoly, you realize that things don’t move much.
And the market leader? Hardly cares.
The Howling Baby
You now have a superpower. Which is that you ask questions.
Why should “Ease of use” rank as low as No. 5? Can I compete on that dimension?
Can a product that is more intuitive to use create a credible differentiation in this crowded market? Is that differentiated ownable?
Do easy-to-use products impact higher and faster product adoption and eventually lower TCO?
Clearly, you have now decided to upend the rank order of importance in buyers’ minds. You get to work to lug that category driver struggling at No.5 to No.3 to No.1. And with some good marketing, you begin to see a shift in what parameters buyers now consider important.
You know you are doing well because the market leader starts noticing you.
And then you have the Howling Monster
This takes more guts. And persistence.
Here you make your buyers think about parameters they never considered important before. How? By introducing a new one.
Marketo, the marketing automation platform did this incredibly well. They introduced “lead nurturing” as the new driver to help marketers show RoI.
Another example could be a “Bespoke Consulting services” in a product-driven market. You can pull together all the data that you have of your customers to create benchmarking on key business parameters. To the customers who buy this service, you provide industry benchmarking data to compare themselves with. And they buy this because it keeps them informed and ahead.
But it does not end there.
Now you go on to reposition the Market leader. You make noise about how the Market leader has got it wrong until now, how they have left their customers behind, how the world has progressed and why your buyers need to adapt to this new world.
Here, your objective is to get the newly introduced driver toward Rank 1. You would require considerable product muscle and marketing acumen to get this executed well.
The market leader would not know what hit them.
Exactly what would make you happy, isn’t it?
Most startup founders and marketing teams skip this exercise. Apart from the outsized impact on your potential product-market & customer-product fit, this baseline model helps avoid stalemates in decision-making and provides confidence to your marketing & sales teams.
So why don’t most marketers do this? Depleted budget, time, or both. And a sprinkle of hubris.