13 0716 webinar q & a product market fit and public relations special topic

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Webinar Q & A Session – Product Market Fit - Worksheet 2

Tuesday, July 16, 2013


Q & A Session 1- Product / Market Fit

• Q 1. What if your customers don't have a pain point defined?– How to you identify a pain point? You should identify what is your biggest problem you are facing,

not a pain point.• Q 2 . Could you elaborate your comment about the difficulty in dealing with a very large company

unless you are $50M and above in revenue?– Business is what you negotiate. Large corporations are also interested in smaller organization. The

important thing is to find the right connections.• Q 3. If your customers are the general public end users, how do you get to them after you've exhausted

friends and families?– Specify, define, clarify! It is always better to be specific rather than general.

• Q 4. In the power generation space, there are maybe 2000 large plants across the US, but only a handful of plant owners, would it help to classify individual plants as customers instead of plant owners?– You should classify Owners and Stakeholders. Map the chain of decision. Sometimes, companies are

managed by hedge funds, so you should look at the existing decision problem.– If you want to know who you should be interviewing, it is the plant management – operators.

• Q 5. If you have many small customers (people) can aggregators (affinity groups) be a way to learn about how individuals might act?– If the group is of interest to you, then yes. You have to understand their buying process in a very

specific way - why they buy, what channels they are using, what problems they encounter. This level of specificity is needed.



• Q 6. How do you avoid the tendency to choose "everyone" is a potential customer when selecting the potential segment?– Talk to the customer, look what they are spending on. Understand what they are doing in their

current buying process. Look at the current line from the bottom up perspective while discovering new customers.

• Q 7. We are trying to ask discovery questions of telecomm companies' UPS needs but are have difficulty in getting to the right people for informed feedback. Do you have suggestions of how to reach the buyers or decision makers?– One way is to get your mentor to identify a person who understands telecomm industry. He might

direct you to right people, suggest names, titles within telecomm companies. Get your mentor to get a specialist!

• Q 8. What if your product users are not the paying customers but channels/partners may buy on behalf of the end users?– Look at the end customer as a primary driver. Partners (Intermediaries) may help to reach that

customer only. Intermediaries add value. If that channel is paying, they are your customer, as long as they are the paying customer.

• Q 9. We are restricting our initial customers to best credit only. Should we be more flexible?– They might be a large opportunity. You do not have to exclude them, but you need to protect

yourself. Bring in the intermediary to reduce your risks. You have to know who can mitigate your risk point.



• Q 10. Is it the case that people want what they know more than know what they want?– It depends how you ask questions. It is important to understand the buying process (what, why) and

what could that be improved, be cheaper, faster or better. It is just too general to ask the customer what they want. Then you run into the question that they want what they know.

– It is also about sales training, people buy people first.– Ask your customer not the pain points, but specific questions, open ended questions, let them

describe the system.


Q & A Webinar- Public Relations

• Q 1. Is information "cheat sheet" an acceptable etiquette in PR communication and media interviews?– Yes, it can be a very useful message, it is a great way how to promote your company.

• Q 2. Is there a best day of the week to issue a press release?– Generally speaking – later in the week works better.

• Q 3. How many news releases are too many in one week? We had three news worth events in one week and were concerned on sending them all out.– To maximize the chance to be news worthy, you should constantly order your events.

• Q 4. How do you measure the effectiveness of PR today, understanding the thinking on ROI is always changing?– There are a lot of ways how to measure the effectiveness of PR - numbers of sales, increase of likes on FB

page. It depends on the specific campaign and the purpose. • Q 5. 2. Would sr. reporters have more than enough connections and materials and not story hungry? Should I

target Jr. reporters instead?– Senior reporters have more knowledge, but junior reporters are more open – you can build a long-term

relationship with them. But Juniors don’t stay in the position for a long time, they like hopping to another field.


Q & A Webinar Public Relations

• Q 6. When does a start-up company launch a website/social media? More specifically, at what point during product development do you make yourself "aware" to the public? Is it too early if the product is not done so you have a website that says "we have a great idea, but it is not done". Is that more harmful than helpful? What is the optimum time to "go public"?– There is no wrong or no good answer. It depends. You should trust your time. Once you start, go specific.

Use questions with a very strong strategy. It should be tangible, concrete and very deliverable.