Finding your sweetspot
Galileo was right! But how to discover those truths? How to walk straight up to the elephant in the room and tell him “You are getting in our way, move aside so we can move on’?
Galileo’s aphorism can be applied to the process of discovery required when building a digital product. What does that process look like, and how can you equip yourself to address the elephant in the corner? Here are some ways you can uncover those truths and understand where the sweetspot is for your business.
Understand your goals
‘We need a new website’ is often how a website project starts. It’s probably true, but not for the reasons you think. A website being 5 years old isn’t reason enough to change.
Actually a big driver for change could be that the sales team aren’t able to pick up new leads instantly, nor are they able to follow up on them because of your tracking and data architecture, meaning your business loses prospective clients and future revenue.
If you don’t have that conversation with the sales team, you wouldn’t know and this key piece of information will not end up in the brief. The end result being a lovely new site, but your business still losing new clients every day.
Perhaps your loyalty team isn't gathering enough data around your customers in order to build out personas of your new vs returning customers. If this truth isn’t uncovered in the initial stages of the project, you won’t know what fields to include or what data you should be tracking. Again, you will have a lovely site but will not have solved the key challenge of how to increase customer loyalty, reducing long term value and again losing revenue.
In order to uncover these key pieces of information, we suggest running a workshop with all stakeholders in the business. You will be amazed by what you learn. The smallest change could make the biggest difference.
Understanding your customers
Yes, this is important. But don’t limit yourself to knowing your most loyal customers. There will be a reason someone only purchased once from your site, or visited once and never returned. You need to find out what’s stopping them from coming back and address that.
As an aside, this reminds me of the Abraham Wald and the Missing Bullet Holes story from WWII. Anyone who’s a fan of statistics should read it. There’s a link at the bottom of this page.
Listening can of course be done through understanding your data (if you don’t understand your data, talk to us and we can set that right). But also speaking with a cross section of your customers/prospective audience. It’s amazing what can be learnt by hearing from those outside of your bubble.
We suggest running some video interviews with your prospective audiences and sending out a questionnaire to your database. The information you gather at this stage is essential if you want a digital product that gives value to all sides.
Finding the right solution
We all want something that looks great and works perfectly. However it’s not always that easy. The answers to the questions above will inform the truths of your requirement and determine your platform/technology options.
For example, if the sales team needs automatic notifications when someone makes an enquiry, is your CRM set up in a way that this information is fed back to the right people in real time? Or if your customer would like to be notified when a new product becomes available, do you have push notifications set to let them know?
It’s one thing deciding between a website or an app, it’s a totally different conversation when you take into account the needs of the many to understand what tech ticks all the necessary boxes.
If apps are your thing, I suggest you read ‘Build speed and value into your mobile app’ by our Technology Director to get under the skin of hybrid apps.
The three “Whys?”
Why change? This is something you need to ask yourself right at the start of any new project. What are the key drivers for change? A global pandemic, a bit obvious but that’s one. Or perhaps the business is changing focus from a pure product sell to a more service driven proposition to combat a reduction of your product’s market cost.
If you can identify why you need to change then it allows you to unlock the budgets you need and ensures any change you make is in line with business goals.
Why Now? Again, right at the start of the process, what’s the reason you need to make a change now, rather than wait for another year? Perhaps a new competitor has entered the market and is taking your business from you? Or if nothing changes, all of a sudden you are in breach of a new legislation in your industry. If you can identify the Why Now, it gives you a focus and a deadline to get it done.
Why Us? Admittedly, this should be Why Candyspace? The different steps of understanding your audience, understanding your stakeholders and identifying the key drivers for change are all part of our Sweetspot formula.
Our focus for any project is to identify business goals and customer needs in order to develop a product that finds the sweetspot between the two. If we can achieve that, then your customer (internal or external) will be working with you (they won’t know it of course) to help drive real business growth.
If you would like to learn more about our formula and discuss how it fits in with your business challenges, do get in touch as we’d love to chat.
Finally, here’s the link to Abraham Wald and the Missing Bullet Holes.
