Marketing new products and services is vital for most companies. Many marketers, however, donrrrt know that fast, inexpensive guerrilla techniques for market concept testing can easily replace cumbersome market research, saving a lot of money and amount of time in the procedure.

An easy Model For Strategic Thinking

In order to test a new market concept you must have one, right? Use this simple, intuitive strategy model for understanding the dynamics in the marketplace you’re looking at. In the beginning you merely sort out the model applying what you already know or strongly suspect holds true concerning the market. Then you return and support each and every assumption you’re holding with market data.

- Do you know the trends in my industry?
- What’s driving these trends?
- What exactly are we currently doing about the trends?
- What are our competitors doing about the trends?
- What could we be doing concerning the trends to increase our profits?

During this process you’re squarely within the analytical phase of selling. You’re creating ties between your idea and a market which will welcome or reject it. Do your projects carefully at this stage or you’ll find yourself with every marketer’s nightmare…a product or service that’s an answer to some question nobody’s asked!

Collecting Unbiased Customer Data
There are a couple of ways to approach this. It’s recommended that you use both methods which means that your information is going to be balanced between primary (completely from the client) and secondary (conclusions from experts). The aim here is to obviously understand your WOW! and just how you’ll prove it.

The first thing to understand (and several marketers don’t) is that clients are a social process. Meaning, to do this successfully, you will be spending the majority of your time dialoguing with individuals…not noodling around on the web. If the considered this provokes anxiety you’re in good company. Most people don’t relish speaking with strangers but successful people in only about every profession just bite the bullet and get it done in whatever way.

Step 1: The web Part
To establish a beachhead, and never duplicate effort, spend about 10% of the time you’ve allocated for this project internet research. The objective is to obtain a baseline understanding of available information about current offerings and substitutes in this market space. You also want to view the various marketing and purchasers channels. It’s especially good to understand about substitute choices your prospects might make instead of buying your products. It’s good to look at the whole chessboard, not just the squares immediately surrounding your next-move.

At this stage we’re searching for available industry reports and similar expert analysis of:

� Do you know the trends in my industry?
� What’s driving these trends?
� What exactly are our competitors doing concerning the trends?

You’ll find out what’s available by doing these searches:

1. [industry name] or [product/service] or [major competitor], financial analysts
2. [industry name] or [product/service] or [major competitor], researching the market
3. [industry name] or [product/service] or [major competitor], Hoover’s
4. [industry name] or [product/service] or [major competitor], [name of local newspaper]
5. [industry name] or [product/service] or [major competitor], business news
6. [industry name] or [product/service] or [major competitor], industry news
7. [industry name] or [product/service] or [major competitor], skillfully developed
8. Run similar searches in your favorite social networking in case those entries weren’t acquired through the search engines like google.

If something about your subject continues to be written, pod casted, YouTube’d, tweeted, blogged or discussed in a conference you will discover it with these searches. Sift through what you find and plug each bit of key information in to the 5-point strategy planning model we’re using. Now you will see a shape starting to form around your strategy model.

Step two: Produce a Discussion Guideline
This is what you will use as a guideline in talking with potential purchasers of the market concept. In essence this is actually the heart and soul of the project. The concern and accuracy you place into this step will determine whether your market concept test results are accurate.

Fundamental essentials objectives:

1. Understand whether your WOW! can be a WOW!
2. Understand industry and getting trends related to your market concept…and what’s driving those trends.
3. Establish a view on growth opportunities for the company or division.

It is recommended that you structure your guide so that it leads to a discussion. People are more likely to unwind and talk freely about your market concept, and also the alternatives, if you are not reading questions verbatim as with an industry research survey. Sketch out five key areas of information you want. These might include:

� What do you think concerning the concept I’ve presented?
� Steer them toward their ideas on advantages and disadvantages.
� Question them what would allow it to be even better.
� What are the substitutes or alternatives including do-it-yourself and in-house solutions?
� How, where and when would you prefer to receive info on services and services such as this?
� Digital
� Traditional (print ads, industry events, telesales, etc.)
� Colleagues, friends & family
� Where can you most like to purchase something similar to this market concept?
� Steer them toward what’s the ideal venue for them, not only where alternatives can be found today.
� You’re seeking every competitive advantage you will get.
� Would terms for example financing influence their purchase decision?
� Who’s the ultimate decision maker and who else is involved in buying decision? Make reference to your notes on complex sales and remember that large consumer purchases can often involve multiple decision makers and influencers.

It is critical that you simply not approach this exercise with pre-conceived notions of what your company can or can’t do. You merely wish to visualize the best possible purchasing scenario for your new market concept. You can parse internal strengths and weaknesses later. Do not base a go/no-go decision in your weaknesses!

It may seem of many other types of questions. Just remember that most people will limit your time together to 15-30 minutes so keep the number of categories low and concentrate on going deep in each category. You could substitute different categories in subsequent calls with different people. Again, after three or four calls you’ll have a much better idea of which categories of information are the best for the purposes.

Step 3: Create A List of Potential Customers
The next is interacting directly together with your market. This can be a hugely valuable exercise for product managers, marketing managers and marketing leaders. You’ll learn more about your market concept per day of doing this than simply about anything else you might decide on, including conjoint analysis and focus groups.

The objectives with this stage are:

� understand who supports the knowledge you need
� view the role each influencer will have in a complex sale
� understand where, when, how and from whom they obtain decision influencing information

The people you have to talk to holds one or more of the following roles:

� Decision maker
� Influencer
� Approver
� User
� Deal killer

With some services and products, mostly consumer products and B2B products costing less than $1,000, you will be talking straight to the decision maker. With many other products and services you will be talking to your decision maker plus one or more of the other kinds of buyer. If you are unfamiliar with the mechanics of a complex sale you’ll need to pause the project until you’re caught up. Just do a search on ‘complex sale’ and you’ll find what you ought to know. This is critical for B2B and higher-end or even more complex consumer products and services.

Your objective is to talk to at least 100 people who have direct relation to the purchase of the forex market concept you’re testing. If you are testing a consumer concept (for example tax preparation software) start speaking with people in your circle of influence including friends, family members, colleagues and professional contacts. You’ll qualify your quest participants based on who prepares his/her own taxes and whether a software method is used. Once you have the list and their telephone numbers you need to move on to Step three.

If you’re testing a B2B market concept you have to go straight to the companies to whom you’ll be selling your products or services. You might have several contacts in these companies but you’ll spend the bulk of your time and effort talking to people you don’t know. Be in advance about your mission and never disguise yourself like a student doing research for any school assignment or project. You need to be yourself and become honest in describing what you are doing.

If you are contacting a company start where one can get a foothold. In case your market concept is a new and alternative to traditional inventory control systems in mid-tier companies, likely you will be speaking with people in logistics, purchasing, operations and accounting. Visit the company’s website and list what they are called of key people in those functions if they are identified. Then call the main number or department number, if listed, and get to speak with that person. You may get through or you may not. Regardless of which team you talk with, even if it is the main switchboard operator, just give him/her your 25 word elevator pitch on which you’re doing and get who they’d recommend talking to.

You will notice that after calling three or four companies your level of comfort will rise dramatically and you will get through more regularly to individuals who have the info you need.

Summary
This seems like odd work with marketing people right? However the benefits of this approach are many.

First, it gets marketing people immersed in the marketplace. This is much better than the superficial practice of having marketing people shadow a sales person for any day or two once a year.

Second, it gives marketing people an affinity for that role from the sales team. It helps them understand selling so that they, consequently, can work with salespeople on devising strategies to overcome resistance and objections.

Third it gives marketing people solid confidence plus much more enthusiasm for introducing new concepts if they have discovered industry dynamics and purchaser habits and practices. This confidence will spread to other areas of the company, giving the marketing and product teams more support than they would have otherwise.

So yes, it’s a truly different approach but it is impressive and requires a lot a shorter period and money than traditional researching the market.

Case Study
A startup company in California has a new market concept for virus protection solutions for iApp (applets for Apple’s iPhones) vendors. This startup is not wanting to spend $50-100K on formal researching the market so they’ve decided to perform the project in-house.

They intend to assess the current competitive landscape for iApp virus protection by:
� Performing a search for iApp virus protection vendors, if any
� Interviewing a small amount of current iApp creators
o Perform the trends they’re seeing advise a market chance of our concept?
o What do they know about current solutions on the market?
o How would our offering solve a current problem or pain point better than other offerings?
o What would they pay to resolve this problem or pain point?
o What level of disruption or complexity can the organization handle for installation and testing?

Next, the startup will assess current substitutes for their concept. They’ll do this by conducting a search and gathering product specifications, distribution models and other key information for every of the potential competitors. A number of these details they will curently have from collecting customer data from the web and other resources they used. The rest of it they will need to go after utilizing the same information gathering techniques. They are some possible insights gained from their efforts:

� Their new market concept would need feature adjustments
� Their new market concept would be targeted at iAPP creators only
� They can lean heavily on internet marketing instead of traditional marketing
� A software application pricing model (pay based on consumption) would give them a strategic advantage
� A unique guarantee would give them a strategic advantage
� Acquisitions would not be a resource of competitive advantage near term

They presently has enough information to create a go or no-go decision. If it’s a “go” the next step is to ensure there’s plenty of profit the bank, or arriving, to fund development and commercialization. Prior to the software writers start working, though, the team needs to create a marketing requirements document along with a commercial release process to ensure they won’t exhaust money before sales revenue kicks in.