Feb 09, 2021 | Updated Feb 12, 2021
by @JoshuaNgala
This article was originally published on joshuangala's WordPress blog

Every entrepreneur has a purpose driving them to undertake a business venture.  With a reason to start a business, value proposition remains an important part of the company’s ideal.

The solution your company will offer by selling a product or service is vital to customers.

For new business owners, finding customers becomes a priority task. However, does your business plan fit into Scalabl’s 7 rules for a virtuous business model? The rules include: no investment, no financial and economic risks, no risks of hidden cost, and scalable combination of gross margin, price, and volume?

The Pareto Principle implies that 80% of your revenue results will come from just 20% of the action.  It is, therefore, important to have strategies for customer segmentation and relationships.

As an entrepreneur, customer segmentation, and persona is key. Who are you selling to and where are they? What is your target industry? What segment(s) of the customers will get the most value? How do you identify and prioritize targets? Who is the target buyer within each company? What are their circumstances? What are the pains that your product or service will solve, or the gains it would elicit for them? What is the job title of the typical buyer? How do you know you are right with the customer persona?

The best way of winning customers is to ensure that your product fits into one of the three core market desires: wealth, health, and relationship. When consumers purchase products, they hope to get results in the three areas.

Remember as a startup, you can build a great product. You can also create an amazing company with almost a perfect business model. But customers will not come automatically.

Below are the steps to win customers:

1. Virtuous business model canvas

One golden secret to get and retain customers is to use Scalabl’s virtuous business model canvas. The model creates continuous learning as the guiding principle to startups. Unlike the conventional business plans, the methodology offers the best customer-centric business model on entrepreneurship and innovation.

With this model, an entrepreneur lets potential customers shape the business in a collaborative manner.

What ultimately determines why you buy from one company rather than another? First, it’s their brands’ images and reputations. Second, it’s the relationships you have with them.

Active listening and testing, therefore, remain necessary tools. As Francisco Santolo, Harvard Business School alumnus would say, “any business ideal should be to improve consumers’ lives. It helps you move potential customers from pain to gain.”

Under this model canvas, an entrepreneur would then do a problem interview to know the jobs, gains, and pains of the already segmented customers.  This process would be considered a customer persona in ordinary marketing.

The next stage is the solution interview. This is where you try out the minimum viable product (MVP) subjecting it to customers to test, learn, co-create and get feedback. At this stage, you are doing a market hypothesis based on the solutions to customers’ pains.

So, why interview potential clients? The reason is consumer identification, and interviews have a decisive influence on the design of the final product or service.

Generating sales materials and various channels of communications come in handy at the tail end. Stick to three important factors when designing sales materials: a clearly defined business purpose, delineated customer segments, and MVP and its validated price.

The final stage is testing the sales road map to scale. With your MVP, price testing remains key with the response pattern of consumers identified and interviewed at the first stages.

This technique will make your business grow beyond the competition. It simply powers an enterprise to the top and keeps it there. Now move on and grow your company, employ staff and create functional areas. Then fire the founder.

Active listening at every stage provides valuable information to an entrepreneur to make decisions that will generate and maximize value.

Below are some of the best traditional ways to get customers for a virtuous business model canvas:

2. Referrals

Referral is one of the easiest ways to get new customers. It remains part of how a business grows its customer relationships.

Research holds that referral customers tend to purchase more over time and in turn become a source of additional referrals.

Landing referrals from networking or past business associations has a way to pick up customers with the highest retention rates. Build referral-generating activity into the sales process.

Create a system that solicits referrals from your satisfied customers.

3. Networking

Entrepreneurship is about continuous learning and networking.  It enhances the creation and nurturing of authentic and, meaningful relationships in the ecosystem. Think of your network: personal, academic, or professional ones.

In your business model canvas, create a database of like-minded individuals to incorporate into your network. The database should contain your potential customers and their contacts.

Achieve your purpose of transformative experience by becoming an advocate of collaboration and a creator of opportunities within a community of people that trusts in networking.

Think of your value proposition as how you’ll build relationships that lead to new customers. Find out “How you can be of service to others” rather than “What’s in it for you.”

4. Partner with complementary businesses

Which activities in your canvas would be performed through others? Have a list of third-party resources in your canvas model.

Again, team up with businesses that have a similar customer base, but aren’t directly competitive.

Collaborate on targeting each other’s customers to drive new business to each other. Also, team up on how to offer discounts and deals to each other’s customers.

5. Improve your channels

These days, consumers find new businesses primarily by searching online. Three key areas of channels should feature in your virtuous business model canvas.

First is the sales channels (describe the means you will sell your product/service?).

Second is the distribution channel (how will you deliver your product/service to the customer?).

Third is communication channels (Which means will you use to communicate your product/service?).

Your social media and website have to attract new customers. You can custom make a website at cost-free. Ensure the design, content, graphics, and SEO links are up-to-date.

Above best tips carefully implemented with customer centricity and collaborations, will make entrepreneurs flourish in their business model. So, is your business model canvas virtuous?

Be a formidable tool for global change.