Building you customer pipeline for product conversations

For product conversations, ideally, you need to have about 10-15 customers engaged with you at any given time. Based on our experience, this number will allow you to get the right amount of feedback and will give you a good idea about the market you want to reach. To reach that number, you need to start with a strong customer pipeline.

When building customer pipeline for seeking feedback, you are not just looking for a list of customers. You need to consider many factors that determine the fit of such customers for your project.

There are three factors that determine the choice of customers.

• Product maturity: Is it the product at a vision stage or is it already in the market? Is it closed to being generally available for purchase?
• Customer Profile: What industry is the customer from and how big are they? What does the customer already own from your company product portfolio? Is the customer using a similar product from a competitor already? Is you customer looking for specific products?
• Value Proposition: Is your product solving a current problem that the customer is facing or a potential problem that they are yet to face.

All these factors evolve with the time. Such evolution is not a bad thing considering the fact that your hypothesis is evolving as well. The wider the knowledge funnel of the product you are going to build, the bigger the uncertainty about the type of customer you are looking for. The closer the product is to general availability, the easiest it is to get a perfect match.

Customer engagement is all about execution. So all this uncertainty cannot stop you from moving forward. As evolving factors interfere with your pipeline building process, you will need to build your pipeline step by step, where each step is a discovery.