I don't want to close off this week without talking a little bit about building a customer call pipeline. I'm sure you're all doing your best now to get some customer conversations going. I'm sure you're getting your feet wet in terms of doing cold calls. I'm sure you're figuring out how to plan the interviews and how to get insight out of them afterwards. But this is a process and for the process, you have to have a pipeline. We're looking at 100 calls here. It's a major goal of the course. You want to make 100 customer discovery calls in 10 weeks. That's ten calls a week. That's not easy. Ten calls a week sounds like it's easy if you have all the calls in hand. But how do you find the potential customers that you're going to call? How many do you need to try in order to get to ten a week? And what do you do if you're stuck. These are some of the questions of building the pipeline. How do you find customers? Well, you start with your own Rolodex. Yeah, I had an uncle who likes collecting Civil War stuff, maybe he could comment on our Civil War app. Yes, my sister studied with a professor who's in the chemical engineering field. Maybe he could direct us to some people who know how to use polymer materials in agriculture. So that's your Rolodex. LinkedIn, if you can find the job title or job titles of the person you're looking for, LinkedIn is an excellent resource. And if you don't belong to, you belong to LinkedIn because you joined for the course. But if you haven't used it, you should check it out and become a more serious user. It's an indispensable tool for business life. So LinkedIn is a good place, but you gotta know something about the job title or some other searchable term for the person you're looking for. Otherwise, you're not going to be able to make good use of that. Industry conferences are interesting. In an industry conference all of the customers who are soil engineers, who work in Latin America are going to come to a conference together. And if that's what you're looking for, if that's your customer segment, you've got them all there. It's a captive audience, you just go around and round them up. It's like catching salmon in a salmon run. And similarly, industry magazines, blogs, and newsletters are pretty good resources too. Usually, the people who edit those things, the reporters, the editors, the publishers, know and love the industry. They know something about it, they probably have a fair number of contacts themselves. If you can talk to them and interest them in the problem of helping to find you customer interviews. Then, you got a real leg up in terms of reaching a lot of people, particularly if it's a segment you know nothing about. So if you're looking at the graphene industry, and you don't know graphenes from a hole in the ground. Go to graphene online weekly, find the editor, talk to the editor, tell him what you're doing, be honest, be transparent, do a cold call. And you may be surprised, they may say wow, that's a great idea, I'd be happy to help you, let me see what I can do for you. How many tries do you need to get ten calls? Well, first of all there is the time to setup an appointment. So you make a cold call and let's say, the cold calls are success. The person does want to talk to you. When are they going to talk to you? There's a lead time. Usually it takes a couple days, it might take a week. As we're going to say, there's some people that are hard to get a hold of. It's going to get two or three weeks. So if you make a cold call now and that turns into an interview, you're not going to even get that interview until next week. It doesn't count in your pipeline for this week. The second thing is, what's your conversion rate? If you make a bunch of cold calls, how many of them actually turn into interviews? I would guess it's something on the order of 10%. 1% is the general rule for conversions where you're haranguing people with some value proposition. Here, it's a little more beguiling and so, you'll probably get people that are a little more interested. But I'd be surprised if you got as high as 10% a night. Be very surprised if you got over it. So, only 10% of your cold calls are going to turn into actual interviews. So, if you have a cold call today, that's a tenth of a call next week is what it is. So, you need 100 cold calls by Tuesday in order to get ten cold calls next week. That's pretty daunting. That's a lot of cold calls. But at least it gives you a benchmark to aim for. Customer types come in different varieties. There's easy and hard customers. An easy customer is a consumer market where, quote, everybody is going to be a customer. We're going to talk about whether everybody's really ever a customer next week. But for the moment, there's a lot of people who could be customers. So you could talk to anybody, like parents. Say, parents is your customer segment. Lot's of parents around, not hard to find them. But, one gotcha, not all parents are the same. Keep your ears open, listen for the different parents. I was helping a company where they had a fitness band that was going to be worn by children, and they thought all parents were their customer segment. And it turns out that only parents who themselves wear fitness bands are really very interested in this. And they had to do some customer discovery to find that out. So don't assume even with an easy segment that everyone in that segment's going to be your mark. And then there are hard segments. Typical one is surgeons. Surgeons are always cutting. That's what they do and when they're not cutting, the last thing they want to do is talk to some entrepreneur who's thinking up some crazy idea to make their surgical life easier. So, any specialized market like that where the potential customer is billable and scheduled, you're going to have a hard time getting those interviews. You might consider in cases like that working with ancillary people, so the nurses, the administrative people who booked their time. People like that can actually be helpful to you and are interesting to approach in any case, as a gateway to the person that you want to get to. But even in a hard discovery market, it means you're going to have to work harder to get those interviews. It doesn't mean the need to get the interviews goes away. So, simple, but if you're going to make 100 calls this week, you'll probably get ten calls next week. It takes planning, and it takes work, and you gotta keep at it. You gotta have some kind of methodology, some kind of process, some kind of system, and just keep yourself going with it. Use any means that you can to find customers, LinkedIn, your aunt, someone you meet in the subway, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Keep working on filling in the call pipeline or you'll run out of interviews. And of course, if you ask at the end of every interview you do get, if there are two more people that they should talk to, you're going to be helping yourself fill their pipeline. So it's always good to ask that question. And when you have a hard customer segment, like surgeons or trial attorneys, or something like that, you just gotta work even harder to get those guys.
