This is Part 1 in a series of essays about Customer Demand.
Let’s talk about demand.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://commoncog.com/speedrunning-the-skill-of-demand
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://commoncog.com/speedrunning-the-skill-of-demand
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I bought Sales Safari 101 last year and it seemed very overpriced compared to what it is and what’s already out there free (e.g. the Paris Conference talk). The technique seems fine but it clearly lacks the context of the situations you use it for.
I’ve been trying to develop small plugins for bigger sites like Trello and Shopify and using Sales Safari felt like having a lot of data that was very difficult to sort into signal and noise. I would search something on Reddit or look through Trello forums and not very many people would have the same problem. The discussions would always have one or two answers and that’s it.
So imagine my surprise when the article discusses the tool in a completely different setting. Either way, I think I had a similar problem with potential customers when I was doing calls based on The Heart of Innovation. There’s probably a pattern in my behaviour where I try to look hard for demand and instead of moving on, I look even harder, not accepting a no for an answer.
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@Jan_Gebauer yes! Hmm, one of the implications around the demand discovery stuff is that if there’s no demand, don’t fight it — just move on. I’m not sure if Sales Safari 101 talks about this, but in 30x500 we’re told you shouldn’t have a preconceived notion about what product or service build during the Sales Safari stage — just do the exercises and collect pains and keep your mind clear. The decision to service a pain is a separate step, and the decision to figure out a package with which to service a pain is yet another step still — and the way you service a pain could be through a variety of ways:
- A course
- A consulting package
- A productised consulting package
- An Excel sheet
- A book
- Some software
- A plugin
Etc etc. By separating these steps you are preventing yourself from lying to yourself, and biasing your understanding of the market need.
The key thing to understand is that uncovering demand requires detachment to do well! So … even though I’ve adapted Sales Safari to uncover why customers are buying an existing product (like Commoncog’s membership, or the software company that I worked with), I still tell folks I’m doing the exercise with to not think about our product or solution, so as to be able to analyse the demand separately. In truth, there are often multiple ways someone could solve a pain, not just through buying our product. We want to understand this demand, and then understand why they picked our product (against alternatives) as two separate steps.
I will also add — I think I’ve spent upwards of 30 hours practicing Sales Safari on my own, from course materials, before even attempting to teach it to someone else. If you just watch the video, or only do the exercises in the course once (without multiple revisits in between going out into the wild and trying it), it may not be enough to reach mastery. I define mastery as “able to identify and then serve demand successfully through that technique”.
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This article came at the right time for me. Running a VC-backed startup that’s starting to get short on runway has me looking for ways to bet understand “what I’m getting wrong” about the business.
What really connected with me in this article (and Cedric’s comment below) is just getting detached from your business / product. That is really hard to do when you have a team you’re responsible for and existing customers and a time pressure.
This gives me hope that there’s a way out that truly connects with our potential customers. There’s so many days where I’m thinking “are we not solving a painful enough problem? Is it something with my pitch or demo?” etc.
So a timely article and I’ll report back after I work through Sales Safari 101. Thanks (again) Cedric!
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You mention that you practiced upwards of 30 hours on your own. What was your technique for validating that you did a good job, please?
That was the main difficulty. I think the folks I trained got better faster, because I could give them feedback. What I would do when training myself is do SS on, say, a Hacker News thread, and then revise the material in the course, and then redo the thread to see if I had missed anything (and invariably I would) and catch those mistakes, then repeat.
Eventually I would graduate to doing a few SS attempts in between each revision of the course.
I kept repeating this loop until I was sure I didn’t made any of the mistakes pointed out in the course. (I’m fairly certain, given what I know of Hoy’s pedagogical style, that the Sales Safari 101 course also has bits where you do an attempt, and then they show you the mistakes other students have made, and correct them?) The goal, as you’re revising these bits, is to make notes about the types of mistakes these students have made, and keep asking if you made similar mistakes. And then rinse and repeat until you’re confident that you haven’t.
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I’m wondering if anyone that has had success with this has any tips on how to find good watering holes. I run a CPG startup, and while we have a solid idea of who our target customer is, it has been VERY challenging to find watering holes where those customers are actually having conversations that are remotely related to our product. Maybe I’m just not being creative enough, but our target customer is pretty affluent, and the products we offer are premium versions of personal care and supplement products. The net result is that most online chatter is from people that are quite price sensitive, even though there is in fact a very large market of people that are also willing to pay more for higher quality. My concern is that the discussions I am finding are really not from people that are the right target audience (even though at the surface they’re “in the market” for similar products). Has anyone encountered something like this?
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Ahh, here’s a trick: Hoy and Hillman designed Sales Safari for the context of 30x500, which was designed to help folks find and start their first side business. But if you already have customers, you may adapt Sales Safari, as I did, to interview ideal customers.
It’s likely you’ll have to offer them an incentive to speak to you, and you should record the conversation. But I’ve found that even 30 minutes yield many of the inputs that make for a good SS analysis. (This is not true for alternative interview methods, e.g. JTBD interviews take at least an hour).
Don’t worry about doing the analysis until after the interview. I find both tiring, though, so it’s double the effort. But perhaps higher signal: these are folks who have already given you money, after all.
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Following this new Customer Demand series with great interest.
Demand is the part of the business triad I am most familiar with, so Sales Safari seems quite basic to me from watching the video, but as you point out, it does look like a great resource for those very new to marketing and customer understanding more generally.
A few thoughts…
The article ends with this quote:
“The job of sales and marketing is to seek out and then filter customers who are the best fit for your product.”
I would argue that marketing is not just about finding the customers who are the best fit for your product, it’s also about defining the product to be the best fit for customers. It’s an iterative process. This is what you seem to be outlining in the essay and the approach to customer demand as a whole.
It reminds me of an old saying about two ways to approach marketing (prob by P&G/Unilever):
Are you making what you can sell, or just selling what you can make?
Sales Safari seems very much in the spirit of the former - ‘let’s make what we can sell’ and so feels like ‘proper marketing’ utilising the 4Ps of product, place, price, and promotion, rather than simply demand generation / ‘selling what you can make’ which is usually just about promotion.
Detachment — as you say this is harder if it’s your product. I’ve only worked inside an org on product strategy and product marketing once, and the rest of my career has been as a consultant, so detachment comes a lot easier! Perhaps I should think about my role as ‘detachment as a service’. 
However, I also wonder if detachment is harder in software / technology businesses, compared to say CPG businesses, which historically have been the masters at understanding, identifying and capturing customer demand. Competitor CPG products within a category are often functionally almost identical, often being produced in the same factories as the supermarkets own brand versions. So it’s harder to hoodwink yourself that there is real functional differentiation, hence detachment comes easier, and more attention and investment on intangible differentiation via brand, packaging and comms.
Research IS exhausting! — I was vigorously nodding in agreement when you talked about how exhausting running this type of customer research is. I have had to politely explain to clients and colleagues many times that NO, 6 or 7 hours of customer interviews in a single day is not feasible!
BigQuery example - I think a proper experienced researcher would also pick up on ‘unpredictability of costs’ being a pain point in this example. But I think your ability to zero in on the fact it’s THE pain point, and not just a possible one alongside high prices is also about a wider commercial acumen and understanding of the business model, cost structure and the industry. This is where an insider doing the interviews has an in-built advantage, but it’s also about context beyond just research technique. I.e. You can teach the habit of looking for things unsaid, but without the commercial insight you were able to draw on, they still might not reach the same conclusion you got to.
@overandout I agree with Cedric’s recommendation to interview existing customers, although depending on how new your business is, you might not have very many. If this is the case you could also interview customers of your competitors — I have found this particularly useful in the past. Ideally you’d want to interview the specific competitor customers you want to steal for your business, but even those that are slightly different (e.g. a different worldview / segment) will still teach you valuable things about the market. And may help you refine who you interview next.
I would also say that there are categories of products that are simply low(er) interest. CPG products typically fall into this category ime, although there will be exceptions (e.g. dealing with a specialist use case like a skin condition). Historically many CPG purchase decisions were made in the final few minutes/meters of the store, which is why the bigger brands pay so much for premium shelf space at eye level, and spend so much on advertising and promotions to be recognisable. In low interest categories people will ‘satisfice’ rather than maximise - and recognisable brands are a great shortcut to doing this.
Without knowing specifically what your CPG products is, I would assume you are less likely to find watering holes, compared to say the B2B products such as those Amy discusses in her video and will have to rely on customer research primarily, unless you are targeting a high interest pain point or niche use case.
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This was the first I’d heard of 30x500 + Sales Safari so I’ve been doing a bit of digging in the process. Using the various Deep Research models available has been good for me to source new watering holes, even for communities I already participate in.
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So I went back to try the Safari and lo’ and behold, I had a much better experience.
Previously, I niched real hard and went to product forums (Trello forums), so I had a bad time because those places had low participation in general and most questions were what Alex calls “drive-by questions”, which is just simple Q&A.
As a result, it seemed to make more sense overall. I also made sure to take note of what Amy presents in the workshop as a suitable thread (she demonstrated on a thread with 60 posts) and that helped a ton too.
I’m really buzzing with ideas now, hence I’ve been trying to piece together the next steps but it’s tough. Sales Safari is packaged really well and I am kind of tempted to enter 30x500 when it’s available next.
Any ideas where to go next? Their Launch FTW Guide (pdf) seems to be good enough substitute for now.
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To answer my own question, the idea is to do the Launch FTW process (safari → ebombs → product) but it’s fine to do safari → ebombs and then have a gap between ebombs and product. Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman discuss it with their guest on their podcast, the key passage starts around the 24th minute. Amy says that it is important to take time and let the patterns of pains emerge. For example, maybe you can stitch a bunch of your ebombs into one course, but I reckon something like this would be true for an app as well.
And this ties really nicely into The Heart of Innovation. The authors suggest that you need quite a lot of experience to do their process. Though I suspect that the amount of experience needed is correlated to the product size you want to make, e.g. big SaaS would require years of experience, a book would need a few months to a year.
I am really excited to see where this series goes.
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