We signed 100,000 new clients during the pandemic… by listening
Our ‘customer discovery’ program was the key.
1. Know your market
The pandemic changed everyone’s needs across industries and locations. During this global shift, we paid close attention to the businesses that we were built to serve: those with under 20 employees.
In fact, small businesses with under 20 employees make up almost90%of the businesses in the US. We saw that almost as soon as pandemic restrictions went into place, these businesses were the ones to drive the accelerated demand for digital financial services.
The increased demand was fortunate for our business, but it posed challenges as well. We were prepared to meet the demand, but with a rush of new customers, we needed to adjust our offerings to cater to their needs.
So at NorthOne, we worked to make our offerings align with the needs of our customers as closely as possible.
2. Determine customer needs
In order to add the most customers during this time of high demand, you need to find as many ways as you can to listen to your customers in order to learn what products and services that are right for them.
And then you need to deliver those products. Our company’s approach was to connect with thousands of customers and closely go through what they needed.
Not all businesses are alike, even within a certain demographic, like those with less than 20 employees. We started by having conversations with business builders in our networks.Then we created personas based on geography, industry, and financial experience. To understand the specific needs of those different demographics, we conducted methodical outreach calls to business owners who were representative of each persona.
3. Implement a customer discovery program
So what is customer discovery?
We define the discovery process as answering these key questions:
For clarity, this process isnotuser testing, feature set discovery, or running focus groups. It involves direct conversations with existing and potential customers. The process starts by determining who to speak with to gather these insights and answer our core questions.
To “discover” a customer, we:
To source the people we wanted to interview once we understood the core problems we needed to solve, we targeted:
To standardize and make the most of each interview, we developed scripts for different length interviews with questions like:
4. Understand the problems you discover
Once you begin to talk to these target interviewees, you will see different problems emerge and, when you do, it is important to understand the different categories that they fall into.
The types of customer problems you will discover include:
Don’t get caught up in all the problems you record. Some are more valuable than others. In fact, the problem that you should dedicate your energy to is the “vision problem.” It is key to note that they have found their own solution but wouldpay for something better.
And you can become the one they pay to do that.
(Here’s a deeper dive into ourCustomer Discovery Plan.)
5. Determine what solution is needed
We found that business owners who had never set up a website, let alone a website facilitating e-commerce transactions, suddenly needed help moving their financial operations online.
In a world where every business needs to convert to digital, people without financial or technical backgrounds are now the ones embracing digital transformation.What they needed more than anything is a solution thatdidn’trequire them to learn the intricacies of financial management or tech development.
And this is something that is easy for entrepreneurs to forget. Often we build things for people like us. But the people that need the most support are often the ones who didn’t have backgrounds similar to us at all.
6. Deliver those products
Following our discovery program, we determined that our customers told us they needed speed, ease of use, and financial management tools that are designed for small teams rather than for companies with hundreds of employees.
Previously, owners’ options were either to go to a large bank that provided small businesses with an anemic, bare-bones view into their finances or to go to a new financial technology company that assumed that they already had a financial operations background.
Consequently, our research led us to prioritize operation speed and to update our tools to make all of our services as easy to understand as possible. By listening to our customers we were able to maximize our impact. And by maximizing impact, you can maximize your growth.
Story byJustin Adler
Justin leads operations and strategy with a particular focus on the intersection of growth and product at NorthOne.Justin leads operations and strategy with a particular focus on the intersection of growth and product at NorthOne.
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