Raising Capital: Defining Your Compelling Case for Customers, Part Three

Last week, we discussed defining your product. This week we’ll take the next steps by taking you through how to reveal and define your 3Cs: Your Compelling Case for Customers™. This starts with determining your product features.

Features

These are properties or characteristics of your product. For example, three features of a dress shirt are its color, size, and type of buttons. Each one is measurable and has an associated “metric” such as blue for color, medium for size, and white plastic for button type.

Features are important when you’re defining, designing, and manufacturing a product. You want your product to be consistent so that the customer will have virtually the same experience with each subsequent purchase. The metrics of features are used for this purpose, but features rarely produce an emotional response in your target customer. For example, customers don’t get excited because the shirt they bought is blue.

Now, make a list of all your product features. Have your marketing and product development team do this as well. Once complete, the next step is to define your product benefits.

Benefits

These are the values that your customer gets from your product features, including how your product makes their life better, more enjoyable, or saves them time or money. Benefits are frequently how the product makes your customer feel.

Benefits of the shirt described above may be that you feel confident when you wear it, that it’s soft on your skin, or that it looks great with your new business suit.

Now, to get closer to understanding your Compelling Case for Customers, from your extensive product features list, make another list, this time of all your product benefits. Ask your team and a few existing customers to do the same. Combine the lists and group the benefits into common themes. From your benefits list, you want to understand the emotional responses that your product may elicit in users.

Defining Your 3Cs

Now that you’ve outlined your product benefits and the emotional responses that they elicit, narrow the list, defining only those benefits that make a compelling case for your target customer to buy.

Your compelling case for customers should be only one or two items; it’s rare to find more than two.

If you find it difficult to come up with your 3Cs, look at the common use cases of your product to gather unusual benefits and values to the customer. These new ideas may reveal your Compelling Case for Customers.

When working with a client, there are times that we can’t define a true Compelling Case for Customers, even though the product has solid benefits and customer value. That doesn’t mean that the product is bad or won’t sell; though, it may mean that raising capital will be difficult. Bottom line: Either define your 3Cs or conclude that a compelling case doesn’t exist.

Have you defined your product description, feature, benefits, and your Compelling Case for Customers? Get in touch and let me know—I’d love to hear what successes and difficulties you experienced during the process and how many times you thought you had your 3Cs defined, then realized that you needed to do more work.

Defining the 3Cs is vital to your success. If you're struggling with it and want guidance, get in touch by either emailing or calling us at (510) 419-0100 for help.

Until next week!

All The Best,