By Liam Palmer, CEO and Founder of Care Tech Guide.
Allow me to begin by stating that this is primarily a reflection of my experience as a start-up founder, exploring the intersection between mission and value and examining my assumptions about both. Many tech founders we collaborate with have echoed similar sentiments, realising that their initial assumptions regarding engagement and traction needed reassessment after their first year.
Positivity and self-belief can take you far until the market responds. Silence offers valuable insights if you observe closely enough. It is the unspoken feedback from your prospects that provides crucial clues. Determine where you captured their attention and where you lost it. Within this information lies the opportunity to understand more about the unmet needs of your customers and iterate accordingly.
Returning to the theme – starting with the mission – on the surface, it appears straightforward: define a mission and a narrative, explain the value and achieve sales. However, the reality is more complex. Let me elaborate.
While crafting a compelling narrative that identifies a villain and presents a hero who overcomes challenges might attract initial supporters, turning these supporters into paying customers is a different matter. These supporters may align with your cause without requiring further proof. The enthusiasm and online support are abundant and welcome. Nonetheless, suggesting a sales meeting to secure a contract and payment for a product or service reveals the difference. Thus, asking how a supporter becomes a customer might be an obvious question but a flawed one in my view.
Now, let’s address the concept of mission to value – isn’t it obvious? The premise here is that if supporters acknowledge the mission’s legitimacy, the value should be implicit and require no further explanation. However, this assumption is often incorrect. Supporters may buy into the mission and concept but not necessarily why their business needs the service or product, or why it justifies the investment.
The complexity lies in effectively conveying the value proposition to new prospects, maintaining commitments and delivering on promises. This process is the essence of true success and is, consequently, quite rare. So, what do potential paying customers need? They require a different set of actions and behaviours from you.
Similar to building relationships, it involves establishing trust, demonstrating credibility and proving a deep understanding of their problems while offering practical solutions. We trust established brands like Audi, Tesco and 3 Mobile because of their consistent marketing efforts and brand familiarity. With new market entrants, there is an absence of trust. How do we verify the reliability of the product or service? How do we assess the credibility and trustworthiness of those behind it?
Engaging paying customers involves more than mere engagement—it requires a credible strategy and realistic plan that fosters genuine connection and traction with real people, often 1 by 1.
Like other founders, I underestimated the extensive work involved in defining and delivering value to customers. It is easy to become fixated on promoting our “baby”, it becomes what we talk about, we get “our flow” but is it enough? It may be more useful to adopt a more customer-centric approach and adapt accordingly. This process is challenging and rarely executed well. It necessitates setting aside our own ideas about the business and sometimes ego, listening more and continuously adapting to delight the customer.
From mission to value – isn’t it obvious? If you believe it is, that is the problem.
