This is a series about building and refining your messaging and positioning

#1 - Series Intro: (i) Messaging & Positioning Template & (ii) 5 Expert Tips
#2 - Messaging & Positioning Template: (i) Customer Unmet Needs & (ii) Persona Worksheet
#3 - Messaging & Positioning Template: (i) Ideal Client & (ii) Ideal Client Worksheet
#4 - Messaging & Positioning Template: (i) Differentiators & (ii) Value Proposition Worksheet
#5 - Messaging & Positioning Template: Market Category
#6 - Overcoming Objections to Positioning: (i) Proof; (ii) Workflow Redesign; (iii) Offers
#7 - Messaging & Positioning Process: Testing
#8 - Messaging & Positioning Process: Learning from Data

Scattered Insights with Ad Hoc Data

Reactively addressing diverse customer segments and their varying needs can lead to an unsustainable "chimera" product that requires costly investments in unprofitable use cases.

Without a focused strategy for defining your ideal client profile, you risk wasting valuable resources and undermining your business's sustainability.

A common solution involves concentrating on specific niches or segments that align with your strategic goals, as we’ve dived into earlier in this series. However, challenges emerge when transitioning from informal discussions with these segments and scattered data to a cohesive, evidence-based understanding of your target market.

Without a structured approach, it becomes challenging to identify overarching trends, key priorities, and urgent customer needs amid numerous conversations.

This fragmented method often results in overlooking important details, obscuring the broader picture necessary for making informed strategic decisions about partnerships and product development. Consequently, you may engage with the wrong customers and pursue unsuitable use cases, jeopardizing your organization's long-term viability and success.

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Key Tactics

To pinpoint partner organizations to prioritize for your product or growth roadmap, there are three key workflows.

Score: Develop a structured lead scoring system that aligns with the strategic criteria you’ve already identified earlier in the series.

Centralize: Set one place to put your customer discovery insights to avoid having data scattered in multiple places.

Synthesize: Tag data and summarize top unmet needs and other key criteria by segment and other important factors.

Altogether, this is “structured" approach enabling you to clearly identify the most pressing segments and needs to address.

While our template uses a free google sheet, this process for tracking and prioritizing potential partners can be implemented within any customer relationship management (CRM) system.

This is ultimately a generalized framework to helping you identify and engage the most strategic ideal client profiles based on your defined criteria and customer data.

👉 For the template, request access to this lead scoring template by completing this request form

A) Score

Develop a structured lead scoring system that aligns with the strategic criteria you’ve already identified earlier in the series.

Step 1: Input

Put in all of your top leads

Compile a list of your top potential partner organizations.

Consider putting the names of your key champions, decision-makers, and key influencers. This is the buying committee

It’s important to build out a personalized strategy to get all of these stakeholders on board. In many organizations, champions (because they are closer to users and admin) likely have a different use case and measure of success in mind than the decision-maker (often an executive less in the weeds and execution). More on that in the appendix below.

Step 2: Prioritize

Add and prioritize your top criteria and score your leads based on them

Determine the key criteria you want to evaluate potential partners on, such as the ones below.

Alignment with your mission and values

How much they’re willing to pay for their desired use case

Their desired use case is differentiated and widely needed

For more criteria and ideas on rubrics to score those criteria, please see Appendix.

Evaluate each potential partner against your prioritized criteria, assigning a score (e.g. 1-5) for each factor. Calculate an overall score for each lead based on your scoring

Step 3: Refine

Refine your score and update throughout the process

Consider whether the scores align with your intuition and your understanding of each potential partner. If not: Rejigger the scores, add/edit/remove criteria, and/or criteria weights

If the scores don't feel quite right, revisit the criteria, rubrics, and their weightings.

Repeat this process until you feel the scores accurately reflect your assessment of the potential partners. This iterative also helps you better better trust your data model

As you go through the sales process, you’ll have higher quality evidence about how these leads score. Because you have limited time, you can use lead scoring to contact the highest potential leads. As you refine your scores, I recommend using the “notes” function to track changes to your score and why so you can keep track and help others on your team follow along for the ride

By following this step-by-step process, you can systematically evaluate and prioritize your potential partners, ensuring that you select the ones that best align with your business goals and strategic priorities.

B) Centralize

Set one place to put your customer discovery insights to avoid having data scattered in multiple places.

Step 1: Identify

Identify the top standard questions linked to your key criteria you're asking and organize them into columns.

Creating a standardized list of questions and organizing them into a structured format, such as a spreadsheet, ensures you're consistently capturing the most relevant information across multiple customer interviews. This makes it easier to compare and analyze the data later on. See Appendix for more resources on discovery questions.

Step 2: Capture

As you do your discovery, capture their responses directly under the relevant question column.

Entering the customer responses directly into the corresponding question columns as the interview is happening keeps the data organized and connected from the outset. This saves time and effort compared to trying to piece together notes and insights after the fact.

Step 3: Align

If multiple team members are conducting interviews, align on a consistent process for entering the data and continuously refine the structure over time.

Establishing a collaborative, standardized process for capturing customer discovery data ensures everyone on the team is contributing to a centralized, cohesive dataset and data structure. This enables better synthesis, analysis, and alignment across the organization.

C) Synthesize

Tag data and summarize top unmet needs and other key criteria by segment and other important factors.

Step 1: Structure

Add in the columns that you want to summarize.

Typically these will parallel your discovery questions. These columns create a structured format for consistently capturing customer feedback, making it easier to compare and analyze the data across multiple interviews.

Step 2: Tag

Tag the qualitative data using a dropdown menu.

This is the critical step enabling you to synthesize patterns across your conversations. Using a dropdown menu to create mutually exclusive tags allows you to categorize and filter the insights, enabling more efficient synthesis and identification of patterns in the customer feedback.

One major limitation is that you cannot select multiple items from the dropdown. The simplest solution is to just create a separate column for each use case or item of interest. For instance, #1 use case and #2 use case as separate columns. Those rankings can be generated through conversation with the lead during the discovery process. You can also choose a more complex route and enable appscripts for this use case (please reach out directly if you want more guidance on doing this).

Step 3: Summarize

Synthesize using a pivot table and prioritize the most valuable leads & use cases

Generating a pivot table using the tagged data provides a powerful visualization tool for quickly synthesizing your findings, identifying the most pressing customer needs, and informing your strategic decision-making.

Below is an example of a pivot table visualizing results for #1 Use Case dropdown tags.

This information can then be an important criteria for your lead scoring. You might give points to leads that want you to build more valuable use cases (eg: pricing or larger market)

To dig deeper and check the data, you can double click on specific numbers in the pivot table to see the underlying data it is referencing. See example below which appears when you double click on the “22.5” in the pivot table.

👉 For the template, request access to this lead scoring template by completing this request form

Conclusion

Taking a strategic, deliberate approach to partnerships is critically important for entrepreneurs who want to build a sustainable, successful business.

This involves carefully selecting the right collaborators, aligning on the most impactful use cases, and avoiding the trap of chasing fragmented opportunities.

By being thoughtful and intentional with your partnerships, you can maximize your chances of long-term growth and profitability.

👉 What’s your biggest challenge in this process? Share your feedback here or toggle by clicking.

This is a series about building and refining your messaging and positioning

#1 - Series Intro: (i) Messaging & Positioning Template & (ii) 5 Expert Tips
#2 - Messaging & Positioning Template: (i) Customer Unmet Needs & (ii) Persona Worksheet
#3 - Messaging & Positioning Template: (i) Ideal Client & (ii) Ideal Client Worksheet
#4 - Messaging & Positioning Template: (i) Differentiators & (ii) Value Proposition Worksheet
#5 - Messaging & Positioning Template: Market Category
#6 - Overcoming Objections to Positioning: (i) Proof; (ii) Workflow Redesign; (iii) Offers
#7 - Messaging & Positioning Process: Testing
#8 - Messaging & Positioning Process: Learning from Data

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