Step-by-Step Instructions

Scaling your Segments

Problems it Solves

At this point you know how to scale your solution, how to scale your channels, and now it's time to expand your reach to a new customer segment.

In this exercise you'll learn:

• When should you target your second customer segment?
• In what order should you continue this process? What segment do you go after next, and next?

Scaling your Segments

You've just finished learning how to scale your channels. You automated part of your solution, and when the return is advantageous, you'll switch your focus and expand into different channels. You will continue this process, over and over until you have a fully baked solution and you are optimizing all of the channels for your primary customer segment.

Once you've exhausted all of the reasonable channels for your customer segment, then - and only then - it is time to move on to the next segment.

I'm a big fan of staying within the segment that you know well, and exhausting every person within that segment. Once you move on to the next segment, you'll have to solve a slightly different problem.

The likelihood that you will have to have different wording for your Offer, a different currency, and even a slightly different solution is high. However, once you've exhausted one segment, you are ready to move on!

You do that by going back to the Finding Early Adopters phase and begin your customer interviews again.

If you find this segment has a similar problem, you may be able to test a similar Offer, albeit through different channels. From there, you will experiment with your currency and solution, and finally to scale your solution and channels as you've been doing with this first segment.

How do you choose your 2nd Segment?

There are two ways to choose your secondary customer segment.

In the first scenario, your current customers are telling others about your product. When they do, you'll start to get requests by other customer segments to solve their problems. When that happens, it's fantastic news because your secondary customer segment will make themselves known by inundating you with requests for help.

Alternatively, if new customer segments are reaching out to you, you've already created a list of additional segments during your SCALE exercise.

While this old list is attractive, do not discount your new suitors! Take a look at who the next top candidate was on your old list, but you may wish to do a quick assessment of any new potential customers who are pursuing you.

In my case, based on my SCALE exercise, I may go after Innovation Consultants at Lean Conferences. However, since I've begun testing FOCUS I am getting new inquiries from Entrepreneurial professors. This new data may change the "Early Adopter" score I had originally for this customer segment and move them up in priority.

Once you've decided which segment to pursue, you know the process...

What's Next

That's it! Now you know when you should target your second customer segment:

After you've exhausted all of the channels within your first segment.

You also know what order you should target your additional segments: every time you go back, run your SCALE exercise again just to see who shows up in first place. Who makes sense to work with next, based on the current data of this particular place in time?

Next up you'll learn when you are done scaling!