“They’re chock-full of technology,” Peggy told me, “It’s incredibly competitive.” Peggy is a consultant working in the market we’re targeting and I had reached out to her for advice.

She was one of two research interviews I completed yesterday. The other was with a direct competitor. A couple of weeks ago, I talked with a potential customer in the market.

I have a hypothesis about the market: that there is an addressable customer need for website design, development, and support for organizations between $3m and $50m. These are organizations that have some staff responsible for communications, but not enough to have an in-house team.

In my interviews:

  • The potential customer I spoke with several weeks ago confirmed that any potential customer under $1m was unlikely to hire us and would use software instead.
  • The direct competitor I spoke with told me that most of the organizations they worked with had a staff size between 6 – 20. He also told me that he was trying to differentiate outside the market because he feared software was making his firm obsolete.
  • Peggy agreed with the hypothesis and told me that, despite the market heavily leveraging technology, there was probably need in that $3m – 50m band for organizations that had distinct requirements. And every organization believes they have unique needs.

All three of them confirmed what I suspected based on research that I’ve already completed.

What struck me though, was that it made sense. There’s a rational story that I can tell about the market and what makes it an opportunity for our agency (and the threat of software overtaking services.)

Often, when someone approaches a market, they think about the market as y number of customers and then say, “We’ll just run paid ads and, ‘do marketing,’ and capture 1%. Instead, they end up with .001%.

Your value proposition should tell a story about who you are and who your customer is and why they will buy from you. And it should make sense.

If it’s vague or assumes things you don’t know, you probably don’t understand the situation well enough and need to find a Peggy.

Featured image is a painting of Rodin’s The Thinker by Edvard Munch. Used under public domain.