Don’t just ask, market — Kelford Labs Daily

“The most common, and costly, business development mistake... is that of mistaking interest for intent.”

— Blair Enns

A classic mistake I see consultants make is asking peers and prospects about their service offering, in an attempt to validate its value, before they actually offer it.

They have an idea for a service offering, so they find a potential customer, or someone they respect in the field, and they ask them if they’d, hypothetically, be interested in their offering were they ever to offer it.

And, in my experience, this can often provide disastrously unhelpful information.

That’s not to say you mustn’t do it, but here’s the thing to watch out for:

The only way to know for sure if someone will buy our service is if they buy it.

Anything else is often just people telling us what they think we want to hear. Or offering advice removed from their actual experience, removed from their actual purchase.

So people might tell us our idea is great (but they won’t actually buy it).

Or they might tell us it’s no good (when they were never our customer).

And then we can end up making decisions based on data that were never relevant.

Because when you have a new service offering, the only way to know for sure if it’s going to sell is if it sells. And that means you have to sell it.

Unfortunately, no service is so amazing that merely mentioning it makes people buy.

Instead, we have to market it, by demonstrating its value at a distance.

I’m not saying you must never ask for validation, only that it’s insufficient (and sometimes unhelpful).

We’ve got to promote our services before we can ever know if anyone will buy them.

And whether they buy, or why they don’t, will tell us everything we need to know.

Kelford Inc. shows entrepreneurs the way to always knowing what to say.