This is a process and for the process you have to have a pipeline. How do you find customers? Well, you start with your own Rolodex. Yeah, I had an uncle who likes collecting Civil War stuff, maybe he could comment on Civil War app. Yes, my sister studied with a professor who is in the chemical engineering field, maybe he could direct us to some people who know how to use polymer materials in agriculture. So that's your Rolodex. LinkedIn. If you can find the job title or job titles of the person you're looking for, LinkedIn is an excellent resource. You belong to LinkedIn because you joined for the course. But if you haven't used it, you should check it out and become a more serious user. It's an indispensable tool for business life. So LinkedIn is a good place, but you gotta know something about the job title or some other searchable term for the person you're looking for otherwise you're not going to be able to make good use of that. Industry conference are interesting. In an industry conference, all of the people, all of the customers who were soil engineers who work in Latin America are going to come to a conference together. And if that's what your looking for, if that's your customer segment you've got them all there. It's a captive audience. You just go around and round them up. It's like catching salmon in a salmon run. And similarly, industry magazines, blogs, and newsletters are pretty good resources too. Usually the people who edit those things, the reporters, the editors, the publishers know and love the industry. They know something about it. They probably have a fair number of contacts themselves. If you can talk to them, and interest them in the problem of helping to find you customer interviews, then you got a real leg up in terms of reaching a lot of people,particularly with a segment you know nothing about. So if you're looking at the graphene industry, and you don't know graphene from a hole in the ground, go to graphene Online Weekly find the editor, talk to the editor, tell him what you're doing, be honest, be transparent, do a cold-call, and you may be surprised. They may say, wow, that's a great idea. I'd be happy to help you. Let me see what I can do for you. How many tries do you need to get ten calls? Well, first of all there's a time to set up an appointment. So you make a cold call and let's say the cold call is a success. The person does want to talk to you. When are they going to talk to you? There's a lead time. Usually it takes a couple days. It might take a week. As we're going to say, there are some people that are hard to get a hold of, it's going to take two or three weeks. So if you make a cold call now and that turns into an interview, you're not going to even get that interview until next week. It doesn't count in your pipeline for this week. The second thing is, what your conversion rate? If you make a bunch of cold calls, how many of them actually turn into interviews? I would guess it's something on the order of 10%. 1% is the general rule for conversions where you're haranguing people with some value proposition. Here it's a little more beguiling, and so you'll probably get people that are a little more interested. But I'd be surprised if you got as high as 10%, and I'd be very surprised if you got over it. So only 10% of your cold calls are going to turn into actual interviews. So if you have a cold call today, that's a tenth of a call next week is what it is. Customer types come in different varieties. There's easy and hard customers. An easy customer is a consumer market where, quote, everybody's going to be a customer. We're going to talk about whether everybody's really ever a customer next week, but for the moment there's a lot of people who could be customers. So you could talk to anybody, like parents, say parents is your customer segment. Lots of parents around, not hard to find them. But, one gotcha, not all parents are the same. Keep your ears open. Listen for the different parents. I was helping a company where they had a fitness band that was going to be worn by children, and they thought all parents were their customer segment. And it turns out that only parents who themselves who wear fitness bands are really very interested in this. And they had to do some customer discovery to find that out. So don't assume even with an easy segment that everyone in that segment is going to be your mark. And then there are hard segments. Typical one is surgeons. Surgeons are always cutting. That's [LAUGH] what they do. And when they're not cutting, the last thing they want to do is talk to some entrepreneur who's thinking up some crazy idea to make their surgical life easier. So any specialized market like that where the potential customer is billable and scheduled, you're going to have a hard time getting those interviews. You might consider in cases like that working with ancillary people. So the nurses, the administrative people who book their time. People like that can actually be helpful to you and are interesting to approach in any case as a gateway to the person that you want to get to. But even in a hard discovery market, it means you're going to have to work harder to get those interviews. It doesn't mean the need to get the interviews goes away.
