Small businesses often face challenges related to bandwidth, budget, and limited resources. Despite this, there are incredible opportunities for smaller businesses and their marketing teams to gain market share in even the most competitive environments. How can they do this and strategically outmaneuver their larger competitors?

That’s why we’re talking to product marketing expert Laurier Mandin (President & CEO, Graphos Product) about how small B2B marketing teams can outperform larger competitors. During our conversation, Laurier highlighted how having a deep understanding of customer needs and developing a solid go-to-market strategy can lead to success. He also mentioned key pitfalls to avoid and provided actionable advice for validating a business, product, or service idea without a massive research budget.

https://youtu.be/okTkHVCtXzE

[1:52] The challenges that small businesses and their marketing teams face

[4:21] How small marketing teams can create order amidst chaos

[6:40] The “Coveted Condition” for success

[9:35] Some key pitfalls to avoid in marketing:

• 
  
• Focusing on SEO over engagement and value
  
• Trying to match customers’ expectations instead of being differentiated and memorable
  
• Not using enough visual language
  

[17:55] How to validate your business ideas effectively by asking these three specific questions to potential customers:

• 
  
• Have they actively searched for a better solution?
  
• What do they like most about their current approach?
  
• What would they pay to solve this problem properly? 
  

[23:21] The benefits of having external partners

[28:51] Laurier’s actionable tips for achieving product-market fit:

• 
  
• Reviews
  
• Retention
  
• Referrals
  

• 
  
• Laurier Mandin on LinkedIn
  
• Graphos Product 
  
• The Book “I NEED THAT”, Creating and Marketing Products People Are Compelled to Buy
  
• Laurier Mandin’s Need Feed 
  
• TBWA
  
• ChatGPT 
  
• Claude 
  

Christian Klepp  00:00

Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on the Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today I’ll be talking to Laurier Mandin. He is the president and CEO of Graphos Product, who is on a mission to help innovators de-risk, position and market innovative B2B products for Category leadership. He is also the author of the book “I NEED THAT”, creating and marketing products people are compelled to buy. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is. 

Christian Klepp  00:31

Okay so. Laurier Mandin, welcome to the show, Sir. 

Laurier Mandin  00:36

Great to be here. Chris, been looking forward to it. 

Christian Klepp  00:39

Absolutely, absolutely. It’s great to be connected. I’m really looking for this conversation. I think this is probably the first time that we’re going to discuss this topic on the show. So it’s going to be an interesting one, for sure. So let’s dive in.

Laurier Mandin  00:52

New ground. I like it. 

Christian Klepp  00:54

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Um, so let’s just say that you’ve been on a mission for a while now, to help innovators and B2B marketers create and sell products that people truly need and transform struggling products into market leaders. So for this conversation, let’s zero in on a topic, and I think I believe you wrote about it too, so how small businesses can outperform larger competitors by deeply understanding customer needs. You know, for marketers like you and I, that kind of sounds like table stakes, but we know, in reality, we’ve seen so many examples out there of what happens when you don’t do this. All right. So I’m gonna kick off the conversation with two questions, and I’m happy to repeat, okay, so the first question is, where do you see many small businesses and their marketing teams, if they have any where do you see them struggle? And the second question is, why do you believe that focusing on features and benefits alone won’t drive sales?

Laurier Mandin  01:52

And this often applies to large teams too, but small teams especially struggle with trying to do everything within really tight constraints. So teams, budgets, limited skill sets on the team, time commitments, all that pressure to perform, pressure to ship, and you’ve never, ever got enough of what you need to do it as well as you’d like to. So those constraints, the smaller the team you have, the more hats people are wearing. Often the more unrealistic the commitments are that people are making, and the expectations are and so those pressures are all a lot higher. 

Laurier Mandin  02:26

And the second part of the question is, why I believe focusing on features and benefits alone doesn’t drive sales? It’s because features and benefits are never on buyers’ minds. Buyers have needs and goals and lots of fears, but your feature list is never on their radar. It’s never going to be, and their brain isn’t even built to do or to want to do the work to understand it and to get it there, especially with, you know, all those constraints that we were talking about, and I can go into more detail on this, and I explore it in the book, but thinking is hard and highly energy intensive to do, and your buyers have other things to invest that energy into. Teams don’t have enough of anything. They’re under-resourced in every way, and they’re under constant pressure to move fast. So when they come to your website, when they’re looking at what your product does or your service does they don’t have the capacity and their resources, the time or the interest to go through connecting those dots for themselves? You really, really have to do it for them. 

Christian Klepp  03:31

Yeah, you really brought up some interesting points there. And I want to go back to the first bit about small marketing teams and their constraints. And you’ve seen this happen a lot, but short of stating the obvious, there’s a lot of chaos in an ecosystem with a lot of moving parts. But let’s look at this from a more constructive perspective. I’m going to say, and I’m going to quote, I think his name is Jean-Marie Dru who used to be the CEO of TBWA, and he wrote this book, “How Disruption Brought Order”, and he talked about creating order amidst the chaos. So back to you, how do these small marketing teams that are, as you said, wearing many hats, they’re trying to create order in this chaos, and they just can’t seem to do it. So how would you advise them to go about creating that order?

Laurier Mandin  04:21

The only way to create order and chaos is always to step back and create basically structure, and to turn that structure into a plan and move forward in an organized, non-chaotic way. So having a really solid sound go-to-market roadmap that your team can action on and be on the same page. That holds everybody accountable is one really important way to do it, and so that everybody on the team knows exactly what they need to be doing, and they know what they’ve got to answer for. That’s one of the things I help a lot of teams work on, is  designing and flushing out action plans like that. A go-to-market roadmap, so that they know everybody is singing from the same song sheet. And at least the chaos will continue to happen, and every day still brings surprises, but then you at least have a framework and guidelines to put things back into rows and columns and make things more orderly so you have a chance at managing it and prioritizing it again. So again, in chaos, everybody’s trying to put out fires and take care of urgencies and very often, what’s truly important and the mission can get ignored. So really, really important to build in that structure and to and to understand what it is that we’re all working to achieve.

Christian Klepp  05:42

Absolutely, absolutely. And you can use whatever analogy you like, right, like whether it’s manning a ship and having the right captain of first mate, or having the orchestra with the right conductor, something to that effect, right?

Laurier Mandin  05:55

Yes, yeah, for sure. I use, you know, singing from the same song sheet a lot, just because it’s very often you see where that’s not happening, and everybody is just kind of doing what they think needs to happen. And you don’t end up with a concert, you end up with a lot of noise. 

Christian Klepp  06:08

Absolutely. Well, it sounds like what you know, what the orchestra sounds like when they’re tuning up right before the concert?

Laurier Mandin  06:14

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think of that too. Or it’s kind of an interesting noise sometimes, but it’s not music. 

Christian Klepp  06:22

Yes, yes. Exactly, exactly. I’m going to move us on to the next question. So in your book, I need you speak at length about something you refer to as the coveted condition. So for the benefit of the audience, can you tell us more about that and how it relates to creating and marketing products that people want to buy?

Laurier Mandin  06:40

I came up with the name coved condition thinking about I wanted something memorable for what I saw as this desired future state that your buyer achieves, not immediately through using a product usually, but through owning and using it and making full utilization of everything that it can do for them. And I tell clients that they should imagine, if their product was taken away from a power user after a full year of use, what would that person miss the most in their lives? What would be the big Oh no, and not just now, I’ve got to go back and do my research and find a way to replace this. But now, what is? What is that, that gulf, that gap, what could no other product do that yours has done? And I have a kind of a little mental tool that I use to help people understand that I have, I say, fill in the blank on this sentence, on behalf of your customer. 

Laurier Mandin  07:32

So the sentence is, I need, and then the product’s name in order to become what, and maybe that what is a new job title of where you want to be promoted to. Maybe it’s become free to focus on another area of the business or life. But whatever that thing is that they say, I need the product to become, takes you beyond I need it to do. And it points out what that coveted condition is, what the real reason is that someone would go to all the pain and trouble and cost of adopting a new product that’s far beyond the you know, those features and benefits that we’ll talk more about, that companies tend to list when they’re trying to promote and sell something. 

Christian Klepp  08:16

Absolutely, absolutely. You just made me think of something. And I suppose you could say this is same, same, but different, but it’s almost like the same exercise that you go through with branding, right? Like so there’s always that question and workshops, let’s say, for example, you take away your company’s logo from the website. Well, people still know it’s you, right?

Laurier Mandin  08:36

And could, I think that is wonderful, and I think it’s another way of saying that is, if you took your positioning, the messaging on your company’s website, those headlines, and stuck it on another brand, could they wear it and Could they say us too? Because if so, then there’s no differentiation. And that’s one of the big challenges, especially in B2B, is having this kind of not differentiating, differentiation that everybody says, Oh no, ours is uniquely asked. It’s like, oh yeah. How come? Your competitor could wear it too, likewise, with the logo, right? If I could put and I think it’s just kind of interchangeable. Whichever part you’re swapping out shows that you’re missing that differentiation, not just in the client size, but really in the way that the company itself sees the product.

Christian Klepp  09:22

Absolutely, absolutely. On that note, that was a great segue into the next question about key pitfalls to avoid. So talk to us about that and what small businesses and marketers should be doing instead.

Laurier Mandin  09:35

There’s so many pitfalls in terms of what the things that kind of that tension between connecting with our audience and pleasing our bosses and peers. And we talked initially about, before we hit record, about content marketers in particular. And I was thinking before this conversation about, you know, where a good example was that content marketers are forced to write SEO (Search Engine Optimization) content and get that word count up, having keyword density, all those types of things. But really what Google is going to measure you by is engagement and time on page and those really important things. And regardless of what those other distractions are, as marketers, we really need to focus on big picture, desired outcomes in the differentiation that’s going to matter to our buyers, to our readers, being memorable and showing value that leads to sales not, you know, not churning out words that we think, especially if we’re in workshops. I have one client that I tried and tried and tried to explain to them why have calling themselves a solution right at the top of their home page was not differentiating them. And if you go to their home page now, that word solution is still there, I couldn’t succeed with that client. And you know, sometimes it’s really a losing battle, and it’s just because B2B is so conditioned, they believe that their customers want to see them positioned in a way that fits with the expectation, but that’s not again, differentiation. It’s about being memorable and showing value that’s going to lead to sales. It’s and for that reason, it helps to really understand what goes on inside of the buyer’s brain. 

Laurier Mandin  11:14

And in the book, I explain, and I need that, I explain in simple terms, how brain science works, with the limbic system being purely visual and having a central role in buying decisions, often making them in a matter of milliseconds. The what I call the dog brain, because it responds passionately and emotionally and quickly, like a dog it, it sees things and makes decisions in as little as two milliseconds. Well, the rational brain, the neocortex, rationalizes and justifies, but it’s 250 times slower than the limbic system at responding and even at reading, which takes a lot of back and forth between the different parts of the brain. The human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text, and features and benefits, things like that are mostly, if not all, text. So it’s really important that when we’re talking to our buyers minds, we’re using language that is strongly visual and helps people to process things and get an understanding of what it is we’re, how we’re going to benefit them in a really clear way that the limbic system understands. 

Laurier Mandin  12:25

So with my client, you know, an example is, instead of saying our automated IT (Information Technology) solutions, use next generation AI (Artificial Intelligence) to reduce manual interventions and provide proactive issue resolution, which isn’t far off from what that client was saying. You might say something like, you could have a self healing system. Well, competitors, IT departments, are still running around with fire extinguishers. Now we have a visual that people can imagine and convert into images, and they’re going to remember you that you’re the company that stops you from having this crazy, chaotic, you know, fire extinguisher comical scene by giving us a self healing system, you can imagine things fixing themselves behind the scenes. So even when you can’t necessarily just present images, because what you’re doing is fairly complicated, you can use visual language that brings images to mind and automatically makes that processing and understanding of why you’re different that much easier for your ideal buyer. 

Christian Klepp  13:26

Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. Like, I love that whole visual language piece, but you brought something up earlier in the conversation. I wanted to go back to it, because I think you’ve seen this 1000 times. How do you deal with clients like that, where there’s a lot of well, for lack of a better description, there’s a lot of analysis paralysis and decision by committee going on, and this is, this is how we think the market wants us to be represented, and this is how we should communicate to the market, like, how do you deal with that internally, to let them know that perhaps this is not really in their best interest.

Laurier Mandin  14:06

Usually, I succeed that one outlier is kind of one of these. Okay, I’m gonna let them have this one because they’re so set on it. But I think it’s really important, you know, and if I were to go back to that client now and kind of explain to them some of the things that I just said to you, as far as how the brain makes these decisions, and to really show them even what we just discussed about, you know, if, if I could take this very tagline and put it on your competitors website, then that means it’s not differentiating you, and people are not going to, you know, When you use the word solution, it’s a blah, blah, blah word, and I’ve listed out before, kind of, there’s a there’s a long list of names, and it seems to keep on getting longer. Of words that either are too commonly used in industry or they’re words that AI really, really likes. Like the word crucial is one of those words that you. It, LLM (Large Language Model) tools like ChatGPT and Claude just can’t help but spitting out every third sentence. And because of that, those words are becoming just more ignorable. 

Laurier Mandin  15:11

So I think it’s really having getting to the point with clients, with the businesses and the decision makers, that they want to come up with something that’s really uniquely them, authentically them, and not just put out words that people are going to skip over. If you’re putting words on a page, recognize that visitors are there just sometimes for a few seconds, and if one of those words is solutions, despite that, you know, as that client would argue, people are looking for solutions. They’re going to see that all over the place, and they want to know how you’re going to be the solution, not just that you think you are going to.

Christian Klepp  15:52

Yep, yep, no, absolutely, absolutely. Okay. Moving on to the next question. We all know that research is a key component, right? Like, especially in creating marketing products that people are compelled to buy, but, and I know we can go down a very deep rabbit hole here, but I’m gonna ask you to, like, be as succinct as you can how B2B marketers can validate a business product or service idea without requiring, well, a monster sized research budget?

Laurier Mandin  16:24

And you can spend a lot of money doing research for sure. The other side of that is, you know, whenever I do research projects with clients, I’ve never had them say to me, well, that that just told us what we already knew. That’s what you often think when you’re being dismissive of doing the research because you don’t want to be to see that you’re on the wrong track. And that’s the big fear, is you don’t want to be told that you know by maybe the wrong people, that what you’re working on is the wrong idea. But it’s more the insights really you want insights when you’re doing research. So the key thing when you’re doing research on a limited budget, and I have quite a lot of the book dedicated to doing this validation, because it’s such a critical area, it’s so important to do this right. But the most important thing is talking to strangers, and if you think it’s going to be hard, finding strangers that match your ideal client profile, now wait until you’re selling their product, because then it gets harder and not easy. You’re trying to do it at scale, but you need to talk to strangers, not not family, and especially not friends, because friends are your friends for a reason. You chose your friends because they say things that make you feel good about yourself, and they want to stay friends, and they want to see you make something cool. So they’re going to tell you that what you’re doing is cool, and everybody’s going to buy it, and it’s going to be amazing, and let’s make it, it’s going to be awesome. I’ll buy it, but they won’t. And so you’ve got to ask these strangers specific questions. 

Laurier Mandin  17:55

I’ve got three key questions that are really, really important. So first of all, have they actively searched for a better solution? Have they gone online and used ChatGPT or Google to try and find a better way of doing what it is they’re doing that your product does? If not, there’s a concern, because that means your solution isn’t being sought. And to market something people are looking for is much, much easier than marketing something that people don’t know exists, or don’t know that they’ve got a problem. 

Laurier Mandin  18:23

And the next question, number two is, what do they like most about their current approach? What do they like about what they’re doing that they would be hesitant to abandon, because, again, we have all these biases, and a really big one is status, cool bias. So if they really, really love their current approach, for some reason, you need to know why that is because you need to fight that status quo bias, and you need to address why your way is better.

Laurier Mandin  18:46

And then number three is probably the most important. One of all is because you need to know this going in into market, and you need the results of it is, what would they pay to solve this problem properly? And with that question, high to low ranges are great. And next important thing after they give you that high to low range is to offer it to pre-sell the product to them at their suggested low price. And that separates the genuine need from the polite interest. They’re saying everybody’s going to buy it if they’re going to write you a check or give you money, cash money to have that pre order down, then you know you’re onto something, and you’re able to take that forward and tell investors that you have people who are putting money down for this product, and it’s just the kind of the biggest acid test for validation is yes, people are willing to actually pay me money. Strangers are willing to actually pay me money to use this product, and you don’t need to do massive market research to do this. I tell people, you can do this entire validation process with just five good conversations with strangers. Might not tell you as much as comprehensive market research, but you. Have some pretty good indicators, and you’ll definitely have insights that you didn’t have before you went into those conversations.

Christian Klepp  20:06

Yeah, no, no, no, those are really good insights, and just one follow up based on what you said, was definitely conducting research and identifying those customers and the types of motivations that they have. I call them demand triggers, right? What would trigger them to find the solution online? What importance or priority would you give to competitive ecosystem analysis, like checking because, you know, a lot of people are saying, Oh, we’re the only ones in in the market that are providing this type of solution. I usually say, Well, I kind of doubt that’s true. There’s an alternative to what you provide that in itself, directly or indirectly, can also be considered a competitor. But what are your thoughts on that?

Laurier Mandin  20:49

Yeah, I’m always surprised at when I meet a new client for the first time, and they tell me something like that, or they tell me there’s just this limited set of competitors. And then when I go out and do fairly simple research, even I’m uncovering all these businesses and these options that I think they look very much like competitors to me, and usually they prove to be real competitors. 

Laurier Mandin  21:09

So I think that’s one of the things about just being, you know, have being inside of a product, being too close to the solution, that you don’t recognize what the other competitive options are. And for that reason, you know, having somebody like you or me, having someone external, take a look at what the other options are, and build those into the if we’re doing a roadmap for them, or coming up with their go to market strategy, really recognizing that there are more competitors maybe, than the inside people think. And that can be, there’s good things about competitors, too. If you if you have a number of competitors that aren’t doing the best job of solving the problem, you know, they they don’t have the best UX (User Experience), they don’t have the best solution, and the solution that the client is working on is much better, then that tells you the you’re in a market that exists. There are customers out there. There’s people trying to solve this problem and paying for it already. Now you’ve just got to show them that you’ve got the best solution. 

Laurier Mandin  22:05

So being able to do that and recognizing that you do have a reasonable number of competitors, but it’s not a market that’s saturated with solutions, and the solution you’re working towards really has those significant differentiators, then finding, you know, having a great understanding of what those competitors are, are essential to get in the point where you can put up positioning that anybody else, looking at those other options, can clearly see why this product is the standout.

Christian Klepp  22:39

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. As you were talking, I just came up with another follow up question. And I’m pretty sure you’ve got your thoughts on this. You brought this up, and especially if you’re dealing with small businesses, right, they’re forever going to be constrained by everything from funding, budget to resources, bandwidth, etc, etc. And there are certainly, I know this, but there are certainly benefits to having an external I’m going to call them strategic partner, conduct this research, right, versus them doing it in house. What are your thoughts on that? Because I know that you probably run into this all the time where people are like, well, can’t we do this ourselves?

Laurier Mandin  23:21

Yeah. And why? Here’s the interesting thing is, it’s not just the small the smaller companies, just the startups that have that problem. And I find that even for some of my larger clients, when my Graphos team, and I go in and we and we show them all the things that are possible, and we bring them the extra value that a good partner can, that it usually expands our scope of work. And pretty soon, we’re not, you know, we’re not arm wrestling their internal people for the tasks that we can do better. They’re handing us stuff and bringing us things from other departments and saying, Can you help us with this too? Can you this other department needs some similar help to what you did for this department. 

Laurier Mandin  24:03

So I find that if you know, as long as you’re staying within your wheelhouse, and you’re able to bring that extra expertise to the to the client, to the business, you tend to discover more and more ways, and they become often, I think, just better at identifying and freer to see the ways that they’re weak or that their point of view is limited by being by only seeing things from the inside, I find the best clients tend to kind of recognize that organically, like they already realize that they’ve got these shortcomings. They recognize that they’re that they’re too small, that they’re strained, and that’s an easier position to come at it from as an outside partner, but I feel that in my experience is that if we do our work really, really well, that the client tends to get better at seeing themselves and seeing their limitations as what they are. Because. So having a great partner come in also helps them focus on why they’re there in the first place. And all these people do have their superpowers, but if they’re wearing 17 hats, they’re not able to go out and do the things that they came in to do that they do really well. So it’s, you know, offering a really good outside team sometimes really flushes out the skills that people have internally and makes everybody better at doing what they were hired to do. 

Christian Klepp  25:27

Yeah, no, that’s exactly right. And then, you know, short of sounding corny, it’s, it’s viewing, viewing you as the extension of their team, and that that additional team that’s coming into to support you or provide those to use the military terms, those reinforcements, right? That you that you absolutely.

Laurier Mandin  25:45

Yeah. And again, it’s so different from one business to another. When you’re working with clients, is some of them just, you know, kind of see that naturally and and that that flow just happens, and they’re just eager to bring in a good partner. And other times, you kind of have to really prove yourself, and you have to fight through it. You have, you know, the odd you have, maybe one difficult person that is being really resistant, and when you win that person over, now, all of a sudden, the magic starts to happen. And you know, they’re happy to all of a sudden take credit for your work, because that’s one thing that I had a mentor teach me years ago, like over 20 years ago, was, he said to me, you know, what I learned in my career is that we’re not here to do stuff for clients as much as we’re here to make them look good. If they take credit for what you’re doing, if they’re happy to say, Look what we did, that means you did something good. It means you did good on them. Because now they’re not saying, look what this partner did. And you know, seeing what their bosses say you’re seeing what the others say. They’re saying, Look what we did, and that says, now we’re now, we’re working together. 

Christian Klepp  26:46

Absolutely, absolutely. And I guess that’s just that comes with the territory, right? If you’re working in this ecosystem, you have to allow the client to take credit for your work, right? It’s just part of the game.

Laurier Mandin  27:00

Yeah and it’s the highest compliment. It really, really is, because if they’re still saying, you know, look what Laurier did, look what Graphos did, then I feel that they’re not truly invested in what they brought us in to do. And you kind of do see that change when all of a sudden the credit taking happens and and I always when I start working with the client, is even if I’m really fresh and new with the brand, I really talk about it as we I really talk about us, because it’s so important that when you get in there and you’re working together with a new team, is that they recognize as early as possible, from your language to that this is a we thing. We’re everything that we’re doing. We’re going to succeed or fail together. We’re going to experiment together, and we are going to find a way.

Christian Klepp  27:42

Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, I found in my own experience that that hesitation on the client side, you know, when dealing with an external partner usually comes when it’s the first time they’ve done it, like it’s the first time they’re outsourcing this kind of work. So there’s that fear, I guess part of it is the whole letting go, like letting go that I’m not going to be working on this, it’ll be somebody else, and then it’s still, you’re still in that stage where I call it like the first date, right? You’re still trying to build that trust and see if the other person can, can deliver on this or not, right?

Laurier Mandin  28:14

Exactly, yeah, on that first date, your night’s not so much of a we thing. It’s, you know, it’s her and me, and we’re going to figure out if this works or not, and the we kind of happens as as you start to have a partnership.

Christian Klepp  28:26

Absolutely, absolutely okay. So we come to the part in the conversation where we’re talking about actionable tips, and you’ve given us plenty already, but so if somebody were listening to this conversation, who is probably in one of these companies, right where they’re dealing with these kinds of situations. 

Laurier Mandin  28:43

Yeah.

Christian Klepp  28:44

And what are some simple frameworks that any business can use to evaluate product market fit? 

Laurier Mandin  28:51

And product market fits is one of those things that’s tricky, and I think you have to have frameworks, you have to have objectivity somehow to be able to know if it’s going to happen. So I’ve got what I call the three Rs of product fit, and it’s the first R is for reviews. If customers, what are customers saying and saying consistently? If you’re organically getting five star reviews written by people in a specific market, then you’re on to something within that segment, within that market, there’s a good chance that you that you’re achieving, or beginning to achieve, product market fit, because people are are buying their liking, and they’re going forward and saying that they’re liking. 

Laurier Mandin  29:28

The second R is returns or retention in physical products. If you have a return rate that’s below 5% that signals strong fit. If there’s 5% or less, if you’re up in that 10 plus range, then your product market fit is weaker. And if you’re 15 to 20, then you’re probably doing something wrong in the positioning. Maybe the product is junky, and that’s a whole different problem. But with product market fit, people buy the product, like the product, and they don’t want to return it. They want to retain it. They want to continue subscribing and in B2B size. Where you watch your turn rate, if, if customers are renewing and expanding their use rather than dropping off, then you know you’ve got strong fit. They’re they’re telling you that.

Laurier Mandin  30:08

The third R is referrals. If customers are actively recommending you, not just saying they would, or promising they will, refer you to other people in similar industries, then you know that they’re actually, they’re putting their reputation on the line. They’re putting their contacts on the line, because that’s the strongest signal of all, that they really believe you’re doing something well and that you’re worth recommending to other people. If you’re scoring well on all three of those Rs, then I say that you’ve almost certainly found your fit, and really, by the time you’re scoring well on all those Rs, you’re kind of off to the races in other ways too, because you’ve got that retention, you’ve got those referrals, you’re getting great reviews, and those are great things to utilize in your marketing, to leverage in your case studies, to bring forward in everything that you’re doing, but if not, there’s, you know, those three Rs also tell you where to focus if there’s one of those that you’re doing especially poorly at if you’re not able to get good reviews, if nobody seems to recommend you to their colleagues or peers, then you’ve got to improve the product experience, reduce buyer friction, or find better ways to delight your customers.

Christian Klepp  31:27

Yeah, no, no, absolutely, absolutely. So just to recap, for the benefit of the audience, those three Rs, right? So we’ve got reviews, we’ve got retention, and we’ve got referrals. So I have a feeling I might know the answer to this question. I’m gonna ask it anyway, just from your experience, Laurier. How long does it usually take a business to get a balanced score for all three Rs?

Laurier Mandin  31:54

Well, in consumer products, it can be quicker than with B2B products. In B2B, it can take, you know, I hate to say it, but it can take years, and it shouldn’t. If you’re able to do things right, if you’re iterating quickly, and you’re reaching out and try and recognizing those because I think when you have those three Rs as KPIs (Key Performance Indicator), you get there faster. You know, I would say it, it’s nice to ideal to be able to get those three Rs happening within a year of launch. To me, that’s, you know, if you, if you aren’t moving towards them, then there’s a chance that you’re doing things that is, you know, potentially quite wrong, that your positioning might be off significantly, that you, either you the product needs improvement. But there’s something that’s wrong if you’re not making measurable strides towards getting that product market fit inside of that first year.

Christian Klepp  32:49

And that probably goes back to something you mentioned earlier in the conversation, right? There’s got to be either that one person or that team that’s like the gatekeeper for all these three Rs, right? That does these regular checkups to make sure that, you know, everybody’s held accountable and that everybody is moving or rowing in the right direction. 

Laurier Mandin  33:09

Yeah, with any KPI right, you have to have someone who is the champion of it, because if you and is able to push that through to the other team members who are accountable for making it happen, to be able to say that, you know, our retention is low. We’re slipping. You know what is there’s something that we’re doing wrong because we’re getting way more turn than we should be, and we’re getting more than we had last quarter. And to have people aggressively go in and work together to solve those problems. So, yeah, you need that, not just to be able to say that’s what our three measurables are here, we need to have identify what the standards are for them. You know, if it’s that 5% that’s your goal, to recognize that, you know, or it’s or sub 15% whatever that goal is from where you are right now, to make it measurable. And then you can continue to adjust and tweak it as you strike those goals and you start to do well at them.

Christian Klepp  34:02

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Okay, my friend, please get up on your soapbox here a status quo that you passionately disagree with and why.

Laurier Mandin  34:17

I’ve got a few of them, but I think the one that you know is most consistent with what I’ve been saying, and it really is one that bothers me. It’s the main reason I wrote the book is that people believe, still out there, even if they you know whether they say it or not, they believe that product validation kills innovation again. They might say it, they may not, but that’s kind of the key reason to not to do the in depth and serious validation, to do the work that it takes to validate the product. And you know, it’s a pervasive myth that’s often backed up by repeating that Steve Jobs quote that customers don’t know what they want until you show it to them. And that’s okay when you have a huge idea and huge money sometimes, but you. Got to remember this, Steve Jobs also got kicked out of Apple and wasted millions and millions of dollars on failed products that we don’t talk about because he had that, you know, that belief, and that’s really expensive experimentation. Validation is, you know, even the expensive validation is so cheap compared to the cost of launching something and not knowing what customers are going to think until they see it. 

Laurier Mandin  35:24

And likewise, you know the brain science that I talk about in the book, and I talk about a lot as a result of that, it tells us that it’s the validation is important too. We use tools like fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging). We can literally watch buying decisions being made in milliseconds in the emotional center of the brain, and when you validate properly. You’re not asking people what features and benefits they want, you’re discovering what’s going to trigger that dog brain to say, I need that. I spent 30 years watching really smart innovators put their life savings and their investors money into products that could have succeeded but failed because they confused validation with feature requests from their peers and focus groups that weren’t properly set up, and just making mistakes like that. That you know doing, it’s not hard to do it right? It really is, you know, it’s, it’s quite simple stuff. It’s just basically understanding, not leading people, not framing for them, what you, you know, giving them the these ideas of saying, Would you pay this much? And of course, they’re going to say yes, because you led them and you framed it. But just really having, having the customer guide you, and to not just be dismissive of the inputs they give you, because it’s not what you want to hear. I think that’s the other side of that. You know, as soon as you start getting answers you don’t want to hear, you go back to that. Well, yeah, but they’re not going to know how great it is until we show it to them anyway.

Christian Klepp  36:57

So true. So true. Okay, here comes the bonus question. And I thought long and hard about this one, but let’s just say that there’s somebody out there, and I’m not going to name any names, but somebody like cuts you a check or calls you up and says, Laurier, I’m going to give you this much funding, and I want you to go out there and create this product that’s going to change the world. If you were given that opportunity, what product would you build? And why?

Laurier Mandin  37:25

That’s a great question. And you know, I’ve thought about this a number of times before, too, because to me, if it’s something that’s going to change the world, it would have to be something around solving some major problems, like flooding or like fires. So I think what I would come up with would be something that would help people to protect their home in a situation where I think of areas not that far from where I live, where very frequently there’s, you know, there’s low lying areas that river has come up and overflow. And if people could create kind of an instant dam system around their house that would protect house after house from flooding. It would save insurance companies huge amounts in claims, and they could subsidize these things. So I think solutions around helping people to better protect themselves, instead of just having to run when things go wrong and come back to the disasters and try and fix disasters after the fact, and you know, that’s becoming unsustainable. That’s where I would put my efforts. If I were all of a sudden to have Elon Musk come to me and say, Hey, here’s a billion dollars. Go and build something cool. My R&D (Research and Development) would go into. I’d probably first of all find out where we could make the biggest impact and then quickly focus on developing something that would be scalable and would be really effective in helping people to protect what they value.

Christian Klepp  38:51

No, absolutely. I think that’s an amazing idea. I’ve always been thinking about finding a cheaper form of desalination, because, as you might know, it’s a very expensive process, right?

Laurier Mandin  39:03

Yes, and even for fighting forest fires right in in LA, I was surprised. I asked that question. A lot of people thought, why can’t they just grab water from the ocean, on the ocean, but they can’t because, and they do in some cases, but it’s really not good because of what happens when you put salt water into these helicopters and into all this equipment, it just wrecks everything, and the salt doesn’t work as well for fighting fires, so not just for human needs, because we’ve got all this salt water and so precious little fresh water in so much of the world. I think that’s a great one, too. I’ll go in with you on that when we get the billion dollars.

Christian Klepp  39:36

But again, making coming up with an affordable desalination solution. Because everything that I know right now about desalination, it’s just expensive. It’s just, you know, unless you’re a wealthy country, there’s no way that you can afford that, right? 

Laurier Mandin  39:51

It is and that, you know, here’s the strange thing. I mean, there’s all kinds of ways, like through reverse osmosis and other processes, to do it, and then it goes and happens on itself in nature. Here is that, you know, there’s, that’s how clouds happen. It’s desalination. You just have evaporation, but to make it happen at scale, in a way that you can capture and put where you want, that’s, you know, that is the really tough question is, how do you do that? I believe we’ll get there, because it’s such an important.

Christian Klepp  40:15

I think so too. I think so too. Laurier, I’d love to talk to you for another couple of hours about like decent elation and all these other product solutions that can help change the world. But you know, I just want to thank you again for your time. Thank you for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. Please, quick Introduce yourself. How folks can get in touch with you and tell us a little bit about your book.

Laurier Mandin  40:36

Sure. Yeah, well, I’ve been running my company. I founded Graphos Product in 1993 so for over 30 years now, we’ve been helping clients to take products to market, to de-risk their new product ideas to create go to market roadmaps. And that’s what I do on the day to day, and that’s what I’ve done in my career all my life, and starting just before COVID, I started writing a book, as I said, it was motivated by seeing businesses fail again and again, because there were simple things they could have been doing differently that would have saved them so much grief, and could have got them to having a product that is built around a need that’s felt by many people. So that’s what the book I Need That is all about. 

Laurier Mandin  41:22

It’s about creating and marketing products people are compelled to buy and how to get there. So, and the book, if you want to get a copy of the book, you can find it on Amazon. It’s called I Need That by Laurier Mandin, and another good way to get it is go to lmandin.com, and there you can get it in paperback, hardcover, ebook and audiobook, or you can sign up to my daily emails. And I think that’s the thing that I spend some time on every single day. Is coming up with ways to move people forward, to move product makers, regardless of if they’re consumer products or B2B products, every single day to move them forward. So I create these short daily emails, and you can sign up to these at lmandin.com you can find out where to write to where to get the book, or how to connect with me with that website, lmandin.com and graphosproduct.com. There’s ways that you can get in touch with me and find out more about what I do. And maybe we’re a fit, and if so, I’d love to work with you.

Christian Klepp  42:25

Fantastic, fantastic. So once again, Laurier, thank you so much for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon. 

Laurier Mandin  42:31

Thank you, Christian. It’s been a delight. 

Christian Klepp  42:32

Bye, for now.