During Diligence, it is most critical to learn from customers and prospects - individuals "sitting in a seat" 1) using a good or service (or working to address underserved or unmet needs better), or 2) influencing purchase and adoption decisions and budget.
Customers who hold the wallet are the experts who matter—and proper Diligence requires getting to them in abundance and gaining a comprehensive understanding of their drivers, perspectives, behaviors, and intent.
If you make investments and commercial decisions, whether for an acquisition, an investment in a go-to-market strategy, or a new product strategy, based on meeting customer needs in the most attractive segments, investment returns improve on a relative basis every time. Meeting customer needs is one of the most fundamental factors in achieving business success, and, together with Porter's Five Forces, it drives P&L, Balance Sheet, and ROI performance more than any other factor.
Every exercise should be custom-sourced—utilizing actual users and decision-makers specific to the case.
Honing best-in-class capabilities is paramount to the exercise, and better and more relevant inputs make better analyses and more accurate conclusions.
Matters Graph not only gains insight into customer satisfaction, NPS, and conjoint views on decision-making and choice preferences, but also develops far more accurate views on sizing exercises (TAM, SAM, and SOM) because we use carefully captured voice-of-customer data to calculate these measures. This approach, rather than using the standard and overly simplistic modeling method of applying assumptions to top-down population data, prevents the dangerous overstatement of the opportunities at hand.
Likewise, we base projected growth, adoption, share, and switch rates, segment analyses, and value gen opportunities on bottom-up, robust, high-n Voice-of-Customer compiled behavioral segmentation (and never limited to demographic segmentation). Again, better and more relevant inputs lead to more accurate analyses and conclusions. "Make the hard work of Diligence a matter of fact."
Great Voice of Customer work is not a dozen or so quotes from a handful of "experts" from an expert network.
Instead, Voice of Customer is a research methodology that requires getting a high sample size (n) for each relevant segment in a market—and includes many current customers, competitor customers, and non-users—and various role players within each. The genuine Voice of Customer requires cross-functional inputs when decisions are made in a cross-functional manner (and most B2B decisions are)—which itself is hardly ever a homogeneous story across the prospective customer base.
Investigative interviews that allow these users and decision-makers to drive the conversation relative to the learning agenda are where you uncover the trends, underserved and unmet needs, and accurate competitive positioning that synthesizes the Voice of Customer. The insights gained during these investigations are the result of deep listening, real-time information processing, and resetting investigative paths. This process stands in stark contrast to the majority of Diligence decks.
Matters Graph refines and evolves its investigation throughout each discussion to uncover what truly matters, noting and drilling into clues, identifying patterns, and discovering the answers to "why," "why not," "how," and "what if."
These differentiated inputs are what make better market work and better thesis pressure testing—a sound basis for effective Commercial Diligence.
