Lawyers always advise clients if you cannot win on “fact”, you must try to win on the “law”.
If you are an enterprise technology or “enabling” business, seeking growth capital fast, you may not “win” immediately in convincing the investor but there is no reason you cannot show investors why you are a “winner” in your ideal customer’s eyes. We are talking about “leverage”, and applying tremendous “normative or peer pressure” to the investor’s thinking. The more impressive the customers (BMW), and the scale of the future opportunities (global markets), the more power you have to exert.
Customer Opportunity Assessment (“COA”):
- Grid A: How much will the opportunity cost to implement (set up, training, operation, licence fees, lease space, new hires, new expertise) vs. How much potential benefit does the opportunity provide (tangible improvements for customers, new products or services offered, self-financing or not, is the risk worth the benefit, how long until we see expected results and so on)?
- Grid B: How difficult is it to implement your technology (customer understanding, reliability, dependence on support staff, physical space, users’ connectivity ease and experience etc) vs. How close is the improvement to your ideal customer’s current corporate strategy (building a stronger brand, faster innovation, stronger business model, current systems, procedures and methods, faster new customer acquisition, quicker new product/services offered etc.)
You are ideally seeking to be positioned as “low” implementation cost/”high” potential benefit on Grid A, and “low” difficulty in implementing/”high” proximity to your ideal customers’ strategy, on Grid B.
If your attitude is the investor must find this out for themselves or you are wary of asking your own customers, you are dramatically reducing the odds of a prospective investor partnership and committed capital.
If you are serious, you cannot take that risk.
