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Test Your Assumptions Before You Launch

To accomplish your goals, you need to structure the sales process into a campaign. The first step is identifying the value proposition. Follow this link if you missed that episode yesterday. The next step is structuring your assumptions. Avoid the temptation to believe your assumption without proof. Make sure you’re right BEFORE moving ahead. […]

James Shepherd

May 18, 2018

To accomplish your goals, you need to structure the sales process into a campaign. The first step is identifying the value proposition. Follow this link if you missed that episode yesterday. The next step is structuring your assumptions. Avoid the temptation to believe your assumption without proof. Make sure you’re right BEFORE moving ahead.

Especially the new entrepreneurs miss this extremely important second step. Once the value proposition is identified the temptation is to dive right into solving the problem. The urge is to forge ahead by creating a big marketing plan around that goal, decide the target market, identify action steps, and go. WATCH OUT! Don’t miss the next step of testing your assumptions.

Suppose you say, “I THINK pizza shops are frustrated with the high transaction fee for credit card processing. So, I’m going to work with my processor and offer the solution of zero transaction fee that has a flat rate. This is going to cut through the white noise, and pizza shops are going to love it.” The key words in that thought process are “I THINK.” But you don’t KNOW your assumption is true! Before you start planning or printing brochures or getting business cards, take this next step.

Walk into ten pizza shops with this script, “Hey, my name is James Shepherd. I’m a local business owner. The reason I stopped by today is I’m just kind of curious if pizza shops are even going to be interested in this idea of mine. I’m about to roll out a new program. To me the biggest problem with pizza shops and the way they process payment right now is their transaction fee is too high. I’m thinking of presenting a program which offers a zero-transaction fee, this means there’s only the one percentage fee. That way, no matter how many transactions you process, there’ll always be the same percentage fee. I’m not asking if you want it today; I’m just asking if it would interest you? Do you think this idea would be successful if I pitched it to 100 pizza shops?”

Of course, their guard is going to be up. That’s fine. The guard is going to be up when you go sell them, too. But listen to their response. This is the way to test your assumption. Whatever your assumptions are, the next step is call or walk into businesses. See if you are right BEFORE you move on to the next step. Avoid the temptation to believe your assumption without proof.