Pretotyping: First Win Customers, then Develop a Product [Guide]

Many companies today first test a minimal version of their product or service (MVP) to see whether they could be successful on the market with it. This makes sense when you consider that nine out of ten innovations are doomed to failure. 

But even investing in an MVP is risky. Here too, companies first make advance payments and invest development time and budget in an idea before testing whether anyone would actually spend money on their solution. A risk that can be avoided. 

How, you ask? There's a way companies can get customers before they even have to invest time and money in an MVP. The concept I would like to introduce to you today is called pretotyping.

A step-by-step guide to pretotyping

Pretotyping Step 1: Define your offer.
Even the best sales are of no use if you have not clearly positioned your product or service. So first of all, ask yourself:

• What is the problem that our product can solve?
• Which people have this problem?
• Is the problem we're solving big enough to keep people up at night?

Take enough time for this first step and be brutally honest with your answers. If your offer doesn't solve a truly urgent problem for your customers, it will almost certainly fail. 

Pretotyping  Step 2: Create a landing page.
Your product doesn't even exist yet. But that doesn't matter. Because you know exactly what problem you can solve with it and who the people are who have this problem. Now put these insights into words and create a landing page for your future offer. 

Your landing page needs these elements:

• Title: The title should make it clear at a glance who you are and what you do.
• Header: In the header area of ​​the landing page you describe in 3 lines: What is the problem? How do you solve it? What does success look like for your customers? To do this, provide a header image that shows a happy customer. So think about what your typical customer might look like.
• Call to Action: Formulate specifically what your users should do on your landing page. Place this call to action clearly visible in several places on your landing page.
• Explain problem: In the next section, describe exactly what problems your customers are having. How does the problem affect your daily work? What does it do personally to your customers? (Frustration, anger, resignation, etc.)
• Describe the benefits: What do your customers get out of using your offer? Be specific about the benefits your customers will enjoy with your solution. Attention: It's not about describing features and services, but rather how your solution makes your customers' lives easier.  
• Show empathy: Why do you actually want to help your customers? Make your customers feel like you understand their problems and take them seriously. This creates trust – an important prerequisite for the subsequent purchase decision. 
• Prove competence: Prove with testimonials, customer logos, key figures or certificates that you can really keep what you promise.
• Plan : Describe in three steps (no more!) how customers can order your product. For service, you describe in three steps how your customers can work with you.
• Pricing and product models: Let your customers choose. Show different product and price options. Three levels have proven successful – Basic, Standard, Premium. 

If you would like to learn more about the elements of a good website, I recommend my storytelling article .

Pretotyping  Step 3: Give your visitors something of value.
Free additional offers that provide significant added value for your users are called lead magnets. You are giving something valuable to your users who are interested in your offer but are not yet ready to respond directly to your call to action. 

In return, these users give you their email addresses. You will use this in later nurturing (step 7) to further maintain them and provide them with helpful information until they are ready to buy. Case studies, white papers, checklists, templates, calculators, webinars, videos and much more are suitable as lead magnets

Pretotyping  Step 4: Find Potential Leads.
In step 1 you clearly defined your target group. Now look for real people who fall into this target group. Social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Xing are suitable for this, where you can search for free by industry, position and title of your target group. 

The LinkedIn tool Sales Navigator (paid) offers an even more effective way to identify leads. This allows you to define your search precisely, for example by industry, zip code, number of employees or seniority. Start broad and get narrower in your search until you end up with a list of 3,000 to 4,000 leads. 

Pretotyping  Step 5: Write to your leads.
Now get in touch with your target group. Send contact requests to your leads and write short, friendly direct messages in which you pitch your free lead magnet. 

Target the leads with whom you have the most common contacts first. Save the leads without common contacts for last. The more people accept your request, the higher the likelihood that new mutual contacts will arise with those leads with whom you initially had no connection. A clever snowball model.

Also helpful: Ask good contacts for an intro to a potential customer.

And: Follow up again in a friendly manner after seven days if leads have not responded to your request. Such direct messages often simply get lost in the inbox. 

Pretotyping  Step 6: Send your lead magnet.
I know from my own campaigns that around 30% to 50% of the people you write to will accept your contact request. Half of them will show interest in your lead magnet. Now send your lead magnet to these leads by email. You can do this manually or automatically, for example with the Brevo emailing tool .

Pretotyping  Step 7: Nurture your leads in a nurturing campaign.
Over the next few weeks, you will nurture your leads with a nurturing campaign. To do this, send them a short, valuable tip every week that will help them solve their problem. In this way, you establish yourself as an expert in your field and remain present not only in the inbox, but above all in the minds of your leads.  

Pretotyping  Step 8: Determine willingness to buy using lead scoring.
When can you finally make your offer to your leads? How do you know when a lead is ready to buy? You can determine the willingness of your leads to buy using so-called lead scoring. In a points system, you determine which interactions of your leads with you and your content are “worth” how many points. I myself work according to the following points system:

• 10 points for every opened email, every page impression and every like 
• 30 points for subscribing to the newsletter or downloading the lead magnet
• 50 points when someone shares content or looks at pricing
• 100 points extra for all leads who are decision makers in a company
• 300 points for leads who filled out the contact form and abandoned it

You can use this scoring methodology to classify your leads’ willingness to buy. If a lead has reached 1,000 points, there is a high probability that they are interested enough in your offer that you can now make them a concrete offer. It's best to automate the awarding of points in your CRM system so that you don't have to do the calculations manually after each contact. 

Pretotyping  Step 9: Make your offer.
How you want to make your offer is a matter of taste. Some people like to pick up the phone and simply call your leads. If that's too direct for you, take a close look in your CRM system at what interactions your lead had with your content, what content they spent a particularly long time looking at, and what links they clicked on. Then formulate a personal email that is tailored precisely to these interests and interactions and make your offer. The offer is your email’s call to action. 

Another way to make an offer to your leads is with a sales campaign. To do this, write five sales emails in which you tell your offer as a story in five acts - each one with a clear focus: 

Sales email 1: What is the problem and how do you solve it for your customers?

Sales Email 2: Have a testimonial tell you how you solved their problem.

Sales Email 3: Anticipate and refute the biggest objection that could stop your leads from making a purchase.

Sales email 4: Surprise your leads with a paradigm shift. Describe a common prejudice about your offer and refute it. An example: “A personal trainer is a luxury that only rich people can afford.” A paradigm shift could be: “It is not a luxury to invest in your own health. If you can’t manage to change your exercise behavior on your own, get support from an expert.”

Sales email 5: Briefly summarize the key messages from the previous emails and end with a specific call to action, e.g. arrange a non-binding consultation, try it out for free for 1 month, etc. 

Conclusion
Pretotyping is a sure-fire way to attract new customers even before you've invested time and money into developing an MVP. The nine steps summarized again:

1. Define your offer.
2. Develop a landing page for it.
3. Give your visitors something of value.
4. Search for potential leads.
5. Write to your leads.
6. Send your lead magnet via email.
7. Nurture your leads in a nurturing campaign.
8. Determine willingness to buy using lead scoring.
9. Make your offer.

The pressing question is: Is the effort worth it for you in the end? The answer to that is a clear: yes. If you invest an hour a day in pretotyping, after six months you will have your first paying customers and a four-digit email list of qualified leads. 

This lead list is your most valuable asset. Because you can scale this list and identify new leads from it. For example with lookalike audiences. If you have a size of 1,000 people or more, you can create so-called lookalike audiences on Facebook and LinkedIn from your lead list. This helps you identify new audiences that have similar characteristics to your lead list and that can be up to 15 times larger than your original list. You can now target this target group again and increase your email list tenfold. 

https://justgrow.eu/blog/​

If you're interested in reading more of Olaf articles please visit the website link above. (Please note that Olaf's site is in German but Google translate does an excellent job of instantly translating it to English.)

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