The development plan begins with an account review. One large customer wants better reporting. Another needs an integration. A third asks for a specialist version. Each request has a commercial case: there is a relationship to protect, revenue attached and someone inside the business responsible for responding.
By the time the requests become a roadmap, the company has a persuasive plan for improving what it already sells. Its ambition to reach new customers has received rather less attention.
Who is speaking for the people who found the offer too complicated, could not justify the commitment or never encountered it at all? Their decisions deserve a place in the growth plan, particularly when the next round of improvements would make the offer more elaborate and expensive to serve.
What existing customers leave out
In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen examined how established companies could lose emerging markets while serving their existing customers well. Their customers and investment priorities helped direct attention towards the business they already understood.
For a mid-sized business, that raises an immediate question: why do plausible customers decline the offer? Answering it can change the development brief, the route to market or the commitment a buyer is asked to make.
When the obstacle sits outside the product
In their HBR article Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done”, Christensen and his co-authors describe Bob Moesta’s work with a Detroit-area condominium developer. Prospective buyers visited but few purchased. Adding features suggested by focus groups had failed to improve sales.
Interviews with purchasers uncovered an unexpected obstacle: the difficulty of leaving a family home and deciding what to do with its contents. The developer changed the offer to include moving services, storage and space to sort possessions, alongside changes to the homes. The authors report that the business grew by 25% while industry sales fell by 49%.
The commercial move expanded what the buyer was paying for. A developer working only from a list of desired property features could have continued improving the building while leaving the difficulty of moving untouched.
Why non-buyers don’t buy
Three questions help turn what non-buyers tell you into a commercial decision.
1. Do they need a different outcome?
Ask what the person was trying to accomplish when the decision arose, which alternatives they considered and what they eventually did. Include workarounds and doing nothing. A request for more features can conceal a wish to spend less time dealing with the problem.
The answer should change the development brief. If the customer wants an occasional answer, adding sophistication to an annual service may take the business further from the opportunity. Test whether a smaller initial service would meet that need at a price worth serving.
2. Can they find and buy the offer?
Follow the route from the buying situation to the transaction. Where does the customer look? Which suppliers or advisers influence the choice? Is the offer available there? In a business purchase, who can approve it, and when do they enter the conversation?
These questions can expose a commercially attractive offer trapped behind the wrong route. Development expenditure will achieve little if the practical obstacle is that a buyer cannot obtain the product through the distributor they use, or cannot get a proposal through procurement.
3. Can they accept the commitment?
Examine what the purchase asks the customer to take on: expenditure, contract length, implementation work, reputational risk and the effort of changing an established routine.
The condominium case belongs here. In other settings, the response could involve a smaller initial commitment, clearer implementation support or different payment terms. Price deserves scrutiny too. A customer who declines an annual contract has not necessarily rejected its total value; the timing and exposure may be the problem.
Reducing that exposure has a cost. The supplier must decide whether it can absorb the risk and service burden at a price customers will pay.
Do not let focus become a ceiling
Understanding a particular buying situation helps shape an offer. It can also tempt a team into defining its market too narrowly.
Byron Sharp of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute distinguishes restrictive targeting from adapting marketing to reach more buyers. He argues for adapting the marketing mix to reach buyers across the market, rather than deliberately excluding people on the assumption that they will never be interested.
For a smaller business, a sensible starting point is an offer it can deliver well and a route it can afford. Keep asking who else shares the buying situation. A tightly described customer persona should not decide that question in advance.
Put the finding into the commercial decision
A proposed response also needs to earn its place in the portfolio. Would it recruit additional customers, retain business otherwise likely to leave or simply move existing customers onto a weaker margin? What work would it create after the sale?
Begin with recent declined proposals, occasional customers and people who chose an alternative. Reconstruct actual decisions. Check what you hear against sales records, channel conditions and delivery economics. Interviews can reveal an explanation worth testing; they cannot establish how widespread it is.
Then take a specific choice back to the leadership team: change the offer, change the route, change the commitment, or leave the opportunity alone. State what evidence supports that choice and what remains unresolved.
At the next growth review, put a set of declined opportunities beside the development roadmap. Ask which requests on that roadmap address the reasons those buyers stayed away. If the connection is weak, revisit the brief before funding the next round of improvements.