Time: ~15 minutes

Let's take an example and see if we can hone in on a specific beachhead customer segment.

Imagine that you are a researcher that is looking into blood borne biomarkers for the early detection of cancer. Your technology could conceivably be used for all sorts of cancers. What is your beachhead customer segment?

The team starts with the customer segment: oncologists and starts to apply the narrowing questions on the previous page.

The Same Strong Value Proposition

The team starts their customer discovery by interviewing oncologists and exploring which specific cancer is the best fit for where their technology can deliver the most value. They ask questions such as:

Which cancer would benefit the most from early detection?
For which cancers would early detection enable a known intervention that is known to improve outcomes?
For which cancers does the lack of early detection result in the most severe negative outcomes for patients?
For which cancers does the lack of early detection result in expensive downstream interventions that could be avoided?

Based on the feedback from customer interviews, the team selects the specific cancer where the value proposition is the strongest. Let's say they pick: glioblastoma.

The customer segment narrows to: neuro-oncologists

The Same Solution

The team begins interviewing neuro-oncologists and uncovers how they diagnose and treat their patients. In this process, they uncover that there is a wide variation in how and when patients get referred to them for evaluation. They find that a certain sub-segment of hospitals are already adding in a biomarker test alongside the initial battery of imaging. This would be an ideal place for them to insert their test as the infrastructure is already in place. Based on their interviews, these hospitals tend to correlate with hospitals with a large amount of research activity in oncology. At the other hospitals, adoption of the product would involve more extensive changes or additions to the workflows and/or the company would have to not only develop the biomarker test but other systems as well.

The customer segment narrows to: neuro-oncologists at large research hospitals

The Same Awareness Channels and Customer Accessibility

Next, the team continues interviewing neuro-oncologists at large research hospitals and learns that there are three major conferences. Society for Neuro-Onocology (SNO), European Association of Neuro-Oncology (EANO), and International Symposium of Pediatric Neuro-Oncology (ISPNO). The team is based in the US and has many more connections and advisors that attend SNO than EANO. Also, pediatric oncology presents some special challenges, and it is not apparent how easy it will be to use this biomarker in children. For these reasons, the team chooses to focus on US-based oncologists that do NOT specialize in pediatric oncology.

The customer segment narrows to: neuro-oncologists in large US research hospitals that treat adults

Continue Sub-Segmenting

The team continues to focus their interviews on trying to discover additional sub-segments of the "neuro-oncologists in large US research hospitals that treat adults".

The goal is to keep probing with more and more detailed questions to understand the question, "Will this customer's decisions and behavior be the same or different than other customers in this segment?" In the end, the team is trying to get down to a tightly defined group of people that will form the first market for the company.