How can you use customer discovery to find the right strategic partners?

Finding the right strategic partners is crucial for any venture, especially in the early stages. But how do you identify and attract potential partners who share your vision, values, and goals? One way is to use customer discovery, a process of validating your assumptions and learning about your target market, competitors, and stakeholders. In this article, we will explain how you can use customer discovery to find the right strategic partners for your venture.

1 What is customer discovery?

Customer discovery is a method of testing your hypotheses about your business model, value proposition, and customer segments. It involves talking to potential customers, users, and influencers to understand their problems, needs, and preferences. Customer discovery helps you to validate or invalidate your assumptions, discover new opportunities, and refine your product or service. It is the first step of the lean startup methodology, which aims to reduce uncertainty and waste in building new ventures.

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Jessica Jones

Operations Evangelist | Mom | Data Wrangler & Strategist | Consultant |
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As a startup, much of the work the first year was customer discovery. We spent time doing market research to understand the competitive landscape in terms of offering, fee structure, and corporate structure. We also spent countless hours getting feedback directly from prospective clients on their needs, pain points, and ideas to help make their lives better. Using that knowledge helped us shape our offering and fee structure significantly. We continue to solicit feedback by pulling in prospects and clients to a monthly council meeting where we can continue to keep a pulse on things.

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2 Why do you need strategic partners?

Strategic partners are individuals or organizations that can help you to accomplish your goals quicker, more cost-effectively, or to a higher standard. They can offer resources, knowledge, access, or feedback that you may not have had. For instance, strategic partners can assist in expanding into new markets or segments, upgrade your credibility or reputation, raise the quality of your product or service, decrease your costs or risks, and grow your revenue or profitability. Strategic partners may be customers, suppliers, distributors, investors, mentors, or peers and their respective roles and expectations may vary depending on the relationship and agreement.

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Charles Ehredt

CEO at Currency Alliance
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In the loyalty sector, strategic partnerships have existed for a few decades - basically hotel groups and rental car companies collaborating with airlines so common customers could earn points faster and get to interesting rewards. Many of these relationships are relevant for frequent travelers, but not for the majority of people who travel once or twice per year. The contrary would be coalition loyalty programs like Nectar in the UK or Air Miles in Canada. These programs usually combine 4-6 anchor brands with high customer frequency of spend with dozens of smaller brands with lower customer frequency. Advantage of these partnerships include sharing customer insights to improve marketing and sharing the costs of incentivizing customers.

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3 How can you use customer discovery to find strategic partners?

Customer discovery can be a useful tool for finding strategic partners for your venture. Start by identifying key assumptions and hypotheses about your potential partners, then conduct interviews, surveys, or observations to validate or invalidate these assumptions. Analyze and synthesize the findings to look for patterns, trends, gaps, and opportunities. Segment potential partners based on their characteristics, preferences, and values, and prioritize the most promising ones. Build relationships with them by communicating your value proposition, vision, and goals. Ask for feedback, referrals, or introductions and negotiate partnership terms. This process can help you find the right strategic partners for your venture.

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Charles Ehredt

CEO at Currency Alliance
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Ask various segments of your customer base to identify other brands that they tend to shop with. Those companies that come up frequently will like be good strategic partners because if the customers already engage with them, it is probably because of similar values. In B2B sales, find out from your target customers which other companies offer complementary products or services. Those companies probably already have hundreds or thousands of clients like your target, and they are likely to already have sales channels selling to the same buyer.

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4 What are the benefits of using customer discovery to find strategic partners?

Gaining insight from customer discovery to find strategic partners can offer many advantages for your venture. Doing so can help you avoid misusing time and resources, discover new opportunities, gain a better understanding of your market and industry, build better relationships with partners, improve your product or service based on partner feedback, and leverage partner resources to grow your venture more efficiently.

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5 What are the challenges of using customer discovery to find strategic partners?

Using customer discovery to find strategic partners can also have some challenges or drawbacks. For example, it may be difficult to find, access, or contact potential strategic partners, or you may encounter resistance or skepticism. Additionally, you may have to deal with uncertainty, ambiguity, or complexity in your market, industry, or ecosystem. Moreover, you may need to balance your time and resources between customer discovery and other aspects of your venture, and you may have to adapt or pivot your venture based on customer discovery findings.

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6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?

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How can you use customer discovery to find the right strategic partners?

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1 What is customer discovery?

2 Why do you need strategic partners?

3 How can you use customer discovery to find strategic partners?

4 What are the benefits of using customer discovery to find strategic partners?

5 What are the challenges of using customer discovery to find strategic partners?

6 Here’s what else to consider

Venture Capital

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How can you use customer discovery to find the right strategic partners?

1

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5

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1 What is customer discovery?

2 Why do you need strategic partners?

3 How can you use customer discovery to find strategic partners?

4 What are the benefits of using customer discovery to find strategic partners?

5 What are the challenges of using customer discovery to find strategic partners?

6 Here’s what else to consider

Venture Capital

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