Here’s the cheat code for business development with military customers for new and small businesses…

The best way to identify military customers is to have conversations around problems, vs trying to demo your product. Your money is precious and limited, so stretching every dollar and minute of time for maximum impact is of utmost importance. Here’s the fastest and most efficient way to do that for any product or service.

Step 1, start with discussing problems to refine the solution opportunity. Create, host, participate in events where you can discuss potential problems with tactical/unit-level military personnel. This should NOT be a sales conversation in any way! The quickest way to turn off military folks is sales pitches. What they do need is access to is technical experts across many different areas to discuss and refine their problems. This is rarely done, and a great opportunity for unique and valuable interaction that can even be done virtually in most cases.

Step 2, focus on expanding the discussion to define the potential customer community. Once you have an initial military person or small group with a defined problem, try and expand the engagement with more military representatives from other units or operational level organizations. This is to help both further refine the overall problem, and scope the actual business opportunity. Is this a small or wide spread problem, how much variation in the problem is there between units, and how high of a priority problem is this on average across all effected organizations?

Step 3, finally start to articulate your range of options for customer engagement. Once you have a well defined problem, AND know that problem is tied to a group of potential users that is of a scale and scope worth pursuing, then start to message your ability to assist in solving it for them. Don’t waste your time on small problems. Don’t waste your time on boring one directional product pitches. Make sure you have a problem of value and size worth pursuing, then offer to ways solve it.

So many companies are running around trying to sell their hammer hoping to find people that have nails. STOP!!!

Foster open conversations about nails, and eventually customers that actually need your hammer will find you. 👍