Focus on one fruitful channel

To gain the initial growth necessary for sustainable business, an entrepreneur is best served by mastering a single, fruitful channel.

To gain the critical number of customers to break even and to receive the customer feedback, a company needs to iterate on a single channel. This is because entering a channel is like drilling a hole into the bottom of a bucket full of beads where the number of beads in the bucket represents the number of customers who will be reached by this channel in the market.

When the drilling opens a hole wide enough for beads to fall, you’ll have a trickle. Only by continuing to widen the hole will you begin to access at a rapid pace the full contents of the bucket. If you drill a small hole in several buckets, you’ll get a trickle, but if you open a wide hole in the right bucket, you can retrieve exponentially more beads.

It seems counter-intuitive for a business to focus its customer development efforts through a single channel. A popular approach is to expose as many people to the business as you can by whatever means you can afford. But just because a bench billboard is cheap doesn’t mean it’s going to attract your customers, especially if your target customer never passes them!

A methodical approach that identifies the channel with the best customer access rate at the lowest cost is vastly superior, even if the up-front cost is much larger. For example, would you rather gain 500 customers by purchasing a booth at the biggest conference in your field for $5,000, or spend $500 to attract 5 customers online? While it may be tempting to spend time attracting online customers, it costs $50 to obtain one online customer and only $10 per customer at the conference!

The channel concept is one I’d heard bandied about, but Traction makes it a concrete idea to me (Weinberg). Up-front thought about the most effective channels can have a major impact on a businesses customer access, and I want to make sure that I’ve explored the options, even those I might not like at first, before deeply learning a single channel.

The online counseling concept that I wrote about in Kati Ray’s interview is an interesting case. Her customers are likely to be in other countries, so it may seem that her website may be the only way to market her business. In particular, online ads to direct clients to her website. While she does post ads on Facebook, another untapped channel that may be more fruitful would be trade shows. Kati does attend a conference once a year for her counseling profession, and probably develops connections which refer customers to her, but I’m not sure she’s considered attending conferences that her customers would be likely to attend. With more experience, she may even begin to speak at these events which could open the channel even further.

It may be worth considering that fruitful channels may surprise.

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