Entrepreneurship feelings, I hope it will be useful to you.

Editor’s note: This article is from the micro-channel public number “everyone is a product manager” (ID: woshipm), Author: village live in ten villages.

Many times, we have to do user research before starting a project or activity. One of the more important parts is to understand user habits, and then make certain adjustments based on the information we learn. So why is user habits so important? What if you change user habits?

Yesterday, the company just moved. Today, the leaders of 14 regions across the country are recalled to the new base for annual summary and synchronization of the pace and direction before March 2021.

The entire innovative business has been tested for 3 months since it was launched in October last year. The business performance of some pilot cities is quite pleasant, but most of the pilot cities have mediocre performance.

Although the operating expenses invested are huge, we still plan to stay calm and decide to spend another three months to see the results of the test.

There are three reasons why I decided to do this and dare to spend 6 months as the test period:

  • Our experience in many past projects tells us that sometimes we want to prove too quickly, but we can’t get real results.

  • Currently, we have almost no competitors in the market.

  • We firmly believe that the current model has better development prospects, not to mention that some cities have fully proven it.

The meeting lasted for 5 hours in the afternoon. After listening to reports from various districts, I also talked about some of my thoughts, and I shared some of the common content with you.

Encourage telling the truth

Why should we encourage telling the truth during a meeting? There are three reasons:

  • Some market students have a serious bureaucratic culture and dare not say anything.

  • Before some large districts came to the headquarters for a meeting, they might have greeted them and asked for them.

  • If you don’t tell the truth and never know the real situation in the market, the problem will not be solved in time.

So before the meeting, we have repeatedly emphasized that we don’t care about ranks, departments, colleagues, and only tell the truth. The culture of telling the truth and doing practical things must be firmly practiced in every meeting.

Those who do not dare to speak, do not want to tell the truth, and respond to market problems will harm themselves and others.

Timely feedback

Sometimes in a meeting, you will find two interesting but annoying phenomena.

One is that some people usually complain about the product, team, support, etc., but they don’t talk about it when they are in a meeting; the other is that some people usually dive, but during meetings, Suddenly said a bunch of questions and ideas.

The first situation is what we just said. Some people may not dare to say hello after being greeted. The second situation shows that some people just show up in front of the leaders and usually accumulate many problems.

In both cases, we need to be vigilant and criticized. We need to encourage and guide each business person to give feedback in time if they have problems.

Some people are really inappropriate

Before this meeting, we optimized the marketing team. Including this on-site meeting, there are still many regional managers, and there are still problems. Therefore, the optimization of personnel will continue, and we must select people who can walk with us.

Because some people are really not suitable, no matter their ability to understand, execute, lead a team or get results is not satisfactory. Including those who perform well on other platforms and companies, but once a new model is changed, there will be unacceptable situations.

The personnel are not suitable. On the premise of complying with the labor law, optimization must be fast and responsible to both parties.

Market demand may not be reasonable

At this meeting, some marketers said that our users want to add this product and hope that there is another product. There are also marketers who asked the headquarters to name some programs, put some advertisements in the local area, and so on.

We just listen to these needs. This is sometimes a manifestation of marketers’ lazy consciousness and inertial thinking. He believes that only advertising can bring sales.

Therefore, many local promoters will not do well in their own business. It is attributed to the fact that we have not advertised locally and there are few non-self-operated products on the platform. Sometimes, what they say is actually contradictory.

Because they will say that there are more products on the platform, and it is difficult to explain to users, and at the same time they will say that the platform has not added more products, then how to judge whether the market students’ demand is reasonable?

  • The decision makers themselves must have sufficient professional capabilities

  • Decision makers should participate in offline business surveys

  • Listen to the feedback from other market students and consider comprehensively

  • With cost under control, let some cities do some pilot experiments

Not necessarily all, watching all

Platform students for better service oneFor online marketers, we have built three types of communities. Every important event, product update, and policy release will be notified through group notifications and one-to-one private chats to ensure that they should be informed.

However, there will definitely be people who will not watch, listen, or ask. This happened at the summary meeting. For example, we made a material template for local push, but some people said that there was no such material.

We made more than 30 operation videos, and some people even said that the operation is not clear enough, and some video version tutorials should be published. Therefore, in many cases, there are fundamental reasons why the market does not issue orders.

  • One is the lack of active awareness of market personnel

  • The second is the inadequate supervision of regional managers

These two points have severely hindered business progress.

The boss must also dare to reflect and admit mistakes

I just spent some space talking about the problems of market classmates, but as a team leader, you should also bravely admit your mistakes.

During the testing process of our business, we adjusted the direction at least three times, which also caused many market students to fail to adapt, or the previous efforts were wasted. The founding team should not only talk about the problems of market students, but also actively conduct self-reflection.

So, this time we also conducted self-criticism at the summary meeting. Some things, the speaker is not intent, but the viewer is interested. What’s more, since we are emphasizing the corporate culture of telling the truth and doing things, the founding team should take the lead in demonstrating.

Measure the value of money correctly

Because various materials are often needed in marketing activities, and some materials are uniformly produced and distributed by us.

There is a case to share with you. We are going to make a batch of non-woven bags. The students in charge of the materials are very careful and specifically go to various parties to compare prices. However, because of the late quotations from several parties, the business development was delayed for four or five days.

After the final quotation, it was found that the actual cost saving was less than 2,000 yuan. We have 6 or 7 places in a city, and a week’s salary is far more than two thousand yuan, which also delayed a week of promotion time.

Another case is that some cities are reluctant to invest in marketing costs in marketing. For example, when we promoted around the community, the monthly advertising fee in some communities was two to three thousand yuan, but some marketing managers delayed in reporting the marketing plan.

In fact, let’s think about it. The cost of selecting 10 key communities in one area is only 30,000 yuan a month, but our marketing staff spends more than 10,000 yuan a month. However, a market student will definitely not be able to handle 10 key communities in a month, because they cannot appear in real time.Push straight in a small area.

So sometimes, we do not judge the value of money by a certain price. Instead, focus on what the business needs most for you in the present. Sometimes, on the surface, it saves three to five thousand yuan, but the actual cost in the end is higher than these.

The Internet is not everything

Too many people have talked about the Internet mythology and talked about the Internet model all day long, thinking that the Internet can subvert everything. Including our own business personnel, we always imagine that our platform can give them some heavy weapons to kill all competitors in the market.

However, in actual business scenarios, there are still a large number of users who can’t operate smartphones, can’t pay, can’t fill in addresses, can’t share, etc. The most important thing is that there are many businesses that can be solved by offline services.

The Internet is not only a tool, but it is actually just a tool.

There is a price to change user habits

The hottest business this year is the community fresh food group buying, but think about it carefully, if you were asked to do community fresh food group buying 10 years ago, do you think you will succeed?

This is likely to fail, including opening stores on Taobao and JD.com. Think about our current field of travel again. Shared cars have died wave after wave, but how long have new energy vehicles been built?

Therefore, there is another very important reason why we dare to spend six months to test. That is, we realize that it is difficult to change users’ consumption habits, the more difficult it is in the traditional field.

Assuming that we now think that online medical consultation is very developed, we can easily emphasize the expert number every day, but there will definitely be a large number of users who will choose to line up offline to grab the number.

If you want to change the user’s consumption habits, you have to face huge expenditures in at least two aspects:

  • For the investment of time, don’t rush to draw conclusions within one month, three months or even six months;

  • The investment of funds requires huge marketing and education costs to change users’ consumption habits.

Think about all these years, free taxi rides, free charging, free takeaway, free tea, and countless, but there are three very important premises for burning money in the education market:

  • You have to take every amount of money you spend seriously, spend money instead of spending money randomly;

  • You have to obtain sufficient supporting model data within a certain period of time;

  • You have to make sureTimely replenishment of follow-up funds.

All work must serve the market

For all sales-driven products, all business departments of the company must serve the market.

The product functions and processes of product design should be simple and clear, and the platform-planned activity gameplay and step threshold should be simple. Customer service should answer questions for the market as soon as possible after sales. Don’t increase the difficulty of market promotion due to internal reasons.

The main purpose of everything is to facilitate market promotion. Otherwise, no matter how fancy the function is, no matter how frequent the activity is, and it is out of the market, everything will be self-healing and no effect.