The Customer Is Not the Unit of Value

In a network business, finding the right customer is not enough. The value of each new laboratory depends on what it needs, what it can provide and how its presence changes the usefulness of the network for everyone else.

The Problem With the “Right Customer”

One of the strangest things I am having to unlearn as a marketer is the idea that finding the right customer is enough.

For most of my career, the logic felt relatively straightforward.

Understand who really needs the product.

Find those people.

Explain the value clearly enough.

Bring them in.

Of course, reality is always more complicated than a funnel on a slide, but the basic unit remained the same: the customer.

Working on Lab2Lab has made that unit unexpectedly difficult to define.

A laboratory can look like a perfect user on paper. It has active research, operational problems, budget, equipment, materials, people.

And still, bringing that laboratory into the network may create very little value.

Because another question appears almost immediately:

Who else needs to be there?

The Value of the Network

If a laboratory needs access to a particular instrument, someone else has to have it.

If it has materials it no longer needs, there has to be another team that needs those materials at the right moment.

If it has a specialised capability, that capability only becomes valuable to the network when someone is actually looking for it.

This sounds obvious when written down.

It felt much less obvious to me when I realised what it means for marketing.

Suddenly, I cannot evaluate a potential customer entirely on their own.

I have to look at what they need, what they can provide, which relationships could become useful, which gaps already exist in the network and what changes for everyone else when one more laboratory enters it.

Ten very relevant laboratories do not necessarily make a useful network.

Twenty smaller ones with complementary needs and capabilities might.

A Different Question

I find this shift fascinating because it changes the question I am used to asking.

Not:

Is this the right customer for us?

But:

What becomes possible for other people if this customer joins?

The longer I work with this, the less marketing starts to feel like bringing individual users towards a product.

It starts to feel like carefully assembling a system in which people become more useful to one another.

From Customers to Relationships

I used to think a good market was made of enough good customers.

I am beginning to think that, for some products, it is made of enough useful relationships between them.