Leverage your customers

Your customers are the market, so having a customer-centric strategy is an obvious choice. The best way to have your customers involved in product development is by having them come up with the products. It means a much briefer market validation period because the solutions originate from your core customer stakeholders.

You can do this by sending a one-off survey via email or running a poll on social media to find out what people would like to see developed next. But there are also ways to be a bit more intentional: user interviews or a full-on program for customer involvement.

A lot of businesses shy away from collaboration and knowledge sharing with industry partners for fear of spilling company secrets.

But if you do it right, your team could walk away with a tremendous amount of new insights, new industry contacts, and even a new lead or two.