Take a step back – Validate your market

In professional services firms, it’s not uncommon for new services to pop up over night.

Your subject matter experts spot an opportunity in the market. Maybe, they worked on an assignment or two that got them really excited. And before you know it… boom! There’s a new service that you and your team are (t)asked to bring to market.

And while I’m all for the enthusiasm, it is important that you help your subject matter experts take a step back, before marketing their solution.

That is, if you want to prevent disappointments along the way…

Before you start any marketing efforts, you’ll need to validate the market for the solution.

According to Harvard Business Review, “market validation is the process of determining if there’s a need for your [solution] in your target market.”

Here’s how you do that in 3 (+ 1) steps.

Step 0 – Check for validation

When your colleagues show up at your desk, excited to conquer the market, affirm their enthusiasm; “It’s great to see you’re excited about this solution!”

“Please tell me a bit more. So I can help you turn it into a business success.” And then ask business questions to figure out if the market is validated:

• Client needs and willingness to pay – “How many assignments like this did you do in the past 12 months? How much revenue did these generate? What was your investment? What’s the profit?”
• Target audience – “Which organizations did you sell your services to? What characteristics do they have in common?”
• Market size – “How many other businesses have expressed an interest in this solution?”
• Acquisition – “How did you land the assignments?”
• Retention – “How many clients stayed on (for additional services)?”
• Competitive landscape – “Who else is offering solutions like this?”

Once you understand more about the demand for the solution, you can decide to move on. And actually validate the market.

Step 1 – Set hypotheses & research goals

First, you’re setting one or more hypotheses to test.

For example: “We believe there is sufficient demand for [our solution] in [our market]. And we should be able to land at least 1 assignment each quarter, resulting in X revenue.”

Then, you determine your research goals, i.e. the missing bits you want to understand.

Quick tip: You can definitely present your hypotheses to GenAI and ask it to come up with research objectives and methods.

Step 2 – Market research

Next, you can move on to the research phase. Here…

You perform market validation research.

You analyse your competitors’ offerings, read industry reports from trusted sources, listen carefully to keynotes during events, analyse industry specific data sets, explore your personal networks, monitor Google Trends, and check Keyword Planner.

You send out client surveys or incorporate the questions you want answered into existing ones.

Your subject matter experts conduct client interviews.

Step 3 – Test

At the same time you could test the waters of the market.

Maybe the solution isn’t 100% perfect yet. This doesn’t have to stop you in validating demand.

You could run a so called ‘fake door test’. You create a landing page for your solution as if it was already perfect. You run a series of ads to get your target audience on the page, where you persuade them to express an interest.

When they do, you know there’s an appetite for what you’re about to offer.

Hope this helps!

Thank you for reading MBD Boost #032, sent to marketers and business developers on March 25, 2025.