For Starters #22: How to Think About Talking to Customers
Come on, it'll be fun. We'll come back with some crazy stories.
The team at NextMileIoT and I, via through, are collaborating on a series of blog posts we’re calling “Getting Digital Back to Basics”.
The second installment - Acting with Optimism and Caution is now up at the NextMileIot blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
“Threat scan. What techs and behaviors have to combine to change demand for what you do today? If that happens, how will demand change? Does that change (positive or negative) add credence to your plan or reduce it?”
Check it out, all feedback welcome as we prep the next installment.
Now, For Starters,
My early career experiences had me assuming all organizations had staff ethnographers ready to get in the field and understand our clients’ customers. It wasn’t until I was facilitating usability tests on my own that I realized just how few organizations even thought about their potential customers until they were ready to launch - and just wanted a stamp of approval from usability to deploy.
So many times, I’d get towards the tenth interview and it became clear this product shouldn’t have been made in the first place.
All of that effort, could have, should have been pointed in a different, more valuable, direction. If only the team assessed customer demand at the beginning - not the end.
There are lots of reasons founders (and even leadership at successful companies) don’t talk to customers:
It takes too much time
and too much money
We don’t know how to access customers
We don’t know how to have a constructive conversation
Nobody is telling us we have to
TBH, we’re actually pretty insecure about our products
and they might yell at us and make us feel bad.
What if they ask us for something we don’t want to do?
Or what if we inadvertently promise them the moon?
Ultimately, all of these are some form of, “we’re not actually curious about the people we want to serve.”
Really, it’s the lack of curiosity about the people we want to serve that baffles me.
I’m not talking NPS scores, I’m not talking the tactical usability or customer acceptance tests I referenced earlier. I’m talking strategically-oriented, qualitative, customer demand discovery research.
You may be more familiar with it’s close cousin: The 20-minutes Networking Meeting.
The similarities: Both have a structure, they’re professional in context, the person asking questions is sincerely curious and wants to help, the person answering is sincere and straightforward about what they want, there’s a follow-up, and even bad ones are over in 20 minutes.
That’s about where the similarities end.
A Customer Demand Discovery conversation is one-sided and all about understanding the customer’s thought process, context, and frustrations around the specific ‘job’ your product is ‘hired’ for.
This isn’t a sales conversation. Nor it is a conversation with any dis-interested Area Man.
The analogy is: you’re documenting grandma’s lefse recipe while grandma’s still with us. Everyone involved wants the story to be accurate, compelling, and helpful. It’s best done in context, you’re going to ask a lot of follow-ups and take a lot of notes, you’re going to find things curious that she doesn’t even consider and won’t be able to elaborate without a side story about Aunt Mabel.
Now, repeat for 19 other Grandmas and their recipes.
Funny how all those objections to talking with customers seem ridiculous when we’re talking Grandmas’ lefse.
Markets change. Customers change. Especially over the last decade….**checks calendar**… er last half decade.
I frequently tell the story of a B2B CEO asserting with confidence he knows his customers - he reached out to many of them directly when he took over the business. But, he admits he doesn’t know why sales of a key product line fell off a cliff last year. Names he’s familiar with can still be seen in recent sales - but there are many more names. Many names that weren’t customers then. Many new, unfamiliar names. Does he still know his customers?
Businesses need to have a structure and process to continuously have customer demand discovery conversations - the opportunities are there; a sampling of brand new customers, a sampling of churned customers, checking-in again with our longest-running relationships, re-connecting with our most lucrative contracts.
As few as five of each, 20 total, the 13th week of every quarter. As small as a 30-min phone call, as elaborate as an in-context site visit. Yes, even this small of an effort, done regularly will minimize the gap between what you’re selling and what your customers want to buy. I guarantee these conversations will bring a competitive advantage if only because your competitors don’t subscribe.
While these conversations are best executed by the Chief Customer Officer, or VP of Product, VP of Customer Success - they can send a proxy, especially one expert in these conversations.
Who is this at your organization?
If you answered: no one - you’re not alone.
‘No one’ was the most popular answer in a recent LinkedIn poll I posted.
If that’s the case in your organization - give me a call, let’s toss around some ideas for a practice that will work with your organization.
Until next time, I’ll close with a line I use when I give this talk to entrepreneurs:
“Take Notes, Take Quotes, Find Patterns”,
Here’s a fantastic example of doing the same with internal clients:
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTLL7GSWG/