Understanding your target customers’ needs and solving their pain points is a key path to success and growing your business. This is a common refrain, but how often do business owners take the time to truly listen and understand their customers? As a business owner or leader, you can’t ignore the importance of making time to understand who your customers are, what they are trying to accomplish, and how you can add value. Understanding your market can make the difference between success and failure. Let me share a few examples from my product management background that illustrate this point.
Because You Built It Doesn’t Mean They Will Come
I was part of a product management and transformation consulting team, hired to help an enterprise technology company learn how to leverage their technology and expertise to build consumer applications for mobile phone. This was in the early days of mobile phones and they wanted to build a mobile app. One of my responsibilities was to lead and mentor the consumer software product team.
When I arrived, a consumer mobile application had already been developed and they were planning to ship it. I asked if anyone had spent time defining the target users for the product and if any market research had been performed to validate it would be successful. We paused the launch to conduct focus groups to validate their assumptions. After multiple meetings, it was determined there was little interest in the product by their target users. The consistent message, from each focus group meeting, was they did not find much value in it, and certainly were not willing to pay for it.
Regardless of the uninspiring feedback from the target users, and the recommendation to cancel the product, the company decided to ship the product anyway. It failed miserably.
Know What Matters To Your Customers and Market
Once, I received a call from a consulting associate of mine. He had a potential client who wanted to discuss bringing us onboard to develop a product marketing and product management strategy around a hardware product they developed. The company was composed of a couple of bright engineers, who built a CD-ROM changer for playing music discs.
During our initial call, my associate and I began learning more about the company and what made their product so unique. There were CD-ROM changers on the market already. They said they believed it was unique because the software that operated the changer was based on the Linux operating system. We asked them the customer research, target market question, “Have you performed any market research to determine why customers would purchase a CD-ROM changer because the software that ran it was based on Linux?” There was a long pause and eventually they said “No”. The call ended shortly afterwards. We never heard from them again. As far as we knew, their product did not ship. They missed the ever important step of validating their product idea with a targeted user base, who would purchase what they offered.
On to a couple of positive stories where market research and listening to your customers paid off.
More Than Two Customer Types
For several years, I was the Vice President of Product Management for MLSListings, the real estate multiple listing service for Silicon Valley and parts of the central California coast. When I first joined the organization, I constantly heard they had two prototypical real estate professional types.
One of the objectives for the product management organization, was to create a two-year product and technology roadmap to support the companies business objectives. The product roadmap included what software features and products we needed to develop internally to address the needs of our real estate agents and brokers. It also incorporate changes and new releases we expected to see from our vendors.
We had hired a consultant to work on a real estate market analytics product we were developing internally. We asked him to interview a range of agents and brokers to help us understand who our users were. At the end of his research, we found there were five unique user types in our market. Based on those profiles and understanding their needs, we were able to create a product and technology roadmap that incorporated product features and products to address all of our user types or personas. Without that information, we would have missed the opportunity to satisfy the needs of all of our user base.
New Product Opportunity Discovered
For a year and a half, I contracted with Adobe Systems as the Acrobat product manager. I was part of a great team of people who understood the importance of listening to your customers and your sales team. At the time, Adobe had two versions of Acrobat: Acrobat Reader and the full version of Acrobat.
The Director for Acrobat, the lead engineering manager, and I were joined at the hip for a while, conducting customer meetings and performing market research. We wanted to understand current and future product needs of Acrobat users. We talked to many customers but more importantly, we talked to Adobe’s sales team and account managers. During a meeting them, we discovered customers really wanted something between Acrobat Reader and the full version of Acrobat. Many large business employees needed more functionality than Reader but didn’t want to pay for the full version of Acrobat to have access to the few extra features they needed. This led to the creation of a version called Acrobat for Business. It included the extra features business customers needed without paying for a full version of Acrobat. Listening to customer needs led to more product sales because capturing revenue the company would not realize otherwise.
The point of these examples is to demonstrate the importance of understanding and listening to your customers. Not listening to or engaging with them, can lead to losing customers or failure. Listening to them can ensure you are satisfying their needs and may identify new, unrealized opportunities.
Get Started Knowing Your Customers
Performing market research and understanding your customers is an ongoing process. You may not be able to conduct market research but there are some things you can do to better understand and connect with your customers. Developing Personas of your customers is a great way to start. Personas are used help you or your team develop a picture of a person(s) you are working to serve with your product or service. Personas include demographic and psychographic information to help you better understand your customer. Below is a template we created, that you will be able to download below.
The following are suggestions for how to begin building profiles or personas for your target market and users.
Develop a serving attitude – With all the competition in the marketplace, look beyond transactional engagement to serving others. How you engage customers can lead to new opportunities and they are more than like to refer others to you. Serving others changes how we engage with them.
Talk to your customers – Building a friendly with them can lead to discussions that reveal unmet needs.
Read your reviews – In terms of the old Client Eastwood movie, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”, read them all. Five star reviews are the goal but there could be gold in the reviews that are less than 5. Respond to any negative reviews and try to resolve them if possible. Ask questions, engage but don’t ignore them.
Profile your customers – Begin to take notice of the type of people who are your customers. Build personas based on that information. You may discover you have multiple personas who have unique needs you can address.
Run surveys – Technology makes it easy to collect feedback. Run surveys on your website, through your newsletter, on your social media accounts, or at in-person marketing events. You can always learn more about your customers to better serve them.
Use lead magnets – Lead magnets are used to build a marketing list but they also can give you an idea of what is of interest to your target market. Lead magnets could include giving away research reports, charts, or helpful tools. The types of free offers you provide can give you some insight, and leads, for deeper investigation.
What About Analytics?
Tracking customer behavior on your website and the performance of ad campaigns has come along way. They are great snapshots of what is happening on your website or in your marketing campaign. My concern with leaning to heavily on analytics is that they only give you insight into what people are doing at any point in time but may not tell you “why” they are doing what they do. In my opinion, understanding the “why” behind customer behavior is more important. The “why” points to motivation, needs and even pain points that you can address.
Free Personas Template Guide
To help you get a head start on understanding your customers and markets, we are providing the following FREE download. It includes information and templates you can duplicate to represent every persona type in your market.
