Early in my prior life as a product manager, I realized that guessing at what customers want and need from products was not a sound strategy. That’s when my passion for soliciting insights from customers directly was born vs. taking a stab in the dark when faced with tough decisions.
I’ll never forget one particular meeting I was in where we were sitting around a table of middle managers and senior managers, talking about the packaging system for our newest product line. No one agreed on which direction to go, but there sure were a lot of great ideas being thrown around. We were really getting ‘into’ the discussion and the creativity of it all. But when it came down to actually making a decision, we were stumped. We could have arbitrarily made a decision, but instead, we decided to take the time to integrate input from our customers who would be living with our products day in, day out. They would be the ‘tie-breakers’. It would take us an extra 6 weeks or so to implement this data-gathering effort into the project, but we knew that trading a fast turnaround time for a better quality decision that was based on real data and customer input was the best way to go.
For those of you in the marketing field, how many times are you faced with decisions about product names, pricing, bundling, messaging, etc.? Do you get that niggly feeling in your gut when you feel like you are making a random choice/decision not necessarily based on any solid data about what will resonate most for customers? Or about what will be most seamless for customers and eliminate barriers for them?
Customer input can help make those decisions easier every time. If you institute ongoing customer listening activities, getting that valuable input doesn’t have to be a big project. It could be tapping into an existing customer advisory group that your organization has created for these kinds of things. It could also be asking salespeople to get input on a few key questions from some of their top customers. And SOMEtimes, it may require a more organized, larger scale data collection effort, either in the form of a survey or 1:1 interviews or even a focus group.
If you manage others, one of your most important customer groups are your employees. Be sure you are tapping into their experience and creativity when making hard decisions. You don’t have to do it alone.
More than anything, we all need to realize that saying “I don’t know” is not a weakness, but is a strength. I am inspired by this article by a friend of mine, Carol Adamski: “Why We Should Admit: “I Don’t Know”. This article reinforces the idea that we have been conditioned all of our lives to come up with quick responses and ‘know it all’, but that there are merits to slowing down and resisting those quick answers that may require reconsideration once we think about it a bit more or get additional data.
And think of the great dialogues you can have with people in ALL aspects of your life if you avoid the trap of knowing it all…next time you find yourself in this situation, try “I don’t know” and follow up with another question…it could lead to some fascinating insights!