Stop Talking to Customers Who Want to Talk to You

As a Product Manager, I try to always stay focused on three questions:

Focusing in this way leads to a lot of customer conversations, if you’re doing it right, and that’s a good thing. But it’s always important to keep in mind who you’re talking to, and why. Be sure to spend your time talking to the customers you want to talk to, rather than those who are willing to talk to you.

Recently I took over an existing B2B product, and in the process found myself reviewing a large pile of customer feedback. Looking through the stack, a few client names stuck out; lots of commentary from lots of conversations. Lots of needs, wants and suggestions. These were the big clients; paying the highest prices for out software. Naturally, the team focused on them. They had lots of suggestions and requests; sometimes contradictory; not always easily understandable.

This feedback from large and vocal customers also felt familiar; it echoed the themes of much of the work in the development queue. The effort we were investing in the product was responding to these clients and their feedback. ‘Makes sense’; I thought.

Later I cross-tabbed this pile of feedback with the customer list and identified the customers who we had little or no feedback from. One customer in particular stuck out, they’d been using the product for 7 years and had always renewed, but logged almost no support calls. There was almost no feedback from them in the pile.

The Customer Support rep for this quiet client told me that each year he made an annual check in call to this small, quiet customer, and in doing so created confusion: ‘Why are you calling me? It works just fine.’ The reason we had almost no feedback from this customer was because they were perfectly happy with our product, and needed no help with it. Their annual contract value was relatively low, but in ROI terms, this was one of our most profitable customers. How do we get more like that?

Digging deeper, I found that this profitable, satisfied customer is at the small end of the client roster, with a simple organizational structure, and simple needs of the product. The contradictory, ambiguous feedback that dominated the pile simply didn’t apply to this case. The core product works just fine, and they’re happy to run it on their own with minimal support needs. Better yet, there are plenty more firms like them in the market — lots of opportunity.

The larger, more complicated customers, on the other hand, looked to be very tough to satisfy. And even if we did satisfy them, it was not clear what the gain would be. There are very few potential customers as large as them, and their business was not terribly profitable given the high demands on our support staff. But man do they like to talk.

In our enthusiasm to gather customer feedback, we lost sight of the why. The point of talking with customers should be to identify a segment who have a problem that you can solve profitably. It is not to talk endlessly about problems and ideas for your business, but to home in on solvable problems and develop the best solutions that you can profitably deliver. Start with a question that you are looking to answer.

In our situation, we had a product that was working very well for a segment of customers. The question we needed answered was how to define that segment of the market so that we could target them more effectively, and customize the offering. Once we started going into each conversation with the objective of answering that question, we became much more effective in managing the product.

Related posts:

If you are looking for the best cupcakes in Baltimore, USA, join us at the end of this article. In this article, we will introduce you to the best cupcakes in Baltimore. This list is based on your…

We have been discussing at OSI over the past year to create a Public Policy project. The idea is to create and manage an inventory of adopted policies, best practices, documentation, and general…

We are constantly bombarded with information, distractions, and responsibilities, and it can be difficult to find a sense of balance and inner peace. Mindfulness is the practice of being fully…