Look them in the eye

“First, I want you to walk a day in your customer’s shoes and actually go out and buy a pillow. Second, I want you to observe people in the process of buying a pillow.  And third, I want you to talk directly to them.”

“Talk to people?” said Koshi. “I’m a scientist, not a salesperson. If I simply asked someone if my pillow was better, they would have no idea. If I asked them if they would buy my pillow, I couldn’t trust the answer. So what is the point?”

“Your job right now isn’t to sell, but rather to learn. You are right, though: getting the customer to speculate is rarely useful,” Samantha said. “You need to understand your market. How does your customer buy? When do they buy? Why do they buy? Where do they buy?  As a scientist, you are fully capable of doing research, gathering data, and seeing if your data supports your hypotheses.  I promise you, if you are polite and creative, people will be more receptive to you than you might think.”

• Giff Constable, Talking to Humans: Success starts with understanding your customers

Here’s the inside scoop: the way you find customers is by asking them what they’re interested in.

Now before you try and throw this ebook out of the window hear me out.

Nothing replaces hearing it from the horse’s mouth.

Nothing.

In Startup parlance they call it “getting out of the building”.

Coaches drill you on how many customers have you spoken to.

Research companies run focused interviews with individuals and small groups within a specific niche just to get an answer on what makes these specific people tick.

You need to start talking to your customers and the best way to get to do that is talking to them face-to-face.

One of the benefits of COVID (I don’t like mentioning it in my book but here we are) is that it has never been easier to get someone onto a video call.

This is an uncomfortable task.

I’ve coached a lot of aspiring founders.

The less committed would find all sorts of creative ways to abandon doing this straight forward task.

They’d agonise over words on a page, logos, whether to have a generic Gmail address, or their own custom domain.

Yet if you actually want to sell things and build a business, none of that matters anywhere near as much as talking to actual customers.

You’ve already had a guess as to who they might be so go talk to them.

How do I find them?

Ask people. Literally ask them. You know some people right?

Let’s say you think busy Mums would like your product.

Example ask:

“Hey Jess. Most of my friends aren’t parents do you know any who I could talk to for 15 minutes?”

“What’s it for?”

“I’m researching things for my new product, and want to sense-check some of the assumptions I’m making.”

We’ll get to what to ask later, but at the moment you want to talk to as many customers as you can, until you know things like:

• The best time to jump on a call with them is
• Where they spend their time online
• How little spare time they have
• What they spend the bulk of their weekends on
• Why certain things frustrate them
• How much they drive their car, etc.

This exercise is messy, and teaches you a lot about humans work.

The “busy Mum” might not get back to you.

This is where 1-10-100 becomes really important.

Remember the first time you contact someone, ask for an introduction, or try and line up a research call you’re going to suck at it.

We planned for this.

Continue being curious and race towards doing it 10 times.

If your potential buyer is actually a busy Mum, you might have to try 30 times before getting one on a video call that’s okay.

You’re not going to be good at doing this until at least the 100 tries mark, so focus on doing the reps!

When talking to customers, you’re looking for themes, patterns, things they say and do, and to understand them better.

World-class marketers know their customers in and out.

They live and breathe it, and are experts at understanding their audience and how the product connects to those audiences.

I worked with one FMCG marketer (Fast Moving Consumable Goods a common acronym for most products you see in a supermarket) who would visit a Coles or Woolworths and observe how long people would view shampoo product in the aisle.

Your product isn’t in a supermarket yet, but the goal is to keep learning about your customers as a continuous process.