It's easy to ask customers about their needs, you need to dig deeper
Hi growth community!
New to IH, I hope this is relevant to the group - if not, my apologies and will redirect elsewhere.
I wanted to share some thoughts around understanding your customer's requirements, and learn some strategies or tips you have found useful!
Customers obviously have needs but more importantly, those needs are tied to things happening within their business.
They'll have certain objectives and will develop certain strategies to address these objectives.
Whether it's hiring for a new role, releasing a new product, or entering a new market - they'll have initiatives to support this.
And the more you can understand about those initiatives, the better your chances are of winning business.
It's easy to ask a customer about their needs.
But you need to dig a little bit further and ask what initiative or what strategies and objectives within that organization or within that individuals life are driving those needs.
That lets you relate more to the initiative, that's actually driving the need.
Prospects really don't want to hear about your products until you've had a chance to build some rapport.
Learn about them and understand what the opportunity is.
It does not do any good to present a feature list or benefits, or start talking about products or services with a client or prospect until you understand why they’re interested.
What is the compelling event?
What initiative is driving the need for your product or service?
That will really help you guide the conversation.
Cheers,
True. I actually want to go a sod deeper and understand the people I want to learn about.
There can be two different schools for this approach:
School 1: Design thinking. Here you start without a real problem to look for one. By starting without a problem, you naturally reduce your own bias by not having fallen in love with a problem/product before investigating people's problems.
School 2: Repetitive iterations. Here you have already identified something that looks like a problem and you are trying to get to the bottom of the problem and quickly find out if it is a problem people will pay for a solution to. So you have a probem you are making a pretotype (yes you read right "PREtotype", this could be a drawing or other low-resource demanding method that shows the essence of your idea). You do this with the idea that if they do not fall in love with your pretotype, then you have not captured the core of their problem.
Besides, it is also an art to study pains. You need to know how to "not" ask about needs. If you ask people directly what their needs are, they come up with some surface BS, as they most likely have not thought about the basis of the need.
Practice never mentioning the need you are looking for and most importantly never mentioning your potential solution as this will affect the answers you get!
If you want to be a good researcher, it will be a good idea to read about behavioral psychology, journalistic methods, scientific empirical methods and of course LISTEN more than you talk.
Well thought out response!
Lots of good points - agreed that understanding pains is an art, and it takes time to get good at.
I think I definitely need to read more into the psychology aspect.
I took behavioral finance, consumer behavior, and a few other psych courses throughout uni and always enjoyed learning the why behind decisions.
Good, so you already know something about it. One of the first books I read on the subject was "The mom test" by rob fitzpatrick, which has a good way of explaining the actual asking part.
For sure. I think this is the primary hurdle most folks have in reaching product market fit!