Understand Customers

Zoom in, zoom out!

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Image courtesy of David Mark via Pixabay
A little over a week ago, I was at a GATE (Gender and the Economy) event at Rotman. Here’s a clip of Abigail Moriah talking about her experience. (If you can’t see it, you can’t be it). 

Later in the event, Shirley Hoy talked about the importance of being able to zoom in, and zoom out, when approaching any issue. The next day, we were involved in a really spirited discussion with clients about something similar. Whether it’s design thinking, or understanding customers, or working through a business challenge, the ability to take multiple perspectives is invaluable. It’s where that old adage about not being able to see the forest for the trees comes from. 

Why is this important to you? If you want to make #better decisions, by all means, look at the big picture. That’s critical. Then take time to focus on a few details. And lastly, zoom back out again to see if what you saw at the beginning looks the same as it did when you first considered it.

My name is Megann Willson, and I’m one of the Partners here at PANOPTIKA. With my partner, Steve Willson, we work with our clients to find practical, usable solutions to their customer challenges. We can help you cut through complexity and ambiguity and zoom in on what’s important. Find more insights on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Then click below to sign up for weekly news that will help you make better decisions for your business.

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How to Piece Together Your Customer’s Story

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How well do you know your customers? Have you undertaken a big research project recently, to gain some in-depth insights? Or have you fallen prey to the not-really-correct school of thought that “Steve Jobs didn’t believe in market research, and that’s good enough for me?” The truth is, neither of these approaches is right. There, I’ve said it. Could it be that famous marketer Steve Jobs was wrong? Yes, sort of. (And about a few things, I might add). 

The truth is, getting to know your customers is an ongoing process. As you launch your business, you need to build an understanding of your targets or prospects. It’s a green field. All you will have to rely on is research. From that point forward, though, you need to constantly be piecing together different layers of intelligence to understand who they are, how they work, what they want, and why they do what they do. Asking them to connect the dots won’t work. It’s not their job to do your work for you. (That’s the kind of research Jobs was right to reject). Instead, give them an opportunity to have free-flowing conversations with you. Let them talk about their aspirations, whether they are directly related to what you want to sell them, or not. Then have some conversations with constraints. Give them things to compare, and try to understand how they select, sort, and prioritize. Look at what you can learn from “unresearch” – sales data, notes from interactions they may have had with your service workers, or your product team. See what they do with other people who sell them things. Find out what delights them when they’re not at work. 

Customer understanding or user experience research is more than simply testing a product or website and seeing how it goes, as a one-off. It’s about building a rich mosaic from many tiny fragments of information. If you throw it all into a database, or a central file, or don’t try to sort it at all, you’re wasting an opportunity to create something beautiful. But if you categorize it, move it around, and look for connections, you may start to see forms and patterns that make something out of what seemed to be nothing. Find ways to sort all your customer data, and you’ll usually find you have a rich mosaic of understanding, sitting right on your shelf, in your hard drive, or floating around in the cloud. And like a mosaic, look at it up close, then stand back, and observe it from a distance. I’m sure you’ll discover things you never expected, that will help you create whole new customer focus, and grow your business, whatever it is that you make or do.

I’m Megann Willson, and I’m one of the Partners here at PANOPTIKA. A customer insight audit can help you and your team to use what you already know to build a solid foundation for this year’s business strategy. If you’d like more insights, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook, or sign up for weekly ideas, tips, and offers using the orange button below. 

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Our client asked us for less!

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A week or so ago, we had the most refreshing experience. It made us feel amazing. Serene, even. 

One of our clients asked us for less. Now, we always try to go the extra mile with our clients, and if they are new to us, and we’re working on a project, we try to show them all the possible lines of inquiry we might explore, to learn more about their customers or prospects. We prefer a very open journey, but if someone doesn’t know us, they might have trouble seeing how that will work out. So imagine our relief when the client called and said, “I like where we’re going, but don’t you think we will get a richer result if we ask very broad questions and then probe as the respondent takes it in their direction, not ours? 

Yes, yes we do. Thanks for asking us that. Constraints can be useful. But questions that will take the discussion in the direction you want, rather than where the respondent wants to go, are likely to end up with you feeling like you didn’t learn anything new, and simply confirm what you already belief. The lesson? Open yourself up to simplicity, if you want a richer, more meaningful result. 

I’m Megann Willson, and I’m one of the partners here at PANOPTIKA. If you’d like us to help you see everything that’s really important to your prospects or customers, let’s talk. You can find all our contact information here on the website. And if you’d like regular insights that will spark ideas you might not have been thinking about already, you can also find us on LinkedIn, on Twitter, or on Facebook. 

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When Convenience Becomes Inconvenient

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When we think about marketing strategy, or even market research, we always think about one of the Four (or Five) P’s, Place. Place is about distribution. How does the thing get into the hands of your customer?

Our advice is always to make it as easy for the customer as possible. The omnichannel movement has preached the gospel of having your product or service be accessible everywhere and anywhere the customer is. It sounds very caring and good, in this season of giving. But recently, we’ve had an experience or two that has made us pause to reflect on that. 

I ordered a few items online from a large department store. I can get to said store in 15 minutes, honestly, but I was super busy, knew exactly what I wanted, and loved the convenience of having it delivered to my door, while I worked on something else. There was an online sale, and free shipping, making it even simpler. Fantastic, right? Here’s the thing…

The first thing that happened was a notification that the first item had shipped, but that the second was on backorder. These were very small items, size-wise. So the first arrived within a day or two, in a box more than ten times its size. Such waste! Oh, the poor planet. The other item said it was shipping a day or two later, but took nearly two weeks to get here. Tracking showed that it went from a warehouse in the west end, to a sorting station, to another station in the east end, and eventually, after sitting who-knows-where for the rest of the time, to my door, downtown. 

Now I, as a customer, was pretty patient. I didn’t need these things urgently, I just wanted to save myself the time and trouble of a trip to the store. But it did annoy me that the second item travelled all around the city. How many GHGs were pumped out while that occurred? And then when it arrived, again, a box many times its size. Neither of the items were breakable. They didn’t need special cushioning. The store just used the boxes they had, I guess. Either item could have easily fit in a padded envelope. 

My reflection was this: I did like the convenience. What I hated, I mean, really hated, the fact that these items travelled all over the city, and used so much packaging, by the time they arrived. And I think, if I had been given a reminder or even an incentive to come to the store, I might have done it. Heck, I know I would have, since I have been to the store at least once in the ensuing two weeks. And I might not have felt so guilty at the impact my perceived savings and convenience have had on the planet. 

So by all means, make it easy and convenient for your customer. But when making it easy and convenient for your customers comes at another cost, perhaps a higher-order cost that may matter to them, it’s worth reminding them of that. In the long run, we’ll all be better off. 

I’m Megann Willson, and I’m one of the partners here at PANOPTIKA, along with Steve Willson. For nearly two decades, we’ve been helping our clients see everything they need to know to make better business decisions, using strategic research and expert facilitation. And today we’ve been married for 39 years. Happy anniversary! You can find more content from us on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. We also share business news you can use, offers, and recommended links and reading every week. You can subscribe using the orange button, and if we’re not adding value, subscribe anytime.

 
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When the frequency illusion is no illusion…

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PictureImage by kalhh from pixabay

The frequency illusion. We’ve all experienced it. (It’s also called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon). That’s when you see something – a picture, a concept, a word, an idea – over and over again, all of a sudden. It seems like you’re being sent some sort of message. The truth is, you may be. In our case, we’ve had an idea come up multiple times this week, almost like a theme. It has to do with honesty. Or more specifically, about being honest with ourselves. 

Now the first time this came up, it was in Eleanor Beaton’s community of practice group. Eleanor was discussing being radically honest with ourselves about our priorities. In other words, if we say something is important, but we keep pushing it aside, perhaps it isn’t as important as we say it is. We need to unpack that and find out why we’re dodging it. Is it really not so much of a priority? Or if it is, why are we putting our commitment to the end of the queue? We need to make a firm decision, then either drop it, or drop something else and focus on making it happen with the effort it (and we) deserve. 

In the second instance, I was having a discussion with a new member of my network. We were talking about one of the reasons it can be better to hire a passionate but neutral third party researcher to have discussions with your customers about satisfaction with you and your performance as an organization. I call this the “do these pants make me look fat” rule. When I ask Steve that question, he is honest, but diplomatically so. In other words, he might be a bit too kind, even if that isn’t giving me the kind of honesty I really need, to be sure I look my absolute best. (To be fair, I’ve trained him to know that I want the truth in this instance). In many cases, a best friend or a sister might be more willing to give the answer we need, instead of the one we want. 

The third time it came up, we were working with one of our clients on a study to understand what customers and prospects want and need. They’re considering a number of new offerings, and want to see how those things rate, and rank, in the customer’s mind. Now we’ve done this sort of study hundreds of times, and nearly every time, there are features or offerings on the list that the customer has no intention (or no ability) to deliver. Then, in the worst cases, the customer says those are exactly what they want. So much that they will do anything (including switching suppliers) to get them.

Now you may think that asking a prospect or a customer or a user whether they want something, when you know you can’t or won’t give it to them, is letting you know where a competitor might have an edge. And you’re right. But if you suspect it gives them an edge, it probably does. The other thing it’s doing, is setting up an unrealistic expectation (and possibly setting the stage for dissatisfaction or disappointment). If the customer wasn’t thinking of it after all, they will be, going forward. So Steve asked them, “Be honest with yourselves. Perhaps if there is anything here you have no intention of providing, whether you can’t or you won’t, you should take it off the list.” This prompt will give them a chance to take a step back and engage their customers authentically and honestly.

What themes have been coming up for you again and again this week? What do they mean? If you need a hand getting your team to engage in some insightful truth-telling, we’re here to help. Just let us know. 

I’m Megann Willson, the CEO and a Partner here at PANOPTIKA, with COO Steve Willson. After more than 18 years helping our clients see everything they need to know to make better decisions and engage their customers, we’ve seen some interesting patterns and learned how to employ ideas that work, in multiple ways. You can also find us on LinkedIn , Twitter , or Facebook. And if you’d like to learn more about what we’re learning by working with companies like yours, why not sign up to have insights delivered straight to your inbox? You can do that with the button below. 

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Let’s Ask This, Just Because We Can…

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This week I was reading The Magic of Thinking Big, by David J. Schwartz. It’s not a new book; in fact it was written in 1959. And although the tone may seem a bit old-timey, much of the advice is as valid today, as when it was new. Schwartz is a big believer in goal-setting, and in the importance of setting out with a plan. He also alluded to a problem we see in the research and consulting business, which is the gathering of data for data’s sake, and an over-emphasis on keeping vast repositories of information in our heads or at our fingertips, as a way to “add value” to ourselves. But machines can do that. Here’s what Dr. Schwartz said: “More and more we rely on books, files, and machines to warehouse information. If we can only do what a machine can do, we’re in a real fix.”

It’s not the data (however big) that helps us make better sense of the world, understand our customers better, find new markets, sell more, or grow our businesses. It’s the synthesis of the data – what we do with it, how we shape it, where we find connections – and our “knowledge goals”, that make a difference. Knowing what we want to do with the answers, how we want to use them, and why they’re important to us, will help us have a richer understanding of the people we’re investigating in our research. Before adding yet another question to an overly-long survey, or jumping in like Columbo with a “just one more thing” query, ask yourself these things:

  1. What will I do with this answer if I get it? 
  2. What decision will I be able to make? 
  3. What action will I be able to take?  
  4. Will it harm the relationship with the respondent in any way (abusing their time, being irrelevant, or being invasive for a purpose which we haven’t been transparent about)? 

If you have good answers for those, and you’re still comfortable asking, by all means, go for it. Then use what you’ve learned wisely and do something excellent for the person responding. That is why you’re asking, isn’t it?

I’m Megann Willson, and with my partner, Steve Willson, we’ve been helping PANOPTIKA’s customers see everything they need to know to make better decisions for richer customer relationships, for over 18 years. You can also follow us on Twitter or connect on Facebook or LinkedIn. And if you’d like to join our community to have the conversation come right to your inbox, there’s a button below that will do the trick. 

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Sort Yourself Out!

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Image by congerdesign from Pixabay
 
“We don’t have enough information to make a decision!”

“Everything is so unclear!”

“We need more research, but we don’t know where to start.”

“Of course we have a research objective. In fact, we’ve got five or six of them.”

Often when we hear clients expressing these things, we work with them to discover that it isn’t a lack of information, but a lack of clarity about what they know, and don’t know, about the problem. If you’re dealing with this in your organization, and you have limited resources, the last thing you should do is invest in more research (yet). First, you’ve got to wade through the complexity and ambiguity and sort out exactly what you need. And a sorting activity is an excellent first step. Here’s how you can get started:

  1. Gather all the data, research, articles, information, and relevant people, that are connected in any way with the problem(s) you are trying to solve. (Things written about the product? Check. About the right customer group? Yes. Sales data? Uh-huh. Customer service logs. Absolutely. Articles from experts in the field? Yup. Vision boards or prototypes? Positively.) Divide up the work amongst the people, by volume. Don’t invest time in who knows more, who did the research, or who found the article. Just sort it, and divvy it up. Quickly. 
  2. Next, ask each person to go through whatever artefact they have (article? research report? dataset?) as rapidly as possible, and assign it a label, or a category that represents what it mainly can answer or illuminate. Don’t debate. Let each do their work on their own. Set a time limit. Max, a couple of hours. 
  3. Now, get together in a room and share the labels. You might hate sticky notes, but they are useful for this. Look at the box of tea in the photo. If you wanted a certain type of tea, could you find it in a messy drawer, randomly mixed together? Not easily. But here, whether you organize it by fruit tea, or herbal infusion, black tea, or by brand, it will be easier to see what you’ve got. Group them, if there are commonalities. As a group, identify patterns. Express what you have a lot of. Now, what’s missing? Why is that important to the problem you’re trying to solve? 
  4. List the missing things. Prioritize them. Ask, “What do all of these point to, collectively, as the concept we need the most, to move forward?” Then ask, “Which of these, if we don’t figure it out, could kill our business/product/project?” Now you’re on to something. 

Sorting exercises may seem simplistic, but there’s a reason these are one of the first things we teach to babies, and then to kids learning to read, and later, to people who are programming, filing, organizing, or creating an information architecture. They help us get to the gist of what we need to know, to make sense of the world. And they can help you do better research, more efficiently, and for less time and money. I’m sure of it.

My name is Megann Willson, and with my partner, Steve Willson, we run PANOPTIKA, where we help our clients see everything they need to know to find, understand, and keep customers. You can also find us on LinkedIn, on Twitter, or Facebook. If you’d like more news you can use to grow your business, subscribe to our weekly updates, and the occasional offer, using the link below.

 
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Price Your Product So that What They Pay is What It’s Worth

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What you believe your product is worth, isn’t always what the customer wants to pay, and especially if they’re a multinational corporation, and you’re…not. 

 

It’s often tempting for service businesses to think of their pricing as simple units of money by time, for example, and that’s what the purchasing people would like to believe. It makes it easy for them. And to be sure, someone will always price their services that way. But in a knowledge-based business, clients are also paying for your experience – your ability to understand the situation from a specific perspective, or as Steve Pulver, the speaker at last night’s #Medventions session at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre described it, your ability to “see around corners”. That’s why you need to build a value story that they can understand. You need to avoid the price spiral. It’s the same thing if you are building a complex new technology, or a medication. “Cost plus” is not the right model for either of those things.

So how do you decide how to set your price? There are a few simple rules of thumb. You do still need to start with costs. What does it cost to produce the product or service (raw materials, manufacturing, time researching, meeting, writing reports)? What are your overheads or fixed costs (rent, salaries, keeping the lights on)? Beyond that, you will need to look at competitors. Their pricing will give you a good idea of what the market will bear, unless your aim is to be much cheaper (because you’ve found a way to do that) or faster (there should be a premium for that) or higher quality (maybe, just maybe the customer will pay for that). Those are all good places to start, if there’s a known benchmark. What if there’s not? What if you’re doing (or you’ve invented or discovered) something completely new? 

Then you need to start with the costs, above, and begin to think more abstractly about your value proposition, what the product is worth, and what levers you can work with. If you have a medical device, for example, start by thinking about other similar medical problems that are addressed in terms of the incidence and prevalence of the issue, the number of patients impacted, the cost of not treating (the “opportunity cost”). You’ll need to use some triangulation if there isn’t readily available data. Then the real work begins.

Consider these questions when you’re setting your price, and thinking about what customers will pay…

How serious is the pain? Is it more like an annoying itch, or is it a raging migraine? Thinking about how serious the pain is, will allow you to think about how much the customer will pay to solve it. 

 

What is the consequence of not solving the problem? (How big is the risk to the customer? If it’s a medical problem, can it be fatal, or permanently disabling?)

How far in the future will the consequence occur? (It’s really hard to get someone young to understand why they might want to pay for life insurance)

And lastly, how often do they have the pain? If it’s episodic, occurring at regular intervals, but never really going away, they may not pay as much (in between, they can live with it). If it’s chronic and severe at the same time, they’ll keep paying and paying for relief (in which case, maybe a subscription model is a good idea). And if it might only occur once – but the risks of not solving it are extreme, you need to make all your money at once, and they just may be willing to pay a premium. 

It’s not always dollars by time. Pricing is a much more complex story than that. But it’s worth spending time to figure out. In fact, your business depends on it. 

I’m Megann Willson and I’m one of the Partners here at PANOPTIKA. We help our customers in complex businesses to see everything they need to know to make better decisions, so they can build and grow. You can also find us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Or you can sign up for regular news you can use, with the handy button below. 

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When you can’t buy information, triangulate it.

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Image by 95C from Pixabay.
In highly-competitive industries with lots of players, there is often a surfeit of data. Marketers’ big challenge is to decide which data to use or to purchase, because their budgets are rarely, if ever, unlimited. If you’re in a B2B business, though, publicly available data sets are often less available. Add a science or STEM focus, and data may be nigh-on non-existent. Money can’t buy you out of this problem. What do you do? How can you forecast your market, figure out your next move, or measure your impact?

The answer is to triangulate. In social sciences, triangulation is used to improve the validity of the findings. This can take the form of combining different data, different viewpoints, or different approaches. Similarly, in navigation, if you are trying to find out your position, finding landmarks that you can validate, will help you figure out where you really are.

When you get your team around the table, and they each bring data that doesn’t show the whole picture, but shows part of it, you’re triangulating. Every finding that relates to the problem you’re trying to solve, can help you become more accurate in your estimate of the “true picture”. That’s why design sprints start with getting your experts in the room to define the problem clearly and share what they know. Getting that clear problem definition or challenge to address is key – much like our discussion in last week’s blog post about narrowing your scope if you want to go deep.

I’m Megann Willson and I’m one of the Partners at PANOPTIKA. We work with our clients to help them see everything they need to make better decisions – using better data, a better approach, or a better frame of reference. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.  For more news you can use to help you or your team to make better decisions, click the handy button, below.

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Put your problems into perspective

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Gum on shoe
This post has been updated since its original publication.
 
Everywhere we turned this week we encountered problems.  That’s not a bad thing, because if there weren’t problems the world wouldn’t need problem solvers like us.

There are, however, a couple of problems with problems; the first is that we often feel compelled to try and solve problems which aren’t ours to solve. The second is that we offer solutions before we really understand what the true nature of the problem.

Two people we respect deeply talked about problems, among other things, this week.

Steve Johnson, a highly experienced Product Management expert, started his article by wondering whether Product Managers should be called Problem Managers in an interview he did with Revulytics. I suggest you read it.

His belief, which we share, is that Product Managers need to focus on the customer problem and not the problems faced by others in the organization.  He also states that you should allow others to develop the solutions. There are many other big brains in the building who can offer solutions that you couldn’t even dream of, but they need you to define the problem to be solved and the outcome the customer is expecting.  Once you do that, step back and go find more problems that your customers need you to address.

“Problems are not stop signs, they are guidelines.” Robert Schuller

The second article that reinforced this was from Ash Maurya, one of the sparks for the Lean Startup movement.  First he reminded us that it’s been 10 years since he and Eric Ries started blogging about a better way to look at start-ups. You can read it on Medium

The point which struck me is his focus on developing the right mindset to successfully navigate the Lean Startup process.  Unless you and your team are ready to jump in with both feet, you’ll wind up with some other outcome.  One of those key articles of faith is to Love the Problem and spend quality time with your potential customers to develop a deep understanding of their problems, from their perspective.

Like Steve Johnson, Ash Maurya reminds us that it is vital for us to become Problem Managers in order to develop products and services which customers will adopt.
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When you are ready to take the leap and become a Problem Manager, PANOPTIKA is here to lend a hand.

I’m Steve Willson, and I’m one of the Partners here at PANOPTIKA. We work with clients to help them use customer-centricity to focus their efforts and their strategy where they can make the most difference. You can also find us on Twitter and on Facebook, and for ongoing news about topics like this one, click the button below.

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