Understand Customers

Forget storytelling. Try storyshowing.

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Photo by klimkin via Pixabay
There’s a lot of attention being paid to storytelling these days, as a way to gain customers’ attention and sell more product. That’s not what I’m going to talk about today, though. Today I want to talk about how you can use stories to build empathy and gain a greater understanding of customer problems and motivators. 

In today’s business environment, there are two things that are in short supply: money, and time. The consequence of this, is that in the rush to meet deadlines, get answers, make decisions, and ship our products and services, soft skills may go out the window. Regularly surveying customers can get us an abundance of data, and data’s what we need to get answers. To make decisions. To validate that the solution we want to give the customer is right, so we can win, or fail, fast. 

What’s wrong with this picture? Well, first of all, in the hurry to find out why customers are doing the things they do, or what their problem is, or how we can fix it, I’m seeing all too much blunt-force questioning. Clients ask me to ask their customers or prospects why they buy. Or they want to ask the customer to tell us how they can solve the problem that same customer is having. Trust me, if they knew, they’d be solving it, or at least trying. Or, clients want to ask questions like the example in this post.

Sometimes, when product or marketing teams or UX people want to get really creative, they ask the customer to tell them a story. They’ve been told not to ask why, and someone has sold them on the idea that storytelling is a great tool to capture customer experience, or the customer journey. If you want to know why asking why doesn’t work, even on ourselves, watch this great video about introspection and self-awareness from Tasha Eurich. 

So what can you do? If asking the customer to tell you a story isn’t always effective, and you can’t ask why, and you can’t ask them how you’re supposed to solve their problem, what is the solution? Look at the picture above. The one kid didn’t say to the other, “tell me a story about that”. She asked, “show me.”

Instead of seeking storytelling, try using storyshowing. Ask them to show you where they’re running into the problem. Sit with them while they demonstrate what’s going on. Share screens, or better yet, go to them one-on-one and observe. Listen carefully. Interrupt with questions that involve “what happens when that happens” or “tell me more”, but sparingly. Seek clarity, not certainty. Take good notes, make sketches, record if the situation allows. Here’s an Innovation Game© called Me and My Shadow that explains a bit about how this works.

We like to add another step. Ask if you can tell them the story of what you saw, in your words. Ask them to be your editor. When they change things, ask them to explain the reason for the change. Then, and only then, let them know that you’d like to share that with your team, so you can come back to them with some fresh ideas. Resist the urge to solve the problem today.

If all of this seems like it is fiddly, and time-consuming, it is. You’re not gathering big data; you’re gathering rich data. And in our experience, rich data will yield a richer result. 

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 – including better ways to ask the questions that will gain them a richer understanding of their customers, users, and stakeholders. If you need help doing that, we do that, too. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and for more news you can use to help you or your team to ask more questions in ways that will let them make better decisions, click the handy button, below.

 
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Narrow your research, if you want to go deep.

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Deep library corridor
“We’d like to investigate this. Oh, and it would also be great to find out more about this. And a few members of the team thought it would be really interesting to explore this.” 

When your product is new, or your team is new, or you’re just getting started with your business, you want to know everything. When you’ve been thrown into chaos by an unforeseen event, the same can happen. Any market information could be useful. All customer insights might be relevant. As a consequence, we often meet new clients, new teams, or founders, who want to look at a really big basket of questions. Sounds fair, doesn’t it? They have a lot to learn. So what’s the issue? 

The issue is that the other shoe usually drops, right about then. The client says, “And we really want you to do a deep dive on this.” 

The fact of the matter is, giant companies who can afford massive amounts of data, may be able to afford to be wasteful with their investigations. They may be able to “go deep” on a lot of different topics, all at once. If you look carefully, though, you’ll usually find that there are many teams, each going deep on a topic or two. If your company is small, you risk learning a little about a lot, and a lot…about nothing. 

How can you mitigate this risk? These four steps that can help:

  1. Make some calculated assumptions.
  2. Establish hypotheses to validate or invalidate with the respondents.
  3. Look at some secondary data and see if you can’t do some narrowing down or elimination on your own. 
  4. Choose the slice that, if the answers turn out to not be as you had hoped, would have the worst outcome. If there are rate-limiting or business-limiting questions, get them out of the way as soon as possible, so you can turn your attention elsewhere. 

So the next time you want to “go deep” in your customer understanding, narrow things down first. If you forget everything else, try this rule of thumb when you decide whether you want to look at something deeply, or in its entirety: Microscopes are tiny. Telescopes are big. 

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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Forecasting without Data? Here’s How.

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It’s Thursday afternoon, just before a long weekend, and Head Office calls…

“Hey Fred, it’s Wilma. I know Monday’s a holiday in Canada, so I thought I’d catch you early.  Barney’s got a presentation to the investors on Monday in Bedrock and needs to know how big the Canadian market is for our new Bronto-vax®. Can we get that by the end-of-day Friday?”

No problem, right?  If your product is a breakfast cereal you can just go to the Nielsen data, or if it’s a retail pharmaceutical IQVIA will sell you as much information as you need. But what if no data sources exist for your particular product?

We get asked to work on these problems quite regularly and the answer is always “Let’s think about it systematically”.

Is there a surrogate marker, for example if there’s no data on popsicle sticks, but good data on popsicle sales, you can assume that, in general, sticks and finished products are reasonably well correlated. If it’s a specialized pharmaceutical product you can find data on the incidence and prevalence of the disease, population size, percent of patients treated, length of treatment for clinical trials…you get the idea.

If you have more time you can talk to a portion your target audience and use their estimates to project for the entire market…wisdom of the crowd.

So, this is a long-winded way of saying that, with a little thought and imagination, you can build a reasonably robust model along with the data sources and references to give it some credibility. Then you can continue to revisit and evaluate the model as you go forward.

When we work on this with you then you get the added credibility of a second set of eyes and the validation that “our consultant looked at the market and built this model”. We’ve done it for others, we can do it for you.
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I’m Steve 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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What are we deciding, exactly?

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Business people expressing different opinions
 
One of the challenges when there has been pent-up demand for action, is that if a team comes forward to figure out the way forward, each member has his or own stake in the decisions as well. Everyone brings emotions, needs, agendas, perspectives, and old wounds to the table. That’s why it is so important to ask this question at the outset, and to not move forward until there is agreement:

“What are we deciding?”

Then, if the process gets sidetracked by the many agendas at the table, or an individual needs to be heard, or something else takes the conversation in an unintended direction (as it invariably will), any member can get things back on track by asking, “What are we deciding, again? Let’s park everything else that doesn’t relate to this direct decision, and get back to those items once we have decided.” This is a way to refocus the conversation on the decision, separate from people’s individual needs, yet without suggesting that any of the “sidetracks” are invalid or not worth discussing.

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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It’s not about me, it’s about us. Using empathy to create abundance.

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According to psychology there are three types of Empathy; Cognitive, Emotional and Compassionate. My brother, the PhD Psychologist, could explain this better than I can, but here goes…

Cognitive is about perspective, knowing what another person is feeling or thinking.  It lacks the emotional component of the other two types and so is easier for us rational humans to understand and use. Emotional empathy goes a layer deeper and is that sense you have about feeling someone’s pain or suffering. It’s the feeling you get when you see the advertising for starving children or displaced persons, then you go on with your normal activities.

The final layer is Compassionate empathy, where we not only feel the pain, but are compelled to act upon it. Mother Teresa is a model we could use to demonstrate the extreme of compassionate empathy.
Look around you these days and what you see is a whole lot of self-interest, a zero-sum attitude, in order for me to win you must lose. Empathy is the tool you can use to escape this destructive cycle and create a space for abundance.

So, in business, which of these empathy models do we want to employ? To steal a phrase from “A League of Their Own” and mangle it: “There’s no crying in business”.

When preparing for a meeting or negotiation, employing Cognitive Empathy will allow you to explore the thoughts, constraints and motivations of the other person. Ask yourself and your team questions such as:

  • What constitutes success from the customer’s perspective?
  • Who do they need to influence to get a decision made?
  • How can you empower them in a way that creates value for them with little or no cost to you?

This is a different way of thinking, so you may need some help along the way.  At PANOPTIKA we have the experience and the frameworks to help you and your team develop these skills and create more wins.

We feel for you!
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I’m Steve Willson and I’m one of the partners in PANOPTIKA. We help clients to see everything and make better decisions. ​You can also connect with us on Twitter, on Facebook, on LinkedIn and on Fridays we share news you can use with our community.

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What’s your favourite channel?

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People shaking hands
 
Judging by the box room in our condo building, you’d think that everything was shipped by courier or post, but we have a saying around here: “It’s hard to ship hot soup by mail”. Whether you’re starting a new business, or developing a new product or service for your existing business, one of the decisions you’ll need to make, is what is the most effective channel to use, to deliver that product or service to your most valued customer. In Megann’s most recent video challenge, two things she asked participants to think about are:
  1. Their most valuable product or service – that is, which of their products or services delivers the highest value back into their business?
  2. Their most valued customer (the one who buys that most valuable product or service).

These questions don’t stay static. They deserve regular review, no matter what your business. When we started consulting, we would have said the most valuable service was in-depth medical interviews, in situ in specialists’ offices. And the customer who bought those was usually a pharmaceutical company with a very specialized product, like a cancer treatment. Now, the highest value services are consulting with companies who are entering new markets, on market selection, or facilitating strategic decision-making. And the clients are varied, but always scientific, technical, medical, or industrial B2B companies.

Once you have a good picture of the key product or service, and who buys it, it’s time to think about how to get it to them. Are the clients remote, or local? Do they need to see you to receive the service? Can it be shipped? Must it be? Figuring that out can be a challenge, and it takes a lot of legwork to determine the most efficient and effective way. More than one channel may be needed. Determining it is a necessity, as it will be a critical part of your cost structure, as well as your value proposition. Are you the fastest? The most thorough? The newest? Each of these directly impacts your channel choice. Moreover, communicating to your customer which channel your using, may be relevant. You might think that those strategy facilitations are always in person for us, for example, but we have tools that let our clients gather together a team from around the globe, and make decisions as effectively as if they were in the same room. So keep an open mind, and find the channel that’s just right for you and your MVC.

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Which came first – was it really the customer?

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Image by Pexels from Pixabay
We’ve said many times, that the best way to market is to find a customer, create a solution to a problem or a need for them, and sell it to them. We stand by that. While you’re busy creating that solution or figuring out how to fill the need (the job to be done, to paraphrase Clay Christensen), someone else may show them the next best option. Also, if you want other people to sell your product or service for you, by describing it to their networks, you need to know what it is that you sell. So which comes first? Customer, or product?

The first truth is this: knowing your customer is absolutely critical. The second truth is this: you need money to have a viable, ongoing business. And the third: sooner or later, to get money, you’re going to have to sell something – whether that something is a product or a service. Revenue is how you pay the bills, pay yourself, fund the work, even if you’re a social enterprise or not-for-profit. Remember: not-for-profit doesn’t mean, “doesn’t bring in money”.

So how do you figure out what it is that you sell? If it’s a widget, a chicken, or an egg, you’ve got the beginning of a description. If it’s more complicated, you need to be able to distill your product (or service) description down to something even your grandma or your five-year-old nephew could explain. Why? Simple: because the more people who know how to describe what you sell and why it’s great, the more unofficial salespeople you can have out there in the world, for free, generating leads for you. So go ahead. Break all those rules we’ve told you about customer focus, and take some time to figure out the easiest way to describe what it is you sell. You’ll be glad you did.

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Time exposure can let you see things differently…

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This post appeared back in March…so this year, instead of panicking two months from now, read this, and give yourself a head start…

This morning one of our connections posted a reminder that we are at the end of the quarter. Now we’re bracing for the inevitable. At least one client is bound to call or email today with a panicky-sounding voice, about how they need research or strategy work, because they’ve just realized we are at the end of the quarter, and they really, truly, meant to get started in January. 

Does this sound like someone you know? If you’re in the business of customer understanding or user insights, and this happens, it can be tempting to respond by taking your hard-won budget, and doing a study that answers all of their questions…at this point in time. Will that let you see everything you need to know?

Snapshots can be really helpful, it’s true. It’s worth considering, though, whether a time exposure might reveal something extra. Setting up a program that opens the aperture to your customers and lets data flow in over time, can reveal patterns in ways that a single study can’t do (no matter how powerful). And sometimes it can be inexpensive to do this, by giving a “camera” to each of your customer-facing colleagues.

Setting up a story bank where their pictures and observations can be gathered and shared is a really useful way to do this. (Don’t know how to start? Let’s talk. We can help.)

I’m Megann Willson, and I’m one of the Partners here at PANOPTIKA. We help our clients see everything they need to know, to make better business and career decisions. Our specialty is finding novel ways to get answers to tricky questions. You can also find us on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, and for weekly insights and offers, why not subscribe to our Friday news you can use? There’s a button just below to help you do that. Next issue drops around 3pm, so sign up before that and receive your first issue this week.

 
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Not everything goes as planned. Deal with it.

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Women making decisions

 
How do you feel when something doesn’t go as planned? Disappointed? Frustrated? Annoyed?

What about energized, excited, or enthusiastic?

Last summer, I spent several weeks working with a client to get ready for an important strategy session. They know there are big shifts looming on the horizon, and they want to be ready. They’ve done the right thing by taking a proactive approach, and they’ve been looking at data, exploring potential outcomes, and discussing “how might we” scenarios. Yet suddenly, in the midst of a session with outside partners, key team members, and even an advisor from head office, they weren’t making headway. Someone said, “Let’s change the focus entirely!”

Now there are times when this might just be a tactic to avoid hard conversations, but in this case, it was because they realized they were looking at the problem through the wrong lens. Their problem definition was out of whack, and they got clarity on this because they had everyone in the room, and because they weren’t so married to the facilitation method they had chosen, that they kept trying to force-fit solutions to the wrong problem. Once they stepped back and framed the challenge in a new way, they were able to very quickly devine the realm of possible scenarios, determine how they could respond to these in their own favour, and what proactive steps they could take right now, to get ready for the most likely eventualities.

The change in energy in the room at the end of the day was palpable. And as a facilitator, it was a pretty spectacular ending for me, as well.

I’m Megann Willson, and I’m one of the Partners here at PANOPTIKA. We work with our clients to see everything they need to know to make better decisions, so they can find, understand, and keep their customers. You can find Partner Steve Willson and I on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. If you’d like more insights delivered to your inbox, or help facilitating your upcoming strategy session, click the button below and sign up for our insiders’ circle. You’ll be glad you did. 

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Does public data really have value for your company, if anyone can get it?

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Shouldn’t you skip right to your own custom survey? We’re always happy at PANOPTIKA to help you with custom research, but there’s really more to it than that. Even if you’re working in an industry like health, technology, or science (where we do some of our best work), where sometimes there isn’t much data, there’s always some. If you’re a new analyst in one of these industries, or you’re just getting into research for the first time (sometimes, until you start to scale, it’s easier and more informative just to ask the questions yourself), start with free or nearly free. Those public data sets get a lot of use – they’re the workhorses of the quadrant we call “the light”.  The answers there are available to anyone – and that  doesn’t mean they don’t provide you with any value or advantage.
Public data sets or  their slightly more expensive cousins, syndicated data, (which is not public, but is available to purchase by anyone who can pay), are a great foundation. They let you get the “lay of the land”. In “The Light”, you’re setting yourself up for deeper questions, making sure you don’t waste time and money on custom projects, if the information is already out there. Doing a good audit of the data you already have in house is where you can start to use data in ways that others can’t. Think sales data, observational research where you see how customers use your products (or the competition’s), and interviewing everyone in your organization who interacts with your customer or prospect. Where an outside consultant can help, is by assisting you in shaping the questions that you’ll use as you move to what we call “The Shades” – positioning or perception research is a good example. It can help you see where customers put everyone – not only you and your product or service, but your competition. And it can help you get ready to develop insights that are only known to you and your team. Not sure where to start with something like that? We’re always happy to jump on a discovery call. You tell us your questions, and we’ll work with you to lay out a plan to get the answers you need.
 
We’re Megann and Steve Willson, and we’re the partners at PANOPTIKA. We work with B2B businesses to help you get the answers you need, and to make better business decisions. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, on Twitter, or to get insights and ideas delivered right to your inbox, click the handy button, below. 
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