Imagine your top customers invite you into their planning meetings.
You’d leave with a solid read on what’s important to them right now. You’d hear their problems and plans, get to ask questions. I guarantee as you walked out of the room your head would be exploding with ideas to help them achieve their goals and solve problems, not to mention ideas that would double or triple your sales to them.
But, they aren’t going to invite you, are they…?
The next best thing? And this you can do. Email them to ask if they’d take 10 minutes to answer some questions on the phone or at lunch or coffee. Questions that will help you understand what’s going on in their world. Questions that will help you provide more value to them:
- What’s going on in your world right now?
- Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the next year? Why?
- What are your initiatives?
- How could a company like mine help get you where you want to go? How else? How else?
- If you wanted to find another company that sells what we sell, how would you look? How else? How else?
- What’s your best advice to a company like mine on how it can create more value to a company like yours?
Have an in depth conversation with just five customers. You won’t be comfortable asking every customer every question. That’s fine. And ask follow up questions. What do you mean by that? Can you give me an example? If that didn’t work, how else would you…?
And don’t even think about making this a written survey (so you can ask more people!!). This isn’t a survey. These are conversations. Have five conversations. That’s all. That’s all you need to get your head exploding.
So, get started, or let me do it for you. Either way it’s the best, quickest path to changing your marketing for the better.
