Lesson 1: Customer Conversations
A business is incomplete without its customers. Sure it can manufacture the best products and provide the best services but it all goes to waste if there is no one willing to buy these products and services. The customers are not only essential to the sales in a business but they are also catalysts to what is offered in the first place. Since it is the customers who buy the products it only makes sense that they are taken into consideration when deciding on what to offer. Knowing that you already have a customer base ready to receive your products can not only save you lots of capital investment but also save you from failure. We now understand that customer input in a business is very important.
Now let us move to the difficult part - actually talking to a customer and understanding them. Most companies have a hard time selling their products not because they have not indulged in customer conversation but because they went about it the wrong way. Companies would either ask their customers some heavy-handed questions like, “Do you think it’s a good idea?” Asking questions like these forces people into saying good things about the business. Other businesses do engage in customer conversations but take the wrong insights from it and end up creating products that no one really asked for. Or they make the mistake of not digging deep enough to get substantial insights. The best way into customer conversations is to dig deep. However, this opens us to the risk of biasing the people we are talking to.
Customer conversations not only take time but are extremely easy to go wrong. Moreover, a bad customer conversation can wrongfully convince you that you are on the right path, leading you into over-investing your cash, time, and team. So let us just summarize and say that engaging in customer conversations is tricky business and if not done right it could be downright lethal for your business. Before going ahead let us briefly understand the conditions in which you will need the support of customer conversations.
- When you are aware of Customer Development but aren’t really sure about how to make the first move.
- When you have a relatively young business and have not quite found your business model.
- When you are part of a startup and want your team to have more helpful customer conversations.
- When you have a new business idea and want to be sure it has potential in the market area.
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