Want better products? Want more sales? Get out from behind that desk!
If there's been one common thread running through all of my business experience since first working at Aspen Research in St. Paul, MN in the nineties, it's that there are some things you can't figure out just sitting in your office and staring at a screen. As one coworker used to so colorfully say, "@#$% the theory, do the experiment". Now Rod was an extremely accomplished chemist, not a marketer--by his own admission, but the same idea holds in product development. Better products come from truly understanding your customers and you'll never get that understanding from a set of quantitative cross-tabs, reading a Forrester report, or keeping up with what some journalist and her editor thinks will sell magazines aimed at your market. Sometimes you have to leave the office and spend time--quality time--with your customers.
Now before you start thinking that I'm imagining some grandiose and costly IDEO-like process for observational information gathering, chill. I'm not there. That's certainly valuable, and sometimes it's precisely what's needed. But it's expensive and normally a tool only the largest firms can afford. No, far too many mid-size firms and even entrepreneurs lose touch with their primary customer base and what matters to those customers most. Maintaining the dialog with these customers--well, the conversation, in the Cluetrain lingo--goes a long way to keeping you atuned to their daily struggles, their challenges, their frustrations, their pain points that your product has the opportunity to address.
At the low end of the cost spectrum, just getting out into the environment where you customers congregate is helpful. When leading new product development at Werner Ladder, I used to head down to a local Sherwin Williams, Home Depot or Lowes early in the morning some days to bump into and talk with contractors picking up their supplies for the day. At Andersen Windows, it meant driving out to construction sites and chatting with framers, contractors and GCs about how the construction market was doing and hearing their gripes. At Quickoffice, it meant spending time at Palm User Group meetings and talking to users about how they used the software--learning how some of my assumptions were very, very off the mark. Sometimes the smallest alteration to a product makes a big impact on a customer: a change to packaging makes it easier to access on a job site, a unified installation for an application makes it easier for a customer to get up and running with your software, the inclusion of a few sample files helps users to know how the app really works, etc.
This kind of customer insight and understanding is not expensive. It does take some time, but it's time that pays back dividends far in excess of the time spent. Sure, it helps to have some idea of what you are seeking input on; creating a list of things to watch for, or questions to ask will help you keep your time valuable. But also be open to listening to what your customers have to say when just given a chance to talk to you--let them ramble on a bit and listen. Ask some probing questions: why is that? when does that seem to happen most? and listen carefully to the answers. You'll likely find some invaluable nuggets that your competitors are not hearing, and you'll have the opportunity to keep that conversation going with development and sales of products that just keep on improving.
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