Watch and Learn

Interpreting the customer experience

By Andrea Hill

When I met Lenny Bloom, he was a 70ish independent sales rep and I was a 22-year-old buyer for a chain of video stores. He was a warm and thoughtful man, but I admit that, at first, I thought he might be getting a little too old for the job. At the end of each of our first two meetings, he asked what I was going to do once he left my office. Each time, I told him I was going to process the samples he had brought and complete my notes from the meeting. Each time he said, “Then you won’t mind if I just sit here for a spell?” I thought it a bit odd, but I had good manners and respect for my elders, so I said, “Of course not!” And since I could tell he didn’t mean to engage in further conversation, I simply went about my work, and let him rest in the chair in front of my desk.

When Lenny arrived for our third meeting, he brought me a box of retail shelf-talkers for the bookshelves lining my office walls because he noticed how much time I spent categorizing new samples. Over the next year, Lenny brought gifts of different types of file folders and pocket folders, a cutting mat and an X-ACTO knife, and perhaps a dozen other items to help me organize the samples and promotional literature under which my office was always buried. Eventually he offered to take old samples off my hands (we had to be careful where they ended up). Lenny turned out to be the most energetic, motivated salesman I have ever known, in part because he was a good observer.

No business knowledge is more powerful than the knowledge of precisely how a customer uses your products—including what must happen before and after they use your products. And no business role is better equipped to collect that information than sales.

Be Intentional

Most salespeople are naturally gregarious, and they collect considerable customer information as a result of their relationship skills. But have you asked your salespeople—including yourself—to carefully collect specific information regarding how customers use your product? For a business client, use of a product includes ordering, receiving, displaying, securing, and delivering the product. Have you made it a point to learn how they make product decisions or what hurdles or pain points they have to clear internally before they can actively search for (or consider) a new product? Do you understand how they set price points, stocking levels, and promotions?

Making assumptions about customer product use probably won’t hurt you—but it won’t help you either. Most customers likely use your products in similar ways. But you will be missing two types of opportunities if you stick with your assumptions—the pinched nerve and the aha.

Every business has some pinched nerves. These are the irritations and time wasters that we accept as how it is. 3M Corp. solved one of those pinched nerves with Post-It Notes. Secretaries weren’t running around saying, “I wish I had a tiny sticky note that I could slap on the front of documents to communicate little thoughts or call attention to things,” but that is what they needed. In the jewelry industry, Glenn Manning of SpeedJeweler did it with Speedwire, a laser-welding wire dispenser with precision that eliminates burned fingertips.

The aha moments are a bit more elusive because the pain trigger is missing. Starbucks started out as Peet’s, and they sold only high quality coffee beans for in-home brewing. It was only after then-salesman and director of marketing Howard Schultz took a trip to Milan and watched Italian consumers drinking coffee as an important social experience that he had the idea for what became Starbucks. In our industry, Eddie Bell’s idea for the Santa Fe Symposium was partially borne out of observing how much trial and error took place during the casting process, and how his customers could benefit from anything that helped them get the process more consistently correct.

When you use your sales force to help you get beyond assumptions about product use, you eventually gain insight into the pinched nerves and aha moments. If addressed, these opportunities could increase your product sales and brand value with your customers.

Learn to Love the Tough Stuff

Of course, along with this advice comes the warning: Be careful what you ask for. When you send salespeople out to collect accurate observations, they will return with information you may not want to hear. Learning to seek and accept feedback about weaknesses in your product or service is a strength your organization must cultivate. Unfortunately, many salespeople learn to keep the feedback to themselves after being shut down by unwilling recipients of their observations. If you learn to love the tough stuff, you’ll profit from customer knowledge that other companies reject.

What If You Don’t Have a Sales Force?

This advice is just as important for companies that do not employ outside salespeople. Someone in your organization should visit and observe some customers every year. You need to know how customer operations look and function, the types of people employed there, who is responsible for purchasing decisions, and how your products and services affect people in other roles. This is difficult information to obtain over the phone.

You can supplement client visits with a variety of methods to ask customers how they use your product, how they make buying decisions, which aspects of purchasing or product use they wish could be easier, and what challenges they experience once the purchase is complete. You can conduct short phone surveys (with permission), seek information conversationally as you provide customer service, start a Facebook conversation with the members of your fan page, e-mail a survey to your customers, and capture survey questions on your web page. Just make sure you document responses and that someone is responsible for aggregating the information. Your sales, product development, and management teams should then review the results of all customer feedback—whether brought in by salespeople or collected through another method.

Gathering information about how customers use your products is vital to increasing sales, as I discovered early in my career through the example of Lenny Bloom. My initial impression of Lenny was of a nice older man who lived in a modest house and would rather spend time with his wife (of whom he spoke often) than making a lot of money. Well, I’m pretty sure he felt that way about his wife, but I later learned he was one of the top salesmen in the country who had amassed a considerable fortune. Lenny’s approach to selling was an extremely productive method. You can do it too!