In this post, you’ll discover a simple technique that gives you a better-than-average chance to uncover new insights about your products and services.
These insights will deliver to you an almost unfair advantage in improving your top-line sales, identifying new uses for your product, and uncovering a hidden source of new copywriting and marketing ideas.
Using this technique in your own industry is the simplest and most straightforward way I know to give yourself and your team an edge in your industry, and an edge in creating compelling audience-pulling messages.
It offers you an opportunity to examine first-hand the real-world beliefs about your product, so you can turn that knowledge into a competitive strategy that few others will match.
If that strikes you as over-the-top… it’s not, which you’ll see in a minute.
Here’s the advice, with more to follow later:
If you are ever at a crossroads in your thinking about a product, or you lack ideas on new promotions with your product, then…
…pick up the phone and talk to your customers!
It’s advice that’s often repeated, but little followed.
In this post, I’ll give you information you can use immediately for talking directly to your customers, and how I learned this powerful lesson firsthand by stepping in-between two managers who were in the middle of an email knife-fight about shutting down a software product that had been selling for years.
Here’s that story.
This all started deep inside the belly of a billion dollar tech company when an engineering manager informed me of a growing problem.
One of our software products was wreaking havoc in his department. His team was spending their weeks fixing bugs on what felt like a never-ending list of issues. This guy was a great engineer, manager, and an even-keeled person, but this long line of bugs was starting to make his blood bubble.
In fact, he confided in me over lunch, he would rather his team work on any of the other products in our portfolio. His weekly status meeting had transformed into a weekly groaning meeting. He thought the company should shut the product down.
To make matters worse, he ran a sales report only to discover that the product had made zero sales in the last year.
This of course, set him off even more, since it seemed his team was wasting their time fixing problems for a product not making sales.
He hadn’t told his team about the sales report because he was afraid they’d burn the building down.
I have to admit, he was right about the last part.
That’s one side of the story.
The growth manager had the exact opposite view – he wanted to put more engineers on the product.
He thought this product had great potential and wanted to see it grow.
That was an obvious response, since he was in charge of growth, but there was something else.
He claimed that the sales team loved the product. He had just updated his roadmap for the next 12 months and he thought for sure that it would be a blowout hit.
He showed me an orders report and a version of this software product had gone out with over 50% of the orders in the last 12 months.
Hmmmmm… What was going on here?
They roped me into this situation because I was in charge of growth for several of the core product lines.
The product under consideration was system software that sold alongside the core products I managed.
Since my time was split between sales meetings and the engineering teams, they figured I was a good referee and would be an impartial judge. Plus, I was the only guy in the role with both a computer science and business degree.
We scheduled a quick meeting to talk it out. They both had good points and both made compelling cases.
With no clear answer, I finally said: “Let’s call the customers.”
And so, we worked out an 8 week schedule to call our customers twice a week, in two-hour sessions.
Now, let me take a minute here.
The end users of these products were programmers, hardware developers, and software engineers.
And 99% of the time, software engineers do not want to get on the phone with marketing people. To paraphrase Maria Kondo – Phone calls do not bring them joy.
But you know what’s crazy?
I see many marketers and copywriters today with the same attitude as these software engineers.
Copywriters will jump through all sorts of hoops to avoid getting on the phone with a client or their client’s buyers. They prefer Chinese water torture to talking on the phone.
If you feel that way, that’s fine, but part of the job is to problem-solve.
Part of a copywriters role is to find solutions to situations that are plaguing your clients, then implement those solutions using your copywriting skills to ignite their growth.
You can’t just “guess” the right answer.
No mountain climber made it to the top of Mt Everest by “guessing” their way up the mountain.
And while I’m a fan of research, it can sometimes leads you astray. It doesn’t give you the whole story.
I talk about this elsewhere, but back in those days I had a reputation as a research hound.
Our research budget was in the middle six-figures and I swear to all things holy that I was the only one in the division that read everything we bought relevant to our industry.
So as far as this piece of advice, I give you this truth with failing eyesight from reading tens of thousands of research pages.
Despite reading binders of research and flipping through screens of graphs, there has been no bigger breakthrough of insight, revelation, and nuggets of wisdom than by talking directly with customers.
No matter how much research you read or how deep you dive into sales data, you will never gain as much insight in as short a time as you do by speaking person-to-person with your buyers.
And if you do the interviews in an open-ended and collaborative way, the info you’ll find can be used for website copy, long form product pages, new campaigns, and all sorts of ongoing promotions and conversion campaigns.
Or, you can use it as we did – To decide if this engineering team should continue fixing this product or if we should take this software product and stab it with steely knives.
In order to make that call, we had to get on the phone.
So the three of us agreed to meet in the engineering manager’s office twice a week for two hours, and make phone calls through the list of customer. There were several hundred customers and it took us eight weeks.
What we learned was fascinating.
Here was our process.
As soon as the developer picked up the phone, we introduced ourselves very quickly, mentioned the product name, then we asked for their permission to continue.
This goes against most scripts, but it worked for us.
If they gave us feedback, we would listen and take notes. If not, then we could either call back later or we would call the next person for feedback.
Some told us to go away, a few asked us to call back, but plenty gave us 20 minutes.
And in these 20 minutes, the questions we asked were open-ended, and specific use cases about the product and their opinion of it.
Now, even though the introduction was scripted, we did not script the questions.
As you just read, we were each intimately familiar with the product, so we could dynamically adjust our questions based on the person.
And with more than one person asking questions, the call didn’t feel like an interrogation. We took turns talking and adjusted to each caller’s demeanor. It was laid-back and light-hearted.
If you aren’t familiar with the product, then scripting the questions is a good idea.
Literally write out what you are going to say, word for word. Not only does this reduce the stress level of recalling the questions, but you can focus on the answer, rather than worrying about recalling the next questions.
And remember, the order matters.
Start with easy, simple questions first, then build up to complicated questions.
You can gather a lot of information in 20 minutes if you don’t dilly-dally.
Let me tell you why calling your buyers and talking with them is a game-changer.
First, it’ll give you personally a leg up because you’ll discover things that your client can’t tell you.
Second, you’re results will skyrocket because you’ll pick things up that others aren’t using.
So when in doubt about a marketing question, pick up the damn phone.
Putting in the time to know your users isn’t always fun, nor for the faint of heart. During our sessions of phone calls talking with software engineering and developers, who can be unpleasant to people who call, we did get hung up on a few times.
But this was a pittance to pay for the rich information we were gathering. When we took the time to dive into our audience by picking up the phone,we discovered things we had never imagined. And it was the willingness to dedicate time to play detective and get to know the audience and how they used the product.
The product manager discovered dozens of new use cases and applications from the calls. He picked up future Beta users, testimonials, and wonderful stories. He said he found enough information to revamp the materials for the product that would help the sales team make more deals.
I picked up several insights about the buying process that I would use later in future growth campaigns. In a few cases, the guys on the phone (all of them were male), didn’t recognize the product name, even though their contact info was correct.
This realization was a lightbulb moment that there is a difference between ordering a product and using a product. I’ve had many discussions with SaaS companies who struggle with this today.
The engineering manager was most impressed with the differences between the occasional users of the product and the “superusers.” And, let me tell you, the superusers are amazing. They will take your product and use it to the fullest extent. They will take the product, immediately see the vision behind it, then run with it, taking it above and beyond what you as a company first thought.
If you’re a copywriter working with a client and you run across superusers, take copious notes. If you’re a business owner and find superusers, you might also call them power users, bend over backwards for them. They are worth their weight in gold when it comes to new product ideas and discovering use cases.
This advice applies to other markets besides technology as well.
Gary Bencivenga mirrors this in his advice to all A-level copywriters: “Always aim for the core of your market.”
He continues, “Every market has a red-hot core of ‘most-active’ buyers. 20% of investors buy 80% of the newsletters. 20% of beer drinkers drink 80% of the beer, and so on. It’s like that in virtually every market. The percentages go up and down a bit, but every market has the core that drives the maximum heat of response. Know who these heavy users are, what they want the most, then show them how to get it. Very often, their drives will be much different than the occasional user.”
One last thing.
Always dive into the sales and order data.
Here’s why.
Turns out, the sales team was tossing this product into the customer quote as an “add-on” to get the deal closed faster. The buyers were either a manager or a purchasing department, and they weren’t the end-user of the product.
And even though the economic buyer might have closed the deal faster because of this product, it made no difference to the end user.
This explains why the engineering manager found no sales, but the product manager showed orders being shipped. Because it was a ‘extra’ that was tossed in to sweeten the deal, it was added to the order form but listed with zero dollars.
This is another reason why many consumer-facing marketing and copy people struggle in B2B. The entire buying ecosystem is different and unique. The buyer is often times completely different from the end user. It requires different handling.
In the end, calling the customers was an all-around great exercise. Everyone learned something.
But most importantly, we learned to pick up the phone and talk to customers.
And you should too.
Sure, you’ll get hung up on, but the intelligence you gain from the calls are worth the effort.
In addition to the lessons learned, that six week effort relieved me of an ongoing email battle.
This technique opened the door to many other insights from customers over the years. It’s simple to see how in this case, but in practice it sometimes feels like a burden.
I encourage you to fight this urge if you ever feel like calling customers is a poor use of time. If you use the technique with your own customers it will change your business in surprising ways. You may change the strategy, you may find new use cases, or you may uncover brand new messaging. But almost always, you’ll find so many good ideas that you won’t have enough time to implement them all.
I don’t think I’m over-exaggerating when I say that getting on the phone with your customers is possibly the most reliable secret for getting whatever you want from your marketing campaigns without guesswork or strain.
Until next time…
Kyle
P.S.
Right now – go call your customers!