Last week I was talking to a potential client about doing some work. The principle there was very good to give me a lot of background on the company, their goals and what they wanted to accomplish. He also gave me a clear pictures of how his company was seen in the marketplace.
I stopped him with a question: “How do you know that?” I asked him. “How did you come to believe that this is how you are seen?”
“Well, everyone tells me that.” He said.
“Who is everyone?” I asked him.
“My best customers.”
“What about the people who don’t buy from you yet? How do they see you?”
He just stared at me.
Knowledge vs Belief
You see, this is one of the things I have learned in my two decades plus of sales and marketing in the Broadcast/AV/Media-centric IT market. Most of us don’t really know what we think we know. We just believe it.
That belief is generally based on talks with customers, or surveys, and our own experience. But my experience is that this only gives us part of the picture.
Let’s take the idea of talking to customers. These are people and companies that already like us, so they are going to tell us what they like. That information is useful. But it is not what the entire market thinks, unless you have most of the market. And even then, you may only have part of the story.
That’s a lesson I learned first in 1999.
Learning the Hard Way
In 1999, I was at TGS (who later was bought by Ascent Media). We were a startup the year before and working hard to grow in a crowded and established market for systems integrators. Our breakthrough project, the one that put us on the map was the HDTV conversion at WTVI in Charlotte, NC.
WTVI was the first PBS station to do a full soup-to-nuts HD conversion. It was also the first station to impliment Dolby E. A $10M project, TGS did the design and integration. It was a good project, a showcase that was featured in Broadcast Engineering magazine.
When it was done, I went to do a post mortem with Wray Ware, the director of engineering. I was prepared to hear about all the things we did well. I thought I knew what those things were because, after all, I was the head of marketing and knew what we were best at.
But that is not what I heard. I found out we were not so good at some of the things I had been trumpeting in my marketing materials. BUT, I also heard that we were very good at some other, equally important things that I had not thought about. It changed my whole approach. I realized I could not make assumptions on what I thought I knew.
It must have worked. TGS grew at over 200% a year for the next few years after that
Three Lessons
That was my first lesson in how I often didn’t know what I thought I knew. And it taught me a few things that I have applied successfully since then.
- You have to ask “how did we do?” constantly. That’s right, constantly. A one time round of traveling and talking to customers only tells you how you are doing in the moment. But the market is fluid. So you need to ask constantly. If you are an integrator, post mortems on jobs are a good idea. If you are a manufacturer, then you need to be talking to people regularly so you can capture both the snapshot, and the movement.
- Unless you dominate the market, you have to ask the people who don’t buy your gear at least as often as people who do. That is, if you really want to know how you are seen. It’s not always comfortable to hear, but it’s valuable.
- Often, someone outside the sales process is the best person to do this. I learned this when I was head of sales at TGS, and it was reinforced constantly when I ran the DC offices for Diversified. I found that when the salesman asked “how are we doing?” He often got a glowing answer. Why? Because he had a relationship with the customer that the customer did not want to harm. But I, as a lesser known member of the organization, would go in later and I would hear both sides of the story, what we did well, and what we did not so well. Why? Because the customer did not have the same relationship with me. He didn’t mind hurting MY feelings. And I didn’t mind using the results of that converstion to win the next time.
That last lesson is a valuable one for manufacturers in particular. Often, when developing new products, they go to their most friendly customers for input. Some of those customers may give them a full run down of what is good in their idea, and what is missing, but many will soft pedal the missing stuff, to protect the relationship.
This is why some companies use a third party to do the post mortems or make the calls and probe customers. A third party has nothing to protect, no pre-conceived notions, and we don't get our feelings hurt if we don't hear what we expect to hear.
The same principle holds when we are facing competition.
I have worked for five dealers/integrators over my thirty years in the industry. At different times, I have competed against all of them.
It was fascinating to hear, when I was at integrator A, how they believed integrator B worked and thought. Having worked at integrator A, I knew the falacies of many of those beliefs, but they persisted anyway.
Summing it up
Still the same kind of market research can help us here. Go talk to the competition’s best customers. Find out what they do well, and why people love them (or hate them). You may not get the sale, but you will learn where they are strong, and what you might be able to do.
Again, often a third party, not the direct salesman, is a good resource for these conversations. It may be a person in your company, or someone outside the company (like us at Quarry House). The point is, you need to have someone unbiased, willing to hear the good and the bad without feeling defensive, and able to take that information from several clients, and see the patterns that help you grow.
Sam Walton used to advocate “Management by walking around.”. I’ve found the same is true of marketing research. You can spend a fortune on market research firms, but often, spending less with a good, observant, trustworthy question asker, asking the right people the right questions, will do more for you.
Tom
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