When you work in a business, you get so close to the language, cadence, and internal pressures, that you can miss what customers say. You listen with a filter based on your needs – growth, revenue, hitting budget. From my experience, independent stakeholder interviews are extremely valuable with the focus on the word INDEPENDENT.
An outsider who does stakeholder interviews can listen and ask questions to help extract helpful observations if they have enough context. You can challenge – gently and ask pertinent follow-up questions like, how do you know that to be true?
An outsider offers:
- A curious mind
- Lacks the knee-deep belief systems of the category
- Avoids jargon for plain-spoken benefits
- Probes for understanding
- Challenges assumptions
- Understands competition without the emotional baggage
What Customer’s Will Tell a Stranger
Often, a customer will tell a total stranger something they won’t share with the company. They are promised anonymity and can be fiercely frank. They’ll relate a story that bugs them enough that they feel it helps explain a misunderstood challenge they face.
If you are thinking about rebranding and searching for a way to position your product offering, a third-party interviewer can unearth golden nuggets.
A Real-World Example
The Marketing Sage Consultancy was hired to help a company rethinking its marketing strategy. We began by interviewing about a dozen customers, including a few who didn’t renew their contracts. What I heard from my client’s customers wasn’t what they were hearing.
My client thought their customers were satisfied. They weren’t.
My client thought their customers believed they got great value for the cost of the service provided. They weren’t.
My client thought that their customers were there for the long haul. They weren’t.
By sharing unattributed quotes for the executive leadership team to see, their eyes opened up. They realized that they were getting noise, not the signal. Their feedback loop wasn’t provided authentic information, and we uncovered several critical problems to be fixed.
And The Moral of The Story Is…
Often an outsider will hear the truth because they don’t have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. The tone, language, and commentary of a client, can be revealing in a one-on-one interview and, it may never be disclosed in a survey. Or, it may get distorted by internal team members who share what management wants to hear – not what they should listen to.
Independent stakeholder interviews reveal a customer’s reality – not the whitewashed information the business wants to believe.
Could an independent listener help you hear what the customer truly believes?
You can set up a time to chat with me about your marketing challenges using my calendar. Email me jeffslater@themarketingsage.com Call me. 919 720 0995. The conversation is free, and we can explore if working together makes sense. Watch a short video about working with me.
Photo by Rafał Szczawiński on Unsplash
Photo by LinkedIn Sales Solutions on Unsplash
