Want To Grow Faster? Spend More Time Talking To Customers

Want To Grow Faster? Spend More Time Talking To Customers

Talking to customers. The original growth hack.

There’s a secret to growth that no one really talks about anymore.

It’s not new — and it’s not all that cool. Or high tech.

And doing this thing usually ends up creating more work for you after you’ve done it.

(Yes, I know this breaks the rules on Medium. You’re only supposed to write about things that save you time)

But time and time again, this one little “growth hack” will have the biggest impact on growing your business:

Talking to customers.

Yep. It’s that simple.

It’s something that I’ve heard people like Hiten Shah, David Cancel and Dharmesh Shah say over and over and over again.

But I didn’t truly believe it. I knew they were wright, but I spend ever day buried in data from Google Analytics, Heap, Mixpanel and HubSpot. And I’m usually one of the first people to respond to support tickets at Drift (we get instant notifications in Slack).

What more is there to possibly know about our customers?

Well, it turns out that there’s a huge difference between looking at data and actually talking to a customer. Data will tell you something. Talking to a customer will make sure that you feel it.

The problem is that talking to customers seems fluffy.

“How will we measure the success of this effort?” — Your Boss

“ Yeah but is this feedback truly indicative of all of our customers, or just this one?” — Guy Who Sits Next To You

So instead, we curl up with our data and our dashboards, because data is concrete. It’s black and white — and we’re data driven marketers after all.

But when it comes to startups and growing a business, we have a tendency today to rely too much on the data.

It’s almost like we’ve focused so much on being data-driven that we’ve forgotten about being customer-driven, and after all, the purpose of a business is to generate customers, right?

The problem with data is that it’s only data. In order to really understand what a customer wants, you need to actually hear their pain, see their frustrations, their challenges and their desires first hand.

One of the best posts I’ve read lately on this topic was from Segment CEO Peter Reinhardt. He wrote about Segment’s initial struggle to find product market fit (they’re crushing it now with 6,500 customers) and how they spent too much time building, and not enough time talking to customers.

They skipped over talking to customers because well, it seems fluffy. It doesn’t seem like real work.

As engineers who had never done this before, talking to people didn’t seem like real work. Real work was coding. But in reality, 20 hours of great interviews probably would’ve saved us an accrued 18 months of building useless stuff.

Just think about how much more effective you could be in selling and marketing to your core audience if you not only knew what their pain points were, but you also were about to find out things like:

How they work
What blogs they read, newsletters they subscribe to, and accounts they follow on Twitter
What other products they use so you can understand what’s competing for their attention

Those are things you won’t find buried in the data — but the best part is, you don’t even have to leave your office.

I know, I know. Sorry Steve Blank. But here are five simple ways you can get more customer feedback without ever having to move from your desk:

Your welcome email. Yes, it should be smart, funny, and welcoming — but it should also be designed to get a response. This is the biggest mistake that people make. Too many people treat their welcome email as a throw away, or something that gets written at the last minute as a finishing touch to onboarding. There’s a good chance that this is the most engaged someone will ever be with — right after they signed up. Use this to your advantage, and send your welcome email with a purpose. Ask new users why they signed up, what they are looking to accomplish, what they’re struggling with, or what brought them to use your product or service.
Net Promoter Score. You know about NPS, but the real gold with NPS is not the score. It’s the text feedback. Take the time to read each response and bucket the feedback appropriately. For startups, think about daily NPS. This works best for early stage teams who might not have a dedicated customer success team. This way, you can manage a few responses a day, vs. trying to deal with thousands of responses at once. Use this as an opportunity to reply to each customer personally and start a conversation. At Drift, for example, we ask promoters for referrals, and reach out to passives and detractors directly to figure out where we need to improve. NPS can also be an amazing way to uncover opportunities for upsell and cross-sell, and help you predict churn.
Use live chat on your website and in-app. When was the last time you wanted to pick up the phone to talk to a sales rep or get help with a product you’re using? Most likely never. So why do you think your customers will want to hop on the phone with you? Live chat is one of the best ways to have real conversations with customers while they’re live on your website or using your product.
You just have to ask. It might be scary and it might take up a lot of your time, but you need to do it. This is one of the best ways to start talking to more customers — and it’s also the most obvious. Sometimes you literally just have to ask. Two years ago, Groove CEO Alex Turnbull noticed a spike in churn and wanted to go beyond the data he was seeing to try and figure out why. So he cut right to the chase: he emailed every single customer and asked for just 10 minutes of their time to talk. As a result, he spent more than 100 hours talking to 500 Groove customers and ended up with feedback that helped him right the ship. In Alex’s case, he reached out to everyone via email at once which produced hundreds of responses, but you can also create on-going campaigns designed to get customer feedback one by one so you don’t have to find the time to manage it in huge chunks.

At the end of the day, great sales and marketing really just comes down to understanding your customers.

And if your competition is able to understand your customers better than you can, guess who’s going to end up winning that customer’s business one day?

Thanks for reading. Want to chat? Email me. dg@drift.com