Dan Martell - April 07, 2015


How to Understand Your Customer So Well Your Product Will Sell Itself

Hosted by
Dan Martell
Mentioned
Peter Drucker
How To Discover Your Life Purpose： 3 Powerful Questions To Help How To Unleash Your Powerdisiac

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

214.01

Word count

1,199

Sentence count

71


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, learn how to understand your customers so that you can find them, understand who they are, what they need, and how to get them to try your product or service so you can make sure they are a good fit for your business.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Understanding your customers. There's a great quote that's really going to summarize what I'm going to teach you today, and it's the goal of marketing is to understand your customers so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself. It's from the brilliant management consultant Peter Drucker, you know, and the goal is to really find the customers. And I don't know if you have, you know, a hundred customers, but there's really like 10 that are amazing. The goal is to figure out what are those 10, what do they have in common? Who are they?
00:00:29.460 What are the characteristics to make them up so that you can actually do marketing that
00:00:34.140 finds those people and attracts 100 out of 100, not 10 out of 100?
00:00:39.860 Because if you look at your day and all the distractions and the craziness, you're probably
00:00:43.540 spending time with people that are actually not a good fit for your business.
00:00:47.440 You know, I really struggled learning this.
00:00:49.520 When I was 26, I started a company, and we built this product, and I thought for sure,
00:00:55.020 for sure, customers are going to be small business owners.
00:00:57.040 I was passionate about helping small business owners.
00:00:59.560 My friends, my brothers, they were all small business owners.
00:01:02.140 So I built this marketing tool, and I remember sitting down at a coffee shop.
00:01:05.680 We did kind of in-person interviews with business shop owners,
00:01:08.920 so we were booking a bunch of them at a coffee shop,
00:01:11.080 and we sat down, and I showed this marketing tool.
00:01:13.060 It was a landing page app.
00:01:14.100 I showed it to a customer, and he looked at it, and he just went blank.
00:01:18.400 He goes, what am I supposed to do now?
00:01:20.580 And I was like, well, you click get started.
00:01:23.380 And he's like, well, okay, and he clicked getting started,
00:01:26.440 and it was like this template. Choose a template for a landing page. This guy didn't understand
00:01:31.400 what a landing page was. He didn't even have the need. He didn't even know why he would
00:01:35.040 use this. And I thought for sure every small business customer needs landing pages so that
00:01:40.740 when they're running paid traffic to their website, they can capture the lead. And it
00:01:45.640 was a horrible, horrible experience. You know, it really made me realize that instead of
00:01:51.060 trying to guess who my customer is, maybe I should ask them. Maybe I should show them
00:01:56.400 the product and say, who do you think the customer is going to be for? You know, a small
00:02:00.280 pivot changed the direction of that. It ended up being that it wasn't the small business
00:02:04.260 customer, it was the marketing agencies they hired to do their marketing. And the business
00:02:08.940 took off. But I tell you that because there's three ways that I've learned to get feedback
00:02:13.980 from the customer to really understand what an ideal customer looks like. The one is in
00:02:18.840 in person, like I just told you, at a coffee shop,
00:02:21.400 sitting down, face to face, watching them.
00:02:24.580 You know, when I was doing these customer interviews,
00:02:26.080 the thing that really kind of blew my mind
00:02:28.700 was we always asked them to bring their laptops,
00:02:31.000 and when he opened up his laptop,
00:02:33.720 I don't know if you've ever seen this,
00:02:34.800 maybe your grandparents have this problem,
00:02:36.620 but he had about 15 toolbars in his browser.
00:02:39.840 Like, essentially half the browser page was spyware
00:02:43.860 that somehow over the years he had collected
00:02:45.840 on his computer, so our landing page
00:02:47.880 pushed everything down. And I would have never learned that without sitting face-to-face
00:02:52.000 and watching them. You know, it's one of my favorite things to actually, like, sit down
00:02:56.440 in somebody's office and watch them interact with our solution. You know, and this is true
00:03:00.460 if you're in retail or a restaurant. It's like, sit down with the customer, maybe after
00:03:04.240 they've experienced your product, and talk to them. You know, one thing I do every Thursday
00:03:09.480 in my company is I call it smile and dial. I get six or seven names from our customers,
00:03:13.820 our recent customers over the past two weeks, and I just call them. Now, here's the trick
00:03:17.660 that I'm going to teach you is don't tell them you're the founder or CEO if you are.
00:03:21.720 Because they will just go off. They won't give you real feedback
00:03:25.480 because they don't want to hurt your feelings knowing that you created the solution they're using.
00:03:29.660 That's a trick, but every Thursday, smile and dial. It's a way for me to really
00:03:33.720 understand who our core customers are. The other way is a bit more
00:03:37.760 hands-off is to survey them. I've done this recently
00:03:41.860 with my blog. If you're watching this on my blog, I sent out a survey to thousands of my
00:03:45.960 viewers and ask them, you know, what are some of your top challenges? What's a question
00:03:50.040 you would ask me? I asked about 18 different questions to really understand
00:03:53.640 who my core audience was. You know, it's a really simple way.
00:03:57.760 In the technology world, there's this thing called the Customer Discovery Survey. You can go
00:04:01.820 look at it at survey.io and it asks some really amazing questions.
00:04:06.100 My favorite one of all of them was, how do you explain our company
00:04:09.840 or service to a friend? Think about that. The language your customers
00:04:13.840 use to explain your product to a friend that you get to learn. And if you looked over a hundred
00:04:19.320 different responses, you can figure out which one of these words should we maybe add to our homepage,
00:04:25.020 add to the description of how our product or service works. I mean, it's a really amazing
00:04:28.700 and intimate way to understand your customers. And the third, probably my favorite way, and it
00:04:34.600 might sound a little creepy at first, but hold out for now. If you have customers or you have
00:04:39.700 friends that should be customers, go to their Facebook page. Go to likes. It's there for
00:04:45.100 everybody. Most people don't even know that the information about this is there for them,
00:04:48.680 so go check it out. And what you can do is you can actually look at all the different
00:04:52.200 likes from artists to musics to TV shows to authors to public figures that your ideal
00:04:58.320 customer loves. And what I do is I write them all down. Maybe I'll look at 10 different
00:05:03.380 ideal customers and I'll see what are the commonalities. Is there a theme? Is there
00:05:07.640 actual people or TV shows or services that they all seem to love and use because that'll tell me a
00:05:13.400 lot of insight into my business and who my ideal customer is. And those are really the three things
00:05:18.180 that I want to share with you today because, again, if you figure out who your core customer is,
00:05:22.820 who is the most best fitted to use your product, it will sell itself. Please leave me a comment
00:05:28.460 below letting me know what the biggest takeaway was from this video. And again, I want to challenge
00:05:32.500 you to live a bigger life and business, and I will see you next Monday.