How can you empower your team for effective customer discovery?

In my, experience setting specific objectives, akin to the criteria set by SMART goals, guarantees that the whole team is on the same page and headed towards a unified vision. By laying out what needs to be achieved, by when, and how success will be measured, teams can avoid duplicated efforts or pursuing conflicting objectives. Essentially, a clear goal acts as a compass, ensuring all team members are navigating towards the same destination.

Start with the ‘Why’: Before beginning, ensure your team understands why you're undertaking customer discovery. It's not just about collecting data, but understanding needs, pain points, and aspirations. When they know the purpose, they'll approach it with more commitment and curiosity. Then move onto the goal.

When it comes to assessing client goals simple is good. Most of what you need to discover comes down to three questions: - 1. What obstacles are in the way of achieving your goals? 2. What are your frustrations at work? 3. What’s your biggest time-waster at work? If your product can help with any of these you’re already halfway to making a sale.

Effective customer discovery requires fostering a culture of curiosity and collaboration. Encourage open communication and active listening, allowing diverse perspectives to surface. Provide training and resources on customer research techniques, enabling employees to gather insights that drive decision-making. Allow team members to take ownership of discovery processes. Celebrate successes and failures as learning opportunities, nurture a fearless approach to experimentation, and share customer insights across the organization to align strategies and reinforce the significance of their contributions. By cultivating an empowered and informed team, you pave the way for meaningful customer connections and informed business growth.

From my perspective as a seasoned executive, empowering your team for effective customer discovery begins with a well-defined goal. I believe that setting a SMART goal ensures focus, minimizes distractions, and sets clear expectations. By knowing what you aim to learn, whom you're targeting, and how progress will be measured, your team is equipped to navigate customer interactions purposefully, yielding valuable insights and driving meaningful outcomes.

In my opinion it is crucial to have designate team members with specific roles and responsibilities within the customer discovery process. This ensures accountability and prevents confusion. Remember, empowerment involves not only assigning tasks but also providing the autonomy and support needed for team members to excel in their roles. In the end to reach the goal and have progress a clear structure in roles and responsibilities leads to higher success rates and insights beside the targeted goals.

Keyword: "discovery." Rather than practicing outdated sales tactics and door-to-door salesmanship, evolving strategies is vital. Asking thought provoking questions in finding voids and pain points to identify viable and creative solutions is key. Decentralization in highlighting strengths of each teammates will encourage entrepreneurship. The goal is to create a team speaking in a uniform fashion, to which will create a standardization in setting expectations for current and new teammates. Empowerment, collaboration, data driven insights, training and development, incentives, and having core values practices will create for an efficient and sustainable team to generate intentional and intelligent discoveries with customers.

Enabling your team for effective customer discovery hinges on fostering collaboration and nurturing creativity. I believe that embracing the iterative nature of this process and encouraging open sharing of ideas, perspectives, and insights fuels innovation. Utilizing tools like brainstorming, affinity diagramming, and customer journey mapping empowers your team to organize their findings and spark creative solutions. Moreover, endorsing experimentation and learning from both failures and successes amplifies your team's agility and adaptability in this dynamic endeavor.

In these difficult times we often win and then move onto the next challenge missing out the celebration. Yet, a basic human need is to feel appreciated, which is what a celebration does. I believe it’s the responsibility of the leader to ensure all the wins are recognised and celebrated.

I am convinced that connecting the team with the customer reality is essential, but in my experience, the best way to do that is encouraging the use of data to drive insights. More and more, to utilize tools and analytics to quantify customer feedback and identify patterns that can guide decision-making is key, but at the same time, as leaders we should encourage our teams to collaborate between, for example, data analysts, marketing teams, product managers, and other areas. Having different perspectives can lead to richer and more connected insights and innovative solutions. I call it "Cross-Functional Collaboration".

I spent some time along with my team to understand pain points of guest in our hotels. We had a few misses and hits. My learnings. - Making everyone understand what exactly we wish to learn and WHY is very important else goals, clear guidelines wont be able to uncover hidden gems which is the whole point of this exercise. - having a set perception can be dangerous so a regular touch up and calibration with team is really important.