5 Questions to Ask Your Customers

As I ramp up my new job leading marketing at Wicket, I look forward to speaking with our existing customers and partners. As I've written before, understanding and using the voice of the customer in your marketing efforts is crucial. And while your predecessors or sales or services teams may have already developed testimonials and stories from your top customers, as the marketing leader, it is incumbent on you to develop these relationships and hear their stories firsthand.

Over time you will hopefully have many opportunities to speak with your customers and ask them lots of questions about their business, their use of your product, their future plans, etc., but in my initial conversations, there are five key questions I find really important to understand:

1. Where did you hear about us?
2. How do you describe our product?
3. What value do you get from our product?
4. What are your biggest challenges using our product?
5. What are your business and marketing goals?

With these five questions, you can both learn from the customer to help influence your core messaging and positioning and start to understand what type of customer stories and marketing activities you can do with them.

Where did you hear about us?

One of marketing's core goals is driving revenue. As such, you want your marketing programs to entice prospects to learn more about your company, ultimately leading to sales opportunities and, hopefully, becoming customers.

There are myriad marketing channels you could be using - how do you decide which ones to invest in first?

Should you invest in digital advertising? Which social media platforms should you be using? Are tradeshows relevant to your industry? What media outlets or influencers do your prospects listen to? While placing a variety of small bets and seeing which bear fruit can be a good strategy, early-stage companies often don't have the resources (people or dollars) to try everything. So how do you decide which channels are the best to invest in?

One way is to measure the output from the programs you invest in. How many leads did a given campaign generate, or more importantly, how much pipeline or revenue did it generate? But for early-stage companies, it may take too long, and there may not be enough data points to draw strong conclusions.

Another way is to ask your customers where they heard about you and where they typically hear about adjacent technologies. What events do they go to, what influencers do they listen to, what social media platforms do they use, what keywords do they search for, etc.? This can help you identify the best places to start running or expanding marketing programs in hopes of landing more customers like the ones you already have.

How do you describe our solution?

The second key question is asking your customer how they describe your solution to their peers and colleagues. The goal here is not to get them to regurgitate your marketing messaging but to hear how they describe your product in their own terms.

Your marketing messaging needs to resonate with your target buyers. How better than to use the language your existing customers are using?

While they may not be marketers, and I'm not suggesting you adopt their words lock, stock, and barrel, listen really carefully to the key words and phrases they use. What aspects of the product do they talk about? What use cases do they focus on? If you consistently hear the same ideas and language from multiple customers, these words and phrases will also resonate with your prospective customers. This can serve as great fodder for your positioning and messaging work.

What value do you get from our solution?

As Simon Sinek described in his seminal 2009 TED talk, great leaders (and thus great marketers) don't focus on the "how" and "what" of their products - they focus on the "why."

How often have you visited a technology company website replete with technology mumbo jumbo and seemingly impressive speeds and feeds only to walk away having no idea why you would actually use the product?

Hopefully, as part of the previous question, your customers will have ascribed some value to your solution. But if that wasn't clear, make sure you double back and specifically ask them what value they get from using your product. They are spending their resources - money and time - on your product. Why? What is the bottom-line benefit for them personally or for their organization?

Capturing this raw ROI is not only helpful for your positioning and messaging but also in developing pricing (ideally, your pricing scales along axes of customer value). It can also be interesting to understand how different stakeholders at your customer site view the value of your solution. You may find that the person implementing and managing the solution has a different perspective on the value than a senior executive. Both perspectives are valuable, especially when you tailor specific marketing campaigns to different personas.

What are your biggest challenges?

Now that you have a good sense of why they are your customer and what they think of your product or solution, it is good to pivot to understand their challenges and goals. These can be specific to your product - what features or capabilities do they wish your product had? But it can also be more generally about challenges and hurdles they face in their day-to-day roles.

Asking about and engaging with customers about the things they care about is also a good way to develop rapport with them and compassion for their jobs.

Understanding what challenges your customers face can inform your marketing efforts - especially if you have ideas or best practices on how they can mitigate those issues - and it can be great fodder for your product team and executive leadership. It can help guide future product development or what companies or technologies you should integrate with or perhaps acquire to expand your solution.

Ultimately your customers will be most loyal to you when you are solving their problems. The first step to solving their problems is truly understanding them.

What are your business and marketing goals?

Another important aspect to understand is what goals your customers have. The obvious question is to understand their business goals - what is their business or their department, or even just your champion trying to achieve? Given some of the early customers Wicket has, I'm immersing myself in the world of sports businesses and learning that improving fan experience is important to them. This is helpful both as we think about product direction and partnerships and also as I think about messaging.

But beyond their business goals, another related question marketers often overlook is to ask them about their marketing goals. What core messages are they trying to convey - and can your product or service be part of that? When I was at Formlabs, many of our major customers, like Gillette and New Balance, wanted to portray an image of innovation and being cutting-edge. Our 3d printers could be a key part of that story giving us marketing exposure we couldn't get on our own. Even if the connection isn't that obvious, it is worth asking what their marketing goals are and seeing if there are ways you can align or tie your marketing activities in with them.

By discovering what customers are trying to achieve with their marketing efforts, you can look for ways your marketing can support them, providing additional value and increasing your brand visibility.

Another common goal your users may have is to spread the word about their work with your technology inside their company. When I worked for Invention Machine - a very small search technology startup - we developed and ran marketing campaigns inside major customers like Boston Scientific and Northrup Grumman. Organizations that certainly had significantly larger marketing departments - but departments that were not focused on marketing technologies within their organizations. Helping our champions market our solution inside their organization expanded awareness of our product and led to upsell and cross-sell opportunities. It also elevated our champions' profiles as thought leaders and change agents.

2 Ears and 1 Mouth

These are some of the most important questions I ask customers in order to shape our marketing and company strategy. And just as important as the questions is that you take time to listen. Use your ears and mouth proportionately, and make sure you aren't just pitching new products or bragging about how well your company is doing. They are already a customer and can provide invaluable insights that can help you make your company and marketing better. Make sure you are truly listening!

What other key questions do you ask your customers?