Understanding your target market

How lazy are you when it comes to understanding your target market?

On the whole, many of us prefer to obtain information about the people we are selling to…secondhand. We buy industry reviews. We pay marketing researchers to do surveys. We read summaries of focus groups. We compile purchase transaction statistics. We listen to the sales force’s anecdotes. We build data warehouses and fill them with every possible fact we can collect or buy.

It seems like we chase down virtually every path to insight except actually listening to our prospects and customers. There are reasons for this—we tend to be busy people, and real interaction isn’t an efficient process. So in the time that you can talk with one person, or listen to some calls into the call center, you can study abstract information about of hundreds of people. And there’s the danger that people won’t be truthful with you face-to-face; they’ll be too polite, or too calculating to tell you the truth. Or worse yet, they’ll complain to you! Personal contact is unpredictable, and it takes a lot of work to “mine” it for real insights. So its often easier to take a more lazy way out.

It’s all very understandable—and very dangerous to your company’s health. Maybe it is MBA programs that bred the personal contact out of so many of us, or maybe we’ve just abrogated too much responsibility for personal contact to our salespeople, or call center reps, or (worst case) our internet software!

Printed words and conversion ratios are unlikely to convey the insights that will provide the competitive edge you’re seeking. Often it is the excitement or disgust in someone’s voice that signals an opportunity. Or body language—a lifted eyebrow or shrug—that tells you how engaged someone is with your proposition. Or just a look in their eye that says that’s the sweet spot.

So try to make some space in your schedule once in a while to actually go see some people face-to-face. Travel with your salespeople. Listen to the call center representatives talk with prospects and customers over the phone. I guarantee you, you’ll get more out of it than you will from any piece of paper in your office.