Daily Lab: Real customer research
Know your customers, find your prospects.
Short summary:
- “Customer research” often focuses on prospects, not current customers.
- Genuine customer research reveals how current customers perceive value.
- Insights from existing customers can help attract potential customers.
When people talk about “customer research,” they’re most often actually talking about “prospect research.”
They’re not researching their customers, they’re researching people who they want as customers.
But true customer research—digging into how our past and current customers experience and speak about our value—is the best place to start if you want more prospects.
There’s no point in finding out about potential customers when you don’t yet know about your existing ones.
What do they think? What do they value? How do they describe your business to others? Why did they return to work with you again—or why didn’t they?
For example, consider asking your last best customer how they’d respond to a common objection you get.
Because when you know the value you deliver to your customers, you can demonstrate it to your prospects.
So do more customer research, and let the prospects come to you.
