Listening to Your Customers – What Do You Hear?

Sales and presales, in particular, are key conduits of customer needs to product teams. I’m curious: how granular, or perhaps how complete, is that communication?

I just had a conversation with a salesperson who repeatedly and vigorously asserted that his company listens to their customers. I asked him, “What does this mean?”

For example, are you listening to your customers, your prospects, or both? Are they saying the same things? And what do you hear regarding different use cases?

What are the Early Majority folks saying? How is that the same or different from Late Majority, and from Innovators, Early Adopters (and Fast Followers), and Laggards?

If you want to improve an existing product or service, you’ll likely get good guidance from existing customers who are in the Majority segments. If you are looking to significantly change a product or service to address adjacent markets or achieve similar objectives, you probably need to listen to prospects. And if you want to enter an entirely new space, you may need to engage with the Innovators, in particular.

Perhaps these and related parameters need to be included in communications from the field to product… Are they?