Understanding customer behaviors is crucial for building better products. But how do corporate leaders get to the bottom of what matters? By asking the right questions.
The Power of Asking the Right Questions: Tips for Conducting Customer Discovery in Corporations
Maintaining an information advantage in today’s rapidly changing world is a top concern for organizational leaders I’ve spoken to.
Corporate innovators often admire startups’ abilities to understand their customers’ behaviors, identify the motivations and emotions that drive specific behaviors, and rapidly act on that knowledge. This gives startups a material advantage in building products that address their customers' deeply held pain points.
Startups do this simply by talking to lots and lots of prospective customers and understanding the “whys.”
The challenges corporate innovators face in asking the right questions.
I acutely remember a moment in my career when I led a research and planning team responsible for providing roadmap guidance for thousands of engineers. At one point, sitting down with my team, I realized that none of us had left the building and talked to anyone outside of the company in… months. Yikes!
If customer discovery is necessary to address your customers’ core challenges and frustrations and respond to their needs in a rapidly changing environment, then any friction preventing customer discovery is a meaningful problem to understand. How did I—and so many others—end up trying to understand the voice of the customer without actually talking to them?
It’s too easy. Here are four common error modes that corporations run into and tips to avoid making these mistakes.
1) Making decisions based on internal conversations without talking to outside stakeholders
Leaders spend months without meeting with anyone outside their organization, as I did. People inside a large organization must break out of their ivory towers and connect with representatives from other companies, startups, and customers to understand what stakeholders think across the industry.
2) Solutions first, customer pain second
Big companies are made up of subject matter experts. These experts are skilled at devising solutions but can neglect falling in love with the problem. A corporate culture that rewards solutions can make it increasingly difficult for leaders to remain humble, embrace curiosity, and ask other stakeholders for their perspectives.
3) Requiring layers of compliance approvals
Customer discovery often requires leaders to be creative, unconventional, and always ethical in understanding the driving factors behind customer behavior. Engaging with outside stakeholders can impose additional risk (real and perceived) on organizations, prompting compliance reviews and regulatory approvals. The reviews necessary for a sensitive competitive research project get applied to a simple discovery program or outreach, and boom, bureaucratic processes, and burdensome red tape get seemingly innocent actions held up in endless rounds of feedback and approvals.
4) Carrying the weight of their companies as a company representative
Corporations, unlike startups, have long-held reputations to maintain. In practice, this usually means that corporate leaders are incentivized to make decisions that reduce the risk of unwanted attention. Their actions represent their organizations, creating a risk-averse culture of engaging in public conversation. Tl;dr, employees are afraid to do or say something stupid, which constrains their interactions.
Customer discovery the right way
Innovation is about getting people to change their behaviors by understanding why they make certain decisions and what deeply matters to them. To do so, you need to be able to ask effective questions. By asking effective questions, you can understand why people use today’s solutions and how you can better address the root cause of their pain points.
Much has been written about customer discovery, not least the volumes based on Steve Blank’s work. Fundamentally, discovery asks you to develop a hypothesis—something you believe—and then get out and talk to people to see if your hypothesis is right. I encourage innovators inside corporations to adopt this mindset of curiosity, of getting out of the ivory tower and asking questions.
Just a few tips from my experience:
- Set minimal context, establish a human connection, and ask open-ended questions.
- Listen, don’t speak.
- Follow emotions—ask about frustration, pride, anger, joy. Emotions lead to opportunities.
Listen, don’t speak. - Look for what people are trying to accomplish, not how they’re doing it, or want to do it.
Listen, don’t speak. - Avoid asking what people want. They don’t know.
- Did I mention to listen, don’t speak? :D
Leave room for wonder
Open-ended questions leave room for customers to dream. Let them wonder why they are incentivized to act in a certain way and why they behave a certain way. Giving the conversation freedom to roam can lead to new insights you wouldn’t have uncovered otherwise with direct questioning.
Failures in customer discovery
Getting beyond their comfort zones and talk to people outside of their organizations is critical for corporate leaders. When doing so, avoid falling into these traps:
Don’t lead with your own opinion within the line of questioning. You want the person on the other side of the table to express their reasoning without any subconscious bias from your perspective. This is how you’ll extract first-principles answers from your subject.
Don’t sell prospective customers on what you can provide. Customer discovery isn’t the time to sell others on what you’re creating. This time should be used to learn about the other person, avoiding any statements that sound transactional or even like a possible solution.
Don’t engage in discovery conversations if you’re not fully present. People want to be heard, and that’s great news for a corporate leader who’s carving out time to learn about their customers. If you want to get the most out of your conversations, you need to actively show that you’re engaged and interested in their thoughts with positive body language and follow-up questions.
These mistakes can lead to vague and misleading insights, ultimately proving to be a wasted exercise in customer discovery.
By avoiding some of these mistakes, your customers are more likely to be engaged in the conversation, using positive body language, asking follow-up questions, and thoughtfully answering your “why” questions.
In today’s age, access to this information is a superpower. It’s what all companies need to succeed in a world where new technology is making it more enticing to focus on a solution instead of a problem.
As a corporate innovator, you can only gain access to that information advantage if you move away from internal perspectives and have real conversations with the people around you. By doing so, you’ll gain better insight into where people feel their pain and the problems they face and, as a result, build better products for them.
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