🍕   Customer Surveys Lie
đź“Ł Â Â Find Your Selling Gap
🤝   Belly to Belly
🍕 Customer Surveys Lie
“Compliments are the fool’s gold of customer learning – shiny, distracting, and entirely worthless,” writes Rob Fitzpatrick in The Mom Test.
Customers lie. Not because they are deceptive or deceitful. They lie to spare your feelings.
Imagine for a moment that you come up with a brilliant idea for a business: build-it-yourself home pizza kits. Just like HelloFresh or a meal-delivery kit, you provide a box with the dough, sauce, cheese, and toppings.
It’s a fun activity for moms and kids to have a pizza party without the trouble of ordering in pizza.
You survey your friends and family to validate if this is a good idea. You share the idea and ask them, “Would you want this for your family to have at home pizza parties?”
They give you a resounding, “Yes! This is the best idea since Amazon Prime and Uber Eats. We cannot live without this.”
So you take your survey data and build the business. You work for months writing recipes, creating packaging, and building the logistics to deliver the pizza kits.
A year later, you make the big announcement: “You can now buy our pizza kits!” But nobody buys!
You poll the group again, “Why aren’t you buying the pizza kits you said you’d buy?” And they tell you, “I just don’t have time. After a long day, I don’t want to think. Ordering a pizza is so much easier.”
Did they lie to you when you first surveyed them? No! They thought they were being supportive and helpful. They were encouraging and validating you, as a friend.
This happens again and again, especially in market research surveys. Customers give you false positives because they believe they’re being helpful.‍
At Sticky Branding, we validate market research through direct selling. This is why we run Sales Sprints. A sale is a point of truth. A contract with a financial commitment reveals more about customer needs, wants, and desires than what you can get by any other means.
đź“ŁÂ Find Your Selling Gap
If your sales are stalling or you’re not meeting your targets, examine three areas of your sales process:
- Market: Are you selling to the right market (or customer) that has a direct need for your products and services?
- Message: Does your brand messaging clearly communicate your value proposition in a meaningful way that speaks to your customers’ needs and provokes them to buy?
- Method: Do you have the right sales or marketing approach to engage your customers at the right time in the right place?
Oftentimes, when a company isn’t generating enough leads, they immediately jump to marketing tactics, or Method. They invest more in digital advertising or social media instead of diagnosing the true sales gap.
Market, Message, and Method are like a three-legged stool. If one area is weak or missing, the system falls over.
If you have a sales gap, look carefully at all three. Chances are you are overspending on marketing tactics because you’re targeting the wrong customers with a misaligned value proposition.
One Stat to Watch
77.2%
of mobile Google searches end without clicks because users get answers directly from AI overviews, according to research from SparkToro.
🤝 Belly to Belly
There is one sales strategy that is more effective than artificial intelligence, Google Ads, and social media marketing combined: getting belly-to-belly or knee-to-knee with your customers. Go meet them!
The simple act of meeting your customers will do more for your sales than anything else.
I can already hear the naysayers:
- Our customers don’t want to meet us…
- Our customers don’t go to the office…
- Our customers prefer to buy online…
- We don’t sell that way in our industry…
What I hear are excuses.
‍If you truly want to understand your customers and bring them value, nothing is more valuable than an in-person meeting.
Is it hard to coordinate or ask for a meeting? Of course. Times have changed. You better have a good reason for a customer to meet with you, because if it’s all about you, why would they waste their time?
Be strategic. Be proactive. Make the effort to get in front of your customers.
🤔 Thoughts on Today’s Issue?
We’d love to hear your feedback. Message with any thoughts, comments, or ideas for future issues.