The Dumbest Guy in the Room

For anyone who’s sat through a meeting with me… I often say “I’m the Dumbest Guy in the Room.”  I also tell folks the reason I know, is my wife tells me every night I get home.  Now I jest about the later… but former is absolutely my goal — to be the dumbest guy in the room.

However, I’ve sat in too many meetings where a high level Marketing Executive, Creative Director or Business Manager doesn’t listen to what is being said — by their team, agency, research team and what’s even more concerning… the customer.

Getting customer input is critical.  Once I did extensive research on how customers found our products.  How they searched, categorized and navigated on a website.  Presenting the results to Product Management was interesting.  At first they were intrigued, almost giddy with the insights from customers.  That intrigue quickly became skepticism as they picked apart every number, comment and recommendation.  

• Use a third party research company
• Include Product Management, Marketing, Executives or anyone who might throw stones at the results.  Include them from day 1 in the design, purpose and question/research development.
• Use multiple customer segments — B2B, B2C, size, geographic, income, sales, etc.
• Speak to customers and prospective customers
• Video tape the input or better yet, have your key constituents actually be at the interviews to listen to input for themselves
• For a website… setup navigation pages for customers to test… if you have the budget, you can go all high-tech and have eye navigation and tracking setup. 
• Get the correct sample size
• Get quantitative and qualitative input… it’s tough to argue with the quantitative numbers, but having the qualitative helps bring the context of those numbers out.
• Get agreement at the outset, what you want to get out of the research.  Agree that you’ll use the research to make certain decisions… basically, you don’t want the research to find it’s way on a dusty bookshelf
• Do an in-person results meeting… and follow it up with individual 1:1 meetings to ensure clarity and get consensus if needed.
• Layout a step-by-step plan to execute the plans the research has identified.  Always tie back the recommendations and changes to the research…bring it back to the customer research

Don’t let that research sit on a shelf… don’t let others “poke” holes in the research based on inaccuracies with the collection of the data…don’t keep the results under wraps…and most importantly, don’t think you’re smarter than your customer.  

Scott