This week, Growth Street kicked off with a new client to help them redefine their go-to-market strategy. As I started prepping for a workshop this morning, I got to thinking a lot about the customer mindset – it’s really the Holy Grail of any brand strategy, and any go to market strategy.
It’s one thing to do a customer survey or to listen in on a customer call occasionally. But as brand leaders and marketers – the people who are out in the market trying to talk to our customers, send campaigns, and do all these activities – what I find is that we’re not spending enough time in the customer mindset. And we’re not really channeling the customer all the time.
So, I wanted to give you three ways to do that:
-
Listen to Customer Service
This is imperative for anyone in the marketing team: you must be aligned with sales and with customer support (whatever you may call it within your organization). These are the people that are on the front lines every day. They’re getting great customer calls, and they’re getting crappy customer calls. They’re going onto customer sales calls, they’re understanding why people aren’t buying, and what’s not resonating. They know what we need to be saying or doing differently to be able to grease the skids and create that traction. So number one, be listening to them.
-
Talk to Your Customers
Make those conversations happen yourself. That means working with those teams and asking, “Can we spend some time actually talking to some customers ourselves?” There is nothing like speaking to a customer, hearing what they have to say for yourself, and carving out the right questions to ask.
-
Use Customer Personas
Every time you’re writing something, producing something, or shipping something, make sure that you’re always looking at the personas that you’ve built. They won’t do you any good if they’re just sitting on a shelf or in somebody’s email somewhere! You need to make sure that they’re living and breathing, and that you’re really channeling that persona and getting into that mentality.
I have a process here to review our clients’ personas. I’m often thinking things like, “Who is Successful Sam? What does he want? What is the narrative that’s going to speak to him?” It’s not about what I like. It’s about what he needs or wants to hear from us – how we’re really going to hit that pain point for him, and how we’re going to solve his problem.
The Bottom Line
So, those are your three for today. Live in the customer mindset. It makes all the difference for your brand, and all the difference for your marketing.
Giddy up!