Ask your customers face to face, when you have them! or they will not tell you!!

One of the key role in technology marketing is customer communication. This seems like a role which no other group in the organization would take as much serious responsibility as the marketing group. I think that this is true even when it comes to the sales organization and P/R group. I would suggest that you look at all the opportunities of talking with customers and potential customers and take full advantage of them. In this article I will cover face to face group meetings like seminars, trade shows, and even direct presentations in customer site.

When you have events like seminars, industry trade shows, and even participate in a customer meeting, make sure you ask them what they think. I would suggest making this a formal process with a printed questionnaire, contact info, and even a prize or a give-away. In a recent full day seminar for a big software ISV/OEM the organizers gave each participant questionnaires to fill. When the forms were turned in you received an MP3 player (similar to an Apple shuffle). This was a nice way (or trick?) to get people to fill a form, I think that essentially you got a name, phone number, and an e-Mail address. Any specific information on what someone needs is probably not going to be too deep. Without real face to face interviews the whole organization, from sales all the way to engineering is loosing a opportunity to understand customers.

There is no substitution for face to face conversation.

In a case of a large seminar or a trade show I would suggest marketing and sales people AND managers to pull off customers and potential customers one or two at a time and have a private conversation. This is perfectly acceptable during the formal 'presentations' and in the breaks for coffee or even lunch. Face to face interviews over specific topics such as: use, problems, additional needed functions and features, training, cost of operation and maintenance, and a host of other issues tend to be company specific. They may even be department and individual specific. So each person you speak with will be much more comfortable speaking in private. Most people will not tell you in writing that your product is too hard to learn or use. Which leads this person (let's assume a system administrator) not tell his boss that there are things he can do better and eventually will help users (but it will take time to learn, try, test, and implement). You get the point; and you clearly know that in face to face conversations a developer and marketer of complex products can negotiate the complex process of improving and selling this product. Fortunately, there are still many face to face opportunities to interview real people about real issues and real opportunities!

Most marketing professionals tend to look at aggregate customers and try to form an opinion based on one uniform market segment. But this is not always easy and in some respects needs to be done in depth and with a real individual customers. Going to customers directly when they are in front of you seems to be one of the best way to gather information and truly understand what customers need.

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Next time: What do you ask? and HOW?