Focus on customers
When Guertin first started in the business, one of his managers made him go to a clinic for two days to watch patients be treated. It helped him better see what the problems were and what the customers liked and disliked.
“You should spend a lot of time talking to customers and having people in your organization talking to customers,” Guertin says. “You need to understand your customers viscerally and spend enough time with them [so] that you do.”
You have to be strategic about it though and make sure you’re spending that valuable time with different demographics.
“You watch new users and see how long it takes them to learn something,” he says. “You talk to the people who have to educate customers and ask them how it’s going and what things are the hardest for the customers to learn. You talk to experienced users and get their opinion.”
The problem with expert users is that they know so much that they often get on tangents, and you don’t learn what you really wanted to learn. Because of this, you have to also hit your intermediate users, who use the product but infrequently. These users may know how to do something but sometimes forget between usages.
“Intermediates represent the bulk of customers, and they’re the most easily frustrated,” Guertin says. “You have to talk to them and figure out how to design your products such that those people stay happy.”
When you talk to customers, open up the meeting by letting them talk. Guertin says that if he’s having a daylong meeting with a customer, he lets them talk for an hour before his first PowerPoint slide even comes up.
“You have to know where they’re coming from,” Guertin says. “Most people go into a conversation knowing where they’re coming from and not knowing where the other person is coming from.”
While listening entails using your ears, it also involves observations. For example, if Guertin sees a glimmer of distaste come across somebody’s face, he’ll ask what bothered him or her.
“There’s a little bit of detective work involved,” he says. “If you’re a detective and if you’re questioning a suspect, you can’t just have a planned interview. You have to follow things up.”
You also should reach out to people who aren’t your customers.
“You have to go talk to the people who aren’t interested in your product, and you try to figure out why and what’s going on in their head,” he says.
It may be your product or it may simply be the way you advertise your product, but you’re not going to know unless you ask them.
“You have to teach your sales force to do this,” Guertin says. “The sales force’s job isn’t just to talk. It’s to talk to people who don’t want to buy the product. It’s actually to talk to cold prospects and learn from that.”
Throughout all of these tactics, remember that you have to be somebody your team can emulate.
“You have to demonstrate the behavior yourself because people will watch the boss,” he says. “If I go into a room and spend all my time telling customers instead of listening to them, I’m not modeling that behavior.”
