Note: If needed, you can interchange customer with prospect (or future prospect).

Getting close to your customer is important for effective, ongoing marketing.

Why talk to customers? It aligns your business and simplifies your marketing efforts. When you lead with customer insights, your relevance and effectiveness grows, saving you time and money.

Here are five ways to begin exploring:

✅ Ask to join sales calls or meetings

Join sales calls on a regular basis.

You will learn how the sales rep speaks about your product, hear what questions your prospects ask, and pick up on lots of nuggets. Make sure to pick up questions, concerns and objections.

If you’ve created an ICP, you’ll already have some base information. Your job here is to identify, validate and confirm so you can do better marketing.

✅  Go to where your customers spend time

Go to events, seminars, webinars, breakfast forums, online forums, visit their LinkedIn-profiles - see what they share, and comment on. Make it a habit to research and look for opportunities.

The better you get to know your prospects, the better you will become at finding them.

✅  Ask your customers if you can talk to them

Here’s a pretty great resource I’ve referenced a few times, that you can use step by step 👉 go here.

✅  Watch your customers use your product

Hearing the words of your customer is powerful.

Another level to this is getting non-verbal feedback. Sometimes, we don’t know how to express ourselves in words, but you’ll see it clearly in posture, a heavy sigh, a look of fleeting annoyance, relief or joy.

Try to be next to a customer when they're interacting with something you’ve created.

Ideally, your product, but it can also be them for instance navigating your website.

Here’s a little check list on how to optimize customer feedback 👇

Want to build a product your customers love? Find the golden nuggets in non-verbal feedback:

1. Invite an (ideal) customer for a session to test your product

2. Have them walk through it. Ask them to narrate everything they do everything they're thinking. Completely unfiltered. Note down comments, feedback, questions and concerns

3. Most importantly Notice them. What makes them smile, lean in or I away. What makes them sigh or mumble 'aha cool'. What makes their eyes foggy with confusion + what makes their eyes light up

4. Bring feedback back into iterations

5. Rinse and repeat. At least weekly.

Optimize for clarity, ease and creating experiences that lights up eyes.