This week we're going to talk about talking to customers. We're going to start the process of speaking to a lot of customers. We're going to ask you to talk to 100 customers during the course of the 12 weeks. And so, I think a little preparation, a little training in how to talk to them is going to stand you in good stead as we go forward. But the first thing we want to talk about is, why talk to customers at all? What do they even know? Why even speak to them? If you know it all already, why should you talk to somebody that you haven't talked to? And inevitably in a group, if we were interactive, inevitability someone would raise their hand and say, what about Steve Jobs? Steve Jobs didn't talk to customers. If Steve Jobs didn't talk to customers, why do I have to talk to customers? Well there's two answers to that. First of all, you're not Steve Jobs, more than likely. God bless you if you are, but more than likely you're not. But second of all, Steve Jobs did talk to customers. Steve Jobs got a lot of his ideas about what customers wanted from talking to them. He didn't get ideas about what the product should be from customers, but he got ideas about what should be in the product, from talking to customers. That's where his ideas came from. What do costumers know? Costumers know about themselves, they know what they like, they know what they don't like, they know what gives them pain, they know what their worries are, they know what problems they have. The problem with customers is that they don't always know that they know these things. So when you talked to customers you're going to have to get the information out of them, even though they don't know that they know it. They can tell you what they like but they do it indirectly. And so when you talk to customers you're trying to do two things. You're trying to identify their pains and their problems because that's what they know. But you're trying to do it indirectly. And you're going to have to work hard to get the information out of the interviews that you do. All of this is not to help define the product. It's to help you know once you go into it. So how do you gain insight from a tacit expert? Somebody who knows something but they don't know that they know it. You get them talking. That's the basic thing you want to do. You want to get them going into their entire situation, their lives, their problems, their job, their worries. And once you've got them talking, then you're going to want to guide them toward the kinds of questions that you want to ask, and you have to ask those questions in the right way. You're going to have to listen for answers that you didn't expect, because they're going to say things that are going to take you off your expected course and you're going to have to course correct. You're going to have to think about the interviews before you do them, and then you're going to have to do work on them after you've done them. Because that's where the work of extracting the insight comes. You go over the interview. Say, why did they say this to that? What were they talking about here? Why did they look uneasy when they said this thing? Those are the kinds of questions you have to ask in order to get to the kind of answers you need. If you think about the life of a customer, if you think about how a customer is, I call it The Tower of Wishes and Woes. They've got a hierarchy of things that bug them or interest them. At the very top, maybe, you've something like my child's education. Everyone cares about their child's education, nobody wants their child not to have an education. It's way up at the top. And way at the bottom is probably something like world peace. Everyone cares about world peace, but you know what, we don't expect to be able to do much about it, one way or the other. So in between are all the things that concern you as somebody who's developing a solution for this customer. Maybe right underneath my child's education is pleasing my boss. Who doesn't want to make their boss happy? And then underneath that is probably not looking like an idiot. Nobody wants to look like a fool. So you do things that make you not look like a fool. Maybe underneath that is something like, am I a good person? I think most people, this maybe a minority of you but I think most people want to believe that they're good. So that's up there too. Then you start getting into things like increasing revenues and saving costs, they're way down on the mix. They're just a hair above world peace if you will. They're important, but it's much more important to please my boss. If I can please my boss by saving costs or please my boss by increasing revenues, then I will do that, but I don't care much about them in their own right. That's a good thing to bear in mind as you talk to customers. So, these are the main points about talking to customers, the kinds of things you're going to learn from them and how you're going to learn from them. They define their problems and you define the product. So they're going to tell you what they need and you're going to tell them how to get it. They're experts on their own problems although they don't always know what they know. So they don't always know how to talk about what they know. They have a hierarchy of concerns and wishes and you're trying to get at that hierarchy in order to understand where the problem that you're going to solve fits in. If it's not near the top, you got a problem. And finally, listening to customers is going to tell you where you fit in, and listening, extracting the information, and working hard.
