How to Talk Directly to Your Customer's Desires

All right, so today we're going to talk about how to talk directly to your customer's desires.

One thing that I learned when I started doing marketing years and years ago, there was this marketer that many of you may have heard of, Sean Ellis, and he talked about something called product-market fit, in which he was just like, you got to figure out what makes your customers super happy and you need a, talk about more of the points that make them happy in your copy, in your marketing, in your funnel, to then convert more people and generate more quote unquote happy customers because you're focusing on what people love and bringing that out. And through his product market fit survey, you can Google it, and he has this whole process of figuring out if you have product market fit. And throughout that process, you can get feedback from people on what they truly like, what's making these people satisfied. And what we found is if you take some of that copy on what's making them truly happy, what's knocking their socks off, and putting that within your copy, you end up speaking to the customer's desires, their wants, and your conversion rate goes up and your ROI goes up as well.

So on my end, there's a couple of things. So talking about product-market fit, Really in the software world, you have to do a lot of customer development to figure out what features or what you should be putting on your product roadmap instead of building in a vacuum. If you build in a vacuum, if you think you have all these ideas and you know it all, you're going to end up not doing the best thing for your customers, right? Ultimately you're trying to, you're trying to build around what your customers need. So The Mom Test is a great book because it teaches you to ask non-leading questions. For example, what's the worst part of your day? Right. In terms of work. And then you can ask other questions like, how would you improve your workflow? And then you understand that the problems that they're facing. And I just remember talking about customer desires. I remember the Levels CEO, it's a continuous glucose monitor and allows me to see when I'm, if I eat something, if it spikes or not. And I signed up for the waitlist and he's, hey, are you free for a 45-minute call? So I was intrigued and I wanted to see how he structured it. So we got on a 45-minute call. He asked me all these pointed questions. And so he understood and he was like asking me, what's your primary use case for this? I was like, I just want to measure my health. So he understands there's a little marketing message right there. Oh, you want to measure your health? And he's okay. Why is that important to you? And so after the call, I was like, hey, those were very thoughtful questions. How many of these have you done? 1,000 phone calls. And what is that? That's 45,000 minutes. So that's a lot. And then, um, the CEO of Superhuman, Raul, I had him on the Leveling Up podcast and they're doing right now, I think it's Their ARR is like $30 million ARR or something like that. Do you know, do you remember, Neil?

I don't, I didn't know they were that high.

They're big. They're big. Yeah. And so they're an email tool. And so what Raul did was he basically, he had a gatekeeper. So he would send an email saying, hey, what's your biggest struggle with email right now? And then if he got really interesting responses, he would cherry-pick the best ones and reach out to them. And if they're in San Francisco, he would meet them in person. So my whole point around this is that Whether you want to send a survey, whether you want to meet people in person, talk to them on the phone, it's really important to not operate in a vacuum, to understand, hey, after you start getting in conversations with these people, it's people saying the same things over and over. You now know this is what their desire is, and you can tie that in with your marketing message. And then the final thing I'll say around this, for the Growth Accelerator that Neil and I have, our peer group, we had April Dunford speak, and she has a great book on positioning called Obviously Awesome. And she really helped catapult a dying product that, that basically they're trying to wrap up. And basically they turned the whole thing around and I believe they sold for $1 billion, but because she would talk to over 100 customers and she started to figure out the core desires on a certain subset and it repositioned the product completely. And then boom, it exploded. She has a great book, Obviously Awesome. I highly recommend you check that out. Neil.

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