STOP Trying to Sell HATED Products | Listen & REENGINEER

Gurav is asking. This is an interesting one. How do you market products to customers who hate the products? What's your strategy?

I think you probably need in that, Gurav, I think if they really hate the products, you've got to find out why. You've got to put number one, obviously, I'd say go where the audience is, put yourselves in their shoes. And then there's some great ways again through social media to find out exactly why they don't like the product. And then back to iteration, test drive, and the product development. Re-engineer the product to make sure they do like it. And, you know, I think these days the product is so much more than just the product. It's the brand, it's the customer service, it's the partnership network. It's so many different things that are part of a product these days that I I think it's really important that you kind of get an understanding of all the elements of the sort of product mix to make sure that you land it better. And again, I would— don't beat yourselves up, you know, Gurpreet. I beat myself up probably too much. And with any company, you never should be satisfied. You always want to do more, but you should savor the moment of what you got. And even if you've got a product out there with customers, the reality is you've probably done pretty well to get it to that stage. But then the next stage is getting your customers to become raving fans. So I think they are— and I know, reality, your customers, they're just human beings. They want to love your product and love your company. And if you start believing that, then you're on a mission to let them be incredibly happy and big kind of net promoters and big advocates and big ambassadors. And they're part of the volunteer army that you can create.

I think if you have products that customers hate, you need to stop marketing and start listening and retool the product, right? That's like, you just stop spending money trying to get new customers in if your current customers are really unhappy. Just listen to your customers and make them happy. Make the product better.

Hey, actually, Evan, I'll tell you a little story. So, um, 1998 in my startup company, and we built it, we thought it was an awesome product. The engineers were great down in California. And then we actually shipped the product to a few customers out on the East Coast. And one of the customers in Wilmington, actually, they're a pretty big brand name. Probably not appropriate to tell you who they are, but they picked up the phone to me one day and said, you know, your product sucks. And it was in the call center. And I said, look, I'll fly out there and I'll fix whatever it takes. Because it's really important we, we get you whole and make you really happy that we've done the right thing for your business. Anyway, I met with him, and, um, in his office, it was a big glass office, there's all these people at the contact center. And, uh, when, when the contact center went down in those days— this is kind of pre-internet, so this is when there was really old technology and we were pioneering— but when, uh, all these agents put their hand up, it meant some part of the system had gone down. And I was sitting in his office, glass doors and all these people are putting their hands up. And actually it wasn't related to our product that their systems had gone down, but he said, "That's what I'm dealing with every day." And he said, and oh God, the data he gave me, he said, "Every 1 second we lose on call costs us $300,000." So what did I do? I went back to California, I got all the engineers together and I said, "Guys, we got a big problem. We built something that we thought with high integrity was an awesome product." but it's kind of not— it's not— it's road tested, we tested the quality, all that stuff, but it's not doing the job we expected it to do. So what I said was, who's up for going out to the East Coast, giving up their lives, and making that product work? And we had 20 engineers, 20 engineers put their hand up and they said they'd do it. And literally, I'm not kidding you, we put them on a plane, they went out there, and they just camped with the customer and their IT department, and they got that product working. Now, the reason why I'm telling you that is, number one, kind of a core belief I've always had from a baby, really, when I was watching my dad in the business: you never let a customer down. Number two, that customer became a raving advocate and fan, and he said, you know, in the world of technology, technology never works the way someone suppliers say it will, but the great companies make it work according to what we as the customer wants. And then the third thing, wow, what a light bulb moment for those engineers. When they came back to California, number one, they were rock stars, but they said, that was the best thing we ever did. We could never have imagined how a customer would have used our product. We back here in California doing all these clever sort of business analysis, data flow diagram, building products. But when you actually see how customers use your product, you've got no appreciation of how they use your product until you actually go out there and you're sitting in the trenches next to customers seeing it. So that comes back to, you know, that was an extreme example. But off the back of that, Evan, we built what, $100 million company in 4 years, sold that product to all the great institutions, Canadian Tire, you know, CIBC, MetLife, Barclays Bank, all these great companies. And the product won awards, and those engineers, they were the proudest people in the company. And they put a fire out for a customer, and they built a company.