Two ways to think like your customers: spend time watching how they actually use your product, and map their entire journey across every touchpoint. Embed this into your culture so product, marketing, and support all own it.
Is there any like, you know, feedback or tips you have on how somebody can start to think in the terms of how their customer's thinking?
Yeah, I mean, look, there are practical things that you can do, you know, and then there are holistic things that you can do. And I do agree with you, John, that there's two things, right? Like, you know, thinking holistically versus thinking in just like initial stages. People will kind of just going to how am I going to sell or how am I going to market, right? I think practically, I will just say like every one of you as executives should be spending time with your customers, right? If I look at how much time am I spending with customers, even having very tactical things like follow your customer home, right? Like if they're using your product, go and sit down with them and just like look at how specifically are they using the product, and that gives you a much better sense of looking at the entire customer journey than looking at just statistics and data and so on. So start with that and have a customer-centric approach in almost everything you do. At HubSpot, we call it solve for the customer, SFTC. This is like ingrained in our onboarding, every single person who's coming into the organization, solves for the customer. So building it into your culture and building it into your way of thinking so that whether you are a product designer, a UX designer, or a product marketeer, or someone in customer success, it's everyone's job to actually be thinking about what it means for the customer. And then, you know, go through the kind of exercise that I just said. In a couple of the organizations I've led exercises where we don't, we literally map the entire customer journey and journey through the digital side, but also the interaction with our employees. So what is the actual—
every phone call, every visit to the— right, exactly.
And that's basically what I would say. And then once you have all of that, then you will get like a holistic picture, not a disjointed picture.
Right.
