Revenue Journal®

The customers I interview for my clients range from engineers to programmers to CPAs to physicians to store owners to sailors to dealers to system integrators to women who buy skincare and makeup to salespeople to marketers to CEOs to...well, you get the picture. Just about everybody.

They always have something interesting to say. In fact, you'd be surprised - shocked, even - if you heard how much your own customers have to say about your product and company.

If you interview people skillfully, it's easy to get them started, and once they get started, they can talk for an hour or two about a product, company, and industry. They can tell you what they like about it, what they wish vendors would do, what else they've tried, and what they thought about those products. They will tell you what was frustrating or convenient about the buying process.

They can tell you how they looked for the product, the questions they had, and the tradeoffs they had to resolve before they spent the money. They can tell you the trends they see in the industry, not just based on their own needs, but by observing what others are doing and buying. They can also tell you what would make the most difference for them.

For example, the women I've been interviewing lately for a cosmetic/skin care company have mentioned that they wish cosmetic companies didn't come up with new colors every year.

The president of a small company recently sent me an email. "We've done well in a lot of areas of business, but what we haven't done is sorely inhibiting our growth. We need to master marketing and are committed to doing just that. Will you point me to the best learning tools?"

I'll bet you can guess where I pointed him…right back to his own customers. Here was my reply:

The CMO Council and MarketBridge just conducted a study to determine how marketing is perceived and how marketers think they're doing. The results agree with what I've observed for many years: the very nature of marketing has changed and many marketers haven't changed with it.

I don't normally post "news" here, since you can get that from so many other places. But I thought you might want to know about the joint study being undertaken by the CMO Council and KnowledgeStorm, especially since you can participate.

The CMO Council consists of marketing execs from 1,300 tech companies, controlling $45 billion in global marketing expenditures. KnowledgeStorm defines itself as "the largest online index of IT solutions," and says that 1.5 million IT buyers and solution providers visit KnowledgeStorm each month.

A joint release says the two companies will be conducting a field study entitled "Driving Decisions: Online Content Consumption Patterns," to explore "where and how IT is shaped, influenced, qualified and driven by online content syndication and consumption."

The CMO Council will conduct qualitative interviews of IT buyers and sellers. KnowledgeStorm will "employ its advanced analytic capabilities, and a network of more than 150 access channels and 600,000 registered users--300,000 of them opt-in users--to conduct a quarterly audit and analysis of technology content being sourced, viewed and downloaded across multiple categories and vertical industry sectors."