Easy Customer Research

Easy Customer Research
Last week I met with a potential B2B client who has been fortunate to have her product accepted by a major distributor in her category. Phone calls and new orders have begun to come in, which is very exciting! However when I asked her how most people were finding her, she did not know the answer. So I suggested the most basic, most inexpensive...

Entrepreneurs: Don’t Write That Survey!

I am an advisor to lots of start-ups. Lately I seem to be spending my time fielding enthusiastic questions from them about the kind of survey questions they would like to ask their customers. Here’s a typical recent email I received on this topic (names are changed to protect the innocent) from a marketing employee at one of these...

The Value Of Fresh Eyes

My friend Joe Hallinan has just come out with a new book Why We Make Mistakes, and he has a related Op-Ed piece in the New York Times this past Sunday. He talks about how fresh eyes bring really do see things that others more familiar with the material miss. In the Op-Ed piece he provides some great examples of how experts failed to see glaring...

10-Point Scale Fan Club

This blog post is guest authored by Dr. Anne Beall, President of Beall Research and Training. Anne is also the author of the succinct and very useful book Strategic Market Research. I asked Anne to write this post because I have found that it is sometimes challenging to convince clients that using a 10-point scale for their customer satisfaction...