To effectively drive revenue, companies need to know why customers buy – and don’t buy – their products. Fortunately, this information is readily available in the form of customers and prospects.

In my experience, many companies may gather some of this information, but few strategically seek it out, regularly solicit feedback, document, and analyze it. This is a project I’ve managed in the past as an employee, and find it is a task well-suited to an external consultant.

Initial Set-Up of Customer Interviews

I’ll work with you to determine what data you want to gather, and build a resulting interview questionnaire. I can then set this up in your Salesforce.com instance to enable capture of the information.

Customer Outreach

Ideally, on a monthly basis, we’ll review all closed deals – both won and lost – to generate an outreach list. I can check dates for tasks such as onboarding calls to time outreach appropriately. Additionally, I often confirm outreach with the sales person.

Customer Interviews

I speak with customers to discover and quantify vital information, such as the reasons your company wins and loses, and which content assets were helpful. Next, I enter this information in your sales force automation system.

Analysis

Reviewing the gathered information, I tally the data that can be quantified, and supplement with key qualitative information. This is generally presented as a PowerPoint in a meeting that leads to a great deal of discussion. Despite being 60 minutes in length or more, this quarterly review was regularly an exceptionally well-attended meeting!

Customer Content Generation

While the creation of testimonials and case studies doesn’t need to be part of this project, it often leads well into the generation of such content.