Bill Anderson
Bill helps technology companies improve their products, sales and marketing results.
Customers: Keep the Good, Fire the Bad
by Eva Skoglund & Bill Anderson
It’s time to stop trying to keep everyone happy. Ignore your bad customers and focus on understanding what your best-fit customers need so you can win more of them.
This article was co-authored with Bill Anderson (bill@marketr.services).
Conventional product management wisdom says you should look at the problems your customers face to define your roadmap. This is a good principle, but the question is: Does it matter which customers you talk to?
If you ask all your customers you will likely get a long list of caveats, weaknesses and feature requests that will point you in every direction. You will get a list of unfiltered opinions about your product and very little guidance on what is relevant to your business. Instead, you should choose to serve your best-fit customers.
The reason is simple: In an ideal world, you want to have only best-fit customers - the ones who see the value, the loyal customers, the happy referrals. Think of your best customer today, the one that loves you the most. Wouldn’t it be great if all your customers were like that? You want to adapt your product for them because you’re already ahead of the curve in satisfying the best-fit customers.
Now, you may ask: If they are happy customers will they have useful feedback? Will they have any problems with my product? Rest assured, all customers want some kind of improvement. You don’t need to worry, they will still have plenty of requests for you!
Your next question might be: Why shouldn’t I talk to unhappy customers? Mainly because unhappy customers, like best-fit customers, have some root cause that make them a bad fit for your product. It could be anything from their size, business model, and market to location, staff experience, and infrastructure.
You don’t want repeat business with such bad-fit customers. Think of it like this: If you compare your best customer (the one that loves your product the most) with your worst customer (the ones that always threatens to kick you out), which one would you like your next new customer to be like? The answer is obvious!
This is why it is a better strategy to learn from your best-fit customer. You want to find out why your solution is such a great fit with them. That kind of insight might help you find many more best-fit customers.
Customer Discovery
The customer discovery process is not just for startups. Mature companies can and should do it regularly to keep up with their customers’ changing needs. There’s a structure you should put around your customer discovery meetings to ensure you are not just hearing what you want to hear. For a deeper dive on how to engage customers this way, read this post.
When you’re talking to your best-fit customers, what are the sort of things you should be listening for? Here are a few ideas to prime your surveys:
Why does your product fit their needs so well? (Go deep on this question)
What do they use in the product? (it’s probably not every feature)
How does the product fit in their overall process?
What goes into the product, what comes out of it?
Who uses it, how does it help them do their job?
Where do the outputs go, and who uses those outputs?
How does the product add value to the customer’s business?
Feature Prioritization
Deeply understanding how and why your customer uses your product can help you identify the features you need to prioritize to keep these customers happy. Pay attention not just to what the good customer likes, but also the features they don’t like, don’t use, or don’t even notice.
If you’re like most companies, after a few years your products become accumulations of all the features anyone thought might be useful, or demanded you build. They are probably not all important now though, and keeping them in your product increases the technical load your team has to shoulder. Take this opportunity to discover features you might be able to remove without affecting your good customers.
Strategic Direction
This deep dive into your best-fit customers may reveal a new, better, strategic direction for your business. You may now be able to define a market segment where most of the prospect have similar needs to your best customers. Knowing how your best-fit customers use your product and what features they don’t use gives you the opportunity to redefine your product and market direction.
This is an opportunity to think about adjusting your company course to tackle a better market.
Qualification Criteria
Real insight into your customers will not only help you build the strategic direction for your product, it will also help you create an incredible tool for your sales force: qualification criteria. If you understand the conditions that make your product a great fit for one customer, you can identify other best-fit customers. Identifying the characteristics of customers where your product is a great fit is in fact one of the four important deliverables that Product people need to deliver to their Sales & Marketing teams, which your can read more about in this article.
Can you discover a clear pattern in the way the best-fit customers engage with your product? It’s possible the customer would describe the purpose of your product differently from what’s in your product pitch. Look for that pattern: it might be the basis for a new positioning statement that will help you win new customers. For a quick overview on positioning, see this article.
Act From A Position Of Strength
It’s time to stop trying to keep everyone happy. By that we mean it’s time to start making better strategic decisions for your company by focusing on how to make your products more successful. As product managers we often find ourselves stuck on a treadmill trying to keep all the complainers (sales reps, bad customers, good customers, industry analysts, board members, executives, and developers) satisfied with a stream of new features. It’s time to take responsibility for prioritizing these ideas based on where the company could sell more, better, faster, and to happier customers.
When finding our strategic product direction and road ahead, we want to act from a position of strength. Your best-fit customers (vs your bad-fit customers) can provide you with good insights and knowledge as to why they find your product valuable and how you can improve further. You want to learn from your best-fit customers so that you can build a strong, defensible business in a place of your choosing.
