Using Voice of the Customer to Improve Your Sales Process

What is the common element in the following business
challenges?

• A $100 million dollar medical equipment company has no
  data to explain their growth, so they don’t know what to
  do to keep growing.
• An information products company can think of dozens of
  things to change on their website, but doesn’t know which
  ones will increase sales conversion.
• A scientific instrument company knows a great deal about
  their technologies, but has trouble knowing what will get
  traction with salespeople and customers.

The common element is a lack of knowledge: What would create
sufficient value to cause customers to buy more?

What would happen if you could get this kind of information
whenever you needed it?

Here is some good news: You can get this kind of information
and easily. In fact the people who have it are more than
willing to give it to you!

The people I’m talking about, of course, are your customers.
Most customers lament that their suppliers don’t seem to
care what they want. However, you can change that if you
simply use Voice of the Customer (VOC) techniques to learn
what your customers experience before, during, and after
they have been in the market for products and services like
yours.

Gather VOC on the Customer’s Journey

A recent client asked me to attend their industry’s biggest
tradeshow. They operated a massive booth, with salespeople
and customers streaming in from all corners of the world.
I asked my client to set up interviews with some of these

customers, where I was able to ask them questions like these:

• How do you first begin to realize you might have a
  problem serious enough to take action on (pertaining
  to my client’s products and services)?
• What did the problem look like at first?
• How were other people in your organization affected by
  this issue?
• At what point did you have to apply for funding approval?
  Why?
• What kind of information would have helped make that task
  easier, do you think?

The patterns that emerged from the answers to these and other
questions provided fabulous insight into their struggles to
solve their problems. This process is also known as the
“Customer’s Journey.”

Clarifying the stages these customers went through revealed
common patterns regarding how they had to gain support
within their organization, what they had to do to secure
funding, and what was most important to their product
evaluations.

Quotes from these customers enabled me to test these
patterns with my client’s salespeople, who almost uniformly
confirmed the findings. This agreement was profoundly
important to helping my client define a common sales
process. The stages of their Buyer’s Journey provided the
organizing principle for everything they did in marketing,
selling, and servicing. What’s more, it made those
activities and their results measurable, and the data began
revealing useful market insights almost immediately.

Using VOC to Help People Buy

It is interesting that salespeople often have a good sense
for what is going on, but no way to convey or leverage
that information to their own company. Most companies do
not use VOC techniques in this way, and thus ignore
strategically important sources of information.

In Chapter 4 of “Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way,”
I wrote about an information products company that needed
to increase sales conversion on its website. A VOC survey
provided statistically valid data about the kinds of
information customers wanted to know before they bought.
When that information was added by means of a “Frequently
Asked Questions” section, the conversion rate increased
by 94%!

Figuring out how to make selling easier is the same thing
as studying how to make it easier for customers to buy.
Who is responsible for doing this in your company? If
the answer is no one, you’ve just discovered a major
blind spot that could double your business growth.

VOC Improves Marketing by Revealing Value Propositions
The scientific instrument manufacturer realized that as
their company grew, product developers and marketers
had started to lose touch with their customers. After all,
it is much easier (and cheaper) to stay in the office
than to go in search of the unknown. Unfortunately for
them, VOC had taken on a narrow orientation toward
detailed product features. Further, it was often
initiated to justify decisions already made rather
than discover what customers really wanted.

One software product manager visited a customer and
observed that the customer had to click through a
complex repetitive sequence each time a sample was tested.
Customers had taken this for granted, and never ever
mentioned how nice it would be to automate the
sequence. Gradually, the product manager realized
that one of the customer’s goals wasn’t to test
the samples; it was to get home in time to attend his
kid’s soccer game!

VOC provides the answers to the types of questions you
ask. If you ask questions about a customer’s objectives,
strategies, and challenges, you can complete Customer
Value Maps based on what you learn. If you ask them
about the steps they go through trying to achieve their
goals and solve their problems, you’ll learn about
their Buyer’s Journey.

This is everything you need to devise ways of finding
prospects by attracting their attention, winning
customers by providing helpful information, services,
and products to solve their problems, and keeping
them by ensuring you have delivered the value they
wanted.

In other words, VOC is all you need to improve your
sales process and increase your sales.

Michael J. Webb

June 26, 2007