Ask Clients Or Prospects What They Want

They came. They saw. They left.

You might think you know what your customers and prospects want. So many companies and firms operate under assumptions that have worked for them in the past. If you want to change something, have you asked your customers about it? I am not talking about big changes like adding or deleting services, I am talking about things like updating your website. Your clients can tell you where to direct your focus so you do not have to fix everything. It’s a lesson we at Industrial Brand have learned. We want everything to be perfect, but maybe perfection isn’t what our clients expect.

Right now, go look at your website. In about ten seconds, you can probably think of five small things you’d like the site to do better— whether you want it to load faster, sort product listings a certain way, maybe even you think the logo should be tweaked. But what do the people who come to your site really care about? Maybe all those things are going to get done, but maybe they aren’t the right things to focus on. If you’ve got a limited amount of resources to manage your site, as most of us do, you can’t do everything. You have to make choices. Instead of making choices with your gut based on what you see and what annoys you, ask your audience. This is precisely why focus groups and surveys exist.

To be clear, you are not your audience. It’s not that you can’t understand what your audience wants, it’s the fact that you are a content expert but your audience is not. For starters, you have too much knowledge, and believe it or not, this skews your thinking. You (probably) know where every button is, where every button leads, what every obscurely-named tool is designed to do and who should use it. And that’s the problem: your audience doesn’t have the same knowledge. Many of our clients have never, or rarely, survey their customers. We’ve even converted this task into revenue for our clients. When architects or engineers realize how valuable polling can be, clients become impressed by their initiative and end up awarding them projects. There are plenty of cheap (even free) ways to collect simple information on what your users want. Try 4qsurvey or Survey Monkey. We use a post-project survey for our clients in Google Drive, and we compile all kinds of feedback. Then we take that feedback and prioritize.

If you want more information about surveying (both pre and post-project) and the best way to find out what you need to change, call us. This is what we do.