The Importance Of Customer Discovery In A Crisis

A few weeks ago, I wrote about some best practices on how sales organizations can keep their revenue machines running through the COVID pandemic.

One thing I didn't spend enough time on in that post was the importance of understanding how things have changed for your existing customers. Your customers were living in a different world when they purchased your product. At the time, your product was likely solving a top 3 problem for your buyer. With COVID, things may have changed. Your product might be significantly more valuable now than it was prior to COVID — or significantly less valuable. Either way, you need to find out quickly.

Most companies are going to be cutting expenses, and you must understand whether or not your product is on the shortlist of things to cut. Reversing that reality may require hard pivots, so you need to know now.

Here are some key questions to ask your customers as you have conversations or complete account reviews:

1/ How has COVID impacted you? How has it impacted your customers?

2/ How have your top 3 or 4 priorities changed due to COVID?

3/ What kinds of products are you buying now (if any)? What kinds of products are you cutting?

4/ Are you cutting staff? Will the users that historically have used our product change?

5/ Before COVID hit, our product was addressing a top 3 priority for you. Is that still true?

6/ Is our product more or less important to you than it was prior to COVID? Do you expect to use it more? Less? Why?

7/ Are you using our product differently now than you did prior to COVID? How?

8/ What parts of our product are more useful to you now? Less useful?

Push your customers to give you hard answers to these questions — even if you don’t want to hear them. And make it easy. Send simple surveys. Quickly run through these questions at the beginning or end of calls or Zooms.

Finally, it’s worth noting that commercial teams tend to be extremely optimistic. This project requires intense pessimism and a search for the real truth. This is not the time to sugarcoat what's happening in your market. Get to the truth as quickly as possible. If needed, reset expectations, find ways to repackage your solution around new problems, or (in rare cases) rebuild your solution to solve the emerging problems your customers are facing in this new world.