Susan Tyson is a senior fractional marketing advisor for small B2B businesses. I liked her recent post on LinkedIn about how small business owners hesitate to reach out to the people who could give them the best feedback on what they are doing well and what could be improved – their clients!
As small business owners, we need this information, but we might feel uncomfortable asking our clients directly, or we might be scared of what our clients might say. Instead, we make changes we think our clients want, but this is simply guess work, and perhaps a waste of time.
Tyson recommends you have an independent third party reach out to a representative sample of your clients and ask them five simple questions. Having a third party conduct the interviews makes them less awkward for you and your clients, and the information you receive will likely be more honest. (You can scroll through Tyson’s full post below.}
By the way, Tyson’s book, Marketing Without The Nonsense: A No-Fluff Guide for Owners of Small Business Who Want To Get It Right, is excellent, and if you want some no-nonsense marketing advice, I highly recommend you read it.
Coincidentally, Lyndsey Maddox, CEO of Digital Third Coast, posted something on LinkedIn here the same day. This is another way you could approach getting feedback – without having to ask clients directly. As part of her team’s offsite meeting, Maddox created a panel that would act as a proxy for actual clients.
Maddox wrote, “We had a dream of creating a panel of our client persona (without being our actual clients) so we could learn more about what it’s like on the other side of the table. I am so grateful to all those who helped connect us to Allison Dancy, Armando Diaz, Jamey Heinze, and Susanne Koch who taught us so much (and made us laugh so hard!). Thank you so much for answering our questions with candor and valuable insights!!”
It sounds like it was not only valuable, but also a lot of fun.
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
