How to Create a Survey that Sells

I don’t suppose that I should share this with the blogosphere, but what the hell.  I’m lazy.  That’s the quick and dirty way of saying that I just don’t understand why so many of us, spend so much valuable time trying to imagine what’s important to our customers when they are buying what we’re selling, instead of just asking them.   If you ask, they will tell.  If you listen – you will sell. (just keep repeating that to yourself)

Does this sound like something you’ve done?

About 12 years ago, I was sitting in one of these meetings.  Bored.  We were brainstorming about some kind of new product or something.  What features customers would like, what the benefits of those features were.  There were disagreements that took us off track.  About 2 hours into this.  I start calculating how much money we were wasting in this meeting.  Let’s see. 10 middle managers, a couple of execs, we’re already 2 hours in and we have about 2 hours more to go.  That’s 4 hours times 12 people at about $100 per hour – not counting benefits.  YIKES!  For that amount of money, we could have actually known instead of guessing.

Don’t Try This at Home

While it’s important to be close to your customer and talk to them and understand their needs – doing your own survey is not the time and place for that.  You already pay people for that — they’re called sales people.  So if you’re not happy with the info you’re getting from them — that’s another issue.

There’s a reason why doctors don’t operate on their own family — they are too emotionally invested.  They have someone else do it.  You should treat your survey the same way.  Have a trained professional do it.

Before you Create a Survey – Have Some Conversations – And Sell in the Process

It’s the whole garbage in garbage out thing.  Don’t just throw questions into a survey.  You’ll actually get answers.  The only problem with that is — were they the right questions?

Run in-depth-interviews (that’s the fancy term for talk to some people).  Create a simple discussion outline using mostly open-ended questions.  I like to start with something like

• "Tell me about your relationship with company X"  I also like to use this one
• "What’s important to you when you’re buying "offering Y?"
• "What triggered you to call company X?"
• "What were you most afraid of when you started working with this company?"

See how those work?  They engage the person to really think about the quality of their experience, these questions get them to focus on the things that are important.

This is not supposed to be some secret branding survey.  This is an open conversation between your customer and this third party.  There’s no rule that says that you can’t ask the person what products they are using and for what reason.  There’s no reason you can’t suggest that the customer call their rep to solve a new problem.  So do it.

Test Your Results – Before You Get Them

This is so obvious, it’s crazy.  After you’ve pulled together your web survey – you’re going to test it.  Run through the questions, hand it over to some other people to take as a test.  Tell them to answer the questions the way they think the customers will.  OK – now you have some data.  Print of a report and pretend that these are really the results.  What will you do?  For example if one of your questions was "Please rate your overall experience" and the results were 3.2 out of a 10 point scale.  What will your team do?  If your answer is get into a brainstorm meeting for 4 hours – please don’t.  It’s a bad question.  Get another one.  If you got a rating of 3.2 out of 10 on "timely answering of the phone" – well then, you know exactly what to do.  Measure how long it takes to answer the phone and cut that number down to nothing.  Get a new phone system, hire an additional person to answer the phone.

See how being lazy can actually be profitable?