When Steve Blank (The Four Steps to the Epiphany) took over SuperMac’s marketing department, he had to explain to his team that facts exist outside the building, opinions reside within — so get the hell outside the building:
My first day at work I found myself staring at a set of marketing faces, mostly holdovers from the previous version of the company that had gone belly up, some were bright and eager, some clearly hostile. “OK, let’s start with the basics, who does marketing think our customers are?” We went around the room and every one of them had an opinion. Unfortunately, all their answers were different.By now, nothing surprised me. This was a company that had sold 15,000 graphics boards and monitors to consumers. A large number of these customers had mailed back their registration cards (this was pre-Internet) with their names, phone numbers, job titles, etc. So I asked the fatal question, “Has anyone ever looked at the customer registration cards? Has anyone ever spoken to a customer?” Silence. Most just stared at me like the question was incomprehensible. The one or two product mangers who should have known better glanced down at their shoes. Then someone asked, “Well, who do you think our customers are?” Ah, a leading question. I said, “I don’t know. And if I tell you what I think we’ll just have one more uninformed opinion. But what we need right now is some facts. Does anyone know where the registration cards that the customers sent back are?”
Why did I ask these questions? As a company with a past history, the company had a massive advantage over a typical startup — it had customers. Normally in a startup you spend an inordinate amount of time and energy in Customer Discovery and Customer Validation. Yet here was a “restart” with over 15,000 customers who by putting their money on the table had personally validated the market. Now I was cognizant I might find a customers that hated the products or company. Or I might have found that the company was in a business that wasn’t profitable and no way to get profitable (which I had concluded was the case with their commodity disk drive business.) But this was an opportunity that needed to start with customer facts, and I was going to get them.
Twenty minutes later a cart rolls into my office with 10,000 unprocessed, unlooked at, and untouched registration cards. All with names, addresses, phone numbers, job titles; all wonderful data longing for human contact.
How often do you get phone calls from the VP of Marketing?
With the questionnaire written I turned and stared at the cart full of registration cards. They were in shoeboxes arranged by month and year they were received. I figured that the newer ones were more relevant than those sent in years ago. I took a deep breath and plunged in. I grabbed 500 of the most recent cards, which were from the last four months, and I started calling. Quite honestly since few customers ever get “hi, how are you doing calls” directly from an executive at the company who sold them a product, I didn’t know what to expect. Would anyone take my call, would I get hung up on, would they answer this long list of questions?Three hours and ten customers later I was beginning to feel like this would work. It had taken about two registration cards to get one customer on the line. And out of those, 9 out of 10 were happy to talk to me. Actually happy is the wrong word. Stunned was more like it. They had never had anyone from any company, let alone a computer company call and ask them anything. Then when I told them I was actually the VP of Marketing they were flabbergasted. They were happy to give me everything I asked for and more. And then to their surprise I offered them either a SuperMac coffee cup or T-shirt for their troubles. Now I had happy and surprised customers walking around with paid advertising for my company.
For the next three weeks I spent 8 hours a day calling customers and another 6 hours a day managing my new department. I’m sure the CEO thought I was crazy. But after three weeks and three hundred customer calls I was done. I had been to the mountaintop and had gotten the message.
He learned some pretty valuable information, including the fact that many customers valued performance over price — and customers never admit that they value anything over price.