I thought I knew custom installers. After all I was one. But a sample of one (me) is not the basis for really understanding custom installers—or anything else for that matter.
Let’s face it: we are all guilty of marketing to ourselves sometimes. We sell the way we want to be sold, and we choose products for our customers the way we would for ourselves.
Want to build a great company? Stop marketing to yourself. Be an expert at reading the tea leaves of what your customers really want. In other words, talk to your customers and (wait for it…) LISTEN.
It's easy for me to take the high ground here because you have given SnapAV a huge leg up. You’ve made it easy for us to listen. You have responded to surveys at outstanding rates, and taken the time to write thoughtful responses to a LOT of questions. Many times the responses were not what we expected (even though we have more ex-installers here than I can count, we can’t always anticipate your answers).
Please know that I have read every word, as has our entire management team and all of our Product Category Managers. These surveys are being put to very good use. In fact, here’s a quick update on some of the things we have in the works based on your responses:
*Disclaimer: Our sales folks don’t know a lot of details on these products yet, as we stay focused on selling what we have on the web site :^).
And the list goes on. I know when you take a survey we send you, many of you wonder if we’re really using the information you spend your valuable time sharing with us. We are. And I’m pretty sure that we will “get it right” because we follow your instructions. For those of you who have taken the time to do this I offer you my utmost gratitude.
I’d like to say we were smart enough to do this from day 1. But we didn’t always have the feedback so “dialed-in”. In fact, many of the big mistakes we made in the past were because we were busy marketing to ourselves and we didn’t ask your opinion. Never again.
Back to your business…how deeply are you listening to your customers? I know that you sold them and you might have handed off the remote at the end of the job, but how much feedback do you get on what they liked or disliked about the process? Do they like the system enough to go out of their way to tell a friend? If you could get detailed survey responses like we do then you would absolutely know. But it is harder to get consumers to fill out surveys than it is to get custom installers to share opinions that they want to be heard.
Try this instead - go out on service calls and ask the customer:
“What would you change about the experience with our company? About our products? What would you not change (company and products)?” Get them talking. Do this often, and you’ll notice trends. Learn the art of asking open-ended questions and listening carefully. Once you are dialed into this feedback, then you’ll have the info you need to market to someone other than yourself.
Go SnapAV
Jay Faison is CEO of SnapAV, a company he founded in 2005. SnapAV engineers, manufactures and distributes more than 900 audio-video related products to businesses across North America and Latin America