Ever built exactly what your customers said they wanted, only to find nobody buys it? You’re not alone – most businesses misinterpret customer demand.
Understanding customer demand is critical to designing winning products and services. It’s also one of the most challenging parts of starting and running a business.
The common advice given is to “listen to your customers” – however this can be very misleading. Customers will tell you what they think they want, or what they think you want to hear. If you build new products or features based on this information, you’re on shaky ground.
What customers say they want
Customers lie to themselves and to you when they tell you what they want. This is not malicious – your customers may genuinely believe in what they’re asking for – however it is almost always misleading.
In our research, we listen for the journey a customer goes on between first realising that they have a problem, through learning about various solutions, until they ultimately choose their vendor, product or service to solve this problem.
Time and again I will hear stories where customers say they want one thing, only to end up buying something entirely different.
- The reason for this is that the customer doesn’t really know how to solve their own problem – they may not even have a great grasp of what “the problem” is at this stage
- As a result, they will ask for a range of features and pricing that might be useful – throwing their requirements as broadly as possible, to cover all bases
For example, one Chief Product Officer I interviewed was redesigning their mobile experience for a diverse set of customers (think Plumbers, Nurses, Truck Drivers, Lawyers, Doctors etc). He was clear that he wanted the “Voice of the Customer” to drive their revamp, but this is not what he ended up paying for.
What customers really want
As customers progress through their buying journey, they gain more knowledge about the types of solutions exist that solve their problem. They start to reject “solutions” that they do not believe will work, and they refine the selection set.
- Typically in the B2B space, this is when the long-list of vendors becomes a shortlist
They have begun to throw out the unrealistic expectations, and they may have learned enough about their own problem to realise some “solutions” wouldn’t be helpful, anyway.
As “the problem” comes into sharper focus, they will also begin to frame or adjust their budget to solve whatever challenge they’re facing:
- Sometimes this means getting more money – as they learn that this is a bigger problem than first thought
- We would dig into these stories to understand where this extra budget comes from – and what they chose NOT to do in order to get more funds to solve this problem
- Other times the budget shrinks or is stuck with whatever they have to spend this year – forcing the customer to make a decision tradeoff
What customers will actually pay for
Finally, we reach the decision point – the prospective customer opens their wallet and becomes a real, paying customer.
This is always one of the more important parts of our interview process – as it is at this point we learn what really matters:
- Which features/services did they give up in order to fit the budget?
- Why did they choose to remove the features they removed?
- Why did they buy the product at that point in time, rather than waiting for more money to get everything they “needed” later?
One thing is certain – the things that end up on the invoice for a purchased product are vastly different from the wish-list of features the customer had at the outset of their buying journey.
- When forced to make a decision in the real world, customers reveal their true preferences
How to use this to build better products and services
This insight tells us that we need to get out of the office and into the field – go and talk to real people that have purchased real products with real money.
- If you already have a product/service you sell – interview your existing customers and your competitor’s customers
- If you are about to launch a new product or service, work out what customers are paying for today to solve this problem (in B2B, this could even be hiring more staff to do things manually)
- In which case you need to interview those people and understand what they’re struggling with
The “Struggling Moment” is a challenge for your customers. Buying products and services (especially in a B2B context) is hard work. By understanding the choices your customers make, you can re-design your product, service, pricing model and delivery approach to give more people what they want.
Using techniques such as Jobs-to-be-Done interviews, you can uncover the real motivations driving purchases, beyond surface-level requests.
If you can solve your customers’ true struggles better than anyone else, then you’ll turn uncertain prospects into loyal buyers, and your competition won’t know how to respond.