You want me to start marketing your company today. Here is what I would do:
4. Create a list we can interview that makes up your buyer, present, past and NEVER. Oh, yes, interview them.
This is normally a huge stumbling block. People time and time again want to build their marketing strategies and tactics within their own four walls. Marketing is about customer communication. So if you’re going to build a plan to do that, you must start at the very beginning, communicating with them. And it is important to get a complete mix, including the ones that don’t buy.
It’s simply not about you, your customer does not care about you and many of the points you’re trying to get across in your present marketing material. He simply cares about who demonstrates best how they can make him more money or make his life easier.
Interviewing people outside the company is scary to many. Typically, companies will agree to a survey of some type. But to leave an outside organization call and communicate with their customers is seldom acceptable. But I would encourage someone other in the organization to talk to these people rather than someone they communicated with them during the sales process. People will continue thinking that it is sales tactic or a type of sales trying to solicit information from them and will answer accordingly. It either takes an independent firm or someone that can assure them that it’s got nothing to do with sales or the judgment of an individual. It has everything to do with the system.