I used to be terrible at getting buy-in for customer research.
I remember walking into my downtown converted-loft office with a huge smile on my face. With the tenor of someone who was about to change the entire company’s growth trajectory, I’d boast:
"Hi! I'm Alli and we don't understand customers as well as we should! We should totally do customer research!"
Would you believe this wildly convincing and self-aware sales pitch didn’t work?!
For a while I grumbled and blamed everyone else for not seeing my brilliance.
"Their loss! Guess they just don't like making money."
But soon I started to see that grumbling didn't help me.
Instead of blaming my colleagues for not seeing the value of research, I decided to get really good at showing its value.
And since I made that shift, I have:
- Gotten buy-in for using JTBD in onboarding strategies that led to triple-digit increases in performance
- Coached over 50 people on how to set up their qualitative research repositories AND gotten other team members actually using the data stored inside
- Launched a 0-1 product in a highly regulated industry in the face of deep internal resistance from folks who said that these customers "preferred spreadsheets" and "would never use an app"
- Sourced and applied VOC data for projects on sales, product, marketing, customer success, and even engineering teams
- Learned ways of playing organizational politics that are nothing like the "manipulate and screw people over" games I used to fear
- Helped teams avert multi-million dollar mistakes in a single meeting
- Gotten not only buy-in, but enthusiasm and excitement and resources for just about every project I've worked on, even my most controversial ones
Now I help software product, marketing, sales, and engineering leaders like you mobilize customer insights across your org
I help people who sit in one of the seats I sat in. Who know there is a way to pull more data into your decision-making. Who know there is a way to get your team aligned around a vision. Who know that other teams do this, but somehow, yours can't.
Not yet, anyway.