ALLI BLUM

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
image of logos Alli has worked with, including MURAL, Atlassian, Stunning, EnjoyHQ, Codecademy, Output, Userlist, TinySeed, and Autobooks.

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.