I used to be terrible at getting buy-in for customer research.
I remember walking into my downtown loft converted warehouse 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 after a while I started to see that grumbling didn't help me. And I decided to do something about it. I decided to figure out how to get good a getting research AND at getting other people to see its value.
And since I made that shift, I have:
- Get 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 get 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 led 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 and more like a game of "making friends and helping people"
- 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 even engineering leaders get the insights to make decisions and the buy-in to get them done
![image of logos Alli has worked with, including MURAL, Atlassian, Stunning, EnjoyHQ, Codecademy, Output, Userlist, TinySeed, and Autobooks.](/media/logobar.png)
How do you mobilize insights to drive strategy across an organization?
That's the guiding question for how I engage with leaders like you.
I help people who sit in one of the seats I sat in, knowing there is a way to pull more data into your decision-making, knowing there is a way to get your team aligned around a vision, knowing that other teams do this, but somehow, yours can't.
Not yet, anyway.
One way I can help you get started now: sign up for emails
I write about how to get buy-in for your customer insights strategy and email semi-regularly.
Click this link to sign up for emails