As an entrepreneur, I've canvassed both enterprises as well as consumers on whether they will adopt the (supposedly) hot new product I'm pitching. And I've learnt that although it pays to listen to your customers, it pays even more to be skeptical when listening.
Most people have a hard time saying unkind things to passionate entrepreneurs who are clearly eager to hear words of approval. Most people also won't lose any sleep over a company working night and day - and spending millions of dollars of others people's money - building a product that the customer might, just might, use a few times a year. And most people are good at telling you all about the pressing need they have for your product right now, glossing over the fact that budget cuts, or changes in corporate strategy, or simply the march of time, will render your product irrelevant. Oh, and they forget to mention that the product you intend to release in 5 years could well be useful to them, but your Release 1.0 won't even make it to a trial.
One of the products I've pitched could be loosely defined as ERP for IT: software to manage the internal processes of IT departments. The first meeting with the IT Director or CIO always went well. "Yes, we have chaos in our department, no, we can't track where we are investing our resources, the CEO keeps bugging me to correlate expenditures to business outcomes", etc., etc. We'd go away elated, hurriedly jotting down the 10 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that the CIO wanted our solution to generate. The next meeting would inevitably be anticlimactic. Apparently the KPIs we'd heard about earlier were all wrong, the real issue the CIO had was poor integration between storage resource management software and server monitoring tools that caused downtime of their Oracle Database last weekend, and why weren't we focusing on that problem, eh?
We soon realized that we were pitching at a very high level, and it was easy for people to get excited about that vision. But until we refined our product to a specific solution that the customer could implement today, their feedback was meaningless and misleading. And however enthusiastic the first response, we had to be convinced that this need would exist for a while and wasn't just a band-aid for last weekend's downtime. Specificity wasn't enough, either - we had to be certain that we could get a decent price for what we were offering. Always, always ask how much the customer will pay for what you can sell them in the first year. And if that isn't an exciting figure, better get back to the drawing board and figure out rapid product extensions.
Skepticism works for consumer companies too. During early concept testing of Riya , we started out pitching a generic photo management solution with cool AI tech. People were intrigued, but pretty soon we could tell that the smiles were forced, the enthusiasm often feigned, and we weren't striking the emotional chord that made people sit up, take notice, and queue up to join the invite-only alpha (as they're doing now). Further refinement led us to a fact that is obvious in hindsight - most consumer pictures are of people, and consumers have an instinctive connection to the people in their pictures. The broad concept of photo management tested poorly; the specific application of recognizing people in pictures tested very well. Of course, Riya has already broadened its technology beyond recognizing people, but we had to find that one thing to get the first "Wow" from the audience.
Please, please, don't accept consumer feedback at face value just because it validates your beliefs. Feedback is most valuable precisely when it makes you slap yourself upside the head and ask "Duh, what was I thinking?" This is particularly applicable to online surveys where you can't gauge the body language of the respondent. Just because 65% of a few hundreds respondents said they would "probably ask grandma to download a 20MB client to share videos" doesn't mean that grandma's actually going to download that client. Or that grandma will even hear about that client! Yes, your client could have more features than MacOS X ... but this response doesn't pass the sniff test of rational consumer behavior. And consumers are rational; they will rarely go to a lot of trouble for just a little more functionality, when quick and simple meets their needs almost as well.. Enterprises didn't use to be rational, but as the deflating stock price of shelfware (oops, I mean software) vendor Siebel showed, enterprises are becoming rational too.
Listening to customers is all about nuances. So listen softly but carry a big hearing aid.
