Happy Sunday, Everyone!

I hope you're all having a good week! We’re at that point where January feels like it’s (finally, blissfully) nearing its end.

Last week's issue on the 5-Interaction Rule hit a nerve. I received more than a few emails back — most of them about the "fired" part. Turns out, telling people to fire their leadership team if they don’t talk to customers is... provocative. Who knew?

But buried in the outrage (and the enthusiastic agreement - the split was ~50/50) was a more practical question: "Okay, I'm convinced. But how do I actually do this? Who do I talk to? What do I ask them?"

All fair questions. I said your leadership team needs at least 5 real, human-to-human interactions with customers each month. What I didn't tell you is how to make those interactions useful and productive. The truth is that most customer research/engagement is (at best) poorly done and (at worst) downright horrific. Brands talk to the wrong people. They ask the wrong questions. They hear what they want to hear. And then wonder why the alleged "customer-informed" messaging falls flat.

This week, we’re going to fix that.

Consider this the tactical companion to last week's piece: the playbook for doing customer research that makes a difference.

The Three Audiences You Need to Understand

The single-most-common mistake brands make when they do customer research is only talking to people who already love them. It makes sense. Those people are easy to find, they're happy to talk and they’re (more than likely) going to say nice things. That creates the illusion of productivity and progress.

But (in the immortal words of Admiral Akbar) it's a trap! If you want research that drives growth, you need to talk to 3 specific audiences:

1. Customers Who Love You: Yes, talk to them, but with the right lens. You're not looking for validation. You're looking for language. How do they describe the problem you solve? What does your product/service do that’s different from others? What do they love about your offering? How do they use it in their day-to-day life? What words do they use to describe your product/service? What was the moment they decided to buy? What almost stopped them? Your loyal customers give you the raw material for messaging that resonates.

2. People Who Rejected You: This is where it gets uncomfortable… and where you’ll find some nuggets of insight. These are the people who were on your list, maybe even started the buying process, but never converted. Or, they purchased it once and never came back. What happened? What was the gap between what they needed and what you offered? This audience can give you tremendous insight into the gaps/areas of opportunity.

3. Your ICP Who Doesn't Know You Exist: This is the audience most brands completely ignore. These are people who fit your ideal customer profile but have never heard of you. They're not on your list. They've likely never visited your site. They have no preconceptions about your brand.

Reaching them requires more effort, but the tools exist. Apollo and ZoomInfo can help you build targeted lists based on firmographics, job titles, and intent signals. LinkedIn Sales Navigator lets you identify and reach out to specific personas. Even good old-fashioned LinkedIn DMs work - you'd be surprised how many people will agree to a 15-minute call if you're genuinely curious about their experience and not trying to sell them something.

What this group gives you is invaluable: an unbiased view of the market. What do they think about the problem you solve? What solutions are they currently using? What language do they use to describe their needs? What do they wish existed that doesn't? What brands/services/products are they most likely to use for the problems you solve? This group is essential for understanding your actual competitive landscape - not who you think you're competing against, but who your ideal prospects are considering. Often, those are not the same.

When you combine insights from all three audiences, you get a much fuller, more robust picture. The lovers tell you what's working. The rejectors tell you what's broken. The unaware tell you how the market thinks. Skip any one of these groups, and you're flying partially blind.

The single-best thing you can do to improve your customer research is talking to all three groups. But - even if you do that - you can still fall into a trap that undermines everything.

The Echo Chamber Trap

Let’s start with a cold, hard truth: if your customer research only makes you feel good, you're doing it wrong. This is the Echo Chamber Trap - and it applies to everything (not just customer research!). If all you hear is what you want to hear, you’re going to miss what actually matters.

I recently worked with an upstart brand that absolutely fell into this trap: they surveyed their best customers. They all (predictably) told the brand how amazing they were, how wonderful everything is (yadda, yadda). Leadership took that as validation and shared the results with investors, confident they were on the right track with both messaging + product - so nothing changed. Then, 6 months later, they were talking to me because growth stalled. They reached the chasm and didn’t know how to get over it - simply because the people that got them to their current level were not the same people they’d need to get to the next level and the product/service/messaging they’d built worked for their current level - not the next level.

The echo chamber is just as dangerous internally. Think about your last all-hands/full-team meeting. How much of it was spent discussing what's working versus what's broken? What percentage of time was spent on positive stories vs. negative stories (it’s not rhetorical - take notes next time!)? How comfortable is your team with presenting a report full of red flags/problems? How often do vendors - agencies, consultants, partners, providers - proactively tell you that something isn't working?

The answer for most organizations is: almost never.

Why?

Because talking about what's broken is uncomfortable. Nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news. Nobody wants to admit that the campaign they championed isn’t performing. Nobody wants to show the CEO a report that looks like failure. End result? Everyone defaults to highlighting the wins, minimizing the losses and hoping the problems resolve themselves. Spoiler alert: they don't.

The problem with the echo chamber - whether it's your customers, your team or your vendors - is that it optimizes for comfort, not growth. Your best customers can only tell you why they bought. Your team naturally emphasizes their successes. Your vendors have every incentive to keep you happy, not to challenge you.

Growth doesn't come from doing more of what's comfortable. Growth comes from accepting the uncomfortable conversations - the ones where people tell you what's missing, where prospects explain why they chose your competitor, where your team admits that a bet didn't pay off. A friend once told me, “Feedback is the gift that almost no one will accept.”

I've sat in on hundreds of customer interviews over the years. The ones that drove the most change were almost never the glowing testimonials. They were the calls where a prospect said, "Look, your product is fine, but here's why I went with [competitor] instead." They were the churned customers who finally explained the real reason they cancelled. They were the almost-buyers who revealed the one objection nobody on the team had thought to address.

When you do customer research right, you will hear things you don't want to hear, but you absolutely NEED to hear. Those are the nuggets of insight that will drive growth - but they’re buried in criticism, hesitation, failure, the "almost but not quite."

If everyone you talk to - customers, team members, partners - tells you you're doing great, you're either (a) only hearing from your fans or (b) not creating the conditions for honest feedback. Either way, you're missing the information you need most.

Which brings us to a critical question: once you've got the right people in the room, how do you actually get them to tell you the truth?

Asking the Right Questions (And Why "Why" Is the Wrong One)

The single biggest mistake I see in customer interviews is leading with "why."

Why did you buy? Why did you choose us? Why didn't you convert?

That’s often surprising for people to hear - after all, "Why" feels like the right question. It's direct. It’s open-ended. It gets to the crux of what you’re trying to understand. But "why" puts people on the defensive. It (unintentionally) forces the person to justify their behavior, which triggers rationalization. You don't get what they actually felt or experienced; you get a post-hoc story constructed to make sense of their decision.

There's a reason therapists don't lead with "why" - and the same psychology applies here.

Instead, lead with open-ended, non-judgmental questions that let people talk:

• Tell me about the last time you dealt with [problem].
• Walk me through how you ended up choosing [solution].
• What was going on in your business when you started looking for something like this?
• What did you try before this? What happened?
• What almost stopped you from moving forward?
• When you think about [problem], what's the most frustrating part?

These questions invite stories. And stories are where the gold is.

When people tell stories, they reveal details they would never think to mention in response to a direct question. They tell you about the moment of frustration that triggered their search. They mention the competitor they almost chose and why. They describe the internal politics that nearly killed the entire initiative. They use the exact language they use in their own heads to describe their problems.

That language - their words, not yours - is the raw material for messaging that resonates. When your ad copy sounds like something your prospect would say to a friend or colleague, it cuts through the noise. It feels real. Authentic. Instantly resonant. When it sounds like something a marketer wrote and a lawyer approved….it just doesn’t hit the same way.

The second key is understanding that every great interaction should involve the other person talking A LOT more than you. Most people will blab about whatever's on their mind if you give them permission. Your job isn't to extract specific answers; your job is to create space for them to talk, then actively listen (not just nod along) for the patterns. Sometimes the most valuable insight comes from a tangent you never would have thought to ask about directly.

Two more tactical notes:

Always ask what almost stopped them. This is the single most valuable question in customer research. The objections they overcame are the same objections your prospects are likely struggling with right now.

Embrace silence. When someone finishes answering, don't immediately jump to the next question. Wait a beat. Let the silence sit. More often than not, they'll fill it - and what comes out in that second wave is often more honest and unfiltered than the initial response.

Having great conversations is only half the battle. If those insights live in your head (or worse, disappear after the call), they're worthless. You need a system.

The Infrastructure for Doing This Well

Once you’ve committed to talking to all three audiences, avoiding the echo chamber and asking better questions, the final step is creating the infrastructure that makes this sustainable. One-off customer interviews are nice, but what you need is a system that is repeatable and scalable.

Let’s get to it.

1. Record Everything.

If you're on a call, record it. Every time. (With permission, obviously. Most people say yes if you ask. A simple "Do you mind if I record this so I can focus on the conversation instead of taking notes?" works 95% of the time.)

Recordings let you revisit conversations with fresh ears, catch things you missed in the moment and build a library of customer language you can mine for messaging. They're also invaluable for getting stakeholders bought in. There's a difference between telling your CEO "customers are frustrated with X" and playing them a 30-second clip of a current customer expressing that frustration in their own words.

Finally (and my favorite use case) is that almost all call recordings can be transcribed by AI - which turns them from “things no one is ever going to listen to again” into “searchable documents that we can reference at any time”.

2. Keep a Running Log

Create a simple document or spreadsheet: who you talked to, when, their contact details, their segment (lover/rejector/unaware), a link to the recording, a link to the transcript and key takeaways. This sounds basic, but almost no one does it.

6 months from now, when you're trying to remember what that one prospect said about your pricing, you'll thank yourself. A year from now, when you want to see how customer sentiment has evolved, you'll have the data. This log becomes institutional knowledge - which is particularly valuable when team members leave/transfer/get promoted.

Bonus point: having both the call logs + the recordings makes getting new hires up to speed on your customer research process so much easier - because not only can they listen to the calls, they can read the transcripts to better understand what questions to ask, how to push/prod, when to follow-up, etc.

3. Use AI to Synthesize

Here's where this goes from being extremely helpful to downright magical: take your transcripts and feed them to Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, etc. Ask it to summarize the key themes across conversations. Ask it to identify patterns in objections. Ask it to pull out the specific language customers use to describe their problems. Ask it to compare what lovers say vs. what rejectors say.

You can process dozens of hours of interviews in minutes and surface insights that would take weeks to find manually. This is one of the highest-leverage uses of AI in marketing right now, and almost nobody is doing it.

4. Conduct Surveys.

I LOVE a good survey - 5-8 questions, sent via email, preferably with an incentive to complete it. There are so many services out there that will allow you to send them to all three audiences (and even help you identify the unknown ICP one). You want a mix of qualitative and quantitative questions - and always end with a “would you be willing to share your feedback during a 15-minute phone conversation about [product/service/industry]?” – this is the easiest way to build a list of people from Audience #3.

5. Don't Ignore On-Site Feedback

Tools like Microsoft Clarity, Hotjar or simple on-site surveys give you a constant stream of qualitative data. What are people confused by? Where do they get stuck? What questions are they asking that your site doesn't answer? This isn't a replacement for direct conversations, but it's a valuable supplement, especially for understanding the gap between what you think is clear and what actually is.

I love a simple, 2-3 step pop-up sequence on most informational pages, triggered with exit intent (i.e. when someone’s behavior indicates they are likely to leave). Step #1: Did you find what you were looking for? Step #2: [if yes] -> great, what was most helpful? Anything you would have liked to see included? [if no] → we’re so sorry! What were you hoping to find? How could we make this better?

There’s nothing crazy about it - but it works like a charm.

6. Talk to Your Sales and CS Teams

Your account managers and salespeople should be having customer conversations every day. They know the objections. They know the questions. They know what points work and which ones fall flat. They hear the hesitation in prospects' voices. They know which competitors keep coming up and which ones are the walking dead.

Most marketing teams treat sales as a separate function when in reality, they're the richest source of customer intelligence in your organization. Buy them coffee. Ask them what they're hearing. Sit in on their calls when you can. Listen.

When you do this, you’ll notice two things: (1) a lot of what you hear is not what you thought you’d hear and (2) there’s a gap the size of the grand canyon between what your old customer research numbers said and what you’re hearing from these people.

When that (inevitably) happens, I’ve found Jeff Bezos’ advice to be right: when the data and the anecdotes disagree, trust the anecdotes. Reports might tell you what's happening. Only conversations can tell you why.

Collecting insights is only valuable if you translate them into something concrete - which means closing the loop.

7. Turning Insight into Growth

Everything I've outlined above is useless if it stays in a deck nobody reads. The point of customer research isn't to produce insights; it's to produce action: messaging that converts, positioning that differentiates, product improvements that matter to your ICP, content that resonates, ads that get noticed, angles that stop scrolls.

If your customer research doesn’t do that, you’re not doing it right.

Here's how to close the loop:

Build a Language Library. Every time you hear a customer describe their problem in a specific, vivid way, capture it. Verbatim. These phrases then become the raw material for your ad copy, your landing pages, your email content, etc. The best marketing doesn't invent language - it borrows the exact words customers use to describe their own experience.

Feed Insights Back to Creative. Your creative team (whether internal or agency) should have direct access to customer research. Not summaries. The actual recordings, the transcripts, the quotes. The more they hear the customer's voice, the better their work becomes.

Update Your Positioning. Customer research should directly inform how you position against competitors. What are the gaps your rejectors identified? What does the unaware audience think about existing solutions? Where is there an opening in the market that you can own? This should not be a one-off exercise, but rather be an ongoing input to your positioning. One of the biggest mistakes brands make is thinking positioning/messaging/differentiation is a fixed thing with a definitive solution - it’s not! Your competitors are constantly evolving both their product/service and their approach - so your response to that must evolve as well.

Test What You Learn. Take the language, the objections, the insights and test them everywhere. In ads. On landing pages. In emails. Use the organic-to-paid pipeline from Issue #150 to validate what resonates organically, then scale it with spend. Customer research gives you hypotheses. Testing gives you proof.

The Bottom Line

Last week’s issue focused on the truth that customer proximity is the foundation for success. This week, I've tried to show you what that looks like in practice.

Real customer research means:

1. Talking to all three audiences — lovers, rejectors, and the unaware
2. Escaping the echo chamber — internally, externally, and with your vendors
3. Asking questions that invite stories — not "why" questions that trigger rationalization
4. Building infrastructure — recordings, logs, AI synthesis, cross-functional input
5. Turning insights into action — language libraries, creative briefs, positioning updates, testing

This isn't glamorous work. It's not always fun. Some of the conversations will be awkward. Some of the feedback will hurt. You'll hear things about your product/service/brand that you simultaneously know (deep down, at places you don’t talk about at parties) are true, but you wish weren't.

That discomfort is the price of growth. The brands that win are the ones willing to pay it.

Here's your homework: Pick one person from each of the three audiences - a lover, a rejector, and someone in your ICP who doesn't know you. Schedule a conversation with each of them this week. Record the calls. Ask open-ended questions. Embrace the silence. See what you learn.

I promise it will be more valuable than any report you'll look at this month.

Until next week,

Cheers,

Sam

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