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Lisa Shepherd

but usually a good portion of what you need to know is already
resident in your company.

One caveat—your team will know a lot about your existing
customers but much less about non-customers. They may
also know how your customers interact with your company
but not how they interact with competitors or with each other.
Don’t assume that what you learn from your internal sources
is the full story. You will still need to do research directly
among customers and non-customers to develop a marketing
strategy that can help you grow your business both within and
beyond your existing customer base.

Step Three—Conduct research

There are several methods you can use to gain and validate
information on customers and prospects:

• In-person, One-on-One Interviews are a great way
to gather in-depth insights, pain points, and issues in
particular industries. In person interviews are a great
way to build rapport and assess context of the answers
beyond the words, such as through body language.
However, this requires a substantial amount of time to
properly execute and, depending on your resources
and the location of your customers, this may not be a
realistic option.

• Telephone Interviews are cost effective and avoid
geographical constraints. The key with telephone
interviews is the quality of the interviewee. Though you
can easily speak to large volumes of people, you are
better to speak with fewer, expert interviewees to gain
deeper, more useful insights.

• Focus Groups can offer powerful insights. However,
logistics can make them difficult. One way to do focus
groups efficiently is to convene them around an industry

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© 2012 Lisa Shepherd