Initial customer discovery
Learning about your customer is an ongoing process. It starts at the beginning of an engagement and continues throughout. You can learn about customers from the customers themselves. However, you can also learn about your customers from outside sources, information that can prove helpful. If a company is featured in the headlines, it affects their business. If the headline is positive (Record Earnings!) or negative (Scandal!), it affects the culture and the people and, in turn, the business.
Initial discovery
When you first learn of a potential customer, many public sources are available for you to access to learn about the customer and perhaps gain insight into their motivation for seeking a software solution.
As you learn about the customer, start keeping track of stakeholders. A stakeholder might be directly named (such as an executive sponsor) or it could be an informal influencer (the tenured, front-line employee that everyone admires). These idiosyncrasies can make or break a project. A keen awareness will set you up for success.
Company public website
While it might seem obvious, you can learn a lot from a company's website. From a website, you can learn about a company's past and their vision for the future. Additionally, you can learn about a company's view of what they have to offer. A bank might mention how safe your money is in their hands, or a university might showcase student happiness and alumni success. These details should help guide you when determining how best to serve the needs of your customer.
The larger the company, the bigger the chances are that they have several lines of business. You might only be involved with a subset of a customer's larger organization. It is important to understand the needs of those with which you are directly engaged and the needs of the larger organization. Furthermore, you should determine how the department that you work with fits into the big picture, and whether you can streamline more than one department or line of business.
Publicly-traded companies will also have posted earnings reports, and the news outlets will have predictions and responses to these reports. These companies will also have named executives and boards of directors. Review these resources, look for patterns, and examine other key details to help build your knowledge of the organization.
Information that you see on websites can offer fast-track help, such as photos on an About page, which can help you quickly recognize faces at your first meeting with the customer. At a minimum, you should know the names and key details of the decision makers whom you are dealing with as well as key C-level executives. Also, on the About page, you could learn that you have a common background with a key stakeholder, such as having attended the same university. Commonalities help create familiarity.
Social media sites
Many organizations have social media presence. Organizations share their own messaging and publicly respond to others through social media. You can review and identify pain points and successes with these interactions. You can also find their fans and casual associates.
In addition to company-level social media, the key players of the organization will also have online details that you can glean and learn from. Some online details can help you discover the CEO's background or whether a company merger recently occurred. Sites such as LinkedIn are great resources for professional details.
News outlets
An outsider's perspective offers different insight. An analyst's view might show comparisons to competitors, offer speculation on market motivation, suggest future movements, and more. Additionally, when an organization is in the news, it should influence how you interact with them. For example, news stories that occur on the day of your pre-sales demo might change your narrative so that you either address or avoid a particular topic. This insight offers you a head start on the conversation and shows that you are interested in the world's view of the customer.
Learn from a request for proposal
A request for proposal (RFP) is often a fairly formal request to meet the defined solution. It can be written by the business or by IT. Ideally, both business and IT have a hand in developing the RFP, with influence from whomever is paying for the solution. You might see RFPs that focus on cost savings and some that focus on rich feature sets. Identifying and learning from these approaches is valuable in getting to know your (potential) customer.
Develop customer questions
From the insight that you've learned in this lesson, you can develop probing questions to help you meet the requirements and offer added business value beyond what is stated in an RFP document.
For example, after learning of a company's mission statement, you might ask the following question:
"This requirement says that you need a response time of 24 hours on support requests. If we could use AI to automate and decrease response times to better meet your mission statement's stated customer focus, would that be helpful?"
Upon seeing that 60 percent of the requirements in the RFP reference secure access, avoiding data breaches, and legal requirements of fiduciary responsibility, you might ask the following question:
"I've noticed how important data security and access is to your organization. Microsoft is committed to helping provide a secure cloud. Are you familiar with the Microsoft Trust Center?"
Reading more into the presented information when you are offering a solution to a customer will help make requirements gathering smoother and more valuable for you.
Exercise: Customer questions
Review the information about Woodgrove Bank, and then determine if certain details are missing that might be helpful in completing your task.
Draft at least five questions that you would ask the customer. Don't forget to ask Why?
Consider asking yourself the following questions during your customer research:
What is the public's perception of Woodgrove Bank?
What is the background of the project owners, stakeholders, and decision-makers?
Does the bank have legacy data that you need to be concerned with? How much?
What are the concerns about the location of data?