Get Over Your Fear of Talking to Customers
Avoiding deviation errors by talking to customers early and often
If at some point you want to get off the road and enter the expanse of the wilderness, you’ll need to learn how to use a map and compass. When someone teaches you how to use these tools to plot out your journey from beginning to end, a good teacher is going to tell you about deviation errors and how to avoid it.
Deviation error is when, for a variety of reasons, you travel in the wrong direction. And I don’t necessarily mean you turned right when you should’ve turned left (although that would suck too). When you are navigating, setting off even a few feet in the wrong direction can have disastrous consequences.
Let’s consider the consequences of deviation error. Being off-direction by even one degree means you’ll be off-track by 100 feet at one mile out. Keep going until you hit ten miles and you’ll miss your destination by 1.7 miles – all from being off by a single degree.
Map and compass are a great analogy for entrepreneurship. The map lays out all of your assumptions about your journey from A to B. The hills to climb, the potential pitfalls, and places you think you could find water or food to refuel are there.
The compass is the customer. It’s your guide to knowing if you are staying on course. And as silly as it would be to start using a compass halfway through the hike, rather than the beginning, so too is starting your business by doing anything other than talking to customers.
The journey teaches you the truth of the terrain.
Why do so many entrepreneurs avoid talking to customers?
These fall into two buckets.
1. It’s hard to hear this thing you care about sucks. People will avoid hearing the truth at nearly all costs. They fall in love with their solution – some product or service – and have convinced themselves that if the world was full of rational, sane people, everyone would agree that their solution would be the greatest thing since sliced bread. They’d rather toil away behind the scenes, building their special thing, than do the work of talking to customers.
2. No idea of who to talk to you or what questions you should be asking. If you can’t get direct access to at least a handful of people in your market, then you should be focusing your immediate attention on solving that problem first. And even when founders or owners get their customers on the line, errors in the conversation are made, and those generate false signals. Everyone is well-meaning, but if you haven’t taken the time to figure out the right questions, you can get deviation errors.
So what can we do about it?
I wish there was some inoculation I could prescribe that would let you go out, talk to customers, and suffer no anxiety about it. The truth is the only way to get used to the water is to get into it.
Once you're in the mix, remind yourself how valuable this learning is to the future of your enterprise. How you're unlocking knowledge that your competition isn't aware of right now. The attitude of gratitude will support you through the times you feel your grit is beginning to slip.