EPISODE SUMMARY
Sameer discusses the science and the art of applying the tool of social listening to scale businesses with Matt Wolach, host of SaaS-Story in the Making Podcast. Sameer shed light on the subtle difference between social CRM and social listening while broadening on how both could be used to evaluate and act on insights gained from customers’ feedback.
PODCAST-AT-A-GLANCE
Podcast: SaaS-Story in the Making
Episode: How Listening to Your Customers Can Grow Your Company
Host: Matt Wolach, a B2B, SaaS Sales Coach, Entrepreneur, and Investor
Guest: Sameer Narkar, founder of Konnect Insights – a social listening and analytics tool.
TOP TIPS FROM THIS EPISODE
Customers’ Feedback is the Basis for an Ever-Growing Business
Sameer believes that working with customers’ feedback is of great importance to the growth of a company. Seeking feedback gives more ideas that could be worked on to build a better product. It also establishes a bond between businesses and their customers.
Sameer advocates an alignment between the ideas of the company and the ideas of the customers. Making changes based on customers’ feedback seals the perfect deal for business because, as Sameer notices, the more businesses do what customers want, the more value they add to themselves.
Listen, Evaluate, and Act on Insights
Business Insights are not stumbled upon by chance. Instead, they are gotten from deliberate data sourcing and gathering and careful evaluation. Sameer thinks that gathering customer data is Gold and he touts social CRM and social listening as the most important tools.
Social CRM entails listening to brand conversations over the web and social media and pulling data from them. Social Listening is more concerned about how a brand is perceived, how a brand is positioned, and the opinion of major influencers.
Conceptually, businesses can tap into Social CRM and Social Listening by inculcating into their core the science of looking for feedback and the art of paying attention to the perception of major players (the customers in this respect) about their products. As such, efforts made to improve their products would be made based on actionable insights.
Understand Your Customers First
While Sameer supports different kinds of research into product development, he still thinks that the most important information to focus and work on comes from the customers. Businesses must learn from customers before they launch into any product development effort.
Understanding customers help in crafting the ideal customer profile. A customer-based knowledge base positively affects the way companies develop products, it positively affects the quality of marketing and sales efforts, and it positively affects the way businesses pitch to customers.
Embrace Simplicity
Simplicity signals a special kind of genius. Sameer advises that businesses scale with a simple outlook. Not only would simplicity help them scale through and be relevant in different niches, but it would also help them fit into the world of different types of clients.
Simplicity is not an alibi for not having a perfect product-market fit. What Simplicity does in communication and sales and marketing is that it fits a product into the world of an array of clients seamlessly.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Customers’ Feedback is a Prefactor to Success
Sameer says that “feedback comes when you are constantly in touch with your customers.” “Constantly seeking feedback gives more ideas that could be worked on to build a better product.” Sameer adds that “you can do a lot of research, you can check out other products, but you only get to know what to build on with feedback from your customers.”
Sameer also says that “before you get into product development, learn from your customers first” because “the more we do what customers want, the more value we add to our product.”
Have a Clear Framework of Values
Sameer urges companies to be “very specific about the way they communicate to customers whether is on a website or when they reach out to them during demos or after-sales.” Sameer wants companies to “have a voice and a tone as well as a clear set of values and to reiterate these values over and over.”
“Once you have a clear framework of values, then communication has to be consistent.”
When You Are Starting, Invest in Understanding the Market
Sameer wants startups to anticipate having problems. Sameer asks startups to “learn from customers. Build something and take it to the market again and again. Failures are going to come and you should treat failure as a kind of feedback.”
“The fear of not getting back a customer you failed to impress earlier would be there but when you get a better product you can again reach out to that customer with a better product.”
TOP QUOTES
Sameer:
[3:15] “When your ideas and that of your clients align, only then should you decide what to do.”
[10:10] “Customers are willing to help you evolve as long as you are willing to help them out.”
[12:15] “You can do a lot of research, you can check out other products but you only get to know what to build on with feedback from your customers.”
[22:00] “Yes, sales and marketing are important but you will get more customers from the quality of feedback from existing customers.”
[22:24] “Going forward, word of mouth gets you results than other marketing efforts.”
LEARN MORE
To learn more about Sameer Narkar and Konnect Insights, visit: https://konnectinsights.com/
You can also find Sameer Narkar on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/sameernarkar/
For more about how host Matt Wolach helps software companies achieve maximum growth, visit https://mattwolach.com/.
As part of the founding team in his first SaaS product, Matt owned the sales & marketing processes. But he struggled to sell and gain traction for the company. It took years of learning and tweaking before Matt created The Perfect DEAL Process, an innovative yet easy to implement method for closing more software deals. To find out more, visit https://mattwolach.com/about-matt.
