Your Customers Aren't Giving Honest Feedback - with Yael Morris, Founder of Decode Insights
Welcome to Coffee with Curtis, your home for quality business conversation. Welcome to another episode of Coffee with Curtis. We're back with a new season. And to kick off the new season, we have Yael Morris joining us, who is the founder of Decode Insights. Yael is a real expert in asking questions, and she's on the other side of the question answer focus today.
Robert Curtis:But her whole work is centered around understanding customer insights so that you can sell more, reduce churn, and build better companies. So, Yael, great to have you on the podcast.
Yael Morris:And thanks for having me, Rob.
Robert Curtis:Well, it's it's gonna be an interesting conversation because I know that you, at heart, love asking questions. And, why don't you kick off and just give the audience a bit of a sense of who you are, what's the backstory, and what does Decode Insights actually do?
Yael Morris:So my, I guess, career or, like, the the beginning of this question asking, understand the customer part of my journey started when I was working in sales for a CPG company in Canada before COVID started and then COVID hit. We were in the most competitive category and granola bars and we had a big sales problem. We were getting tons of projections into getting into retailers and they were saying, you know, we've tried this product. It won't move. Stop trying to get us trying to get in here.
Yael Morris:And I basically went to the founders and I said, like, no one wants our product. There's something wrong. We also did have some customers who were buying, but we needed to understand why were they buying and why were they just not selling in certain places. So I said to the team, let's stop selling. Let's stop trying to push this product into stores and let's understand why the ones who are buying, why are they buying?
Yael Morris:And the ones who are not, what are they looking for and what are the gaps in the market where this product actually brings a solution? So I had interviewed tons of retailers, grocery buyers and end consumers. And after about a month's worth of just digging and probing and having conversations, I came up with these insights. And the insights led to changes into price, product formula, packaging, messaging, positioning, everything. I had left the company to build a marketing agency.
Yael Morris:But when I had followed up, you know, about a year later, I asked, you know, how are things going? And they had completely relaunched with the product and product was flying off of Amazon. Their sales were record high, higher than they've ever expected. When I was building a marketing agency, the first service offering we were providing was website development. And website development, brand strategy, they all kind of work together.
Yael Morris:And our thought process was if we're going to be building you a website, it's not for you. It's actually for your customer. And so in order to build something that's effective, we need to understand who your customer is and what motivates them to buy. So we decided to interview our clients' customers to understand how do they describe the value? How do they describe their problem?
Yael Morris:How do they describe their perception of this business? We would deliver these websites and we would go to our customers with these insights about why their customers buy and don't buy and some recommendations, you know, problems the customers are facing. And it turns out that our clients would get you know, they would they would be surprised about what their clients are hearing and their their perception of their value proposition, and they would make changes to their business.
Robert Curtis:I think what you're describing is so common because we all build these, like, sort of ivory towers of what we think our businesses should look like based on our own passions and, what we think the product should be. So I guess what you're you're describing is is actually pretty common because as a user of, obviously, many, many websites and businesses, we all feel that, oh, they don't really get me thing. And, actually, what you're talking about is going under the the radar and actually having conversations with customers directly to see what are their, you know, real pains, gains, and jobs to be done when it comes to, I guess, b two b, but you're talking also from b two c angle as well. So how do how has that manifested into what you do today? What is decode?
Robert Curtis:What do you do specifically? If you you've got an elevator pitch moment here, Yael.
Yael Morris:Okay. So I work with marketing and sales teams to get specific clarity on exactly why their current customers buy from them and why lost customers don't. And through one to one third party in-depth dialogues with their customers, I provide these insights into their pains and desired outcomes.
Robert Curtis:For me, that sounds a lot like what I used to do as a VP sales. So we'd have these these, you know, internal meetings where we'd look through the pipeline, and we'd look at all of those deals that had either won or lost and actually the reasons why they progressed, what was the core motivation behind the purchase, or often, obviously, looking heavily at the loss and actually understanding, was it budget, was it timing, was it people moved on? That process often can be really laborious. And, also, it sounds like wrong because the salesperson is typically putting something in the CRM to tick off that box to say, yeah. I've given a reason as to why this deal lost.
Robert Curtis:And, actually, what you're saying is there's something deeper that we're not really getting out of the customer. Like, what what is your conversations bringing to the table that we don't know already?
Yael Morris:Oftentimes in those sales conversations, the customer is under like, they're aware of the fact that you as a salesperson have stake in the business. And you might be trying to sell them something because you are. Surprise. Surprise. And they are not going to be a % vulnerable with you because they don't want to share the full truth about why they didn't buy.
Yael Morris:They're being put on the spot. And secondly, as a salesperson, you're trying to, you know, you're not gonna necessarily dig deeper for the purpose of seeking to understand because that's not your I mean, that's your job. But it's not really your job. Your job is to figure out how do you just get a sale, not try and decode the real underlying reasons and peel off the layers behind what's truly motivating a person to purchase. It is uncomfortable to ask the questions that focus on the pain, the trigger points.
Yael Morris:It's an uncomfortable conversation to be had. And most salespeople who are, you know, doing this kind of win loss analysis internally aren't going to be asking those questions.
Robert Curtis:So here's a controversial one for you. I've written these myself. I've done workshops on these myself. And this whole internal playbook of how to handle objections when a customer doesn't wanna purchase, are you saying that that actually is a completely flawed process? And the reasons that we perhaps think that a customer is objecting to moving forward are not the real ones that they're saying to us.
Yael Morris:Yeah. Oftentimes, you hear an objection like price. One. Most common objection. What that really means, if you read in between the lines, I'm not seeing value or I don't wanna share with you what I really think.
Robert Curtis:Why? Why do people hold back? What's the human interaction here that we're not getting from a psychological perspective? Is it that people don't want to have conflict? And therefore, when they're coming back with information to the salesperson, they're holding back?
Yael Morris:It's a it's a self preservation mechanism. People don't wanna expose their full vulnerabilities to somebody who's truthfully trying to, you know, trying to sell to them. And so it's a salesperson's job to first make it clear that they're not actually trying to sell. They're trying to just understand and help and see if there is a, you know, market fit and an opportunity for the customer to then feel comfortable and open up to you. That's what really good salespeople do.
Yael Morris:The customer feels like they're just trying to be understood and they're being truthfully heard and listened to. But most times, that's not what's happening in the sales sales discussion. So they kind of resort they they kind of get into the zone of resistance where they're not out of fear and discomfort. They're not going to share their full truths.
Robert Curtis:I agree with you. I think also what I am seeing more and more in the marketplace is that and and and I say this as a sort of former salesperson or a recovering salesperson is that sales is actually just bad marketing. And what I mean by that is that if you have a prospect in your pipeline who requires cajoling, convincing, and a process that the salesperson is having to drive them through, to take them through objections and negotiate with them, then actually what happened at the marketing stage was really a bad job. The marketing didn't do their job properly of educating, informing, and driving the right type of information to the buyer. And I say that because I think generationally, people have changed.
Robert Curtis:Probably my parents' generation, even my generation, we want to speak to someone quickly to talk about what their product is, how it might help me. But, actually, the the younger generation don't wanna have those phone conversations or Zoom conversations as much. They wanna do their research first. They wanna go and learn all about the company and the product. They wanna see reviews.
Robert Curtis:They wanna go and watch YouTube videos on them. And, actually, they want to get further down the pipeline before they even actually enter the the the company's internal pipeline. So I think there's a there's a there's a marketing job that needs to be done to really educate properly before people come into the sales pipeline.
Yael Morris:Why do you think that's the case for this younger generation or the current generation?
Robert Curtis:Because we all now grow up on these. We're addicted to video and social media and, the rest of it. And, you know, we're the same. It's it's no longer generational. I think we're all addicted.
Robert Curtis:And, actually, we don't want to have those human interactions where we feel fear. There is a, probably a psychological process going through the the buyer when they're already in that conversation with the salesperson. Mhmm. But they're they're naturally guarded. They're like you said, they're naturally feeling this person might not have my best interests at all.
Robert Curtis:All they wanna do is sell the product to me. Right. Right. But if you warmed them up completely in the marketing process, then by the time they hit the sales pipeline, you shouldn't having to be convincing somebody to purchase. It's much more about how we're gonna do business together, not whether we should.
Robert Curtis:So so in that process that you take a company through, and I feel like we're jumping ahead here, but I'm gonna ask it anyway because we're in a flow. Presumably, you're hitting a lot of key departments that take Agusta on a journey from marketing to sales to customer success. And what's the what's the, I I guess, journey that you want to take a customer through in getting those customer insights? Is it always customers that have purchased? Is it customers that are interested?
Robert Curtis:People that are currently in the pipeline? What's the journey of a a, you know, a decode architecture of taking companies through this process?
Yael Morris:So it it depends on the use case. Say there is a churn problem. The first questions that I'm trying to understand is, you know, like, really, like, why do they churn? Was it because there was an unmet expectation? Was it because they found a better alternative?
Yael Morris:Was it because their preferences and needs changed? So when I speak to those customers, I try to understand what were their initial, you know, pain points and reasons for purchase. What were they really looking for? And then what was the value they were getting or not getting? And then what were their unmet expectations?
Yael Morris:And why did they leave? I try to go through those different stages of before the purchase, during and after. To understand an existing customer, it's pretty much the same. It's to understand, for marketing and sales teams to understand, you know, why are our customers actually buying? What is our true value proposition?
Yael Morris:I try to understand what was the pain that they were experiencing before and what is the transformative outcome that this business has provided to this customer? What is the outcome? What is the impact? What is the change in their life or their business, in their operation as a result of now using this product or service?
Robert Curtis:So what are the what are I guess, if you were to bullet point them, what are the key problems that typical business owners, leadership come to you with when they're thinking about engaging with you?
Yael Morris:Okay. So one is churn. Customers are leaving, and we don't actually know why. Or there is customer, you know, dissatisfaction. And we're not clear on the true causes of this dissatisfaction because people often what they say is not always what they mean.
Yael Morris:So, people are saying these things, but we're not really sure what this actually means and how this is directly applicable to our product. Messaging. What is the messaging that drives urgency? In a sales call, in our marketing, what actually drives urgency? What drives urgency is understanding a person's pain.
Yael Morris:Why are they in pain? What is their desired outcome? So the clearer you can get and the more precise you can get on what those pains are, the more you can drive urgency. Other questions are, you know, how do we grow our sales? How do we make our marketing work?
Yael Morris:How do we increase our conversion rate and close rate? How do we get our, you know, our social our content to get more engagement?
Robert Curtis:I mean, it all sounds so obvious that you should be speaking to your customers or prospective customers, to really improve your business. And I guess in the old days, we call this focus groups or market research. Why is there a hesitancy, or is it just not top of the agenda for leadership teams to be doing this as a almost basic one zero one in how they're going to market? The it's interesting to me that they're not doing this.
Yael Morris:I think some teams are doing it, but they're doing it in a way to check the box.
Robert Curtis:What, like sort of NLP scores or surveys or Yeah.
Yael Morris:We wanna check our NPS scores. We're gonna send it to a survey. We're gonna speak to a few people. Product marketing managers, this is really a big part of their job, but most people don't really have time for it. So they kind of just they it's being half assed.
Yael Morris:Think a lot of teams are like, we know it's marketing teams. We know it's important to speak to customers. So we'll listen to Gong recordings as opposed to, you know, speaking to our customers ourselves and taking that initiative upon ourselves. I I think the major reason behind why they don't is I think it's such an obvious activity. You're talking about the customer all the time and what you're doing to engage with the customer where it's just of complete oversight.
Robert Curtis:But is that because they're scared of what they're gonna say? Is there a fear of bad news, or they have assumptions that they don't want to be knocked down and we know better than the customer?
Yael Morris:So, yeah, I was just going to say that. I think a lot of people assume they know what's really going on in the customer's mind. And people just rely love to rely heavily on assumptions because it's easier. It's easier to just sit in your own assumptions as opposed to going out to the customer and then having that conversation. I think a lot of people also, if they were going to get on that call, people have said to me, what do I Like, I don't know what to say in those discussions.
Yael Morris:Like, what questions do I even ask? How do I focus the discussion? It's probably gonna be biased. I wouldn't even really know where to start. I think that's an it's uncomfortable to just start directly, you know, confront a customer, the real people who are, you know, have money in their pockets you're putting in their credit card.
Yael Morris:It's easier to just, you know, sit behind your wall and just put out marketing content. So, think that it's easier. And I think also just finding out the truth. People don't want to be proven wrong and be told, actually, this is what the customer thinks. I'm wrong.
Yael Morris:I think that's scary for a lot of people who are super confident in what they say and believe. People are always saying, oh, no, this messaging is gonna be better. I know what's gonna resonate, you know? So then being told and finding out this is actually not true, it can be uncomfortable.
Robert Curtis:Feel like we need a movie moment of, you know, you can handle the truth.
Yael Morris:Exactly. Exactly.
Robert Curtis:But do you think there's something inherent about the company not being able to have these types of conversations with customers directly? Do you think what you do could be done internally?
Yael Morris:Yes. Because I've done it internally.
Robert Curtis:Fair.
Yael Morris:So when I was working in a few companies, it actually wasn't my role to be doing this, but I took it upon myself. And what I observed from my peers was that they, I think, they didn't want to ask those uncomfortable questions to customers. And then they also, and even if they did get the insight and feedback, they wouldn't go to the CEO and be the whistleblower to call out the bad news. No one internally wants to be that person to actually say, guys, we're looking at everything wrong. Let's let's look at it this way because this is the truth.
Yael Morris:This is what's happening. That's an you gotta have balls to do that. And I think, you know, and I think, you know, deciding that you're gonna be the detective internally, deciding you're gonna be the investigator to ask, you know, raise these questions about customers' true motivations and what the business's value is to the customer is it's not an easy thing to do. And so I think you have to be a very specific kind of person with a very specific mentality who has a, you know, looks at your role and has a certain type of relationship with key decision makers to actually call bullshit and do the dirty work. You know, emailing customers, cold calling them, asking them for thirty minutes of their time, you know, going through this uncomfortable discovery process is not something that people, you know, choose to do.
Robert Curtis:Did did you ever consider going into the police and becoming a detective?
Yael Morris:No. But I used to call myself that. I am an investigator. I'm a detective.
Robert Curtis:But, actually, what that's a great spin, and, actually, maybe you should be marketing yourself like that. You are the private investigator that can get under the skin of the, you know, the the customer and actually understand. It brings back memories of that you're way too young for this. But watching Columbo, who's the, you know, US Detective in his sort of trench coat, horribly walking along, and he's you think he's about to, like, leave the room and actually the, you know, person he's accusing, he goes back and says, you know, one more thing, one more question. And, it's it's that extra layer.
Robert Curtis:It's that next question. Actually, as salespeople, we are trained to to do to keep keep that conversation going to unpeel the onion and actually understand why they might wanna buy from us and how we can help them. I think things have changed dramatically, particularly in b to b, you know, software sales or professional service sales. But I think what you're getting to is really key. Again, it's all psychology that people don't wanna be the whistleblower.
Robert Curtis:They don't have the balls to go and say, look. What we're doing is wrong. Maybe they're lower down the the, you know, the the food chain hierarchy, and actually don't want to say, well, actually, I'm seeing this, and actually what what leadership is saying is wrong. But I think a lot of that might come down to, in perhaps more established companies, around data and metrics, because that informs the questions we ask or produces answers that might be completely off skew when it comes to what we're trying to do. If it's all about, well, why did they churn?
Robert Curtis:What's the breakdown of those reasons? People aren't necessarily gonna give the right information.
Yael Morris:You have to give them the opportunity to give the right information in those instances. You have to make them feel comfortable, and you have to show that you're truly seeking to understand and not what they say to not take what they say is face value. Because what people say is not always what they mean.
Robert Curtis:That's true in all life. You remind me actually of an amazing book, an amazing, sort of methodology of marketing called They Ask, You Answer, which actually I only came to really recently. I read the book. I recommend everybody read this book. And it's built on this concept by Marcus Sheridan of really getting under the skin of why customers buy and the questions that they ask before they purchase from you.
Robert Curtis:And he ran a swimming pool company, actually, originally before he became this marketing guru. And he realized that he could beat the competition by being so transparent with his customer base, And that, in the old days, might look like a sort of a blog or a website. Today, that's content. It's all sorts of other assets. But if you can think of all the questions that they would ask, and then you answer them in a very upfront way, either in the sales process itself and fit that feeling of transparency can really be felt.
Robert Curtis:But if you've got every answer to the questions that they might ask on your website, in your content, and it's super transparent, then that increases the conversion rate in the sales process. It increases the, you know, marketing NQL to SQL rate, and people will churn less because they purchased in full knowledge of what they're doing. And we're seeing companies do do this and use the they ask you answer methodology to really open up the possibility for customers to know as much as possible before they buy. I come back to that point that sales is just bad marketing. Sales, you have to ask.
Robert Curtis:Right. Marketing, they come to you.
Yael Morris:%. I I love that point about, you know, anticipating their questions before they even ask. It builds trust. And it actually also if you can decode what those questions are and why they're asking them, it just reflects their true concerns and pain points. That's what it really, you know, is.
Robert Curtis:Completely. And I would say in all the work that you're doing with companies, you've probably got a library of questions that customers have shared with you around what they did or didn't know when they maybe purchased the product or questions that they developed throughout the journey of using the product. That actually, if every company turned that into content
Yael Morris:Yep.
Robert Curtis:Whether it's a blog, whether it's information on their website, whether it's social media assets, whether it's a podcast that's answering each question in each episode so that actually the buyer is more educated, I I almost guarantee that revenues go up.
Yael Morris:A %. I've speak spoken with customers who were super dissatisfied just because there were certain things that were not communicated on the website before they purchased that could have easily been communicated, and it would have prevented an angry customer.
Robert Curtis:Yeah. Sell the way you buy in that you're a customer too. You're buying products all day long. The same pain points that you have in the journey, in that friction, if you can bring that out into the journey for the customer that enables them to feel so confident, The transparency is there. The trust is high.
Robert Curtis:The there's a proven and trusted journey that they feel has been trodden by others before, and they feel so empowered when they come into the funnel. Again, it's revenue. That's revenue growth.
Yael Morris:You won't know, though, what to sell if you don't understand how your customers are buying and what they're thinking and what value means to them and what their concerns and hesitations are. There's, you know, direct to consumer focused businesses that don't really have that sales intermediary there to help the marketing team get intel, they're completely detached from understanding how the customer is buying and what are their key questions. So without that understanding and having direct one to ones or, you know, engagements with the customer, you're gonna be completely blind about what the heck to even put on your website. You're just gonna be putting stuff on there for the sake of it because you have to.
Robert Curtis:So what do you see as the difference between b to c and b to b in the work that you do? Is there a difference in the, process of purchasing when it's personal versus something that's professional?
Yael Morris:In b to b, there's a human interaction. So there is still a dialogue happening where you have the opportunity to ask your customers some questions in b to c.
Robert Curtis:Not always. I mean, a lot of, SaaS businesses, you're purchasing, you know, the the product through through this through the tiers even before you maybe get to enterprise. You are making decisions before you even speak to a human sometimes.
Yael Morris:Okay. Sorry. More meant to, like, b to b sales is what I was thinking. Like, in b to b sales, that's but in any scenario, if it's b to b or b to c, when there's no person guiding the customer or that, you know, interacts with the customer and is directly signing them something, it's heavily dependent on the message that you have, your onboard, the whole buying journey and understanding how people buy and don't buy and don't want to buy. And so you need to understand their expectations, you know, their thought processes, their pain points, what they're specifically looking for in terms of desired outcomes, what are their goals?
Yael Morris:It's I would argue that it's quite similar because it's people at the end of the day trying to find a solution to their problem. And they're not being handheld. They're going through a digital process.
Robert Curtis:So the the the friction point or the change point is really what you're saying is either did a human have to interact with another human to purchase the product? And that will change their journey whether they did or they didn't. And I presume the remedies that you can give to companies to try and help in those two scenarios are gonna be different. If you're a direct to consumer or a SaaS product that can be purchased on a website that you don't need to speak to anyone for, the remedies for those are going to be different to an enterprise sale or, you know, selling, I don't know, monday.com to, you know, a team of 20 people. I presume the way that you would suggest remedying that is different.
Robert Curtis:The medicine is different.
Yael Morris:Yeah. I I would say so. I mean, also, you know, a lot of it's building a relationship. There are other variables and factors that come into play when it's, you know, a human selling to a customer versus it's it's a completely detached experience.
Robert Curtis:What what do you see as the differences in terms of remedying?
Yael Morris:There are opportunity like, there are there is objection handling. There's opportunities to show information and get it right in front of their face and have someone's full attention. There is, you know, when it's direct to consumer and it's a digital buying journey, the user experience, the onboard, what the customer has to figure out themselves is not the same as when it's a direct, you know, a B2B sell. So people will, you know, churn or drop off in the funnel after a free trial or after one week of trying something or one month of trying something. And you can just That will happen without even knowing.
Yael Morris:Whereas like, you know, a more truly business to business, you get onboarded properly. You gather all this information. You have a purse You get transferred to an account manager who can help you or a success person. It's very handheld. But, you know, when there's no person working with the customer, you're like kind of guessing.
Yael Morris:You're often guessing about what are their expectations? Why did they drop off? What did we do wrong? What was wrong with our onboard experience? Did we give the wrong message?
Yael Morris:How do we improve the message? What kind of tools and guidance can we use to, like, help the customer make this more seamless, like, make it more seamless for them? It's a very different it's a very different, you know, onboard getting started sales process.
Robert Curtis:I think what's interesting about what you're saying, I don't know whether this is where you're heading as a business, is you're actually disrupting traditional methods of obtaining that feedback. So that might be surveys, it might be polling, it might be customer reviews. In in essence, you're being a bit of a disruptor in saying those traditional methods of getting customer feedback is flawed because of all the reasons that we've mentioned, whether it's that they just don't want to tell the truth, psychological things involved or or others. Are you saying surveys, reviews are actually not a true reflection of what your customers are thinking? And, actually, unless you have a way of questioning them that draws out the truth ultimately, you can't actually get to that position.
Robert Curtis:I think of my politics, you know, the polling in different countries is often off. And it's when you ask, you know, some a voter, you know, you're voting for this party or that party, Well, they might not wanna tell you the real truth. They might wanna give you the answer that they think you wanna hear, or so on and so forth. There's a lot of crossover with that. So I feel like you're a big disruptor to the traditional ways of gaining that feedback.
Yael Morris:So I I love this question. I'll ask you back. When was the last time you filled out a survey, like, in-depth?
Robert Curtis:Like, never.
Yael Morris:Okay. People often, like, just get check the box when they're asked to do a survey. It's not reliable information. If we were to have, you know, a one to one thirty minute discussion, even if you weren't being 100% transparent throughout the whole discussion, the value of what you're saying in that conversation is going to be so much higher than a 50 person survey where you're getting all different kinds of answers because we're going deep. When you're, you know, having a conversation with a person and the purpose is to truly understand not to sell, which, by the way, every time I speak to somebody, I say to them, I am not part of this company.
Yael Morris:They're a client of mine. And my job, which they hired me for, is just to really understand you. You know, we do a lot of rapport building at the beginning. We talk about the weather. Everybody loves to talk about the weather.
Yael Morris:But and we start to they start to like me because, you know, they really feel like I'm just there to understand them. But I'm asking them questions to really understand. And the questions are often like this. What do you mean by that? Can you give me an example?
Yael Morris:Am I understanding you correctly? And I will repeat what they say and I'll maybe like crystallize it a little bit more just to ensure that I'm understanding exactly what they mean and there's no room for interpretation. When you read a review or when you, you know, read a response to a survey, people will put like a one sentence kind of thing in there. And you'll kind of have to guess at what it actually means because you're not fully sure about the motivation behind that statement, which is why it's so valuable to have a person who is actually probing and uncovering, what do you mean by that? And, you know, sometimes for once, even just one point, someone will say something and answer to a question and I'll have to probe like five times.
Yael Morris:I'm still not sure I fully understand. Do you mean this? And maybe they'll say no. And I'll say, Okay, so if I'm understanding now this correctly, do you mean this? And we'll just get further and further and dig and dig until it is super crystal clear about exactly what they mean.
Yael Morris:A survey cannot replace that. If you're truly trying to understand your customer's pain points, their motivations for purchase, their drivers, those trigger points, their desired outcomes, the transformation that they're seeking, or where you're going wrong, why customers are really churning, what your, you know, their unmet expectations, it is very hard to get a clear answer in a survey because you are left up to interpreting what it means. And oftentimes, I mean, I've worked with clients who said we do this survey annually or biannually and we kind of just are still guessing at what the information means. I'll also say that the questions in those surveys have a lot of they're they're crafted with this confirmation bias.
Robert Curtis:Yeah.
Yael Morris:You know? They're trying to just confirm what they already know. You know, sometimes the question is, would you refer us to another person just to get, you know, that NPS score just for the sake of it? What do you do with that information? How is it actionable in any way?
Yael Morris:What does that tell you? Why would you refer us to another person? Which kind of person would you refer us to? What problem are would they be like, for what kind of solution to what problem would you, you know, provide this recommendation? Like, it's it's not specific.
Yael Morris:It's very generic.
Robert Curtis:I think also it's who's asking. So often marketing surveys are run by marketing. So there's an inherent interest in receiving data and statistics back that can be used in marketing. 73% of our customers said they would refer us to another party to use our product. Great.
Robert Curtis:But like you said, there's no other layers behind that. And actually, the way you describe some of the work that you do with customers and asking those specific questions, it's actually sort of like customer therapy. This concept of, you're smiling. It sounds like you've heard that before, but it's it's asking that that open question, letting them come forward with information, validating some of those feelings, but going further again. I'm not quite sure, you know, bringing the examples.
Robert Curtis:I I guess for customers, they're probably coming off saying you're, like, the best purchase shrink in the market.
Yael Morris:Well, I've had really interesting conversations. I have had engagements with customers that I've interviewed where they full blown sort of crying to me in the conversation. I've had, you know, the feedback at the end of a call where someone says, thank you so much for listening to me. And I've had feedback where people say, never have I thought about my own problem in that way. I've never actually said it out loud.
Yael Morris:And this has actually crystallized the way that I view my business or myself. And so it's because when you're in therapy, I don't know if you've ever done therapy, when you're in therapy, it's someone who's asking you those questions and helping you to get, you're really trying to get clarity. That's really what you're trying to achieve. So if you can understand yourself better, the more you can be more aware and you kind of get to where you want to be. But so what I'm doing is I'm actually doing that.
Yael Morris:I'm actually helping me. I want to get clarity, but the customer, you know, by default is getting clarity for themselves on their pain points and what they really care about.
Robert Curtis:I think I think you what you're hitting on is this concept of self awareness. And obviously, this is something that has become a big industry on on a personal level, you know, whether it's psychometric testing that we can all start to understand our, you know, quality set, and how we use that in the real world. But the the self awareness that we have as businesses is actually probably quite poor. And and what you're bringing to the table is for companies to be able to be self aware of how they're performing and interacting in the world and in the audience that they're trying to sell to and having that clarity and knowledge of their customer base, sharing that therapy back to them of, you know, what what they feel about that business, You're giving you're giving companies self awareness.
Yael Morris:I think I'm giving I would kind of reframe it a little bit. I'm giving them empathy, and I hope this doesn't sound like a fluff word, but more that, you know, you actually understand the thought processes behind your buyers, the better you can sell to them and solve their problems and address their needs. Because if you have your blinders on, you can't achieve that to the to the greatest potential.
Robert Curtis:So first of all, we've debunked or we've disrupted the survey review market. So they're on notice. And that's fine. But I think what's interesting here is that you are upending what I call the ICP persona journey that lots of companies go through when they're building their playbook as to who am I selling to, what do they look like as a person, and how do I then craft content and other information around that. Now to some extent, that does work because you do need to understand who's my target audience as a you know, which companies do I want to sell my biz my my product or service to, who within the company would be most likely to purchase this product.
Robert Curtis:But what you're saying sort of challenges that persona building process to some extent when it goes beyond that. We start to think we understand the chief digital officer or the director of HR. We start to build a sort of template around who we think they are and what their day looks like and the things that are coming to, you know, disrupt the way that they do their work and the pains that then come out of that. Are you saying that we live in a sort of post persona building world?
Yael Morris:I think people are still basically fixated on these avatars. It's like, we have this avatar in a document. It's Jenny. She's 35 years old. She buys this
Robert Curtis:I've never used Jenny before. I've definitely used that.
Yael Morris:Yeah. Jenny or, like, Hannah. And, you know, they're in this specific position. They live in this geography. Here's their demographics.
Yael Morris:It's like, how does this You may Okay, fine. You're going to have a replicable kind of image of this person on your website or in your content. I think they're overused. It's what we're taught in business school, to have these personas to rely on, but it never actually gets at what are their specific problems, what is the context in which they're experiencing this problem, what roadblocks have they encountered, What are their specific goals and why are those important goals? What do they want to truthfully achieve?
Yael Morris:Those aren't really questions that we're, you know, taught to fully ask. We're taught to just put it whip up this persona and just bullet point, what we think is true for this kind of market. It's high level. It's it's vague. It's generic and not precise and specific.
Yael Morris:And the reason for why is because there's truthfully lack of insight into why.
Robert Curtis:So interesting.
Yael Morris:I don't know if we're in the post era of personas. I I was I still create personas, but the persona that I create is not these like demo it's not demographic and and it's more psychographic focused. It's more specific to their thought processes and true experiences and exactly their pains and desired outcomes and the context that they that they are in.
Robert Curtis:I love that. Psychographic.
Yael Morris:I don't know. People use the term psychographic. I don't I don't use the term psychographic, but it's one of those things that people put on personas sometimes.
Robert Curtis:It's like the whole Hollywood genre.
Yael Morris:Yeah.
Robert Curtis:The latest psychographic movies. Talk to me a little bit about AI now because it's all the rage. This wouldn't be a modern podcast if we didn't have something about AI. Are you seeing any role that AI AI agents can be deployed and used in the journey of understanding customer insights? How are you how are you using it, first of all, yourself?
Robert Curtis:And then secondly, how do you think AI can be a partner to the work that you do in gaining customer insights?
Yael Morris:There's a few things. So the one major way in which I'm using AI is aggregating and synthesizing the content that I have essentially fed it. Every customer interview that I conduct is recorded. There's a lot of a lot of questions that are being asked, a lot of points that are being hit on. And I'm I'm
Robert Curtis:Sorry to interrupt you. Does that matter to the customer in that it's being recorded? Do they hold back at all?
Yael Morris:They know it's anonymous.
Robert Curtis:Okay.
Yael Morris:So I'm recording the conversation, and I'm usually doing, you know, 10 around 10 on average customer interviews per segment. And I then need to synthesize these insights in a way that's packaged and delivered in a way that's very digestible and actionable to my clients, for my clients. And so I'm using AI to synthesize these insights and, you know, get very specific and precise on what are the common themes and patterns that we're hearing. Or I'll ask questions like, can you pull me a couple anecdotes that speak to this pain point so that I can share these anecdotes that really reflect the true sentiment of the customer? Or I also do, because I'm learning, I'm getting essentially case studies in these conversations with happy customers.
Yael Morris:So I will put together a case study, a before and after story, before and after impact story just from a conversation. I'll say, put together a case study that looks like this and take it from one of these, you know, do two of them and take them from these five conversations. So I'm going I basically use AI to read my data and content and do my analysis for me. It's not a % reliable, but it does the the majority of that uplift.
Robert Curtis:Are you uploading transcripts from those conversations and then, you know, you could probably create a custom, yeah, LGBT that understands your methodology behind that that could actually, at scale, give you some interesting data, I would imagine.
Yael Morris:Yes. And I'm working on that.
Robert Curtis:I'm sure you are. Stories. Yeah. I wanna hear some stories. You don't have to mention company names, obviously, but, I'd love to hear some of the, stories that have either most impacted cost customers that you worked with, or what's the most egregious, scandalous story that you can share with us?
Yael Morris:When I got the epiphany around maybe why I should be doing this was when I was working with a suit company who was selling luxury suits across The US. They're still around. They're a 100 year old business. I, at the time, didn't know they had any churn issue. The CEO said we were, you know, we're celebrating our 100 year anniversary and I, you know, brought on a brand strategist and I wanna understand what's our key differentiator.
Yael Morris:Okay. So the solution I proposed was, okay, let's speak to 20 of your customers. I didn't know anything about how many customers to speak with at the time. I just knew, like, if you go straight to the the source, you'll understand why people buy. So they they I went to the sales team and I said, can I get, you know, a list of customers?
Yael Morris:Can you introduce me to them? Do you have their contact information? They said we can give you their phone numbers and their locations, but we can't introduce you to them. And I'm like, well, there was some sort of already a red flag here. If you you're, you know, the account manager and you can't interview me introduce me to your clients, well, that's gonna there's already a problem.
Yael Morris:I don't really know what I was going into. So I went through this, you know, phone like this this list of of accounts, customers, and I called them up. And I got, I don't wanna talk to this company. I'm not interested. And I and I had to, like, fight back.
Yael Morris:All these people were were they're men, like, male fifty five up clothiers who they're these professionally They don't have time for me. They don't have time for this. They don't have time for nonsense and working with a vendor who they don't like. And I had no idea. No one told me there was a problem, customer feed.
Yael Morris:There was a negative feedback. There was a negative sentiment. No one told me this. All I knew was they're celebrating their one hundredth year anniversary and we need to understand why they're different. I basically went into these conversations like, my name is Yael Morris.
Yael Morris:X company hired me to really understand you. I just need ten minutes of your time. I want to ask you a couple questions. And I ended up having hour long chats with these guys. I got 21 people to chat with me.
Yael Morris:And they went on and on and on. I asked them, who are their customers? Who are their clientele? How do you sell this product? In which instances do you provide, you know, this do you suggest this suit versus this suit?
Yael Morris:How do you view yourself in your role? Where like, I I would get very specific about why they buy this product versus another and in which instances they provide you know, they recommend this product to their customers. And so over time, I was hearing very specific patterns and insights. Okay. It's the best this is the best product as for a best price point for a double canvas suit.
Yael Morris:It is the best basic black, gray, and blue suit. It is an English style garment, not Italian, not American. It's for this specific customer who's in this role. They wanna feel confident, but they don't wanna look too they don't want it to be too extravagant. And so I got these nuances of exactly how they were describing this product.
Yael Morris:And then they would complain to me. You know, I used to buy this because it was so great at this, but they've changed exactly They're starting to change exactly who they are and they're no longer serving its purpose. I want them to go back to who they were twenty years ago. These are people who've bought this product for over fifty years. And so I went back to the CEO.
Yael Morris:Actually, that's not what happened. I had called the brand strategist and I said, I'm hearing these insights and you need to know this. The CEO needs to know this. But I don't want to go over your head. And she wouldn't believe what I was saying.
Yael Morris:She wouldn't believe what the customer was articulating in these conversations because she had an agenda. And so I emailed the CEO. I'm like, I have done my job and this is in your best interest for me to share with you exactly what your customers are saying. It's not my job to, you know, to hear, to like have peace with people and appease people's egos. I want you to know what your customers are saying.
Yael Morris:So I went in and I sat with him and he said, you know what you just did there. You just burn a bridge. Not just with the, you know, brand strategist, but also with the head of marketing who works with her. And I said, my job is not to, you know, appease people. Like, I actually don't care.
Yael Morris:I said to I flat out said to the CEO, I'm like, I don't care. He goes, okay, present your insights next week. So I presented these insights. I called him a year later. I'm like, so what's going on?
Yael Morris:How like, did you use these in? Did you use the feedback? He goes, yeah, we did and it didn't make an impact. I'm like, okay, can you give me some sense of numbers? How did it change your business?
Yael Morris:Saved $2,000,000 on inventory because we completely adjusted our product strategy. We increased our retention by 15% at record 98 and increased our ARR by $4,000,000 because we adjusted our pricing strategy and our product strategy to align with what customers are saying. I'm like, oh, that's a a pretty
Robert Curtis:good very much.
Yael Morris:Thank you very much for letting me know.
Robert Curtis:Yeah. But And that's a that's an incredible story of success, and it uncovers again the issue around agendas and who is involved in a business that they will often have their own agendas. That could be marketing, could be customer success, it could be a brand strategist, and everyone is either pushing their agenda or scared to show information that puts their job or department at risk. Whereas, actually, if you build, and this comes probably back to maybe larger companies or even even small businesses, if you have a culture of challenging Yeah. Perspectives, of coming through new ideas, of not respecting hierarchy as an authority, but actually challenging leadership with things that you're hearing on the ground, then you breed a culture that can say, well, our customer is first.
Robert Curtis:We need to sell to them in the best way that they wanna buy and give them the outcomes that they want. But if you've built that culture internally to share and remove agendas, then you're probably going a long way down the line to helping your customer.
Yael Morris:A lot of what people are doing internally is their I think this is a great idea, so let's go do it, which, by the way, is is great. People should be creative and bring their ideas to to life. But you have to listen to what matters to the customer at the end of the day because that's the most important voice. If you're making big changes to your business based on your personal, you know, gut feel and your opinion without validating and ensuring that it aligns with what truly matters to your most loyal customers, you may be headed in a completely wrong direction. And that was the case with this client.
Yael Morris:They started to do that. They started to go in a completely different direction because the CEO wanted to go into a different category, change the price, change the product. They brought in a brand strategist who wanted to go in a very specific direction, raise the price dramatically, change the whole brand image, but that wasn't why the customers were buying this business. That's not why they were buying the product. So if you go back to the customer, understand their needs, their gaps, desires, and really understand that in a very, you know, nuanced and in-depth way, you can use that information to strengthen your brand strategy and your value proposition.
Robert Curtis:It so resonates with a business that I was involved in for many years called Graduate, where we were selling to yeah. Graduate, where we were selling software to university alumni departments. And unless you're, I guess, a big brand university with, you know, very VIP alumni and there's, you know, big brand behind it, Yale, Harvard, Oxford, etcetera. Often, the alumni professional industry is sort of like a forgotten department on the university campus that put on nice events and do some nice marketing with some old alumni who come back and reminisce. And, yes, they have a fundraising department in the advancement team, but we were specifically focusing on the alumni directors, and they were sort of like a forgotten hero within the university establishment.
Robert Curtis:And, yes, the product that we were building for them would help them do x, y, and zed for the alumni community. But this I I still, to this day, believe that the single biggest reason that they actually purchased us over competitors in the market was because we gave them a voice. We recognized them for the work that they do, and we gave them a community through the work that we did. That was through events and, sort of user group, community events, conferences, where we really sort of elevated them as an industry and as a profession. And I think the ability that we gave to make them feel heard and recognized was the single biggest reason of why they bought us over other competitors.
Yael Morris:People want to be understood. They want to be, you know, the hero of their own, you know, story. And
Robert Curtis:that comes back to the story brand. Sorry to interrupt you that I don't know if you've read Donald Miller's story brand, but, you know, a a famous methodology now in really understanding how to do marketing right, which is making sure that the hero in your work as a business is not you, that the hero is the customer. You are what he calls the guide, and you come along to help the hero fight the villain. And the villain could be a better, photocopy machine. The villain could be the inability to manage my projects correctly, and I need a better tool to do that.
Robert Curtis:And he takes the methodology of Hollywood, actually, that all Hollywood movies typically have the same beat to them. That there's a hero, and something happens to them that they're wronged or they can't move forward with because the villain has done x y zed. And a guide comes along to help the hero to the end journey where they beat the villain and life looks fantastic afterwards. And that's actually what every customer wants. They wanna be the hero, whether it's eating that granola bar that you referenced right at the beginning of how that makes them feel or through to other SaaS software, like for the alumni industry, they are the hero in the journey.
Yael Morris:I I couldn't I I have so much to say. Say it. No. That villain, I would say, like, it's those pains. It's the real roadblocks that they're facing that they can't break through to achieve their desired outcome.
Yael Morris:Sometimes those pains, those villains aren't actually labeled properly because they're not really spoken in the most, like, painful, clear way because people use, you know, like, again, people don't mean what they say always. What they mean is like that underlying villain, you know, that problem, that pain, the trigger. So when that's spoken, like verbatim on a landing page, on a website, on some piece of messaging that actually triggers the customer and makes them feel, wait, that is me. You're speaking my mind and how I feel. That is making the customer feel understood.
Yael Morris:It's fully making it about them. So I think, you know, if you're only talking about you and your features and your product, which so many businesses do, you're missing the mark in your ability to connect with the customer as they shop around.
Robert Curtis:Look. It's it's current state, future state. Yep. Where are you now? What did you what do you want the world to look like after you use our product?
Robert Curtis:And if you can if you can meet that gap in your marketing, your content, your customer journey, your sales process, your post sales process, then you have happy customers who buy again and refer to others with a a real sense of, honesty behind their their recommendation.
Yael Morris:Do you think, Robert, as a marketing marketing expert, what could possibly happen if we listen to our customers too much?
Robert Curtis:I think about, Henry Ford, the carmaker, who said at the time, you know, if I asked my customers, you know, what they wanted, when it comes to travel, they would say a better horse, a faster horse. And actually, if I'd listened to them as Henry Ford, then maybe I wouldn't have gone and innovated the, you know, internal combustion engine. So I think there is a line at which we have to say, look, we're innovators. We believe we have a solution to something in the world that we can build a product or service for. And there is a balance between listening to customers too much.
Robert Curtis:The customer isn't always right when it comes to product development necessarily, but I think the customer's always right when it comes to their experience, and that's what we have to listen to. The journey that they go on is perhaps more important than the the reality of how correct the product might be for what they're trying to achieve. So I think I think we have to be cognizant of what customers are saying. We need to feed that into their journey, their experience, and to some extent, But I think disruptors and innovators by nature want to come and heal something in the world. They wanna give something that isn't there already that that they wanna make better.
Robert Curtis:And everything already has existed under the sun, as they say. But most businesses are trying to just do something a little bit better than their competitors or give the customer a new option for delivering what they're trying to achieve. So I think it's a balance. I do I do resonate with this concept of, may ask you answer, though. I've mentioned it already that, you know, it's it's if you listen to the customer journey, then I think you'll be much more successful.
Robert Curtis:I mean, what do you think? What are you hearing when it comes to customers? Can they always be right? Their experiences are right. Their feelings are true, but that doesn't necessarily mean that that they're correct.
Robert Curtis:It might be that they're a mismatch for the product. It might be, a whole host of other things.
Yael Morris:I actually I use I look at the Henry Ford quote in a different way. What people are saying is not always what they mean. I want faster horses. What do you mean by that? Is what I would ask the customer.
Yael Morris:I want to get from this point to this point faster. So it's like the way in which you frame the question and how you decode what the customer truly cares about, which is they want speed. Sometimes I lean so heavily into the customer insights and the voice of the customer that I'm not a creative person. And it would be so cool if I was a creative person because I truthfully believe that these insights fuel creativity. When you understand, like, what actually matters, then it's like you're not even guessing.
Yael Morris:You're just You can just unleash your creative mind and frame this different Frame a message in different, you know, really witty ways and clever ways to get the customer to stand out in the market. I love working with marketing teams that are really clever. And, you know, they know how to take these insights and it's, like, true understanding of what's in the customer's mind and spitting that into something really interesting. But I mean, I used to personally get really caught up in, or I do, get caught up in the details. It's part of my job just to get caught up in the details.
Yael Morris:But I would agree that when you ask the customer to tell you what the product should be and what certain things should be, shouldn't take that at face value. You should really instead just try to understand what they mean. And it's your job to kind of figure out what that solution should be.
Robert Curtis:And often I found actually in sales processes, customers might say, well, you haven't got this or you haven't got that as a feature, or your competitors have x, y, or zed, why don't you? Or are you or or would you be prepared to build this into the product as well? Often, we'd have the conversation around, first of all, the questioning. Why? Why do you need that?
Robert Curtis:What are the layers underneath what you're trying to achieve? So a, can that be achieved in a different way? But an objection is, well, you don't have that in the product. We often would use the scenario of saying, well, we can build for that for you on a custom basis if you need it so much, and it's gonna cost x in addition, or we take all product feedback really seriously. And if enough of this type of request comes through from our customer base, then absolutely, we go ahead and build it into the product.
Robert Curtis:There's no charge for that, and it becomes a standard. And two things usually happened. If we offered the custom development that would then and I'm talking about tech business here, obviously, that request would fall away. The reason why they wanted it wouldn't actually be as vital as they thought it was, or it was an objection that they were using to stop the process.
Yael Morris:Right.
Robert Curtis:Or it was great feedback. And, actually, we heard it from 50 other customers, and we went ahead and built that into the product, and it was a, you know, a great winner. So I think there's there's it's like you say, the questioning. You have to ask why, and and the the agenda that they have behind giving that type of of insight. Yael, there's so much more we could discuss, and maybe we'll do that on future podcast episodes.
Robert Curtis:For those who are interested in connecting with you, what's the best way first of all?
Yael Morris:Probably LinkedIn. Yael Morris, y a e l m o r r I s.
Robert Curtis:And last piece of advice, Yael, before we wrap up this episode. For smaller businesses who maybe can't yet include a service like you're offering into their into their process. What would be your top, you know, two or three tips for making sure that they install this type of thinking early on into the work that they're doing to go to market?
Yael Morris:Try and challenge your assumptions about what you think about the market, number one. Number two, lots of conversations. You don't need a hundred conversations, but enough to kind of find recurring patterns and themes behind the customer's problem. Focus on understanding the problem in the context in which they experience it and listen. Just listen.
Robert Curtis:I agree with that one. I I shared with you offline that, you know, in doing lots of sales audits in companies, I can often spot the best salespeople just from their Gong statistics that, you know, if they speak for 50% or less during the sales call, I know they're a good salesperson because they're using their ears. You've got two ears, one mouth for a reason. So, yeah, Al, I've enjoyed this. This has been so insightful, educational, and I'm sure we're going to do more.
Robert Curtis:So thank you for being a guest on Coffee with Curtis.
Yael Morris:Thanks, Rob. I loved it.
Robert Curtis:Thank you for listening to Coffee with Curtis. I hope you enjoyed it. Please follow or subscribe to get notified when I release future episodes.
