Bob Moesta’s first role in sales and marketing happened relatively early in his career. He came from engineering, and so found the notion of tackling sales and marketing — soft, squishy, people-centred — to be extremely scary.
One interesting feature of Bob’s approach is he actually put himself in the customer’s shoes and did what the customer did. He didn’t just interview the customer. He worked in the store that sells to the end customer. As a result, he found out what sales people struggled with, what customers struggled with and how to solve those problems.
I wonder if he’d done interviews if it would have taken him longer to find the issues. Would a sales person even mention how challenging quoting is since they are used to it and all the other companies had complicated quoting systems too?
If I asked Home Depot’s customer what makes it hard to choose a countertop, I bet they could tell us though - the small samples make it hard to match colors, I’m confused by all the colors, etc.
In any case, I’m happy to see that there’s another solution than to do weeks of interviews. Maybe shadowing the customer is a useful approach some of the time.