Customer Discovery — Verbal vs. Digital Survey
@TheDLu What’s your thought on split of digital vs verbal? There’s a LOT of value in in-person, but difficult to scale
— David Vandegrift (@DavidVandegrift) July 3, 2015
Fantastic question. My response:
@DavidVandegrift Great question! One I should tackle the next post, but in short, I’d say, “It depends”. #consultantAnswer. It’s about…
— Daryl Lu (@TheDLu) July 3, 2015
Digital surveys (SurveyMonkey, Google Apps, etc.) can be easily scaled and sent to a wide-range of audiences. Whereas, verbal surveys can be time intensive and expensive to scale – scheduling, logistics, etc.
As Don Pottinger, CTO of Kevy, points out, however: “[actual] conversations tend to go unexpected places and reap unexpected insights…something that is harder to do [with] digital.”
Assuming you get in front of the audience, thoughts on digital vs. verbal:
- Depends on Phase of Customer Discovery. At the beginning, verbal is the quickest way to test and modify an initial hypothesis. As the pain-point and solutions become clearer, you may switch to digital for scale. Then, switching back to heavier verbal during solution build.
- Consider who you are asking and your relationship. Do you know the audience or have the clout to motivate someone to take a digital survey? Or would verbal develop the relationship to get results?
- What’s the value of your offering? The higher the price of your offering, the more critical and appropriate it is for verbal communication. This is simply as sales cycles can be lengthy; thus, more involvement is required to foster trust and development.
Surveys are great direction tools, but not the end-all be-all. Mike Bivone (currently of Juice Analytics) recalls from his startups, “people often tell you one thing but behave completely differently.” At Body Boss, we built features given input from coaches that they would buy if said features were built. However, when we did build those features, coaches didn’t buy. Instead, we should have built lightweight versions and tested with prospects before full development.