That sounds simple, doesn’t it? But there are still some people out there that don’t seem to get it.

Question: Who knows what you should provide for your customers?

Answer: The experts on your customers, of course.

Your customers know what your customers want much more then you do. They are the leading experts for what you should be providing.

Question: How do you find out what your customers want?

Answer: You ask them. In other words you create a survey and see what they want.

Question: How do you run a survey?

Answer: You can run a survey as simple as sending out an email and asking them to respond or setting up a formal survey on a web page or you can mail out a physical survey.

Doesn’t that sound easy? In concept it is very easy, but in practical application there are a lot of things that you need to do to make your survey work for you.

When you ask a question you can lead the person reading the question to an answer. This can give you bad information from your survey. You have to be careful when you word your survey questions, if you lead a person to the answer that you want to hear you will end up with the information you want instead of the information you need to have when you create your product.

Remember, you can lead a person to the answer with not only the question but with the choice of answers, if it is a multiple choice answer. For example:

Question: Who do you think is the world’s most peaceful person?

1. Adolph Hitler
2. Osama Bin Laden
3. The Una-Bomber
4. Mike Tyson

As you can see that is a question that most people either wouldn’t answer or if they did answer they would be picking an answer that they didn’t really agree with. This is why it is very important to phrase your questions, answers and the way the questions are answered in your surveys.

Once you have your answers and you have analyzed the results you will know exactly what your customers want. If you are the one that provides the information or product that people want they will gladly pay you for it.

Michael Cheney has done a lot of surveys to learn what his customers want as a result of these surveys he has had a couple of products that have sold over $100,000 worth of product in a very short time. Wouldn’t you like similar results?

Even though setting up a survey sounds easy there are people that get paid thousands and thousands of dollars to create, run and analyze surveys for other people companies and some of the larger companies actually have a survey section of their marketing company.

Besides product development, surveys are also used to:

1. Generate qualified leads for your products
2. Refine your existing product
3. Streamline support issues
4. Check your customer satisfaction
5. To find out almost any information you want on how to make your business, product, customer support, etc., better.

Question: Why doesn’t everybody use surveys?

Answer: Who knows? I would assume a lot of the time it is because they don’t know how to run a survey or they don’t know what to ask or it could be they don’t know whom to ask.

If you are thinking about doing a survey I would recommend you do some research on it before you create. There is a bunch of information out there to be had but I can personally recommend Marketplace Detectives. This is by Marie Kane who made a good living doing surveys for other businesses.  In Marketplace Detectives she gives up all the tips, tools and information she used to become a expert in the survey field.

If you want to maximized your money, surveys are one of the most reliable ways to start and will provide you with the most bang for your buck. Don’t believe me? Ask!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 10:49 pm and is filed under Product Creation . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.