EntreLeadership - Always Be Generating Great Ideas with John Felkins and Teresa Torres

Episode Date: December 12, 2022

Join us as our host, George Kamel, sits down with John Felkins, the executive director of Elite for EntreLeadership. John shares some of the worst ideas he’s had and executed along with what he learned from them. Later, George talks with Teresa Torres, an internationally acclaimed author, a speaker and a product-discovery coach. She explains how talking to your customers will make sure you never run out of great ideas. You’ll learn: •      How to turn your failure into success •      How to consistently make products that sell •      The key to knowing what your customers actually want •      How to talk to your customers the right way Support our sponsors: •      Hite Digital: https://bit.ly/HiteDigital •      NetSuite: https://bit.ly/NetSuiteEntre •      Trainual: https://bit.ly/TrainualEntre •      BELAY: https://bit.ly/351P9AE Links mentioned in this episode: •      The EntreLeadership Podcast: https://bit.ly/TheEntreLeadershipPodcast •      Give us your feedback by leaving a voicemail at 844.944.1070 or emailing [e-mail] •      Learn more about EntreLeadership Elite: https://bit.ly/3Vn82ne •      Get your tickets to EntreLeadership Summit: https://bit.ly/3Uw3PMQ •      Teresa Torres’ website: https://bit.ly/3FjQhzu •      Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres: https://bit.ly/3iiqEG7 •      Listen to The Rachel Cruze Show: https://bit.ly/3OU4TbX Learn more about EntreLeadership Events: •      EntreLeadership Master Series: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipMasterSeries •      EntreLeadership Summit: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipSummit   Learn more about EntreLeadership Coaching: •      Elite: https://bit.ly/3tI2fN8 •      Advisory Groups: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipAdvisoryGroups •      Executive Coaching: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipExecutiveCoaching •      Workshops: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipWorkshops Listen to all the Ramsey Network podcasts anytime, anywhere with the Ramsey Network app: https://apple.co/3eN8jNq Learn more about your ad choices: https://www.megaphone.fm/adchoices Ramsey Solutions Privacy Policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On today's episode, if you want to take your team to the next level, you've got to have new ideas. And when it comes to new ideas, you have to know when to hold them and when to fold them. You've got to know how to discern between the good ideas and the ones that aren't worth your time and money. And that's what we're talking about today. Welcome to the Entree Leadership Podcast from the Ramsey Network where we help you learn the proven principles for winning as a business leader. I'm your host, George Camel, and each week here on the podcast, I sit down with some of the best leadership minds out there to help you grow yourself, your team, and your profits. I want to say quick thanks to all of you who have left us voicemails with feedback on these new segments we've been trying. Some of you are really enjoying it.

Hey, you really gave me something tangible to take back to the workplace. And some of you, not as much. But either way, please keep that feedback coming. It's so helpful to this show and our team. So in our first segment today, John Falcons is going to share some of the worst ideas he's had and executed along with what he's learned from them. Then in our second segment, Teresa Torres will join me to show you how to never run out of great ideas. For our first teaching segment, we've got John Falcons, Executive Director of Elite for Entree Leadership. John, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, George.

Thank you for being vulnerable and sharing some of the worst ideas you've had. We couldn't find anyone else who was willing to share. I think this is my worst idea as agreeing to being on here. And you didn't come to mine first. I want you to know that. We had a long list. Yeah, thank you. Of failed idea executioners.

But this is a big thing for business owners because trying new things is risky. There are zeros on the end and nobody wants to fail. I mean, part of businesses, we got into this thing because we love to win. So are you willing to tell us about a time you had an idea that you executed and it just flopped? Yes. But, you know, I was thinking about this and thinking, why did I agree to do this? That's my first thought. But secondly, you know, you said it very well, nobody wants to fail.

And we've long had the philosophy. You only fail when you quit, you know, if you don't keep trying. You're going to learn something or you're going to succeed either way. So it's a success. But we have tried stuff that just flat hasn't worked. And I think the biggest takeaways are what did we do in that decision-making process that needed to be different? So don't worry. I'm going to give you a straight answer.

and tell you about a time that we did something that didn't work. But I'm going to start with a punchline and just say, we didn't make the decision the right way. It wasn't necessarily that we just made the wrong decision or went with the wrong idea. It was how we went about coming to that decision that screwed us up. And what it was was we decided to come out with a new feature in Elite. And this is years ago. And we thought, this is going to be great. We're going to give access to everybody's team member.

We're going to charge a different price. We had a pricing strategy. We're going to roll this thing out. We've already got the owner in Elite. They're going to want to include their team members. It's going to be great. We're going to make, you know, big difference in the world and make a bunch of money in a process. And it just totally flopped.

Nobody signed up for it. It didn't work. It was a nightmare technologically. It created all kinds of problems. And it just flat was a failure. The thing that we took away from it, at least that I took away from it, was how we got to that decision. Why did we do that?

And the truth is, George, we got to Q4 in a year. We started looking at our budget, and we started saying, we've got to come up with a way to make more money. We're not going to hit our budget. What could we do?

What are some ideas? Let's throw some ideas on a board and try these ideas and see if any of them will work and get us to where we want to go. And that's just 100% the wrong way to look at coming out with something new in the marketplace.

So the learning from that was we need to relook at the whole process of how we execute an idea and when and if we do that, which is honestly the hardest part. You know, ideas are a dime a dozen. We got ideas all day on the whiteboard. But realizing, oh, that one is actually worth doing. That's the hard part. That's the hard work that teams have to do every day. Yeah. And the truth is, like you said, we've got a lot of ideas.

The hard part's not coming up with the ideas. is the hard part is getting our team on board with the idea and everybody pulling in the same direction. That's tough. And the thing is, is our team is smart. They're smart people. And when they see us as leaders act out of fear or make a decision out of fear because we're not going to hit our numbers or it isn't even about the numbers, it's about the fear of letting our leadership down. It's about the fear of embarrassment of not doing what you said you were going to do. The team picks up on that. They know. see that. And they're like, why are we, this feels like a money grab. Why are we doing this? This isn't a good idea. And then you don't have a team that's all aligned around the idea. And it ain't going nowhere.

It doesn't matter how good or bad your idea was. Yeah. And there's a lot of, you know, probably blaming happening going, who's, oh, well, this is because of the marketing team. They didn't pull their, you know, versus the leader putting the mirror up and going, I got to own this one. Yeah. It's always, it's always somebody else. One of the things that we fall, pray to all the time is this thing called the fundamental attribution error. And it is, when I make a mistake, it's because, like you're saying, it's my environment, right? If I'm late to work, if I was late to the podcast recording, it's because traffic was bad.

It wasn't my fault. It was my environment. But if you, George, were late to the podcast recording, it's because you're a lazy slug. Traffic's not an option. It's just you and your character. We make that attribution error. And so when we make mistakes like this, you're absolutely right. the first thing we do is not look in the mirror and say, gosh, what did I do? What was the mistake that I made?

We don't, as humans, tend to do that. But the fact of the matter is, we made that decision to launch this idea. Team member access was what we called it out of fear, without good planning, without incorporating our team in the decision-making process, and it flopped. So no matter what idea we executed, we here at Ramsey, here at Entree leadership, we retro things. What is the strategy, the framework that we use to do that? A lot of times we ask these kind of four questions about something, a project that we've just done. And like you said, we call that a retro. And we'll ask, what worked about this? What didn't work about this?

What were we missing? And then the last question is, what were we just confused on? So what worked, what didn't work, what was missing, and what was confused. And if we can set our ego aside and have a real honest conversation about that, we get to the last 10% of truth, and we tend to not repeat that mistake again. We're going to fail. We're going to try stuff that doesn't work. If you're not trying stuff, if we're not trying stuff and risking it not working, then we're

not pushing hard enough. That's going to happen. But if we don't learn from our mistakes and we keep doing them over and over again, that's unexcusable. Yeah. And just getting those things on the whiteboard isn't enough. We have to actually implement them into the next idea, or if we're iterating on the idea, if it's still alive, we've got to actually go make the changes.

So right, wrong, missing, confused, get everyone in the room to contribute to say something. And usually the wrong column is really big and the right column is real small. So it's always good to start with some positives. Otherwise, it just turns into like a complain fest, which I've seen happen, unfortunately. And sometimes it was a bad idea. Sometimes there's not a lot to put in there, but you're right. We need to be honest with ourselves. And as you know, we're hard on ourselves.

We expect excellence of ourselves and each other, which is great, but we got to be careful that it's not hurtful. Yeah. You know, we don't damage people. So I love leaders who give their team an opportunity, who empower them to run with some of these ideas. But how do you handle it as a leader when an idea flops? And it truly was, hey, you ran with this. I gave the opportunity. It didn't work out.

What's the right way to go about that? Well, let me start with the wrong way to go about that. And that is to blame that team, to throw. that team under the bus publicly and say, I gave them everything that they needed. And, you know, it didn't work because of how they screwed up. So you don't want to do that. We don't criticize in public. We praise in public. And so if something needs to happen, we've seen Dave set this example really well for the entire organization. And we've done this at all levels. We have to do this with our own teams. And that is just get up and say, y'all, this didn't work. And I led us in this

effort that didn't work. And so that's on me. Now, we've all been in this together. Everybody worked really hard. There's not a lack of character, but we made these decisions together, and I'm the leader, and so I'm responsible for that. We're going to figure out why it didn't work, or we're going to learn from what we've figured out. We're not going to do that again. And, you know, I think the phrase that we use a lot is we're going to treat people like adults. We're going to tell them the truth, and we're going to expect them to act responsible in a process. So what process is to you have now or does our team have now to kill terrible ideas before they ever see the light of day? Well, we have those processes. This is why very few of my ideas get through anymore.

No. The process is as simple as listening to your customers as opposed to trying to drive your own ideas. You know, I have been here 10 years, and when I started, I was on the front lines, I guess you'd say I was talking to customers every single day and I was hearing what they had to say about, you know, what their challenges were. Now I just worked mostly with the team, almost entirely, you know, working with the team, coaching the team, and I'm more removed from the customers. So that begs the question, like, who knows what the customers want most? Me or somebody that's working with them every day. And so that process of really doing discovery, which is our term for discovering what customers value and what they want and listening to them.

Our old friend Rick Perry used to say, God gave us two ears and one mouth, so we should be listening more than talking. So the idea of leadership people sitting around in a meeting saying, I know what we ought to do. This is the idea that will work, doesn't work. And so we've developed and are still working on this discipline of listening to our customers, listening to our frontline team members, giving them the strategic context, meaning, hey, this is what we're trying to accomplish. This is what we're trying to go. This is what we're trying to do in the marketplace. What are you hearing from customers? And what do you think we can do in light of that context to meet that customers need? And that's what we organize our teams around and how we,

how we do work now. And it's not bulletproof, but it does help us avoid dumb ideas from John. I love that. Well, it's a great reminder to have your mission, your vision, your values in place so that you can vet those ideas and go, oh yeah, this lines up perfectly with where we're trying to go. Yeah. So that's a great reminder. Those should be filters for all your decision making. And they're hard sometimes, George, because it's like you're looking and you're saying, how does my mission vision values really affect my bottom line? Like I want to be talking about stuff that I can look at on a P&L, you know, on my profit and loss sheet. Well, those things absolutely are going to drive the profitability and the success of your organization. If you do what you just said,

use them as a filter for your decision making. Love it. Well, John, thank you so much for being hashtag vulnerable with us today. Always love having you on. Thank you. Some great conversation there. As Dave says, success is just a pile of failures that you're standing on instead of underneath. And so I love that reminder for all of you to not just let go and say, we're not going to try any ideas. We're not going to try to avoid all the risk we can. You've got to go for it if you want to win in business. So what did you guys think of that segment? Did you like it or not? Call and leave us a voicemail at 844-944-1070. If you'd rather email us, we've got a link to that address in the show notes. So as a leader, you guys pour so much of yourself into others every single week. It's your job,

and a lot of times it's your joy. But man, we can all agree it can be exhausting at times. So if you feel drained, you feel worn out, Entree Leadership Summit is the place to recharge. Summit is our premier where the world's top business and thought leaders pour into entree leaders like you. You're going to be energized, re-inspired to keep challenging the status quo and motivating your team to greatness. If you want to join us, go to ontraeleadership.com slash summit and secure your tickets today. All right, coming up next, how to never run out of great ideas. It is possible.

Stay tuned. All right. Joining me now is Teresa Torres, internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and product discovery coach. She's coached hundreds of teams at companies across all sizes and industries from early stage startups to global enterprises. And her book, Continuous Discovery Habits, has become a staple for our own product leadership team. Teresa, welcome to the show. Thanks. I'm excited to be here. Well, we brought you on because we want to help our business owners out there never run out of great ideas. And it's hard to know as a business owner which ones to run with, which ones you

shouldn't because no one wants to waste time and money, right? Yeah, definitely. So to start here, your book is on a lot of desks here at Ramsey. It's all about product discovery. What the heck is a product discovery coach? Yeah, it's really this simple. It's how do we know what to build? I often say ideas are cheap. It's easy to have ideas. Finding the ideas that will work is a lot of work. And that's as a product discovery coach, I just work with people to help them figure out which ideas are going to work. And a lot of that is focused on how do you do that in a way that's really customer-centric. And that's kind of a buzzword that we give lip service to. So it's really, how do we make that very concrete and how do we make sure that we really are serving our customers?

Yeah. It's great to have an idea, but if it doesn't actually connect with the people it's intended for, then it was a bad idea. So it's interesting how that works. Yeah, we see a lot of examples where it's clear somebody fell in love with their idea. It's a lot of, it's a lot of a solution maybe looking for a problem. And that's, I think for people that have ideas, we're not the best judge of those ideas, right? So we need to have some kind of feedback loop to say, yep, I'm not crazy, the only person who's going to use something like this. The product discovery process is just how do we do that in a really structured way so that we don't waste our time building the wrong stuff. So I'm curious, looking at your resume here, just the words hurt my brain. You've got a BS and symbolic

Systems from Stanford, Masters and Learning, and Organizational Change from Northwestern. How did you get into this whole idea of, I want to help companies and businesses create products that reach customers? Yeah, so as an undergrad, Symbolic Systems is a cognitive science program. The key difference between it and cognitive science is cognitive science is all about how do we process information in our brain. Symbolic systems is how to humans and machines process information. My focus was on human computer interaction. So really, even as a 19-year-old, I was starting to think about technology and how are we going to design it in a way that works for humans.

And that really influenced sort of my worldview. And I went and worked, I was at Stanford in the 90s, which was a pretty good timing for taking advantage of the internet upswing. I was pretty surprised when most companies didn't have this ethos of designing for the customer. Like, you think in business, that's what we're doing. But really, we do a lot of designing for shareholders. and for executives. And so I, over the course of my kind of full-time employee experience, just saw the same challenges everywhere and really wanted to stop building products in the traditional

sense and start focusing on training. And how do we start solving this problem? How do we make sure that teams are spending time on things that customers care about? Wow, that's incredible. So you've got this concept of continuous mindset. What does that mean for a business owner to have a continuous mindset? Yeah, so I think it's pretty human nature to think about things as projects. So I have this idea. Let's build a thing. Maybe if we're lucky, we're going to do some research to figure out, is that the right thing to build? And then we're going to build it, and we're going to put it in the world, and we're going to move on to the next thing. We see this a lot, and it's how the world used to work, right? If you were making something like soap, you built your soap, it got on a store shelf, you moved on to maybe

shampoo. But in a digital world, our products are never done. We don't package it up. We don't ship it. It doesn't go on a store shelf. We don't move on to the next product. Our digital products always evolve. There's always room for improvement. We have the tools and the mechanisms now to get constant feedback, which means we can constantly improve our products.

And that's really inspired more of a continuous mindset of how do we think about engaging with customers continuously, how do we build continuous feedback loops, so that our continuous improvements are good, right? They're the things that we should be doing. Well, for a lot of entrepreneurs, they like to build something and then ship it and then be done with it. So for a lot of people to go, wait, you want me to just keep thinking about this day in and day out? I mean, does that feel like a grind for a lot of the people you've coached?

It can. Again, we're fighting human nature a little bit here, right? We want to build a thing. We want to put it in the world. We want to call it success. What the internet is teaching us, one thing we got with the internet is it's really easy to observe behavior. It's really easy to observe impact. And what we're learning, sadly, is that our ideas don't have as much impact as we

originally thought. So I like to think about it as like for a lot of business, we flew blind, right? We only had lagging indicators. We could look at our sales numbers. We could look at revenue going up. But we couldn't always get at the why. Like, why are people buying this? What are they using it for?

How does it fit in their lives? It was a lot harder to get at that information. Whereas now at the Internet, we literally do. track everything. We can debate about whether that's good or not, but we do literally track everything. And we kind of have this window into what's causing revenue to go up. Why do people buy our products and services? Why do they use them over and over again or not? And we sort of assumed that people used our ideas, our stuff more often than they actually did. And so even though we probably want to launch something and move on to the next thing, because new ideas are shiny,

we're learning that if we want to have impact, which I think is the most important thing, can we actually have a positive impact on our customers' lives, we got to stick with it. We got to iterate when we fall short. We got to find ways to improve what we're offering. So you mentioned chasing all of these shiny ideas. As leaders, we have those all the time, like we mentioned, how do you start to validate these ideas so that they don't become time wasters that draw you away from having the impact that you want to have and hitting your goals? Yeah, I'm going to repeat what I said earlier because I feel like we need to a daily reminder of this, ideas are cheap. Too often we think that the idea is what's the value.

I'm sure everybody listening has had a friend that said, oh, I had the idea for Twitter before it existed, right? Insert your favorite product. Ideas are cheap. The work is in the execution. The work is in finding the version of that idea that will actually work, matching it with the right customers, matching it with the right market, getting all the little details right. And odds are, In fact, I don't know of a single instance. I would be shocked if one exists where somebody conjured up an idea and they built it exactly as is. And it worked perfectly with no edits, no revisions, no iterations. Right?

So like the real work in any business, this is not unique to digital products. The real work to any business is that iteration. It's that testing, it's those feedback loops. It's how do we evolve this so that it's a better fit for our customers so they engage with us more. So you've worked with a lot of big companies to help them do this. I'm thinking about the small business owner. They've got four people on their team. How can they do this?

If they don't have a lot of time or money, they can't go hire seven people to go out and do all of this research. What are some ways they can talk to their customers, create those feedback loops, and make their product better? Yeah, first of all, I'm a small business owner. I have a business of one. And I run this process. It's as small as you can get. I run this process myself. So I run a online training program. We offer courses, basically a knowledge business, right? I have a book. I have online courses. We do both public training and private training. Every single training I've ever designed happened through this same process. I had an idea. I found customers to test with. I iterated on it. We collect feedback. I say we because now I do have other instructors. They're not full-time employees, but I do have other instructors that teach my courses. But yeah, I eat my own dog food. That's sort of a

tech saying, but I really do live this process. And I really think it's, you know, we talk about this in the context of digital products and the age of the internet, but I think what we're talking about is bigger than that. I think it's a fundamental evolution in business and that digital product teams are leading the direction that business is going. So what do I mean by that? Like if we think industrial revolution, we get Taylorism, stopwatches and factories, optimizing for efficiency, right? And And then in the 60s we get Porter, who's all about strategy and the five forces, and differentiating not through efficiency, but by positioning. I think that this world of discovery in fast feedback cycles and iterating with your customer

is going to be that next big jump in business. Because it is a way to differentiate. It is a way to make sure you're creating value for your customers. And so while it's very steeped in the digital product world right now, I think it's broadly applicable, and I think anybody in every business. should be doing it. Let's talk about that feedback loop. Are there certain ways you found that are more helpful than others, for example, should I

call my customers coldly? Should I ask them to fill out a survey via a link and an email? What are the ways to get the best feedback? Because a lot of times, if I'm filling out a survey, there might be an incentive involved. Is that help or is it hurt? Because am I just kind of going through the motions to get a thing? What are the right ways to do this? Yeah, it kind of depends on your audience, and it kind of depends on what you're trying

to learn. So I'll say broadly, there's two categories of activities that we're going to do. The first is we're interviewing. That's a very qualitative activity. It's designed to be generative. Help me uncover what needs you have, where I can create value for you. And that's something I think is really important to be a conversation. So you get context, you get the full story.

I think it's really hard to get that type of research done through a survey. I know teams do it. I've seen those marketing surveys where people ask what features you want. but they're very unreliable. They don't lead to a lot of success. So the first piece is really having those rich conversations where we're getting that generative insights. Where are there gaps in your customers' worlds today? And then I think there's a second activity which I tend to call assumption testing. Some people just call it experimentation. But regardless of what you call it, it's this idea of you start with an assumption and you're trying to collect data to evaluate, is there a risk

in that assumption. So for your context, is it mostly true or mostly false? How do you evaluate that? And that's where we might get into more quantitative methods like surveys. In both instances, so in the one hand, on the interviewing side, we're generating insights. On the assumption testing or experimenting side, we're evaluating our theories. So that's sort of a way to think about both of those. In both cases, it's really key that we do a little bit, we learn a little bit about what gets us reliable responses. So how do we ask those questions in a reliable way? And when we talk about this, there's going to be people who love the product service experience and there's going to be people who hate it. What is the value in having both of those? And how do you kind of take it all with a

grain of salt? Because some people might give you a one star because they were just having a bad day. Some people just love you for some reason and they're always going to give you the five star. How do you kind of balance all of the feedback? This is exactly why we want to have rich conversations with folks, right? If we just run a survey and say, what do you think of this product and we get that whole gamut of one to fives, we don't have context. We don't know for the people that loved it, why they loved it. We don't know for the people that disliked it, why they disliked it. We often see people dislike products because they're not the target customer, right? And that's, we shouldn't adapt and change everything to meet their needs if they're not the target customer.

That's going to come at the cost of the people who are your target customer. So I think this is the role of interviewing is really diving in and understanding in that rich context and getting really clear about this is who my ideal customer is. This is who I'm designing for. And then making sure you're getting feedback from them. And that if you do get feedback from people outside of them, you've got to set that aside. And maybe eventually, if you hear enough of that feedback, you might decide there's another customer segment we can go after and you can choose to do that. But for the most part, we want to focus on the feedback that's coming from the people that we are choosing to serve. And a lot of people make the mistake of trying to serve everybody. And there's

very few products that serve everybody. And the ones that do did not start out that way. So yeah, I'm thinking about that person who there's a squeaky wheel and they have one complaint and you go change the product just for them when it wasn't the right move. So you're saying you need to have enough of that feedback that you're going, oh, this is a trend that we're seeing. And we agree this is a problem that would make for a better customer experience if we solved it. Yeah. Let's talk through an analogy here because I think it'll help. Like, let's say that we're running a grocery store, right? And if we think about grocery stores, there's a lot of variation.

We have chains like Whole Foods that is a little bit higher end. Amazon's changing that, I think, but used to be a little bit higher end, going for a more upper class sort of socioeconomic group. And then we have maybe like the Albertsons, the lucky, I can't even, that company's bought so many grocery stores. I don't know their current brands. but they're more on the lower end everyday grocery store. Let's say you work at Whole Foods and you get feedback from your customers that things cost too much.

That may not be feedback you're going to act on, right? Because your target customer isn't price sensitive, they're quality sensitive. And so even though a customer is telling you, hey, this costs too much, in fact, the joke about Whole Foods is its whole paycheck, right? But the people who make that joke are not Whole Foods target customer. So what do we do with that feedback? We can react to it, but to lower prices, we have to lower quality. And when we lower quality, we move away from our target customer. Now, if we look at the Albertson's lucky, whatever that chain is now called, I think they're buying Safeway or they are Safeway.

They're the opposite, right? If their customers say, hey, things are too expensive, they want to take that seriously because they're going after the coupon clippers and the people who want deals. So it's not that all feedback is equally valid or we should act on all feedback. We have to put that feedback into context. What type of customer is telling us this? How desirable is that customer to us? And that will vary by business. That's super helpful.

And I'm curious as to how you get people on the phone. You're talking about interviewing is the best way to get this feedback. I think about the, you know, I get off the phone with the customer service and it says, hang on the line for a brief, sir. And I'm like, nope, I'm good. Yeah. No, thank you. Don't care enough. How do you actually get people to go through with this process, to kind of be the rat in the maze, if you will, to go, right? You're going to be the guinea pig. Yeah, so the first thing is, this is universal across all businesses. You've got to frame the ask in a way

that benefits the customer. I'll tell you, I get emails all the time from companies, and they're so generic. Hey, we are trying to improve our product, and we'd love to hear from you. Will you help us with our research? I have never once. Even as the product discovery person, I have, have never once said yes to those emails. Why? I don't know what you're doing in the research. I don't know what you want to learn about. I don't know if I'm the right person to help you, and I don't know what's in it for me, right? Now, if instead I get an email that says, hey, Teresa, you use this specific product and it looks like you're using this feature. We're working on improving that feature and we'd love to hear how you use it. If I care about

that feature, I'm saying yes to that every single time, right? Because we want the products and services that we use to get better. So we want, the first thing is, is making sure that the way that you ask creates value for the customer, not just for the business. The second thing is, we can remove a lot of unknowns. Don't say we're inviting you to participate in research. That sounds scary. That sounds like I'm going to be a lab rat. I don't want to be a lab rat. Communicate. You want to have a conversation. I want to hear a story about how you use this feature. Okay, great. I love talking about myself. Welcome to tell you a story about how I use that feature. Right? All humans love talking about themselves. Now you feel special and unique. Exactly. If someone cares about you and your

experience. Exactly. And then the mechanism, like, how do I actually reach out to a customer, is going to vary quite a bit by company. So if you're a consumer company, like let's say you're a Facebook or a Netflix, you don't have to have their level of traffic, but a company like that, you can recruit people while they're using your product or service. So you can put in an ask somewhere within your product. We're seeing this a lot more often, just like you see people do like net promoter score surveys, you can use that same kind of embedded mechanism to just say, hey, do you have 20 minutes to tell us about your experience with X? If you work in a B2B product and you might have to use like your sales team and your account management teams to get

access to your customers, if you're a small business, you might have to like go to where your customers are, right? Do they go to a conference? Can you go interview people at a conference? Is there somewhere as part of their day where they're waiting in line? waiting in line is boring. Go talk to them while they're waiting in line. So the key is to really think about where do your customers hang out? What's the easiest place to reach them where they have excess time? So it's easy for them to say yes. So I'm thinking, you know, aside from digital products, if I'm in landscaping, would it be worth my time to say, hey, Teresa, you're a customer of ours. I want to give you a free Mo. All we ask is that you kind of share how we could make this experience better.

at the end of it. Is that a good incentive that would cause you to give us good feedback? Yeah, incentives are complex. So arguably, if I'm giving you a gift, it's going to color your feedback, right? You're going to be more positive. This is the best company ever. They gave me a free mo. Not the most helpful. Now, if what I care about is I'm good at interviewing and I know how to uncover the story and I know how to uncover your needs around maintaining your lawn, the incentive may not interfere with that. Now, if what I'm looking for is just superficial feedback, how are we doing, the incentive absolutely is going to interfere with that. I'll also share that I don't think most businesses have to offer an incentive at all. I think what they need to do is position it as being

beneficial to the customer. So if you tell me, you're going to make a part of your product better for me, I don't need an incentive to tell you how you can make your product better for me. right? And the key to that is most people, when they interview their customers, they're really selling. They're saying, hey, look how great my product is. Nobody wants to be sold. The key is to flip that on its head and learn about your customer. So the interview isn't really about your product at all. It's about your customer. And again, all humans love to talk about themselves. So when you interview well, what inevitably happens is your customer says, wow, that was great. When can we do it again? I love that. It's like a great first date where it wasn't just someone talking at you. They were asking good questions. That you can steal that one, Teresa. That'll make me feel really good. So for leaders listening out there, they want to start adopting this. They want to never run out of great ideas. They want to have these feedback loops. How do they start adopting this method into their teams this week? What's a good first step they can take? Yeah, don't overthink it. So I tell teams, I want to see you talking to a customer every week. That can feel really overwhelming. If you've never talked to you. I've never talked to you. I'm going to talk to you. I'm going to talk to you. I'm going to you're talking to you. I tell teams. I don't know, I'm a customer every week. That can feel really overwhelming. I'm a lot. I'm a lot a customer, ignore the every week part. Find one customer to talk to you. Right? Anybody. And it doesn't even actually have to be a customer, right? Find somebody who's like your customer. So I worked with a company. They were a bank. Banks are regulated. They had all these rules about who was allowed to talk to customers and how they were going to talk to customers. And I was like, okay, great, let me make sure I

understand your business. You're a bank. You sell checking accounts and savings accounts. And they're like, yeah, I go, and I mean, I get that your bank is amazing, but as your checking account and savings account meaningfully different from, say, any other bank in the U.S. that offers checking and savings accounts, and, you know, of course, they're like, yeah, we have all these features. I'm like, yeah, but at the core of it, like, do your customers bank in a different way than other bank customers? And they were like, no. I said, great, you can go talk to any human who has a bank account. you don't have to ask them where they bank, so you're not going to violate any of your company's rules

because you're not talking to your... Compliance is happening. Yeah, you're not talking to your customers, you're just talking to people who have bank accounts. So that's the other thing to keep in mind is that if you're not sure how to find your exact customers, what you want to ask is, can I find someone who is meaningfully similar to my customer?

So if your customer is really budget conscious, you want to find people who are really budget conscious. If your customer has pain points about maintaining their lawn, who their gardener is right now does not matter. What matters is uncovering those pain points about the lawn. So this is where focusing on the customer and not on the specific product helps make recruiting a lot easier. That's huge. And it starts with knowing who your customer is, knowing what you're aiming at, and then going through that process to get there. These are so helpful. Teresa, thank you so much for the tips. We love your work here at Entree Leadership and at Ramsey Solutions.

and we're so grateful you joined us today. Oh, thanks for having me. All right, good stuff from Teresa there. If you guys enjoyed today's episode of the show, be sure to follow or subscribe and give us a five-star review wherever you're listening. And share this episode with your team, with your friends, or on social media.

You can follow us on social at Entree Leadership. And if you enjoyed this podcast, Entree Leadership, check out some of the other great podcasts from the Ramsey Network like the Rachel Cruz Show. Until next time, keep learning and keep leading.