Talk with your Customers

You shouldn’t let your customers position your product for you, but you should talk to your customers as part of the positioning process.

This is especially true for open source projects (in which your ‘customers’ are just your active users and/or non-maintainer contributors) and SaaS products with a low-touch sales process. It’s less important if you have a high-touch sales process with a team of sales reps and sales engineers and implementation specialists — but still a good idea even in those cases.

A fair amount of positioning is simply applying critical thinking skills to look at your product or open source project. But positioning also requires understanding your customers’ pain points, what they would do about those pain points if your product / project did not exist and how your customers would describe your product to a colleague. You have to get inside your customers’ heads to know the answers to those questions — and talking to the customer is the only way to get there.

Know you should talk to your customers, but not sure where to start? I’m hosting a webinar on Friday at 10am PT about how and why to talk with customers. Register here.