Episode 182: Your Customers Can Teach You How to Sell to Them. Here’s How (FS182)

One huge risk in modern small business is to spend months or years working on a project only to release it… and find nobody wants it. Show Notes: FizzleShow.co/182 Entrepreneurship has *risk* at the heart of it. We manage risk. Some of us manage that risk well. Others poorly. Most of us don’t plan for risk very well, but we’ve got enough tenacity to make changes on the fly as we learn. So, what if you could reduce the risk of your business? What if you could make your project or business or campaign *more likely to succeed*? What if you could do that right now, without creating a [business plan] or [designing prototypes] or even [naming your business]? Would you do it? And if I told you it had something to do with talking honestly, curiously and candidly with potential customers — doing more listening than talking, in fact — would that make you nervous? Or would it excite you? It probably bums you out a little. **Talking to customers can be hard, but it will literally make your business more likely to succeed over the long-haul.** Now, when we at Fizzle talk about talking to customers we actually mean a very specific methodology. We teach that method in [this course]. It involves anchor questions, follow up questions, insights about finding people to talk to, etc. But for those of you who might be new to this way of talking to customers, we wanted to create a podcast episode where we talk you through what we think are the most important pieces of this process. This conversation will be especially helpful if your business is online and you, like many of us, spend more time talking AT your customers than you do talking WITH your customers… … because feedback from these people can change the course of your business success forever. Enjoy!