I work with Fortune 500 companies and startups, CEOs, CMOs and founders. One methodology that’s a part of nearly every project I engage in, regardless of the size of the company, is qualitative customer interviews.

There are myriad benefits to speaking with your customers, one-on-one, by phone, for 15 to 20 minutes at a time. Here are 10:

1. They think about your products and services differently than you think about them.
2. You will understand how the real world benefits from what you create and deliver.
3. They speak about emotion (outputs) and your instinct is to speak about functionality and specifications (inputs). They describe how your product improves their lives. You describe how your product works. Guess which language is the more powerful for marketing?
4. You will become a better leader, making more effective decisions, if you know how customers describe your product or service.
5. You will learn how people use your product or service.
6. You will understand how they think and talk about your product and service.
7. And, critically, you will uncover what they want from your product or service.
8. Once you have this information, you are in possession of the most resonant, relevant and compelling language to your market. Why? Because this language comes from your market.
9. I submit that it’s physically impossible for you to create language that is more emotional and resonant than the language your market give you during qualitative interviews.
10. If you’re not doing this, you’re just guessing from a conference room.

And to drive the point home: If you are not involving qualitative customer insights in your marketing formulation, I believe you are being negligent. This is incredibly easy, and it doesn’t take long at all. And if you don’t want to do it yourself, you can always have an expert (ahem!) handle it for you.

Gather customer insights. It’s the best thing you can do for your marketing.

My new book, Evangelist Marketing, is 288 pages on topics like this one.