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3 Steps to Customer Intuition

Guest post by: Rebel Brown

Article Overview: Numbers and facts will tell you the same thing everyone else, including your competitors, knows. Your customer intuition is what sets you apart. Find it, and use it!

3 Steps to Customer Intuition

Wanna be a market leader? Apply your intuition. You know what I mean, that feeling that tells us a product idea has legs, a story is going to sell, a customer segment is going to love our new idea. You just know when you're on the right track. If you think like your customers.

Custom intuition makes or breaks our business. When we're in sync with our customers - we soar. Just look at Apple. When we lose our gut feel for our audience, we spiral downward.

Customer intuition used to be an easy thing. Not anymore. Customer intuition is a tricky thing in today's warp speed world. Our intuition can go from 'right on' to outdated' in a matter of months. We have to stay in touch with our customers to keep our gut feel tuned to their thoughts and needs.

We get lots of chances to tune our customer intuition.

We're involved with our customers on a daily basis. We interact with our markets and competitors and partners all the time. What better way to tune our instincts than grounding our intuition in pure market reality. How?

1. Talk with customers and partners often. This is a no-brainer but too often we forget. We get stuck in the office for week after week. Before we know it we get stuck in a rut, assuming what our audiences want based on history. That's a sure way to let intuition go stale. What was true six months ago could be on its way to ancient history today.

2. Speaking of history - study it. Just don't wallow in it. Great strategies leverage lessons from yesterday's successes, and failures. Note, I said ‘leverage' not 'repeat'. What happened in the past won't work today. Apply that experience, tune it to match today's customer reality.

3. Talk to Objective Experts. No matter how hard we focus, we can still be stuck in the status quo. That's where experts come to the rescue. Find an expert who eats, breathes and lives the intricate details of your market and customers. Use them as your eyes and ears.

Numbers and facts will tell you the same thing that everyone else, including your competition, knows.

Your customer intuition is what sets you apart. Find it, and use it!

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  Intuition Listening and Noticing Alert Is A Way of Leadership
  Cultivating Intuition
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  Should I Decide with My Head or My Gut?
  The Art of Growing Your Intuition: Journaling Your Way to Success
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  It Takes G.R.I.T. to Win More Sales
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Article Tags: customer focus, customer intuition, defying gravity, status quo



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