Twenty plus years ago I left a robust corporate career behind and launched a consulting practice.  Certainly, when I left the telecommunications industry and corporate environment, I felt I had achieved a great ROI on the first 17 years of my career.  However, as a professional in the marketing world, I did feel something was missing.  In fact, it was the direct connection to the MARKET and the customers.  I could see that slipping away then and today, with so much marketing technology in place – it’s further away than ever.

Moving up often means getting too far away | FTF Time Wins

As a marketing leader in a large company, my duties were focused on motivating and leading my team, setting goals and objectives, and reporting into the top of the company with results from various programs.  I had to fight for fact-to-face time with the sales team, field managers, and customers.   My favorite programs always included actual customers and/or partners namely – Customer Advisory Boards, programs in the field in competitive markets, and identifying and qualifying partners when that opportunity presented itself.  I often felt bogged down with administrative duties that didn’t leave me time to do the outreach with the field.  Yet I felt, marketing needed to be balanced with both traditional quantitative and select qualitative research to be effective.

The best opportunity for me to have direct customer interaction came when I was sent to Asia to build our markets there.   We virtually had no product, brand, or customer track record in this part of the world.  It was a clean late – a tabula rasa!  Every outreach to a potential customer large, state-run telecommunications enterprises required a consultative sell.  It was also a very raw type of market research using a lot of creativity and grit to identify challenges and potential solutions in this wide open “market.”    Here I learned out to “test” a value proposition real time.  I also learned that in many cases, the best way to enter a market is through forming partnerships.  Long before today’s formal partner programs, partnering was a matter of identifying key complementary roles that each could play and sharing a vision for a market – a simple, but critical principle.  It was equally important to engage with partners to understand their needs and priorities in order to set the right expectations.

It’s Powerful to Listen to the Market | Observing Forward

Fast forward to my years as a consultant, I have many examples of the impact of value proposition testing – an opportunity to work with a third party to ask the right strategic questions and engage the client in a conversation that demonstrates you are listening and willing to pivot if needed.   This is very high-level market research and a type that should be done by someone with a wide range of experiences upon which to draw.  The conversation is mostly held with a top tier decision maker and the person initiating the conversation should be their peer in terms of years and/or experience.

One cannot argue that digitation and now generative AI have made customer targeting and filling the sales pipeline more efficient.   At the same time, however, it also takes the face-to-face strategic conversations with customers and partners more inaccessible.   Such conversations assure that both the timing and efficacy of a product or new market entry makes sense.  Based on my experience and consulting engagements – I believe this part of the short-term market research process is more important than ever.   I would advocate strongly to invest in this marketing step in collaboration with the sales and partner team but engage an outsider to actually do the work.  You may be surprised at what you hear and in the long run, it will pay to take a step back to move much further forward in launching new markets and products.