Why Products Stall (use VOC to Fix It) | Dave Kern

Find out how a Fractional CMO can get the right questions answered from the right audience. https://meshagency.com/fcmo-fractional-cmo-fractional-marketing/

Connect with Bill https://www.linkedin.com/in/founderandcdo/

Connect with Dave Kern https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-kern-dkny/

Product stalls aren’t engineering problems—they’re listening problems. Dave Kern joins us to unpack practical Voice of Customer (VOC), why brand awareness matters before the sales call, and simple, low-cost ways to validate direction without bias.

00:00 Brand awareness & Why VOC isn’t optional
01:36 Meet David Kern — data over opinions
05:15 VOC 101: quant vs. qual, why it matters
07:25 Case study: “our users aren’t on social”… until the data says they are
12:49 From low awareness to lift: education-first digital done right
15:25 What sales wishes prospects knew before the meeting
18:10 Simplify the science; visuals that help, not distract
22:53 Getting buy-in: start small → scale VOC
26:09 Selling into systems: trust, advocates & avoiding “me-too”
31:08 Quick wins: tap networks + one-question polls
40:39 Segmentation, hidden influencers & avoiding bias
47:31 Wrap-up

Too many teams “build it and they will come.” 

They won’t. 

Dave Kern breaks down how Voice of Customer turns foggy assumptions into crisp direction—so marketing educates, sales accelerates, and product lands. We talk brand warm-up (why strangers won’t buy), short educational content that stops the scroll, and how to run quick, bias-resistant validation without a six-figure research budget. Dave shares practical patterns: use social polls to test beliefs fast, ask the Five Whys to get past surface answers, and interview the people who didn’t buy to find the real friction. We also cover avoiding KOL-only echo chambers, sizing the true reachable audience, and framing VOC for execs who want outcomes, not research theater.

Stop Guessing, Start Hearing: Dave Kern’s 3 VoC Power Plays
Tip 1 — Pre-commit to the decision your question will drive:
 Before you draft a survey or book interviews, list the 3–5 product/marketing decisions you’ll make based on the answers (e.g., “If ≥60% say X, we build Feature A first”). Use a tight, 10-question cap, apply the Five Whys to 2–3 core items, and split audiences (KOLs vs. everyday users). Aim for a fast N=20 “sanity pass” via short calls + one-click social polls; anonymize responses so titles don’t sway outcomes.
Tip 2 — Warm the market while you listen (90-day runway):
 Run education-first content (problem → science → implication) in paid/organic social to the exact audience you’re interviewing. Ask sales, “What do you wish they knew before you walk in?” and turn that into 60–120s explainers. Tag everything with UTMs, equip reps with the same assets, and track leading indicators (video completions, return visitors, branded search) so brand lift and VoC learnings compound.
Tip 3 — Design out bias in the room and the sample:
 Don’t let KOLs speak for the market. Include “no” and “lost” accounts, set a quota for late-majority users, and add 3–5 disconfirming interviews. In workshops use silent ideation → dot-vote to equalize voices, time-box discussion, and name a single decision-maker with a decision deadline. Document assumptions in a one-pager and “red team” them before you spend.

Burning budget on noise? Audit with an FCMO → keep what works.
https://meshagency.com/fcmo-fractional-cmo-fractional-marketing/

#VoiceOfCustomer #MedtechMarketing #GoToMarket

Transcript

0:00

Why is brand awareness so important? Our team was handicapped already by going out and not having a lot of time to spend with customers. Our brand awareness R&D attribute association just skyrocketed. That's because we did the research upfront to understand what the customers needed, what they wanted to hear or needed to hear. Welcome to life site continuum. I'm Bill Schick, your fractional chief marketing officer. Today, we're digging into the three big ideas to decide whether your launch stalls or scales. Why voice of customer isn't optional and how leaders get it wrong. And the hard truth that even big brands struggle to sell without the right story and targeting. You can really understand what makes your customer segments tick, and you can also begin to think about what position do we really want to own in this market space? Right now, we're just throwing spaghetti on the wall and hoping that it sticks. I mean, we didn't have a position. We didn't have the positioning statements. We didn't really have any message architecture. See, too many teams think they can optimize later. But if you skip real customer insight and rely on proxies, you'll burn money. Misread demand. Make it harder for sales to break through. So today we'll look at how you turn evidence based marketing into revenue, even in regulated niche markets. To impact this, I invited David Kern, executive marketing leader across biotech, pharma and medtech, a former client and now a good friend. When we just execute and don't necessarily understand our customers, we're just going through the motions. He's led multi-million dollar budgets and delivered award winning strategies by aligning cross-functional teams around data and not wishful thinking. Avoid reaching out to your colleagues that aren't going to give you the answer that you want to hear. That will skew your entire working campaign to what you think you want to do and what you think is right. By the end of this episode, you'll walk away with the toolkit from running practical voice of Customer. What to ask, what to avoid, and how to kill bias. Using education first social to create demand without a hard sell and giving sales what they need before they knock. Clear positioning, realistic targeting and measurable signals that shorten the path from first touch to closed one. All right, let's get to it. Thanks for hopping on with me today. Looking forward to this discussion. Thank you for having me. I mean, we've worked together a bit in the past, and we've had some good conversations around digital marketing. Voice of customer taking products to market. And, I think today, you want to you want to talk a little bit about voice of customer work and why why it's so important. Yeah, absolutely. It's the cornerstone, I think, of what marketers are really need to do to have effective campaigns and understand where to go and look for markets. Is that your particular superpower? I would say I would say yes, really trying to understand what is motivating the customer base, the customer, they're trying to reach to and really trying to build a robust plan that articulates the brand and the company position to meet those needs that you've uncovered through voice of customer voice, the customer spans a pretty broad spectrum. You know, your classic brand marketing, your medical marketing, messaging, positioning. So voice the customer is really a crux of identifying how it is you want to approach the business and what problem you're trying to solve, or how you want to meet the needs of your of your target audience. So, yeah, I think it's a great place to, to review and discuss. Is there a particular other story or scenario where you could point to it and say, so this is this is what I'm passionate about. And here's an example of it. Like it just clicking and and the benefits or, you know, however you would share that a couple of companies ago, a very large company, we were in a very crowded market space and I would say market research voice a customer during our annual budgeting process was always the first thing to get cut. And because I think senior leadership is trying to make a budget goal, right, like we all are. If you haven't worked in this capacity and you're just looking at your numbers, or is the customer just sound sort of nebulous if you will. It's kind of out there. What does it really mean and how do you execute against it. How are the organization somehow came to terms with understanding the importance of really doing the hard work upfront? And they actually put us through what I would call a, a boot camp. You know, I won't name names, but this person is very, who led this course is very prevalent on LinkedIn. Just a phenomenal, individual in terms of it teaching, educating, individuals within different marketing classes of products. And it sort of revolutionized how we thought about, our business in his mantra was really understanding what the market needs are to key market research and then developing from there. And that was sort of the basis of, of that moment from a case study perspective, just like from your perspective, when we talk about voice of customer, how do you define that? I define where's the voice, the customer? There's a couple different ways I define it. One is from a quantitative perspective. When you're going out to your target audiences, because it can be you could be communicating to, the general public. You could be communicating to, physicians, decision makers. So it's a little bit different in terms of your voice of customer audience. And you want to tailor, I think, your research approach to that. So I think about it from a quantitative perspective, where we're trying to identify key correlations, between, their intended thoughts or their intended actions and their actual behaviors. And, another piece of that would be, you know, the the qualitative aspect of it, which is really getting in and doing the I call out, rolling up sleeves, you know, the resume joke, sitting behind the glass, really answering, asking the questions, having a discussion from a qualitative perspective. So it's pretty basic, but it's the, you know, the your classic quantitative and qualitative approach to identifying. We see we see a lot of, companies tend to just not even consider doing it. Or like you said, when they're they're looking closely at budgets, being frugal, maybe cutting it and why why would you why do you believe that voice of customer is important? I believe voice of customer is important because in the whole marketing planning continuum, it establishes all of your strategies and tactics that are going to help you achieve the goals and objectives that you've set forth. I think many times, and I'm as guilty as this is, you know, as anyone in this space is kind of beginning with the end in mind and just focusing solely on just focusing solely on executing. And when we just execute and don't necessarily understand our customers, we're just just going through the motions. I believe as an example, I currently have a client where, you know, they've been with me for a few years now, and in the first year, one of our, recommended tactics was paid promotion in social media. And for a med device company, you know, whose audience is pretty narrow. They they couldn't really wrap their heads around it. They'd never done digital marketing at all. And they just felt like, well, you know, our users aren't on Facebook to quote them. And what we were trying to tell them is that the customers were telling us this is where they're spending their time and where they get a lot of their information. Not Facebook specifically, but social media, different channels. And, they were really resistant for about six months. And every conversation that we had or like, should have been worse. You know, we're spending a lot of money here. We're not you know, we haven't made a sale. And in medical devices, that's kind of a, you know, they're always kind of looking at where the leads are coming in, where the new business and how what accounts to bring in. And what we were able to do is show them the data. We came into sorry, we came into a meeting, after six months, and they said, we've just unilaterally decided to cut this part of what we're doing, and we want to redirect our resources elsewhere. And then I pulled up their dashboard that they have access to, and I scrolled to the social media activity, and then it accounted for about 77% of the traffic and activity. That was driving awareness, of their thought leadership team. And getting, you know, filling that funnel for them. But they just didn't have visibility. They didn't have the experience. And without those things, they also weren't listening to the customer. And so it is it is important as part of your, your work, if you're spending your time, you know, promoting through channels where your customers aren't just wasting your you like you said, you're going through the motions. You know, before that, actually, when you and I work together, you you trigger memory in the digital marketing efforts that we deployed. And I think that was a really strong success. And that is one area where I think it took a it took a while for senior leadership to get their heads around it. And it really articulated, just as you described, where, this whole digital marketing, social media, it's not, you know, it's too large. How do you really laser focus into it? And, you know, I, I distinctly remember the initial research that we did together. And I remember just literally writing the questions with you. It's really to really get to the point of, what are we trying to understand with our customers? And we designed, right, considered to be a really robust campaign around that from a digital perspective. And if you remember what we found, the research is a our customers didn't know even what our brand name was. Our brand awareness was so low. And when they could identify our our brand attributes, the associated them with our competitor. So we had no brand recognition. And when we did have brand recognition, they replied to our our competitor. And you know, you wisely brought forth, hey, this, this digital is digital efforts. It was very, I think it was approached with a very cautious lens from senior management because they didn't necessarily believe that our customer base, a had the time to spend time, scrolling on their phones or looking at social media, or were interested in it. But if you recall, we were in that campaign for a period of time and our, our brand awareness, our brand attribute association just skyrocketed, as because we did the research up front to understand what the customers needed, what they wanted to hear or needed to hear. And then we were able to show senior leadership, the results of those interactions and how much it improved or overall brand attribute scores. Yeah. And I remember that. Well, it's a it's a really great case study because, I think when people think about, paid promotion on social media, they think about putting a product out there like a product features video, like, here's our product, here's what it can do. Buy it. And that's not how that works. What we've found and what we applied in this situation was really leading with education. And rather than, than, you know, kind of jamming the product out there, we lead with the science behind, why your market was experiencing some of the pain points they were experiencing. Like what drives that, what the cost of that is, and just educating them on something, they just, they just didn't get and then leading, kind of leading them through breadcrumbs to the product conversation. So we, we, we talk about things like brand awareness, you know, in this space just to kind of hammer at home. Why is brand awareness so important? Quick interruption I've got an offer for med device and life science companies doing at least 3 million a year. But dealing with growth challenges. The first step is really easy. Just connect with me on LinkedIn. The details are below. The rest is to follow. That's it. Let's get back to the podcast. Why is brand awareness so important? Why was that key to this? You know, maybe in this particular situation especially, it was, you know, key for a lot of different reasons. But when I try to distill it down to why it was so important is because one of our competitors was a behemoth and we were just kind of chipping away at Mount Everest. Right. We're at the base near this colossal mountain, and when our customers didn't even know that we existed, it was hard for our field team who are communicating to our customers to even begin to to have a discussion or dialog with our, our customer base. So when our team, our team was handicapped already by going out and not having a lot of time to spend with customers in the first place to deliver this a, and you're already beginning in a place where no one even knows who you are. You know, it's just it's propagation. Yeah. It's very challenging to to overcome that until you build that base of awareness. I actually remember the meeting where, this, this all came up because we were, we were sort of we have a process and some frameworks that we go through, and we were beating our heads against a wall a little bit in trying to get to, what it was that we needed to communicate to really get into, the heads and, and stay there, you know, in typically in the work we do, the audience is, you know, they're critical thinkers. They're really smart, they're independent. They they want to figure it out themselves. They don't want to be sold to. And you're right, they are really, really busy. And so we had to figure out exactly what it was that would kind of check all those boxes and get them to start warming up to considering, really changing, a key part of a procedure they were doing. And in the call with the sales team, you know, I sort of. And this was off the cuff. This is a question that I never asked before, but in the moment, it sort of hit me, with, with all the, the challenges the sales team was having, like you said, it was it was getting harder. I think at the time it was almost impossible to get into, physically in the door, into a health care system, you know, into a hospital. And if you were able to at all get some kind of connection there, get some kind of meeting. Wow. You had very little time. And so what we found is that, you know, the question was, what do you wish? And this was to the salespeople, what do you wish they knew before you walked in the door? And there were two answers to that one. I wish they knew who we were. And I wish they understood the science of what we're doing because we were built to solve this big problem in the market. And, we, we we thought about that a bit. And for us, we can't just go out and, you know, you know, with, I guess, limited budgets, we can't just splash the name everywhere because first of all, it's waste money. Second, nobody cares. You know, there's so much noise out there. So if you just throw that name out there, I mean, we can hammer home repetition, but the cost to the company to get that to happen and the impact of it, it just doesn't make sense. So what we decided to do was lead with educational content first. And then of course, feeding it through social media. Why would we do that? It was a multifaceted campaign. So we got it in the hands of the sales team. And, you know, it's on the website and things, but, in social media, we can target the audience pretty closely. And put that out there in front of them. And since we're treating it as education first and it's not promotional, it, it taps into that natural curiosity, and leading with a problem. So are you experiencing this problem? And are you kind of tired of it and you want to fix it? Here's the science behind why that happens. And there's new science and new technology to address that. And then we eventually get down to the product. But we're we're tapping into their their natural curiosity and problem solving thinking. And I remember that was, you know, without getting into the details, I was insanely, effective in that first salvo. If you will, of of getting out there. Yeah. And that's a that's a great point. And I remember this, like it was yesterday in terms of before really implementing a, a robust voice, a customer, program. The science that was attempting to be communicated was very complex, very disjointed, very hard to understand. And through the voice, the customer, we were able to really distill that messaging down, really distill the educational down to what was most important to, to the customers. I mean, I remember just getting way down into the weeds of just cellular biology that was like, no, nobody. You know, we were way too deep for this, for this audience. We raised our it simplified our approach. That was to your point, very effective. Yeah. I think, at one point when we were looking at creating assets, we were we were landing in the, the land, 15 to 20 minute explainer videos where, like, they're never going to watch this. It's too long, it's too deep. You know, there's a little bit of a hook, but it's not quite there. And where we ended up with was about it's just shy of two minutes. It's I think our target was 90s, but wow, we could not we could not squeeze it in. But when you're, when you're framing out an entire story. So starting with a problem, agitating the problem, explaining kind of why it's happening and kind of bigger implications for the patient and for the, for the doctor and for the hospital system. That's a lot to tell in a short period of time. And I think at a couple of different levels, one of the one of the challenges I think we ran into is there was there was an, I think, an initial mandate to make the presentation, like even just the animate and the medical animations look as realistic as possible. And that was something that that took a lot of, coaxing to say we're focusing on the wrong thing. What will what we my experience has been is if you're too close on things like the presentation, like it looks you you get the animation 3D and hyper realistic. If it's if it's actually too realistic, but it's not quite there, the audience starts critiquing the presentation of the information, meaning that, you know, that isn't exactly there and that doesn't look like that. And they're not actually listening to the message anymore, and it's distracting. So we decided to move in in the opposite direction. And and, you know, we're not getting into one of those silly whiteboard videos, but simplifying it down to just the elements we needed to tell the story without it being distracting. And so the visuals supported the science. They didn't get in the way of communicating the value. And that's a small detail, but it's core to, I think, what, what we want to do, which is don't let the vehicle get in the way of the message that you're you're trying to tell. Yes, that's what I said. And, you know, voice of customer research can be humbling as well for, for the for the team. Right, for the marketing team, for, our advertising partners. Because we can come in with our own preconceived notions. And I'm highly guilty of this. And thinking that it's going to be just this phenomenal message, you know, deliverable strategy. And it's really if you don't have that voice, that customer, you know, you're unable to pivot, adjust and make it for what the customer needs. We're kind of stuck with our hubris with what we think is correct, but a lot of times isn't right. So so let's talk. We've sort of talked around it a little bit, but so voice of customer for this particular story. We, we didn't lead with voice of customer initially. It wasn't on the table as part of the budget or the strategy. We, you know, in our, in our work, we had noted that typically we would have a little bit more conversation, but initially, senior leadership in the sales team acted as a proxy for voice of customer. And that really drove some of the initial work. And then and then further down the line, I think you, you really spearheaded this for this client and said, we need this. We need to get our kols in here. We need to hear, you know, what the market is saying. We need to get out there with people who don't know us, and get them talking. So what? Maybe talk a little bit about getting that going. Yeah. How was that? Was, a lot of, I guess, uphill, work in the beginning. Right? It was. I think you said it. Well, and getting that whole voice of customer, I think initiative in place, a couple different ways. We've got that done. One where I remember I convinced a few folks are we convinced a few folks that let's at least talk to maybe 5 or 6. Let's get it initial, you know, qualitative sample, with our customers. And I remember that was that was not an easy conversation either. And this is smaller companies. So I understand the the budgets are tight but hoping to understand the bigger picture. So let's just start really small and at least build a case around it. And just from those initial interactions with that, one on one interviews that we did, I think really opened the eyes to a lot of senior leadership that, wow, they don't know who we are, they don't know what our brand stands for, and they can they can pick us out of a lineup with our competitors, you know. So it was eye opening. And it's also eye opening for senior leadership when they've got, you know, budgetary objectives to meet. And you're trying to influence your share price, especially when you're a small startup organization. So to them, that was I think that was a very intriguing proposition of, okay, this is what our customers have said. Then we we're able to, actually share with them some case studies from previous organizations I had worked at. I know you brought in some examples of work that you and your team have done in the past that really demonstrated that if you do an effective voice of customer, program, you can really you can really understand what makes your customer segments tick. And you can also begin to think about what position do we really want to own in this market space. Right now, we're just throwing spaghetti on the wall and hoping that it sticks. Though I remember we didn't have a position, we didn't only positioning statements, we didn't really have any message or architecture, established. And if we did, it was it was just of loosely thought about or loosely considered. So it's just a lot of tactical execution. Spaghetti on the wall. So I think being able to I know I'm kind of going on a tangent here, but being able to, get that initial buy into at lease, let us talk to some of our customers, interact in a qualitative format, and then let's go from there. And I think that just it just snowballed from there into, more qualitative focus groups, additional large quantitative, which is an A2, which no one really knew what that meant in the organization. It took some convincing as well. And, you know, that just spearheaded everything. And you just you saw, you know, what happened was a hockey stick in terms of our awareness, and most importantly, our utilization of our product went up as well, dramatically. So it really worked. Absolutely. You made a really great point with, brand awareness and that the, you know, maybe leadership didn't have necessarily the right read, on how much the market knew or understood about us. And that's, that's important because regardless of the industry we're in, and even on a personal level, we we buy products from people we know we like and we trust. You talk to any good sales person out there and they will tell you they can sell much more easily into an account that knows the company, that they have a relationship with. It's why why companies hire seasoned sales reps with connections. Because it's easier to sell to the people you know. And what building the brand does is it softens up the market. It warms them up before you go in and try to I mean, even just switching to a, a very similar product, you know, it's it's the same in every way. There's just this one little tweak we made that makes our product better than that one. Yeah. But I don't know you, you know, you just showed us your startup. You just showed up yesterday. Why should I trust you? You know, and then the bigger picture piece of it is you're not. You're not just selling to that person. You're selling into a system that's built to keep you out. Right? There's a there's this idea that, a lot of, a lot of founders are clinicians. They see a problem. They're like, why haven't we why are we doing it like this? Why haven't we addressed this or fixed it? And then they go and they work with an engineering team and, you know, or they tinker in their garage if they're predisposed to that. And then they think, well, I'll just walk in and show, other clinicians what I have here, and they're just gonna fall over themselves. They're gonna, you know, the whole Kevin Costner build it and they will come. Right? They don't. The system. It's not just the other clinician. You know, your average other user likes what they're doing. You know, they're used to it. They know it. They trust it. You know, and when you're trying to introduce something and you don't have, like, the cloud of a big brand behind, even when you have a big brand, sometimes it's really hard to get through all that noise. And it's not the one person that you're selling to. It's the whole system. That person then has to be your advocate internally, and that's where understanding the brand and the story behind what you're doing, really gives them the tools and maybe that extra little push to stand up for you in a system that's really designed to keep you out. That's right. And you probably would as well as that for a period of time, though, there was actually some momentum within some of the leadership team that we will approach this market as a classic me to. And it's hard to be a meta, just as you said, when you're going against systems that are designed to keep you out. And they were relatively happy with what they were, the current product they were using. And again, that current product they were using was being sold by just the behemoth organization. So yeah, we don't need to go down that obviously that thought process we were able to deter based on our voice, the customer research, we were able to deter, distractors or proponents of that approach. Yes. With our experiences, we've seen a lot of, things go really well and things go really wrong. And we can look at a product, we can look at how we're positioning it, we can look at the pathway, for the evolution of that product. And, and we can say sometimes with data, sometimes intuitively, we might not want to head down that road, you know, and, but at the end of the day, we're sort of smaller voices in the room. You know, there are other things driving, that, you know, there are people at the table that you never meet, you know, and have a lot of influence in these things. And what I think, I think where you're getting to with the voice of customer is when you hear your customer say, yeah, I don't want that, I need this. Yeah, I, I wouldn't use it that way. I would use it this way. They're telling you how the real world is going to respond to react and and leverage your solution. And you have to work in the real world. We can't have this magical thinking of, you know, here's what I think about it. And so projecting that onto everyone. And we see that time and time again. Yeah, that's exactly right. Exactly right. And yeah. And I think to when, when you're kind of a small scrappy startup, you know, I think chasing a meta path, there's no path there. You can't beat a big established incumbent by being that small unknown and saying, well, we do the same thing, right? We're just we're just as good with a lot less resources and support. Right. So I think that's a that's a that's a tough place to be. If you were, to give some advice on maybe convincing, senior leadership that that just simply doesn't think they need voice of the customer, they know better. What what might you recommend to, somebody earlier on in the process that needs to make that argument? I would I would literally, try to get maybe in an unauthorized manner, a smaller pool of insights from your customers. Whether it's via a phone call to a senior leader, whether it is like we did, you know, 5 or 6 individuals to say, hey, let's just get a proof of concept here, that we're going down a path that we don't want to go down if we want to be sustainable. It's not necessarily a covert operation or what's the word skunk operation. Skunkworks. But you can start you can start small. You don't need to do a community study right out of the gate to demonstrate your point. You can start really small and go from there. That's the advice I would give. Yeah, I so I can think of two examples of really, really tangible things that to, to do that, that are really generally low or no cost. The first one is if a company has someone like you, you know, in the product marketing role, you know, kind of leading, leading the, the charge on this, and you, you have a network, you have people that you've worked with before. I have another fractional CMO that I work with. We we partner up sometimes, and he just has a network of surgeons on like, Speedo. And he simply I mean, he doesn't pick the phone, he just text them a message like, hey, doctor so-and-so, when you have a second, I have a quick question for you. And he's built those relationships over time, and it's not something that a lot of us have the benefit of us of, just simply because we may be new to this, you know, we're just not there. So if not, if you're not the one who has access to that, you know, those network effects, knowing someone who does have that and can ask just a simple question just quickly, the other thing is a little bit more, tangible and maybe scalable for some different things. And that is running a quick, you know, one question survey in a social platform. You know, and, and that can be, that can be really, really telling, they're easy to answer. They just scroll through your feed and you see the question and you just answer it and you can gather quite a bit of data very, very quickly in a short period of time. I like that a lot. And I just want to kind of come back to that. Why social media for our market? We tend to think of, you know, we compartmentalize. Here's my business time. And this is, this is when I'm focused on the work that I do. And if I'm in surgery, you know, 80 of my 50 hours. I of course, I'm not on Facebook. Okay. Sure. But social media is the outside of work time. It's the, you know, I'm. I'm watching my kid's soccer game. I'm kind of standing in the crowd at the edge of the field, and, maybe it's a little quiet right now, and I'm kind of scrolling through my feed and on Instagram. And, yeah, if you throw your product in the middle of that, you're just going to scroll right by. But if you're throwing in something that is educational, or engaging, you know, like a quick poll or a survey, it doesn't sound terribly interesting, but it really, really works. Because you're catching them when when they're available in the platforms where they are. That's right. So there's are those are some, some things that that can really get the thing moving quickly. Grabbing in this morning, I know we're having this conversation. So as a little more aware of my surroundings in terms of what people were doing as they're walking down the street or walking to a bus station, not one person at a very busy bus station had their head up looking around. Their every single person literally was in their phone. It's just remarkable, you know, five minutes here, ten minutes there. Yeah. That's. Well, very well said. Yeah. And that's why, we spend, sometimes to the irritation of my clients, but we spend so much time focusing on, what's going to show up, you know, and they're just like, we just need brand awareness. Put our product out there. They're just to see it a million times. And that's not engaging. That's not memorable. It's so hard to cut through that 6 million. What do we get? 6 million messages a day now. Access status anymore. But, you know, you just imagine how much you're scrolling through. So we spend so much time figuring out exactly what it is we want them to to, understand, learn or engage with. And then the hook for that scroll stopping moment that gets our attention. There's so much garbage on social media, to filter through. So it's it's really, really key. So we talked a little bit about, recommendations on sort of getting that across. What about what about starting up? I mean, we, we went through quite an exercise in putting together the questions that we ask, during, voice of customer interviews or surveys and things like that. Any anything that you've specifically seen go well, or maybe that was less helpful, you thought would be really, really compelling and you were like, this is a dad. Yeah. That, really taking the time and working. In a collaborative manner with not only your colleagues, but also with, you know, people like you building your team. I think that was really the most rewarding aspect for me, in terms of building, starting out, like really getting the questions dialed in and then testing those questions to make sure that there were the right questions. So really spending the time upfront to make sure that you're bringing your best foot forward and asking, you know, the question behind the question, as you said, you know, you can you can, you can have a really impactful one question survey that could be, more impactful than a 25 question survey that by the time someone gets to the bottom of it, they're just, you know, it just kind of checked out, which was, again, good learning for me. Right? We all want to do these 100 page surveys that have all these correlations. And, you know, you can do those as well. But it's really starting up doing the hard work upfront, and then testing it to make sure you're on the right track. Yeah. It's the other side of the you know, these are really busy individuals. They're too busy to be on social media. But let's put together a survey that's like three hours long. There's no way they're just going to open that up and see page one of 33 and be like, I'm out. The what what I've seen work really well, is having so using, are you familiar with the Five Whys framework? Oh, yeah. So, so, when we're putting something together with Voice of Customer doing our initial swing at the questions and the information we want to learn, but also kind of whittling it down to what we really, you know, we have what we want, but what do we really need to know here? What is going to be the most valuable in whatever exercise we're doing, whether it's we're we're just we're going to market or we're looking at the future pathway of this particular product. What do we really need to know? And using that framework to get to the core, you know, the heart of the problem or the heart of whatever the situation is, because what I see a lot of companies doing is they, you know, they get a bunch of people in the room and they just brainstorm all these questions, and then they throw them into this survey and it's we're good to go on the voice of customer. And getting into the why, you know, why are we asking that and what is the point and just keep going to why do we need to know that? And really pushing and sharpening the pencil. And, and often times internal teams lack maybe the bandwidth or that external non-biased view just to push on those things and lean on those things. It's more of a, of a million things to do. Let's just get this thing out. The door. And we just torpedo the entire effort and, and we get some responses. But those responses drive a lot of what we do. So it's important to get the best information, you know. Absolutely. And I know we didn't get into another what I think is a critical element, voice of customer. And that is we've spent a lot of time on this as well with you. Those are really understanding our customer segments. And I know segmentation isn't necessarily as sexy as people thought it used to be. And I would I would I might disagree with that. Maybe they're micro segments now because there is so much noise out there. But if you're just throwing your messaging out there and casting a broad net and I guess it depends what market you're in, and where you're at in your, your life cycle or your brand. But if you're a small startup company, you've got to be pretty laser focused with your resources. And if you don't really understand what those key customer segments are, you don't really need, you know, someone who has you know, dark hair or a blue shirt and, you know, have someone way, that doesn't mean that they're specific. You can have more general, general segments to be effective. Yeah. Those I mean, those those also don't really apply to us. Right. What we're doing I mean, it's like a, you know, are you working in a complex, you know, health care system with multi, you know, tiers of decision making and arguing going on and budgeting. And you have to factor those things in you know, even sometimes looking at maybe what common workflows are because sometimes an existing workflow within the system will be resistant to introducing anything that's going to upend that cart, because getting those workflows approved, there's a lot of, complicated pieces that, that you have to overcome, and people and personalities. So the segmentation is, is really key here. This is kind of a I love and hate this moment when we were working together. But there was a moment, when and I just cringe to tell a story is or it's going to hurt a lot right now. But we were presenting, reporting the data to a campaign and what we were, against our, you know, projections versus sort of where we were at in getting to getting to that goal. And we were talking and you were very polite and quiet. And then we stopped talking, and then there was still quiet and looking back on it. I know you were looking for the way to say it to not hurt our feelings, but you were. You were looking at you like, I wonder if we could look at that target audience number again. And so I looked at it again. Now we know, we know there are maybe 7000 people in North America that would use our product in the. In the meantime, up on up on screen, we have 1 million potential users. And I was just like, that was like a big like swing and a miss. My team is like, oh no. So, we don't always get it right all the time. But that, I mean, it is it is important to know. And I do tell that story, frequently. It's like we don't we we mess up sometimes. But you were so, gracious. Like you were just like, we might want to look at that number again. Well, well, I appreciate that. And, but that's, you know, that goes into the relationship as well because we do get things wrong collectively, you know, as a group and being able to respectfully challenge one another a lot of times is where we come out with the magic, where we can accept that the challenge. Yeah. You know, I don't know if you remember this or not, but it speaks to kind of what you're talking about. When we did The Voice, the customer, and we really uncovered a very viable segment, which we weren't even looking for. And there were a group throughout the country, pockets of very influential practitioners that were still in a private practice setting. They weren't part of a large hospital base. And because they were so influential within those systems and because they brought in so much business to those systems, they had a lot of sway in terms of what products are brought in. That wasn't even on our radar. We were so focused on the health systems and the providers within the health system that we didn't identify these areas of key influence within those those rare cases where they were private practice settings. Two, three, four practitioners that had huge influence in that community, that really turned the tide for us in a lot of big markets, just having you into those segments. Yeah, because you can get a lot of information on, what's having happening in kind of the bigger environments from sort of those micro, interactions and those things. So yeah. Yeah, that is key. What's one thing that you would recommend? Maybe people avoid when doing Voice of Customer, avoid going into your voice a customer, or establishing your voice of customer program. Your your research tools and your questions to give you the answers that you want to hear and avoid reaching out to your colleagues that are going to give you the answer that you want to hear. Because your you know, your skill, your entire marketing campaign to what you think you want to do and what you think is right, the one with an open mind. Yeah, we want to avoid bias. You know, we I think I think sometimes people do just want to hear that what they're doing is the right thing. I think we all want that. Yeah. Right. We want to ultimately we want to hear good job. We want validation. But in this case, I look for, and this is, this is always really hard. This is a challenge. But, hey, who didn't buy from us? Who didn't pick us? What? Why didn't they buy? Oh, I don't I don't know if I want to go back to them, but that's where the information is. Like, we like, why did we fall down? Why didn't we win in that case? And I think that's really tough. So I think that's a good point. And avoid bias. You know, don't just tap into those. Especially I think with k k a wells are tough because K wells are essentially your early adopter. They are the ones who who maybe, maybe if they'd taken a right instead of a left one day, going to work like they could have been the one to say, you know what, this is a problem. I think why don't we have a solution to it? I think I could, but they didn't. You did. And so they're they're one step away. They get it. They they believe in it. They're they're primed and ready and they're wired differently than your average user who just goes about their day saying, oh, well, you know, I have to deal with this again. But that's how we've always done it. You know, so I think it really is important to, to avoid that kind of bias and the, the self-congratulation in when you're trying to figure out what is the market need, what do they want and how do I how do I meet those need. That's right. All right Dave, this is great today. Thanks for hopping on with me. I really appreciate it. Yeah thank you Bill, this was a lot of fun. And, it's great to talk with you again. If you made it here. 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