Your customers are (unintentionally) lying to you
- Lucy
- Jun 2
- 6 min read
When I began freelancing a few years ago, I wanted to offer a free resource that potential web design clients could download to kick-start the typical client funnel. So I asked my first few clients what they would have found helpful from me.
Most mentioned a website launch checklist and guidance on the most important sections to include on their site. So naturally, that’s what I created.
Fast forward six weeks, and it was mostly other website designers or businesses looking to DIY their website, rather than qualified leads, downloading it.
As ever, hindsight is a blessing. Or perhaps it’s simply more experience to know that was never going to work. Clients were coming to me because they didn’t want to design and build their website themselves, or they didn’t know how to. And no amount of free checklists would change that.
My clients did want a checklist, but to help them understand the reasoning behind what I was going to design for them, before I created their website. A checklist isn’t the best way to show that, but as they’d already gotten the service they needed, it’s notoriously tricky to explain what you would’ve wanted.
This was a classic example of the difference between what customers say they want, vs what they actually want.
When customers say one thing and do another
In 2005, Cheetos launched a Cheeto-flavoured lip balm. This may sound a bit mad now, but customers had frequently talked about how much they loved the dusty residue left on their lips after eating each crisp, and some had even asked (or maybe joked) for a Cheeto-flavoured lip balm
To cut a long story short, they made it and pulled it from shelves less than a year later.
The problem wasn’t that the customers were lying. It was that there’s a significant difference between enjoying something as a by-product of an experience you love, and actually wanting to apply cheese flavouring to your lips as a deliberate act. It may be nice for a few seconds, but there’s a reason why we also quickly lick our lips after.
I’m sure you’ve all heard of the quote that’s been thrown around in at least 85% of the product and strategy days I’ve been in, and potentially 100% of business school books:
Despite there being no actual proof that Henry Ford said this (the first time it appears in print is in 1999, more than half a century after Ford died), the point rings true.
As humans, we often don’t know what we want until someone else creates it, or at least tells us we want it.
So how do you put something in front of your customers to see if they actually want it?
Coca-Cola now lead by example
Coca-Cola showed that the best way to truly understand what customers want is through data.
The Coca-Cola Freestyle machine lets customers mix their own combinations from over 165 different drinks. There are now over 50,000 of them globally, pouring more than 11 million drinks every day. And every one of those drinks is a data point. An actual choice made by an actual person, rather than just a throwaway comment.
When Coca-Cola examined how people combined ingredients, it identified patterns and used that to launch new products.
What we now know as established flavours (Sprite Cherry and Coke Orange Vanilla, to name a few), started as identified patterns from these soda machines. Coca-Cola could then launch these, knowing they would sell before a single bottle was manufactured, because millions of people had already bought it.
They managed to change the approach from asking customers what they want to examining what their customers were actually doing.
This matters more than ever right now.
A lot of service-based businesses I’m speaking to at the moment are rethinking what they sell. AI capabilities are advancing faster than anyone can comfortably keep up with, and it’s raising the uncomfortable question of, if at least some of what you can do can be automated, what should you actually be offering?
That is not a question that can be answered with an Instagram comment box. Like Coca-Cola, it can only be answered with data.
So how do you get your answer?
Firstly, stop asking people who are already in your world.
The most accessible people to talk to are other freelancers, other people in your industry, people who follow you online and already get what you do. They are easy to reach, often happy to give feedback, but almost entirely useless for this purpose.
(Sorry to all those in the freelancer groups I’m apart of. You’re very useful for lots of other things I promise).
They already have a version of your knowledge, and they’re not the ones who are consistently getting frustrated by the thing your service is supposed to solve.
The only person you can be talking to is your target customer.
Use those call transcripts!
I don’t advocate for loads of AI tools, but AI-generated transcripts are among the simplest yet best technological advancements for business owners.
If you are having discovery calls, project kick-off calls, or any kind of conversation with potential clients, record and download the transcripts, run them through an AI tool and ask it to pull out themes.
What problems keep coming up across multiple calls? What are people saying they’re looking for? And then what is the gap between what they say they want and what you end up recommending?
Clients may tell you they need a gym programme, but on the call, you can hear them describe their actual problem and realise they need a dietary plan instead to properly meet their goal.
Or they might be saying they want more social media content, when what they mean is that they want more leads, and content is the solution they’ve already decided on without fully diagnosing why leads aren’t coming in. The real solution being entirely different.
Call transcripts are gold-dust for showing what leads are circling around, what they’re mentioning in passing, and things they don’t even have a name for yet.
Actually talk to customers
Obviously, the gold standard is still direct conversation with the people you want to serve. I know this is easier said than done, but if you haven’t spoken to people who genuinely match your ideal client and asked them about their biggest frustrations in your area, then that is the most valuable thing you can do.
Try not to fall into the trap of talking to past clients when your products or services have evolved to the point where they may no longer serve them, or to your audience, who already follow you for a reason, or to peers in your field. But people who don’t know you yet, or even better, people with whom you had discovery calls but then didn’t work with.
I’m a beta testing advocate
It’s taken me a really long time to truly nail beta testing. For much of my corporate career, and even right up to the first freebie I mentioned at the beginning, I struggled with the balance between perfectionism and just launching the thing.
I promise you, you learn so much more from just launching something than suffering through endless rounds of amends by yourself.
If you have something you’re developing, consider who you can put it in front of at no cost in exchange for honest feedback. A testing group of even just four or five people is invaluable.
Alternatively, could you offer it at a reduced rate or even for free, framed as a beta, in exchange for a detailed review? Meaning you can get real-world data and a product review you can use later.
But when do you stop collecting data and start?
I know all too well that research can be taken to the point where it’s simply a disguise for procrastination.
Try to define “done” before you start your research phase. Set a specific threshold: I will speak to X amount of people, collect feedback from X beta users, run this for X weeks, and then make a decision based on what I have.
If you genuinely need more at that point, extend the deadline, but with a new specific target rather than an open-ended continuation.
Always remind yourself that the most valuable data often only comes once something is live. So at some point, you have to launch a version of the thing to find out whether people actually want it.
It doesn’t end when you launch
Coca-Cola’s Freestyle machines are still running and monitoring which combinations are being made. They’re an ongoing loop that feeds continuous decisions, rather than them simply stopping that data collection when they launched the first products from it.
Of course, your version of that doesn’t need to be a global network of smart soda machines.
But what is your equivalent of watching what people actually do, rather than asking what they’d like you to make? Could it be a quarterly conversation with three or four clients? A review of which parts of your service people engage with most, and which they skip? Or a follow-up after project completion to understand which bit made the most difference?
Building a regular feedback loop is the only way to stay ahead of what your customers actually need, even while still technically listening to what they say they want.
