How to Discover What Customers Think Without Asking Them

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Here’s something that successful businesses recognize in today’s increasingly noisy world: To earn the attention of potential customers, you must truly understand what they think. This is why empathy is more important than ever for marketers. Without taking the time to understand what motivates your audience to take action, you run the risk of simply creating noise. 

Many businesses are trying to get inside the minds of potential customers by asking more intentional questions during the sales process. That’s a great first step, but it only provides a small sample size. What happens when you can’t ask every single customer what they think and feel about every little situation surrounding your products and services?

This is where taking time, whether it’s an entire day or a two-hour brainstorming session, to consider how customers think and feel can be incredibly valuable for your team.

5 Questions to Discover How Customers Think Without Asking Them

As you look to put yourself in your customers’ shoes for a day, here are a few questions to unlock what they might be thinking when it comes to your products or services: 

  1. What do your customers say and do? Think about a typical day in the life of your customer. What do they spend their time doing? How do they behave in different settings—with their boss, with coworkers, and with friends and family? These questions help you think about all the different decisions they might have to make in the course of the day.
  2. What do your customers think and feel? Now that you’ve considered their day, it’s time to consider how those activities and decisions make them feel. What are their dreams, worries, and daily emotions? What makes them happy, sad, scared, emotional, and angry?
  3. What do your customers hear? Think about all the various ways your customers gather information. Who do they hear from? What media are they influenced by? What are the primary messages they’re being bombarded with day after day? Knowing this can help you identify how to reach them and rise above the noise. 
  4. What are their biggest challenges every day? What frustrations and stresses do they encounter daily? What risks and threats do they face? Knowing the fears your customers experience allows you to speak into the various ways your brand can help resolve them. 
  5. What opportunities exist if they succeed? All customers have heroes in the stories of their minds—and it’s not your brand. It’s them. What do they need to be successful and achieve their goals? How do they measure success? Knowing what will make them feel like even bigger heroes is a powerful way to capture their attention. 

As you and your team walk through these questions, write down every single answer you think of. Look for patterns. Most importantly, don’t forget to use the answers to these questions whenever you’re considering new products and services, crafting new marketing materials, and so forth. These questions will ensure that your deliverables resonate with your customers.

3 Biggest Obstacles to Marketing & Sales Alignment (and How to Overcome Them)

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Marketers have always had a love-hate relationship with sales. But, making sure your sales team feels supported and happy is essential for the relationship to be successful. If your sales team is frustrated with marketing, no one is happy. So, getting to a state of alignment is crucial. 

Most marketers have issues aligning with their sales teams to create a true partnership. However, new technology and the evolving roles of both teams have created new obstacles for alignment. The good news is that there are ways to ease these burdens and create a working partnership that creates a better customer experience.

Overcoming the 3 Biggest Obstacles to Marketing & Sales Alignment

Here are three obstacles that marketing leaders find most challenging when it comes to alignment, along with some recommendations to overcome them: 

1. Accountability

Being a marketer is tough. You spend a lot of time on lead generation activities, trying to generate new conversations for your sales team. Sales teams who don’t follow up with leads can be one of the biggest frustrations for marketers. 

Holding sales teams accountable to follow up with marketing leads starts with making sure both teams understand their roles and expectations. It also requires developing processes and systems that enable both teams to collaborate together, even if it’s for 30 minutes a week. Some teams even put together formal service-level agreements to define the responsibilities of each team. 

2. Measuring ROI

Marketers must have confidence that the strategies and tactics you’re investing in are going to help your business group. If you can’t define and quantify the role marketing plays in driving conversations for sales, it’s difficult to understand the contributions you’re making.

In order to measure the ROI of your marketing efforts, both teams must be up-front about what has worked (and what hasn’t). It’s also important to identify the specific marketing metrics that impact sales. Discovering these numbers isn’t always easy on the front end, but it’s important if you want to quantify the ROI of your marketing efforts. 

3. Feedback & Data Input

Feedback from your sales team is the only way to know whether or not the leads you’re creating are worth anything. However, getting sales teams to provide feedback or update Salesforce, for instance, can be a considerable challenge. 

To get ahead of this, you might need to explain why marketing and sales alignment is important. You might need to educate your sales team on what you need. It’s also important to earn their trust by coming up with quick wins for them.

When sales and marketing teams are on the same page, everyone’s job is much easier. Not only do you optimize your marketing efforts, you also enable sales teams to be more effective by creating a seamless journey from lead to customer.

How to Pivot Your Marketing without Abandoning Your Entire Strategy

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As the owner of a marketing agency, I’m constantly getting emails from frustrated business leaders asking for help. They’re discouraged because their marketing isn’t working. But, they also want to know what adjustments they could make to start gaining traction again. We also see this with our own clients—when certain tactics take time to pay off or other strategies don’t produce the results we thought would happen.

Most businesses can’t throw out their entire marketing strategy and start over from scratch. They’ve invested a lot of time, energy, and resources into their long-term plan. And, most of the time, I encourage them NOT to throw the baby out with the bath water. What they need involves finding a way to course-correct and stay on track to meet their goals.

How to Pivot Your Marketing Strategy

So, how do you balance the short-term course corrections without abandoning your long-term strategy and larger objectives? Here are a few principles I’ve seen work really well for our clients at Green Apple:

1. Build short-term adjustments into your long-term plan.

One reason course corrections can be so frustrating is because we don’t plan for them. But, if you’ve been in marketing for more than five minutes, you know things don’t always go according to plan. You can do all the due diligence, and a strategy might still fall flat.

One way to avoid the frustration of course-corrections is to proactively plan for them. Recognize there will be three to four course corrections you must make each year, and build margin into your strategy. Actually include them in part of your annual planning process. When you assume the worst and recognize there will be marketing campaigns that fall flat, you can be more proactive about building in short-term adjustments into your long-term plan.

2. Set aside a portion of your budget for testing new ideas and tactics.

Marketing is always evolving and changing. If you rely on the same strategies year after year, you’ll pay for it down the road. Therefore, it’s important to constantly test new ideas and tactics that help you reach potential customers.

A good rule of thumb is to reserve at least 5-10% of your budget for testing and learning. Whatever number you land on, it’s important to reserve funds for testing marketing tactics that could improve short-term results and provide insights for future campaigns.

3. Make it a priority to constantly measure performance and leverage data in your decision-making.

Creating a data-driven culture where everyone understands the value of data is a crucial aspect of marketing. Constantly measuring the performance of each campaign will help you know when to pivot before it’s too late. As you gather data over time, you should be able to develop a more effective long-term strategy. Ideating around strategy is fun, but measuring results leads to growth. With discipline, you can deliver both.

Bottom line: Long-term planning and short-term course corrections are both essential when it comes to effective marketing. If you are frustrated because your marketing isn’t working, make sure to evaluate which short-term methods can be executed quickly and are proven to have an immediate impact.

How to Align Sales & Marketing in Just 30 Minutes a Week


Let’s face it: Aligning your sales and marketing teams isn’t easy. For many businesses, there are big obstacles to overcome—from breaking down the silos between the two departments to getting everyone to agree on the ideal customer for your business.

While business leaders understand the importance of marketing and sales alignment, most businesses can’t stop everything they’re doing to make sure marketing and sales are on the same page. Leaders are left asking, “How do we improve marketing and sales alignment as we go?”

How to Align Marketing & Sales in Just 30 Minutes a Week

One solution I often recommend is to establish a weekly 30-minute standing meeting between key stakeholders. These stand-up meetings don’t have to be complicated. In fact, each meeting agenda can be built by addressing three simple questions:

  • What progress have we made since the last meeting?
    • What insights can sales team members provide that are valuable for the marketing team?
    • What is the marketing team working on that would be helpful for sales team members to know?
  • What is the plan going forward?
    • Are you gaining traction on sales conversations? What can the marketing team do to support those conversations?
    • What parts of your strategy need to be tweaked? What new ideas should you consider implementing?
  • Blockages
    • What information do you need from the other team to do your job well?
    • Where are you getting stuck? What potential problems do you see?

The biggest piece of advice I can give is to spend time focusing on what matters the most for your business. If you have a major event coming up, you could focus the stand-up meeting on how you’ll set up meetings at the show. It’s OK to be flexible on the topics covered, as long as everyone has a clear sense of next steps.

Sales and marketing stand-up meetings are one of the most important things a company can do to create alignment and foster face-to-face collaboration between the two teams. Don’t let it become a simple review of the existing marketing programs and schedule. Instead, use the time to collaborate and problem-solve together.

3 Ways Marketing Can Enhance Your Company Culture

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Corporate culture has arguably always been important. But as many business leaders are beginning to recognize, it is actually becoming more important as the modern workplace continues to evolve.

  • 88% of employees believe a distinct workplace culture is important to business success. (Source: Deloitte).
  • Employees’ overall ratings of their company’s qualities are 20% higher at companies with strong cultures. (Source: CultureIQ).
  • 90% of employees at winning company cultures are confident in their company’s leadership team. (Source: CultureIQ)

And while culture has become an increasingly important factor for employees, it is also on the top of mind for business leaders as well.

  • Companies with strong cultures saw a 4x increase in revenue growth. (Source: Forbes)
  • Being named a Best Place to Work is associated with a .75% stock jump. (Source: Glassdoor)
  • 82% of business leaders believe that culture is a potential competitive advantage. (Source: Deloitte)

Everyone in your organization makes hundreds of decisions that affect the business every day. Culture determines the quality of those decisions.

So, what does this have to do with marketing?

3 Ways Marketing Can Enhance Your Company Culture

While marketing might not be responsible for many of the factors that impact culture —  it can have a direct impact on creating certain aspects and taking your current culture to the next level.

Because of the unique place it sits within your organization, here are three ways marketing can enhance your company culture:

  • Supporting and re-casting vision. Leadership is responsible for casting the vision, but it’s not something that should happen once. Companies with positive cultures are constantly reminding employees of the vision employees are working together to achieve. Marketing can support this effort by using your expertise to help identify which messages will stick with your audience, your employees, and developing creative ways of keeping that vision in front of employees.
  • Learning and development: Continual learning and personal development are two big factors in employee satisfaction. Because marketing is often at the forefront of changes in the industry or updates to a product, you can play a valuable role in keeping employees educated on the latest trends worth noting.
  • Connection and collaboration: Marketing can help people stay connected — especially as more and more employees start working remotely. Whether it’s something incredibly simple like managing an internal employee Facebook group to share updates or putting together a more formal employee engagement plan, your marketing team can lead out in enhancing communication and collaboration between employees.

3 Marketing Metrics Every CEO Should Know By Heart

As a CEO or business leader, you’re responsible for a lot. Leading your company and making sure everyone is set up for success requires a working knowledge of each area of your business. Because of this, it’s essential that you focus on the metrics and key performance indicators that are truly driving your business forward. While there are hundreds of metrics that impact your company’s marketing performance, your primary concern should be ones that directly impact the bottom line. 3 Marketing Metrics Every CEO Should Know By Heart If you want to keep a pulse on how your company is really doing when it comes to marketing, here are three metrics to keep top of mind:
  1. The Number of Customers Influenced or Generated by Marketing. Identifying the number of new customers that were either directly generated through marketing or influenced by your marketing activity gives you a high-level overview of your marketing effectiveness. Calculating the number of marketing-generated customers can be done by simply dividing your total number of new customers by the number of marketing-generated leads. Calculating influenced customers is a little more tricky, but it can be estimated by identifying all your new customers divided by the percentage of customers who had interaction with marketing material or activities during the sales cycle.
  2. Conversion Rate Through the Marketing and Sales Funnel. Being able to identify the conversion rate from an impression to a lead, a lead to a sales opportunity, and a sales opportunity to a customer is critical. Not only does it help you effectively evaluate your new business pipeline, but, more importantly, it helps you identify the strengths and weaknesses in the customer journey so that you can constantly make strategic improvements.
  3. The Cost to Acquire a New Customer. Defining how much you spend to bring in a new customer is critical to measuring ROI and is a question that’s important to your board and stakeholders. By adding up all costs (both marketing and sales) and dividing it by the total number of new customers for the same period, you’re able to get a rough idea of how much it costs to acquire a new customer. If possible, breaking it down by specific activities (conferences, inbound marketing, advertising, etc.) is even better.
If you’re looking for a way to evaluate your marketing efforts, these metrics will give you a good start toward proving marketing ROI to your board or stakeholders.