Luciano Pesci, CEO at Emperitas and Professor at the University of Utah brought his A game as the first speaker for the Big Leap Room breakout session. Luciano teaches a variety of economics and statistics classes which explains his heavy emphasis on data and data analysis in his presentations.
Luciano emphasized that nowadays everything is connected and that the layperson has no idea how much data currently influences and will influence our lives in the future.
The purpose of his presentation was to show that there is a personal step that can be taken when doing product development and marketing in general; a qualitative step to gathering data that makes it so you don’t have to guess.
Here are some of the research and data collecting steps Luciano outlined:
- Define Your Purpose: Information is only as good as the questions you are asking.
- Get a Realistic Market Snapshot
- Plenty of free tools - Tools are helpful but they do not replace the experts
- Spyfu is one of the more interesting ones
- Use NUVI to find customers
- Know Your Place
- Market Size
- Look at Competitors, their offerings and strategies
- What your really need to get out of this stage: Identify experts, influencers, and customers. Go on social media and in a half hour you can convert disgruntled customers.
- Talk to marketing and product research team at the same time - Your organization is the first resource to tap into
- Learn how everyone's role connects
- Identify the unknowns
- Who has connections with the experts?
- Interview Experts
- Come with clear questions
- Record it if they allow it
- Use snowball sampling - Do you know someone else that I can talk to about this?
- Compensate them if they are willing
- Talk to Real Customers: If you come prepared to actually talk to customers they will readily give you information.
- Get out of the building and go talk to them
- What features do they care about?
- Ask about messaging preferences and formats for receiving data
- Complete at least 30 interviews
- Be prepared but don’t interrogate them. Make it a conversation.
- Compensate them somehow
Luciano closed by imparting this nugget of wisdom. “If you can’t explain it to an 8 year old child it is not ready for upper management.”