~by Haley Lynn Gray~
Once people get to know me, they work out that I’m a people watcher. I’m also extremely creative. I spend a great deal of time looking for new ways to approach a situation — which is either interesting or annoying, depending on where you’re standing.
Put those two together and you get the thing I actually do for a living: working out what the real problem is, rather than the one I was asked about.
The question is rarely the problem
You might think you’re asking me a marketing question. Frequently you are not.
A business comes to me wanting more leads, more ads, a bigger budget. I go and look. And the problem turns out to be that nobody is answering the phone — that hundreds of enquiries a month are already arriving and quietly dying because no one calls back for three days.
More marketing would have poured more leads into the same hole. The analytical half of me looks at what the numbers say is happening; the creative half asks what else could explain it. Neither alone gets you there.
Most bang for the least bucks
The other half of how I think: what’s the largest result available for the smallest spend?
That question rules out a lot of what the marketing industry sells. The expensive answer is usually the obvious one — buy more ads, build a bigger site, hire an agency. The cheap answer is usually better and considerably less popular, because nobody makes much money recommending it.
Answer the phone within five minutes. Fix the page that already gets traffic. Ask your existing customers for referrals. Email the list you already have. None of it is glamorous. All of it beats a larger budget spent on the wrong thing.
Why watching people is a business skill
I watch how people interact with the world — how they behave, what they do rather than what they say they do. I find it genuinely fascinating, and it turns out to be useful.
Because customers don’t behave the way your plan assumes. They call at odd hours. They abandon forms at a specific question. They ask the same thing repeatedly, which tells you something on your website isn’t clear.
Analysis tells you what is happening. Watching people tells you why. Most businesses measure the first and never do the second, which is how you end up with a great deal of data and no idea what to change.
How to do this yourself
Ask what the stated problem assumes. “We need more leads” assumes the current ones are handled. Check that first — it’s free.
Follow the whole path. Be your own customer. Fill in your own form. Ring your own number at 4pm on a Friday. You will learn something uncomfortable.
Look for the cheap fix before the expensive one. Always. Then compare what each would actually produce.
Watch behaviour, not opinions. What people do is more honest than what they tell you in a survey.
And keep both halves in play. The numbers and the intuition aren’t in competition — the numbers tell you where to look, and the pattern-spotting tells you what you’re looking at.
Creative and analytical isn’t a contradiction. It’s the combination that finds the answer everyone else walked past.
