Most people simply don’t get enough feedback in life, especially not in business.
Period!
And here’s the thing: Even if you do get feedback, it’s most likely poor quality, not timely and delivered in a terrible manner.
One of the best things that happened to me in life was one of my first bosses being an advocate of live feedback; this is where we would give each other one piece of feedback (it could be negative or positive) after every interaction together.
Not only did this get me accustomed to receiving feedback (particularly the negative kind which can be hard to process) but it also gave me far more opportunity to make changes to my behaviours and skills which in turn helped me develop so much quicker.
Just as importantly, it taught me to get comfortable giving feedback to a senior individual [again, not a skill that is common].
When I moved onto subsequent jobs, I discovered that Live Feedback was the exception, not the norm, and I was left as thirsty for feedback as a Marathon de Sables runner is for water.
When I worked in the corporate world, it turned out that you could make up for this lack of feedback through other means but when I founded my start-up this lack of feedback was crippling.
Without feedback your business is scratching at its potential, most likely stuck with no product market fit (aka nobody buying your product or services or giving a damn) and sure to die slowly.
I didn’t want that to happen to my business; I needed to find my start-up equivalent of Live Feedback… and that’s when I embraced Feedgagement.
What the hell is Feedgagement?
This is the act of gathering feedback whilst creating engagement at the same time.
As a big fan of the 2 outputs from 1 input school of effectiveness (just one of the entrepreneurial hacks I was taught by another old boss), I wanted to find a way to experiment, get feedback on each aspect of my business whilst also building up a customer base — sure I could build stuff but how could I be sure that anyone apart from me gave a damn about it?
The first place I desperately wanted this feedback was when I came to designing the company logo.
Rather than outsource it, I paid £10 for an online logo generator and created 4 different logos.
I then sent these 4 logos to 100 specially selected connections and asked their opinion.
The connections had been selected not for their expertise in logos but because they were people I imagined would make great clients.
To ensure I piqued their interest I wrote personalised, very flattering emails (it’s the equivalent of smiling at a golf ball).
Amazingly about 60 of the 100 replied and some of their responses were very detailed; more than that many of them asked follow up questions about my fledgling business.
Bingo! 🙌
Everyone loves something that is a bit new and they were now hooked.
I then repeated this trick with my website, sending each new page to 100 people slowly expanding the number of people who knew about my new business; this got them engaged in the business, an equivalent to building a product wait list.
Once the website was done, it was time to move onto designing our first workshop.
Each time I would pick 100 people (mostly new people but sometimes some of the previous people who had shown interest), send them a small snippet (I didn’t want to overload them) and would personalise the message as much as possible.
It was slow and steady but crucially it built engagement and got me the feedback I needed.
I would always look for patterns in the feedback rather than change things in a kneejerk manner based on one person’s opinion.
It’s amazing how many of those people that gave detailed feedback in those early days went on to become our clients — it was like a beautiful funnel 😊
Feedgagement is now heavily focused on our marketing pack
Although we’re now into year 6 of the business and we’re no longer a plucky little start-up, I still regularly deploy the Feedgagement technique.
It’s crucial for designing a new offering but even if we don’t have one of those in the mix then I consistently use our marketing pack to generate and maintain momentum in our engagement.
Every week I aim to send the latest version of the pack to at least 50 selected people (many come from the random networking I do and often the voice notes I use help with this) asking for their feedback. Every 2 weeks, I paste that feedback into AI and ask for it to pick up the major themes (as well as compare it to previous feedback we’ve received) and then we make changes to our pack ready to go for the next 2 weeks.
This consistency and making it memorable has led to an immensely successful approach for us so far and has helped sharpen our marketing exponentially (let me say thanks to all those that have contributed).
I am conscious that I can’t keep developing the marketing pack for ever and will need to “turn the app notifications off” at some point but we are a way off that for now.
What does this mean for you?
It doesn’t matter what you are building or what part of your business you are trying to optimise (it could be sales, pricing, new services, etc), you should be using Feedgagement in your approach; it really helps cut through the noise.
Invariably you need the feedback, you won’t regret additional feedback and you’ll be building up a feedback muscle that will serve you well in all areas of life (heck I reckon feedgagement is perfect for your personal life too and trust me it is far easier than this approach).
If you have any questions on how to do it, then drop me a line otherwise I’d Love to hear whether it works for you or not.
Good luck out there and let me know any feedback about this blog 😉
Faris
Faris is the CEO and Founder of Shiageto Consulting, an innovative consultancy that helps firms and individuals sharpen their effectiveness. Connect with him here
Success = IQ x EQ x FQ
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Originally Published on https://farisaranki.medium.com/
