– How to Know Your Customers (and Why Most Founders Stop Listening) with Michele Hansen

Ready to know how to know your customers so deeply your business never loses touch as it grows? In this episode, Suzi Dafnis talks with Michele Hansen, who bootstrapped Geocodio into a multimillion-dollar business (without outside funding!), about why understanding your customers is the real foundation of a business that stands the test of time.

Michele Hansen is the author of Deploy Empathy: A Practical Guide to Interviewing Customers, and she practises what she teaches. If more than TWO weeks go by without a customer conversation, she says, she doesn’t feel like herself. That habit of structured listening (yep, not systems, not SOPs) is what has kept her business relevant and thriving for over a decade.

This is a conversation about staying close to the people you serve, making sharper decisions based on their behaviour, and leading without becoming the bottleneck in your business. If you’ve ever wondered how to know your customers well enough to make confident calls about your marketing, pricing, offers, and more… Michele is the expert to hear from.

Why Knowing Your Customers Is the Foundation of Everything

So many businesses rely on systems, procedures, and SOPs. Or, we simply do things the way we always have done them. But Michele makes the case that it’s something else entirely: evidence and customer insights. She uses a jobs-to-be-done framework to give customer interviews structure — what they’ve tried before, what they’re really trying to accomplish, and why other things haven’t worked. She shares why running those conversations are essential at every stage of the customer lifecycle, from prospects to ten-year clients.

Learning how to know your customers (and talk to them) keeps you connected to who they are and how their needs change over time — instead of guessing, or worse, building from a gut feeling and the noise of what competitors are doing.

What You’ll Discover in Episode 373: How to Know Your Customers (and Why Most Founders Stop Listening)

Mentioned in this Episode:

• Learn more about how to know your customers and use audience research in Michele’s book: Deploy Empathy
• Check out how Geocodio can help your business.
• The Growth Network — the HerBusiness community for women business owners ready to do business by their own rules

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