How To Ask For And Use Feedback About Your Business, Part 1
How To Ask For And Use Feedback About Your Business
Part One: Get the 411
Feedback is an essential component to improving your products, services, and client relationships. In this three-part blog series, I?ll explain how to gather, assess, and implement feedback to make your business even better!
Toward the end of the year, I tend to start thinking of new ideas to grow my business and better serve my audience. It helps to vet ideas with my current and prospective clients, as well as with trusted advisors. Asking for feedback provides me with an honest reflection on how my friends and clients perceive me and my business, and it?s an amazing idea-generation and self-improvement tool.
It can work for you too! Step one is to gather the feedback. Here are my top tips on how to gather useful and actionable feedback that will help you improve and grow your business:
Know what you want to discover. If you don?t know what you want to know, you won?t know what to ask. I?ve seen too many surveys ask a wide range of questions that are poorly worded and confusing. As a result, the answers won?t be very useful, which will waste everyone?s time and won?t help you grow your business. This can also be true of a face-to-face conversation, but at least if you?re not eliciting useful information from your initial questions, you can ask for clarification.
Decide who can give you the information you are seeking. Once you understand what type of feedback you want to improve and grow your business, think carefully about the individuals who can give you the most relevant insight. You want to find people who are both supportive and honest. They will be the ones to give you feedback in a sensitive and constructive manner. Be careful in asking for feedback from close friends or family members who might not be completely honest in order to protect your feelings.
Decide how you will gather the feedback. Once you know whom you will ask for feedback, and the subject of your feedback, you can identify the best channel to gather the information. The most popular options are a survey, a phone call, a focus group, an open-ended email, or a face-to-face meeting. Personally, I prefer a phone call or a face-to-face meeting. This allows me to follow up with additional questions that crop up during the discussion. Phone calls and face-to-face meetings are more work-intensive, but they can truly provide a wealth of great useable information to grow your business.
Once you?ve gathered feedback from several individuals, the next step is to review and assess your treasure trove of information. Join me next week to learn how in part two of this series, What The Heck To Do With All This Feedback?
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Feeling a little lost, overwhelmed, or ready to take your business to the next level? Consider purchasing the Launch Your Life Workbook, a guide to setting and achieving goals for life and business. The workbook and audio companion will help you determine what you want from life, how to develop and prioritize your goals, and how to set out to achieve them.
About Sara Clark-Williams
Sara Clark-Williams is the founder of Launch Your Life, created to help women launch themselves forward to create the life they want. As a Life Coach with a special emphasis on female entrepreneurs, Sara helps you discover what you really want in your life and business and how you can achieve this. She enjoys working with "fempreneurs" who are ready to do what it takes to achieve their goals.
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