A friend of mine was the marketing guy for a major shoe company. I was giving him a hard time one day about the quality of his shoes and he called me a FGO1. As I was buying time to figure it out, he said “Let me guess, you play basketball twice a week, and buy a pretty good pair of shoes every year or two.”
I nodded and he continued “We have kids buying a pair of shoes every week. That is my market. You are a focus group of 1.”
- How often do we make judgements based on our personal bias?
- When was the last time you ran a focus group to understand what the market really wants from you?
- Do you understand your target market, and do you appeal directly to that market?
- Can you confidently ignore a segment of the market?
PureStone Partners LLC 
Michael, as I deal with a ton of Software Vendors, I find that most of them will do occasional focus groups, but tend to tell their customer what they intend to do and ask for feedback as opposed to listening to what the customer wants. In order for me to win in sales, I have to listen to my customer, and really understand what they want and what they are trying to do.
By doing this with BI projects, the customer ends up with a bunch of useless data and visualizations that don’t allow them to answer the key questions that will help them better understand what has happened, where they are and where should they be going.