Despite the dwindling number of people with longer attention spans, they’re still out there, and when you find them, take advantage of the gift of their time!

For the others, our approach needs to be:

• Make unscheduled calls
  The key here is that it needs to be unscheduled for them. Keeping calls unscheduled eliminates having to commit to talking to you and fretting or forgetting that they have a scheduled appointment in the first place. In addition, by having less time to prepare calculated responses, you have an opportunity to learn things they may not have meant to tell you
• Collect “hot takes”
  These are personal opinions, usually strong ones, about certain topics. These often have nuggets of great insight because feedback that stems from a visceral reaction are important signals to listen to because it affected them deeply. Hot takes often don’t come from long, protracted conversations, rather, they come from short ones.  Remember, when a thought has had time to cool down, they’re no longer “hot takes”!
• Use a third party
  This part of the approach is often overlooked and the task of doing follow-ups or collecting feedback falls to the sales/ marketing/product intern. While these individuals may be capable, and even excellent, at doing their job, there’s one thing that will prevent them from getting the best responses — they aren’t separate from your organization. Let’s face it, nobody wants to tell you bad news!  In fact, they’ll tell anyone else BUT YOU!