Many years ago, I was working at a software startup geared to helping salespeople set the best prices to charge customers. For a rep with a few dozen accounts, each of which purchased dozens of items at a time, the incremental profits added up to big money quickly. Since our tool was built to help sales reps optimize pricing, we felt we had a strong product and a proven user base–but there was a problem.

The overall metrics looked good, but our data showed that the best-performing sales reps weren’t using our product for accounts where the biggest opportunities were. This was worrisome, because we wanted these sales reps to be our main evangelists. So my company sent a few product managers into the field to ride shotgun with the sales reps and do some user research.

What we found out surprised us. Every entrepreneur has been told over and over again to spend time talking to real customers–and that’s good advice. But it doesn’t really get at the true value of market research, which isn’t just about getting heaps of feedback from users and then heeding the insights that crop up the most. In fact, it’s the opposite. The whole point of talking to loads of customers is to listen for the one or two who will tell you something really surprising–the feedback that doesn’t square with everybody else’s. Here’s why.

I set out into the field to accompany a young saleswoman who worked for a big food distributor; we’ll call her Lucy. Lucy’s job was to call on restaurants and keep their kitchens stocked with every possible product you can imagine, and she was very good at her job–exactly the kind of person we wanted singing our product’s praises to her peers.

Most prudent entrepreneurs intuitively follow statistical best practices, and toss the outliers in the garbage.

In what would become a recurring theme in my career, being in the field showed me things I never considered from the comfort of the office. For instance, I never thought about how frequently sales reps’ laptop batteries died on the road, making our product unavailable. I also never realized that the reps usually consulted our product after a customer meeting, rather than before. And I certainly hadn’t considered how our user experience held up when accessing the product on a 3G mobile Wi-Fi card while balancing a laptop on the steering wheel of a car.

Those were all really useful observations. But the biggest surprise came when we stopped for lunch at a pub whose big thing was serving exotic meats. Lucy was scoping the place out, figuring out how to turn the establishment into a customer. I think she had an antelope burger. I distinctly recall having a camel burger.

Now, I’ve heard camel is supposed to be like a cross between beef and veal, but I remember finding it tough and dry. I’ve also heard this means that I probably ate an older camel, which is just . . . super. Be that as it may, it was while I was laboriously chewing my old-camel sandwich that Lucy finally gave me the gold I was looking for: