How to Talk to Customers to Gather Useful Insights
How to Talk to Customers to Gather Useful InsightsTalk to customers about their problems, not about your productJoin 35,000+ others who get my thoughts on product, tech, and creators — in as few words as possible, no more than twice a month. Dear subscribers, Today, I want to share a practical guide on how to talk to customers. The only thing worse than not talking to customers is to draw the wrong conclusions. Unfortunately, when founders and PMs talk to me as a potential customer, they too often focus on:
Here’s a 5-step guide on how to talk to customers based on my personal experience and Rob Fitzpatrick’s The Mom Test, my favorite book on this topic. Today’s post is brought to you by…Pinata Pinata lets creators host, manage, and share NFTs on any blockchain. Any file uploaded to Pinata cannot be taken down or deleted by a platform. Over 300,000 creators and developers are building with Pinata, check it out below. 1. Talk to customers about their problems, not about your productThe best way to conduct a customer interview is to delay talking about your product for as long as possible.
Focus instead on the customer's past experiences and struggles. The #1 mistake that people make when talking to customers is to jump straight to talking about their product. Remember:
As Rob Fitzpatrick wrote in his book, “Ask questions that even your mom can’t lie to you about. When you do it right, they won’t even know that you have a [product] idea.” Talk to customers to uncover problems and then talk to your team to create solutions. Don’t get these two steps mixed up. 2. Ask customers about their past experiencesTo uncover problems, ask customers to describe a past experience.
Here are five great questions to ask about the past:
Focus the interview on past experiences instead of future opinions to uncover the underlying problem. 3. Listen and follow upThe best way to conduct a customer interview is to ask good follow-up questions to get the customer to talk more.
Here are three ways to dig: Mirror: Repeat key words that the customer saidThis will prompt customers to share more information with you.
Labels: Use phrases like “It sounds like…”This will tease out the customer’s emotion and underlying problem.
Follow up: Ask “Why” until you uncover the problemFollow up using questions like “Why is this important?” and “Can you tell me more?”
4. Deflect compliments, fluff, and ideasDespite your best efforts…
There’s an entire chapter in the Mom Test dedicated to how you can bring these conversation back on track: Compliment: “I really love that idea!”Compliments happen when you mention your idea. Bring the conversation back to the customer problem:
Fluff: “I would definitely want that!”Fluff happens when you ask hypothetical questions (e.g., “Would you ever…”). Bring the conversation back to past specifics:
Idea: “You should build feature X!”Ideas are fun for customers to brainstorm. When this happens, probe deeper to understand what their underlying problem is. A cheeky example:
5. Get commitmentConducting an interview is just the first step.
I’ve written in the past about the importance of tight customer feedback loops. Instead of relying on a one-off interview, you’re should ideally be talking to customers everyday to build a relationship. So if your customer discovery call is going well, close by asking the customer to make a commitment with their time, reputation, or money:
The stronger the commitment, the more likely they are to be an actual customer. To recap, here’s how you can talk to customers to gather useful insights:
Now go out and have some better customer conversations 😉 Further reading:
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