📂 Use video calls to capture voice-of-customer, identify sources of influence, and discover digital watering holes

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📖 The following is an excerpt from my work-in-progress book, Founding Marketing. It's a (very) rough draft of thoughts, notes, and research... so feel free to reply with your feedback on what I should expand more on and what needs to be clarified. Enjoy!

The ideal way to do customer research, where you’ll get the best insights and be most confident about what you learn, is through 1-on-1 conversations.

But we need to go over some rules to it right.

The first rule of customer research: You do not talk about customer research

Keep it casual. It’s not a “meeting,” it’s a conversation.

If you’re talking to people who aren’t your customers yet, telling them that you’re doing research for your new product or company immediately introduces bias. Even if you’re talking to people who are your customers, it’s best to follow the same principle and keep the conversation focused on themselves, not your product or company.

The goal of customer research is to test your assumptions, not to validate your assumptions. If anything, your aim should be to prove yourself wrong rather than to prove yourself right.

The typical method of customer research is to explain that you’re doing research for a new product your building, give them the pitch, describe or show the product, and then ask questions like “What do you think?” or “Would you buy it?” or “Is there anything you’d change or add?”

But most people are nice. People lie. People are agreeable. And their feedback is likely more harmful than it is helpful. People want to be supportive, so it’s difficult to get unbiased feedback during customer validation.

Which is why it’s important to have the right approach in order to garner the right feedback from the right people. This is something Ben Orenstein and Derrick Reimer experienced first-hand and talked about on their podcast with the author of The Mom Test, Rob Fitzpatrick.

Note:The Mom Test makes for a fantastic follow-up resource.

Start from a place of empathy and curiosity

Curiosity is the desire to know and learn from others. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

Customer research without curiosity or empathy will give you brief, shallow insights into your customers that may not be helpful at all. Treating customer research like a chore will not result in good data.

Curiosity and empathy are the keys to customer research that’s actually insightful and useful. Remember that you’re not just trying to get answers, you’re trying to truly understand the motivations and desires of someone.

The goal is to get inside the mind of your customer. To know everything you possibly can about them.

Ask the right questions

Still, even with the right mindset and frameworks to use, it all comes down to asking the right questions.

Asking the right questions eliminates bias and prevents you from asking leading questions. Some of the best practices for asking the right questions include:

• Ask open-ended questions
• Don’t ask yes/no questions
• Don’t ask leading questions (asking a question that suggestions or even injects the answer that you want or expect)

Here’s a list of questions to ask both prospective customers and active customers that fits into the jobs to be done framework without introducing bias.

For prospective customers:

• What are the most persistent and painful problems you experience?
• How have you tried to solve this problem in the past?
• How did some products work for you and others fail you?
• What happens if you don’t solve this problem?
• If you could wave a magic wand and create the ideal solution, what would it allow you to do? How would it work? How would it help you?

For active customers:

• What was going on in your world when you started looking for something like our product?
• How did you try to solve this in the past?
• How did some products work for you and others fail you?
• Why didn’t those solutions work out?
• Why did you originally decide to try our product?
• Why did you decide to go with our product rather than others you’ve tried?
• What is the primary benefit that you have received from our product?
• How would you feel if you could no longer use our product? Why?
• What would you likely use as an alternative to our product if it were no longer available?
• Have you recommended our product to anyone? If so, how did you describe it?
• What other roles or titles besides yours do you think would get a big benefit from our product?
• How could we improve our product to better meet your needs?

Great questions to ask, regardless:

• What are your favorite blogs, newsletters, podcasts, or websites to keep up with?
• Who do you look to for inspiration or advice?
• Which events, online communities, or forums do you spend time in?

Of course, questions can be personalized to your specific business or industry. These are merely a starting point. Adjust the phrasing and exact words to fit your own style and voice. And again, you wouldn’t ask these like an interviewer, but instead weave it naturally in conversation.

Every single one of these questions is a goldmine of insight that will help later down the road with the other five factors of growth.

Keep asking why (dig deeper)

The single most powerful question you can ask in tandem with any of the questions above is, “Why?”

Often when someone answers a question, they’re only telling you about 25% of everything they could tell you. We tend to hold back because we don’t want to seem like we’re talking too much.

But in this situation, the more the better, always.

So when they answer your question, always follow up with another clarifying question or asking them to tell you more about that.

For example, if you ask them what their most painful and persistent problem has been in the last few months and they tell you that it’s ‘the challenge of attributing leads and customers to certain marketing channels,’ ask them why that’s an important problem to them. And if they tell you because they need to know which channels are working and which ones aren’t, ask them why again. Maybe they tell you that they just got a bit of funding and need to know where to invest, and now you’ve really gotten down to the root of it.

There’s so much more to explore than what’s at face value. Keep channeling your empathy and curiosity to dig into the true motivations and desires of someone. Usually two or three “why?”’s get down to the real answer.

And if they don’t respond right away, don’t be afraid of the silence. Avoid copping them out with “that’s okay if you don’t know…” because the reality is that many of these questions are very thought-provoking and may not conjure an answer right away.

Silence is avoided like the plague nowadays, but you can use it to your advantage to get a more honest answer from someone if you just give them a few seconds to think critically.

How To Find The Right People To Talk To

Talking to the right customers and prospective customers is just as important as talking to customers in the first place. Basing critical decisions on feedback from the wrong customers could send you in a direction that could be devastating.

But don’t let that discourage you from trying to find the right customers. They’re there, you just have to know where to look.

One of the best sources of customer research is going to be to identify your “best” customers from your user base.

Just based on looking in your CRM or database, you could curate a list of top customers to talk to based on finding segments with one or a combination of these characteristics:

• The highest average deal size
• Short sales cycles (the time from sales conversation to close is small)
• Lowest churn or longest retention

You could also talk to your sales team (or maybe you’re the sales team) and ask them questions like:

• What were some of the largest deals we closed in the last year?
• Which customers were the easiest for us to close? Why was that?
• Who typically bought our product or service? Or in other words, what was the most common title of the person buying our solution?
• Who were other decision makers that were involved in the buying process?
• When you’re on a sales call with a prospect, is there any situation or circumstance that indicates someone is more likely to buy? For example, are there any tell-tale situations or scenarios whenever you see it, you know this lead will close? (Or this lead will never close).
• For the companies that bought our product/service, what was the most common reason they bought?

Your customer success and support team will also be a great source for identifying customers to talk to by asking questions like:

• Which customers or groups of customers have a low support headache?
• Which customers really see the value of our product or service?
• Who are our largest accounts?
• Who do you view as our “best customers?”
• What companies have we been able to sell additional products or services to? Why?

One final method for identifying who you should be talking to is to ask a simple question at the end of each conversation with someone: “Who else should we talk to that you think would get immense value out of our ?”

It may take a minute for them to think about it and identify someone, but this can be a great way to get a warm introduction to another company like them that’s either already your customer or has the potential to become a customer.

Once you have a list of at least 10-20 customers to talk to, it can be as simple as sending an email asking if they have 30 minutes to spare for you to get to know them better so you can make a better product for them.

Thanks to tools like SavvyCal and Zoom, it’s easier than ever to talk with your customers. Make sure to thank them for their time, smile, and reassure them that there are no right or wrong answers — you’re just looking to get to know them better.

As you explore each avenue and take notes on what you find, patterns and commonalities will emerge. Make sure to list them out and suss out what these commonalities have to do with being a great customer for you.

—Corey

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