How do you validate customers remotely?

3 Prepare your questions

The third step to validate customers remotely is to prepare your questions for interviews and surveys. These should be open-ended, unbiased, and focused on customer problems and needs, not your solutions or features. Additionally, it is important to avoid leading, hypothetical, or multiple-choice questions that can affect or limit customer answers. Examples of good questions include inquiring about the biggest challenges and frustrations in a domain, how they currently solve or cope with them, the most important goals or outcomes they want to achieve, how they measure or evaluate success in a domain, and the main criteria or factors they consider when choosing a provider or solution.

4 Recruit your participants

The fourth step to validate customers remotely is to recruit your participants for your interviews and surveys. To do this, consider leveraging your existing network of contacts, such as friends, family, colleagues, or acquaintances, who fit your customer profile or can refer you to someone who does. Additionally, utilize your online presence, such as your website, blog, social media, or newsletter, to share your research goals and invite followers or subscribers to participate. You may also want to take advantage of industry events, such as webinars, podcasts, or online forums by joining relevant conversations and offering value and incentives to your audience. Finally, consider paid channels like ads, referrals, or incentives to target and reach out to specific customer segments and offer rewards or discounts for their feedback.

6 Analyze your feedback

The sixth and final step to validate customers remotely is to analyze your feedback and draw conclusions and insights. You should review and organize your data, looking for patterns, themes, and gaps in customer responses. Compare and contrast the feedback with assumptions and hypotheses to validate or invalidate them. To do this, you can transcribe and code interview recordings and notes, categorizing them by topics, keywords, or sentiments. Summarize survey results and statistics to identify the most common answers or trends. Create and update customer segments and personas, highlighting their problems, needs, and preferences. Additionally, create and update a value proposition canvas and lean canvas to refine product or service features, benefits, and differentiators. Finally, prioritize the customer feedback to decide what actions or experiments you need to take next.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?