Advanced customer interview tactics

6 B2B marketers share their insights for getting inside your ideal client’s head (in a nice way)

Written by: Diliana Popova

Contributors:

Lee Densmer

Afton Brazzoni

Ryan Paul Gibson

Jessica Mehring

Emily Amos

Hanah Shamji

A hill to die on

Picture this...

It is the end of the world and the marketing apocalypse is upon us. It’s time for me to pick a hill to die on. Scanning the post-apocalyptic horizon, I see several hills of different sizes. I immediately choose the hill farthest away from the SEO hill. It’s the tallest one, the one that takes a little longer to climb than the others, but man, is the view worth it! The company’s not bad either...

Yep, I’m talking about customer insights hill.

Why?

99% of the time, the reason our marketing efforts are met with lacklustre results is because we don’t have customer clarity. Despite the fact that lack of customer knowledge is the number one culprit for failed content efforts, only a small percentage of marketers treat it with the gravitas it deserves.

Source

Ryan Paul Gibson from Content Lift and I are dying on the same hill.

When was the last time you had a tête-à-tête with your customers?

Most of the clients I have worked with had never made a point of scheduling these important calls, which leads me to ask this question:

“What was their content strategy based on?”

The truthful answer:

• Hunches
• Their own industry knowledge
• What competitors are doing

This scares me a little because it sounds an awful lot like guessing and guessing makes me nervous.

I’m not the only marketer who feels this way either.

Lee Densmer from Globia Content:

“There is no way to create content that speaks to customers unless you… uh… speak to customers. It sounds obvious when you say it like that. But you will only be guessing if you try to create any kind of content without understanding fully what the customers need, like, and want, why they buy, and how they like to get their information (among other things).”

What if I told you that there was a way to take the guesswork out of your content strategy—a way to know exactly what your customers need to hear from you in order to engage with and buy from you?

Sounds too good to be true?

It isn’t.

All this and more is available to you through the art of the customer interview.

A well-executed customer interview will:

• Tell you what went into the buying decision
• Reveal hidden objections that stood in the way of a conversion
• Uncover the behind-the-scenes process (B2B procurement is complex)
• Explain how your client made the decision to buy from you and which competitors they considered alongside your solution
• Highlight the pain points they were experiencing prior to seeking your solution (my personal favourite)

These insights, when put together, not only map your content against the funnel but will help your sales teams, customer success teams, and your C-suite. It’s a win-win-win!

Customer interviews 101

Who to ask

This one depends largely on what you hope to gain from the interviews. Let’s say, for the sake of our discussion here, that our goal is to craft a content strategy. Other reasons to get on the phone might include dealing with churn/unhappy customers or pre-revenue research for a startup.

In the case of content strategy, you want to look for people who have benefited the most from your solution and are happy with the results you have delivered for them.

There is some value in interviewing your least happy customers, but this is not the interview we want to conduct when crafting our content strategy. If you are a small company and have a high-touch approach to your services, you will have a few people in mind. If you run a larger organization, the best thing you can do is reach out to sales and customer success. They should be able to help you create a shortlist.

Find your cheerleaders!

Who should do the asking (For the love of Godin, hire someone)

I highly recommend hiring someone to do these interviews for you. The main benefit of hiring for this expertise is the quality of the data you get, but there are others.

As Jessica Mehring from Horizon Peak Consulting puts it:

“To get over the hump of talking to customers, I recommend hiring help with it. There is often a lot of fear around letting a third party talk to your customers—and I get it, the customer relationship is EVERYTHING. But getting experienced help with this can be a massive benefit. When you hire an expert, like a market researcher or conversion-trained copywriter, to help you gather insights from your customers, you're getting their expertise in the mix AND, MORE IMPORTANTLY, your customers are likely going to be more open and honest with them. When it’s ‘the company’ asking them questions, customers sometimes don’t want to offend—but when it’s a third party, they can feel safer sharing the whole story. Then you end up with much deeper and more meaningful insight.”

Some of you might be a little hesitant to let an outside writer loose on your best customers, and I understand that hesitation. After all, you and your team have worked hard to build those relationships, and you don’t want anything to damage them.

Some great tips for navigating this hesitation come from Afton Brazzoni founder of Scribe National.?

“If you have concerns about allowing external writers to work with your SMEs, the best thing you can do is to take these tips and create a standard operating procedure around SME interviews. The other thing to note is that hiring experienced external content writers will help ensure SME interviews go smoothly. Experienced writers have done dozens, if not hundreds, of SME interviews and typically either have their own dialed-in process or can follow yours very easily.”

What to ask

One of the most important pieces of data we get from conducting customer interviews is the customer journey, which follows a before, during, and after cadence.

Your questions need to be structured in such a way that they reveal this journey.

Before (TOFU)

Awareness Stage (Pain/Problem Aware):

What you need to uncover:

• What was going through your customer’s mind before they found your solution?
• How did they gather information to help them solve their problem?
• Did they Google a specific phrase? Was it word of mouth?
• What triggered them to look for a solution in the first place (pain)?

At this point in their journey, your customer is problem-aware.

During (MOFU)

Consideration Phase:

What you need to uncover:

• Who is involved in the purchase decision?
• Once they decided you were the solution, how did they sell it to the organisation?
• How was the onboarding process?
• What drove them over the edge—why did they choose you?
• What went into their decision-making process?
• Who else were they considering at the time?

After (BOFU)

Decision Stage:

What you need to uncover:

• How is their life different/better as a result of your solution?
• What major pain did your solution solve for them (time, money, hassle)?
• Are they happy with your solution?
• Would they recommend it to others in their industry?

Structuring your questions

If you structure your interview questions in this manner, you will not only get the customer journey but also how it maps onto the marketing funnel. This will then inform your content strategy.

You will also get testimonials, and in some cases, these interviews can be turned into case studies/customer stories, which you can publish as BOFU content.

I’ve also gotten insights that help sales do a better job and even product/solution ideas, which I have passed on to the C-suite.

I recommend taking the time to put all the gold nuggets together into an insights document. (Steal mine.)

Note: It is time-consuming to go through the transcripts, but I find it worth it. Although AI is getting better at summarizing information, it rarely picks up the subtlety that I catch when combing through them manually.

Some questions to get you started

1. Can you briefly tell me about your role at Company ‘X’ and a bit about yourself and your career?
2. What prompted you to look for a solution like ‘X’? Can you describe the challenges or problems you were having? (Follow-up: When you say ‘X,’ can you be more specific?)
3. What tipped you over the edge? What would have happened if you’d done nothing?
4. When you went out to look for a solution to this problem, how did you go about your search? Was it word of mouth, or did you search for something specific online?
5. What specifically were you looking for? Did you have some criteria in mind?
6. What does the internal approvals process look like for a solution like this? How many people are involved in the buying decision behind the scenes? Would you mind letting me know their roles/titles?
7. Ultimately, how did you make the decision? Were you comparing between a few solutions?
8. What were the top three things that led you to choose ‘X’?
9. Can you tell me a bit about what has changed since implementing ‘X’?
10. What was the onboarding process like? Anything you appreciated or thought could have been done better?
11. (My personal favourite:) If you had a magic wand and could change/improve anything about ‘X,’ what would it be?

Check out this guide from Emily Amos at Uplift Content for more customer interview questions.

How to ask (2 Competing Approaches)

A customer interview should not feel like a customer interview- it should feel like a conversation. That is why there are two approaches to this:

Some experts send out the interview questions in advance and some go with the flow. I am in the flow camp as I find the more scripted I am with my questions, the less insightful the conversation and the more biased the answers. People naturally want to tell you what you want to hear.

?That being said, having a bank of questions in your mind, or close to your screen to help you along is also a great hack. The more experience you gain doing this, the easier it becomes to just let the conversation flow.?

From the brilliant Hannah Shamji

How many should you interview (Insight Saturation)?

I learned something cool from Ryan Paul Gibson—the concept of insight saturation. It boils down to this: after the sixth interview, the amount of new information you get declines.

I usually ask clients for 3 to 5 interviews. After 3 interviews, I begin to spot patterns in the conversation, which are usually enough to draw some solid conclusions and move forward. If you can get to 7, your VOC data will be watertight, and any content marketing decisions you make based on it will be sure to resonate with your ideal client.

Of course, quality matters here so make sure you are selecting the right people to interview in order to get those patterns. The closer you get to your ideal client the better. Interviewing 7 bad-fit clients or clients with lacklustre results may not yield the same results. Talk to sales & customer success to help with finding the right candidates.?

Avoid these missteps

Canned Questions

I am all for being prepared for interviews, but sometimes these questions make people feel like they are on a literal job interview. Where you land is up to you but I would be careful not to get on a call and just rattle off one question after another, without paying attention to the flow of conversation or other ‘human’ cues your interviewee is giving off.. You will get much better answers if you remain relatively flexible with your approach.?

Leading questions

Now I am not going to sit here and pretend I have a degree in data science or analysis, but I do recommend being aware of leading questions. A leading question is one that

subtly guides respondents toward a specific answer, potentially influencing their responses. These questions often contain assumptions or suggest desired outcomes.”

Read the full article here.?

These types of questions can seriously wreck your results and lead you down assumption paths you have no business going down. The downstream effect of this is an ineffective content strategy and poor results.

An example of a leading question would be: “Can you talk about how ‘x’ has improved your results when it comes to ‘y’?

Jargon & B2B Formality

Sometimes you will be getting on the phone with fancy people. CEOs of things and VPs of other things. The inclination is to go formal and corporatey (yes I made up that word). I’d swing the other way. Remember that the more human you present the more at ease your prospect will be and the more likely they will be to tell you the truth vs. telling you what you want to hear.?

I have found that when I lean towards formality people give me the formal (and often expected) response. I know this might sound a little ‘off’, but this is an area where ‘playing dumb’ and asking a lot of obvious questions actually pays off. People open up right away when you come at them with curiosity and a willingness to listen to their point of view and experiences.?

Conclusion

Where do we go from here: turning insights into strategy

I shared my template earlier in this article. This document is my starting point when I work on content strategy. Combine several of these documents together and you have a full funnel map out and content ideas for at least 6 months to a year.

You can leverage AI here by uploading all the documents and asking it to give you an ICP summary and TOFU, MOFU, BOFU content ideas. Make sure you prompt it to look for gaps in the market so you can find unique angles that your competitors are not covering. More on this in a future issue of Content Micro Dose.?

If you found this helpful, do connect with me and send me a note or share this article.?

Cheering you on.?

Diliana

P.S. Thank you to all my colleagues, who were generous enough to share their ideas with me in the making of this article.?

Here they are again…Go connect with them!

Lee Desmer

Afton Brazzoni

Ryan Paul Gibson

Jessica Mehring

Emily Amos

Hanah Shamji

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Thanks for reading!

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