The Secret to Successful Customer Interviews: "Get Out of the Building" and Hit a Home Run

The Inner Game of Work, a book I'm currently reading, has a great anecdote about a sales manager whose team had the worst results in the company, and how he turned it around. It's about sales, but the underlying principles are highly insightful and applicable to solopreneurs and the process of searching for product-market fit

The sales manager's surprising experiment

(The sales manager) had done everything in his power to try to improve performance results and he constantly talked about increasing revenues. But he figured that he had little to lose in trying to rebalance the work triangle (of performance, learning, and enjoyment). He announced that for the following quarter, he was suspending all sales quotas! He let the sales team know they were to ontinue selling, but that they would not be held accountable for reaching any specified levels of revenues. What he expected them to do was to learn how to have fun selling. He asked his salespeople to rate their current enjoyment levels on a scale of one to ten and to set any goals they wanted to improve their "enjoyment" scores.

During subsequent sales meetings, they discussed what they had done to bring more enjoyment to their work as salespeople. Most became much more aware of what interfered with their enjoyment. For some, it was fear of failure. For others, it was following rote procedures. Others discovered that they were working themselves to the point of exhaustion. performance results were not even discussed, just submitted on short reports.

To the great surprise of the sales team as well as their manager, by the end of the quarter, the team was leading all others in the company in sales results! When they reviewed the experience of their best quarter ever, they were amazed at what they found. On the whole, their team had spent 25% less time with customers, yet had seen the same number of total customers. They had spent 30% less time planning their presentations and 30% less time on paperwork. But the conclusion was that the real benefit had come from the quality of the relationship with the customer. They were more relaxed with the customers and vice versa. Customers seemed to be more open about their problems and needs and more responsive to the team members' recommendations. Each salesperson knew that he was getting more sales, but thought it was a fluke until he found that the total revenues of the team had increased by 40% for the quarter.

Getting Out of the Building: A Necessary Step, Not a Guaranteed Solution

I remember learning from entrepreneurship guru Steve Blank that you need to "get out of the building" and talk with customers. Don't just stay in your office, make assumptions of what you think customers want, and then build products that customers end up not wanting.

Get. Out. Of. The. Building.

But one takeaway from this anecdote that I had was getting out of the building is a great first step, but some have a misunderstanding that it automatically equates to success.

I've recently been talking to many solopreneurs and one of their primary challenges is getting a signal from the noise.

I've talked with hundreds of customers, but I'm more confused than ever! I thought I would gain clarity through customer interviews, but I'm left with more indecision on what I should build next...

I thought through why this was happening.

Let's assume our goal is to create amazing products and services that customers love and are willing to pay for.

Ideally, the first step would be to create a crystal clear goal for our company. This comes through a long term lens, such as the 10-year vision, and also through a short term lens, such as the OKR for the next 3-months.

The second step would be to clearly define our target audience. In other words, if we solve the problems of our target audience, it will unlock massive value, which will lead to the accomplishment of our goal. So, we need to create hypotheses of what those problems are, which will lead to us creating questions that we want to ask when we interview them.

The third step is to "get out of the building" and talk with customers. This can be broken down to different levels of success using a baseball analogy.

From Single to Home Run: Maximizing Customer Interview Success

1. Single (i.e., hitting the ball and getting to 1st base): just talking with any customer - worthy of celebration!
2. Double (2nd base): you already thought about the potential pain points of the customers, so you ask them more pointed questions based off of the hypotheses. This leads to better insights than the single. Yay!
3. Triple (3rd base): you're able to get customers to reveal deeper, honest insights by making them feel at ease. That's what the sales team in the anecdote did. By being more relaxed and open, it led to the sales team having a better quality relationship with customers. In turn, customers were more open in sharing their issues - their real issues - which gave the sales team an edge. We can also do this too. By having the right attitude and keeping the customers at ease, we can go past surface-level insights and uncover deeper insights that the market has not uncovered yet. That becomes our competitive advantage.
4. Home Run: we can take full advantage of the deeper customer insight from the triple. We use first principles thinking to critically think through what the customers said and gain a deeper understanding of their pain points. Then, we use our creativity to brainstorm various solutions that are innovative (both because of the novelty of the solutions themselves, as well as the novelty of the depth of insight we were able to obtain from customers from the triple). Then, we move quickly to create a small prototype to test our assumptions again, reflect and learn, and repeat the process until we find the solution that customers love and are willing to pay for.

"Get out of the building" is such an important mantra. I still remember it from my entrepreneurship class from 10 years ago, and it still rings true today.

But that alone does not yield success.

There is still work to be done, before you leave the building, during the customer interview, and after you return to the building.

Helping Solopreneurs Hit Customer Interview Home Runs

As I've been talking with many solopreneurs, it surprised me to hear about this issue so many times. Getting quality insights from customer interviews is crucial, yet so many struggle with separating the signal from the noise.

That's why I started to think about putting together an online course to equip solopreneurs with a proven framework for conducting insightful customer interviews - from crafting the right questions to making customers comfortable to analyzing the data. The goal? To rapidly increase your learning velocity and gain clarity on the products customers truly want.

If that sounds valuable to you, leave a comment (or DM me) with your biggest customer interview challenge. I'll use those to shape the course content and ensure it directly addresses the roadblocks solopreneurs face.