A mistake I made early on was treating every prospect the same. We'd call every prospect in the market and give everyone the same message.
Our conversion rates only improved once I segmented our list and tailored our messaging to the prospects best fit for our product.
The question is, where do you begin?
I started holding interviews with our best customers. Customer interviews gives you product feedback, an understanding of their current challenges, better criteria for list segmentation, and a view into their world beyond your product.
In today's issue, I will teach you 3 steps to conduct better customer interviews that pull out actionable insights for your revenue teams.
Unfortunately, it's easy to push these off due to the following reasons:
When you conduct a good customer interview, you'll get the following:
Here's how to do it:
Coming to the interview with a prepared set of questions will make the process painless and identify patterns. I've added some of my favorites below (Here is a link to a my full question set):
▶ Background & Goals
What does your day-to-day look like? What does it mean to you to be successful in your role?
▶ Watering Hole
How do you gather the information you need for your job - events, social media, podcasts, blogs?
▶ Challenges and Solutions
What are the biggest challenges you’re facing?
▶ Buyer’s Journey
Describe a recent purchase… Why did you consider this purchase? How did you research available products and services? What was your evaluation process? Who had the final say?
▶ Product or Service
How do you measure success when adopting a new solution? What barriers might keep you from investing?
Start by scheduling 5 customer interviews.
Go into these with a beginner's mindset and drop any assumptions.
We often don't realize how much has changed in our customers' lives outside our day-to-day with them. I'm always surprised about what I learn in these conversations.
Document your answers and look for consistencies. No consistencies? Schedule 5 more. Rinse and repeat until a common theme presents itself.
This is the step companies skip the most! They've gathered great information, but it never leaves the department that held the interviews.
Clean and share the notes with the marketing, sales, and customer success teams. In particular, pull out anything you find insightful and build customer stories to share with prospects.
Creating a defined question set, holding consistent customer interviews, and sharing them with the revenue teams will keep everyone attuned to your customers, and you'll have much better conversions.