Get customers to tell you what's really on their mind

Read time: 3 minutes

Hi friends,

We all know you need to talk to customers to understand their pain and build better products. But sometimes customers mislead you by telling you what makes them feel good.

I'm here to help you ask them questions in a certain way that gets to their real problems so you can build the best solution and messaging in the market.

If you're looking to re-position your product, research new features, or launch a new product, then today's issue is for you.

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In today's issue, I want to focus on how to get the most out of your customer interviews.

For too long, people feel overconfident they know how to talk to customers. Then when they get to the interview they ask questions in a way that gets customers to respond with misleading information.

I'm here to fix that.

I've held 80+ customer interviews, and been on the receiving end of several that needed help.

Let's fix your customer interviews:

Issues with typical customer interviews

Have you ever heard the question:

"Would you buy this product?"

"How much would you pay for this product?"

If you have, chances are whatever the customer said next was a lie, because "no, I don't want your product" is an uncomfortable answer.

Questions to get real opinions from customers

1) "What's the hardest thing about [doing this thing]?"

With this question we want to find the part of the problem that's frequent or painful enough to be worth solving.

Asking it this way creates an open-ended conversation about how they currently deal with the problem so you can understand (and solve for) their deepest pain point.

2) "Tell me about the last time you encountered that problem?"

Get more context on the situation around when the problem occurs.

If you better understand the scenarios your problem occurs in you'll be able to better address all aspects of the customer's problem.

Who were they with? What happened?

3) "Why was that hard?"

Understand how to explain your solution to potential new customers.

Customers buy the “why” not the “what.” If you understand what makes the problem hard, you can create messaging that converts.

4) "What, if anything, have you done to solve the problem?"

Here we want to understand if the problem is worth solving and to learn the tools and processes your solution will be compared against.

The hard truth: if the prospect hasn't tried to solve the problem on their own, then it's likely that the pain may not be big enough to get them to buy your solution.

5) "What don't you love about the solutions you've tried?"

With this question we're looking to find opportunities to build features that better solve the problem.

Great!

That should be enough to get you real insights from your customer interviews!

Special thanks to Y Combinator for the customer interview questions (see full lecture here).

Hope it's been helpful!

If you enjoyed it, please forward this email to friends looking to grow their business.

See ya next week,

Brian