 Founders often come to me complaining about not getting enough leads or not attracting the right audience into their products.
Now, the good news is that you’re probably only about 20 conversations away from knowing everything you need to know.
20 conversations away from knowing who to speak to.
20 conversations away from nailing your messages,
20 conversations away from nailing your positioning.
The bad news is that it’s not always easy to conduct user interviews.
👉 Not a subscriber yet? Subscribe here and get the video newsletter delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning.
Now I’m gonna share how I do it at the end of this essay. I’m going to share a template with my interview questions that helped conduct more than 20 successful interviews in this year alone. Resulting in completely mapping out who my client was selling to and what we needed to say to his clients so that they would convert into paying customers.
Don’t care about the content, I want to skip to templates
But first, a story on how we saved more than 30.000 euros by just talking to people.
How to save money with user research
I’m working on a project for a company from Dubai and we’re creating a new type of social media where you can collaborate to do good. You can collaborate to do challenges that inspire positive social change, you can collaborate to raise money for people struck by disasters and so on.
And we conducted about 10 interviews and had two focus groups and we found that people were only interested in one part of this app in the challenge. They were only interested in one part of the app we tried to create.
If we didn’t talk to these people, if we tried to build the product behind closed doors without talking to people, this would result in:
- Overdeveloping the app
- Overspending on development
- Having a poor GTM strategy
- Us missing with messaging
- Struggling to get the app going
By talking to people early, we:
- Found our niche before launch
- Found the features we need
- Saved on development
- Designed a clear GTM strategy
- Wrote clear positioning statements
Building in public VS building behind closed doors
Have you ever heard the saying “if you want to go fast, go alone;
if you want to go far, go together”?
That’s how I feel about building in public.
By sharing my work and progress with my audience, I’m able to learn and grow in ways that I never could on my own.When I started with Tangible Growth I learned a lot just by posting on LinkedIn and I still learn everyday by simply posting on LinkedIn, by reading the reactions and comments I get from my peers.
And even now, as I prepare to spend the next couple of months in Detroit, I’m excited to document my journey and share my insights with all of you.
In case you missed my previous posts, I am going to Detroit in April & May as part of a business exchange, to work on a positioning project.
Now, Detroit may have once been known as a bankrupt city, but it has since transformed into a startup hub, attracting over 50,000 early-stage startups in the last decade. This means that there’s a competitive landscape that’s perfect for doing proper market positioning.
To succeed in a crowded market, your product needs to stand out. Proper positioning is key, and it requires your best effort. With so many competitors fighting for attention, you need to make sure that every aspect of your product is at its best.
To come out on top, you need to strive for nothing less than 100%.
And in my mind, building in public is a powerful way to grow and give that 100%. By sharing my progress and insights with you, I hope to help you make your products the best they can be.
So let’s go on this journey together and strive for success in the crowded and competitive marketplace of Detroit and beyond!
Conducting interviews is easy with the right tools
But more on that in the newsletter. I promised my interview templates. So here goes.
First you need to jot down what you need to learn. Stuff like where do our customers get the information? Where do they experience the problems that they’re facing, that we are solving, what are their jobs to be done?
Write down all the information that you need in order to sell your product. If you just think about what you need to know to make sure that the sale happens? And then you need to structure the questions so that people will actually answer these questions.
You wanna start the interview with a combination of wide open generic questions first.
So an example, can you describe your typical workday? What did you do yesterday? Now you start with, describe your typical workday, but people tend to lie and without maybe even knowing. So you want to have a specific day, you want to focus on a specific day. So what did you do yesterday? And then they’ll start thinking about what they actually did yesterday.
And that’ll bring you truthful answers, not made up ones. And ideally you want to learn, not just about their day, but how do they measure success as well? So the idea is that you need to get their criteria for success. So how are they measuring success? Success on daily tasks like you’ll get answers like I start my day by opening the emails and replying to 20 emails.
But I need to do that really quickly because at nine we have a meeting where we define objectives. Okay, so now you want to know more about that meeting. If they don’t answer with how they measure success, you need to double down on that, on that message. So ask them, like, if I understand correctly, you do this and that.
Now what would success look like in your eyes? Like how would a successful day look like in your eyes? What would a successful early meeting look like in your eyes? So just double down on that and find what you need to know, and then you move towards more specific questions, depending on their answers.
So you go from generic open answers, basically to the meat of what you need to find out. So where are they looking for the information? Like, how painful is the process of doing what they have to do right now because they don’t have your software
And basically you move from generic to more specific.
Now obviously, the questions are gonna be different depending on what you need to find out, but I prepared a short template you can use. Simply download the template and just adjust questions depending on your needs.
How to go from lead gen to demand gen?
Now again, why would you want to do the interviews? Why would you want to spend your precious time with your customers?
Because you want to sell more and want to move from lead generation to demand generation, right?
You don’t want to be constantly having to find new customers, be in the sales process. You want the customers to come to you. And getting to know your customers can help you do that.
By speaking directly with potential customers, you can learn about their pain points, needs, and desires, which can help you to create more targeted and effective demand generation strategies.
And it often happens that these discovery interviews actually result in sales calls as well.
Want to sell more? Invite people to interviews. Literally.
Additionally, armed with the information on their pain points, you can create demand generation content (such as webinars, demos, lead magnets) that specifically addresses this pain point and shows how your product can help.
So…
If you’re looking to stay ahead of the competition in today’s hyper-competitive business environment, consider incorporating user interviews into your demand generation strategy.
This will allow you to move from lead gen to demand gen.
Imagine. People raising hands because they want your product. What could you do with that?
Interested in finding your best-fit customers? BOOK a call and let’s talk about how I can help.
