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You know you need to know what people think of your product.

You need it for copy, you need it to improve your product over time, you need it for social proof to get people to buy.

But talking to people who pay you is (often) fraught with (emotional) peril.

I get it.

So here are 5 steps to getting customer interviews on autopilot. (With tools and templates for each step of the way!)

1. Identify the top customers you want to talk to
2. Clarify which points in the journey to reach out
3. Draft your emails
4. Decide who’s going to talk to people
5. How to conduct the interviews

1. Identify Your Top Customers

You don’t want to talk to everyone per say.

You want to talk to the people you want more of.

Look for those who

• Most use of your product - pick usage KPIs that make the most sense for your business and filter
• Signed up recently  - past the initial honeymoon phase but still relatively new and excited)
  • for B2C: in the last 3-45 days
  • for B2B: in the last 1-3 months
• Interacted with you beyond purchasing - whether through support emails, reviews, or social media praise. Not required, but definitely helpful

These are your most bought in customers.

Here’s examples of KPI’s you can use to narrow your power users down

If you are a new SaaS and don’t have a lot of customers, you can email all of them and take note of which ones reply.

You can do this by creating a campaign in your CRM or email-sending software.

You have your people.

Now when do you hit them up?

2. When to reach out

There are 3 great times to reach out to a customer for feedback

• they get to the “aha!” moment in your product.
• they get clear ROI from the product
• they’ve successfully used the product for 2-3 months → this is a great time to ask for a testimonial or referral too!

Why those three?

Because;

• at the “aha” moment - they will have a clear before-and-after and be able to see how their lives are going to change using your product
• at the ROI moment - they have a numbers-backed reason to stay around
• at the 3-month mark - they have made the product part of their lives

And you want people at each of the three stages so you know if there’s a breakdown someone and you can fix churn before it happens.

Okay so how do i write this dang email?

Glad you asked, we’ve got a template for that.

3. Draft your reachout emails

Your customers not really email people? Here’s some other ways to get hold of them.

• Push notifications
• Posting in your company community tool, like discord
• Third-party in-app survey tool, like SurveyMonkey, Typeform
• pop-up survey within your app’s interface

Keep the email short, sweet, and to the point.

Here’s what it looks like when we coordinated this for a client:

Not sure how to actually talk to them when they jump on the call? We’ll cover that in two steps.

But first,

4. Who’s going to talk to people

This is for a larger org, if you’re a small team or founder-led, there’s really only one person - you!

But if you have the team size, I recommend doing a round robin so that multiple departments talk directly with customers.

Here’s why.

Having a “round robin” approach to taking these calls will ensure that everyone is talking to the customer directly and can help cut through siloing.

It puts everyone on the same page with the same goals: understand the customer, build positioning that speaks to and empathizes with them so that everyone makes more money.

If you are delegating your customer interviews to a team like an agency to fix your faulty marketing foundations then it’s better to have one person conducting all the calls.

Ideally the same person who is going to do the messaging work (copy, marketing changes, product recommendations and leadership updates) and be responsible for it’s implementation.

Whichever route you plan to go, you want to make sure you’re listening more than your talking and konw what questions to ask.

Here’s how to have the conversation.

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5. 5 principles for conducting customer interviews

There are 5 principles for Customer Interviews that don’t suck

1. Prep

• know enough to ask deeper questions
• have notes with your top questions ready to go.
• make sure that you can record the meeting easily whether it’s in person or virtual

2. Use Open-Ended Questions

• Be specific to the topic, general on the solution
• nothing that can be answered yes/no

3. Paraphrase and Summarize

• this makes sure you didn’t mis-hear something

4. Be okay with silence

• if they’re trying to collect their thoughts (virtually or in person!) don’t jump in

3. You need it verbatim

• use notes to jot down a thought or a followup question you want to ask.
• let the recording software capture the verbatim responses

Okay what questions should i ask?

That depends (i know, such a lovely answer).

It’s much better to go “what do i want to know about this person and their problems?”

Then write 3-5 questions centered around that.

At a bare minimum you want to know

• who they are (as people as in their role) “tell me about you!”
• why they started using the product “what made you try [product name]?”
• how they feel about using it (this will probably be a natural followup questions to “what made you try [product name]?”)
• what they would like changed “is there anything you’d like changed to added in the product?”
• how they feel about a future using it “what’s next for you?” (and see if they mention the product)

💡 Tip: You really only need a group of 12-30 of those customers. It’s best to have these emails automated, so you always have a trickle of interviews on the calendar to revise the positioning and see what’s hitting in real time. :)

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What do i do with the data?

Great, i have customer interviews now!

How do i turn those into website copy, my marketing plan, and a brand that makes me unignoreable?

You could hire us to do the customer interviews, and in 30 days you’d have

• Clear positioning backed by data
• Unforgettable brand and messaging
• Marketing planned out for the next 6-9 months

DropEvent founder Jeremy did and was blown away.

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Or you could do it yourself.

We have that covered for you (with more templates and tools to make it easy to do).

related blog posts

We cover how to do that in our newsletter Marketing is Not My Job. You can subscribe here.

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