4 mindset traps that prevent you from running effective customer interviews

Mar 10

“Talk to your customers,” they said. But how do you actually get to those mind-blowing insights everyone’s talking about?

Yes, interviewing customers is complicated. But not the way you think.

Scheduling interviews, coming up with incentives (or choosing not to incentivize), deciding on the questions, and challenging yourself to turn on your camera are all table stakes. The biggest challenge: overcoming mindset traps that make you a crappy interviewer, without you even noticing.

Agenda-driven vs curiosity-driven

genda-driven interviews: interviews that don't leave any space for exploring things that you didn't know you might encounter — because they have a hidden agenda (or a pretty obvious one).

Agenda-driven interviews: interviews that don't leave any space for exploring things that you didn't know you might encounter — because they have a hidden agenda (or a pretty obvious one).

When this happens:

You’re running customer interviews as a way to validate the things you assume you already know about your customers, from their buying process to the value they get out of specific features.
You’re looking for specific data points that you believe you need to improve conversions — or because you feel you need a specific type of content to fill out your webpage structure.

What it looks like:

Leading questions: “How important is {{x}} for your company?” vs “What are the things that are important?”
Repeatedly following up on a question because you don’t like the answer (for example, when you feel that your Problem - Agitation - Solution framework is about to fall apart because this pain point you thought mattered… apparently doesn’t).

To me, agenda-driven research makes no sense. It’s the junk food of the research world — satisfying in the moment, but dooming you to feel hungry (for more meaningful customer insights) in no time.

An alternative approach is curiosity-driven research, where you're not going into the conversation with a goal of finding out you're right, or expecting that you’ll be able to get exactly the things you’re looking for.

Being curious also helps you feel less pressure to be right — and to keep conversations pressure-less. There’s a world of difference between pushing someone to get what you want and asking follow-up questions because you find what they’re sharing with you to be fascinatingly unexpected.

Check-the-box vs deep listening

Check-the-box interviews: interviews where you don’t ask any follow-up questions because you’re following a script and want to make sure you get through all of the questions.

When this happens:

There are too many questions and unknowns, so you feel forced to find out all the things.
All questions are considered equally important, so you feel you need to have answers for every single one.

What it looks like:

Not listening, not asking follow-up questions, and missing opportunities to find out more about your customers.
Rushing through the list of questions without giving your interviewees the opportunity to take a step back, think some more about their response, and share more information.

Really Listening 101 level stuff. But really, if you’re not listening, people can tell, even over Zoom.

Asking good follow-up questions not only gets you more detailed, in-depth answers, it also matters for getting answers that are more accurate and honest. Just because you happen to jump on a call with someone, they won’t necessarily want to share their whole story with you. Especially if the call doesn’t feel like a conversation.

Another reason to be more flexible in your approach to running interviews is that — trusting strangers aside — we are all unreliable narrators, with our own biases, preconceived notions, and motivations.

If you’re paying close attention to both what your interviewees say and how they’re saying it, you can get a better picture of the things they’re not saying — and either follow up on an intriguing thread or make sure you’re taking what they’re saying with a grain of salt.

This leads us to the next point — (not) treating customer interviews as the single source of truth.

Because remember:

via GIPHY

Single source of truth vs one of several data points

Single source of truth: elevating one thing one customer said to “True for 100% of our prospects” status.

When this happens:

You are under pressure to deliver results, fast — so you feel you need to move fast.
You feel that other points of reference are not very helpful (or you don’t have them in place) — so you hope to be able to use customer interviews to solve *all* your problems.

What it looks like:

Not knowing which question to prioritize because they are not based on any additional research data points.
Running the smallest number of interviews possible (extra pressure to extract every single magical sparkle of insight from each and every one of them — not good).
Copy is launched without validation — or without having a validation plan in place.

Interviews help you better understand your customers, but the biggest benefit is being able to see clear trends and understand why those trends exist — and how they’re relevant for your business.

Still, your interviewees are unreliable narrators, and even 10–15 interviews are not going to translate into a “We know everything about our target market” level of insights (which is… unachievable to begin with).

That means knowing better than to trust just one source of research or data. Interviews are going to give you the most bang for your buck — but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do anything else, either before scheduling those interviews (to ask better questions), or after the interviews (to validate your hypotheses in the wild).

Ultimate knowledge vs better guesses

Ultimate knowledge: “Now we know everything we will ever need to know. And can *finally* be done with talking to our customers.”

When this happens:

You believe that there’s a point in time when research is done.

What it looks like:

A one-off customer interview round is meant to fuel strategy, content marketing and growth initiatives for the next 3-5 years.
Or, you plan to get back to the research, but get swamped with a tsunami of to-dos… and never get back to it.

Research is never done (like laundry).

The whole point of investing your time to do research is making better guesses when moving forward and creating things that we will then test by putting them out in the wild and learning from that.

Constant learning: not very sexy, but super useful.

How to make your customer interviews all sparkly and unicorn-y — and amazingly effective

We all have our pet ideas, we all go into interviews with specific assumptions or hypotheses (or even hopes to make your favorite framework work).

That’s not the problem (hey, that’s how our brains work).

Problems start when we try to shoehorn research into what we want it to be (and ignore the bits that don’t fit).

Bad news: “Garbage in, garbage out” still applies. Good news: “You don’t always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need” applies as well.

I wish there was an easy, 5-minute hack to extract 500% of the value out of each customer interview and turn them into copy that coverts 99.9% of website visitors, regardless of the traffic source.

But really, if you’re just starting out with customer interviews, you need 2 things:

Start practicing — mindfully:
1. Read The Mom Test, if you haven’t already
2. Work on your listening skills
3. Be OK with customer interviews not giving you the easy, fill-in-the-blank answers
Keep an open mind:
- Be aware of your biases and assumptions (you can even document them, making it a part of your process)
- Accept that there will never be a moment when you know everything — and that there is no single source of truth

Even if customer interviews seem like a time-consuming, infuriating, neverending mess, taming the interview chaos means discovering things about your customers and the way they interact with your product that CS, sales, and — yes — marketing need to know to work better, together. And make all of that sparkly, unicorn-y stuff happen, when 5-minute hacks can’t deliver.

I help B2B SaaS startup founders and marketers get more traction with research-driven conversion copy — without slowing down their growth initiatives.

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