Direct interviews with prospects and customers are the most effective way to find out if your product is beloved, wanted, required, or not yet ready for the marketplace.

Startups working with Lever conduct 20-25 interviews with likely users of their product or service. The goal of the survey process is to validate the business strategy.

From the MFN Journal: How a Renewables Entrepreneur Treats Customers as Co-Developers

Jenny and ARC’s founder and CEO Rob Monteith joined the 2021 Berkshire Sustainability Challenge that required candidates complete at least 20 customer interviews. “Those cold calls were tough work,” recalls Jenny. “Many people either don’t answer their phones, since they don’t know who is calling or are hesitant to talk to you because they think a sales pitch is coming. I was extremely grateful to those who took the time to listen and answer some questions.” She discovered that while universities were deeply interested in adopting sustainable technologies, they couldn’t move quickly enough for a start-up to survive while waiting for that first contract.

At MFN, we’ve found that customer interviews work best when approached with a structured, repeatable process. Here’s our proven five-step process for conducting effective interviews with prospects and customers:

1. Identify Your Target Audience

In the beginning this will be the circle of people you trust for feedback about what you’re working on. Over time you’ll be able to get more nuanced and use segmentation to categorize who your prospects and customers are.

2. Prepare a Script, But Stay Flexible

Some essential questions include:

• What are your biggest challenges related to [problem your product/service solves]?
• How are you currently dealing with this problem?
• What do you like/dislike about existing solutions?
• If you had a magic wand, how would you fix this?

3. Listen More Than You Talk

The goal of these interviews is not to sell but to learn. Encourage customers to share their unfiltered thoughts and probe further when you hear something interesting.

4. Record the Conversation

Keeping records of these conversations is crucial. Be sure to mention to your subjects at the start if the sessions are being recorded. The easiest and most accurate way is to record the conversation with a service like Otter or Fireflies. These provide a complete transcript, and their ability to summarize the conversations is also useful. If there’s no other option, taking notes is better than nothing. 

5. Follow Up and Build Relationships

Sharing the results of your customer survey is a critical part of building ongoing relationships. Even if it’s just a few paragraphs of summary, providing feedback to your interview subject will increase their willingness to talk to you in future projects.

Here’s an overview of some of the data points you could work on filling in:

In MFN’s experience, companies that have used  this five-step process to complete their customer surveys have universally found it to help identify the way forward for their venture. If you have questions on customer interviews or surveying, reach out for help here.

This article is part of the MFN Go To Market Resources hosted at MassFoundersNetwork.org. Click through to see the series index for all available topics.