The Rules for Customer Interviews

welcome to the lift series on customer development today we're going to be talking about customer interviews or specifically how to do a good customer interview and the rules around that so customer development is all about validating your assumptions around your business and the way you do that is by talking to your customers there's a couple simple rules that we have that will help you make sure that you're getting good information from them the first one and the most important is no pitching the difference between sales and customer development is subtle but basically at the end you're not asking them for money and so if they think that you're going to be asking them for money they're not going to be giving you the information that you want they're not going to open up to you so if I say hey I'm building this dog shampoo that makes dogs not smell bad would you want that that sounds like you're selling to them so they might say no or they might say yes but either way like they're probably just saying yes because they want to be nice to you they may not actually need it you haven't demonstrated anything you haven't validated any of your assumptions so no pitching while you're doing customer development during your customer interviews the next rule is no ice cream questions a great example an ice cream question is do you want ice cream no rational human being would ever say no to that question everyone wants ice cream all of the time so by asking do you want ice cream you're not getting anything useful out of them so back to the dog example does your dog smell bad sometimes yeah it does wouldn't it be great if you're all if your dog didn't smell bad sometimes yes what rational person would want their dog to smell bad so you're not learning anything from that so why bother asking because it ends up making you feel like you've validated one of your assumptions when you really haven't the next one is pull don't push so you want to pull information out of them you don't want to push things onto them so I might ask someone do you have a dog yes cool what do you dislike about having a dog and they're like oh well I mean my dog isn't particular well-trained so it misbehaves a lots o interesting interesting and you you dive into that a little bit but you really want to see if they want this shampoo because the dog smells bad so you're like well what else don't you like about having a dog like oh I mean it really messes with my social life like I have to come back every day after work and walk it and take it to the bathroom and clean up after it and I gets really obnoxious because I can't go out to the bar with my friends after work there go interesting interesting come about that bla bla bla bla bla and then you're like well what else don't you like about having a dog well I mean it sheds all the time and I just have a dog fur all over my house Erico interesting they've gone through three questions you've pulled three problems out of them and none of them have been my dog smells bad sometimes so maybe that's important right maybe that means that their dogs smell bad isn't one of their top three problems so in that case you know you learned that their dog sheds all over the place so maybe you should think about pivoting your dog shampoo to something that makes dogs not shed anymore next one and if one is not proof so that means one person saying something shouldn't make you validate or invalidate anything it shouldn't make you make any big decisions if someone says something interesting and unexpected you should go validate that and try to get 10 more people to come to the same conclusion independently if you can't that person was just crazy if you can then you've learned something really interesting past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior basically if I say you know I want to go to the gym I'm going to go to the gym this year it's my new year's resolution I'm going to go three times every week for the whole year if you look back in the last three years I've been to the gym once now there's a chance that they'll change there's a chance to go to the gym all the time but with much more likely is that they'll go to the gym once or twice that year and then they'll just kind of stop going so if you look back at what they have done it's a great indication of what they will do so a great example another great example of this is asking some what their diets so let me bring my assistant up and let's see what this looks like this is kev-kev why don't you tell me about your diets um I eat pretty healthy all the time yeah any any rules that you live by yeah I do kind of the Paleo thing mostly various kinds of Lokar honestly I sort of play by whatever rules I feel like at the time but I try to stay away from the bread and the pasta and stuff like that great great so we've learned as CAV eats really healthy and he stays with her breads and pastas and a lot of big meats and vegetables right keV mm-hmm I eat a lot of meats and vegetables yeah great so so we've asked have about essentially his ideal self about how he sees himself in his kind of future behavior how he plans to eat so let's try it for question keV tell me about the last meal you had I had a sandwich a couple minutes ago um it was it was a meatball sandwich it was pretty good it was a lot of bread there though definitely yeah and what about the meal before that I was running kind of late to a meeting so I had a Starbucks breakfast sandwich hmm and what was on the breakfast sandwich some egg there was a lot of there was a muffin definitely they had salads there um but I didn't really feel like having a salad for breakfast I felt like that was a little weird gotcha thanks keV so what we discovered is you can go to you have like wait you wanted uh what we discovered is if you ask have what his diet is he'll talk about his ideal self how he sees himself it also is kind of like how he sees that he'll eat in the future but instead if you ask about his past self you end up finding out what he actually did you found out of his actual self and it turns out cab doesn't actually eat particularly healthy he has a lot of breads I bet he had pasta last night or Mexican food or like all sorts of other stuff right so asking about their past self is asking about their actual self and that's a great predictor of what they will do in the future and so the last one is and you just notice this with the previous question stories are better than statements so have how do you eat it's like I eat healthy I don't eat bread great those are statements tell me about the last time you did this that that encouraged them to tell a story and from that story not only do you learn a lot more but it gives you a lot more jumping-off questions like what am I going to follow up I eat healthy what does that mean and like cool I eat x y&z that's not very interesting that's pretty boring so instead use the health story and then you can riff off that story you can ask much more deeper questions and they just talk a lot more so that is the lift video series on the rules of customer interviews tune in next week for good techniques to get those stories

Channel: LIFFFTInc

Views: 62,884

Keywords: customer development, customer interviews, how to do a customer interview, business model canvas, LIFFFT, video tutorial, Whiteboard, product design, product development

Id: KZYntTU3JW4

Length: 7min 2sec (422 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 22 2013