How do you talk to customers?

I'm no expert, but I know experts at this recommend The Mom Test: https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone/dp/1492180742

In particular - Chapter 6 "Finding Conversations" will be useful to you. There are 4 subheadings in that chapter that you might find extremely relevant:

• Going to Them
• Bringing Them to You
• Creating Warm Intros
• Asking for and Framing the Meeting

But if I had to extract the principle from these, I would say the key is to be authentically interested in what they're doing (and give compliments when you see great work!). In that sense, the key here is the essence of "How to Make Friends and Influence People"

Best of luck!

I'm currently reading Lean B2B and it goes through exactly this process, speak to an audience, identify multiple problems, then work on the problem with the best potential for success.

I have a few thoughts/inputs but take it with a grain of salt as I've not done this nor am I terribly effective communicator:
1.) Leverage personal/professional networks to initially sit down with people who will be absolutely honest with you.
2.) Ask successful interviewees for referrals to others who may have similar problems.
3.) Take an area of personal passion/knowledge/experience as a starting point. So, for example I am passionate about data so I might sit down with a gym owner and ask them to walk me through the workflow of data entry, data storage, and data analysis. You could do the same with customer management, invoicing/payment, customer communications, workout logs, physical asset management (gym equipment), and so many other areas. In other words, many people don't know their problems and/or don't know what problems you might solve so giving some direction to the conversation and focusing more on workflow than specifically problems can be helpful.

Hope that helps,