20 Customer Discovery Calls
by Alessandro StiglianiTo better understand the current challenges our prospect userbase is currently facing, we initiated one month ago a round of discussions with CMO's, acquisition experts & founder's from a wide range of company sizes.
How:
Reach our network (Mostly Linkedin & Friends) to set-up 30min Google Hangout call with ideal customers.
Difficulty:
- Easy to Medium
- Mostly time-consuming
- Doing this during summer is a challenge by itself (a lot of people are OOF especially in Europe)
- Defining ahead the topics needed to be covered during these interviews is also a great exercise > this will put you in the shoes of your prospects.
Objective:
- Validate our current alpha build
- Prioritize our roadmap for the Beta release
- Discover new pain-points and challenges we did not think of
- Get insights on possible pricing models
Results:
Talking with a wider range of company sizes gave us a better understanding of marketing pain-points companies are facing at each step of their growths.
Having real discussions with people greatly helped to shape our sales pitch and how to shift-it for different types of prospects.
There are some specificities between B2C and B2B types of companies, mostly around the acquisition channels they are targeting and how they address their userbase.
Our product vision did not pivot but the timing for each feature releases has been ordered differently to enhance our go-to-market strategy.
Next-step:
- Add 20 more interviews to our backlog
- Get more B2B type of businesses
Tips:
These types of interviews should not be about your product, but about their current working process & pain-points = LISTEN
Keep in mind the topics you wish to cover (print your topics on a sheet of paper) and jump between topics while keeping the discussion as fluid as possible = This is a discussion, not an interrogatory.
The first interviews will seem a bit weird, but as you practice your discussion flow will improve greatly (you won't need that sheet of paper anymore)
Keep track of every discussion by taking notes and store them/rank them/... = We use Airtable to arrange and track everything.
Use Calendly to ease-up the meeting scheduling (Doing everything by hand is very ineffective and results in many email back-and-forths)
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Thanks for sharing, it's really useful to see how others do things.
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You're welcome!
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I like this approach, from what I can read from your blog you already have an mvp to show, so I think you are on right path to validate your assumptions and ideas.
How do you balance this effort of customer discovery and working on mvp ? I mean 50% time each day, depend on schedule or what ?
In your experience is feasible to validate with potential customer about pricing too or is too early ?-
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We are currently 3 working on Abyssale.
In order to be as efficient as possible, I mainly conduct these interviews myself, they take around 30min of my time and I have around 3 to 4 interviews per week scheduled... In-fine it is not really that time-consuming to conduct them.
From what I've seen so far, you can always discuss about pricing but you need to be smart about it and only talk about this subject at the end of the interview after you've explained all the possibility offered by your solution and give enough time for the prospect to really understand your proposition value and what they could gain by using your product. (ie: "If given a range how much would you pay for this type of product")
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I agree talking about money should be last point, but is also important to validate it too.
Keep track of every discussion by taking notes and store them/rank them/... = We use Airtable to arrange and track everything.
What do you track exactly ?
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- Company size (mapping the requested features + the potential pricing plan/model)
- Business type/model (SEO + advertising segmentation)
- Job title (for potential advertising segmentation targeting on LinkedIn)
- name + email (for future contact)
- Prospect possibility to be onboarded afterward (0 to 5 stars rating)
- Related feature requested (this help to plan the roadmap)
- Other things related to our market (advertising & marketing)
- Complete note written by myself during the meeting
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That's great! This is very helpful
How difficult was it to get people to agree to an interview though, and how did you get them to?
In my mind, not very many people would be willing to dedicate time to just talk to "some sales person".-
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It was not that difficult but mostly time-consuming... as I explained during July/August there are a lot of people OOF in France (our country)
I was especially not driving this meeting as a "sale meeting" and I never pushed our product, I just started the discussion with a simple sentence like "we are currently building a product for marketing teams in order for them... " then pushed the topics that I explicitly talked about in our email exchange "I'm looking to understand what is your current process..."
Most of them asked in the last 5min "btw what are you guys building ? because all these questions seemed very interesting" and most of them were willing to be kept updated on our progress.
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This comment was deleted 7 years ago.
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