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B2B Inspired
B2B Inspired, the podcast by BlueOcean - The B2B Agency, is all about exploring the ins, outs, ups and downs of B2B Marketing here in Aotearoa, New Zealand. We'll uncover emerging trends and thinking while sharing inspiring real-world stories from B2B Marketers here in New Zealand. With the goal of supporting New Zealand’s B2B Marketing community in becoming one of the best and brightest anywhere in the world, let’s roll up our sleeves and take on tomorrow together.
B2B Inspired
The Art of the Customer Interview
🔎 Keen to bring more customer insight into your decision making?
⚖️ Need to democratise discussions in the boardroom?
💡Or maybe you need to send the right signals to support your journey through the levels of seniority…
Join BlueOcean Senior Marketer, Freyja Spaven, on a thought-provoking and practical discussion about the B2B Marketer’s superpower, nailing customer interviews.
Freyja reveals effective strategies for conducting powerful customer interviews that go beyond surface-level feedback.
· Learn how observing customer environments and engaging with various levels within a client’s organization can lead to richer, more actionable insights.
· Discover practical tips on building relationships with sales teams and maintaining client trust
· All while gathering comprehensive feedback that can transform product development and marketing strategies.
Freyja’s advice is not only practical but also rooted in a deep understanding of the nuances of B2B marketing. Freyja discusses the importance of curiosity, the art of asking meaningful questions, and how tools like the Strategy Canvas and Value Proposition Design Book can enhance your approach.
Building rapport, understanding interviewee contexts, and maintaining flexibility are crucial for gathering authentic feedback.
Join us as Freyja highlights how integrating these insights into your marketing work can foster a customer-centric approach and ensure alignment between sales and marketing teams. This episode is packed with actionable advice and resources to enhance your customer interview skills, gather meaningful feedback, and rally your organisation around a unified view of what matters to the customer.
...and in a real shake-up for the show, producer Louis hosts this episode – being in front of the camera rather than behind it.
For more B2B insights, ideas and opportunities, head to www.blueoceanagency.co.nz
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/blueocean-agency/
Website: https://www.blueoceanagency.co.nz/podcast/
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Let’s roll up our sleeves and take on tomorrow together.
Kia ora, and welcome back to we Do B2B, the podcast by Blue Ocean, where we unpick the ins outs, ups and downs of B2B marketing here in Aotearoa, new Zealand. I'm your host, dale Kerner, and I'm a B2B marketer like you, from emerging trends and thinking to inspiring real world stories from smart, good people here in New Zealand. We're here to help the New Zealand B2B marketing community to become one of the best and brightest anywhere in the world. If, like me, you're a B2B marketer looking for a place to connect, learn and be inspired, you have come to the right place.
Speaker 2:Morning folks, and welcome to another episode of the we Do B2B podcast brought to you by Blue Ocean Agency. I'm very excited because I have a very special guest that I get to interview today by the name of Freya Spaven. She's one of our senior B2B marketers and I am going to pick her brain about a few things today, specifically around customer interviews. About a few things today specifically around customer interviews. So, as I said, freya is a senior B2B marketer here and she's passionate about sustainable and purpose-driven business, which we'll get into in a in a little bit of a sec. Freya, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Great to be here. I can't believe I'm on the side of the podcast table.
Speaker 2:I'm normally behind the camera, so for me to sit here and interview someone is a little bit nerve-wracking. But I'm really, really excited to have a conversation with you. I thought we'd start off with a career break that you had to kind of just realign or reassess where you were at. Can you just take us through just like a brief history of who you are and what that looked like?
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure, so probably my marketing career has been quite wandering for many years now and I think I'd reached about year nine or ten of my career last year and I just had to take a little bit of time out just to figure out what my next steps were.
Speaker 3:I think I'm very lucky in the fact that I absolutely have a career that I love, so I didn't really feel the need to completely pull the plug or anything like that. It was more about adding a little bit of a layer of exploration and adding a bit of a layer and a deeper layer of inquiry about what I wanted to achieve going forward. Yeah, and during that time I actually managed to work with some really lovely clients, so I took on board a few clients that I was really the industry particularly I was really passionate about. And, yeah, I spent time just reconnecting with the community, rebuilding my network, going to every single breakfast, lunch, dinner that I could. Here in Tauranga. I went to a three day conference, which is usually a luxury that you can't really afford when you're in a full-time work. Yeah, and I decided to formalize my education as well.
Speaker 2:I think it's a very important aspect of someone who has been in a career for a while and if you have the opportunity to kind of press the pause button, I think it allows a little bit of space for reflection and for other stuff whatever those thoughts and those conferences and those conversations to happen where you're not in a constant drive because you are working. I think it's a vital aspect of growth. Actually, you know for yourself and and and for others around you, to kind of, exactly as you say, reflect and just go. What's it about? Where am I I going? What am I doing? What do I really really enjoy? What do I want to cut out? I'm curious to know about the sustainability, because I know you are studying again what is a sustainable and purpose-driven subject? I'm going slightly off topic here, but what does that mean for you? What are you studying? What are you going to achieve with that?
Speaker 3:I think we're seeing two things in business right now, or one thing in particular in business right now, and that is the drive to sustainability and being more sustainable. Whenever I talk with clients, it's usually a core tenant of their business. We've got a few things that are forcing that. We've got legislation that's coming from the top down, but then we're also seeing a level of inquiry coming up through the business as well in terms of employees hiring strategies, and it is a question that has been asked.
Speaker 2:Perfect segue into what we're talking about today, which is customer interviews. So that's, that's, it's a. It's a meaty subject, because it's where all the stuff happens. Basically, it doesn't. So customer interviews why did you want to talk about that today?
Speaker 3:Well, I think it's just such an underestimated part of our general research process in marketing. You might do your primary research, you might do secondary research and that forms a body of understanding about your products or what you want to go forward in. I think that marketers can be guilty of losing a connection to our customers. I hear it quite often we get bogged down in the data, we get bogged down in the day-to-day and very focused on what we're doing immediately, at that point in time, and this is just such a fantastic way, and a very effective and efficient way, to reinvigorate yourself and remind yourself of the why that your business might be doing business with the people that you are doing business with.
Speaker 2:It's a vital part of it and I think, like, as rightly as you say, you know you get separated from the why and you get separated from who you're doing this for. What are you doing this for? So let's dig into this a bit, let's have some fun with this. When is a good excuse to do an interview?
Speaker 3:Well, firstly, I think that in B2B, it is our superpower being able to talk Absolutely.
Speaker 2:I have to agree with you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, because we've built these relationships and we've built an environment of trust, often with our clients, with our customers, and those relationships they hinge off of having conversations. They hinge on. It is a two-way street. We've got to deliver products and messaging that resonates with the person that we're talking to, and in order for that to happen, we need to know, understand and empathize with the customer. And I don't think you can do that unless you have a genuine conversation and you have a genuine connection. I think the gold standard of customer interviews is to be able to not only just do a face-to-face interview and sit like how we are doing now, but actually to go in situ and spend time in the person's environment as well. So if you're a very lucky marketer, as I have been in the past, go and see customers in the wild, see them using your product in the wild, so you can add observational data to the way that you observe.
Speaker 2:You raise an interesting point there about the situational observation, because it's one thing to ask a question digitally either email or have a telephone conversation but being in the person's environment must be a whole different experience for you as the interviewer and also gives you insight into how you can actually market their product as a marketer, be a more effective marketer for them. I mean, have you got any examples of that just off the cuff, of what it's been like for you to kind of step in to an environment and go, oh, I didn't know about that. We've been missing the point the whole time. This is where we need to focus.
Speaker 3:Probably the best example is from. I used to work in the tech industry down in Wellington and we were quite close. We've got a wonderful ecosystem in Wellington so we were able to go and visit a lot of our customers quite a lot of the time. Stepping into an environment where someone's working, you can start to notice things like what kind of things that they enjoy outside of their work life. It gives you a little bit of an insight into you know, perhaps, what posters they have up on their desk. Or you know not not being nosy, but you know have they got families like, how many cups of coffee are they drinking a day? How messy is their desk? And real data isn't it real data? Which books are they reading? You know, often we have a stack of books I know I certainly do on the side of my desk as well um, so that kind of data can help to enrich your understanding of not only how they use the product but how they operate in day to day life.
Speaker 2:Gotcha Makes perfect sense. Ok, so now that let's let's ask the big questions. Who should I interview? Are we only looking at, like you know, the top level kind of C-suite people? Are we looking at management? Are we looking at people on the floor? How does that look? Who?
Speaker 3:should I interview? Looking at people on the floor, how does that look? Who should I interview? And I guess it comes back to like the question previously around when is a good excuse to do an interview? Because actually, yeah, yeah, well, when, versus the okay. So when do we do a customer interview?
Speaker 3:And I think any time is a good time, any time that you're making a change in the business. But I think I mean it's a fantastic 90-day plan. You go into a business. What you want to do is you want to ride shotgun with sales and develop that relationship with your sales team so that you're actually sat next to the sales team inside of their calls. So when they're talking to their customers doing interviews, you start to shape and build your foundation of your product and or service very early on and you start to develop that from the conversations that you're having and the level of the inquiry that the sales team is also giving as well. So I think that that's a very, very good time to do a, to start doing customer interviews.
Speaker 3:The other time that I would recommend doing customer interviews is just any time that you feel like there's a gap in your understanding If you need to get from point A to point B and you're not quite sure how to get there. That's a fantastic time to start building out your understanding and building out what the customer sees in your product as well. So, any time that you're going to be making a change within your business, anytime you're looking at changing your messaging and positioning, anytime that you're launching a product, as marketers, of course, we love to do case studies and gather testimonials, but perhaps that is a topic for another day.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but it's part of that interview process because it leads you to kind of like be able to build more information about a product that you can do a case study on, which will help the client anyway.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, and that's like the level of intimacy that you have with a customer, right, because you want to be asking what do you want to achieve from your customer? Interview is probably the first thing that I would ask in an interview process and that will determine the level of who you talk to. So you might talk to somebody who is friendly, but they haven't purchased your product yet. Why haven't they purchased your product? And that develops your set of interviews and gives you a direction for the way you want to go. Have they bought your product, used your product and then exited? What were the reasons that they left? They might have clicked do not need it anymore, you know on a product survey, so you can start to gather that data and then build a database and potentially talk to them.
Speaker 2:Are you interviewing these customers from that environment? Are you doing this separately? Are you asking the client for prospective customers? What does that chain look like? What does that journey look like in terms of? I know you said when is a good time to do an interview, which you've mentioned, but then the who should I interview part, how does that trickle down? Does that come from the client or do you kind of do your separate own research about people that are using a product?
Speaker 3:That would always come from the client. In an agency environment, relationships are very, very important and we are in a great place of trust to be able to talk to a business's clients, and we certainly don't take that lightly Having a deep level of respect.
Speaker 2:Just going back a step. When you're deciding who to interview or why to interview, do you give any feedback to the client first, before you interview customers? You said you're out shotgun with the sales team so that you can understand what that process looks like. Are you literally like a fly on the wall, like a a degree separated, or do you actually insert yourself as a marketer to say, maybe you could ask it like this, or or have you? Have you spoken about this? In other words, have you seen the gaps? Can you immediately insert yourself there, or do you wait until after you've actually interviewed a customer? Does that make sense?
Speaker 3:it does make sense. Yeah, I think that um to me, if I was to ride a shotgun with a sales team member and we're looking again, we're probably looking at a different level of what we're trying to achieve out of the conversation. So I would absolutely be in a position of bringing my ears in that context. I'd be listening to the responses, but if I did actually want to get something from the conversation, for example a testimonial, I might very nicely ask if we could insert a question around. You know, I'd be just like hey, you know what's the biggest benefit that you see from using our product and let that come through the sales team member and then I would be able to extract that. And you know we go through the permission process of asking for a testimonial, but not all customers are happy customers, right?
Speaker 2:Well, that was the other thing I was going to ask. It's like not all customers are equal, are they?
Speaker 3:No, not all customers are happy with your products, but they have fantastic insights really, where they come from, what are their, you know? And then we're talking about pain points and gain points. Right, what pain points do they have with your?
Speaker 2:Oh, I bet you've got some very interesting examples of that, but we won't get into that now. But yeah, I mean not happy customers. How do you handle that? I mean, you're not even from the company. You're actually, you know, you're the marketer asking these questions, but I suppose we can get into that a bit. So just to continue on, who should I interview? So that comes from the client.
Speaker 3:That would always come from a client in an agency environment. But I think if you're client side you have an extra layer, less removed Oftentimes. Our B2B clients are very close with our customers. You know, maybe they're talking once a week at the very minimum. So we've always found that people are very willing to talk. We're always very respectful of that. So if they say, hey, I just don't have time don't press, it's all good.
Speaker 2:Is there a magic number about how many customers you interview?
Speaker 3:Is there sort of standard, industry standard, or is it kind of as much as you can, or is there a magic number? I would absolutely be going for more than five is probably where I would sit, but then the upper limit of that. There's a lot of research to suggest. Actually, you start to reach a saturation point and you'll start to hear that in your customer interviews and when you're listening for those customer insights, people might start to say the same words over and over again, or they might start to talk about the way that they're using their product and in what situations that you're using it. But at that point it becomes about validation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it feeds into your data points about okay, cool, we're getting the same message come through again and again and again with all these customer interviews. Okay, yes, all right cool, let's move on a bit. And let's move on to how should I develop my interview, because it's it's an art, it's a skill, and you have to be quite on, you know, on it to are to get the information that you, that you need to get, without being, without being, biased, I, I'm sure.
Speaker 3:So let me ask the question how should I develop my interview? I think you talked about a great point there, which is bias. We're always going to bring inherent bias, but that is when bringing your ears is very important to the conversation. Try not to ask leading questions and my particular approach. I'm sure that many marketers and other people have a um, a very uh, might have a very different approach to me, but I much prefer a semi-structured um uh approach. So that is where I would take, say, this is why I find 30 minute interviews very, very um, sometimes quite difficult. Yeah, I agree, you want to try and extract some meaning, but also I'm very grateful that other people have given me time. So I always try and keep it to 30 minutes to 45 minutes to an hour, but I would in that time you might actually find that you can only get through five or six questions.
Speaker 2:All right.
Speaker 3:So how I would do it is I would understand very clearly what I want to get out of the interview. What insights do I want to derive? Because then you can start to steer the conversation, and that is a skill. That is a skill to gently steer the conversation away from maybe a rant into the insight that you want to achieve, because you've got to be respectful of their time. So I would actually develop out the theme that you're trying to get. I would develop out a structured question that is very, very open and leads to a lot of can lead to a lot of outcomes, and then, underneath that I would develop probes. So I'm quite structured in my interview process.
Speaker 2:Do you give those questions to the clients or do you have a conversation when you meet them for the first time?
Speaker 3:That's a really great question. I think that if I was doing a case study, I would absolutely deliver those questions ahead of time. However, if trying to derive messaging positioning, no, I don't think that I would.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree. It's such an interesting thing because I like what you say about you know, keeping the interview to like 30 or 40 minutes because you're respectful of their time, but it often takes the first 10 minutes for them to get out of their own head and to build the rapport and to build the trust in order for them to go. You know what I actually really don't like this product, or I really like this product because whatever and that is when, as you said, the structured questions that layer deeper is those probing questions where you can guide that conversation to the information that you are looking for and to get out of that person. I love that.
Speaker 3:And to your point, though, it is a skill and that's why I recommend doing it as often as you can. Firstly, you know, as a young marketer coming through I don't know if how many people who listen to this are, you know maybe more wanting to get to that senior level.
Speaker 2:Tips and tricks are great. I mean, you're an experienced marketer and you've done this many, many, many times, so please share your knowledge. This is exactly what we want to get out of this.
Speaker 3:Well, I think that's exactly it. I mean, it not only gives a signal to the business that you are interested in what's going on, but you can develop a very good understanding of the business and the business environment very quickly by talking to customers, and it is a skill that you can develop so you'll even find after four or five that actually it becomes very comfortable. And these are skills that transfer all the way through into your daily life with your friends, with your family. Active listening, maintaining eye contact without being creepy it's hard, it's difficult, and the active listening part as well. You know, active listening is a skill and we often talk about how we come out of interviews and we're like, oh, quite tired, but that's okay and that's a really good sign because it shows that you've been thinking through.
Speaker 2:And you're engaged.
Speaker 3:And you're engaged and you're actually listening to what they're saying. It's very important. So if you're tired coming out of your first couple of interviews, you've used some of your social juice and if you're an introvert, you can go away and and take a moment. But yeah, definitely recommend it if you are a up and comer I, I am going to add a layer to that.
Speaker 2:I mean, obviously I've been behind the camera for many, many years and I've conducted many, many interviews from behind the camera and to your point about just the one thing about maintaining eye contact, sometimes you've got a camera in front of you and all of a sudden, the person in front of the camera not that the interview is always recorded shuts down or feels like they have to perform yes, or it's a different persona and it's not what you want. So, getting to that point where you can look at someone, as you rightly say, not in a creepy way, but to give them a focus point of going hey, I'm here, I'm listening to you, we're on the journey together for us to get information so that we can better serve the client so the customer, and there are some fantastic, just on that, learning and education points.
Speaker 3:There are some fantastic courses that you can take. I might even Share, share, share, we could put it in the show notes.
Speaker 2:but, yeah, off the top of your head, is there anything that particularly sticks out for you? You don't have to answer it, but you can put it in the show notes. But is there anything that's a resource that you go to or something that you've done that you could share with us?
Speaker 3:I think videography resources are actually very good. Well, I'm your guy, I know. I mean, there's a lot of marketers who started their life out in journalism. They developed that curiosity for human beings. I think that that curiosity is a skill as well, I think, and there are lots of things that you can bake into your suite or your, your interview toolbox.
Speaker 3:I think, because you need the hard. Yeah, you need the hard skills, but you need the soft skills as well. So hard skills are, like you know, asking being able to shape and develop your questions in a way that's going to extract the meaning that quickly get the job done, right jobs to be done. We'll talk about that in a way that's going to extract the meaning that quickly Get the job done. Get the job done, right Jobs to be done. We'll talk about that in a second. But, yeah, deriving the meaning, I would say that that's a hard skill that you need to develop, but there's soft skills as well. I mean, as an example, look how I'm sat.
Speaker 3:Exactly Toward you, I'm sat at a slight angle. Those kind of things can help to put other people at ease as well, so keep them in your toolbox, because they're ever so useful, even if it gives you a semblance of control over how the conversation might go and listen and listen to this podcast, because you'll get more and more information from us, which I love.
Speaker 2:Okay, cool. So so, steering it back in your, in your words, um, how should I develop my interview? You've spoken about getting the structure, the length of the interview, the structure, then the leading questions, the probing questions. What else do I need to think about when I develop those kind of questions, or even the area where we're going to do the interview? Is that it's obviously an in-person interview, it's obviously in situ, or is it their workplace or their boat as the customer, or is the customer coming to you, to the actual client?
Speaker 3:Any and all of the above? Yeah, absolutely. And you know we often do have certain time constraints so we might give ourselves half an hour. So, going back to that point of how do we extract and I'm talking about extraction, I shouldn't really how do we have a meaningful conversation that outputs what we require in half an hour without actually wasting the other person's time? And a technique that we use here at Blue Ocean in particular is not necessarily the semi-structured approach. When we're trying to derive, when we're trying to build out messaging and positioning or gain an understanding of the business, we actually use a blend of qualitative and quantitative data. So we will start an interview process, quite friendly, and, you know, really derive. Those start to develop an understanding of the person's situation.
Speaker 2:Gotcha, Okay, and this was about building rapport with the customer and understanding where they're coming from.
Speaker 3:yeah, developing a situational understanding of where they're coming from. But then we'll also use something called the Strategy Canvas, which was developed by the Value Proposition Design Book, which I have right here, and what that does is it is essentially a like it type scale. So you know one of the scales that goes from strongly agree to strongly disagree on a scale of one to six or one to seven.
Speaker 2:So you're verbally asking these questions, so verbally asking, on a scale of one to six six being I absolutely love, zero being I absolutely hate when would you rate X?
Speaker 3:Yes, yes. So it's a mixed method approach which allows us to not only dig into, get the qualitative numbers that we need to develop a data visualization which gets across meaning very, very quickly in a way that is meaningful to Okay and can also, I suppose, show patterns and validation of what you were asking across, however many customers you're actually speaking to.
Speaker 2:That's exactly right, gotcha, thank you.
Speaker 3:And it's a seven. You know, it might be right at the top of the scale. So it's like a seven.
Speaker 2:But then they might say something like it's a seven, but it's because we have to do it, not because I care about it, and then you can that leads you into exploring that a little bit more say well, can you tell us why that is? Yeah, because I had a bad experience with the customer service or the client or something. Let me down, okay, I'm, it's beginning to form a picture in my head. So it's actually giving you hard data, but it's also informing your follow-up questions about can you tell us why you you've said that? And and and also it's interesting because sometimes you break through the veil, don't you? I'm giving you a seven because I have to give you a seven. Actually, I only want to give you a four. So I assume most of these custom interviews the client is not present.
Speaker 3:In our environment. Yes and no If they've been invited.
Speaker 2:yes, so does that make? I'm going off a little bit of tension. What would your preference be? What would you say is a better outcome to look for, client present or not present to get the information that you need? It might be a very subjective answer.
Speaker 3:It's a very subjective answer and, can I say, it just depends it really just does depend on whether the client wants to be present or not. You might find that by you not being there, that you create a little bit of space and you allow them to express themselves in a way that they might not feel like that they can in front of the client.
Speaker 2:I suppose it also goes back to the relationship you have with the client and what you're trying to achieve. Okay, that's beautiful. How long do I need, I mean, and then how many should you do? We touched on it. But let's get a bit specific here in terms of I'm a marketer, I need, and I've got a client and I'm going to go and do some interviews, and I of I'm a marketer, I need and I've got a client and I'm going to go and do some interviews, and it's. I suppose it does depend on the clients if it's large clients or small clients. But yeah, how long do I need and you know how many should I do? Is there a magic number?
Speaker 3:I would always set aside 30 minutes as a minimum, as the minimum, and then I would go plus, I think, once you start to get to an hour. It's, it's a little bit you get what you need by then.
Speaker 3:You'll get what you need by then. And, um, our good friend dale here, he's extremely good at it like you can start to get to the crux of an issue. I think the last time I sat with him I did time him. I think it's about seven minutes. Yeah, it was very, very, very quick and that's the mark of a very skilled interviewer, I think. Um, but having an hour, um, you start to maybe get a little bit too long.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's tiring. Like you say, it's exhausting, doesn't?
Speaker 3:it. It is when you're doing back-to-back interviews.
Speaker 2:Okay, all right, cool, so we've done the interview. Yes, we've looked at all the all the client's needs and we've gathered all that information. How can I extract meaning from all this data?
Speaker 3:Lovely. So you are going to have to put that inquisitive hat on, and I think that we say here you're either an archaeologist, like anthropologist, you're trying to derive meaning from something that is potentially quite literal. How do you do that? So, firstly, I would be absolutely recording and transcribing these interviews. Absolutely record and transcribe. Please get their permission before you do that. But we record and transcribe the interviews, and this is where AI has done so much of the legwork for us, because, my goodness, I have transcribed an interview by hand. But we record and transcribe the interviews, and this is where AI can come in. It has done so much of the legwork for us because, my goodness, I have transcribed an interview by hand, so have I it's? Uh, yeah, I can imagine it's um time consuming?
Speaker 3:yes, it is, but um, one thing that I will say about that is I don't think it's it's spot on yet. Um, absolutely, please don't put your customer information into chat GPT and get their permission if you are going to use AI at any sort of level to do this work. It comes back to that, just general respect. Yeah, I agree the human aspect. Yeah, the human aspect. Let people know what you're doing. But I haven't yet found a free AI that works very well.
Speaker 2:There's been some interesting transcriptions that have come back.
Speaker 3:I tend to pay and I tend to use Rev. You use Rev Rev. Yeah, I tend to use Rev because they've got to pay. Anytime. You're paying a little bit more for an AI transcription, it's going to be more accurate. You want something that's very, very.
Speaker 2:And what's the difference with Rev? Are they picking up accents or is it very specific? Is it just a much better AI to do transcriptions?
Speaker 3:It's just a much better AI. They just have a better AI model. They must have trained it on accents. Rev, r-e-v, r-e -V yes, rev or Otter AI is also very good. O-t-t, e-r, e-r yes, yes, but I tend to use rev just because I'm a creature of habit. Cool, okay, so you've transcribed.
Speaker 2:Transcribed because it's there and you can actually get that information out. So what else you know?
Speaker 3:tell us more about extracting this data so you might have now a nice stack of interviews. Um, I'm a very um, I can be a very analogogue person, so I would print them and I would get my highlighter and I would start looking for themes within that data.
Speaker 3:So say, if I wanted to. I was running support with a product team on the user experience of an application, of an app, and I had asked questions like over the shoulder questions that may have been please navigate to the take free trial button. What I would be looking for within that is commonalities or places, perhaps that where they hadn't been able to find what they needed, and this is coming to you from all those different customer interviews that you're doing.
Speaker 3:Yes, yes. So you're looking for themes. So I might go through my first interview, get my highlighter and say, oh, that's tricky, I don't know where that is, and I'll highlight that and I'll put that into a theme of one or two words which is like difficult to navigate.
Speaker 2:That's on a separate piece of paper now, or a separate note.
Speaker 3:Same. It's on the same transcript. My transcript looks like an absolute mess when I'm doing it. Now. I'm very interested because this is very.
Speaker 2:this is I'm very curious about this, about how that actually works. So, okay, cool Please. So you're picking up the different themes from those different customer interviews.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so you're trying to. This is about now. You're adding the layer of meaning. You're trying to extract meaning from the conversations that you've had. So I would go through the interviews and I'd develop themes and then sub-themes as well.
Speaker 2:Gotcha.
Speaker 3:A wonderful tool to do this is Dovetail. Dovetail a piece of software. It's a piece of software that will do this for you, which is yeah.
Speaker 2:Are you feeding that transcription into dovetail or just or?
Speaker 3:just your themes, no, the full transcription cool, so rev for the transcription.
Speaker 2:Yes, dovetail to take that transcription and pull out the theme. You're pulling out the themes, or?
Speaker 3:um, so dovetail will do the thematic analysis, um for you. Um, but, yeah, so, but. But I think that you, as a researcher, or as somebody who has a lens of discovery on you, need to be doing this work. I do think that you need to be going through and understanding truly what somebody is saying, or how they're saying it and why they're saying it, because tonality is very important.
Speaker 2:You're listening to the way that people have spoken um and you can start to imply meaning and get meaning from that I suppose that's where the human aspect comes in, of the submodalities and those subtle um inflections and, as you say, that the the way they are saying things which, with all due respect, and ai is not going to pick up. So it might pick up something, you realize that that's actually not the case because I know the way that she said it was um, you know, not not truthful to what she was actually saying okay, cool. So it's a very there's got to be a bit of a balance there, doesn't there? In terms of using the software, yes, and your own human is to go okay, go, okay, cool. This is the true, this is the true meaning of that yes.
Speaker 2:So once we've got that, then what are we doing with that information? How are we putting that together for the client or how are you using that in a marketing aspect to move forward, to get the benefit out of these customer interviews to actually affect change or to give feedback or to actually market a product or a service?
Speaker 3:Okay, so I'll use it in the context of writing copy, because I've written a lot of copy. So, when it comes to the way that you're communicating with your customers, those themes are very important because you'll start to see you'll not only start to see themes, but you'll start to see words that they're using as well, very specific words. This product, I just feel like it gives me peace of mind. I just feel like it gives me peace of mind Every morning when I wake up, I'm not worried about my software that's on fire or my XYZ, because of your product, and you can start to work that into the copy that you're writing. You know, and throughout your materials as well. You know there's no need to worry in the morning. Are you waking up in the morning worrying about your website traffic or are you worrying about this?
Speaker 2:There's no need, because Because of X, Y, Z and it's reflected because you're getting customer insights from it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly so you can almost. You're speaking in the customer's language, and I think that one of the biggest mistakes that we do make as marketers is think that we are the yeah, we are the. Say it. Why don't you say it, yeah? I think one of the biggest mistakes we make as marketers is that we think that we're the customer, but we simply are not, so it's unfair of us to put that bias on, so that's why we've become an anthropologist.
Speaker 2:What do you love about interviewing customers?
Speaker 3:I think I'm always curious. The connection that we make with our customers is very important, like connecting with them on a human level. There are many times that I have interviewed customers and they've become friends. There are many times that I've interviewed customers that I've learned a great deal about myself and the people that you know and the product that we're trying to sell. I think, beyond you know, beyond being, I guess, from the technical side, we're trying to develop a deeper story about why customers seek our solutions, how they evaluate options and what might enable a purchase.
Speaker 2:I think probably coming down to the very down to the wire is the practical reasons, but yeah, but I have to be honest, though, it does speak to me a little bit about a self-awareness that you have about interviewing customers, because you learn more about yourself, even though it might be a product that you will never use in your own day-to-day life like a role former or a you know, a big piece of machinery. But there is still the engagement with another human being about what they do and why they do it and why they use that product or service, which just informs you to be a better human being and listening and finding out what actually matters. Okay, so let's kind of wrap this up in a way that says, from a sales and marketing alignment point of view, how do we bring that back to a sales and marketing team in order to service the client? And then I've got one more question for you. So yeah, so talk to me about sales and marketing alignment.
Speaker 3:So I've spoken a little bit about how we can use our insights to develop marketing materials for the customer. But there's a huge internal piece as well, because there's a signal to the company. When you're doing customer interviews and deriving insights from those interviews, there's a signal to the company that you are giving a customer a seat at the table. So when you go into a meeting that is perhaps an early product meeting, you're starting to shape the product. You're starting to make another milestone within your business. You are able to give a customer a voice at that table. It makes your argument. It gives your ability to make a convincing argument for your point Based on evidence.
Speaker 3:Based on evidence. So you've given yourself rigor. So you've actually given it some robustness in putting yourself through that process. Rigor, so you've actually given it some robustness in putting yourself through that process. A way that looks like practically is make your transcripts accessible to the whole company so that they can read them in their own time, you know, especially a case study or something like that, Because different people will get different things from the interview.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's a collaborative it can be a collaborative effort, can't?
Speaker 3:it. It's a wealth of information and they should be made available to the whole business, and so that can be what that looks like in practicality, or you can use it to identify what's a good idea and when there's a bad idea in the room, so you can actually say, okay, well, actually, well, actually no, this customer thought this and this customer thought this, and I think that you have to be sure to bring the data, not the anecdote. I think that's probably the most important thing.
Speaker 2:That's another skill as well, because now, if you are talking to a client where maybe the product has got some negative feedback or whatever the case is, you're a bit of a conduit, aren't you?
Speaker 3:Which is quite tricky, yeah it can be tricky, it can be, but you can tactfully deliver that. And I'm never shy of delivering feedback to a customer or to a client because, as a somebody in product, I think that any product manager with their salt would would would want that negative feedback as well, just as much as they want the positive feedback okay, okay.
Speaker 2:So don't be afraid to give that feedback based on the fact that you've actually spoken to customers and that's a genuine response to, to, to what? To what? Their response to a product or a service. Yeah, okay, and you're moving forward, you're helping the clients along that journey. Yeah, just at the top of your head, any resources or anything I did ask you earlier, but any resources or anything that, um, that you can share with us, that that is really helpful in terms of conducting interviews or, specifically, customer interviews for our audience out there, whether they're senior level marketers or just junior level marketers is there any resource that you can think of that you could share with us?
Speaker 3:I think that content marketers in particular are just extremely good at this in general. So whenever you, you product marketers as well are very, very good at this. There are some fantastic newsletters online. I don't want to overwhelm anybody's inbox, but Tracy Wallace's contentment is an excellent newsletter to sign up to for for these insights. I don't know much outside in the in the product realm and I'm trying to rattle my brain.
Speaker 2:That's cool. If we know them, we can put them in the show notes.
Speaker 3:I think we should put a few resources in the show notes because they are accessible to you. They're perfectly, I mean, if you wanted to take an evening just to go through them. I mean they're very enjoyable resources to make your way through and I think they're an absolutely essential skill as a marketer to develop. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:I have learned so much from this conversation. So the last question I've got for you is that, Freya, is there anything that I have not asked you? Have you got an ask of the audience or something that's a message for the audience that you would like to actually share with them from a from a marketing perspective or a customer interview perspective?
Speaker 3:don't wait to talk to your customers whenever you feel like you're a little bit disconnected or you don't. You're not quite sure of a path through. Um, the relationships that we build in B2B are the reasons why we can make each other successful. I think is the Love it Kind of key takeaway.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love it. Speak to your customers as often as necessary. As often as necessary, yes, thank you very much for your time today. I've learned a hell of a lot, so I really appreciate your time and thank you very much, much, and hopefully we can do this again on another meaty topic I'd love that and if anybody's listening, they want to suggest a topic that um would be good to talk about.
Speaker 3:I know sales and online sales and marketing alignment is always um is always a hot topic, or I'm really happy to dig into any of these as well. Brilliant, thank you. Pleasure, great to talk to you. Thank you very much.
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