Lesson 6 - Conduct An Informational Interview

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In this lesson, you’ll discover how to gain valuable insights by conducting informational interviews with internal experts or top-performing peers. These conversations will help you refine your knowledge of your product, industry, and customers. Your assignment will involve scheduling and conducting at least one informational interview, documenting key takeaways that can enhance your sales approach.

Transcript

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Nicholas, welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, you're going to begin conducting informational interviews with your prospective buyers. So what's an informational interview? An informational interview is face time with your prospects, where the goal is not to sell, but to learn. So ultimately, with an informational interview, you want to set up some time where you're going to ask them about their role, about their challenges, about their goal, about the different projects that they typically take on, about the different things that they would typically look for in a solution. And the benefit of this is, one, you're going to get a better understanding of the business needs, the challenges that are being faced by your prospects. Two, you can start to build relationships without the pressure of making a sale. Typically, people are less guarded whenever the goal of the meeting is to exchange information, rather than for you to pitch them on a product. So it helps you establish rapport, establish trust, learn how to talk to these personas and titles. It will give you some market insights as part of these informational interviews, you can ask about, you know, hey, what are the trends? What is the jargon I should know? What is the competitive landscape that I'm walking into? What are some of the other tools that you use in your day to day? Right? It's really just a way for you to to start acting like a student and and learning from them, and most people are more than willing to give you that information in a kind of pressure free environment. So hopefully you see the benefit in doing interviews like this. So let's talk about how to do them. First, you need to identify the key rules of your prospective buyers. Hopefully you've already done that through our previous lessons when it came to building your persona cards, mapping your buying committee, but focus on individuals who are typically going to be your champions, or your economic buyers or your end users, those are really the three titles that you should be prioritizing with these informational interviews. Then you want to leverage LinkedIn. Look at your network. Do you already know someone in this role, maybe a classmate, maybe someone in that worked at a previous organization with you. And if you don't go into the LinkedIn groups for these roles and just look around and maybe identify a few people that look like they might welcome a conversation like this, people that seem more willing to share their knowledge. You can ask your current customers as well if they'd be willing to have an informational interview. You've already sold to them in the past, so there's no pressure of making a new sale. Just make sure that you're not treating it like an expansion conversation, that you're truly there to learn. You can ask your CSMs if they know anyone that you can talk to, but at that point, once you've identified a few people, you want to reach out for an interview. I will go ahead and put an example of this messaging in your study guide. But the guidelines for this are, you want to craft a clear message. Be transparent about your intentions, let them know, Hey, I'm new into this sales role. I'm looking to learn more about my prospective customers. I'm looking to learn more about your world. The goal of this call is not to sell to you. I truly do want to learn from you. Would you be willing to jump on a call for you, know, 25 to 30 minutes to tell me a little bit about your role and what you do? One easy way to disarm them is to actually send over a list of some of the questions you would plan to ask. This has worked for me, personally in the past where I reach out, I say, Hey, I'm new to the role I'm looking to learn from you. Would you be willing to jump on a quick call? Here are four to five questions that I was thinking we could discuss, and once they've seen those questions, now there's kind of this unofficial contract that that's what you're going to talk about, and they might be more willing to jump on with you. Make it easy for them to book time with you. This is going to be a constant trend in all of our conversations, but you need to make things super easy when it comes to booking meetings with you. My recommendation is to set up either Calendly or tidy Cal or any of a number of Google Calendar integrations or Microsoft Outlook integrations, depending on the tool stack that you use. But ultimately, you need to make it easy for them to click a link book a meeting and just throw it on the calendar and that availability, your availability, should be up to date in whatever tool that you use. Yes, once you've secured the interview, prepare for it. Look this individual up, make a list of questions. Understand what they probably care about and what their ex their area of expertise is. It's going to be embarrassing if you jump on a call and you don't know what to ask them, or you ask them things that are completely out of their scope. So make sure that you're asking questions about their role, their responsibilities. What you know things like, can you describe your current role and the key responsibilities of your role? What are some of the biggest challenges that you face in your role? What tools do you use, and what do you like or dislike about the tools that you use today. How does your organization evaluate and decide on new tools or solutions? What are the trends that are currently impacting your industry? What are some of the what is some of the lingo? What are some of the frustrations? What are some of the inside jokes, you know, depending on how personal they're willing to get dig in and just ask them these questions to learn more about their role once the interview is over. I know it's cliche, but send a thank you. It's professional, right? It's a professional thing to do. Send a note expressing gratitude for their time, for their insights let them know how valuable it's been. Something that I do is a few weeks later, I'll send them another email that says, Hey, by the way, I was able to use your insights to book a meeting and give value to a prospect. So I just wanted to let you know that it was really, really valuable for me, and most people will will greatly appreciate that sentiment, and then just consider how you might keep in touch with them. Maybe you can give value to them by sharing some of the insights that you learned throughout your sales career. Maybe you can give value to them by sharing an article that you found interesting or pointing them to a report that's relevant to their role. So think about how you can make it kind of a two way street, and then finally, integrate these insights into your sales strategy, tailor your pitches to address the real things that you learned in this interview. This personalized approach is not just going to increase your credibility, but it's going to ultimately enhance the effectiveness of your sales effort, and frankly, it just makes everything more personal and more fun cool. All right, it's your turn. In your study guide, we're going to walk you through this, but you're going to identify contacts that would be good for an informational interview. You're going to craft some messaging and reach out to those contacts. You're going to actually conduct one of these. You're going to take notes on what you learned, and then you're going to evaluate how you can leverage those notes in your future sales. Your study guide will walk you through all of this, and that's it for today's lesson. Thank you so much, and we'll see in the next one. Applause.