The Do's and Don'ts of Client Interviews
Follow these 7 guidelines to crush your interviews and fix shortcomings in your business
In Leveraging Feedback for Efficiency, we discussed how critical capturing feedback is to your business, and why it needs to be executed through a live interview process.
Here are the dos and don’ts of Interviews
Do: Compensate
You’ll want to ensure you schedule ample time to get through the interview and dive deeply into the lifecycle stage you’ve chosen. I’m a fan of at least $100 per hour or more if you can swing it. The investment should be enough for a high participation rate of prospective participants. It should also be high enough that you take the prep work seriously.
Don’t: Freestyle
The interview should be completely standardized down to each question you plan to ask and the feeling you aim to solicit. In our Buy/Sell Interview we have 5 minutes scheduled for the Intro with 7 specific bullet points to cover. After the intro, we allot 10 minutes to get to know the person, then 35 minutes to dive into the stages of awareness through conversion. Each section is scripted out which allows the conversation to stay on course, and on time, and helps to guarantee the results will be comparable to other interviews in the same lifecycle.
Do: Record your interview
You’ll want your undivided attention on the interview itself and thus taking notes will be difficult. Look at any amazing interview on television and you’ll never see the interviewer taking notes, and you shouldn’t either. Record it via Zoom, or your iPhone so you can reference back to important quotes. If you’re soliciting emotion you’ll end up with quotes like
“I selected your company because I trusted your team, and had no fear of you wasting my time like other companies.”
100% of your undivided attention should be on the interview. Keeping it on schedule and capturing the results with very attentive listening. It goes without saying that you should let your interviewee know you’re going to record and that if there are any questions they don’t want to answer or anything they don’t want to say on the record you’ll pause the recording.
Do: Set the scene
During the intro make sure you explain that you’re wanting to know how the process made them feel. Explain that you won’t be taking notes or paying attention to anything else and you may want to go deep on specific topics, but that if there’s anything they don’t want to answer that’s fine. Have them imagine that they’re on a TV show-style interview. Finally re-hash the time commitment, compensation, and the fact that this is being recorded, and explain that you’ll request permission to use any quotes prior to publishing.
Don’t: Take the first answer
Humans don’t typically volunteer feelings freely. This means you’ll have to drill down far enough to solicit the emotion behind each action. For example, when you dive into the Awareness process you might start by asking “what problem did you have that made you think about needing a service like ours?”, then follow it up with “how did that problem make you feel?”, and then finally “why was that problem so frustrating?”. If you aren’t hearing feelings like anger, thrill, trust, joy, etc you’re not done with that part of the interview.
Do: Stay on topic
During the interview, the participant may likely skip forward before you’ve had a chance to go deeper into a specific topic. It’s important that you mentally capture their entire statement and use responses such as “I hear {repeat what you heard}, and I’d like to understand a little more about {the section that you need to draw the participant back to}.”
Don’t: Rush the responses
When you finish your question you may find that your interviewee needs time to think. Don’t step on their toes by providing additional thoughts. Exercise some patience and they’ll request clarity in the question if they need it.
Bonus:
Ask the question, then provide commentary around why or how you’re expecting an answer. This gives the subject extra time to think through their response without rushing it. An example would be “I’d like to learn what other companies you evaluated during the selection process, and if you can recall how their process made you feel. I ask this because I want to compare if we’re actually communicating our company culture and values better than our competitors.”
Performing these interviews at a high level will take practice, but I can assure you that in your very first one if you follow the simple rules outlined above you’ll land on highly valuable insights that can take your business to new heights.
Good luck and happy interviewing!