Customer Research Insights with Hannah Shamji

frustrating all right we are live um had a little tech

difficulties zoom in facebook did not want to cooperate today uh we should be in the main facebook

page instead of so i'm gonna pull that up and make sure i let people know that

we are going because uh when i did that before i was

able to do it right in the event page but this yeah oh facebook

yeah i know i know facebook is now not seeing it live

that's what uh yes there we are okay we are good nice

i'm going to all right

all right let's get i wanted to share that yeah just share it to the facebook

okay um

my name is todd and this is the website copy framework uh office hours and i am delighted to have

hannah shanji did i say your name right yes he did i keep wanting to say hannah

for some reason my parents actually call me that and i don't introduce myself that way often

just because it causes a bit of a stumble but if it's easier for you please go for it

hannah hannah you seem like a hana to me yeah yeah can you hail from the great

city of toronto uh yeah yeah right and right downtown

i wish i could visit toronto for one one of my best friends lives there and

in that area and i seem to meet people who are from the toronto well canada in general but you know

it seems like all the great copywriters in canada right maybe there'd be some people would argue

with me on that i think probably rob marsh and kira hug but uh anyway yeah so in in the thing about

hannah now let me do you consider yourself a copywriter or no not really no yeah more than maybe

like a former copywriter i definitely dabbled and i do understand the principles and

i've worked at a copywriting agency so i know the ropes but i wouldn't consider myself a copywriter

yeah you like the research side of it before more don't you yeah yeah i remember very clearly when i

first uh saw you it was on a tuesday tutorial a tutorial tuesday

um that copy hackers does and um you told us that you had a

a counseling degree yeah and it boggled my mind in a good way not a bad way i was like

whoa okay because i took a class in graduate school called past short-term pastoral counseling

so i understand a smidgen a smidgen of what you know from that and you have

used that to parallel or i don't know if it's right word but parlay that's what i'm looking for into

a career of a customer interview and research yeah so my background academically have

a bachelor's in psychology and from then even through my master's very heavy in like academic research so

i've been doing qualitative research in the health space for quite a while and then when i switched to marketing it

was like right around the same time that i decided to get some training in becoming a

counselor or therapist and it just layered in so well

with the interviews with the surveys like asking more um intuitive questions and really like

listening to what people are saying all of that kind of like human behavior i mean therapy is essentially like

facilitating behavioral change right and uh selling is the same so

the the layering in was was really like a very perfect um happenstance like i just kind of

stumbled on it and uh it worked out really well the two kind of tug on each other quite nicely

um yeah yeah and copywriters they love to say they're amateur psychologists so that's kind of

an interesting thing but um so before i get started um with the questions about your

expertise i want to ask you these are three little questions uh kind of for fun if you watched any of

the copy chat shows i asked several questions it won't be that um and that was kind of rapid fire

and you know this is different uh three little questions so first of all i like music so what song

or music do you have on repeat uh probably ebay i don't know if you've

heard of them um i b e y i they are uh twins and they are

cuban and um cuban and something else but the music

is amazing um yeah you should totally check them up so any look them up anything from their

album um i'll usually have it and just i

oh okay so canadian so they probably have like really energetic top music it's uh i don't know

it's it's so it's a mix of like some of it's spanish they also speak french some of its french and

english and they have a um another language that they grew up learning like it's actually very

uh like it's a good vibe i don't really know how to how to place it i'll check it out yeah i was lit how do

i prepare for online interviews like this i'm like listening to music and and i'm sitting there listening to and i

got i went down the rabbit hole of um what would have been rock uh lady rock back in the late 70s early 80s

and there's a lady now named lizzie hale who she's younger probably in her early 30s and she's

covered some of that stuff she's amazing she's a throwback to the joan jett lita ford

type thing and i was listening to her as i yeah she kind of gets me going but but not just her but other people

i was listening to stuff as i was getting going so um so what is your favorite dessert oh

that's a really tough one um lately ice cream strawberry ice cream

yeah yeah i can i can go to town on strawberry ice cream yeah and last little question if you

could do anything for a living other than what you're doing now what would it be

oh these are tough hey i feel like i have to say something that's like super impressive

um i would say something super fun like i want to be a circuit delay or

something like that i don't know i mean uh

uh it's yeah i'm i'm not sure i think i like if i if i could do

anything assuming i had enough money i don't know that i would do i would be working in the same way you know what i

mean that's kind of what i'm getting at that's kind of what i'm getting at uh i think i would do some like i do like

workshops and seminars and about like the kind of counseling human behavior but i

would then spend more time like um

outside like hiking and traveling a lot and on the beach and reading and

yeah it's uh i'm kind of trying to build that life anyways so yeah you caught me right in the smack

in the middle of me like figuring all these pieces out there's a guy in in town where i live he

ran a um uh crepe shop for a long time here in town and he just sold it

uh to another couple and now he's basically traveling uh all the cool places in the united

states outdoor related like parks and stuff like that yeah and i'm watching him on facebook like oh you know he was in virginia in one

week and now he's in you know wyoming and it's like dude you're having the time of your life it's just him and

his dog and they're just having a blast i'm like i'm a little bit jealous but you know good for you buddy so

yeah yeah my husband and i did we traveled for like a year and a half um and i'm with all this like covered

craziness yeah certainly miss miss i admire the younger generation who are

doing that while they can and uh when you get my age you're like man i don't know if i'll ever be able to

do that you know so i tell people and especially now because you can so many of the jobs not all of them of course but

so many of them could be done virtually so i mean you know go do it while you're young you have

energy you have your health's good go do it i more power to you that's what i say i kind of wish i could be there

with you but okay let's get into uh what we're talking about and if you're watching on replay and you make a comment feel free

to put um hashtag replay or something like that just just to carry on the conversation but hannah is

a customer insight research expert i guess that's the right way you're putting it yeah you had some fancy title at the

copy hackers agency what was it lead research copy hackers i was head of research um

or sometimes it would be more call like conversion research um but now i would say

um yeah customer insights researcher is kind of the the title that i go that's what you have on your website i

think that's where i pull that from so talk to me about um interviews um

this because this is where you get your your research that you or the insights you get you get it from interviews

and um so talk about why i do interviews even as maybe a smaller company

and how um interviews can help uh our business so i want to share my screen actually

a few slides that i've got and let me see if i can

is it letting you do it um [Music]

i think your application window i think i have to open it in a different

application window maybe uh is there something you can share with me and then maybe i can share

like um yeah it's a google it's google slides

so i wonder can you email the slide to me and i'll i should be able to share because i have

the bill hold on a second uh screen sharing is easiest with two monitor screens sharing works best

on a good computer some screens yeah i can share you should be able to share okay let me

send that to you tech stuff's always fun

yeah it would be much easier if um the the zoom would have worked and

sometimes it just doesn't cooperate so stream yard is kind of a fallback and uh thankfully it works most of the time so

yeah and zoo and facebook actually has a much more intuitive uh live feed you know inside their own

application now and i haven't really actually used it but i need to play around with it okay i

just got it you got it yeah okay let's pull that up and okay

uh that's okay oh you have like six slides i i've got a couple but they

just sort of opened out so there's more when you scroll down it's just because i really don't like doing animation

i think it takes longer so i'll like break out the slides you'll see what i mean is that sharing yet i

don't see it hold on a second uh chrome tab let's do this and do this

there we go there we go okay perfect um i don't know if you want to put it in

like presenter mode oh sweet awesome um okay so i want to

talk through these and i think it'll help to sort of like crystallize the actual why

and the other points that that we'll cover um and just really dive into like that first piece

of like why why do it why why should you talk to your customers um you can have sometimes kind of like

an intuitive sense it sounds like a good idea um to get closer to your customers since

they're the ones that you want more of and you want to keep around but there are more

like concrete pieces that you can get from customer interviews um that will really

like serve you not only in marketing and selling in actually like putting together the

copy and the content on your website like the whole gamut i mean these uh interviews can really really serve

pretty wide spread um so i'm gonna walk through a couple points both for the side of copy and

for the content and you'll start to get a sense too and see how they sort of overlay uh can you go to the next slide

perfect um so first is buying and sign up objections um this

is it's very very easy to identify these kind of at a broader

level like price is too high or people don't have time or switching is too hard

um but when you actually have a chat with a customer or i also like to chat with folks who like just recently

stopped being a customer as well you can really dig into like what their thinking was

um why they actually stopped buying why they actually decided against or resisted

even making the decision to buy and you start to get a sense of like what is it that they need to hear what kinds of things are they looking for

and then that becomes information that you can feed into the copy on the page um even the content

really like you'll as we go through you'll see a lot of these kind of overlay um a blog post about addressing some

common objections and helping people navigate navigate those it's it's a very easy way

to start to speak to these customers more and more in any platform um and and really kind of

understand what to say to them because you know what they're thinking and what's kind of standing in the way of their of their buying decision or

even their their sign up decision uh next life

sticky features and benefits so i'm bumping these two together but they are quite different

and this is also really helpful to understand like what what are they looking for what are the features that they

have in their mind as sort of like presets like you know i need a mattress that is a

hybrid for example um and then also what what are the actual benefits so people don't

necessarily buy a mattress because they want a mattress they buy it because they want a good night's sleep they want to wake up

feeling refreshed in the morning they might have aches and pains from their current mattress all of those would fall into the

benefits category um and you can kind of use these like interchangeably so you've got

the buying objections and then you can address them with a benefit and you can do that again

in content um in copy on the page itself it'll really help you um suss out themes

so the goal in these interviews is always to talk to you want to talk to

around like um eight to ten i i know with jobs to be done they typically say around seven i

like to talk to eight to ten customers and what you're doing is you're asking them very similar questions

so that you can start to pull out themes you'll hear a lot of overlap you'll identify those buying

objections and what they like about the product what really stands out as a benefit pretty early on

and once you have those themes you can start to filter that into the copy or into the content

yeah that makes sense so people you know they're people are always looking for you know content

idea ideation that's a big deal content foundation and i would tell people and and this is

kind of a piggyback on what you're saying is like what are the top 25 questions people ask yeah uh but if you go in and do

interviews now i'm interested in this eight to ten interviews are you talking about like actual interviews or surveys and

interviews or just one or the other so surveys are um ideally you're getting a much bigger

sample you're looking for like you can do a survey and have like 50 plus

responses um interviews those are going to be like the more the one-on-one conversations if you can't do eight to

ten do as much as you can you definitely wanna do at least like

three more than three so you're not having too biased of a response but even if you're able to sometimes

it's also helpful to talk to people in the company who have a

customer facing role so you're not necessarily getting like direct from the customer in that case if

that's not possible but you might be talking to like the sales person and understanding what themes

um come out of their conversations with sales but yes ideally you want to talk to

eight to ten you'll hear some folks say seven but often not less than that if you really

want like robust data um and then you know you can kind of work with what you've got as well

it's it's never uh it really depends on the client ideally you wanna interview customers but if

that's not available to you you can interview front-facing employees like

sales and customer support yeah exactly so i i like to do both

and just kind of layer the two in often when i talk to sales or customer support they give a

really nice framework they often know exactly what objections come up pretty quickly and then i can drill down even more

specifically into if you hit the next slide you'll see into

like behaviors and motivations um and really start to understand like the customer's perspective

so you can kind of pick and choose based on what you've got there but those are those are the two buckets that i would

um i would tap into hey one other question and is this maybe something you address later so if it is

just tell me that but um do you find that you have to offer some kind incentive to get people

to interview with you yeah so um it depends on how i've i've had uh clients where the

customers are just so engaged that they're more than willing and it would almost

sort of interrupt the relationship and the dynamic to offer an incentive i've also had

instances where it's very um they're not used to engaging with the client and so offering an incentive really

helps um i would go and check in where the clients at with it and what their take

is if they're not sure you can probably like if a client knows a client will know if their

customers will respond or don't need an incentive if they're not sure chances are you can benefit from an incentive

and just something like a 25 amazon gift card works really well um if you can offer something from the

product like a free month if that's a fit uh nothing over like 40 bucks

it tends to stop biasing responses and they want to be very pleasing and you don't want to muddy the data

that way right but uh yeah a 25 20 25 amazon gift card works really well as

well i would wonder i wondered about thresholds like a minimum to a maximum so maybe 25 to 40 buck value of

something yeah exactly and i uh i have had an instance where clients given like 100

gift card um but these are always kind of outlier cases it's not something that i recommended

that they felt that you know the threshold of 50 40 uh wasn't sufficient

for their audience so it is dependent but you do want to be mindful if you are giving more you want to be

really careful of like how much um that you're not creating an environment where they feel like they need to please and sort of earn

that amount and say things that are very pleasant when maybe that's not actually their experience

right got you yeah um you can hit the next one

all right so in terms of content um this is like a huge huge source of content you once you

start to sort of like engineer the way you're approaching these conversations you'll pick out kind of um really

juicy topics customers will introduce things that maybe the clients haven't thought of that

maybe aren't top of mind for the clients um but they're really sort of like

nagging questions when you have a conversation with them to understand kind of their buyer journey um you'll

identify like what their roadblocks were what were their hesitations how did they overcome their hesitations all of like

pretty much anything that they're talking about from the point of like competitors and first looking um at the product

all the way through to making a decision to buy and sticking around you can pull out topics um for

content from all of those uh all of those like articles about like five ways to do this or five questions

to ask when you're considering buying x um they fall really really nicely into

like from from customer data so you'll get that uh that insight that will just make it

easier i think to start like thinking like a customer and if you were the one buying what were the questions that you

might have and you'll find that all of those can make individual uh blog posts with a little extra insight and research from

you uh once you pull out those themes next slide

pains and needs so this is these are this and then um is kind of one of the buckets like the category so you've got

like objections and you've got benefits and those are further along the buyer journey

but then you have pains and needs which are in the beginning so like what are they struggling with in the first place that they're even

considering this product what do they need from this product to even

step further into the buyer journey so these are just other categories that you can get really clear on um

there's a big uh i would say i don't know if debate's the right cord but

um a big back and forth between you know it's difficult to ask customers why they

buy or um because often people don't really know like we buy for a myriad of reasons

and we might have our pros and cons list but then the actual decision happens separately in kind of a singular moment

it's something else that sort of nudges them along the way or you'll have instances where a company will

flat out ask a customer like would you buy this product um and anytime you start veering into

like future and hypothetical questions uh it's people are horrible at predicting the

future um new year's resolutions is a perfect example of that like we think we're

gonna have them for the year and it's really good if we have them through the through to february 2020 turned out to be uh something

nobody predicted i guess so yeah i mean if you had a resolution to like i'm going to travel a lot this year

that i was kind of kybashed with with all of the 20 20 things unless you're like my friend spencer spencer

who's going out in the in and visiting parks and stuff where you can stay socially distanced and

hang out with your buddy and that's about it yeah yeah yeah yeah um so it's uh it's really important

to kind of help your your customers knows their problem often better than we

know their problem um so it's a really great space to figure out like what is it that they're looking for what do they need what's

their kind of decision matrix in their mind and interviews will help you tap into all of that

and voice of a customer you can spread across whether it's in your copy or in your content i have

many times used a messaging messaging like an actual quote from a

customer to populate like a headline um it might be a call to action

you can even pull testimonials or figure out how to phrase a particular benefit because that's how your customers raised

it they've got some distance from the product which really helps so they're not kind of thinking with the same lens as you are

um and they often have very like accessible language because you know that's how they're processing

things yeah i'd never heard of voice a customer until i started hanging around the copy hackers

group and that's where i first learned about voice of customer research and all that kind of stuff and then of course what

you're talking about is how you get the voice of customer research and that data so um

yeah yeah it's a it's a very useful uh lens and i find with clients too like

it's a useful tactic to get their buy-in on something so it's one thing to say

like hey you know customers are struggling with price for example or perhaps they don't have enough money um

to afford a particular product it's very different to bring that to life and like show them well

actually this is what the customer said this is how they said it it changes the tone of the conversation right they they can

have more buy-in and more investment in um the themes that you're that you're

bringing out i think nikki said about you it's like magic

and that's what your testimony on your web page and i went ahead and wrote that into a headline for my uh

email one of the emails that i sent out about this particular office hours yeah yeah see it's like custom voice

customer data is so um you can just repurpose it right like it's very easy to

to filter it in and it's funny because she was talking about about the playbooks that i put together and so

then you took her voice of customer data and it's like a chain of like a telephone pole that's awesome

yeah um yeah do we want to go into the next piece yeah is there a slot another more

slide yep do's and don'ts okay good so this is like a quick kind of cheat sheet um there is

uh there are a few pointers that will just really help you make these swift and easy and um

if you're new to this i've i've heard a lot of like i've done customer interviews and i

don't know if i'm doing them right or they're very frightening and scary and intimidating and that newness

talking to a stranger is absolutely normal and it's actually a good thing it just makes you a little more alert

and on your toes with asking questions because you will need to

guide that conversation and that's why the first thing on there is have an interview goal

an interview goal could be it's separate to like what you want to

do with the interview data so it wouldn't be something like from the interviews i want to like write

copy for a home page but it might be like i need to understand what the buying objections are and what

people really care about and why they choose this particular product you can have like those three

goals and they typically come in the form of questions um but really having those anchors like

what is it that you're trying to understand from the customers specifically once you

have those goals and you have a list of questions that you want to ask your customer you want to practice

out loud this sounds kind of cheesy and like a throwaway point but it makes a big difference like i

anytime i'm feeling nervous about talking to a customer i'll practice how to kick off the call um what am i

going to say what are the points that i need to hit i need to ask their permission to record um i need to give them some context

about what this is but not tell them too much you need to make them feel comfortable build rapport really quickly

so i'll practice that stream um and even practice follow-up questions like in the

mirror you'll notice if you feel comfortable it communicates that comfort to the customer and

often the questions that you're asking them are not questions they've even asked themselves um or had to answer before so the more

that you can guide them there and make them feel like they can share openly the easier that conversation will be

practice out loud with yourself or do you like get a friend or a family member to

i would say i think you can go either way i mean i'm someone that does a lot of like in front of the mirror practicing by

myself um i prefer that but more than

more than helpful to practice with someone as well if you feel like you that way you can

also get the dynamic um and have like if you were actually to play out the whole interview

that would be helpful too but if you don't have that that luxury practicing by yourself helps um a ton or

i guess you could use your pet yeah i feel like people have gotten so

creative with like how to talk and how to be more social even though we're all like

bungled up in our homes yeah and asking follow-up questions so this

is a really really big one you'll notice that people don't often answer the question that you

ask them and that's not because they don't want to but often they'll have like their own agenda

they want to say something they want to share something with you they have an experience with the product that they have already tapped into

because they know that's what this conversation is about and follow-up questions will be what

will get you kind of under the surface so you might have a script of questions but include in that script what your

follow-up questions are um it'll really really help you dig deeper

because people you'll be able to sort of like navigate the conversation and also slow

it down a little it's very easy to kind of run through your questions and just think that like i need to ask the questions and

then the interview's done but you do need to like step into the conversation and slow it down

and ask about things ask a natural follow-up question that you might have and builds that muscle

um the all of the gold that you're looking for is always at the end of a follow-up question it's very very

rare that you'll get that insight right off the cuff if you do that has more to do with the customer and less to

do with with anything else makes sense and don'ts uh don't over script so this

is something that i've worked with some folks on to like

over scripting is helpful to think it out like what are the questions that you want to ask

but then lean on your research goals your interview goals and have your big bucket questions and

and don't um feel like you have to stick to the script a lot of the power of this conversation is going to come with if

you hit the next slide it's going to come with like following your curiosity

more than the question so once you understand like i'm clear on my research goal i need to figure out why they chose this

product and what their buying objections are those are my two pillars i've written out some questions and now

like step into the conversation it doesn't mean you have to memorize your questions you can have them there with you

but listen to what the customer's saying and if they say something that is kind of pulls up another

question it intrigues you you're a little confused because you want some more insight

lean into that um that is going to be a bigger uh strength for you than the actual

questions assuming like because the goal here is you trust that you've kind of prepared you know where the goal is

of what the goal is of the interview so now just really follow follow your curiosity there and i have

another last don't hear like don't ask why this is not a hard and fast rule

but you will notice that more often than not when you ask someone why they can get a little on the defensive

it might be a really really tiny amount but why is a question that implies that there's like one answer and

now i'm asking you why and you actually have to prove something to me like why didn't you clean your room or

why did you leave the dishes out there's a slight like accusation almost in that and um a lot of it

can disappear if you swap out why for a what so like what made you decide to buy this product

um what was what made you choose this product over another product so you're still

asking why but if you don't lead with why it kind of softens the tone a little bit

um i often find when i ask a why question the first response is like uh i don't

know there's a different there's a different action that you're inviting people to do

so if you ask why they kind of have to search through like i need to prove this point i need rationality justification

if you ask what i have to actually just recall information so the exercise is quite different and i

would really strongly if you ever do a survey steer clear of the why questions if you can because

you're not there as a person to facilitate i'll totally ask why questions if i feel like the rapport is there if i

have a good relationship with that person you can be a lot more direct and they won't feel as put on the spot by it

but if you can steer clear of why you actually get a lot more juicy insight

interesting um was it ryan levesque who's got the book about the why

method or whatever i don't know how that plays into your um saying don't use why in customer

interviews but it's a tricky one because i think the goal is to ask why so it's less

about not finding out why ultimately you want to know what your customer's why is absolutely um but in an interview

and in uh in a conversation when you're trying to build rapport really quickly with a stranger

this is something that um came from the counseling world uh that you'll find that you don't have

to dig as much if you can work around the y uh it doesn't mean you shouldn't ask it at all but it's a little

it's and a lot of people still do but it's a little kind of technique that will help you slip under the layer

um and get people to recall the information that you're looking for from from the get-go so you're still asking

why you're just not necessarily always using that word well in and it does make sense what you're

saying though why is something that you maybe you could use with a friend or a family member or somebody you know

really well but could become more accusatory for somebody you don't know that the customer uh so now if i was

interviewing rhonda i might say why because i know ron but um but a customer i don't know i

might you know want to not say why yeah and i think you can kind of

put a catapult on the situation so i'll definitely use it with a customer if i feel like

there is the rapport there if it's a little uncomfortable if they seem a little bit shy

you kind of make a judgment call but sometimes you do want to be more direct and your tone and your energy is very

different you can ask like why is that right there's a different energy of like curiosity um

so it's just it's less of like don't ever ask why and more of like be mindful of if the situation would

actually benefit from a question like that or if there's a softer way to get to the inside that you're looking for

yeah i like that not over scripting and go ahead and follow in your curiosity because

you do you do find yourself in the actual interview rather than you're just asking

a series of questions and yeah i've always kind of followed that like when doing interview for a podcast or

whatever because and then sometimes what happens is you end up not answering asking the questions you had scripted

but but in the in the meantime you've gotten some really good stuff you know sometimes you

can't get it all in one actually there were more questions i don't know if we followed up on that uh you you've covered a lot of these i think uh

what can i learn from interviews i don't know if you want to say anything uh different than what you already have

no i think that like i would say that interviews are more comprehensive than we think

like you can actually get away with doing interviews and maybe you don't do surveys um maybe

you don't it's just a really strong source of data

so you can cover a lot of things you can cover trust benefits just content course topics the customer

journey the timeline the decision sort of matrix you can pull a lot a lot from there

there's very little i can think of that you can't actually get but the goal again is like you do want to have a representative sample

so talking to one or two customers if that's all that you are able to do you're going to benefit

from talking to like customer sales support that kind of thing and to get like a more representative

sample of the fuller customer but if you can't and you can talk to more customers then

there's really like it will be such a source of um insight and i often encourage um

like a survey that goes out where at the end of the survey you ask folks to do an interview and i've done this with clients where

like you can kind of have it on repeat so you always have like a pool of customers that have self-selected

to and opted into doing the interview and there's a lot less friction that way as well that makes sense yeah

yeah yeah huh okay um i think you really

the other one is how how can i get how do i get customers agreed interview you really touched on that but if you want to say anything else to i'm

gonna drop i had i just wrote an article on this um and i'll share the link with you

or we can drop it in the comments on this thread um and it goes through like the exact

templates that i use to ask for an interview and how do you actually talk to the client as well

to get them on board because you're probably going to have to go through them and they're going to have to send it out so including like what you know what do

you say how do you frame it do you include a booking link how do you frame it to the customer so that they

are actually willing um given that they don't have any context so there are templates in there that you

can pull from and use and kind of copy paste and adjust as you need but those are the ones that i've used in and work really

well that come out of your playbook they um so they've come out of so the playbook

is more the insights synthesized um but these would be like the tea up to the playbook so how i've

gotten with with clients like what is it that i do um because this this can be kind of a tedious process of

like i have to now get the client to buy in and is this going to take a while and

what do i say to the customers and so i just sort of tried a bunch of things templated out and overdoing them for so

long um i've got a couple methods that work so all of that's an article and i'll link to it

that would be awesome yeah yep i think the last question was and you did the do's and

don'ts of customer interviewing so i don't this is really anything to unless you have something else you want

to add i thought you were really insightful and also very

not overly hard to do yeah i tried to pull out pieces that i

mean it really is a conversation so just leaning into that know what you want to get from it and then

and then just step in um and practice

yeah yeah well okay so you got i'm bookmarking this um so i would imagine that in your

career you've probably done this for maybe businesses that are a little bit bigger and you know they have the funds

so if you're uh we have a lot of agencies small agency owners that kind of thing that are

that are in the group so they are likely doing it either for them their own business or

helping their client with this is there a way to do you feel like you can

meet that context with with all this it translates pretty well you think oh yeah um so i've i've worked with

bigger companies but also like startups um and much smaller companies that

sometimes are a little nervous because they don't have maybe a huge customer base but

the way that you reach out to the customer is going to be make a big difference right so because you want to make this like a personal

invite a personal request so often it will like the email that i that you'll see in

that article is written in a way to imply as it should that like

you're kind of hand picking who you want to chat to um but it's absolutely translatable i would

um i would recommend so typically i'll to land like somewhere between eight to ten interviews i'll email like three

times that amount um just so that you know people aren't able to book or they don't

see the interview etc and then i'll back end do the interviews over the course of like one or two days

um but in the case of a smaller company you might want to just email the people that you're actually

looking to chat with so you don't maybe exhaust so many customers

and kind of go through it one by one that way but it's absolutely translatable um i would say that if if

you're worried that you're not going to do enough interviews to make them useful like that that's never going to be the case if you

can only do one now um do that one now and maybe you can do another one you know next month or

next week or whatever the case may be but you will always benefit from talking to the customer and all of these rules

will still still apply for sure you talk about the logistics of doing an interview do you like

record the interview and get transcriptions and how do you recommend that's what i would

think anyway yeah absolutely so i always record but i always ask if i can record um right before we hit records just so

that they know the recording's not actually going anywhere um i've never had anyone have any issues with that or say no

and then what i do is i'll get it transcribed because i want the actual like voice of customer data

but i'm always taking notes as well um so there'll be a couple times i take notes during the interview itself

if something like really stands out and i want to remember it but then i do a quick little like brain dump after the fact because

there's something that happens you make some kind of connections in the conversation that you might forget later

on there's something with like the recency of it just happening and you have time to like digest what

they said and maybe they were talking and they said something in a certain way that really stuck with you or it was a

different perspective so i'll take a couple notes afterwards and then i'll i'll look at the transcript

as well and then those are the themes that i'll pull out like oh i know that they talked about

price here and i'll pull out all the language that they where they talk about price and and kind

of filter it and i use a spreadsheet to track everything and um and organize like all of the

price comments and if they're benefits or objections etc yeah um i have a hard time taking notes

while i'm doing an interview like that and i don't know if it's just me or if that's the nature of

you know i don't guys are not really good at uh doing two things at once so maybe that's i don't know but um that's why i have

really gone to to recording them because it just like i can go back and get the transcription

yeah but i haven't thought about the brain depth i think that's brilliant it's very helpful and even if there's

something of like um even if you don't because i like when i get more comfortable with a particular

client let's say i'm like three interviews in and i've got five more to go um by then

i'm familiar with the questions a lot more i don't need the script at all um but i'll do something like

maybe i have a bit of a like i'll write b like ben if they really say something cool about

benefits i'll just like jot down benefits or i'll jot down like objections so i can see if there's like a leaning in the interview

and then when i do my brain jump afterwards i'll fill in because you can often remember exactly how someone said it

because it just happened so that's really valuable too that's just something i hadn't thought of

sometimes when i'm done with the interview like i want to like leave it completely and kind of so you know

there's a part of that but but i can see taking you know a notebook or something and saying you know some stuff you just

offhand remember and and like mo and and might help you when you go back and look at the transcript about that

i will keep that in mind um going forward to try to learn to do that better i do agree with the leaning in and

really just getting into the interview and because i think i when i when i depend too much on a script

um i think that's when i lose the authenticity of who i am um yeah so

um you know even when i do presentation i told somebody the other day i'll probably do better

oh just doing it off points and that kind of stuff but i can't script it out i've never done a

scripted video so i you know maybe one day i will but i just never have

i figured todd comes out better when todd just talks and you know for better or worse i guess so

anyway yeah i think you you gotta find your own rhythm with it like how you navigate the conversations and

where you can kind of bring out your strengths as well for sure yeah yeah well

very cool fantastic information i know rhonda is like i'm bookmarking this and

you know i know some people uh are are going to really get a lot of information out of this awesome yeah thanks for having me this was a lot

of fun yep and i know you i noticed the last slide had you know information about how people can reach you and

hannah's very active on twitter and right now she's dropping these little gold nuggets of like one one sentence or two sentence

tweets with incredible value in it alone so and she does several of my day

so i'm just like there she goes again like he's on fire and then also she has a

youtube channel um where she is doing breakdowns on questions and surveys yeah and you can we can drop

maybe can we drop the link and everything is kind of through my through my twitter um so you can find me

there and the link to the survey teardowns as well and my website and all of that fun stuff

yeah you are i've got it pulled up here so yeah i will make sure we have that in

the in the thread as well and i hope i didn't take too much of your time i do

appreciate it i do i do highly recommend hannah for podcast interviews if anybody's

listening and they're looking for somebody uh i know she's wanting to do some of that and uh would be uh i i hope jason was able to

book you on on his podcast so yeah yeah sounds fun all right well appreciate you uh joining

us and uh i'm gonna call today all right thanks guys bye