A better question to ask in your customer research interviews
(This originally appeared in my newsletter. Sign up now to get content like this, for free, every two weeks.)
Talking to my clients' customers is a huge part of my business.
If I'm writing you a sequence of emails designed to get someone to buy a product at the end, I'm going to want to talk to your customers to figure out what those emails should talk about. If I'm writing a case study, I am going to want interesting, unique details to make it a story worth reading. And so on, and so forth.
In other words, I want to know why they use your product and not someone else's.
Early in my career, I used to come right out and ask people why they work with my client. But over time, I've learned that it's kind of a pointless question. It's unlikely to get any valuable information.
Here's a better question: "what was happening in your life when you decided to start using our product?"
Outcomes > benefits
When you ask someone why they love a product, they'll respond with a benefit statement. Something like "it saves me time," or "it's easy to use" or (my least favourite) "the customer support is great."
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
These things don't differentiate you at all. In fact, they are barely even worth talking about. They're all basic things that apply to pretty much all software. In fact, they apply to pretty much all b2b products and services, and indeed to a huge number of consumer products and services!
So your time-saving, easy-to-use product with great customer support is not really standing out from your competition. At all.
They're benefits, yes - but to really write copy that makes a difference, you want to talk about outcomes. What did your product allow your customer to do that they weren't able to do before? What problem did it solve for them? How did it specifically make their life better?
That's why it's useful to ask customers what was happening in their lives before they started using your product. Questions like this shine a light on these outcomes. If you can find these, you'll be able to write much more compelling copy than "saves time" and "is easy to use".
A few examples
Let me work through a couple of different SaaS products I use, so you can see what I'm talking about.
HNRY
If you asked me why I love using HNRY (which is accounting software for freelancers that also automatically takes care of taxes), I'd say that it's a great product that saves me the pain of doing my own taxes. Not very interesting.
But if you asked me what was happening in my business before I started using HNRY, here's what I'd say:
I was putting money aside for my taxes at the end of the year, in a savings account that I kept on raiding.
I was spending $70/month on Xero, and using a fraction of its features, because it's super overpowered for a one person business like mine.
I was hiring an accountant every year to deal with my taxes, which cost hundreds of dollars - and was just another task I had to do every year.
Do you see the difference here? The former answer is just giving a straight-up-and-down benefit statement. The latter answers are painting a much richer picture of the outcomes HNRY is delivering for me, and the problems it's solving.
Let's look at another one.
Canva
Canva is drag and drop design software. It's great - it makes it super easy for a non-designer (like me) to create reasonably passable presentations, one-pagers, PDFs, etc etc.
And that's what I'd say if I was asked why I love Canva. But if you asked what was happening before I started using Canva, I'd say something like:
I was ramping up the content marketing component of my business development, with things like Linkedin presentations.
I was building my email list by developing lead magnets like long-form guides and checklists.
I was developing lots of content, quickly, in an effort to find out what resonated best with people - rather than hire a designer for each and every idea I had.
Again, you see the difference: the former is a vague benefit, while the latter is a specific set of outcomes that Canva delivers for me. That specific set of outcomes is going to be much more useful for developing high-converting emails or landing pages, or writing an interesting case study.
You'll have to dig a bit
Of course, your customers are unlikely to offer up all this stuff immediately. You might have to dig around a little bit. But it's a much better starting point than something like "why do you like using our product?" because it is so much more open-ended. It gives you the opportunity to dig in on what was really happening in their business when they bought the product, the actual problems it solves and how they talk about those problems.
All this stuff is much richer, much more specific and much more effective than that bog-standard stuff like "saves time" and "easy to use".
So give it a go next time you're doing customer interviews - I bet you'll be surprised at what you dig up.
See you next time
Sam
PS: Another good Linkedin discussion happening at the moment - this time about whether it's good practice for consultants to charge people for short consults. My approach to not charge people for short "pick my brain" calls. The relationship building is far more valuable than the $500 or so I could charge for the call. Take a look and weigh in.
PPS: As always, you can get me to review some copy for you for $599. Most people use this for their website home pages. I've sent you the landing page enough times by now, so I'll just give you the form directly - book a review now.
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