Hikers on mountain

Customer Insight Interviews

Gain a Greater Understanding of Your Customers’ Buying Needs With Impartial Third-Party Interviews

 

 

Request customer insight interviews

arrow
  • FT logo
  • Totaljobs logo
  • Capital economics logo
  • Appcast logo
  • Disguise logo
  • Stepstone logo
  • sson logo
  • Auctane logo

Do you really understand your customers? Have you listened to them recently?

If you do not understand your target audience it does not matter what marketing you do. Regardless of which shiny tools you buy, what marketing rock stars you hire, how good your website is, how pretty your branding is, your company will not achieve its potential.

 

Understanding your target audience and what makes them feel, think and act is fundamental to the success of every company. This seems obvious, yet so many companies still make assumptions about their target audience.


Many businesses also fall into the trap of relying on old research for too long, internal bias, hearsay, and the viewpoint of just a few 'friendly' customers.

The solution… allow an impartial 3rd party to interview your customers and prospects

To better understand your customers, we recommend interviewing your closed-won customers and closed-lost prospects, ideally that have gone through the buying process within the last 2 months. Our interviews are designed to understand the buying journey (needs, actions and thought processes) that a customer went through when buying or not buying from you. 


We consolidate the interviews and look for similarities and patterns that can build a picture of the ‘typical’ buyer journey and the associated pain points your audience experiences as they navigate this journey.

 
Request customer insight interviews
 

Five ways companies fail to use customer insight to drive strategy

  1. Failing to test assumptions about customer needs and preferences
  2. Relying solely on survey-based customer data collection
  3. Not talking to prospects, customers, and former customers on an ongoing basis 
  4. Overweighting the feedback of a small number of large, noisy, or friendly customers
  5. Failing to align sales and marketing to a single, unified customer insight process

Just some of the insights you will discover with an audit:

  • What is the ‘trigger’ that drives your target audience to start their buying journey vs. remaining with the status quo
  • What does a ‘typical’ buyer journey look like?
  • Who are your buyer personas?
  • What resources do your personas use on their buyer journey?
  • What friction points do your personas encounter on their buyer journey? What should you do to remove friction?
  • Which competitors do you come up against most often? How can you beat them?
  • Who makes up a ‘typical’ buying committee?

What Do You Get From Your Customer Insight Interviews?

  • Interview design, questions, and script: A framework and resources to keep so your team can continue to do more interviews and build further insight over time
  • 5 x 30 min customer/prospect interviews (more can be conducted if needed)
  • Interview analysis and a 1 hr presentation of key findings and recommendations
  • A ‘typical’ buyer journey mapped
  • 2 x initial/emerging buyer personas created/updated
  • List of common customer pain points, problems, and challenges
  • Results provided in Excel and PowerPoint format
Request customer insight interviews

Who Benefits From The Customer Insight Interviews?

B2B Business Leaders

  • Owners, CEOs, and Marketing / Sales / Commercial Leaders who want to better understand their target audience
  • Leaders at businesses entering new markets or targeting new buyers

B2B Sales & Marketing Leaders

  • Sales & Marketing leaders at businesses that haven’t conducted any customer research in the past 12 months
  • Sales & Marketing leaders that have no customer feedback mechanism where the information is collected, reviewed, shared and acted on
Request customer insight interviews

Frequently Asked Questions

Q.5-6 interviews isn’t many. Can we really learn anything from just these?

Yes you can. This is just the start and a great, fast and inexpensive way to get some initial findings and prove the value of the investment. You can then build on this initial insight by conducting more interviews internally following our process, or with further outside help. Other data can also be used to cross-reference the findings.

Q.We have customer feedback from surveys. Isn’t this enough?

Survey data is a valuable source of customer insight, but it only gets you so far. First, it only captures responses from customers who opted into the survey – so may have a bias towards a more “friendly” audience. Second, the structured nature of surveys may limit customers to a set of pre-defined responses – it doesn’t capture their true feelings, in their own words. Finally, a conversation (as opposed to formal data collection) allows us to dive deeper into certain areas of interest.

Q.Can I just run these interviews myself?

We encourage all in-house efforts to gather customer voice on a continual basis (indeed, we’ve helped clients set up programs to do just this). There are significant advantages to asking a third party to run customer interviews, however. First, closed-lost customers are more likely to agree to a conversation with a third party as they can be confident that it will not turn into an attempt to save the sale. Second, customers are more likely to be honest with a third party – often brutally so – enabling us to capture much more valuable information on your behalf. Finally, we find that while most businesses recognise the value of conducting customer interviews, and have the best of intentions to do so, the pressures of day-to-day tasks mean it is constantly deprioritised. We ensure the task gets done, and we deliver you actionable information while your team carries on with other urgent work. We do all the initial time-consuming work to get you set up and deliver your first interviews. You and your team can then repeat this process with the resources we have provided.

Complete this form and we’ll be in touch within 24 hours to discuss your audit

What our clients have to say

Audits to Consider Alongside Your Organic Social Audit

Strategy & Planning

  1. Campaign Planning Audit

Platforms & Processes

  1. Sales & Marketing Alignment Audit
  2. Website Audit

Demand Generation

  1. Content Marketing Audit