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How to get insights from customers
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From the course by University of Maryland, College Park
Master Class for Corporate Entrepreneurs
11 ratings
University of Maryland, College Park
11 ratings
Course 5 of 5 in the Specialization Corporate Entrepreneurship: Innovating within Corporations
From the lesson
Building the Business Model
This module challenges you to develop and apply the Business Model Canvas tool to scope a corporate challenge or opportunity. You will learn how to identify and communicate the nine elements of a business model: Customer Segments, Value Propositions, Channels, Customer Relationships, Revenue Streams, Key Resources, Key Activities, Key Partners, and Cost Structure.
Meet the Instructors
Dr. James V. GreenDirector of Entrepreneurship Education
Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute
Okay, so let's talk a little more nuts and
bolts about how we're actually going to get insights from talking to customers.
As we said last time, you're going to want to ask the right questions.
You're going to want to listen for answers that you didn't expect.
You're going to want to think about the interviews before you do them,
and do work on them after you've done them.
And you're going to want to extract the insights, that's your job.
The customers don't necessarily have the insights,
you're going to have to tease them out.
They don't always know them, in fact they usually don't know them, and
they certainly are not in a position to tell you.
They may not even want to tell you.
But your job is to figure out what they know, that they don't know they know.
Number one tool that you have in your arsenal, if you're going to try to get
the right answers out of customers, is to ask them the right questions.
There's good questions to ask and there's bad questions to ask.
The number one rule is always ask open-ended questions.
An open-ended question is a question that is not a yes or no question.
A question like,
do you think that'd be a good solution, is not an open-end question.
They're going to answer that, yes, or they're going to answer it, no,
and that's the end of the interaction.
An open-ended question is, what does a good solution look like to you?
That gets some talking, that gets some thinking,
that gets the trail going for you.
So always ask an open-ended question.
Never ask multiple choice question.
First of all,
it’s like a yes or no question in the sense that it's not open-ended.
But second of all, it's going to confuse them.
If I asked you question, take one of the above, A, B, C, or D, but
not D, but not E, what would you do?
You'd get confused, you'd stumble, you'd probably give the answer you thought I
wanted to get, and the conversation will go nowhere.
So never ask multiple choice questions, big waste of time.
The kinds of questions you want to ask begin with who, what, why, and how.
The old reporters' questions.
Reporters are always told to ask these questions.
And the reason they're told to ask these questions is the same reason you should be
asking these questions.
It gets the story out of the people you're talking to.
A who question is, who in your organization does that?
Who approves that kind of purchase?
Who do you have to go to get sign-off on this?
Who else would like this product?
Those are who questions.
What questions, what is that process look like?
What kinds of things do you have to do to demonstrate
that the inspection is a success?
What kinds of people do you have with you?
What kinds of resources do you need?
What, what, what, what, what?
Why questions are fabulous, in fact, people talk about the five whys.
If somebody gives you an answer to a question, you go, why?
Then they give you an answer to that, you say, why?
Then they give you an answer again, you say why again.
You can do it up to five times and then it gets kind of stupid.
But why questions go into the heart of
what people think they're doing when they're doing something.
Which is exactly what you want to get out of the customer discovery interviews.
So always ask why questions and don't be afraid to ask more than one.
Why do you guys do it that way?
Because administration has to sign off on it.
Why does administration have to sign off on it?
And then you can ask a who question.
Who in administration has to sign off?
Why them?
Why are they the ones that are picked to do that?
So you can combine who and why and get to the heart of the matter.
And finally, how.
Don't be afraid to ask a how question.
People love to explain how they do things, and you don't know, you're an interviewer.
How would you know the answers to these questions?
How do you guys do that?
So, I don't understand; you buy them at ten and
sell them at eight, how do you make money on that?
I don't get it, how do you get so many people in but get so few successes?
How, how, how, how, how, great question.
And finally, drill down, on two topics, always.
Whenever anybody mentions money, drill down.
That's who pays how much for what, so it's a who, how, and what question.
So they mention that,
Administration can only pay 500 bucks for things.
And you say, who decides that?
How do they make that decision?
What else do they spend money on?
What's the rest of their budget look like?
Any time there's a money question, you want to go to the heart of that.
Because that's going to lead you into the organization's innermost secrets,
that's how they do things.
And whenever anybody mentions another customer type,
which is something that we'll talk about it next week, please follow up on that.
A customer type is someone else who's involved in the decision.
So somebody might be using a product but they might not be the one who approves it.
When they say, so-and-so has to approve it, you say, who are they?
We have to get sign-off from Fred about that.
Who's Fred?
What's Fred's role?
Why does Fred do the sign-off?
Who does Fred report to?
Blah blah blah.
As you drill down into questions like money and other customer types,
you'll get much more information about the situation there.
And always finish with two questions.
What did I forget to ask?
Because sometimes there'll be something they're dying to tell you and
you just haven’t ask it.
We forgot to mention that we've had 14 accidents in the last year and
2 of them were fatal.
Very interesting information, and they wouldn't have mentioned it if you hadn't
asked them, what did I forget to ask.
And then finally, is there anyone else you think I should meet?
You want to get at least two other referrals from everybody you talk to,
otherwise you're going to run out of referrals.
And you gotta get 100 customers to talk to in the next few weeks.
So always ask, is there anyone else you think I should meet?
When you ask a question,
sometimes the answers are not going to be what you're expect.
So do not ask questions that are rhetorical.
What's a rhetorical question?
A rhetorical question's a question you, like I just asked,
it's a question to which you already know the answer.
Questions that begin with is, are, would, do you think, and
should, tend to be rhetorical questions.
And you want to get around them.
You want to ask how questions, who questions, and go on with that.
Follow the five whys, as said before.
Don't be afraid of silence.
If the person answers the question and they don't say anything,
let the silence just kind of set there for a moment.
Sometimes they'll say something else.
They'll say, yeah, well that's what we used to do but
we haven't adopted the new system yet.
What's the new system?
Who brought that in?
Why did you bring it in?
And therefore you get more information.
And always, if you can, have someone else taking notes.
Its a big job, actually steering the conversation, listening, paying attention,
reflecting back, listening for unexpected answers, all this stuff.
It's too much to ask that you can do all that and take notes too.
Always have a partner with you taking notes if you can.
And then afterwards, how do you extract the insights?
Facts are very interesting, but your goal is to uncover insights.
And customers don't usually know their own insights, you have to find them.
They can tell you how it feels to be them, but they can't generally tell you why.
You need to discuss every interview afterwards and see what the insights are.
What was he really saying there?
Of course these are the same questions you ask them.
Why did he say that?
Why didn't he talk about the other stuff?
What did he leave out?
Why did he look a little distressed at that point in the conversation?
Why did he look really happy when he talked about
the new system they were going to use?
All those questions help you figure out what the insights are.
You have to put them there.
Interpretation of data is the core of customer discovery.
And if you're not doing that, you're not going to find out anything except what you
are already went in there to know.
You turn data into information through pattern recognition, and
that means a certain amount of statistics.
One person says something, that's an observation.
If two people say something, that's interesting.
If three people say something, maybe you're onto something.
If ten people say something, I think you're onto something deep.
That's why you want to do a lot of customer interviews,
simply to get to the heart of it.
If you do 100 interviews and you spread them over 5 kinds of customers,
you'll only get 10 data points.
That's not going to help you much.
if you could focus on 1 customer segment and get a 100 interviews with all of them,
that gets you a lot.
That'd get you some statistically significant information.
So make sure you spend as much time interpreting the data as you
are collecting it.
And make sure that you're looking at things that are statistically or
semi-statistically significant.
You have to understand your own biases to do a good job as interviewer.
If you're weak on business, your tendency is going to be to not ask business
questions, because you don't know anything about it.
But that's exactly the wrong approach.
You're exactly the person who should be asking business questions.
If you're a techie, don't wallow in tech questions,
they know and you know all about the tech stuff.
Drill down on the business questions and ask them about those,
that's where you're going to get your insights.
Similarly, if you're weak on tech,
if you're a business kind of person, ask tech questions.
You want to find out why, how?
Why do you use that process?
Why don't you like it anymore?
Why is it so expensive?
And finally, you gotta be aware of two kinds of biases that
researchers know a lot.
Confirmation bias and small sample bias.
Small sample bias, we just talked about, it's pretty simple.
If you get a small enough sample, like one person, that's not a trend.
You need [LAUGH] you need at least two to make a trend.
No, you need a few to make a trend, and
you have to be careful how you weigh information that comes from small samples.
The other, confirmation bias, probably deserves a little bit more discussion.
Confirmation bias is simply finding what you expect to find.
Our brains are looking for comfort in the known.
It's something that we already know.
So typically, if you have a product, and
your product you think is going to solve a problem for a customer, you're going to be
looking for evidence that the product solves the problem for the customer.
And you're going to ignore evidence that tends to make you uncomfortable,
that disproves that.
So you have to work hard against your own confirmation bias.
because otherwise you're not going to learn anything except your own
preconceived notions.
So these are the main points.
Don't ask yes or no questions.
Always ask questions like who, when, why, how, how much.
Always ask open-ended questions, get your informant talking.
Listen for unexpected answers, things you didn't expect to hear.
And you gotta work to get the insight out, it's not there on the surface.
And understand your own biases, thanks.
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