Market research has a reputation for being expensive, slow and academic. None of that is true for a small business. This eBook gives you a working method you can run in a week, with nothing more than a browser, a notebook and a willingness to read carefully and ask a few good questions.
Members ebook·7 chapters· 35 minute read
Chapter 5
Short, Cheap Customer Conversations
How to run twenty-minute conversations with five or six potential customers and learn more than a survey would tell you.
After all the desk research is done, there's still one source you can't replace: a conversation with someone who could actually be your customer. Twenty minutes on the phone with the right person tells you more than a hundred survey responses. The trouble is that most owners don't run these conversations because they feel awkward asking, don't know what to ask and don't know what to do with the answers.
The good news is that the format is small and repeatable. Five or six conversations of twenty minutes each, run over a fortnight, will sharpen every other piece of research you've done. The bad news is that it requires you to put yourself in the slightly uncomfortable position of asking for time from people who don't owe you any.
This chapter gives you the script, the question list and the practical tactics for finding the right people. By the end you'll have a method you can rerun every few months without it feeling like a project.
The full chapter covers how to find the right people, the seven-question script and what to do with what you hear.
Who to talk to
Five to six people who fit your target customer description and are not currently your customer. The non-customer part matters. Existing customers will be polite. They'll tell you they love what you do. That's nice but not useful for research.
Where to find them depends on the business. For a local service, ask in a relevant Facebook group, post in a local community forum or ask existing customers if they know one or two friends who might fit. For a business-to-business service, LinkedIn searches with a polite first message work well. For an online product, post in a relevant Reddit thread or community offering a small thank-you in exchange for the call.
How to ask for the call
Be honest. "I'm doing some research before launching a maintenance contract for landlords. I'd love twenty minutes of your time on the phone to ask a few questions about how you currently handle this. I'm not going to sell you anything. I can offer a fifteen-pound coffee voucher as a thank-you."
About one in three or four people will say yes. Don't over-personalise the message - send it to ten people and you'll have your five conversations within a week.
Mistakes that kill the response rate
Pretending it isn't research ("Quick chat?" is suspicious).
Asking for an hour (twenty minutes is the magic number).
Not offering anything in exchange (a small voucher is enough; cash feels strange).
Asking via cold email at scale (this isn't a survey - send personal messages).
Going to existing customers first (you'll get warmth, not insight).
The seven-question script
Open with one minute of context: who you are, what you're researching and a reminder that you're not selling. Then run through these seven questions, in this order, with room for follow-ups.
The script
01Tell me about the last time you needed [the thing]. What was going on?
02How did you start looking for someone to help?
03Who else did you consider, even briefly?
04What made you choose the option you went with?
05If that hadn't worked out, what would you have done?
06What was the most frustrating part of the whole process?
07If a perfect version of this service existed, what would it do that the current options don't?
Listen more than you talk. Don't defend any current option. Don't pitch your idea. The instinct to test your concept by describing it is strong - resist it. The most useful answers come when the person doesn't know what you're hoping to hear.
What to write down
After each call, spend ten minutes writing notes. Three sections. Quotes you don't want to forget. Patterns you noticed (similar to other calls or different). One thing this person said that surprised you.
After all six calls are done, sit down with the six sets of notes and look for the patterns across them. Three calls saying something similar is a real pattern. One call saying something dramatic is interesting but not yet evidence.
What to do with what you hear
Three uses. First, validate or invalidate the assumptions you brought in. If you assumed customers cared most about price and they actually cared most about response time, that changes how you describe your offer. Second, sharpen the language you use - drop in the phrases you heard people use naturally. Third, identify gaps the existing market isn't filling that you could.
The conversations also tend to surface a couple of unexpected ideas you hadn't considered. Don't pivot the whole business based on a single comment, but write the unexpected ideas down. Some of them turn out to be the best opportunity you find all year.
When to rerun the conversations
Twice a year for most businesses. Before any significant launch. After any significant change in the market - a new competitor, a new technology, a noticeable shift in customer behaviour. Each round only takes a fortnight, but it keeps your understanding of the customer fresh in a way nothing else does.
What to do this week
Send ten outreach messages today. By Friday you'll have replies from three or four people. Book the calls for the following week. The earlier book 'Best Customer' helps you describe who to send the messages to. The next chapter is about pulling demand, competitor and customer signals together to find a real gap.
Start with the customer. Twenty minutes on the phone with someone who fits the description is the cheapest, fastest sense-check any small business has.
The rest of this chapter walks through the practical steps, the templates and the checklists you need to put it into action. It includes worked examples, copy frameworks and the small decisions that make the difference between a plan that sits in a drive and one that gets used.
Inside you'll find a step-by-step playbook, a downloadable template, a checklist you can run this week and a short list of common mistakes to avoid before you start.
The full action plan, broken into weekly steps.
Ready-to-use scripts, templates and checklists.
Worked examples for different sized businesses.
Common mistakes and how to avoid them.
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