Discovering helpful answers require asking the good questions

The secret to knowing the most from your interviewees is to spend more time listening than speaking. Ask the question you have and then get out of their way.

In a "Buyer Persona" interview, the one question you need to prepare for and ponder upon beforehand is the first question you will ask. Ultimately, the first question will be about the first time the interviewee realized that he/she faced an issue that required him to find a new solution.

You can say, as an example, "Tell me about the night that you have found out that you needed a new solution for email marketing. Describe what happened."

The answer of your interviewee likely won't be the whole story. While you may be given the most straightforward, a little poking may allow you to get a better view of the situation. To ask those exploratory questions, however, you will need to listen well to the way your interviewee answers.

Let us consider the response of the interviewee to our hypothetical question. She may answer that she was motivated to find a replacement email-marketing service because she wanted their marketing campaigns to be more streamlined and she wanted to measure ROI more accurately.

Here, the person being interviewed talked about the benefits that they got from the solution they decided on, but did not actually answer the question. You wanted to know what had caused him to search for other solutions so that you may uncover what the client really wants.

To discover these causes, use the interviewees own wordings when you probe further with followup questions.

It can be said, as an example: "Let us take a step back for a minute. You had mentioned that you needed to measure ROI and effectiveness. What made you suddenly prioritize this for your business?"

This line of questions should bring you to a more substantial and direct answer about why the client started searching for other solutions in the first place.

Study Your Buyers' Insights To Find Out Their Needs And How You Can Accomodate Them

There is this old Egyptian saying that goes "Do you know so and so? Yes. Did you spend time with him? No. Well you do not really know him." The same principe applies to your buyers. You cannot presume to know them if you have never talked to them.

To be able to understand your buyer's behavior, you have to talk to them and find out the "Five Rings of Buying Insights". Doing this will give you everything you need to figure out your buyer's decisions.

The first ring is called "Priority Initiative". You want to find out why some buyers decided on your solutions and why others are satisfied with their status quo. You can find the Priority Initiative through the types of questions we outlined before.

The second ring is called "Success Factors" - these are the results that your buyer persona expects to reach or achieve after purchasing your solution. Is she looking for better efficiency? Reduction of cost? or something different altogether?

The third ring is called "Perceived Barriers". Here you will want to identify any reasons a buyer might have to say that your solution is suboptimal, as well as any other concerns that she might have. As an example, your potential customer might be concerned about keeping her client's privacy, or maybe she sees your company as not reliable.

Next is the "Buyer's Journey" ring. You will want to who or what influences your buyer, and how she judges options in her process of selection.

As an example, if you are a B2B company, you may figure out that the COO at your prospect's company oftentimes interfere in each big purchase. This information can help you adjust your priorities in your marketing investment.

And now the final ring is "Decision Criteria", which outlines the critical parts of your potential customer's ideal solution as well as their expectations. You want to figure out things like whether the buyer is looking for a "user friendly" solution or for the most complete service possible.

Once you have identified the answers to these, you will finally have your complete buyer persona.

Develop Actionable Insights By Organizing Your Interview

So now you are done gathering the data, what is next? Next comes the careful analysis. Do remember: you are not just looking for data that will confirm your biases but rather you need to stay as objective as possible in order to find out what your customer really needs.

Question now is, where do you start?

Put together all the information from the interviews you have conducted into a single coherent story for each ring. If you have done 20 buyer interviews, you do not want to be left with 20 different results. Rather, you want to aggregate the discoveries into a single discovery.

Of course, this does not mean randomly jumbling all the information together. You still need to divide your collected data into each of the five "Rings of Buying Insight".

Separate the gathered data for each ring unto it's own piece of paper. On each page, find a quote that is memorable, figure out who said it, and then add a headline that highlights what the quote pertains to.

As an example, when writing the "Decision Criteria" ring, you might have found this interesting quote from a prospective buyer: I do not want to waste resources having a solution made especially for us. Instead, I want software that exists already, but which can be handily repurposed for our own business goals.

Make another column, write where the quote came from: Toby, Marketing Head. And on the next column, write the headline for this quote so you can understand it easily later on. On this quote, you might say "Ease of Usability"

Once this exercise is complete for all the rings, you will have to organize the answers to all the interview questions. With these answers you can uncover the very essence of your "buyer's story" in a decisive way.

Craft a message that tells your buyer what they want to hear

"We have the best software." "We are the cheapest." "Our software will save your company money." Do these types of messages make you want to buy? It is more than likely that these are types of that you will completely ignore. It is because these messages do not speak to you and your concerns.

With the output of the interviews, you now are armed to address your buyer's unique concerns.

During the course of the interviews with the buyers, it was revealed to you what it was that had inspired tem to go looking for a solution, which barriers would prevent them from procuring your solution, and lastly, which features they were looking for.

So in short, you will have the complete story of your buyer, containing every possible insight about their purchasing habits.

But once you are aware of what your customers need, you will then need to link what you have to say with what they want to hear.

A great place to begin is by taking inventory of all your solution's features and selling points in a "Capabilities Document"

Then, utilize your previous study to create a list of buying insights in a "Buyer Expectation" document.

Display the two documents side by side and look for the areas where they intersect, that is, where your buyer's expectations match up with your capabilities.

If for example, "flexibility" is one of the characteristics that define your product, and if your buyer wants a product that is customizable then you should match these things.

Write a simple sentence about each of these matches - things such as "We are flexible and capable of adapting our solution to your needs". This way, your creative-sales-marketing teams will know the message they need to say.

Armed with this last piece of the puzzle, you can finally grab your buyer's persona and apply it into the real world, making sure that your product solution is marketed to the correct customers - those people that are looking for exactly what you are offering

In Summary:

You should know your customers if you expect to sell anything to them. You must figure out what it is that motivates them to purchase, what their needs are in a solution and how they see your product. By uncovering their Buyer Persona, you will have what you need to create specialized campaigns to sell to the prospects who want your solutions most.

Make preparations in advance of the customer interviews.

If you are to make the most from your interviews with your buyers, you will need to be prepared. First review your interviewee's LinkedIn profile to know more about who they are and their background. Inquire of your sales marketing team for more info about them: Have they interacted with this person before? What is your business relationship with them?

Take all of this into consideration when making your questions.