How to Make the Most of Your B2B Customer Discovery Problem Interviews

If you don’t want to lose a ton of money and time, your ideas should be guilty until proven innocent. – Trevor Owens, Lean Startup Machine CEO

You were able to schedule meetings with early adopters all through next week; great opportunity to start selling, right?

The worst thing you can do with problem interviews is to try to sell. You don’t know what your prospects want, you have no idea what the solution could be, and you don’t even know if the people you’re meeting are people you would like to sell to. You have to find a jury and a problem to tackle before thinking about sales.

Setting the right context for the customer discovery problem interviews is paramount.

If the meeting is too much about sales, then you’re really narrowing the conversation by asking prospects to react to a solution to a problem. The meeting is no longer around finding the best opportunity possible for your startup, it’s about convincing the prospect that your value proposition makes sense.

You don’t learn through sales calls, it’s not customer validation. – Jason Cohen, WPEngine Founder

If the meeting is too much about the product, then the prospect is completely separated from their job and the context becomes the product. The meeting is no longer about whether that prospect is considering solving that problem, it’s about helping you add features to a product for someone else.

To be successful, you have to shift the context to learning. In a learning context, the customer does most of the talking and you don’t have to know all the answers. You’re not trying to knock down the barriers; you’re trying to find out what they are in the first place.

The early adopter must remember the meeting as a validation meeting, not a sales pitch. In the first few meetings you shouldn’t mention your solution. You’re there to talk about their problems, not your solution.

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