Every early-stage marketer should be completely obsessed with what their prospects and customers think and how they behave.

When you’re starting out, you won’t have much meaningful data or insights to model customer behavior. Instead, you’ll need to model this yourself by interviewing customers or prospects and teasing out information about how they learn about their problems and buy software to solve them.

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Unless you want to waste time sharing messages and campaigns that no one cares about, I suggest you run customer interviews too. With limited time and resources, and so much to prove to the market, early-stage marketers need to do everything they can to narrow their margin for error.

If you’re having trouble convincing your team that you should be doing customer interviews, show them this table.

How to define your audience

Before you know how to interview customers, you need to know who to interview. To do that, you’ll need to define your audience.

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Right now, you’ll be in one of these positions:

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1. Pre-customer: You’ll need to speak to prospects to find out more about how to reach your target audience.
2. First 25 customers: You’ll need to find out as much from this group as possible and try to find more customers like them.‍
3. More than 25 customers: You might have a few different types of customer, and need to prioritize which group you target based on how valuable they find the product, how much revenue they contribute, how easy they are to service, and how large their combined market size is.

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Whichever it is, we’ll go through the steps you should take to find out everything you need to know about your customers and prospects, and how you can differentiate your brand from the competition.

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First, you need to define who your best-fit customers are. This audience may be smaller than the total market you can sell your product to, but when you’re starting out that focus is helpful.

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Marketing legend Seth Godin says it best: “Drop a teaspoon of dye into a swimming pool, and all the water in the pool will become bright purple. But if you drop it in the ocean, no one will notice.”

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It might not seem like a blessing, but finding a swimming pool is one of the only advantages you have as an early-stage marketer. That’s because well-defined groups are often underserved by larger brands who are trying to turn the ocean pink, so they’ll be more responsive to messages and campaigns that target their unique situation.

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Here’s how to find your swimming pool (while avoiding larger bodies of water for now) by grouping customer types:

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1. They use your platform to solve the same specific problem.
2. They rave about your platform and refer you new business.
3. They spend big and there are opportunities to expand the size of their account.
4. Their requests for new features are similar.
5. Their brand names are significant to one another (for example, they’re in the same sector). This builds consensus in the market that your software is the first, most obvious choice.
6. They were relatively easy to sell to because the need for your product was clear and understood by all buyers.
7. They are better served by your tool than your competitors’ software (be honest here).

Hopefully between sales, product, marketing, and your founders and advisors, you’ll have a good grasp of who fits your target audience vs who doesn’t. You’re not starting from scratch, of course: your product was developed to solve the needs of a specific audience.

If you don’t have many customers or none of your customers have much in common, you might want to draft in some prospects. Pull some favors to get the calls booked, reach out to them to offer a voucher, or cold call them (not the easiest way, but folk were very sympathetic when I tried this!)

Don’t be too concerned if you end up speaking to customers who won’t fall within your ideal customer profile. Chances are you’ll need to qualify some folk out of your target audience after you speak to them. Recognizing the differences that disqualify folk is just as important as understanding the similarities that include them in your target audience.

‍Now book those calls

I’ve run more than 100 customer interviews, here's the best advice I can think of for those about to book their first calls:

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• 45 minutes is the best. Half an hour is OK, but I usually end the call thinking, “I could have done with another 15 minutes”.
• When you’re asking for a customer or prospect’s time, this email should come from the founder. Your founder doesn’t need to join the call, but your customers are more likely to say yes to them.
• It can take up to a month to get customers to turn up on calls, so get started as soon as possible. People go on holiday, reschedule, flake out, etc. This is your priority, not theirs!
• Hosting and processing info from these calls takes a while, so book 5-10 for starters.
• Record the call with a tool like Loom so you can download the transcript afterward.

And here’s the template email I use to send out requests for customer calls. If you can think of a better way to make your customers say yes do that instead!

Host some high-quality interviews

Let’s imagine there are only a couple of minutes until your first customer interview. You haven’t prepared so you quickly flash up their Linkedin profile, but before you finish reading their bio, they jump on the call.

Don’t let it get to this! Preparation makes it easier to mine gold from your conversation. And preparation comes down to deciding what you want from the interview and knowing the questions you’ll ask to get there.

It’s worth noting that when you’re taking up customers’ time for an interview, there definitely is such a thing as a dumb question. In this case, a dumb question is anything you could have Googled or found out from your customer success team in advance.

Very broadly, you’ll want to find out these things about your audience:

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• How they learn
• How they buy
• How they make decisions
• What they are worried about
• What they want from their career
• How they approach problem-solving

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Below are the questions you should ask to uncover this info. Since I first heard Katelyn Bourgoin lay out the fundamentals of customer interviews in a podcast called Everyone Hates Marketers, I’ve been tweaking and adding to this list of questions. I’ve used it again and again, and it has never let me down.

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You’ll probably want to adjust the list to make it more relevant to your product, but here are the six main questions I usually ask, along with the sub-questions I use to dig deeper. The best answers are usually specific, personal, and honest, so it’s best to re-ask a question or linger on a theme until you feel you’ve found the ‘true’ response. Bear in mind that surface-level questions get surface-level answers!

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Tell me about yourself. What makes you great at what you do at work every day?

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1. What sort of things do you like to read or listen to?
2. How do these things help you get better at your job?
3. Who around you do you think of as an authority? Think broadly, this could be your old boss or an influencer. How did that relationship form?
4. What are you tired of hearing about in your industry?
5. What do you think people should be talking about instead?

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What was going on that made you or your team recognize the need for our software?

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1. What was going on with you at the time? How did you think our software would improve your situation?
2. What would improving that situation mean to you?
3. How did your business view this problem? Was it a high priority?
4. Does introducing the software clearly impact one of your business or departmental objectives? Can you tell me more about the link between business performance and our software?

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After you recognized the need to improve things, how did you get the ball rolling?

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1. What were the first discussions you had internally? Who was involved in the decision to buy a new tool?
2. Where did you begin looking for a solution?
3. What 'signals' from vendors were you looking for that showed you that they were likely to be a good fit?
4. Did you make a shortlist of vendors? Who else did you consider?
5. What were your alternatives to taking on new software? For example, making a new hire, using Excel, or doing nothing at all.
6. Why did you decide to go ahead with our software vs our competitors and the other alternatives?
7. In the end, was there a single most important factor that helped you decide we were the right choice?
8. Did you have any reluctance at any part of the buying process? Tell me more about that.

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Taking your mind away from our software, have you brought on any other tech partners recently?

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1. How did you decide they were the right partner?
2. What steps were involved in choosing this partner?
3. Are these steps standard for working with all tech partners?

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How would you describe the change that happened when you started to use our software?

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1. When was the first moment you realized our tool would be valuable?
2. Have you ever been surprised by our software? What happened there?
3. What are your short-term indicators of success for introducing software like ours?
4. What are your longer-term indicators of success? How do you see the way you use our software evolving?

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And now I’ll ask some questions about what motivates you.

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1. What are your personal goals at work? What do you want to achieve?
2. What motivates you to hit these goals?
3. What are you most worried could stand in the way of you reaching these goals?
4. What is it about you that makes you better at your job than others?
5. Can you think of anything that makes you roll your eyes when you’re marketed or sold to?
6. Which brands do you aspire to be like?
7. Which brands appeal to you visually? 

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Now we’re going to structure and group these responses to build customer profiles we can introduce to our content plan. Download a transcript of each call and categorize each answer from the interviews within one of the following groups:

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• Personal attributes
• Company attributes
• What they struggle with
• How they buy
• How they learn
• What they think success looks like
• Any other key points

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By this point, you should have recognized some similarities between your customers. Understanding how a group behaves makes it easier to predict their behavior and launch campaigns that’ll convert them or take them a step closer to conversion.

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Running this process for the first time was a real eye-opener for me. I used to think that, without access to lots of data, guesswork was a big part of early-stage marketing: the best marketers had the best instinct. Now I know that’s nonsense. The best marketers are best at uncovering and weaving together information: they’re the best at eliminating guesswork.

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Knowing that your marketing strategy and content ideas should come from your customers’ heads is liberating. Now you’re in service of your customer, rather than in service of proving how right or wrong you are. There’s a Buddhist mantra in there somewhere.