فصل 6

CHAPTER SIX

Finding conversations

Now that you know how to ask good questions and fix bad meetings, you know enough to have good customer conversations. Go out and do it. Flex your conversational muscles and talk to some people.

If you’re scratching your own itch with this business, you likely already know your customers. Great! Talk to them. Now that you’re armed with The Mom Test, they won’t be able to lie to you even though they know you.

But if you don’t already know folks, where do these conversations and meetings come from?

Here are a few tactics, divided into 2broad categories: going to them and bringing them to you.

Going to them

Drumming up good conversations from cold leads is hard. It’s doable and sometimes you have no choice, but it’s far from ideal.

The goal of cold conversations where you’re trying to talk to a stranger, is to stop having them. You hustle together the first one or two from wherever you can, and then, if you treat people’s time respectfully and if you’re genuinely trying to solve problem they care about, those conversations start to turn into warm intros. The snowball is rolling. So these are transitional tactics. You should do them to get started but you don’t wanna rely on them for ever.

Cold calls

Okay. What does it mean if you sent out a cold call or a cold email to 100 people and 98 of them ignore you? Well, it doesn’t mean anything, except that people don’t like getting cold calls which you probably already knew. No surprise there. However, more importantly, if 98 people out of 100 ignore you, that means 2 people didn’t ignore you and now you’ve now got 2 conversations in play. Unless your long term plan is to sell your product via cold calls, the rejection rate is completely irrelevant at this point.

It feels terrible emotionally to get rejected that much but it does not matter. Only the successes matter.

I know one team who successfully used cold LinkedIn messages to reach C-level execs of several major UK retailers. They were ignored by almost everyone in the country. They reached out to every retailer but you only need one to say “yes” to get started. Once that person likes you, they can start making the key introductions.

Beyond hard hustle, stay open to serendipity. There are lots of ways you can get lucky when you’re in the mood for it.

Seizing serendipity

While I was considering building tools for professional speakers, one of my many product ideas; I found myself at a friend-of-a-friend’s engagement party. I heard someone across the room say “ blah blah blah, my talk in Tokyo next week”, so what did I do? I made a quick beeline over to her, said hello and got to chatting about her work. She left the party thinking I was a nice guy who was super interested in her speaking career and I left with a ton of really good customer insight, without ever having to set up a meeting, cold call or convince someone that I was worth talking to. And in the end, she ended up becoming my first committed alfa user.

If it sounds weird to unexpectedly interview people, then that’s only because you’re still thinking of them as interviewers when you should be thinking of them as conversations. The only thing people love talking about more than themselves is their problems. By taking an interest in the problems and minutia of their day, you’re already more interesting than 99% of the people they’ve ever met.

Rule of thumb: If it’s not a formal meeting, you don’t need to make excuses about why you’re there or even mention that you’re starting a business. Just ask them about their life.

Find a good excuse to talk to them

I was chatting to an aspiring entrepreneur in a cafe. Among other things, his product could help cafe owners educate their customers on the origins and backstory of the coffee beans. You know it kept track and shared their supply chin. He had been hitting the pavement for 2 weeks, trying to get cold meetings and getting turned away from cafe after cafe. He’d asked me to chat with him about his customer interview process and figure out if he can find a better way to make this work and of course we met in the cafe. Ten minutes into the conversation, I cut in and interrupted him. I was like: “Who have you talked to so far?” And he said, “nobody— nobody will take the time to talk to me. They all just say come back later.” I asked him what he’d be doing and he said, “well, I go in. I say I’m an entrepreneur that I have a product that I would like to talk to the owner about it, and they have me get out of there.” Well, of course because you’re trying to pitch them. This is a learning conversation. Talk to them like a human. Talk to them like someone like them cares about coffee. And about that point the waiter was walking by and I said, “hey, excuse me, I’m sorry to bother you. Can I talk to the manager? Can I talk to the owner?” And of course the waiter was scared, I could see it and so I apologizes and said, “no, no, it’s nothing bad. The coffee is amazing and I just wanted to ask some more and learn about the story behind the beans. Where you got them from, how you think about all that.” And so the waiter said, “oh, great, yeah. I think he’d love to talk to you about that.” Disappeared for a second, came back, said, “the owner isn’t available today but the manager can talk to you.” So the manager sat down, we had a great chat about what they care about and what they look for and the origin of their coffee, how it matters to them. Everything this entrepreneur wanted to learn and in the end the manager gave us our coffee for free and told us the owner would be back in Tuesday so he’d let him know and we can come back and talk to him then. This is great, right? The entrepreneur had failed to get this conversation for weeks because he’d been trying to be too formal. He’d been putting a pitch in a meeting in front of it, just find a goof excuse to talk to people. It doesn’t need to be all formal and in a calendar.

The practical downside is that, no matter how well a chat goes, when you do this kind of impromptu conversation, no matter how well the conversation goes, it’s really difficult to transition into a sells or a product conversation, since doing so, kind of reveals that you used a bit of deception and it destroy stress. So when I open a conversation in this way, I tend to consider the chat to be a throw away, it’s a one time learning experience. I’m gonna get as much as I can. I’m gonna learn about the person’s world field. But I’m not gonna bother trying to sell to them.

You’ve go the ultimate excuse to talk to random people if you happen to be getting a PhD or you’re doing any kind of research project. You can call basically anyone and say, “hey, I’m doing my PhD research on the problems in your industry, it would be a huge help if I could ask you a couple questions for my dissertation.” Or if you’re really desperate and you don’t have a PHD, you can always be claiming to write a book and wanting to interview experts. If you do this a few times, it’s nice to actually share the research back with them, maybe they’ll be some useful best practices. But you can create these best excuses that get you to a conversation.

Rule of thumb: If it’s a topic you both care about, find an excuse to talk about it. Your idea never needs to enter the equation and you’ll both enjoy the chat.

Next strategy: Immerse yourself in where they are

When I wanted to build tools for public speakers and conference organisers, I knew a few of them. But I didn’t know any of the big names, I only knew the lower and middle tier. I didn’t know the big speakers who charge $5-50k per talk. And that was a problem since I thought they might be one of my best customer segment. So what I did is, I hit the conference circuit. I got a flight and I didn’t come home for months. I just follow the conferences around Europe. The speaker’s lounge become my personal customer conversation arena. I would sit in speaker’s lounge all day. I would volunteer to give a talk in conference. That was a benefit I was working with but I would have found other ways to get in there if I hadn’t. Maybe to be a volunteer at the conference, offer to help organize, find some excuse to get myself backstage where the speakers I wanted to talk to were. And by immersing myself in that room, I met a load of people. I was able to talk to them, “oh, how did you get this gig? What do you think about it? How do you feel about the career? Is this your full time or part time?” And having done this, I ultimately decided that this big name speakers in the big flashy conferences were not the right customer segment for me. And that was great result, even though I walked away. Not every conversation is gonna end up in someone throwing money at you. It’s just is good to find out that you’re chasing a dead-end.

Another strategy is: Landing pages, which is often talked about in the deline startup circles.

Joel Gascoigne from Buffer is famous for having done a “landing page” for his startup. They describe Buffer’s feature, it does these things, give us your email. But I chatted to Joel cause I was curious, how did you really convince yourself that this is worth doing and what he told me was that it wasn’t the wrong numbers and the analytics but each person who dropped their email, Joel quickly responded to them and he asked them, this is from memory so this is not gonna be exactly accurate but he would ask them, hey, why do you want this so much? Why are you so interested? What’s this gonna allow you to do in your job? These are great customer development questions. He’s learning a lot. When he could, if someone was really engaged, he would try to get them off of the email and onto a Skype call. And he said it was actually those conversations, these free for and one to one conversations which really convince him to move forward.

I as well am skeptical of the quantitative value of landing page metrics. You typically don’t get that much traffic, it’s just hard to tell for sure, yes or no, I’m gonna commit my future to this. But these landing pages are certainly a great way to start collecting the contact info of people who would be keen to talk about this stuff. It isolate a group of already shown themselves to care.

Paul Graham suggests that a generic launch can be a for the same purposes. Get your product out there, see who seems to like it most, and then reach out to those users for deeper learning.

This is starting to bring the customers to you instead of going to them, but still involves sending a mostly cold email. Coming up next we’ll look at a few strategies for how to run with this bringing to you principle to make your life even easier.

Bringing them to you

When you are finding ways to sneak into customer conversations, you’re always on the back foot. You made the approach, so they are suspicious and trying to figure out if you’re wasting their time and what you really want. Instead, the most sustainable, easy, most fun, the best way is to look for ways to separate ourselves from the crowd, to make ourselves a desirable person to talk to, so that the customers would like to speak to, can come find us. Beyond saving vast sums of time and frustration, bringing people to you also makes them take you more seriously and it makes them want to help you more cause you’ve already demonstrated your value. So the question becomes how can you plant a flag that your customers can see? What can you offer them that will make them want to talk to you? Here are a few ideas: Organise meetups

For only a little bit more effort than attending an event, you can organise your own event and benefit from being the centre of attention.

Let’s say you wanted to figure out the problems that human resources professionals face, HR folks. You could organize an event called “HR professionals happy hour”. Even if you don’t have a lot industry expertise, this simple fact that you are the person who organize the events, who sent the invite emails and introduced the speaker or welcomed everyone to talk to each other if there’s not a speaker, that gives you so much assumed credibility. And from then on, you’re gonna have a really easy time chatting to anyone in the room about their problems. Plus they’ll answer your emails. You’ve already given them something of value, a great event. It doesn’t have to be big. Getting 5 or 10 of the right people is enormously valuable. Don’t focus on the vanity metrics of attendee numbers.

Almost nobody has ever listened to or believed me on this particular recommendation, but it’s honestly one of the first things I would do if I was moving into a new industry or a new country. It’s the fastest and most unfair trick I’ve seen for rapid customer learning. And it also simultaneously build to a huge amount of credibility in the sale’s network. There’s just so many benefits. The fewer readers who have actually done this and sent me a note of all praises. I highly recommend organizing your own events.

Another option is: Speaking & teaching which is obviously similar but you’re letting someone else to do the organization for you.

Teaching in particular is hugely under-valued as both a customer learning and also a sells tool. Let’s say you’re making better project management software. In that case, you’ve probably got both expertise and a strongly held opinion about how project management could run better. That’s the magic combination for being an effective teacher.

You wanna spend the time to teach. You can teach at conferences, at workshops, through online videos, blogging, contact marketing, doing free one on one consulting or office hours with potential customers.

During this time you’re gonna refine your message, get in touch with a room full of potential customers who take you seriously, cause you’re getting them value and you’ll learn which parts of your offering and your process and your prescription resonate (before you’ve even built it). Then simply chat up the attendees who are most keen and transition them into being your early customers.

This is a bit off topic and I hope you’ll forgive the self-promotion but if you’re interested in learning more about how to run more and teach check out my other book, The Workshop Survival Guide about how to design and run educational workshops that work every time. That’s it, Workshopsurvival.com.

Another option is blogging in your industry. Industry blogging is really powerful and if you have a reasonably sized and relevant audience, lining up conversations is trivial. You just write a post about it and ask people to get in touch if they’re specially interested in solving the problem that you’re talking about. Of course, not everyone has a relevant audience. That’s one big reason to start blogging to your customers before you need it. Start today so that you have this asset available a month, a year, a decade from now.

Even when I still had a very small or no blog audience, I still found blogging to be helpful. When I sent cold emails, people could see from my email address, which was the same as my blog and from my footer, that I was writing stuff and the recipient of the cold emails would often checked my blog. And they would tell me that they took the meetings specifically because of what they read on my blog. So even thought google analytics was telling me that I had 5 or 10 that months, those 5 or 10 people were the 5 or 10 who I wanted to have meetings with and talk to. It was really important for cutting through the noise and getting them to take me seriously. Blogging about an industry is also a great exercise to get your thoughts in order. It makes you a better customer conversationalist and in essence makes you smarter within your industry.

A final option is to break all the rules and get clever.

I once heard a brilliant hack from a guy who wanted to sell to top-tier universities like Stanford and Harvard. But these are notoriously difficult to reach, they’re even more difficult to sell to in some cases than big enterprises. And before he could even sell to them, you needed to understand their problems, be taking seriously about the decision makers and even figure out who the decision makers were.

His solution was to organise a semi-monthly “knowledge exchange” call between the department heads of these top universities to talk about the challenges around his area of interest. Furthermore, he set up as a conference call where any other universities could dial in and listen to the best practices of the big ones.

But how did he get those first 3 big ones? Well, he called the each of them or sent them the email, he contacted them and he told them that the other 2 were already gonna be doing this knowledge share call. And asked if they would like to join the 3rd participant. Of course the each one of the 3 wanted to learn from their 2 peers, so they all agreed. And then every one else followed to learn what those big 3 wanted.

Every business is different and that particular tactic won’t necessarily work for you. Swan cake, a London startup for live music, that’s been doing brilliantly, founded by a couple of friends of mine; they got a ton of customer learning by just throwing parties for their most active and passionate users who are living in London. Those super users would come to the office, the team would mingle with them and everyone would learn something. You can use these clever hacks. There’s no reason that everything needs to go through a meeting, so try to figure out who do we need to talk to, what are we trying to learn and is there a way that we can cut straight to that without having to go through all of the admin over head.

Creating warm intros

Warm intros are the goal. The other tactics we talked about, going out to strangers or bringing strangers to you are very energy intensive whereas warm intros are sustainable, easy and completely golden. It’s so much easier to talk to someone, specially to have the open ended casual types of conversations we’re talking about if you’ve been introduced through mutual friend. It gives you a reason to be there. It gives them a reason to help you.

The world is a relatively small place, much smaller than people expect. Everyone knows someone. You just need to remember to ask.

I was talking recently to a group of graduates who needed to reach consultants, the types with the fancy suit and big office. And these entrepreneurs, they were pulling their hair out because they’ve been sending all these emails and trying to get through and no one would answer and no one would take a meeting. But this group of entrepreneurs were working in a co-worker space full of other young entrepreneurs who were also recent graduates. So when they told me their problem, I just stood on a chair and yelled, “Excuse me! Does anyone here know anyone or is friend with anyone who works at big consulting firms? A bunch of hands went up. I said, can I talk to you for a second? We’ll buy you a beer — come over here!” A bunch of people approached us, the founders bought us some beers, had a series of quick chats, and they left with a diary of intros.

This is even easier for consumer products. Not everyone knows a consultant, but everybody does know, for example, someone who’s a new mom or an amateur athlete or a theatre enthusiast. You don’t need to only go through strangers. You don’t need to do all this work yourself. The people you know, the people in the room with you right now, may well be able to make the intros you need, if you’re just willing to ask them.

Rule of thumb: Kevin Bacon’s 7 degrees of separation, the idea that through a series of connections you can reach anyone you want in the world, that apples to customer conversations. You can find whoever you need if you’re just willing to ask for it a couple times.

Industry advisors

I relied heavily on advisors as a source of introduction in my first company. I didn’t know the industry and nobody took us seriously. They didn’t want to talk to me or meet with me. One of the very best things that our investors recommended that we do was to built an advisory board and we ended up with 5 industry experts who were amazingly helpful. I met with each once per month, so I had a different meeting with a different advisor about weekly. During those meetings I would told them who I was trying to get in touch with and more often than not, they would have some way to reach the person I needed or I would even say that I’m looking for a person in these industry, doing these things. To figure out who those people were, each week I would buy all of the industry trade press. The industry magazines, the industry newspapers and I flipped through to look for PR stories about companies who were doing stuff that was relevant to us.

On a bit of a tangent, you’d be surprised by the quality of the folks you can get to join your advisory board. The first conversation with a good advisor looks similar to the first conversation with a flagship customer: you get along and are talking about a space you both care about and they’re excited about what you’re doing, it’s getting emotional. In this way, you can sometimes find killer advisors from your early customer conversations. That early evangelions, if they’re really going above and beyond, they may actually wanna be part of your company long term.

Another source of introductions, warm intros is: Universities

I’m jealous of founders who are still in universities or who are recently graduated. Professors are an absolute goldmine for intros. They get their grant funding, their research funding, from friendly high-level industry folks. And since those industry folks are investing in research through the professors, they’re kind of self-selected themselves to be excited about new projects. That’s exactly who you’re wanna be talking to if you’re trying to get to big businesses.

Professors are super easy to get in touch with if you don’t know them yet. As long as you enter the same university that they’re working at or they used to be working at or as long as you have any connection to the what so ever, you can gain introduction, you can go into their office hours. It’s so valuable. University students have so much of their finger tips to this extended network for you to their professors. You gotta make use of it, if you still have access to it. It’s just too good to pass up.

Another source of great warm intros is your investors.

Top-tier investors are awesome for B2B intros. Beyond their own rolodex and own portfolio of companies, they can usually pull off cold intros to practically anyone. Investors can also help you find better advisory board who can then make introductions and they can also help you set up your company directors who are like supper advisors. This applies more generally than investors to anyone you know who takes you seriously, who’s a big deal and who’s already bought in to your idea. Write down a list of all these people. Start thinking about what would the dream introduction be and then talk to them. You’re not necessarily gonna get it right now but you can at least learn where you need to get to for them to feel comfortable making the intro.

Another option is to cash in all of the favours that you’ve recruit all of your life to this point.

Remember all those people who brushed you off for example. Maybe an investor who you pitched and they said, “well, it sounds really interesting, keep me in the loop and let me know how I can help.” Now’s the time to call them in. Yes, they might not have actually meant it, but who cares? Worse case, you got nothing. Best case, you get a killer intro. So reply back to that ancient email, tell them you’re ready for an intro to that guy they know that they mention before. I’ll give you a template in the next chapter that you can use to write emails that are really easy for someone to use as an introduction for. It removes all the ambiguity and the fear.

You’ll get ignored a lot, but again, who cares? You aren’t trying to minimise your failure rate; you’re trying to get a few conversations going. The person you’re being introduced to won’t know the backstory anyway, so as far as they’re concerned, however the intro happens, it’s a clean start from there.

I wouldn’t make a habit of doing stuff like this since it’s a bit annoying and can burn bridges, but sometimes you’re backed into a corner and need to get started somehow, however you can manage.

So remember, reaching out through cold emails is the worst case but it works and you can hassle it if you have to. But it’s a way to get started, similarly you can plant to flag, make yourself visible and bring people to you. But in both cases the real goal is to get enough momentum and credibility going that the people you starting to talk to, will make new warm intros for you to their peers, their industry, their friends and from there it’s all easy breezy.

Asking for and framing the meeting

Sometimes a proper meeting can’t be avoided. For example, you might want the full hour or need to talk to someone who’s really senior and you don’t know them well, so a formal meeting is the only way to do it. But since you don’t necessarily have anything to sell, it’s unclear from the customer’s perspective what the purpose of the meeting even is. In those cases, it’s your job to provide the right explanation and framing to make them feel comfortable and aware of the purpose and the goals for the meeting.

If you don’t know why you’re there, it becomes a sales meeting by default, which is super bad for 3 reasons. First, once you’re in a sales context, the customer closes up about some important and sensitive topics like pricing cause they’re worried you’re gonna use it against them during negotiations. Second, attention shifts to you instead of being on them. They wanna see your product. They wanna talk about your idea. And finally, it’s going to be the worst sales meeting ever because you aren’t ready. You don’t know enough about your customers to be able to get through the sales meeting.

The symptoms of this is starting a conversation by saying:

“Um. So….” Or “How’s it going?” or getting stuck in small talks or saying, “well, I guess we should just tell each other about our history” as a defaulting to “well, I’ll guess I show you the product.” There are a lot of bad ways to frame the meeting, both when first asking for it via email and also once it actually begins.

Questions like, “Can I interview you” or “Thanks for agreeing to this interview”, it set off alarm bells that this meeting is going to be super boring. As a customer I don’t want to be interviewed; I want to talk to you, I wanna help you! I wanna talk about my problems. I wanna learn the common request or framing for feed back meeting. Can I get your opinion on what we’re doing. This sets expectations of neediness and that you want compliments or approval. It really invites these types of bad data.

But it’s not about avoiding expectations. For example no expectation at all are set by something like, “hey, do you have time for a quick coffee/lunch/chat/meeting?” They don’t know what it’s for and this suggests that you’re liable to waste their time. Think about it. A stranger approaches you or someone you’ve just been introduced to and they’re asking for a block of your time with no propose agenda? That’s gonna make you really suspicious if you’re a busy person.

So the framing format that I like and I use this both for my emails and also at the beginning of every conversation that I take, it’s got 5 elements. Let’s talk through them.

First establish that you’re an entrepreneur trying to solve some horrible problem, or to usher in a wonderful vision, or to fix stagnant industry. But don’t mention your idea, talk for a high level at this point. “Hey, I’m trying to improve education” or even, “hey, I’m trying to make it easier for busy overwhelmed teachers to create great breakthrough classroom activities.” It’s talking about your visions but it’s not necessarily pitching the idea or going into any details. Ideally you wouldn’t even tell them this cause it does introduce some biases but in reality you need to give them some reasons for why are you there or what you want and this is as close as I found to a workable compromise.

Second: you’re gonna frame the expectations by mentioning what stage you’re at and, if it’s true, that you have nothing to sell them. If you are gonna to sell them something, then obviously don’t say that.

Next stop: you’re gonna reveal weakness and you’re gonna give them a chance to feel like they can really help you by talking about the specific problems that you need insights and answers about. This will also clarify that you’re not a time waster, that you’ve done your google research, that you’ve answered the obvious questions already and that there’s something unique to this person where their particular life experiences and insight and contributions can really help you.

Next stop: you’re gonna put them on a pedestal by showing them how much they, in particular, can help.

This sometimes happens automatically as you reveal weakness cause it applies how they can help and other time you need to do it explecidly.

And the last stop, the 5th step: is to in certain terms ask them to help you.

The shorter version of this is: Vision / Framing / Weakness / Pedestal / Ask. Or mnemonic fo VFWPA, I use “Very Few Wizards Properly Ask.” Here’s what it might look like before you have a product: Hey Pete, I’m trying to make desk & office rental less of a pain for new businesses (that’s the vision). We’re just starting out and don’t have anything to sell, but we want to make sure that we’re building something that actually helps (that’s the framing, not selling, just trying to learn). But you need to say more than that cause at the moment you could be a huge time waster.

I’ve only ever come at this problem from the tenant’s side and I’m having a hard time understanding how it all works from the landlord’s perspective (this is your weakness). You’re revealing that you don’t have all of the answers, that you need help. You’ve been renting out desks for a long time, you’ve got so much expertise and you could really help me cut through the fog (that’s putting them on the pedestal). You’re amazing, you can help me so much, you in particular.

Do you have time in the next couple weeks to meet up for a chat? It would take about 15 minutes and I’m totally happy to come to you (that’s the ask, making it explicit). Sometimes the 5 parts will be combined into just one or two sentences, or they can be in a different order. You don’t have to follow this rubatom. For example, when I originally wrote it, the next email that I’m about to read to you, it sounded a little too pitchy and I was worried the recipient would delete it as sales spam. As such, I moved my admission of weakness and I tried to reveal weakness as early as possible. That’s really disarming to the recipient because sales people typically don’t do this so it shows that I’m not being salesy. So: Hey Scott, I run a startup trying to make advertising more playful and ultimately effective (that’s the vision, very short).

We’re having a ton of trouble figuring out how all the pieces of the industry fit together and where we can best fit into it (that’s the weakness). After the first line he’s thinking, “Oh, it’s a sales pitch”, but now he’s thinking like, “wait, what is this?” Like why is this guy telling me he doesn’t have all the answers. Then I immediately follow it up: You know more about this industry than anyone and could really save us from a ton of mistakes (that’s the pedestal).

We’re funded, we have venture capitol and we have a couple products out already, but this is in no way a sales meeting. I have nothing to sell you about this at this point. We’re just moving into a new area and could really use some of your expertise (so that’s the framing). Hey, this a learning thing, not a sales thing.

Can you spare a bit of time in the next week to help point us in the right direction over a coffee? (that’s the explicit ask). People like to help entrepreneurs but they also hate hate hate, wasting their time. An email like this tells them that you understand their concerns and that they’ll be able to actually help you. They want to help, you just have to give them a clear, non time wasty way to do so.

Once the meeting starts, you also have to remember to grab the reins or it’s liable degrade from there, into them drilling you under their idea then giving you their opinions, which is exactly what you don’t want. It forces you into a pitching situation and destroys your learning. To set the meeting framing and agenda, I basically repeat exactly what I said in the email and then immediately drop into the first question. If someone else has made the introduction, I like to use them as a voice of authority about why this is worth doing. For example: Hey Tim, thanks so much for taking the time. This is kind of how the meeting would begin.

As I mentioned in the email, we’re trying to make it easier for universities to spin out student businesses (that’s our vision) and we aren’t exactly sure how it all works yet (that’s the framing & the weakness).

Tom (that’s my authority who made the intro), Tom connected us because you have pretty unique insight into what’s going on behind the curtain and could really help us get pointed in the right direction (that’s the pedestal) and then we can chat from there. And then the transition into questioning, I might say something like, I was looking at your spinout portfolio and it’s pretty impressive, especially this company. Can I ask you how did they get from your classroom to where they are now? So what I’m doing here is instead of allowing the meeting to go silent where it will often degrade into a pitch, so tell me what you’re working on, so show me your product, so what are you guys thinking about? You need to push the conversation into direction you want which is to get into all of the mom test rituals, specifically examples in the past, decision making, world view, all that stuff. These conversations are easy to screw up so, you need to be the one in control. You set the agenda, you keep it on topic, and you propose next steps. Don’t be a jerk about it, but do have a plan for the meeting and be assertive about keeping it there.

Once again you can only pull this off if you’ve done a bit of preparation. You need to know your 3 learning goals. You need to have an idea of possible next steps and you need to know what kind of commitments you’re gonna ask for if the meeting goes well. That’s the sort of stuff that you do with your team each week and preparation for your customer learning. It’s worth noting that this is I deal with setting up meetings after a warm intros. So the person has already got an introduction from someone they trust and then I immediately follow it up with this sort of VFPWA (Vision / Framing / Weakness / Pedestal and Ask). It’s a super powerful combination. Cold approaches are a somewhat different beast and to be honest I have never found a magic bullet that works perfectly, however this form out works much better than what you’re probably already using.

To commute or to call

One of the solutions to the time cost of these conversations is to move them onto a web call or a phone calls. In most situations, I would avoid doing that because I don’t think the added number of conversations is worth the decreased information that you get from each one. There’s a lot of subtle signals that come across in an one on one conversation and personally I tend to lose them if I’m not able to easily see their face and body language.

More subtly, calls damage the delicate power dynamic of these conversations. When someone is having a coffee with you, there’s the potential to chat as friends. You can small talk, you can banter, you can talk about their life. You can just shoot the breeze about the industry for a bit and keep it casual. They’re enjoying it. But this is definitely not true on the phone or on the video call. In those cases people try to squeeze calls in between other activities, and they’re spending the whole time wondering how quickly they can “finish with business” and hang up so they can get onto the next task. Folks on the phone or on the web calls are super annoyed if you “just want to chat”. So you need to make the whole thing more formal to keep them on the line, which is one of the exact mistakes we’re trying to avoid!

Phone calls for this reason end up sounding more like scripted interviews than like natural conversations, because they are. It’s a constraint of the medium but it really, really, really damages your ability to get unbiases learning.

Plus, nobody becomes friends over the phone, which means you aren’t going to get the warm intros. Your future meetings are gonna be more difficult and setting up calls feels faster in the short-term, but that’s because you can’t see all the long-term time-saving and business-helping benefits of in-person one on one relationships with your customers.

That being said, sometimes you got no choice. If you are serving customers in a completely different country and if it’s viable for you to go there yourself, to start talking to them and getting to know them, then having phone calls with them is certainly better than having nothing. And as Joel’s Buffer, it can work. It’s just you’re gonna lose a lot of the subtly from the signals.

The advisory flip

In terms of mindset, customer conversations can often be very scary. People go into them, they feel like they’re on the back foot because they’re asking for a favor. This person is helping me and I have nothing to give them. Oh, it’s so awkward, I’m wasting their time. Okay, here’s a trick that’s gonna fix that: don’t go into these discussions looking for customers. It creates a needy vibe and forfeits the position of power. Instead, mentally tell yourself that what you’re doing is you’re going in, looking for industry and customer advisors. And the ones who are amazing who can really help you and who really know their stuff, you’re gonna give them part of your company. What you’re doing is trying to find those people, helpful, knowledgable and excited about your idea.

With that mindset switch, you’ll know why you’re there. And instead of it being a customer-learning-but-I-really-want-to-do-sales, and they can kind of read that, they can read the desperation, it gets wiered. Instead of that, it’s more like: hey, let-me-figure-out-how-great-you-are-by-asking-questions that are difficult and important and deep about the industry and see how much you know your stuff. It becomes much more like you’re interviewing someone to hire them and it puts you naturally in the position of power.

You don’t need to explicitly tell them that you’re looking for advisors. In fact, I wouldn’t unless you already quite like them and already to make them an offer. This is really just about tricking you minds to give you a helpful internal narrative and to mean that your default behavior is in line of what you should be doing which is not feeling needy or desperate or like you’re on the back foot but rather feeling like you’ve got something important to learn from this person and you’re gonna find it out.

How many meetings

Every meeting has an opportunity cost. When you’re traveling to that meeting, you aren’t writing code or generating leads or drinking wine.

If you’re running a sales-driven business (especially enterprise sales), the opportunity cost of early conversations is basically zero since many of the people you’re learning from are gonna turn into your sales leads. So this means you’re doubling up on learning and dealflow.

In that case, it’s probably wise to talk as many people as you possibly can because they’re gonna turn into dollars in your pocket later. There’s really no down side. If you’re talking to consumers on the other hand, it’s not quite the same because you’re not gonna reach your consumers through a direct sales process. The interviews, the conversations are purely for learning and then you’re gonna kind of throw away that group of customers and do your more scalable online marketing, whatever that is.

So there’s this decision, how many conversations is enough conversations. How much time should I spend on this? There’s a few to think about it and it is definitely not just a fix number of conversations. The UX community, they say that you should keep talking to people until you feel like you’ve heard everything before. That means the point of diminishing returns for your leaning and any further conversations aren’t gonna change your thinking or your product terribly much. So you get to the point of diminishing returns, you build your product to your business to the next stage and you go back you, you reengage to the customers and you’re hearing new stuff cause the product is in the new place. That’s one way to handle it, works totally fine.

Another way to handle it is to think of customer learning not as something you do want but rather as an ongoing process which takes a certain number of hours per week. And you’re gonna keep doing that for the entire life of your company. So for example, you might say, I’m gonna spend 4 hours per week as the CEO or as the head of products or as the head of sales or what ever you are. I’m gonna spend 4 hours per week talking to customers. Or I’m gonna spend 10 hours per week talking to customers. What ever the number is that you’re comfortable with. And that could involve going to 2 meetings with your sales person, maybe sales isn’t your main thing but you’ll tag along for 2 meetings so that counts us 2 of your hours. And then you’ll spend an hour trying to respond to people who’ve put in a support ticket or reported a bug or how to software or made a request. And you’ll try to sparkle an email conversation and then a phone conversation with them to learn more about why they wanted that feature. And that might be an hour. And then for an hour you’ll go to a meet-up once per week. And you’ll talk to as many people there as you can, who are in your customer segment. And you’ll use good mom test and the incognito conversations, not to pitch or to tell them about your business but just to learn as much as you can about them.

Boom, there’s you 4 hour investment per week in customer learning. You’ve kind of define what it is ain advance so you have an easy process. It doesn’t take a lot of mental cycles and it means that the learning are gonna be constantly coming in to your product decisions, your strategy decisions, for the life of your company, no matter what changes.

This stuff isn’t about doing thousands of meetings. It’s not about delaying your ability to progress with your product and your business. You don’t wanna slow anything down. When you do customer conversations correctly, they should make you go faster, not slower. Partly because you made them really efficient by using the rules that we’ve talked about, you’re getting good high quality data, you’re keeping it casual, you’re using incognito conversations. But they should also make you go faster because you’re learning important stuff. Remember when I told you that I built the entire analytics slash board mutelessly? That wastes 3 or 4 months from my whole team’s time. I could have saved that by asking 1 or 2 good questions.

Once you start to have these experiences yourself, you’ll see that those few hours per week are the best hours you’ve ever spend. And they actually let you program faster, rather than taking time from your programming and your product.