Ask HN: How to actually “talk to your customers”?
The most precious advice as I see is to “talk to your customers”.
How do I practically turn this advice into action?
Say, I have:
- an office with a computer and internet
- a map of the town and its suburbs I located in
- search engine to my service
- some details about the domain I’d like to work for
- zero contacts
Now, how do I actually talk to my potential customers? I can knock at doors of every office I find online and with a broad smile say a pitch then attack them with my questions? I don’t think it will work as I would like it to. More likely they will think I am trying to sell some bs and thus be quite skeptical and cold to me.
Should I try to approach bosses or common workers of companies?
Should I phone them, ask for an appointment, explain my goals and if they let me in, do the talk?
What is the right approach to talk to my potential customers?
Can you please share your experience and maybe books about how to do it properly?
Thanks!
115 comments
[ 556 ms ] story [ 3123 ms ] threadIf you go to a small retail business (say a cafe) when it is not the peak hour, you might find the owner working there. It is usually not hard to get them in a conversation, many of them will talk your ear off. (Sometimes this even works for a supermarket or a large chain store.)
On that front, people usually like to be heard so if you do a lot of listening that takes the pressure off you. Often a good sales call is 90% or more listening to the customer talk.
I've gotten good prospects through LinkedIn and simlar means and have had very good luck (much better than 80%) at sending a message or email and getting an appointment for a phone call.
If I have any challenge here it is that there are people out there who really like to talk and talk and you can easily wind up having an absurd number of calls over a long period of time and get no sales. However, almost always in B2B sales you will need to make several calls over a period of 2-3 months. Big companies lke IBM can tolerate a sales process that runs longer that, but you can't.
Who does the talker know? Introductions and referrals are often worth some chatter.
Early on you are doing business development, which involves developing product-market fit and figuring out how you sell your product.
Later on you get into straight sales, where you have a playbook that you can give new salespeople that has a proven strategy for selling your offering. At this point you are interested in scaling and optimization, and qualifying customers (knowing if they are real buyers) is really critical.
If you are not a natural born salesperson it is more important to get comfortable with it than it is to carefully qualify people. Later on when you find talking to people is easy but you're frustrated about wasting time, you will reach this point where qualifying people will seem really urgent.
Well said and agreed
Ok, that wasn't helpful. So let me try to break it down, without knowing anything about what you are selling.
I will assume that your service is to solve some problem in a particular business domain. From that you can decide on who would have the problem you are solving and how critical it is for them. Hair on fire is good. Nicer typography on the menu - meh. Nevertheless, you can sketch your ideal customer. Potentially only a very small proportion of your town's business population is a possible prospect. Once you have identified the businesses, you could look at who in those businesses would be most motivated to do something about getting you to solve the problem(s) you have identified and are capable of solving.
Then you go an talk to the people you have identified. You listen more than you talk and refine your approach.
For a far more detailed approach you could read "Four Steps to Epiphany" by Steve Blank. Customer Development Method might be exactly what you need to help you maximise the productivity of your time when you are out of the office, talking with prospects.
If you provide some details about your business then some HNers might be able to give you specific advice.
Good Luck.
- Include an invite for a quick 10-15 minute chat in the welcome email (more people than you would think actually take up the offer)
- Ask them why they signed up (this is key to help you determine what problem people want you to solve)
- Ask them their biggest frustrations about the solution so far
And just take it from there.
Processing existing customer feedback has always been a problem even at large, established places I've worked for - chasing the new customer and adding features is always sexier than a general feeling of unease that requires a lot of prying to get to the root of.
Often in my experience most customers don't seem to know what the exact problem is, or can't put it into words, so having strategies to tease that out would also be appreciated.
If you have nothing to go off of but a rough sense of which part of their day is causing them frustration, you can ask "I heard that (process X) is hard or frustrating. Can you walk me through how that works? Where does it start?" followed by very simple questions to keep them talking - they'll get as detailed as they can for someone who appears to be in a position to help.
I might meet to chat for 10 minutes but if you told me you'd give me a $5 (or even $50) gift card in exchange for my time, I probably wouldn't.
Yes! That is exactly the point of the advice.
Go out in the field and you will learn something - because it will NOT be what you expected!
I am excited for you! Good luck!
- still at the idea stage, I began talking to people online on iOS dev forums - iphonedevsdk forum, and reddit.com/r/ios /r/iphone, etc
- I asked my friends who I knew were devs. I live in Poland, and my target audience is mostly US, so their feedback was slightly limited, but still valuable, because I could talk to them in real life
- as soon as possible I went to San Francisco, and went to any meetup I could find through my contacts, on Meetup.com, and Startup Digest
- I try to follow news as closely as possible (e.g. there is iOS dev weekly newsletter), and look for opportunities to engage in the communication. Even without mentioning the name of my project (which is AppCodes.com -- a shameless plug here :D )
- Sometimes I write to bloggers and people who write about my subjects about something I work on, to honestly gather their feedback, and of course to ask if they want to know more about my project. It's always personal.
After a few years of doing various projects, I noticed that it almost always takes around 6 months for the word to go out that I do things, and people start coming back to me by themselves ("are you still doing X?"). With time, finding connections is easier, but not faster - it always takes exactly 6 months :)
As a former indie iOS dev, ( ie. a tool for Apple Computer Inc. ), my honest feedback is- if I was ever making enough on the App Store to afford a $15 monthly subscription, I wouldn't need the help; for the most part indie iOS developers don't make jack so our #1 consideration for any product is going to be "Is it free...?"
Of course if you already figured that out; but saw that people were thinking "Why the hell am I not making any money on the App Store, maybe I need; like; SEO?" and are likely to give it a try- even if they don't like it, even if it doesn't work, you still got $15 out of that customer which is 10x what they're making on each customer who downloads their $1.99 app; so- good on you.
I realize it is a different target market but often SEO/search marketing/email/retargeting solutions can cost thousands of dollars upfront, without any guarantee of a return.
People love to talk about themselves and their businesses. You will get a ton of positive response by picking up the phone (or sending emails) saying "I'm new to this sector and I've been learning everything I can online and through books and trade magazines. But I know I would learn more by talking to someone working in the field. Could I stop by Monday morning for 15 minutes and learn about your business. I'm interested in finding out how you came to even be in this business, what parts are enjoyable, and what parts are challenging. Thank you for your consideration."
Perhaps the question you should be asking is "how can you go listen to your customers"
You provide value by meeting people's needs. So it is very valuable to learn about those needs!
Source: been there, done that.
For all of the positive examples of companies that were "built to scratch an itch", there are thousands or tens of thousands of failures where the itch turned out to be a tiny market worth nothing, or no market at all.
The itches of typical developers fail in both of these criteria; typical developers are a small niche of consumers and they can scratch their own itches, so there are many solutions and if it's still itching, then probably simple scratching won't help.
You need to find itches in other domains. It might be your own itch if you have extensive background in some specific business domain and just happen to have development skills, but for most people you'll have to go out of your way to find and understand the itches that you couldn't possibly ever have - possibly because scratching them would be so easy for you that you wouldn't notice the problem if you had it, while they have been suffering for decades.
There are probably still a lot of non-developers out there using bad software, because developers with a genuine interest in that field and the skills to make great products for them haven't showed up yet. I work for a SaaS company that found a poorly served market, and it's been like pushing on open doors: there were a whole bunch of people with the same problem, but it's not a problem that developers care about, so the most popular solution in the market before us was Excel spreadsheets.
I disagree. We know that most first time entrepreneurs will fail. Not b/c of a terrible idea but because of lack of experience. Someone's first venture should be relatively easy, not necessarily a great idea or even an idea that can raise funding. You mentioned in another comment a bill splitting app, definetly an itch, nothing unique, and in itself will never become something special. BUT the lessons you learn from building and shipping such a simple product will help you immensely in your next startup.
I've built a bill splitting app. It was stupid and I learned something, but I wish I had been smarter and built something that [might have] solved a real problem with that time instead.
Im honestly asking, i do b2b, please tell me some secrets :)
Doesn't matter that I now have a known brand behind me. Customers want the same essential thing: That you care about their success. I still answer my cell in the middle of the night during an outage because clients want to know i care and feel their pain because my company is impacting their ability to be successful, to pay employees, to pay bills, to feed their families.
The point is the same throughout and hits at my philosophy. I don't sell servers or hosting or support. We sell good days. We sell a developer wowing his or her boss. We sell an absence of worry that a client will be pulled away from time with their family to solve a web issue. We don't sell RAM and processors. We sell good days.
This is all spot on. The beauty of it is the real friends you make and what it is all worth.
There are calls I answered at O'dark thirty 10 years ago that are HUGE today.
People starting careers, people I helped to get there. They remember, and when I need or ask, they return consideration I gave them.
Or, I walk into a booming department, shake hands with the person building it, and we go have a lunch to chat about the early days.. They share all they are doing, and it's awesome.
When people know you know it makes sense to get there more than just do a deal, everyone values that.
I was an account manager intern at a VAR in college and was really shocked to discover this. I sold about $50k of training to a big company based on a cold call. One time a guy called looking for advice on sharing files on NT4 and ended up in a conversation about licensing -- I sold him an EA. Another time I was in a wingman role for a site visit with an account exec. On the way back, we stopped at a really large company, the account exec bullshitted his way in, and we ended up chatting with their local IT director for about an hour. We started getting RFPs a few weeks later.
There's no secret. Just treat people well, talk to them and find out what problems they have. If you can't solve them, refer them to someone who can.
Think of it this way... It can be an excuse to make a pitch, which sucks. Everyone knows the charm was just a ruse.
Or, if your team has a genuine interest in the field, that charm isn't a ruse. It's genuine and earnest interest. It's the piece that can get the real convo started.
The difference is, after a time and maybe some business done, whether real understanding and a shared, common interest in success exists.
Where it does, everyone will have improved and that network of people has value. Becomes a center of gravity, attracting others.
Where it does not, it's just a deal, and maybe it was worth it, maybe not. But nobody is invested on a personal level. There is no real understanding.
With the former, it's common to check in, exchange news, share success, failure, introduce new people, etc...
With the latter, it's extremely common to only talk when needed, as it's just noise otherwise.
Truth is, for a given niche, there are always interesting people who care about it. You want to be and cone to know those people because they are where all the real action is.
Circle back to the bullshit way in.
Having the goal I put here means that conversation is extremely likely to have enough value to warrant the effort needed to start it.
He charmed his way past the various gatekeepers and got to the guy he was looking for. There was nothing deceitful about it.
Its true what the op says that there are people that naturally want to share and mentor what they do. Now that you can easily find them or that there are signs of it you can find as a stranger..
Im running a b2b business, and even though i have personal contacts in the area, im frequently stonewalled to even start a basic conversation, let alone a product sales one.
Actually, thinking about it most of the reputation we had was in speaking to smaller owner-operated businesses where the owner or self-employed associates were free to speak to us and could gauge the benefit to themselves from doing so (our interviews were often on behalf of larger companies testing the market for product ideas, so they would get the satisfaction of providing feedback and even getting advance notice of what may be on offer)
anyway, what I'm saying is.. it can be difficult and time consuming to arrange that but it is possible to get somebody else to do the drudge work.
Just start talking to people... or to the parent's point: Listen to people (and follow up!). You're looking to build relationships, not marks (I hope).
Engineering software, process, tools.
Stopping by to learn about a company, share experiences, maybe buy a lunch isn't a bad thing.
It is regional. There are parts of the nation very hostile to this. They don't even have receptionists.
For those parts, working social media, holding events, making calls works to get that appointment.
In all cases, general networking is needed. Give and get.
First you need to figure out who you want your customers to be.
If your answer is local coffee shop owners, then it's easy to make a list of customers and you can call them, email them, or visit them in person.
There are many places on the internet that give free advice on how to do cold calls, emails, visits, etc. Steli Efti writes about it a lot on the close.io blog. There are numerous questions asked and answered on quora.
Start at those two places and once you know more of the basics, you can start learning more specific skills.
But if you don't know who to talk to, then you are trying to solve two problems at the same time: who to talk to and how to talk to them.
Solve one problem first, then the other.
Once you know who to talk to, then you can start talking to them to see if they have the problem that you are trying to solve.
If the service or product you are selling doesn't solve their problem you are not going to be able to sell it to them.
It's much, much easier if you are trying to sell to a customer base (market) that you understand well or already know some problems they face.
Then you can talk to them and verify that you are correct and they have the problem that you think they have.
Great point
But on the topic of how to talk to people, I really want to recommend the book by Dale Carnegie 'How to make friends and influence people'. Ignore the corny title and read it. This book has changed how I talk to people.
The biggest takeaway for me from that book was that people love to talk about themselves. Make the conversation about them; focus on their situation instead of on your product.
You might also find the UX book "Don't make me think" generally useful. I am mentioning it because it does talk about how to get effective feedback on your website. If you are doing an online thing, you may find it very pertinent.
The advice is good but often it means talk to your users. You can use it to validate your idea, but it is helpful to validate your product.
If you are building something be damn sure it's something people want this is hard if you don't know those people
Wrote to a bunch of strangers. Made it a point to stress that I've nothing to sell (not yet at least) and just want to talk and pick brain. Promised not to take more than 15 mins and never did. Most people never replied, a handful of them did and I had lovely conversations with them. One even became a friend (I referred her to the place I work) and we still keep in touch, even though the original reason I talked to her didn't work out. When I thanked one person, she simply said "no need, just promise me you'd do the same if a stranger reaches out to you".
From my limited experience, it is more or less a numbers game, unless you are willing to spend enormous amount of time looking for that specific set of people who is the perfect fit to help you. There is no guarantee that they would though (why should they? Everyone is busy with whatever they are upto anyways)
I did the same thing but in person. Went to an airport hall where tons of people are just bored waiting. Said clearly at the beginning of the discussion that I want feedback on my project and won't ask for money or personal info.
These were the hours where I learned the most from my potential customers.
"Hello, this is cosmorocket, and I'd like to learn more about your industry. Can I stop by sometime and ask you some questions? Perhaps shadow you for a little while? I'll bring coffee and danish."
Just watch and listen. If you see them get frustrated by something, give them a moment then ask "So, what just happened?"
https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone/...
Easily the best book on how to do non-biased interviews
If you are making software for restaurants, go sit at the restaurant during peak and off hours, and be keen about what's actually going on, down to the minute detail.
If the problem you are solving is in the kitchen, see if you can offer a hand doing dishes for free and observe at a detailed level what everyone else is doing and what their problems also are.
Asking questions in survey format could potentially work, though I doubt it. It could also be high barrier if you are basically a nobody trying to talk to restaurant owners.
The worst thing that can happen is people telling you they have a problem they don't actually have, and you create an imaginary problem to solve that nobody cares about.
If you don't think there's a group of people online discussing the problem you are trying to solve, then you either haven't looked that hard, don't know the domain, or have a golden opportunity to build the community and have that be a source of leads and content. Depending on your demographic, Reddit, Facebook or forums are good places to look.
Improving here might be crucial.
Let me assume that you have a consumer product -- an app, or a piece of hardware. There are things out there that do something vaguely similar, but you think yours is better.
Go to the comments sections of various chat boards that are discussing the current way of doing things. Make note of the complaints.
Ask the people there if they will chat with you for 5-10 minutes about a product idea.
Be polite.
Fwiw, I've become mildly obsessed with this topic, and have written up a couple articles that may help:
* How to talk to customers: http://customerdevlabs.com/2013/11/05/how-i-interview-custom...
* Which customers should you talk to first: http://customerdevlabs.com/2017/03/20/who-are-early-adopters...
* How to ask for conversations: http://customerdevlabs.com/2014/02/18/how-to-send-cold-email...
The first day I was in Palo Alto (and the US), I had absolutely no contacts and was severely jet lagged. I had just moved to the US to establish my startup (https://journeyapps.com) in the US, raise "Silicon Valley VC" and chase the dream ;) tl;dr - JourneyApps is a platform for businesses to quickly developer mobile apps for internal use.
I walked down University Avenue, and spotted Palo Alto bicycles. I walked in (very nervous) and asked one of the sales people if the manager is in. Jeff (the manager), was there and asked what I wanted. I explained I'd just moved here, and was working on a startup that eliminates paper forms.
He was kind enough to not kick me out, and (because it was closing time), spent some time talking to me about how they sell bicycles and which paper forms he uses. He also explained how much of a pain it is.
I kept delving into the details of his business, which he absolutely loves, so he was keen to keep talking. After forming a good idea of what his world looks like, I asked if he'd be keen to do an experiment with us. We'd make an app that does bicycle sales on a tablet, and bring it to him in a day or two. The experiment would be free, he just needs to tell us what works and what doesn't.
He was really keen, and gave me copies of the forms he uses. Overnight we built an app on our platform that acts like his paper forms. The next day we rolled out in his store, and waited for bicycle sales.
The app worked, and we learnt a heck of a lot about US business culture, even though it was just a "small family owned" bicycle store.
Eventually we raised the mythical Silicon Valley VC money and got our first Fortune 100 customers, but the process stayed remarkably similar:
1) Find someone who's passionate about their business
2) Talk to them with genuine interest and learn about their world
3) Be upfront and open about which problems you think you can help with, and which not
4) Over deliver.
I watched the Emerson video; very neat. Is JourneyApps something that I'd be able to utilize as a third party to create solutions for clients I've had previously and future opportunities?
Or, do you work one-on-one with all of your customers and develop only in-house?
Unfortunately, it's shifted to internal use (Journey employees, and enterprise employees).
Also - Thanks!
Then I'd call them up and chat.
At first I'd setup calls only with those who responded.
Then I began calling up people even if they did not respond.
Most people are happy to talk about problems.
I see the zero customers part. I would update my content marketing game until someone called me.
Think of what you can do to support what your customers need to do rather than think of how you can get your customers to fill your pocket :)