Customer discovery is the process of talking to customers and prospects to deeply understand their activities, processes, and problems. If you understand your customers’ problems, you can provide value in the form of solutions. If you understand your customers better than anyone else, you can provide value that no one else can, thereby creating competitive distance that can be hard to close.

If your business is anything like those that I’ve seen doing customer discovery over the last 20-30 years, you’re doing it wrong.

Most organizations that are performing discovery (you ARE doing discovery, aren’t you?) conduct regular interviews with prospects and customers, which is an excellent place to start. Where they fall down is in the meetings themselves. Most interviewers will pepper the prospects with questions like:

• “What problems are you having with your procurement process?”
• “What are your pain points?”
• “What’s not working?”

These types of questions are understandable, because hey, if you want to learn about someone’s problems, you should ask them about their problems, right?

Nope.

We don’t want to directly ask customers about their problems. If we do, the critical-thinking part of their brain fires up and starts looking for problems for us. That’s NOT what we want. People generally do a poor job of identifying and describing problems, particularly their own. If you’ve ever listened to a friend complain that a coworker’s attitude toward them is ruining their week and thought, “Dude, that is not the problem you should be focusing on,” you know exactly what I mean.

It’s hard for people to understand their own problems because they are so close to them. If the issue is causing pain, it becomes even more difficult to accurately identify the source of the problem. Other, less painful obstacles may have calluses built up over them so the person may not even be aware of them.

If we’re trying to understand a customer’s problems, we have to recognize that they are not necessarily in the best position to understand them. We, however, are in an excellent position, but what we lack is context. If we could sit next to our customers throughout their day and watch them work, we could easily identify the issues that plague them.

Given that we’re limited to interviewing the prospect and not able to sit with them all day, what is the best way to get the same information? Have them tell us stories.

We don’t want customers to share their problems. We want them to tell us stories.

When we’re telling a story, we’re engaging the narrative part of our brain. We’re not breaking out the heavy equipment and trying to excavate problems, we’re simply sharing our story. Given enough detail, a customer’s story can illuminate part of their day just as if we were in the room with them. We can “watch” them work, and through this process, we can identify problems they cannot see.

When reaching out to a customer or prospect to schedule an interview, simply tell them you would like to hear stories they have to tell about their day:

Hey Shaina, I’m reaching out because I’m building invoicing software for urban veterinary offices, and I’m interested in hearing about your experiences billing customers.

This sets the expectations for the interview. We’re not asking Shaina to come up with a list of stuff that bugs her. We’re merely asking her to tell us about part of her day. We might start the interview like this:

We’re interested in learning more about your experiences billing customers, and we would love to hear your stories in as much detail as possible. When was the last time you had to bill a customer? Can you walk me through all the details of that?

Many people will try to be considerate of your time and be brief. Instead, encourage them to go into more detail with more questions: “Can you tell me more about that?”, or “I’d like to hear more about that part, can you go into more detail?”, or, when in doubt, ask “What else?”

Let the prospect speak as much as possible, and when there is silence, don’t try to fill it. Take detailed notes and continue to encourage them to go into detail. If they spend too much time in an area that clearly isn’t applicable, like complaining how Brent in Marketing is always emptying the coffee and not starting another pot, gently steer them back to to topic at hand: “Can you explain again how you access the customer’s record in your system? “

The goal is to engage the interviewee’s narrative mind. The more raw detail you can get, the better you will be able to identify important problems and develop valuable solutions.

It will be challenging at first, but stick with it. You should be talking to your prospects and customers every week, so you’ll get plenty of practice.

Now get out there and start listening to stories!