Customer Discovery Interviews Development Activity PDF

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Customer Discovery Interviews Development assignment for MGT 482 with Armstrong....

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MGT 386-388-482-582

Customer Discovery Interviews Development Activity From The Real Startup Book What is it? Customer discovery interviews are conducted with potential customers to gain insight into their perspective, pain points, purchasing habits, and so forth. Interviews also generate empathy between the customer and the entrepreneur to aid the design and ideation process. The best interviews help narrow down the target market and provide a deep understanding of what causes a market need and the underlying psychology of the customer. Time Commitment and Resources Typical rounds of customer discovery interviews require at least five separate interviews with individual customers, but some entrepreneurs advocate doing as many as 100 before drawing a conclusion. The time commitment can entail as little as 15 minutes per interview for consumer products to a 2 hour conversation for B2B sales. The most significant investment of time can be in recruiting interviewees, which can again vary from a 5 minute walk to the local coffeeshop to a lengthy cold outreach program via LinkedIn Plan the Interview ● Define the learning goal for the interviews. ● Define key assumptions about the customer persona. ● Create a screener survey of simple questions that will identify if the potential interviewee ● matches our target customer persona. ● Make an interview guide. Note that it should not be a strictly followed script. If you don’t ● know where to start. Something like this: ● What's the hardest part about [problem context]? ● Can you tell me about the last time that happened? ● Why was that hard? ● What, if anything, have you done to solve that problem? ● What don't you love about the solutions you've tried? ● Prepare a handy template to put your notes in afterwards or check on the tools to record your interview (first check legal restrictions that may apply to recordings

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MGT 386-388-482-582

Learning Goals Learning goals should focus on the most important assumptions you are currently making about your intended customer base. Focus on what they are currently doing when they are in the situation you are trying to improve for them.

Examples: “I want to learn how university professors currently distribute their presentations and other classroom material with their students.” Or: “I want to learn how much time and money first time employees in San Francisco spend commuting to work.”

1. Write your learning goals here ↓ I want to learn how local restaurant owners feel about their current marketing situation in their community.

2. Talking Points What is the hardest part about marketing your business in Fairhope? Do you have a marketing budget/would you mind giving me a broad estimate of the budget? Do you think people regularly check to see if your specials have changed? Do you think you’ve captured your full market potential?

3. Conduct the interview Chive Talk’n:  Hardest Part? “I guess we’ve really only done word of mouth. We’ve grown our business like that just because it’s a small town. So I guess it would be just growing community and reaching new people moving into town.”  Budget? “No. we do lots of donations as far as gift certificates for silent auctions in the community – food, certificates, so I guess we get the word out that way.” – took a second to think about this one. I don’t think she at first wanted to say that doing donations was a form of advertising or marketing.

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MGT 386-388-482-582

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Check your specials? “Probably most people check email, which is odd. We have lots of people who follow email but not a lot who reply via social media but they do reply to email. I guess our customers are older and are more reluctant to get on facebook to check when we can send it to them in their email inbox.” Full Potential? “No, not at all. I think we definitely could grow. We plan on doing that, but I guess for us its been a slow growth which is work. We tried to slowly grow just to maintain our family and business at the same time” --hesitated before answering this question

The Mill:  Hardest Part? “I guess target marketing. Figuring out how to best use your medium or your money to reach your target market.”  Budget? “We are so new so right now we do not. We’ve just been using social media. That’s probably another issue we should worry about, you have to wonder if people are seeing it, if they’re actually seeing on their timeline or if they’re missing it because of Facebook’s algorithms.” – seemed as though she was going to try and come up with a way to pay for marketing. I am not sure if she had thought about some of these things before, because I could almost see the wheels turning in her head as she answered this question.  Check your specials? “We’re broadly trying to get people to come in. Last week we had gone through some of our ice cream. We had not advertised specials as in pricing for that, but we posted about what flavors we had available and needed to get rid of. We do plan on offering happy hour and other things like that at the bar, but ABC keeps us from advertising specific brands of beer.”  Full Potential? No I think we’ve got some room to grow for sure. I think buying the Windmill Market, it’s certainly a place people were familiar with and people were familiar with. We’ve been updating people but I still run into people who ask “where is your restaurant again?” and I’ll tell them. Windmill Market was open for a long time with the same few restaurants, so people usually know where we are, but for the most part we were a lunchtime place. Now that we’ve changed the name, have the bar and have some of the restaurants stay open until 9 every night, we have to make sure people know that so they can come in. I think people just don’t know.” – this business is a revamp of a longtime community staple, so they really are working to change the perception that business had while still trying to maintain the customers from the original restaurants.

4. Interpreting Results Are you able to listen and record data based on the following? ● Job: What activities are making the customer run into the problem? ○ Slow nights: when people don’t know what they offer, people don’t come in ● Obstacle: What is preventing the customer from solving their problem? ○ Money and time

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MGT 386-388-482-582

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Goal: If they solve their problem, then _____? ○ They will have more customers, and in turn more revenue Current solution: How are they solving their problem? ○ The are using social media Decision trigger: Were there pivotal moments where the customer made key decisions about a problem? ○ I don’t think so yet Interest trigger: Which questions did the customer express interest in? ○ The questions about how often people check their specials and about their market potential ○ They seemed to want to talk more about their interactions with current and potential customers Persons: Are there any other people involved with the problem or solution? ○ Other business partners in the restaurants Emotions: Is there anything specific that causes the customer to express different emotions? ○ Not that I have seen Measurement: How is the customer measuring the cost of their problem? ○ I am not sure if they are measuring the revenue they are potentially losing by not marketing outside of social media

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