One of the most impactful parts of my work is when we speak to your customers.

This is when we stop thinking about your product, your process, your proposition, and start hearing about the customer’s world and how they perceive the problems they face and how they go about solving them.

Sadly many companies don’t spend any time doing this kind of work. Any customer interaction is based around networking events and maybe grabbing a talking head video gushing about the ‘strategic partnership’.

Here’s an approach to help you really understand your customer’s world - its called the Switch Interview, popularlised by Bob Moesta, co-author of the Jobs To Be Done framework.

I have created a template to help you formulate your own questions, but with a caveat - don’t use this template in your actual customer meetings - it will seem like an interrogation.

Instead, use it for planning and preparation so that you have the flow internalised and can dive around depending on the customer’s responses.

Grab the template

The Switch Interview

Switch interviews are a form of customer conversation that help you understand the decision-making process that a customer goes through when hiring a product or service to perform one of their jobs to be done.

If I asked you why you bought your CRM system, you might immediately answer that you needed sellers to be able to track their opportunities centrally.

But as you’d go through the switch interview we’d likely uncover the real reason. It could be related to your board meetings, challenges involved when hiring senior leaders, or planning for a fundraising event.

The switch interview is a casual conversation with no right or wrong answers. It’s about helping the customer to tell their story, and to uncover decisions and emotions that they might not have connected to the purchase.

Buying

You start off by having the customer talk about the time they actually made the purchase of the product (yours, or a competitor’s):

Were you at work or at home?
How long did you shop/click around before you made the purchase?
Who were you with when you made the purchase?
Were you on our site or a partner’s?

Passive looking

Then you take your customer back to the start

So how did this all come about?
What were you using before you bought the CRM?
Do you remember the first time you thought about buying a CRM?
What led up to that moment?
How did you handle forecasting before you bought the CRM?
Why didn’t you carry on forecasting like that?

These open-ended questions start the customer talking about their world and the thought process that’s indicated at the top of the diagram: passive looking.

“I’m not looking for a CRM at this moment, but I’m starting to realize I have things I cannot achieve without one.”

Active looking

Now we can start asking the customer about their process for starting to look for a solution to their job to be done:

When did this turn into an active search?
How did you start looking for CRMs?
Who else was involved in the search?
What alternative approaches other than CRMs did you consider?
How many different CRMs did you look at?
Why did you decide to look at the CRM you chose?
How did you find that CRM?
Which other CRMs did you look at/trial?

Buying (again)

We’ve now brought the customer back to the point of making a purchase, but now they are thinking more clearly about the real reasons they have got to this point:

How did you get to the point of deciding to buy this CRM?
Did you have specific features or objectives for this CRM?
Were there specific features or use cases that you wanted to trial?
Who else was going to be involved in the decision?
Describe the process of making the purchase?
What was your plan immediately after making the purchase?

Consuming

Now we want to learn about the customer’s experience after the purchase:

How quickly did you install the CRM?
Who else helped you with installing the CRM?
How comfortable did you feel installing the CRM?
How did you try and test out the CRM once you installed it?
How many times did you test it before its first proper use?
What help did you get from the supplier to install the CRM?
At what point did you decide you were happy to use the CRM?
Was it one thing or a combination of factors?

Satisfaction/Dissatisfaction

Finally, we can start to ask the customer about their happiness or otherwise with their new way of working:

Once you decided not to use the CRM what did you do then?
Did you go back to your original solution or choose another?
What did you do with the CRM you had purchased?
What was the process of returning it to the supplier like?
How did you share your satisfaction/dissatisfaction with others?

How many people to interview?

When selecting the customers to meet with, don’t restrict yourselves to those that chose your product. Following the same conversation flow with someone that chose to do nothing (the most common outcome), or a competitor is hugely valuable.

Bob Moesta suggests that as long as you target the right customers, once you’ve interviewed 7-10 people you’ll have learned enough.

That might be 7-10 people for a particular customer industry, a particular role, or a particular country.

The point here is that this isn’t a complex project with large overhead.

More important than the raw number of interviews is the consistency with which you continue to carry them out.

Grab the template

And if you want help leading a program like this, it is some of my favourite work.

How to run great customer interviews