Three non-obvious customer roles to interview
As a startup striving for product market fit you will have become an expert at running customer interviews.
With your copies of The Mom Test, The Lean Start-up and The Four Steps to the Epiphany lying on your desk you have focused on ‘getting out of the office’ and learning about the world your customers live in and how you can solve a meaningful problem for them.
Most customer interviews focus on the user - the person that will actually use your tool - and the admin or champion that would bring your tool into the organisation and lead the buying process.
As you scale into the Enterprise, there are other roles that can make or break your deal, and provide feedback at renewal time on whether you are easy to do business with or a pain.
Whilst these individuals don’t drive the decision, they provide an influential thumbs up/thumbs down to initial purchases, renewals, upsells and expansions.
Legal - want to reduce risk
As a startup, especially if focused on SMB, you might have paid little attention to terms and conditions.
A templated web page.
A simple check box on the onboarding process.
An email update once a quarter with any changes.
Done.
As you start selling into the Enterprise, or outside of your domestic market, then the conversations become more real.
You need a signed contract instead of a tick box.
Your customer wants to start redlining and negotiating terms.
Your bigger customers arrive with their General Terms and Conditions and ask you to start with them.
A never ending cycle of redlined and commented Word documents consumes the time of your sales and legal teams.
This negotiating process can start to derail your forecast, and by their very nature, it is for the ‘quarter-swinging’ big deals.
When they slip you and your investors know about it.
Instead of just allowing your legal process to organically develop and become more complex, treat it like a part of your product and interview legal teams at your customers (including companies that chose not to go with you).
How do you manage your contractual process?
What systems do you use to negotiate terms?
Which terms do you have that are non-moveable?
Which terms are easily negotiable for you?
At what stage of your buying process do you start reviewing contracts?
At what level of spend do you require negotiation of a contract?
What makes a vendor easy to work with from a legal perspective?
What are your priorities when negotiating? Risk minimisation, commercial advantage?
How do you typically negotiate? Phone, redlined docs, contracting platform?
What do vendors do that causes friction in the legal process?
What is your experience of contracting with us?
Don’t try to explain away any objections, but seek to learn about the customer’s process and learn how you might be able to improve the way that you handle this process.
Accounts Payable - want to know how an invoice relates to the contract
As a startup you charge customers on a credit card, you generate an email invoice via Stripe, simple.
As you add on more products, expand into different teams, with multiple contracts on varying renewal dates things become more complicated.
Now your customer receives an invoice, which is passed onto an unlucky Accounts Payable representative who has no context of what your product does or how your “premium plus” licence is priced.
They have to try and unwind what you have in your invoice and link that to what is contracted in the pile of initial and upsell contracts you have issued.
This causes delays to your payments impacting your cashflow, but it also becomes a huge time sink for the customer facing roles - your Account Executive and CSM.
“We’ve received this invoice and can’t work it out - can you help?”
Your rep then needs to try and unravel the invoice, speaking with finance and legal to get an explanation back to the customer - because these internal teams will rarely speak to a live customer themselves.
This happens ALL THE TIME and ruins your Rep’s productivity.
Interview Accounts Payable at your customers:
Can you walk me through your internal accounts payable process?
What are the most common reasons an invoice gets delayed?
How do you work out what an invoice relates to?
Can you walk me through your PO generation and call-off process?
How do you make sure the invoice is aligned with the signed contract?
What happens when a PO has no spend left on it?
How do you handle invoices for consumption based products?
What do the best vendors do to make your accounts payable process easier?
What information do you like added to the invoices to help you?
What are the most common questions you have about an invoice?
Who do you speak to when you have questions?
What is your experience of the invoices we send?
These questions will help you get inside of the Accounts Payable world and design a better process for invoicing your customer that speeds up payment and saves time for your reps to spend on selling.
Security - want to understand risks to their business
As a start-up focused on solving a user problem, we saw there are few questions raised about terms and conditions, data processing or security by customers.
They are business users buying on a credit card for their own team’s use.
However, as you grow into the Enterprise and start providing higher levels of service including single sign on, governance. reporting and multi-country support, your customer’s IT and Security teams will start getting involved.
They need to know that you are not a security risk to their internal systems when you are ‘plugged in’.
Depending on the vertical you are selling into you might have more extreme checks to pass - regulated industries like financial services and healthcare have very stringent requirements due to the nature of the customer data they hold.
Instead of waiting to receive the ‘security questionnaire’ - a spreadsheet with 245 rows of questions that don’t really relate to a cloud service, think about getting ahead of this by providing potential clients with answers to the questions that are most commonly asked.
Set up interviews with some of your customer’s security teams:
What are the main risks you are worried about when bringing on a new platform?
How do you assess these risks?
What systems/processes do you use to assess these risks?
How have you developed your security assessment/questionnaire?
How do you alter your assessment for cloud and on-premise platforms?
Does your assessment vary depending on hosting geography of vendor?
When in your buying process do you start assessing these risks?
Are there industry standards (like Cloud Security Alliance) that shortcut your process?
How do you handle vendor’s Data Processing Amendments?
Who is involved from your team in the process?
How do you make a final decision?
What do the best vendors do to help you with this process?
Do the answers need to be in your format or do you accept vendor formats?
What was your experience of working with our team?
By designing a process that gives your customer’s security teams the answers before they knew they needed them, you can strip out weeks from your deal cycle and free up significant time for your sales teams.
Interview and iterate on non-product processes
As you scale into the enterprise, new products and new regions, don’t lose your culture of customer curiosity.
Your ability to understand your customer’s world outside of your core product and deliver a seamless, efficient process of contracting, security assessment and invoice payment all adds to the future decisions about continuing to work with you or expanding the relationship.
Imagine providing your potential customers with a buyer enablement site that provides each of these customer teams with answers to the questions they haven’t even thought of asking yet.
As customers increasingly focus on vendor consolidation and SaaS spend optimisation, you need everyone in your corner when they are asked, “What’s it like working with X?”
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