MBA1357 3 Big Things I Learned From Customer Interviews + Free Ride Friday

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Hey, today is Free Ride Friday so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's free ride. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to one of our courses. We're giving away Easy Course. It retails for $500 over at EasyCourse Co, but you can win it for free. All you gotta do is leave us a rating and review on itunes and you enter our weekly random draw. Just listen in on Friday to see if you won. It's that simple. It's a hard way to say thank you for showing us love on itunes. All right, let's jump into today's episode. Heyo. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, the business podcast that you need to get better as an entrepreneur. But time is of the essence. That's why we deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's episode you will learn three big things I learned doing customer Interviews. Customer interviews are so so important in your business. These are calls, video calls that you can do with your current customers to learn more about what they do, how they product, why they continue to use your product, how it can be improved, and even how do they describe your product to others. Not only do you learn a ton in these interviews about how to create a better product and service for your customers, but also you learn about their perception of your business. You learn the language, the words they use to describe your business. And even though I've learned countless valuable nuggets from my customers in this exercise, I want to highlight three big ones in today's episode. My goal is to inspire you, knowing what to look forward to. Inspire you to do these customer interviews. Can't wait to get into this one. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I have a confession to make. I had on my to do list to do my customer interviews with our users at Webinar Ninja, our software company, for a little over two months. I knew it was important, I knew I had to do it, but I kind of made a big deal out of it in my head. Like, how do I reach out to them? What's the format? What questions do I come up with? And then one day I was like, this is so important. I can't delay. I need to get down to this. And I literally just went into our user database. I sent an email to users who have been with us for six months or more and said, hey, I'm doing these customer interviews. Grab a time on my calendar. And I allotted like two weeks in my calendar for people to choose times. I'd love to do a video call with you. And that got the ball rolling. I just committed and did it. And before I know it, people were scheduling times or my calendar was getting filled up and it was all set up. Now I just created some questions to ask them. Many of the questions I mentioned at the top of the episode and I asked their permission if I can record these calls. And with those recordings, I just got them transcribed. So it's just easier to not only review later on, but when I do the interview, I don't have to take down notes. I can just focus on the conversation and try to get the best information from our customers. If you're wondering, we use Rev.com to do transcriptions from these calls and videos. It's a dollar a minute, super, super awesome service, easy to use. So I want to mention the three biggest things I learned from these interviews. The first thing I learned that was huge, and this is just an overall gut feeling I had at the end of every interview, and that's that we have lovely customers. We have great customers. The chats I had with our customers and our users at Webinar Ninja were fun and enjoyable, and it wasn't awkward. And it really made me feel like we are serving our people, the people we want to serve, the people that we resonate with, and they resonate with us. It almost felt like we were speaking to old friends, people that I never met before. But we appreciate and are into the same things like teaching and learning and helping our audience and building a business that we're proud of. This is an important thing you will learn in your experience of doing customer interviews. Why? Because you need to make sure you are serving your people. If you find that when you are doing these interviews, you're not really enjoying them, you're not liking the conversations, you don't really connect with your users, you have a bit of a problem here because hard to market. Create a product for people that you don't understand, for people that you don't connect with, that you don't resonate with, and they don't resonate with you. It's a lot easier to create a product for a community you're a part of. And I'll be honest, when we started our journey with Wiber Ninja, not all of our customers were good fit. Not all of them. We had that kind of feeling. I would say a good portion of them were not our people. But we've made a lot of effort in the last five years with our messaging, with our positioning, with our marketing, with who we tried to attract. And I feel like that's paid off for the most part. So in these interviews, you get to learn who these people are that you're building this business for, who you're serving, who you're creating a product for. And I got to tell you, these conversations not only mean so much to you, but they mean so much to them. There's a very good chance that after every call, the person on the other side, the customer, is going to tell other people about this experience. Hey, the founder of the company that I'm using for Product X or Service X actually reached out to me and we had a video call, and he asked me all these great questions, and she was very helpful, and she was kind and actually open to hearing suggestions. Talk about amazing word of mouth. All right. The second big thing that I learned through the customer interviews was that our users, our customers, really liked our product, really liked Webinar Ninja. They were happy, but they didn't Love us. A few people did. Some people were really over the moon about our product, but I would say the majority were in the category of, I like this product. I'm happy with it. It does the job. But I wouldn't say they're in love with the product. I know that for some founders, it's hard. It's hard to say this about your own business, but you have to come to terms with the truth. And the thing I learned in these interviews is that we can do a few key things, a few pivots or changes to our product experience that can make them absolutely love us. It will take them over that line. It will make them raving fans, and that's super encouraging. One of the questions I ask in the interview that really indicates this is, what. What would you do if you can no longer use our product? And a few of them said, oh, my God, that would be horrible. No, please. That would be really a big disappointment and a huge, huge, sad day for me. But some just said it would be inconvenient, but I would try to find a different provider. And that is not the answer you're looking for. The first one is what you want. You want people to say, I love you guys. I look forward to using your product. And it doesn't mean your product is flawed or there's something very bad about it. It just means that you're just a few steps away from exceptional, something that they just don't want to live without. And that's the kind of product you need to have if you want to have longevity. And that's really a great thing I learned in these interviews. All right, number three, the third thing I learned by doing these customer interviews is the key reason that they choose our product. Now, the big shocker was that they actually choose us for a much simpler reason than I thought. As the creator of your business, as the leader, you're in the weeds. You really kind of know too much about the business and the product. And you may think your customers love you because you offer features xyz and you're better than the competition in this way. And for the last 12 months, you've been really working hard on your customer service. But when I went through these customer interviews, I realized that they choose us for a much simpler reason, and that was that we're just easier to use. We're easy to use. And this is something that we know is true, that we are the easiest webinar platform to use. It's clean and simple and well thought out. And many of our Customers have used several different other platforms beforehand before joining us and said, hey, this is so much better. And we know this, but we sometimes think if we launch this next feature, this next thing, it's going to change everything. When really you just need to understand that you have to double down on your strengths. You have to double down on the reason why they choose you. It doesn't mean you don't have to innovate or improve or add those features. It just means that don't do it at the cost of being less of the reason why they chose you. It also tells me that we need to emphasize this reason in our marketing. Every time I asked a customer, how would you describe us to a friend or colleague? The first thing that came out of their mouth is, it's simple and easy to use. That question is a very good one to ask because when you ask it, they are giving the information to somebody else or saying, this is what I would say to somebody else. But really it's this is why I chose Webinar Ninja. This is why I chose this product and I want to convey that to somebody else. You should choose it because of this and it's absolute gold because they give you your market positioning. This is your positioning. This is how you differentiate yourself. This is your usp. This is why people choose you. Double, triple down on it. These customer interviews are absolutely game changing for your business. You have to do them because they get so much valuable information from your customers that you can use in not only improving your business, your product, your team, your service, but also your messaging, your marketing, how you position yourself against your competition.

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Right?

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Right.

So we shouldn't get the parachute pants. These are making a comeback, I think.

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Guys, to wrap up today's lesson, three big things I learned from these customer interviews. Number one, who our customers are and if they're aligned with our values and we resonate with each other. Number two, what are the things we can do that can take our customers from liking our product, enjoying it, being okay with it, to absolutely in love with it. And number three, the main reason why they choose your product. Understanding that and making sure it's crystal clear to you, your team, and to everybody who visits your website and interacts with your product. I highly encourage you to not delay and get your customer interviews done. It doesn't matter if you do 5, 6, 10, 20. Do a few at least and see how it feels. See what you learn after your first couple. You realize this is a lot of fun and painless and totally, totally informative. That's today's lesson. But today's episode's not over. It's Free Ride Friday. So let's see who won this week's Free ride. And the winner is. Madloska. Madloska says Daily Motivation five stars. Thank you Omar for this podcast. Whenever I feel stuck or demotivated in where to start, I listen to your podcast and get back on track. Keep up the amazing content. Thank you so much Madloska for that amazing review. You are a Free Ride Friday winner. Your mission is to email me@omar mba net so I can hook you up with the Free Ride to ezcourse. Our 30 day course on how to build your own online course retails for $500 over EasyCourse. CO. If you want to win access to Easy course, just leave us an itunes or and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Friday to see if you won. That simple our way to say thanks for showing us love on itunes. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. You can't build a great product, a great experience for your customers if you don't know who they are, if you don't know what they need. If you don't do these interviews, get somebody else to do it for you. This is imperative and a whole lot more informative and effective with connecting with your actual customers than a survey. This is a real conversation where you can learn more than just what they want to tell you. You can see how they feel. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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