MBA1816 What I Didn’t Know About My Customers

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Hey. Oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA show. No fluff, just the good stuff. Every single day with our 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 Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014. And in today's episode you will learn what I didn't know about my customers. We've recently been doing customer interviews. We like to do these interviews where we actually just jump on a video call with our current customers to learn more about them. The more you know about your customer, the more you're able to serve them. You'll learn what their pain points are, what they're struggling with, who their customers are, what they sell. All that kind of stuff is going to allow you to build a better product or better service. But throughout these interviews, I learned a ton. And today I want to share with you a few surprising things that I learned about my customers. That totally changes how we serve our customers, how we market, how we write our emails, what our products going to look like in the future. Now why am I sharing this? Well, because I think that it'll inspire you to do your own interviews and learn some things about your customers you just did not know. I'll also give you some tips on how to run some of these calls, these customer interviews so you can get that gold, you can get that information that's in their head that you need to know to run a better business. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business looking For.

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Just for context in today's lesson, this past April marks seven years of us running our software company, webinar Ninja. And we like to do these customer interviews at least once every every two years. But recently we've been doing them a little bit more often. And the reason why we did it recently is because we felt in the seven years, there's a good chance the customers that we started with are not the same as the customers we serve today. This is especially true because of COVID 19. A lot of people came to our platforms from different marketplaces, from different industries, and even moved over from other products. So it's important for us to get reacquainted with who we serve. Now, I'm the kind of person that needs to know why I'm doing something before I do it. So why do we do this? Well, I'm going to take this information that I learn and I'm going to apply it to my marketing, my sales, and if there's some really significant information, I will maybe even change my product or what it's going to be in the future. Because I learned something that's so insightful that, hey, my customers actually really need this. So I want to start with one of the biggest things I learned about my customers. That was shocking, but at the same time makes sense now that I know it. 95% of everybody we spoke to delivers some sort of teaching, coaching course content as their product. That means they're professional teachers. Like they teach whatever it is in their small business, whether it's how to launch a podcast, how to balance your budget, how to shop for a new car, how to understand data science. They're in the creator's market where they create great content and sell it to in live course form or recorded course form or coaching, you name it. Now, why was this surprising to me? Well, because I thought a bigger size of our customer base were SMBs or software companies that are demoing the product and selling it on webinars now, the reason why I had that understanding, or thought that was true, was because those types of clients I would deal with personally as a CEO. But of course, the vast majority of the people that sign up for Webinar Ninja and use our product are not that. And in fact, those types of companies, of small businesses or even larger businesses, getting them to commit and buy our software is a long process. They want several calls. They have a million questions. They want to have something customized for them. There's a lot of stakeholders, a lot of decision makers. And guess what? That customer, their value, in terms of customer value, how much money the company makes from that customer is the same as that solopreneur that's selling their courses and coaching online. So from a company point of view, it actually makes more sense for us to go after the solopreneurs, the teachers, the educators, the trainers. They're very light touch, and the product actually is exactly what they want. They don't want anything to change. In fact, they're surprised about half the features or even available. Like, they're constantly being delighted. And as a CEO, I was thinking, oh, we need to go into bigger businesses. We need to try to get more of that market, when really the people that love our product are actually the opposite. So it was a huge finding for me. And the reason why it makes so much sense now that I know it is because I'm a former educator. My co founder, Nicole, is a former educator. We both were teachers in the classroom for 13 years plus. So of course, we built a software that is teacher first. That's great for people that teach for a living. Our backstory, our background is appealing to that audience. So we resonate with those customers, and they become lifelong customers, customers that really love our product and are happy to pay us. So I learned a big lesson. Which group of customers we should be doubling and tripling down on in terms of going after and getting more of them? Huge takeaway, right? The second big thing I learned was how many features my product offers my customers have no idea about. For example, in this interview, we're asking them, hey, is there any feedback you want to give us? Did you have any trouble when you were using our software? And they would say something like, yeah, I'd love to do this. And we're like, well, you can actually do that. You just press this button. And they're like, oh, I didn't even know what that button did. And we hear that over and over with different features, and we realized, okay, we need to make these important features A little bit more prominent. So we started to install on screen tutorials for some of these features. We would offer some in app help videos. And what I realized is that when a customer signs up for any product or service, you need to continue to sell them. What does that mean? It means that have you ever bought something and when you bought it at the store or online, you're like, okay, I'm really happy I'm buying. This is exactly what I'm looking for. And then when you actually get the product, you start discovering all these little things about this product and you're like, wow, I didn't know it also did this. I didn't know it was this good quality. I didn't know that the color looked so nice. Whatever it is, you want to continue to sell them on your product and give them value after they actually pay you. So this is what we learned is like, hey, we got to continue to show off the product because we can't show every little feature on our sales page. We can't show every little feature when we do webinars or shoot a video or on social media. Once they actually buy, this is where our job is to really give them a tour, really show them around. The challenge is not making it overwhelming, only showing things when they need it, but huge takeaway about some of the things that they don't know we have, or worse, they think we don't have it right. So it's really, really important because you are working hard on improving your product, and sometimes when you're making a lot of improvements, you forget to tell people about it. The next thing I learned about my customers that I didn't know is what they love about my product. We often do not hear about what people love. Most of us only hear complaints, whether it's in support tickets, whether it's bugs, whether it's issues, whether it's a bad experience. The people that complain are the loudest. So you might feel like, oh, man, my business, my product, my service lacks all these things. I need to fix so many things. I feel overwhelmed. The problem here is that you don't really have a balanced point of view. You don't know what you're doing well, so you can focus on doubling down. A lot of us will do good things for our customers, and then we'll stop doing them because we're unaware that they like them. So knowing what you're doing well is just as important, if not more important than knowing what you're not doing well. Sometimes if you just focus on your strength and triple down and say, we do this amazingly well. These other things not so. People are happy with that. They're like, okay, fine, I'm buying you for these reasons. So it's good to hear from your customers in these interviews what they love about the product. And those things will be surprising to you. They were surprising to me and not surprising because it's like, oh, I don't know, my product is good. But you would think other things are your strengths or the things that stand out. For example, I thought our number one thing that people would say is that we're easy to use, which is true. But actually people really like it because it's reliable or in our customer's voice. They say it works every time. We have a feature in webinar that allows you to charge for your webinars and that came up over and over. I love the fact that you have that. And it's one of these little features that we don't really promote that much. We don't talk about. And I thought, you know what, I should shoot a video. I should do something on social that really just highlights that. Run some ads against that. Because our current customers love it. Another thing that we learned through these customer interviews is what annoys our customers. Not necessarily about our product, but just what annoys them in general about their life or their business. This is something that required us to dig a little deeper and ask follow up questions, learn a little bit more about their workflows and how do they actually build their products or services or how do they serve their customers? What are the tools they're using? Through these questions and through some follow up questions, we start to realize, oh, this is a real pain point for people. Oh, this is something that is really bothering them. The reason why this is important is because. Because it gives you great information on how you can further support your customers. Now, you can't solve all their problems, but maybe you can help in some way. Maybe you can write a guest post on how to make that particular problem easier on them. Maybe you can invite an expert to do some sort of interview or a live webinar to address this issue. For example, our customers are not afraid to be on camera. They're not worried about creating the actual webinar in the software. They're totally fine with actually running the real webinar. Those parts are all easy. The thing that takes most of their time is putting the content together, putting the slides together. This is a thing that they wish was faster. Now I can't build everybody's slide Deck, I can't put their presentation together. I don't know their area of expertise, but I can speed things up by giving them a template, by giving them some best practices. And in fact, we're teaming up with the team at Canva to create our own webinar templates inside of Canva. So you can have the slide presentation for your webinar right inside your Canva account. And all you do is just adjust your branding colors and pop in your content. It doesn't solve the whole problem, but it makes it easier and your customers will appreciate you for at least trying and getting them halfway there. Now, of course, if you create something that you could sell or you can incorporate in your existing product, that's even better.

Oh, could this vintage store be any cuter? Right?

And the best part, they accept Discover. Except Discover in a little place like this. I don't think so, Jennifer.

Oh, yeah, huh?

Discover's accepted where I like to shop.

Come on, baby, get with the times.

Right? So we shouldn't get the parachute pants. These are making a comeback, I think. Discover is accepted at 99 of places.

That take credit cards nationwide.

Based on the February 2025 Nielsen report. To wrap up today's episode, customer interviews are a must. You gotta do them. You learn so much. They're gonna help you sell better, market better, get the right clients, build a better product. Now, a few tips on these interviews. I highly recommend you do them on a video call. Why? Because you wanna be able to see their facial expressions, their hesitations, all that kind of stuff. Second reason is that you're going to transcribe it. So make sure you record this video call. You want to be able to have an archive of all these customer interviews to refer to and share with the rest of your team now or in the future. And of course, at the top of the call, you could say, hey, do you mind if I record this call? This is going to be for internal purposes only. Our team is going to be watching this. This won't be shared publicly without your permission. And the vast majority, in fact, all of our customers that we spoke to said yes. Next, you're going to transcribe this call so you have all the key elements, the key takeaways in text, so you can analyze the language you're using so you can use it in your marketing, you can use it in your sales conversations, you can use it on your website. A tool I highly recommend when it comes to transcribing is Spoke Spoke app. It uses their incredible AI to transcribe and it's nearly perfect. You can also do some nifty editing with the video and the text and it's pretty cool. But just for the transcription portion of it, it's worth its weight in gold. Go ahead and buy without hesitation. If you're listening to this episode recently, I think there's a lifetime deal going on right now. They have it on the banner of their website. Regardless, buy this product. It is great. It's a huge time saver. It's a huge money saver too, because if you got it transcribed professionally, it's going to cost you a dollar a minute. So just get it done with spoke. So the next step is, once you've done all your interviews, you want to do a summary, maybe a one or two page summary so that you can share it with your team. What are your biggest takeaways? Your biggest insights? The things that we can improve, things we can do better, things that we can continue to do that we're doing great and maybe even a little. A few quotes from each interview that kind of sums up what that customer thinks, what that customer feels about your product. That wraps up today's lesson. I hope you found it useful. If you did, let us know in an Apple Podcast rating and review. We read every single review. And in fact, we read out a review every Friday we call Free Ride Friday. So if you want to win a free ride to one of our programs that can cost up to $500 and you want free access, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter a weekly random draw. Listen in on Friday to see you if you won. That easy. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Some people get nervous about talking to their customers. They feel like, oh, what if they complain? What if they're not happy? They get really nervous. I want to tell you that I've been doing this for over a decade and I have not once had a uncomfortable conversation. The reason why I recommend video calls is because people, when they're face to face, will be on their best behavior. They'll really be polite and if they're going to give feedback, they won't be that harsh. At the end of the day, they respect you for creating something that they bought. Okay. And the fact you're giving them the time to hear from them and improve your product or service through their feedback, they're already coming from a place of gratitude. So I really would push you to just get a few under your belt and you'll start to realize, oh, this is actually fun. In fact, Nicole, my co founder who ran the last cohort of customer interviews found it to be the most delightful thing she's done in months. So interesting, so engaging and just made her excited about the future of our company in a new way. So go ahead and get them scheduled. Do it if you have not done them already. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then.

I'll see you.

Take care.

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