Playbook: Customer Discovery

As a founder, you spend a lot of time pitching. Customer discovery is all about taking a back seat while letting the light shine on your customer. Good customer discovery is the foundation of a good company. You will leverage what you learn in customer discovery to shape your product, your sales, and your marketing.

Whether you are doing interviews to get a better idea of your problem space or trying to identify your ICP, asking the right questions can help unlock better conversations, and a better understanding of your customers' pain points.

This playbook is a step by step guide on how to prepare and run customer discovery.

1. Set a purpose for your discovery
2. Prepare your discovery questions
3. Finding people for your discovery
4. Structure customer discovery calls
5. Follow up

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Step 1: Set a Purpose for your Discovery

Setting a purpose for your discovery is essential.

Are you looking to validate a problem? Understand a market segment? Or get feedback on product features? An aimless discovery might give you insights, but they'll be scattered and hard to action. If you’re unsure about the purpose of your discovery, ask yourself: what question do I want answered by the end of the discovery phase?

It could be as broad as 'Do people need my solution?' or as specific as 'What features are essential for my target demographic?'

“Do people need my solution?”

“What features are essential for my target demographic?”

Along with your purpose, set goals for who you want to talk to, how many people in this category, and why? In the purpose setting stage you can start with a hypothesis to help you decide who you should talk to. For example a hypothesis could be: “from my research I think B2B SaaS companies that are between $5M and $15M in ARR are underserved by Hubspot and Salesforce and would be open to a new CRM tool built specifically for them”

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Purpose

Who am I talking to?

What does success look like?

Understand how my prospects engage with their CRM today, what problems they have, and what it would take to get them to switch to a new solution.

Marketing & Sales leaders at 50 B2B SaaS companies with ARR between $5M-$15M that currently use either Hubspot or Salesforce.

We understand our customers' pain points in customer communication.

We know there is a willingness to search for and pay for a new solution.

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Step 2: Prepare your Discovery Questions

Once you have your purpose, it's time to prepare questions. Remember, the goal isn't to get a 'yes' or 'no'. It's to unearth stories, struggles, and opportunities.

Do not try to wing it with your questions. Preparation is key.

  TRY ASKING YOURSELF THESE 2 QUESTIONS:

01.

What would you like to know about your customer that would help you make better decisions in the product you are building?

02.

What assumptions do you have about your customer's pain points that you can dig into through this conversation?

Each one of the questions should lead back to your established goal. It’s hard to strike the balance between being too narrow and being too broad. If you’re too narrow in your questions, it’s easier to get skewed answers. If you’re too broad, you may not get the insight or information you really need.

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 Examples

To strike a good balance, think about your discovery questions like a funnel.

At the very beginning, we might ask some broad questions like “Tell me about some of your major goals for this quarter” or “I’m curious how your organization is thinking about xyz?” then drill down once you have more specifics.

Example: Selling CRM software

“What problems do you have with your current CRM software”

“Tell me about how you think about sales?”

“When you think about managing relationships with customers, what are some of the most important things for you and how do you currently keep track of them?”

*too broad

*too narrow

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Top 3 Tips

Ask Open-ended Questions: Start with "how", "why", or "what". For instance, 'How do you currently handle XYZ?' instead of 'Do you use software for XYZ?'

Avoid Assumptions: Don't guide their answers. Instead of 'We hear from a lot of people that XYZ is a problem, do you agree?', ask, 'How do you feel about XYZ?'

Follow-up to learn more. Don't just accept the first answer. Dive deeper with 'Can you tell me more about that?' or 'Why do you feel that way?'

01.

02.

03.

  Being prepared will enable you to be agile. Sometimes, the most valuable insights come from unexpected tangents. Remember that a discovery call should not feel like an interrogation.

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 Step 3: Finding people for your discovery

Once you set the purpose and decide on your interview questions, it’s time to find the right people to have conversations with. Make sure the people you are meeting with are people who can actually answer the questions you outlined. They should have direct exposure to the problem you are trying to learn more about, or be in your target ICP.

If you are reaching out to people cold, check out our playbook on how to write cold email here.

Other ways to reach people:

Ask people in your network if they can connect you

Reach out to associations or groups for the types of people you are trying to talk to

Attend or host events for the types of people you want to connect with.

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Step 4: How to structure customer discovery calls

A structured call respects both your time and the participant's. Start with a warm thank you, acknowledging the value of their time. Clearly state the purpose of the call and assure them that their genuine feedback, whether positive or negative, is essential.

 Suggested Structure

QUICK INTRODUCTIONS

Thank them for taking the call.

Share a little bit about your background and 1-2 sentences about what your company does. This should take no more than 2 minutes. Transition to talking about them. Your first discovery question can be “I’d love to learn more about your role and what interested you in taking the call today?”

DISCOVERY

This is the most important part of the conversation.

Here you should be asking the questions you prepared and staying attentive to where you can double-click. Keep in mind, this is not an interrogation. You should engage with each question and respond genuinely.

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 Instead of jumping into solutions, try to say things like

“Yes, we are hearing that from other customers” or

“That’s interesting.. I’m wondering if you have also experienced XYZ?”

Keep it focused on them and try to get them to expand so you can better your understanding. If it feels like conversational ping-pong that’s not it.

TELL THEM ABOUT YOUR SOLUTION AND ASK FOR A FOLLOW-UP

Now that you have a better understanding of what your customer is experiencing, you want to deliver your pitch based on what you learned from the conversation. Understanding your customer enables you to present the solution in terms that make sense to them. You can talk up certain features that matter most based on what you learned vs. trying to tell them everything about your company.

“Based on what you told me [these] are the major pain points we can solve for you and [here] is how we are going to do that.”

The goal here is to get them to understand exactly how you will help them. This might be a very narrow pitch of everything you are able to do, but that’s not the point. The point is you heard your customers' experience and now you can deliver something that is valuable. You can solve their pain.

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 5 MIN NEXT STEPS AND WRAP UP

Depending on the purpose of your discovery call the next steps might look a little different. Always have the next steps before getting on the call.

 Example: Customer discovery

to help you understand your

problem area

“We are working on building a solution for what we discussed here today, woulditbeokwithyouifI kept you up to date on what we are working on and got your feedback on a couple more things?”

 Example: Discovery for a

potential sale

Before you get off the call, have an idea of what comes next.

Is it a demo?

Do they need to bring in additional team members?

Learn that and make sure it’s clear.

Make sure you leave enough time for this section. Getting an idea of a person's willingness to continue to engage will also give you insights into the depth of

the problem they are experiencing.

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 Step 5: Following up after a Discovery Call

 Thank You Note

A brief email acknowledging their contribution goes a long way in building relationships. In this note try to jot down something specific that you learned or that surprised you. Re-cap the next steps that you agreed to on the call.

 Documentation

Ideally, you should be using a recorder for all of your calls. This will be the best way for you to remember everything the customer said. You should spend time listening back on those calls to digest the information and also to improve your discovery questions or evolve them based on what you learn.

Customer discovery is an iterative process. You should be refining your questions and revisiting your purpose to iterate quickly. If you find that you have many different questions to answer I suggest filling out the template in the purpose section for each one of the questions. This will make sure you are talking to enough of the right types of people to get

the answers you need.

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