Ask HN: How to actually “talk to your customers”?

Cart is ahead of the horse. Getting out of the office to talk to potential customers has NOTHING to do with selling. It has to do with learning about the sector you THINK you want to be working in. In other words, you need to accept that your foundational knowledge is largely made up of information that made its way to you by going through your filter of preconceived notions and biases. My advice to my sales team (and to you) is to stop thinking about your needs (selling something, validating your product, etc.) and start thinking about discovering their needs. You do this by asking questions and listening.<p>People love to talk about themselves and their businesses. You will get a ton of positive response by picking up the phone (or sending emails) saying &quot;I&#x27;m new to this sector and I&#x27;ve been learning everything I can online and through books and trade magazines. But I know I would learn more by talking to someone working in the field. Could I stop by Monday morning for 15 minutes and learn about your business. I&#x27;m interested in finding out how you came to even be in this business, what parts are enjoyable, and what parts are challenging. Thank you for your consideration.&quot;

Here&#x27;s a specific anecdote of how I did it in Palo Alto (after just arriving in the US from South Africa):<p>The first day I was in Palo Alto (and the US), I had absolutely no contacts and was severely jet lagged. I had just moved to the US to establish my startup (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;journeyapps.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;journeyapps.com</a>) in the US, raise &quot;Silicon Valley VC&quot; and chase the dream ;) tl;dr - JourneyApps is a platform for businesses to quickly developer mobile apps for internal use.<p>I walked down University Avenue, and spotted Palo Alto bicycles. I walked in (very nervous) and asked one of the sales people if the manager is in. Jeff (the manager), was there and asked what I wanted. I explained I&#x27;d just moved here, and was working on a startup that eliminates paper forms.<p>He was kind enough to not kick me out, and (because it was closing time), spent some time talking to me about how they sell bicycles and which paper forms he uses. He also explained how much of a pain it is.<p>I kept delving into the details of his business, which he absolutely loves, so he was keen to keep talking. After forming a good idea of what his world looks like, I asked if he&#x27;d be keen to do an experiment with us. We&#x27;d make an app that does bicycle sales on a tablet, and bring it to him in a day or two. The experiment would be free, he just needs to tell us what works and what doesn&#x27;t.<p>He was really keen, and gave me copies of the forms he uses. Overnight we built an app on our platform that acts like his paper forms. The next day we rolled out in his store, and waited for bicycle sales.<p>The app worked, and we learnt a heck of a lot about US business culture, even though it was just a &quot;small family owned&quot; bicycle store.<p>Eventually we raised the mythical Silicon Valley VC money and got our first Fortune 100 customers, but the process stayed remarkably similar:<p>1) Find someone who&#x27;s passionate about their business<p>2) Talk to them with genuine interest and learn about their world<p>3) Be upfront and open about which problems you think you can help with, and which not<p>4) Over deliver.

I hear you. There&#x27;s a lot of guidance on the importance of talking to customers, but a dearth of information on how to do it.<p>Fwiw, I&#x27;ve become mildly obsessed with this topic, and have written up a couple articles that may help:<p>* How to talk to customers: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;customerdevlabs.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;11&#x2F;05&#x2F;how-i-interview-customers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;customerdevlabs.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;11&#x2F;05&#x2F;how-i-interview-custom...</a><p>* Which customers should you talk to first: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;customerdevlabs.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;03&#x2F;20&#x2F;who-are-early-adopters&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;customerdevlabs.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;03&#x2F;20&#x2F;who-are-early-adopters...</a><p>* How to ask for conversations: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;customerdevlabs.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;02&#x2F;18&#x2F;how-to-send-cold-emails&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;customerdevlabs.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;02&#x2F;18&#x2F;how-to-send-cold-email...</a>

It depends a lot on what you are selling.<p>If you go to a small retail business (say a cafe) when it is not the peak hour, you might find the owner working there. It is usually not hard to get them in a conversation, many of them will talk your ear off. (Sometimes this even works for a supermarket or a large chain store.)<p>On that front, people usually like to be heard so if you do a lot of listening that takes the pressure off you. Often a good sales call is 90% or more listening to the customer talk.<p>I&#x27;ve gotten good prospects through LinkedIn and simlar means and have had very good luck (much better than 80%) at sending a message or email and getting an appointment for a phone call.<p>If I have any challenge here it is that there are people out there who really like to talk and talk and you can easily wind up having an absurd number of calls over a long period of time and get no sales. However, almost always in B2B sales you will need to make several calls over a period of 2-3 months. Big companies lke IBM can tolerate a sales process that runs longer that, but you can&#x27;t.

For me, when I was a tool for indie iOS devs<p>- still at the idea stage, I began talking to people online on iOS dev forums - iphonedevsdk forum, and reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;ios &#x2F;r&#x2F;iphone, etc<p>- I asked my friends who I knew were devs. I live in Poland, and my target audience is mostly US, so their feedback was slightly limited, but still valuable, because I could talk to them in real life<p>- as soon as possible I went to San Francisco, and went to any meetup I could find through my contacts, on Meetup.com, and Startup Digest<p>- I try to follow news as closely as possible (e.g. there is iOS dev weekly newsletter), and look for opportunities to engage in the communication. Even without mentioning the name of my project (which is AppCodes.com -- a shameless plug here :D )<p>- Sometimes I write to bloggers and people who write about my subjects about something I work on, to honestly gather their feedback, and of course to ask if they want to know more about my project. It&#x27;s always personal.<p>After a few years of doing various projects, I noticed that it almost always takes around 6 months for the word to go out that I do things, and people start coming back to me by themselves (&quot;are you still doing X?&quot;). With time, finding connections is easier, but not faster - it always takes exactly 6 months :)

If you have no network, the first thing to do is build a network. You can do this by building something people sign up for, getting leads, by talking to your neighbors, by talking to organizations, by giving talks or by sitting out in the park with a sign that says &quot;Talk To Me About JavaScript&quot;, but you can&#x27;t build something people are going to use without knowing the people who are going to use it and the best way to find those people is by asking people you&#x27;ve already met.

Well .... it really depends on what you are selling. You said service, but doing what? In what domain?<p>Ok, that wasn&#x27;t helpful. So let me try to break it down, without knowing anything about what you are selling.<p>I will assume that your service is to solve some problem in a particular business domain. From that you can decide on who would have the problem you are solving and how critical it is for them. Hair on fire is good. Nicer typography on the menu - meh. Nevertheless, you can sketch your ideal customer. Potentially only a very small proportion of your town&#x27;s business population is a possible prospect. Once you have identified the businesses, you could look at who in those businesses would be most motivated to do something about getting you to solve the problem(s) you have identified and are capable of solving.<p>Then you go an talk to the people you have identified. You listen more than you talk and refine your approach.<p>For a far more detailed approach you could read &quot;Four Steps to Epiphany&quot; by Steve Blank. Customer Development Method might be exactly what you need to help you maximise the productivity of your time when you are out of the office, talking with prospects.<p>If you provide some details about your business then some HNers might be able to give you specific advice.<p>Good Luck.

I&#x27;m working on a consumer product. Here&#x27;s what I do.<p>- Include an invite for a quick 10-15 minute chat in the welcome email (more people than you would think actually take up the offer)<p>- Ask them why they signed up (this is key to help you determine what problem people want you to solve)<p>- Ask them their biggest frustrations about the solution so far<p>And just take it from there.

No contacts, no domain experience -&gt; you need 5-10 years to build these. Contacts+Experience are also a longer way to say &quot;business value&quot;.<p>You have two ways to build it. One is always coming from the outside, hoping for nice&#x2F;stupid people to explain it to you, hoping to get shitty contracts to make some kind of money. This way will be the slave road.<p>The alternative is becoming an excited new employee at a customer or another provider for your customers and work there for 5-10 years. You have rights (like laws working in your favour), you have regular income, you are at the table where things happen and get some tips from people who work in that area for 10+ years, and hell, you may even save a few bucks that later can be used to found a company.<p>Yes, you&#x27;ll be your bosses bitch, but only to some degree, because of laws. Customers will be much, much more cruel. If you can&#x27;t bow to a boss, you certainly won&#x27;t be able to handle customers yourself.<p>If you neither have rich parents nor business value, don&#x27;t attempt to build your own business. People just say that because they are part of the economy that makes money from the sacrifices you take on your own, or at least have rich parents themselves and therefore don&#x27;t even know that it can be a problem if one is behind rent payment and lacks $20k in funds.

It depends on your market.<p>But if you try to build a company, I assume that you want to solve a problem.<p>If you solve a B2C problem: talk to friends affected by the problem, or launch a Meetup based on this problem. You&#x27;ll get free feedbacks and people LOVE to talk about themselves.<p>If you solve a B2B problem: talk to friendly businesses affected by the problem, or go to events and conferences as a vendor with kakemonos talking about the problem you solve. If the problem you solve is really important, you&#x27;ll get plenty of people coming to your stand to talk to you.<p>Once you&#x27;ll have a few &quot;leads&quot;, you will be able to refine the market segments that are the most affected by the problem you solve. THIS is really important: for B2C, you&#x27;ll have to target this segment in your future ads, for B2B, you&#x27;ll have to target this segment in leads generation.<p>Also:<p>- &quot;Should I try to approach bosses or common workers of companies?&quot; =&gt; Talk to the guy affected by the problem you solve. It might be the CEO, or a manager, or the worker.<p>- &quot;Should I phone them, ask for an appointment, explain my goals and if they let me in, do the talk?&quot; =&gt; Yes, phone is better than cold email. But be prepared, it&#x27;s really harder than cold email.<p>- &quot;What is the right approach to talk to my potential customers?&quot; =&gt; Beginner script: Hi, my name is X, I represent Y, we solve THE_PROBLEM_YOU_SOLVE. Are you affected by this problem? Could we talk about this in person at your office?

Too early to try and sell them on anything. Call them up.<p>&quot;Hello, this is cosmorocket, and I&#x27;d like to learn more about your industry. Can I stop by sometime and ask you some questions? Perhaps shadow you for a little while? I&#x27;ll bring coffee and danish.&quot;<p>Just watch and listen. If you see them get frustrated by something, give them a moment then ask &quot;So, what just happened?&quot;

From experience, it&#x27;s much easier to recruit from a list of people who&#x27;ve already said that they&#x27;d be willing to talk to you than doing cold calls. Cold calls work, but expect a way lower response rate than if you find a way to pre-assess your customers.<p>For example, I&#x27;ve worked with clients where we would insert an NPS question at some strategic point in the digital parts of their service. Not at a point where it would be intrusive, but rather, for example, at the very end of completing a bank transfer. Make it very small: 1) The NPS 1-10 scale, 2) Field for free comments 3) Checkbox to the effect of &quot;is it OK if we contact you for more questions?&quot;<p>This serves the dual purpose of finding people who are willing to talk to you, as well as giving you an idea of what they think of your service at the current moment.<p>You can now contact the people who put less than 9 on the NPS scale to do two things: 1) find out what you can do to improve the service, and 2) take care of the complaints they might have and improve your relationship to the customer in question directly, potentially turning a negative impression into a promoter.<p>Obviously, if the product doesn&#x27;t exist yet, you will have to find a different way to reach your potential customers rather than inserting it into the existing service.

I have no suggestions where to find people to talk to (that really depends on your field).<p>But on the topic of how to talk to people, I really want to recommend the book by Dale Carnegie &#x27;How to make friends and influence people&#x27;. Ignore the corny title and read it. This book has changed how I talk to people.<p>The biggest takeaway for me from that book was that people love to talk about themselves. Make the conversation about them; focus on their situation instead of on your product.

Your problem with figuring out how to talk to customers is that you don&#x27;t know who you are trying to talk to.<p>First you need to figure out who you want your customers to be.<p>If your answer is local coffee shop owners, then it&#x27;s easy to make a list of customers and you can call them, email them, or visit them in person.<p>There are many places on the internet that give free advice on how to do cold calls, emails, visits, etc. Steli Efti writes about it a lot on the close.io blog. There are numerous questions asked and answered on quora.<p>Start at those two places and once you know more of the basics, you can start learning more specific skills.<p>But if you don&#x27;t know who to talk to, then you are trying to solve two problems at the same time: who to talk to and how to talk to them.<p>Solve one problem first, then the other.<p>Once you know who to talk to, then you can start talking to them to see if they have the problem that you are trying to solve.<p>If the service or product you are selling doesn&#x27;t solve their problem you are not going to be able to sell it to them.<p>It&#x27;s much, much easier if you are trying to sell to a customer base (market) that you understand well or already know some problems they face.<p>Then you can talk to them and verify that you are correct and they have the problem that you think they have.

Maybe I can answer the question &quot;where to find people to talk to.&quot; I&#x27;m in consumer research; here&#x27;s what&#x27;s worked for me.<p>If you need b2b: LinkedIn, conference and trade show lobbies (you don&#x27;t need a ticket to hang out in the lobby), email lists you can buy online. There are also companies that maintain lists of experts with every imaginable background you can speak to for an hourly fee; not cheap but worth it.<p>If you need consumers: survey panel companies will let you field a simple survey to people who match your criteria, who you can then recruit into a phone&#x2F;Skype call. You can also recruit people yourself through well-targeted Facebook and Twitter ads. Craigslist works well; set up a short survey to prequalify people.<p>Money is a great accelerant. You will always find people who would talk to you for free, but offering to pay them for their time and expertise makes things go a lot faster. Plus, if you are on the shy side, money changes the dynamic. You are now not asking for a favor, but are offering to engage in a business transaction.<p>Six people is often all you need to start seeing some common themes.

I&#x27;m no expert, but I&#x27;ve tried this so far and it worked a bit:<p>Wrote to a bunch of strangers. Made it a point to stress that I&#x27;ve nothing to sell (not yet at least) and just want to talk and pick brain. Promised not to take more than 15 mins and never did. Most people never replied, a handful of them did and I had lovely conversations with them. One even became a friend (I referred her to the place I work) and we still keep in touch, even though the original reason I talked to her didn&#x27;t work out. When I thanked one person, she simply said &quot;no need, just promise me you&#x27;d do the same if a stranger reaches out to you&quot;.<p>From my limited experience, it is more or less a numbers game, unless you are willing to spend enormous amount of time looking for that specific set of people who is the perfect fit to help you. There is no guarantee that they would though (why should they? Everyone is busy with whatever they are upto anyways)

You should consider your idea if you are building it for a group you literally know 0 people who are part of it.<p>The advice is good but often it means talk to your users. You can use it to validate your idea, but it is helpful to validate your product.<p>If you are building something be damn sure it&#x27;s something people want this is hard if you don&#x27;t know those people

On an earlier idea I had, I wanted to do something with tech recruiters. They were always calling me or emailing me, so I thought it would be pretty easy to talk to them since they were coming to me. I build a script that I semi memorized based off the template in the Running Lean book. I adapted it for this industry. I also have a paper form where I could fill in the answers.<p>I would schedule a phone meeting or in person meeting, and I would run through the script. After the meeting I would quickly write down all the answers off the top of my head while it was still fresh.<p>I did this for about 30 interviews, and then I created an answer matrix in a spreadsheet. My goal was to try to see if there were any common problems among the majority of people I talked to. The answer ended up being a big NO, but I did not write a single line of code in this process. It did save me a ton of pain in the long run doing this up front.

Wouldn&#x27;t even talk to them. Try to find ways to observe in a passive manner instead.<p>If you are making software for restaurants, go sit at the restaurant during peak and off hours, and be keen about what&#x27;s actually going on, down to the minute detail.<p>If the problem you are solving is in the kitchen, see if you can offer a hand doing dishes for free and observe at a detailed level what everyone else is doing and what their problems also are.<p>Asking questions in survey format could potentially work, though I doubt it. It could also be high barrier if you are basically a nobody trying to talk to restaurant owners.<p>The worst thing that can happen is people telling you they have a problem they don&#x27;t actually have, and you create an imaginary problem to solve that nobody cares about.

Highly recommend the Mom Test which is exactly about this.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone&#x2F;dp&#x2F;1492180742" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone&#x2F;...</a>

Stop thinking about selling your idea to your customers.<p>You&#x27;re talking to them in order to understand the problem that you&#x27;re trying to solve.<p>The best book on this that I&#x27;ve read is &quot;The Mom Test&quot;, well worth the price

Read the book &quot;The Mom Test&quot; -&gt; <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;momtestbook.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;momtestbook.com</a>. Even if you just read the first chapter, it&#x27;ll help you out a lot.<p>To properly talk to customers to identify if there is a need for your product&#x2F;idea requires for you to not bias them by telling them what you are working on. You should be able to talk to your mom about your idea without her ever knowing that you have an idea for a product.

Say a little more about what space you are in.<p>Let me assume that you have a consumer product -- an app, or a piece of hardware. There are things out there that do something vaguely similar, but you think yours is better.<p>Go to the comments sections of various chat boards that are discussing the current way of doing things. Make note of the complaints.<p>Ask the people there if they will chat with you for 5-10 minutes about a product idea.<p>Be polite.

I will recommend the book &quot;Wishcraft.&quot; It is not specifically about this, but has a lot of good general advice for just getting things done.<p>You might also find the UX book &quot;Don&#x27;t make me think&quot; generally useful. I am mentioning it because it does talk about how to get effective feedback on your website. If you are doing an online thing, you may find it very pertinent.

I sent 100s of LinkedIn emails saying &#x27;Im a software entrepreneur interested in learning about the problems&#x2F;challenges in your industry. Would you be open to chatting? I have nothing to sell and only want to learn.&#x27;<p>Then I&#x27;d call them up and chat.<p>At first I&#x27;d setup calls only with those who responded.<p>Then I began calling up people even if they did not respond.<p>Most people are happy to talk about problems.

This is how I did it for my first failed startup which did not go beyond the survey phase<p>1. Make a list of fb friends who would be interested, add them to a group, a secret one. 2. Try to validate the idea 3. use reddit to validate the idea 4. using HN is tricky because you can&#x27;t guarantee that the post will get attention.

Take up Uber driving and use it as an opportunity to pitch your idea&#x2F;service to riders: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14166730" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14166730</a>

Is it talk with potential customers (market research) or talk with existing customers (customer service and support)? Seems like it should be the latter. If you have no customers, then consider a new product, right?

Try not to look at your customers with as walking dollar signs :)<p>Think of what you can do to support what your customers need to do rather than think of how you can get your customers to fill your pocket :)

I answer their phone calls and have a conversation. Seriously,. Don&#x27;t over think this.<p>I see the zero customers part. I would update my content marketing game until someone called me.

What if your customers are big companies? As in fortune 500? How do you talk to them? There will probably many different people with different opinions.

&gt; some details about the domain I’d like to work for<p>Improving here might be crucial.

&gt;&gt; I don’t think it will work as I would like it to.<p>Yes! That is <i>exactly</i> the point of the advice.<p>Go out in the field and you will learn something - because it will NOT be what you expected!<p>I am excited for you! Good luck!