How to Ask Questions That Uncover Your Customer’s Needs
Don’t Create Another New Product Without Getting This
When you’re in business, you need to understand your customer.
Knowing your customer is the difference between a launch that rocks or a launch that flops.
Every business decision from launching a lead generation campaign to get more prospects to creating new products should be made with your customer’s needs in mind.
But how do you find out what would-be customers (and already customers) need?
If you’ve ever tried to research “customer needs discovery” you’ve probably found a variety of lists of sales questions, but nothing that actually explains the fundamentals of how to ask great market research questions yourself.
Well, you’ve finally found the holy grail here.
There are plenty of other great dumps of all kind of sales questions, but even in a list of 500 questions you’re lucky if a handful of them are even relevant to your specific situation!
Now you’ll finally know just what information to collect in your opt-in forms.
You’ll learn how to identify what information you even need, yes how to ask the questions, but most importantly where to use these tools in your business to gather customer intel and move your business closer to your goals.
How to Know What You Need to Know Before You Even Know It
If you’ve ever set out on the task of creating a survey to find out more about your audience, then you know even figuring out where to start can be overwhelming!
I understand exactly how you feel.
Almost everyone has felt that way the first time they’ve set out to do some research on their own.
Through my marketing teaching, some of my clients have found that a simple framework helps them easily assess what unknowns you’ve got to find out to successfully create new products that really resonate with their audiences.
What’s SPIN?
It’s not just for doctors!
S-P-I-N is an acronym that comes from a critically acclaimed sales technique created by Neil Rackham.
Rackham has been a consultant to executives and board members at 40+ of the U.S. Fortune 500 companies like IBM, Xerox, AT&T, Citicorp, GE, Microsoft, and Oracle, as well as to professional services organizations such as KPMG, Booz Allen, and McKinsey & Co.
The acronym stands for:
Situation
Problem
Implication
Need/Payoff
It comes from his book SPIN Selling, so it’s designed as a sequence of steps that a salesperson should lead their questioning while having a conversation with a prospect.
It’s not just useful for face-to-face conversations though.
SPIN is also a great tool to help you organize gathering information when designing market research projects (like segmenting your email list, creating a sales inquiry page on your website, and gathering survey responses).
What Questions Should I Ask?
Now we’ll look at each of the SPIN steps in more detail and think about how you can ask questions to get information for each category to get a complete understanding of your customer’s individual situation.
Situation
Think about this part as like an inventory of what’s already going on.
It’s where you get your demographic information.
What that means depends on the business, but demographics are going to be those common characteristics that many of your customers share.
If you’re in the fitness industry, then age, gender, height, and weight might be important demographics to you.
If you’re in the professional services industry, then job title, company size, and even company revenue might be important demographics for you.
If you sell a luxury good, then household income might be an important demographic for you.
You’re also going to want to look for psychographics, or why they buy.
While demographics are usually more tangible facts, with psychographics you’re looking more to identify which personality traits, lifestyles, and goals your audience has in common.
For example, people attracted to Apple products are probably trendy, value quality over price (so maybe they use other luxury brand products too), and see themselves as creative.
I mentioned learning about what other brands they use because that can give you great insight into your audience’s psychographics. Just look at the company cultures (and audiences) of the other brands they do use.
You might consider asking them where they currently look for information about (their health, growing their business) whatever your niche is.
What shows do they watch? What podcasts do they listen to? What websites are they going on?
You can even use insight gained from the Situation questions to make your marketing plan.
Do you know which social media platforms your audience actually uses? Is Twitter or Facebook more popular with them?
You might have a presence on all of these platforms, and maybe you spend the most time on Facebook because you understand it the best but your audience actually prefers something else.
Maybe you’ve been thinking about starting a podcast but your audience doesn’t actually listen to podcasts, but they do spend a lot of time on YouTube — you might want to focus your attention there instead.
And finally, in assessing the current Situation you should most definitely ask about their goals related to the problem you’re solving.
Problem
When someone is talking about their desire to drop some weight, or grow their business — there’s some reason it’s still something they want and not something they have.
So someone wants to drop some weight…
First of all, what is some? 15lbs? 60lbs? More than 100lbs?
Do they have any medical conditions?
What does their diet look like?
What does their typical week’s activity look like?
WhatEVER it is you do if it’s help people get their finances together, help people get organized, help people become healthy, get more leads for their business you know that all situations are unique.
Some people might be disorganized because they’ve got 3 young kids at home, another might be a hoarder.
One person in debt might have had a string of bad luck, and one might have a problem making impulsive purchases.
There are some situations that you’re best able to handle, so you’re going to be asking questions to survey the landscape of their problem to see whether it’s your specialty, something you can even handle, or something outside of your wheelhouse.
You might want to ask them what kickstarted their search for information about (losing weight, hiring marketing services) your industry.
How long have they been trying to overcome this?
What else have they tried to solve their problem? How did that work?
Implication
Now you’re going to twist the knife.
What would happen if you couldn’t reach your goals? (Really, you should ask that.)
What did the doctor say could happen to you down the road if you don’t drop that extra weight?
Do you ever worry about being around for your kids as they grow up?
If you were having an in-person conversation, or doing something like using SPIN as a structure to write a sales message (also not a bad idea, instead of asking questions about the SPIN sections you would describe a story of a situation, illustrate a problem your customers face, quantify how they’re losing because of their problem, and then end with how you can help them reach their goals) you could even take the time to show them how much they’re losing because of their problem.
For example, what if you’re selling a software that would help a business owner’s employees do administrative tasks 45% faster.
If you figure out a couple of things like how many full-time employees are in administrative roles, how long they spend on these kinds of tasks, what their hourly wage is then it’s only a matter of simple algebra to explain how many dollars of labor hours she’d save by using your software.
Needs/Payoff Questions
In this step you’re looking to ask questions about how solving their problem would feel for your audience.
If you were able to create a side income stream that gave you an extra $2,000 per month, what would what allow you to do?
How would you feel when you’re finally able to get to your goal weight?
How else do you think giving your employees 45% more time in their week would affect your business?
The reason why you’re asking these questions is to help you uncover their deeper motivations for wanting to engage with changing their situation so that you can use these angles when creating marketing, generating leads, and interacting with future prospects.
You can use SPIN as a guide to make sure that you include questions that help you gather all of the information on your customers you need like who they are, why they want to buy, what they’re struggling with, what their unique situation is, and their hopes of what overcoming their setback will feel like.
When you use SPIN this way it’s a feedback system that allows you to constantly learn about your customer and integrate what you’ve learned right back into the beginning of the process through your marketing and business decisions.
How Can You Use This in Your Business?
Create Surveys, Distribute Them on Autopilot
When you’re setting out to create a customer avatar or learn about your audience it can be really overwhelming to think about what to ask.
How should you ask your questions, about what, what’s even relevant?
By keeping the SPIN framework in mind you should be able to create a tight list of questions that actually gives you the practical information you need to influence product creation, or create marketing that converts for you.
If you’ve been following me for any time then you know that I’m a BIG proponent of having a welcome email sequence.
Well incorporating some kind of Google Form into that to survey the attitudes of incoming members of your audience gives you a finger on the pulse of what’s going on in your audience’s mind.
You’re not going to be sending surveys to everyone all the time, but if a new topic you haven’t seen before starts popping up a few times on your incoming survey — you can be sure that older members of your audience (who you’re not actively surveying) are thinking about it too.
Make Marketing Decisions
The whole point of gathering all of this information is so you can feed it back into your marketing to make your landing pages more relevant, to prioritize where you’re spending your time better, to trim the fat of what’s not working, to understand what topics to talk about.
Optimize Opt-in Forms
Do you have a page where you collect sales inquiries?
It’s a perfect candidate to be revamped with your new understanding of SPIN.
You might be collecting incomplete information at the form submission stage and relying on later steps of your sales process (like phone calls with sales people) to fill in the gaps.
You can save money by passing on more qualified leads to your sales team by collecting complete information on prospects situation, problems, implications, and needs/pay off earlier on in your process.
When you ask for more information don’t be surprised to see your on-form conversion rates drop significantly. What you want to look for though is a higher conversion rate when your sales team tries to close as your indicator for success.
It can be scary to see that drop in conversion rate at the front of your process, but you’ll be rewarded with a more efficient sales team!
Customer market research is important for SO many reasons.
If you didn’t know where to start with market research, now you have a simple framework to help you figure out what info you need to know from your customers.
You can use your audience insights to get a better understanding of what products you could create, what benefits and goals to create marketing messaging around, where you should be spending your time to reach your tribe, what makes them tick, and where you can start looking for new prospects!