Why you need to stop pitching and listen?

Lesson Details:

This course is brought to you by Appy Pie as part of our academy series this video I’m going to talk about two important topics when it comes to customer interviews the first is the importance of listening and the second is why it's important not to pitch now I've mentioned the importance of listening many times before and at this point you're probably getting sick of me doing it but the reason why I keep bringing it up is because it's so important and it's also so hard to do well and that's because listening is something that people often take for granted but it's really a skill that can be developed and most people haven't spent a lot of time developing that skill so when you're doing these customer interviews it's important that you try to listen with a really objective mindset this means you're not placing your expectations on the interview let's say you have a certain idea and you really want your customer to like it you don't want to put those expectations on because you're gonna get biased answers so you really just want to step back and try to listen to what your customer is saying as objectively as possible another thing that you can do to take that a step further is try to really put yourself into your customers shoes and this is a test of empathy that is pretty hard to do but if you keep trying to do this you're gonna learn a lot about where your customer is coming from and this is something that you just get better at the more you practice next up is don't pitch an idea when you're talking to customers and the reason is you're gonna get biased answers and it actually a lot of people do this without even realizing it because when they think of a pitch it's standing in front of a group of people and doing an elevator pitch or a ten minute pitch about their business but actually pitching can be very different than that if you're asking a question like would you buy this product and hinting that your customer is supposed to say yes about your product you're pitching and that can actually be very harmful because you'll get resolved that aren't true so a great example of this is that would you buy this question I see a lot of people do this in customer interviews is this something that you would want would you buy this and the problem with that is people will often say that yes I would buy this but the truth is when you actually ask for money for your product they're not gonna buy it and in that sense it's a pointless question and actually beyond pointless because it's dangerous you think people are willing to buy your product or service when they're not and that can cause you to waste a lot of time building something that nobody wants and that's actually the whole entire purpose of the MVP the MVP which we'll talk about in the next section answers the question would you buy this because it actually asks our customer to give us money for our solution so we want to leave that out of the equation when we're doing our customer interviews and avoid that question at all costs and as a rule of thumb you want to ask questions about what people have done in the past or what they're doing now but you want to avoid questions that are based on the future so you don't want to ask questions about what they're gonna do in the future because the truth is most people don't know and you don't want to use answers that will mislead you to building something that nobody wants.