Effective Research Interviews – Part 1 of 3: Planning

Conducting effective interviews, and getting the most out of them, is a skill that takes time to learn, but there are a number of best practices that will help speed up the learning curve and improve the ROI on the time you spend with customers.

This guide will help you get good at interviewing faster, with concrete advice on how to plan, execute, analyze, and report on B2B interviews.

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HOW TO PLAN YOUR RESEARCH PROJECT

Doing one-to-one interviews is a time-intensive endeavor. The best way to get value out of your time investment is with proper planning before you jump into your interviews.

This section covers how to develop your research brief outlining your project, manage logistics and recruitment for your interviews, and ensure you ask the right questions in the right way.

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STEP 1: DEVELOP A RESEARCH BRIEF

The research brief is simply a shared document that all internal stakeholders can feed into, that helps with alignment on research objectives and interview questions.

The research brief should include:

1. Background – context for the project, including who the stakeholders are, why you’re doing the research now, etc.  
2. Objectives – clear descriptions of what you are looking to achieve with the interviews. There are two tiers of objectives:
   1. Business objectives – the business impact, most often in revenue or customer growth, of a successful project (e.g. “improved sales through a higher converting sales funnel”).
   2. Research objectives – these translate and break down your business objectives into the insights you need to bring about the business objectives (e.g. for a higher converting sales funnel, you might need to understand customers’ needs, conversion factors, competitive positioning, sales process satisfaction, etc).
3. Internal hypotheses – it is very helpful to get internal assumptions about the research questions down on paper (e.g. “Ease of onboarding is a key consideration for customer adoption”; “Ease of onboarding is a competitive advantage for us”). Take special note if different stakeholders have conflicting hypotheses, as that is a gold mine for actionable insights.
4. Methodology – how you plan to achieve the research objectives. It doesn’t need to be fancy, it can just be that you’ll conduct 45m Zoom interviews with participants recruited through your sales network, that participants will receive a $250 cash compensation for their time, etc.
5. Participant profiles – define who you want to interview, and how many participants you want from each customer segment. It is important that your stakeholders have signed off on the participant profiles before you start recruiting.
6. Deliverables – expected output, like a written report with an in-person presentation to stakeholders. 
7. Timeline – project kickoff date, when you plan to start recruiting, how long the interviews should take, and when you plan to deliver the final report.
8. Interview guide – a prioritized list of the questions that you will pose to the participants (details on this below).

Even if you plan to use a research vendor for all or some of this project, you should create your own internal research brief before you engage the vendor.  A Google Doc research brief template for an internal project can be found here.  

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STEP 2: DEFINE PARTICIPANT PROFILES

Map out the participant segments you need to speak with. Work through your research objectives and consider (a) the profiles of the people who can provide insights to these questions, and (b) if you need to split them into multiple segments.

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What is the right number of participants?

You will not be able to specify exactly how many interviews you need for a research project up front; the best you can do is set a range and adjust as you go.

A market research project for a mid-sized B2B company with 3-5 different segments might need 20 and 50 interviews. Sometimes you get away with less, if you have simple objectives and just one or two segments, but it’s rare. If you end up needing 50+ interviews, the resulting volumes of data makes the project a beast to analyze, and you’re better off splitting your objectives into multiple projects.

To estimate how many interviews you will need, identify how many segments you want to gather feedback from, and multiply by ten.

Some general guidelines:

• Results from less than five interviews are likely unstable – you don’t want to report on less than five data points for a question or segment. It’s rare that five interviews are enough, but you might be okay reporting on a question after five completes if:
  • The feedback is consistent and uncomplicated.
  • The feedback aligns with prior expectations and experience (i.e. you provide external validation for internal knowledge).
  •  The research question isn’t very important.
• If you receive consistent feedback across 10 interviews, you’re probably okay –  if ten respondents from a segment say the same thing, you likely have a solid understanding of that segment’s perspective.
  • You might be unlucky and there are still major differences to be undiscovered, but that’s pretty rare. It’s more likely that any alternative views will be outliers.
  • But if there’s a lot of variability in responses from respondents in the same segment after 10 interviews, you might have two or more distinct customer segments there. Split up the segment, and go back and make sure you have at least five responses per new segment.
• Refine your segments during your research – it’s common to find that what you thought was a single customer segment consists of multiple distinct sub-segments, each with their own needs. Often these segments are based on criteria you didn’t even know about before you started your research. This might mean that your initial plan to do 20 interviews (ten per segment for two segments), will have to be revised to 30, because one of your initial segments turned into two.
• Interviews won’t give you quantitative measurements – you will never be able to report that e.g. “70% of our customers are in segment A” from interviews. Interviews allow you to identify distinct segments that you can later quantify through surveys. Continue interviewing until you stop uncovering significant new insights, not until you have a statistically significant sample.

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Knowing when to stop

Some rules of thumb for knowing when you have enough feedback from a segment:

• Does the feedback from a new interview repeat what you’ve already heard, or do you keep hearing new perspectives in each interview?
• Would you feel comfortable claiming that you know what you need to know from this segment?
• How important is this segment to you? 
• Do you feel comfortable defending the number of interviews you’ve conducted to stakeholders.

Build flexibility into your research plan, and budget for the upper range of your target. And keep in mind that almost every research project ends at a ‘good-enough’ stage – where you’d like to keep doing more interviews but time and cost means you have to stop – so don’t feel bad about ending short of your ideal.

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Logistics

Practical details around arranging participants:

• Recruiting – recruiting participants can be challenging, but fortunately, I have written a comprehensive guide on how to recruit B2B research participants here.
• Format – in the choice between in-person, video calls and phone calls, I strongly prefer video calls. There is a big benefit in seeing the respondent’s body language, and being able to show you’re paying attention non-verbally. It makes interviews go smoother, and the added personal connection makes participants open up more.
  • Provide the opportunity for participants to go off camera or to call in via phone, but make on-camera video calls the default assumption.
  • Only do in-person interviews if it’s really convenient for you, like if you’re meeting people at a conference. In-person adds some marginal value to interview quality, but it’s rarely worth the cost in additional time per interview.  
• Scheduling – once a candidate has agreed to participate, schedule the call as quickly as possible to lock them in. Use a tool like Calendly for participant ease of use, but make sure to lock the time down immediately.
• Incentives – most of the time, you want to offer incentives for participation. I have written a comprehensive guide to managing incentives here.here.

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STEP 3: DEVELOP THE INTERVIEW GUIDE

Your interview guide lets you follow a consistent path in each interview, and allows for comparison between respondents. It should mirror the research objectives, to ensure you cover all relevant topics.

Here’s a good process for developing an effective interview guide:

1. Open a new document and create headers for each subject you want to cover in the interview. These usually correspond to your research objectives, e.g. “Discovery; Evaluation; Purchase”.
2. Under each header, brainstorm what you want to know about this topic. Write down everything that comes to mind, Don’t worry about question language, just get down on paper what you want to learn. Get your stakeholders to add in what they want to learn.
3. When you have an exhaustive list of things you want to cover, allocate your time between the topics in 5m intervals. It could look like this for a 45m interview.
   1. Introduction & respondent background (5m)
   2. Discovery  (10m)
   3. Evaluation (10m)
   4. Purchase process (15m)
   5. Final questions & wrap (5m)
4. You probably have more questions than time in the interview. Go through each header, consolidate similar questions, remove low-priority questions, and highlight in bold the most important questions that should be asked each time.
5. At this stage, start writing the final language that you will use with the participants.
6. Do a pass through your business and research objectives to check that the questions cover each objective in enough detail.
7. Share the final interview guide with stakeholders for review, with focus on what’s being prioritized. If they provided input earlier in the process, they should only have minor changes.
8. An optional – but very useful – step is to share the guide with internal subject matter experts and ask for feedback.

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Best practices – question language

• Ask open-ended questions – a good question invites long-form answers. Avoid questions that lead to yes/no or single-sentence answers.
  • Don’t take this too far. Use closed-ended question to establish facts (e.g. “when did you last change cloud providers?”), and follow up with open-ended questions (e.g. “tell me why you started looking for a new cloud provider?”).
• Use short questions with simple language – avoiding jargon and complex sentences helps you both communicate better and think better about what you’re asking. Ask the shortest question you can while keeping it clear.
• Use language that invites elaboration – e.g. “what were some other reasons…” makes the presumption that there is more to share, while “were there any other reasons…” allows a respondent to shut down the conversation with a “no”.
• Stick to one topic per question – only cover a single idea per question (e.g. avoid asking “what teams were involved in the decision and who was the primary decision maker”).
• Avoid leading questions – don’t unintentionally add assumptions into your questions (e.g. “Which of our product features did you find most useful?” assumes they find any of your features useful). 
• Avoid providing answer options in the question – e.g. “Did you switch tools because of price or functionality?” or “Do you think product stability is the most important for our Q2 roadmap?”

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Best practices – question types 

• Ask about the past, not the future – you get more useful feedback on past, rather than planned, behavior.
  • For example, respondents are likely to say they plan to make a purchase in the future, but asking about what they actually purchased in the past will give you a sense of actual willingness to pay.
  • Almost always believe respondents stating they’ll stick with the status quo; discount claims about changing behavior. This holds true whether the change is good or bad for you.
• If asking about the future, focus on motivations – if you want to ask about future plans, focus on what would motivate the action (e.g. “what would be your main reasons for switching to a new cloud provider”).
• ‘Why’ is a magic phrase – following up a practical question with ‘why’ questions on motivation can unlock lots of great feedback. This is often where you uncover genuinely new insights.
• Focus questions on the respondent’s own experience – ask about topics the respondent has direct experience of, so they don’t have to filter someone’s decisions or preferences in their answer.

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Best practices – question flow

• Start with a short warmup question – I usually ask respondents to describe their role and company. Though if the responses to your warmup question are longer than a minute or two, you’ll want to tweak the question.
• Follow a logical question flow  – within each topic, try to make your questions build on each other. Go from the broad to the specific, and from the concrete to the abstract.
• Ask sensitive questions late in the interview – for B2B, this is often around price and value.
• Conclude with an open-ended catch-all question – finish with an open-ended question that asks respondents to share anything important that wasn’t covered in the interview guide.

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NEXT POSTS

The guide continues in the following posts:

• Part 2: Conducting interviews
• Part 3: Analysis & report development

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