How Cybersecurity Marketers can Interview Customers for Insights

I work mainly with cybersecurity startups, which means that often the company is still trying to figure out messaging and positioning. What’s a great way to glean insights into why people have bought your product, how they found out about you, and why they love or hate it?

Ask them directly.

In this post, I’ll go over the steps that cybersecurity marketers need to take to get the most out of customer interviews.

Why should cybersecurity marketers talk to customers?

Marketers do not talk to customers as nearly as often as they should. And there are a bunch of reasons why that happens, as well as reasons why it should happen.

Maybe you’ve just joined a startup cybersecurity company, you’re new and still getting a feel for the product. It could be that you’re one of a 2 or 3-person marketing team or the marketing team is a brand new addition to the company, or not so new but historically under-resourced. Either way, there hasn’t been much time spent talking to customers.

At times, marketing never has a chance to interface with a customer at all, this occurs when there’s no official product role, or the product and marketing teams are super-siloed (don’t laugh, it can happen!).

The other scenario is that customer interviews were conducted years back, the team lost the recordings and took shoddy notes.

Maybe the “customers buy our product because X” has been an ongoing, but slowly-turning-off-tempo drumbeat through many product iterations. Maybe it’s just not true anymore, and when you deploy that messaging in your advertising, you are going to waste a lot of money.

Nailing the target audience is another success factor and alignment on this important detail is critical. Many times marketers are given marching orders to target Fortune 500 but it should be SMBs. Maybe there’s 1 Fortune 500-customer among a sea of SMBs and you want to figure out: what made this one company choose us, and can we even scale that?

Maybe nobody has any idea why people buy your products, or how they buy your products, or how you even got customers in the first place. And you need to figure it out.

Regardless of all the situations outlined above, marketing is in charge of messaging.

And when you’re forming that messaging, it does not hurt to ask the people that you will be targeting, what they think about it, and what messaging worked for them.

The Process for Cybersecurity Marketers to Interview Customers

I love talking to customers. I could talk to customers all day.

As a marketer, this should be your attitude too. In fact, it must. The customer is everything. You are nothing without them.

Therefore, I approach interviewing customers with delight! And, though you may be a little nervous at first, with some preparation, it should all go smoothly.

Step 1) Research the customer

Don’t go into interviews not knowing who you’re talking to! If the customer success team or sales set up a call, be sure to ask about the relationship history in order to get an understanding of:

• When did this customer join us?
• What experience have they had so far with our products?
• What products are they using?

And then hit the good old Google and LinkedIn for more information on the person and company specifically.

Step 2) What is the Goal of the Conversation?

Why are you talking to this customer? It’s not just to have nice chitchat, right (reserve that for sales)?

While your conversation should be chitchat-esque (as in free-flowing and casual, not an intimidating, hardcore interrogation), you’re not looking to make a new best friend here.

Define what you’re hoping to get out of this conversation. Here are some common goals:

• Determine how the customer came across your product and what made them want to purchase it
• Figure out what the buying process is for this type of customer
• See where your product fits competitively in the landscape of products in your customer’s mind
• Uncover improvements or gaps that could be made in your product
• Learn about complementary products that the customer uses that could inform future partnerships
• Get some quotes, testimonial fodder, or snips & quips that can be used as social proof

This will help inform your line of questioning.

Step 3) Compile your List of Questions

The key to writing questions is to make your questions open-ended. That will encourage conversation when asked, instead of simple yes/no’s.

I typically break down my list of questions into sections:

1. About the customer and their personal & organizational goals
2. Why the customer was compelled to purchase
3. How the process worked
4. Product-based information, including proof points from the customer

I’ve included a list of common questions I ask in the document below, which you can download.

Get the list of Cybersecurity Customer Interview Questions

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Step 4) Talk to your cybersecurity customer!

You may be nervous about this part. Customers are important, and you don’t want this experience to go sour.

To help you, remember this: this is a conversation, and you are talking to a person. Let it flow!

Below are all my tips & tricks for how cybersecurity marketers can interview cybersecurity customers.

Tips & Tricks for Interviewing Customers

Thank the customer & set the stage

Okay, you haven’t met this person before (probably). These are the 4 things I always start with:

1. Thanks – Thanks for meeting and agreeing to talk to us.
2. Recording Notice – This call will be recorded, but only for internal use. This is so that I don’t have to take handwritten notes and we can have a free-flowing conversation.
3. Casual Convo – This is meant to be a casual conversation! I’ll be asking a lot of questions, but please don’t feel like this is an interrogation!
4. Questions – Feel free to not answer anything that you don’t want to.

Let them talk

This call has a point, a direction, a North Star of course. As mentioned above, you are trying to figure something out – uncover an insight, learn their perspective, gather something that helps you put together the customer user journey.

At the same time, you don’t want to be so rigorous that you don’t let the customer talk, or you re-direct away from something that could end up as an insight or interesting thing that you wouldn’t have uncovered by ruthlessly adhering to your list of questions alone!

One thing I do in interviews is to stay silent. Humans are naturally inclined to fill the silence. It will be awkward, but if you just stay silent, you will often find that the customer will keep talking.

Another thing to do is ask for deeper answers. When I’m hoping that the customer keeps talking about a certain subject, I typically phrase follow on questions like this:

• Can you explain more about X?
• How come you X?
• So, what was your reasoning behind doing X?

Ask if there’s anyone else you should talk to

The answer might be no, and that’s fine. But if you speak to the IT Analyst, and it wasn’t like pulling teeth, they may recommend you also talk to the Manager, or a Security Engineer, or someone else.

Step 4) Save that recording!

Ahh! Don’t let it disappear into the Zoom ether! You might be looking for that interview in 7 months and realize that your Zoom cloud storage auto-deletes recordings after 6 months.

Plus, putting the recording somewhere accessible enables you to share it with others in the company who will find it useful, and future marketers on your team.

Also, I always recommend transcribing the interview as well to make it searchable and faster-to-comb-through.

Step 5) Rinse and Repeat

Talk to customers as often as you can without being annoying. Listen in when you can when Product or Sales talks to customers.

Are there Downsides to Customer Interviews?

What? How can there be downsides to interviewing customers? Beyond a situation where a customer is not willing to talk on the interview, ends up hating you, and you both get into an insult-laden screaming match, there are still some things you should keep in mind to ensure that your customer interview doesn’t negatively affect marketing.

This is Qualitative, Not Quantitative

Well, first and foremost, 2 interviews with existing customers does not a statistically relevant survey make.

You can glean insights from customer interviews, learn about the user journey, and generally get a better sense of what makes your product attractive and how to target customers, but don’t let a single interview make or break your entire marketing strategy. (That’s why you’d probably want to speak to ~10 similar customers to identify trends and patterns in that customer segment and continue speaking to customers whenever you can.)

And you could obviously still, pepper your customers with surveys to determine NPS scores.

But your customers are busy, they hate surveys, and surveys can never really get into the meat of things well anyway.

A/B test what you learn from interviews

Like I said wayyy up above, you can obviously test messaging in different ways – A/B test ad campaigns and landing page copy, track click-through rates on different messages. You should still do that with what you’ve formed/created based on your interviews with customers.

Cybersecurity Marketers Need to Talk to Their Customers

I pull a lot from my experience conducting user interviews and customer journey research in the early stage startup world for my style of interviewing cybersecurity customers.

There is very little to no downside for cybersecurity marketers to interview your customers. In fact, it’s a vital activity if you want to remain a customer-focused company.

Have any questions? Leave them in the comments below and I’ll reply or incorporate them into this post.

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