📄 Article
Free
Intermediate
Why we picked it When you start with no credibility in a market, customer interviews are how you borrow the insiders' knowledge, and doing them badly quietly wrecks everything downstream. Garbugli, who wrote the book on lean B2B, gives concrete tactics for getting senior people to open up and for keeping yourself from talking your way into a false answer. Read it as a practical field guide, then adapt it to your own industry.
16 Tips for Great Customer Development Interviews in B2B
From Lean Startup Circle (Medium) by Etienne Garbugli ~10 min read
- Aim for roughly 90 percent listening and 10 percent talking, and never pitch: your job is to understand the problem in their words, not sell a solution.
- Meet one on one and, if a senior contact feels intimidating, move to neutral ground like coffee to even the odds and get an honest conversation.
- Keep a consistent script so you can compare across interviews, and focus on real past behavior instead of what people say they might do.