In this episode of the Rivergate Marketing Podcast, Grace Clark and Georgia Whalen discuss the importance of client interviews for relationship management and business growth. They argue that in-depth interviews provide valuable insights into clients’ needs and pain points, and are more effective than surveys or questionnaires. The conversation also highlights the benefits of using a third party to conduct these interviews, as clients are more likely to be honest with an impartial party. The interviews can be tailored to the company’s goals and can also be used to ask for testimonials. The discussion concludes with examples of how these interviews have helped uncover gaps in knowledge and opened doors for further business opportunities.
Grace:
Today we’re talking about client feedback and how to get good client feedback. Why get feedback from clients? What can I do with a client interview?
Georgia:
A client interview is really invaluable to relationship management. It’s going to give you insights as to how they think you are performing for them. And if there are any types of issues, you have the opportunity to address those issues and you may not have known that you had those issues. And, it’s just a great way to really get inside the head of your client and understand what’s important to them. Our clients find this invaluable.
Grace:
Something that I think we’ve heard from clients about client interviews is, do my clients really want to do this? Do they really want to do a client interview with me and are they going to feel like I’m bothering them? Am I wasting their time?
Georgia:
I’m glad you asked that question. Grace, we find that the clients, after they’ve gone through this process of doing this deep-dive interview – on their business, their concerns, what’s on their radar – you can tell that they are just totally committed to wanting to share those things. And they actually feel like the integrator that has hired us to do this cares about what their opinion is. It’s a lot different to have someone actually reach out to you and talk through an interview than it is to get this survey and select one to five. Were you happy with them? It’s a conversation and it makes clients feel important. I just want to give you a real-life example, a real quote from a Fortune 500 senior director of engineering in charge of all engineering functions and projects for 11 plants. He closed an interview with this.
I asked at the end of the interview, is there anything else you would like to add? And he said, and this is a direct quote, “Good conversation. And I like the process. A lot of times you kind of get this piece of paper to fill out or an email or your standard survey questions, which makes it a little harder to have a discussion. So, I think a discussion like this is a good process and I applaud [integrator name] for investing in having you do this. I think they will get a big benefit out of it. And I like the idea, I might steal it.” So, that’s a raving fan of one of our integrators that we interviewed, a client of theirs. It’s an important client, who really liked the process and thought that it was a great discussion.
Grace:
That really ties into what I was going to ask you next. Our interviews really that much more valuable than a survey or a questionnaire.
Georgia:
Yes, definitely. Because it is interactive and these questions, we have a set standard list of questions that we typically like to ask, but we don’t necessarily follow that – we will go where the conversation takes us and where that client is taking us, and we can pivot based on what they want to talk about and what’s important to them. So again, it’s that relationship management and showing that you care about what is going on in their business, what their pain points are, what’s on their radar for the future, et cetera.
Grace:
If you’re going to conduct interviews, what kind of questions should you be asking your clients?
Georgia:
We like to tell them upfront when we start these interviews that we want to ask them about the integrator who has hired us, how they feel about their delivery of services, how they feel about their expertise and what they bring to the table for their company. But beyond that, we would like to get an idea of what is their role, what kind of challenges do they face on a daily basis, what keeps them up at night. We want to know about their role. We want to know about how they go about researching solutions. And then we also want to get a feel for what’s on their radar for the future. Do they care about digitalization? Are they concerned about legacy controls, upgrades? What is on their radar for the future? And a lot of them will go very deep on that and we’ll get insights as to what types of projects they’re looking at and what the future holds, which are invaluable insights for our integrators.
Grace:
Do you feel that there’s a real benefit to using a third party rather than doing the interviews yourself?
Georgia:
I actually do because you do find that people are going to be freer to speak exactly what they think in terms of what types of delivery of services and how they feel about your performance, your project management, your team, they’re going to be much more honest with a third party than they are to the face of somebody that they are working with on a regular basis. It just takes that barrier away that they can be honest.
Grace:
What can these interviews focus on? Can you incorporate these interview questions into your different business goals?
Georgia:
Actually, yes. We will customize our line of questioning depending on the goals of our clients. So, if they have a goal to understand if they’re coming out with a new service or product, potentially, is this something that is going to be of interest to their clients, to their key customers? Is this something that is going to resonate with them or are they already addressing that type of problem or that type of service in a different way so we can really find out some insights that are specific to the goals of the integrator that we’re working with.
Grace:
Since you have the client on the phone, how do you go about asking for something like a testimonial?
Georgia:
That’s an interesting question. It depends on the interview and it depends on what we’ve learned through the interviews. Sometimes we will not even ask for a testimonial if it’s quite clear to us that they’re highly sensitive or that they have not had the best experience. But if they have had a good experience with our integrator client, we will ask at the end if that’s something that they would be okay with if we formed a testimonial quote from our conversation with them and sent it over. We email them a draft of it; we make it super easy on them. We’re not asking them to take more time to write out a testimonial. We’re taking their own words from our conversation and we’re forming the testimonial for them, sending it off for approval. And usually, it’s about 50% in this industry as to whether they can approve using their name and company, which obviously, you always want to use that if you’re allowed to. But, a lot of them will say you can use that anonymously.
Grace:
Client interviews are such a good tool for integrators to take advantage of. They’ve got such great clients, such interesting clients, they do such interesting work. It’s a really great opportunity that more integrators should take advantage of just talking to their clients like this. Is there anything that you want to add to this conversation that I haven’t already asked that you think really highlights why integrators should be taking advantage of interviews?
Georgia:
I would just say that in a number of cases with these interviews, we have been able to uncover gaps in knowledge the client’s client has about the integrator and about the integrator’s capabilities. And we are able to ask them questions. ‘Well, have you talked to whatever integrator we’re working with about digitalization? Do you know that they actually do create digital twins?’
Grace:
Yes, it’s an opportunity for future work.
Georgia:
It is, absolutely.
Grace:
And relationship management, just like you said in the very beginning, that’s relationship management and developing it further.
Georgia:
I just want to give you one more example of when we were able to uncover gaps in knowledge for our client’s client. We were working with interviewing a very large company in the chemical engineering space, and our integrator only did work with certain plants in the country. We knew that they had an office where this particular company had another plant, and we knew the integrator was not, or actually we asked, ‘well, did you know they have an office in this area and why have you selected not to work with them in that area?’ And then we found out that the type of technology that our client is working on in the plants they currently work in is different than the technology platform that is used in the plant in the other location. And he did not think that they knew that technology. And so we were able to shed light on the fact that we were pretty certain they did. It opened the door for the conversation. It doesn’t always happen, but occasionally it does. And we love it when that happens.
Grace:
Yes. We love to see our clients win!
Georgia:
Absolutely!
Grace:
Well, Georgia, thank you for joining me with this discussion.
Georgia:
It’s been great, Grace. I’m happy to participate and I’m looking forward to doing future interviews for our clients.
Founded in 2009, Rivergate Marketing is a full-service digital marketing agency, serving small to mid-size B two B companies trying to reach technical and engineering buyers. We are passionate about building strategic and data-driven marketing and PR programs to help our clients compete and be found in a crowded digital space against much larger companies with seemingly endless marketing dollars. For more information, visit us online@rivergatemarketing.com.