A simple test that will show if you talk (listen)to your customers right

The more you’re talking, the worse you’re doing.

In the previous post, I talked about the importance of Public Speaking skills for a Designer, the value of being able to clearly communicate your ideas and engage people into conversations. But what about the other side of the coin? What about the ability to listen? How important is it for a Designer? Would you consider it a skill? I think it is, and generally speaking, there are very few people who are great at it. If you have such people in your life (including business), those are precious.

Let’s see how listening skills are crucial for a Designer while talking to clients, customers, or users (in fact, anyone).

📘 /Rob Fitzpatrick, The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers and Learn If Your Business is a Good Idea when Everyone is Lying to You/

Asking Good Questions

We all wish to simply ask our potential user or customer this simples question:

❓“Would you pay for my genius product and use it forever?”

See them with no sign of hesitation responding with “yes, this is what I was waiting for so long!”, after what purchasing lifetime subscription and live forever happily after, using our product which makes their life so much better. We wish.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. When we ask “would you” kind of question and hear that “yes!” in 99 % of the time it’s a sweet lie. Not because the respondent is a lier, but because the question is wrong.

In real life, when this question is asked and so desired “yes” is granted, what happens is:

🧑‍💻 the interviewer (left with sweet verification aftertaste) starts to happily develop their product (which no one needs)

and

👀 the respondent (just a polite person who doesn’t want to hurt interviewer’s ego) just hope they will never see that guy again.

They probably would use your product and even pay for it, but in fact, they never will. For many reasons, but it’s out of the scope of this article.

So how do we do it right?

That is what Rob Fitzpatrick, a techie guy with no sales background, a natural introvert who is bad in meetings (as he describes himself in a book) talking about in his book: “The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers and Learn If Your Business is a Good Idea when Everyone is Lying to You”. Rob is sharing his own lessons of failing and succeeding at customer conversations.

What “Mom Test” actually is?

If your questions can pass the test, even your mom can’t lie to you about them.

• Talk about their (customers, users, potential target audience) life instead of your idea
• Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future
• Talk less and listen more

Insights from the book

It’s a super practical book. You’ll find checklists, how-to (and how-not-to), rules of thumb, good and bad conversations examples analyzed and fixed.
The methodologies and tools described in a book are coming from a wide range of communities including Customer Development, Design Thinking, Lean Startup, User Experience, traditional sales and more.

Rob’s sense of humor also makes it very engaging and easy to read.

P.S.

At some point, while reading that book, I realized how actually our human nature is manifesting itself in every aspect of our life. It doesn’t matter if we are talking to our mom or a business customer. There are always human beings on both sides of the table. All of us love to get compliments, we all look for verifications. We all lie to avoid hurting the other person’s ego. We like to talk about ourselves most of all. Most of us wish to be right at all times. We love to talk about our problems and be listened to. We are always humans.

I wonder if you have any interesting observations from your customer conversations and if it ever was a challenge to just step back and listen?

💡 Thoughts that spoke to me:

(the quotes are taken out of context, keep in mind it’s all about customer conversation)

Learning that your beliefs are wrong is frustrating, but it’s progress.

“…compliments are worthless and people’s approval doesn’t make your business better. Keep your idea and your ego out of the conversation until you’re ready to ask for commitments.”

Anyone will say your idea is great if you’re annoying enough about it.

The more you’re talking, the worse you’re doing.

Keep having conversations until you stop hearing new stuff.

Every time you talk to someone, you should be asking at least one question which has the potential to destroy your currently imagined business.