A Product Manager’s Field Guide to Talking to Customers

Product managers, when was the last time you talked to a customer? If your answer isn’t “earlier this week”, I want to help you change that.

If you need convincing that talking to customers regularly is a vital part of your role as a PM, this is not the article for you. However, if you know how important that part of your job is, but find that it’s always the first thing to slip when your schedule is crammed, you have trouble making contact, or for some other reason this isn’t part of your weekly routine, I think this nuts & bolts guide will be helpful.

To start, I want to thank Kyle Jacobsen for introducing me to the two tools I’ll be talking about in this post. I’m going to share in detail how I use these tools to talk to 5–10 customers a week. The basic flow I’ll cover is:

• Prep Work
• Tool Setup
• Weekly Routine
• Making the Call

Let’s begin.

Prep Work — Find some people to talk to

(Time required: 1–2 days)

Contacting existing customers is going to come down to gathering a list, preferably in spreadsheet form. The fields I always want access to are name, and email address. Last name and phone number are nice to have but are easy enough to gather later on. More profile data can be helpful but is not required.

If you work for an early stage startup, the easiest way to get this list is usually through an engineer with database access. If your company is larger, your customers are probably in a CRM (like Salesforce) so you’ll have to buddy up to one of your CRM admins or get access yourself.

I typically like to apply a couple of filters to narrow down the list and give me an idea of who I am talking to. The filters could really be any demographic or usage data point. For example, customers who have been with you for over a year, customers who have interacted with a specific feature, or who have recently answered your NPS survey. Resist the urge to talk only with your fan club here. Customers who have provided negative feedback or who are not using a specific feature can be equally valuable to talk to.

Let’s start with a list of 1,000 customers. That will last us at least a month using the method I’ll describe below.

Tool Setup

Calendly

(Time required: <30 minutes)

Ok — we’ve found our customers, let’s get down to the nitty gritty.

Set up a free Calendly account. Calendly automates the call scheduling process by connecting to your calendar and letting your customers book a time that is convenient for them and open on your schedule. It supports connections to Google, Office 365, and iCloud, as well as Outlook through a plugin.

You can set up an event for each type of call you want to do. Each event type can have different instructions, duration, etc.

Setting up your Calendly event

Be sure to look at the Advanced section on the calendar in the “When can people book this event?” to really fine tune when you are available for calls.

In the “Invitee Questions” section I add the, “Where should I call you?” field and set the answer type as “Phone Number” so I get a good number for calling the customer.

Add the “Where should I call you?” field to the Invitee Questions

Once you’ve got your event created and are ready to go, you can turn the event on and copy the url. We’ll use it below.

Yet Another Mail Merge

(Time required: <30 minutes)

Yet Another Mail Merge (or YAMM) is the other free tool we’ll be using. It sends out email blasts leveraging Google Sheets and Gmail. The free version lets you send 50 emails a day which I have found to be plenty for talking to 5–10 customers a week.

Setting up an email is simple:

1. Use your customer list to create a Google Sheet with contact information for 50 customers in it. Email address is the only required field but as I mentioned, I like to also include first name because YAMM will let you do some personalization.
2. Compose a new email in Gmail and write the message you’d like to send to your customers. Make sure to include your Calendly event link in the email. Use {{column name}} to pull in data from a column in your Google sheet. For example, {{First Name}} will pull in whatever is in the First Name column. YAMM looks for templates in your Gmail drafts folder so once the email is automatically saved as a draft, you’ll have access to it in the YAMM plugin. Make sure to give the email a subject and you’re all set.

2. Compose a new email in Gmail and insert your Calendly link

3. When you are ready to send the email, go to your Google Sheet and click Add-Ons > Yet Another Mail Merge > Start Mail Merge.

3. Click Add-Ons > Yet Another Mail Merge > Start Mail Merge

4. Skip through the premium plan marketing, add your name in the “Sender Name” field and select the Gmail draft you’d like to use as a template (all your current drafts will show up in this list).

4. Add your name in the Sender Name field and select your email template

5. Make sure to turn on “Track emails opened, clicked or bounced” so that you can get data on how many customers are interacting with your emails. YAMM sends you an awesome email with statistics, and also has a really cool little side bar that will sit right in the Google Sheet to show you a real time tally of your stats.

5. YAMM Tracking Report inside Google Sheets

You can send yourself a test email to see what it will look like. You can also choose whether to send right away or delay until a later time. Clicking “Send 50 emails” will fire off your email blast.

The Weekly Routine

(Time required: 10–15 minutes/week)

Now that everything is set up, let’s talk about my weekly routine for getting customer calls on my calendar. When you first start you’ll want to find out which days and times get the best responses. To do this, use the first couple of weeks to test out some different days and times. Use the YAMM tracking report to get an idea of your open and click percentages and pay attention to how many actual calls result from the calls scheduled.

At Weave, I’ve found that our customers like to book a full week in advance. I’ve also learned that mornings at the beginning of the week or afternoons near the end of the week tend to produce the best results from a “calls booked” perspective. With that in mind, I’ve found that if I send out an email to 50 customers each Tuesday morning and another each Thursday afternoon, I am able to keep my schedule full week to week. If the calendar for the next week is already fairly booked, I may skip sending on one of those days.

To give you an idea of my stats, when I send 50 emails I get ~25 email opens, 8 of which choose to click through the Calendly link. An average of 5 will book a call and I usually have 1 no show from those 5. Thus sending 50 emails twice a week gets me in the 5–10 calls a week range. This will vary based on your market and how frequently your customers interact with your product.

Making the Call

Disclaimer: There is a fair amount of debate around this but I personally prefer not to pay customers or prospects for their time. I’ve found it can skew the type of feedback I get. If you’re having trouble lining up calls, and think some compensation might help, I recommend offering a discount on your product.

Now that you’ve got a bunch of calls scheduled here are a few tips that have resulted in successful calls for me:

• Introduce yourself and ask if now is still a good time for a chat. Reschedule here as necessary. Don’t be pushy if you can tell it’s not a good time.
• Let them know how long the call will take and commit to keep the call to that duration. Make sure to watch the clock and don’t go over! It’s important to value your customers’ time.
• I start with about 5 minutes of general demographic-type questions. For example, with our target market of dentists, I will ask them about size of the office, number of staff and their roles, and what days they are open. This is good info to know, but more than that, it gets the customer comfortable talking to me with some easy-to-answer questions and shows them I’m familiar with their industry.
• I love having engineers and designers on calls. It’s great to see how it energizes them and gives them more purpose in what they do. I always have an open invite to my team to listen in and participate. However, and this is very important, do not let people’s busy schedules stop you from talking to customers regularly. It’s better to talk to customers on your own weekly than to talk to them every other month with a group, because that’s the only time that works for everyone.
• Write out a basic outline for the call. Use it as a guide but don’t push to finish every question if the customer is especially interested in giving you detailed information about one of your questions.
• Avoid Yes and No questions whenever you can. You learn very little from a simple “yes” or “no”. When you must ask a Yes or No, be sure to follow it up with a question that will give you more information.
• Focus questions on past not future behavior. When you ask “how likely are you to do X?” most users will have an opinion based on aspirational thinking rather than hard evidence. They might even yield to social pressure and give an answer just to appease the interviewer. Humans are more accurate at telling you how they did something in the past than they are at predicting the future. Get real data by asking them what they HAVE done, and search for clues in those responses to gauge whether they’d find value in something new.
• If the customer doesn’t have a work around for their problem, it may not be a problem worth solving. Listen for hints about their work arounds and ask follow up questions to get all the details.
• Questions like “What challenges/problems have you had with Feature X?” put the blame on the customer and don’t yield great answers. I prefer asking things like, “What about Feature X doesn’t work like you’d expect?” which puts the blame on the feature.
• Take notes and look for patterns. One of my favorite ways to discover patterns as a team is to jot down insights on sticky notes during the call. Keep track of whether the insight is positive, neutral, or negative by either color coding or using emojis. Then after the call, throw them up on the wall in 3 columns and stack similar insights on top of each other. After a few calls your patterns will be the thickest stacks!

• Adapt your call outline as you find patterns and better understand the questions that get the best answers.

Wrapping up

In addition to looking for insights into the new solutions we might develop next, I’m always looking for customers who would be good to reach out to when we’re ready to ideate on things in our Next and Later backlogs.

I also tend to put on a bit of a Customer Success hat during calls and tell the customer about cool features they may not be using or help troubleshoot issues they are having. You can definitely go overboard here so try not to turn it into a support call.

A question I get a lot is, what if other people at our company are contacting the same customers? Won’t they get annoyed? Since the YAMM/Calendly method is opt in and quite nonintrusive, I really don’t worry about that. As I’ve mentioned earlier in this article, it’s easy to let things like this, or other best practices keep you from making customer calls at all. Get out there and talk to your customers and figure out how to solve real problems as they pop up versus letting hypothetical problems keep you from learning.

I hope this process works as well for you as it does for me. I’d love to hear about how it goes!