Anna Leshchuk. Head of Research Department at Refocus.
More than a decade of experience in marketing and product. Harvard alumni.
Have you ever used coaching techniques in your CustDevs? Here are the reasons why you should try it!
As a professional researcher, I conduct dozen of qualitative interviews every day to gain information for business development. CustDevs help our company correctly address the pains of the audience, create the product they indeed need, and simply understand in detail sho we are targeting at.
Implementing coaching techniques helped me make the interviews more effective and learn everything the business needed within an hour. Here is why I recommend trying them in your Customer Development.
Problems, traditional qualitative research face
Business needs CustDev to understand the actual pains and desires of the client which can be later used in product development, communication strategy, and ad creatives. And the list is not full at all! However, the chance that the respondent will answer your question directly and sincerely is quite low.
For example, if you ask something like “What would you like to achieve in the future” you are most likely to hear something from the list above:
- Vague phrases about “being rich and happy” in different variations don’t give any particular data.
- Stories only about your product. It might happen because of the questions that are traditionally asked in the CustDevs such as about why choosing your product. A person is likely to think that it’s the only thing that interests her. But the reality is quite the opposite because in this case you actually learn nothing about the respondent.
- Or just anything come to their mind first so you leave them alone if the question is difficult and they didn’t think about it before.
So, productive CustDev is impossible without being in contact with the respondent, giving them a safe space, and listening carefully. And that’s where the coaching technique came in handy for us!
What’s coaching?
Its classical ideas of solution-focused coaching were formulated by Erickson. Coaching is helping people to raise self-awareness by the following approach:
1. Solution-focused. The coach helps the client move forward to their future achievements instead of focusing on the negative background.
2. Systematic. Coaching emphasizes how one particular issue is affecting the whole life of the individual.
3. Client-centered. Coaching doesn’t give any ready-to-go solutions but helps clients to find it inside themselves.
4. Action-oriented. The coach not only discusses the feeling of the client but inspires them to make some measurable steps toward the goal.
Still, how can it help during Customer Development?
During CustDevs we are usually eager to learn 2 things: what are the pains of the client that our product should solve and what are the values it should align with? All the questions are pretty tricky: imagine being asked them once of a sudden by an unknown person.
That’s why at Refocus we’re using instruments from coaching to help our respondents answer them sincerely and comfortably.
1. Visualizing B point.
This technique is widely used in coaching to determine the aims of the client in 4 simple steps.
- Ask a person to take a comfortable position: they might close their eyes or walk if they want.
- Suggest them to imagine their most comfortable future in detail: which year is it, where are they, who is around. Practically, most of the respondents would imagine working in their big new house surrounded by the perfect family. But it’s not the most interesting part!
- Invite them to describe all the mile points that lead them here: for example, I bought this house 2 years ago, so I started saving 4 years ago. Or, my child is 3 now, so 5 years ago my wife and I understood that we’re wealthy enough to have the kid we’ve been dreaming about. Be as precise as possible: if a person mentioned “big house nearby the sea”, stick to it, and don’t call it just “house”.
- Question every step: from which did you make money, when exactly did you decide so, et cetera.
Consequently, people verbalize what is actually a B point for them – and you can ask what difficulties they expect while reaching it. Once a respondent said that he was afraid that he was too shy to finish the course because he didn’t have the courage to ask the questions. So, we started emphasizing that students are welcome to ask questions directly to mentors or community managers instead of writing in the chat. As a result, we made the course a little bit more comfortable to go through. And just imagine, how much more could be here!
This approach was particularly useful when we were entering the Philippines market. After reading about the country and speaking with the locals, we found out that the family was a huge value here. For example, there are traditionally big families with tight connections between parents and children. Moreover, it’s a norm that the youngest child stays with the elderly parents and takes care of them. That’s why we immediately came up with family-related creatives like “earn more for your family” or “work remotely to spend more time with your kids”. But they were not effective… Yes, people here value family a lot but that’s not what they speak about when you ask them what will change in the future. One respondent who was the youngest of 7 children and takes care of her parents, told us that she actually needs money from the course just to be able to buy beautiful clothes just when she wants to! So, she and many others won’t buy a product that’ll help them support her family – they’d choose the one which promises independence.
2. The wheel of life.
This tool is also quite widespread in coaching. The respondent is asked to draw a circle, divide it into sectors and dedicate each to an important sphere of life. It can be family, health, money, or whatever – don’t think for the respondent, wait for them to formulate what really matters. Then he or she should evaluate each sphere from 0 to 10, where the more scores the person gives, the better their life situation is. Now you ask the respondent to tell in detail about every sector: why is it that much, what’s not enough to make it a 10. So, people start thinking about every part of their life – and thus can tell you brilliant things!
This technique showed us similar results in mentioning family in communication in the Philippines. One respondent showed us the brightest reason why it’s not the best trigger. When creating the wheel of life, he just gave the family 10/10. For the researcher, it’s much more interesting to dig into topics where everything is not that perfect. Therefore, he spoke a lot about what actually motivated him and where the scorers were 5 or less: self-realization, economic goals, and career development. So, we started using this message in ad creatives and it increased the conversion rate.
These insights can be widely used:
- In marketing strategy to raise the conversation of ad creatives
- In the product development to make it more aligned to customers’ pain and consequently increases their satisfaction. For example, we apply to them during the so-called “honeymoon” – the very beginning of the study when the students are the most motivated.During the studies, we found out that many potential students are afraid of not finishing the course. So, we upgraded the onboarding process: emphasized informal communication between students, created goal-setting techniques, and a system of motivation during live sessions.
Can one use it without a psychological background?
Personally, I do have psychological experience and have been working as a coach for several years. But the vast majority of my team doesn’t have it. Nevertheless, the methods were easily applied by all of them. In reality, implementing them is pretty simple if you follow some rules:
- Learn the basics of psychology and coaching methodology. So, you’ll be able to formulate the questions correctly. There’s plenty of information that can be found online about it. For example, study materials by Marilyn Atkinson or reading books from Erickson College.
- Listen carefully and show the respondent their experience matters to you. To make it, try to concentrate only on the speaker and pay attention to the association that comes to your mind. If you’re not sure that you manage to memorize everything, listen again to the recording.
- Give the respondents a safe space to express their emotions. Make sure to emphasize that a person can walk across or close their eyes if that helps. You can suggest it depending on nonverbal signals: is the person sitting steady or seems to be unsettled, is he or she watching straight into the camera or looking away? Those little signals will help you understand how to make anybody feel more comfortable.
- Do not answer your question yourself – or even suggest the answer you think the respondent is thinking about.
To summarize, if you dive deeper, you get quality information about your clients in an almost ready-to-use format. Coaching techniques are pretty easy to implement but will save you tons of time and money on asking the same question several times ad still getting vague answers.
