Customer research is the fastest way to find what is broken in your funnel and how to fix it.
When keywords cost fifteen euros a click and sales cycles stretch for months, guessing is expensive. Five focused conversations can reveal the exact language your customers use to describe their problems, the moment they started looking for a solution, and what nearly made them choose a competitor instead.
I have done more than one hundred customer interviews across SaaS companies, e-commerce businesses, agencies, and professional services firms. In this playbook, I will show you step by step how to do it yourself. You will learn who to interview, how to get them on a call, how to run conversations that reveal real insights, and how to turn findings into messaging and campaigns you can use immediately.
Here is something most people do not realise: you can do customer research even if you do not have a product yet. You can interview the customers of your competitors.
When I worked at Sanoma, a large European media company, a colleague wanted to build a dieting app for women. Instead of building first, she set up three WhatsApp groups. Each group used a different competitor app. She paid for their subscriptions in exchange for regular feedback. After three months, she knew exactly what to build. The company had assumed users wanted a big library of recipes. But nobody used the recipes. What actually mattered was the social pressure of seeing other people lose weight. Both the motivation of "my neighbour can do it" and the proof that change was possible.
She built the product around that insight. Not around the assumption.
You might think that interviewing your competitors' customers is awkward or somehow off-limits. It is not. You are not trying to sell them anything. You are genuinely curious about what they like and what works for them. People are happy to share. They feel valued when someone asks for their opinion. I have done this many times, and the insights are often more honest than what your own customers tell you, because there is no relationship to protect.
Plan for 4 to 12 interviews, and do this every quarter. The investment is a few hours. The payoff shapes every campaign you run for the next three months.
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