Sometimes getting leads and sharing the experience is really hard — people don’t like to talk or write and don’t know how to turn bits of important information into one structured piece of content.  Sometimes it’s also hard to get answers from your audience when you’re evaluating or validating your product.

If this is the case and you want to get leads, help your team get noticed online as an expert, or if you want your audience to help you build the best product, one interview can bring it all together.

Let’s outline the process of getting out valuable information from your team or from your audience in one simple guide.

To start sharing valuable content to attract leads, you need to get this content first. You can do it in several ways.

Sharing expertise isn’t something that is written in the contracts of your team members. So to encourage them — start sharing the knowledge yourself:

Don’t make it mandatory. Nobody likes when extra workload is suddenly added for no particular reason. But you may add some extra benefits for those who are keen to open up and share, like giving them some additional super cool and cozy merchandise.

Such an approach works for agencies or service companies but is not so common for SaaS. If you provide software as a service, you can turn to your users for insights.

When your product already has a loyal audience, it’s not a problem to conduct some interviews and get answers to shape your product better and get the content you need. But when you’re just starting your product journey and your target audience is not familiar with the product, or your product hasn’t even been launched yet but you need to validate your idea, things get complicated.

There are no strict rules for how to collect the ideas, but there are several common practices:

There is no company where nothing interesting happens. All you need to do is to listen carefully and each time you hear or see something valuable, write the idea down. It may happen during an inner workshop, daily meetings, or even during lunch break chats.

In the same way, look at how your community is responding to your updates and gather their responses. It will help you to collect all the pros and cons of your product development in no time.

Remember, not every idea must be a genius one. Write down even the simplest and the stupidest of them.

When I started to take front-end development courses online from scratch, I came up with a pile of 101-level questions. It turned out that there were no instructions to help me because all the articles were written for novices with a more technical background than I had. When I asked some developers to help me with my questions, all they could say was: “Well, it’s so simple for me that I don’t even know how to explain it. It’s just obvious.”

At that moment, I understood that I had uncovered a niche where people like me would appreciate clear, simple help from experts.

From the list you’ve written down, pick the ideas that will be most interesting to share, but don’t toss the other ideas out. The idea that’s not so catchy now could be a hot topic tomorrow.

After you write down all the ideas, a little research can help you find the most valuable ones, the exact ideas that will attract your target audience to the content.

When you’ve done it, you can choose the type of content you want to share and finally move on to extract valuable information from your team or your audience.

In my experience, even team members who don’t want to write or talk in public about their expertise are eager to share their knowledge with the team. Especially if you guide them with supporting questions like “can you elaborate on this a little bit more”, “how did you find out the problem”, “what was the initial solution and why it has transformed”, etc.

The same goes for your target audience during customer development interviews. If you show the value behind your questions, they’ll answer them eagerly.

For cust-dev interviews, the preparations are a little bit different. You don’t need to prepare your audience much, but you do need to prepare an explanation of the value of this interview. Don’t just ask them to answer your questions, explain why it’s interesting for them.

It’s common practice among journalists to record the dialogue during interviews, and I recommend doing a recording too, so as not to miss any numbers or particular examples.

Always ask your team if it’s OK to record. Even if the interview is held online, try to make it as informal as possible to make your team relax and spill more interesting facts and details. Remember that your team may not be used to the interview process, and it’s your responsibility to make them less nervous.

I also recommend voice interviews instead of written ones for getting the answers from your target audience. This way you’ll be able to learn more about the actual pain points and needs.

Once again, as an interviewer, you may not be in possession of all the knowledge necessary to speak freely on the topic. If your team goes deep into some specific terms and abbreviations that you don’t understand, ask them to explain. And don’t forget that even if you understand everything they are talking about, the audience may not.

When I began writing for and about startups, I was really surprised at how many people didn’t know the meaning of things like ARPU or CR. My basic expertise was different from theirs, so I explained some things in the blog posts that were obvious to me.

Rarely do in-house interviews go strictly to plan. In the process, you may understand that some questions become irrelevant and some questions need to be explored deeper. Don’t be afraid to cut some questions out and ask new ones. Sometimes your team doesn’t give enough credit for some things they’ve done, but it will be crucial for the audience to understand.

Imagine your team found a bug in a product and fixed it, making the product load and run two times faster. For the developers, fixing the small and easy bugs is no big deal, but the audience will be eager to know how to make products better. Especially since such a bug may be common.

If you’re interviewing the target audience, it’s important to cover all the questions from your list and add some in the process of the interview if you discover something strange or interesting. The main difference from in-house interviews is that you need to ask all the questions you’ve prepared in advance to make the post-analysis correct.

After the interviews, the process of writing the actual piece is similar to writing any blog post based on your personal experience and market research:

Remember that for a blog post based on real-life experience, you’ll need to provide examples; otherwise, your post won’t be of much value.  If this blog post is written in the first person, examples should be personal. What is even more important, they must be supported by data, or at least some valuable numbers.

To create a good piece of writing, it’s important to have someone else proofread your work. If it’s not possible, try reading your draft out loud. You will be surprised at how many things you will change afterward to make it sound more natural.

You can also use some services to proofread your text or at least help you check for mistakes. I am, for example, using Grammarly as a tool for quick and efficient proofreading.

Of course, you can post everything without proofreading, but some small mistakes or typos can give you a bad look, even if your information is valuable.

The amount of content being published every day is close to infinite. So it’s important to make each of your posts stand out.

There are so many things and posts online that even the most intriguing and valuable interview can be buried under the pile of trash content. So think in advance about how to reuse your content in a different format and how to present this interview from another angle. Can your written interview be changed into infographics or video? Think of other ways, there are always plenty of options!

Why so much effort, you say? Well, this people-centric approach will pay off in leads.

If your teammates see that their work is noted and their expert profiles are growing, they will be more eager to come to you by themselves with new interviews and new ideas.

And, of course, your company will stand out among competitors because of the value you’re giving, the transparency, and the huge pile of information supporting the expertise.

Written by Alena Lysiakova