The Definitive List of B2B Customer Interview Questions
184 customer interview questions that unlock insights and build winning go-to-market strategies.
You want insights to build a strong marketing, sales and business strategy. Deeply understanding everything about your ideal customer is certainly the best way to get them.
When trying to turn insights into actions, success always comes down to asking the RIGHT questions.
However…Here’s something about customer interviews people don’t often know.
Simply “talking” to buyers and customers won’t help:
Create a product or service people will pay money for
Position your product or service in a way that’s relevant to buyers
Write copy that attracts your ideal customer
Build a website that has the relevant information buyers want and need
Increase the chances of landing new business and revenue
To de-risk the chances of getting these things wrong, you need to ask the right questions, in the right way. Otherwise, you may get irrelevant answers that don’t provide any value, wasting all the time and money you pump into marketing and sales programs.
We’ve put together a list of 184 questions you can start using today.
The questions have been organized into the various topics or discussions you may want to have with a customer. Before you start booking meetings with people, here are some key things to remember when running customer interviews.
Chapters:
Intro
How to Conduct A B2B Customer Interview
After running hundreds of interviews, we've come to realize that running a successful one is like anything else in business. You need to prepare and have a process. If you want to make the most of your time with a customer, here are five key steps you should always try to follow:
Outline Your Game Plan: Start by mapping out your interview. There are many different types of interviews you can have with customers. What do you want to learn? Sketch out an outline with key questions or topics you want to explore. This helps you stay focused, especially when conversations take unexpected turns. It's like having a roadmap in a city you’re exploring for the first time – you might take a few detours, but you’ll never lose your way.
Record it, Because you won’t remember: Always record your interviews – whether it’s on Zoom, a phone app, or any other tool. Relying on memory alone is risky; recordings ensure you don’t miss any golden nuggets of insight. Think of it as your safety net, catching every detail that might otherwise slip through the crack.
Jot Down the standout insights: While recording is crucial, don’t underestimate the power of pen and paper. Scribble down key points, surprising insights, and follow-up questions as they arise. It’s like highlighting the most interesting passages in a book so you can easily revisit them later.
Know Your Interviewee. A little homework goes a long way. Before the interview, check out your interviewee’s LinkedIn, company website, or any published work. It’s like getting a sneak peek into their world, helping you tailor your questions and break the ice more effectively
Embrace the Power of Listening: Active listening is your secret weapon. Really hear what’s being said, and use it to guide the conversation naturally. Avoid the temptation to just wait for your turn to talk. It’s about tuning into the frequency of their thoughts, not just catching the words.
These are five crucial steps, but there is so much more to the art and science of running in-depth customer interviews. Our DIY guide, “How to Run Customer Interviews that Don’t Suck” is the process we’ve used to accomplish this in hundreds of successful B2B customer interviews.
You’ll learn how to set strong research objectives, decide which customers to speak with, advice for conducting the interviews, and techniques for extracting insights from the conversations.
Most importantly, it has actual clips from interviews we’ve conducted, showing what to do (and not to do) when asking any of the questions from the massive list below.
Roles & Responsibilities
These customer interview questions are great for understanding a customer or buyer’s day-to-day. What do they oversee? What is the makeup of their team? Who do they report to? These questions will help you get started on a buyer persona for your ideal customer profile.
Walk me through your responsibilities.
Walk me through an average workday.
Describe a very successful workday.
Describe a challenging workday.
What is the makeup of your team?
Who reports to you? What are their roles?
What are the team’s responsibilities?
What responsibilities are shared across departments?
Who do you report to?
Priorities & Success Measurement
These customer interview questions are for understanding what’s most important to buyers/customers, what they are “on the hook” and how their work fits into their business overall. It also helps you understand the importance of your solution or product in accomplishing tasks within a person’s role.
In B2B it’s important to contextually understand your best-fit buyer or customers, what they work on and why. Otherwise, it will be difficult to build marketing and sales programs that drive new business.
How do your priorities get set?What would have to happen for these priorities to change?What is your top priority?
What activity can never be neglected?
How do you measure success in your work?What KPIs or core metrics are you tracking?
How do you measure your collective success with other colleagues?
How does your work impact the business?
What is one thing you have to accomplish in the next 6-12 months?
What’s a significant professional goal you have in the next 3 years?
Pains and Anxieties
These customer interview questions are for digging into core challenges. In this context, we define “pain” as the blockers to them achieving their goals or priorities. Anxieties are any fears they have about not achieving their goals or priorities.
For many marketing and sales teams, these questions are the first steps to understanding how to position and message your product. They are also great questions to generate content ideas
What are some of the biggest challenges you face in everyday tasks?
What stops you from getting work done?
What is one activity you are getting done, but don’t feel it’s your best work?
What happened the last time you couldn’t achieve X?
What happens to the business if you don’t get your priorities/goals accomplished?
What staffing challenges do you face in achieving your goals?
What skill challenges do you face in achieving your goals
What is one thing in your role that keeps you up at night?
What’s the one activity you wish you could take off your plate?
What do you wish you had more time to do?
Buying Triggers
Buying triggers are specific events or catalysts that motivate a buyer to prioritize finding a solution to solve a problem or set of problems. Sometimes these are specific events or a culmination of pains and anxieties. These are also great customer interview questions for gathering insights into ways you can position and message a solution. It’s also a great source for content ideas to attract high-intent buyers.
What were you doing before using product/solution X?
Walk me through the first time you had an issue or pain with x.
What were you doing or trying to do when this happened?
Was it a new issue or a pre-existing one?
When did you realize the old way wasn’t working?
What did you realize you needed something to solve the issue/problem.
When were you forced to change?
Why did you want to change from your previous solution?
How did this problem impact your ability to accomplish things?
How did this problem impact the business objectives?
Who did you speak with about this challenge?
What did you discuss?
Vendor & Solution Research
These customer interview questions help you understand the process of how a buyer seeks out solutions like yours and how they build a preliminary list of options (sometimes called a shortlist). These questions are great for understanding what options buyers are considering at this stage and the information they need to make more informed decisions. Insights from these questions help inform marketing programs & tactics.
When you decided to start looking for solutions, what did you do first?
Was there a tipping point which caused you to start researching?
Were you actively looking at this point or was it more passive?
Who did you talk to, outside of your organization, to help guide your research?
Did anyone influence your thinking or make recommendations?
What is the worst thing a company can do when marketing to you?
Who helped you evaluate potential solutions?
What criteria did you use to evaluate various solutions?
How does a business earn your trust at this stage?
What other solutions were you looking at?
What could we have provided, to help your research process?
What did not sound believable?
How do you prefer to interact with companies at this stage of research?
What information was vital?
Were there any red flags?
How do you decide what information to trust?
Where do specifically go to learn about the latest in your industry?
Who is a major influencer/thought leader in your space?
Vendor & Solution Evaluation
How a buyer (or committee of buyers) evaluates a short list of solutions or products. We want to gather insights into what information they want from vendors. It also helps us understand how we could win or potentially lose deals These are good customer interview questions for auditing the sales process.
How long did you wait before contacting the sales team?
What concerns or objections did you face during the sales process?
At what stage did the objections appear, and why?
What did you think of the answers to your objections?
What made you trust us/the sales team?
What info do you need to make a confident yes/no decision?
Who's involved in each stage of the evaluation?'
What budget did this come from?
What budget tradeoffs did you make to purchase this product?
What convinced you we were the right choice at this stage?
What mistakes do companies make in their sales process when you’re evaluating products?
What were the goals of every person involved in the process?
Was there a “buying committee”?
What did everyone want to achieve with our product?
At what point did different buying committee members join the sales process?
What are the benefits every buying committee member gets from our product?
If you could only pick one, what is the top reason you decided to choose X?
Did you visit any review sites?
Did you review any analyst research?
How many people sign off on new purchases?
How many people might say "no"?
How could you test our solution without needing approval?
Solution/Business Outcomes
This line of questioning helps us understand and gauge the impact a solution has on a customer's business. Great customer interview questions for case studies and testimonials.
What were your expected outcomes after using/working with X?
What changed after you started using X?
What benefits do you expect to see over time?
What’s different about your day-to-day now?
What would you say to a peer who asked about our service/product?
How would you describe the benefit to a friend?
What KPIs or ROI data can you share that demonstrates the value of using X?
I take away our service/product tomorrow, what happens to your business?
What would have to be true for you to not use/work with X anymore?
What should we stop doing as a business?
What should we start doing as a business?
How likely are you to take our product/service with you, if you move to another company
Competitive Intelligence
These customer interview questions will help you understand what buyers/customers perceive as your direct or indirect competitors.
What products/services do you consider similar to this?
What category do you think this product/service belongs in?
When I say (product/service x), what comes to mind?
When I mention (product/service X), what do they do well?
When I mention (product/service X), where can they improve?
What was your experience like using (product/service X)?
What features using (product/service X) are/were most valuable? Why?
What product/services used in your work, stand out to you?
Brand & Identity
These customer interview questions help you establish your perceived brand identity in the eyes of customers or non-customers; not necessarily the brand you have tried to cultivate.
What other businesses do you buy from, that you consider similar to us?
Why do you buy from these other brands?
What are the reasons you would stop buying these other brands?
If X wasn’t available, what would you buy?
If you had to explain to a friend what X does or offers, what would you say?
What makes X special?
When you think of interactions with us, what is the first image that pops into your head?
What role does our product/service play in your life?
If our business was a person, how would you describe them?
Is there anything else we should have asked?
Probing Questions
These are great customer interview questions for following up and trying to dig deeper into the initial answers that people provide. It’s common for interviewees to sometimes give vague or generalized details - they often do the first time you ask them a question. These can help you get through those types of answers.
How did you decide…?
How did you conclude…?
How did you determine…?
Why do you think this is the case?
What do you think would happen if…?
What would be the impact of…?
What is the connection between… and…?
What if the opposite were true?
What criteria did you use to…?
What’s another way you might…?
Win-Loss / Sales Audit Interviews
The customer interview questions help you gather insights into why you are losing deals. These questions are good for auditing your sales process and can be combined with other types of questions already listed.
What did you think of our company before speaking with us?
What other vendors did you evaluate?
Who did you end up choosing?
What did you think of [competitor x] before speaking with us?
What strengths did we have compared to other vendors?
What weaknesses did we have compared to other vendors?
Who was responsible for what in the buying process?
Which people were the most influential in the decision-making process?
What part of our demo experience was the most valuable?
How did our demo compare with others?
What were we missing?
What did you want to see more of?
What did you like about our product/service?
What were our weaknesses?
How did our sales process differ from others?
How can we make our sales process more effective?
How well did we customize our presentation for your business?
Was there a budget for this?
Customer Discovery / Business Validation
This list of customer interview questions is good for validating an idea or understanding the pains or challenges a potential customer has. You are trying to understand business drivers & pains, and how they prioritize and solve them. Another way to approach this is mapping out a key business process that you want to help support.
What are your top three challenges?
What is the top challenge from these?
How are you currently solving this challenge?
What would be the impact of removing this challenge?
How many people are affected by this?
What percentage of day/week do you spend fixing problem X?
How much would you be willing to pay to solve this problem?
Have you found any tools that can help with this problem?
Do you expect this challenge to improve, get worse or stay the same in the months?
How much time do you spend trying to solve this challenge?
How much money do you invest in solving it?
How many man-hours does it typically take your team to do task X?
Who else in your company shares these challenges?
Who would most benefit from solving it?
Whom else in your company should we be speaking with regarding this problem?
What keeps you from acquiring more customers / accomplishing priority x?
What is the first thing you would change about the work you do?
New Product/Solution Idea
These customer interview questions help you gauge whether a proposed idea/solution has any perceived value for a target buyer/customer. NOTE: you will want to use the Customer Validation/Business Idea Questions before getting to this step and pitching a potential solution.
(Describes potential product/service) - what are your initial thoughts?
What value would this bring to your organization?
What is one thing you like about this idea?
What is one thing you dislike about this idea
What are you using today that is similar?
(Showing product screenshots) What are your initial reactions?
What challenges would you hope this helps solve?
What is missing?
What would stop you from using this?
Would you try it today?
Would you pay for it today?
What do you think would be a reasonable price for this?
User Experience
These customer interview questions uncover how current or potential users solve problems or interact with current tools. These can help you improve existing products or help determine new features, products or services.
How much of your time is spent solving/dealing with X?
How much time would you like to spend on this?
How important is saving time on X important to you?
What obstacles are in your way in dealing with X?
Why is X important to do?
Do you have any workarounds for X?
Tell me about those. What are the easiest parts of (issue/task)? Why?
What would an alternative solution to this task look like?
What are your thoughts on our product or service?
How often do you currently use it?When do you use it?
What other products or services have you used to accomplish the same goals?
How successful were those in comparison to our product or service?
If you could improve this product or service what would you change?
How would those changes impact your use of it?
How valuable would the product or service be to you with those changes?