Eight Phone Calls Your Competitors Will Never Make

Most business owners have spent more time choosing a logo font than they’ve ever spent asking a customer why they bought.

The customer research guide argues that eight phone calls beat a persona deck. This page gives you everything you need to make those calls. Who to invite, what to say, a full interview script, a bank of follow-up questions, and a one-page template for turning the answers into something your marketing can use. You’ll do it yourself, with no research budget and no special tools.

Who to Call

Aim for eight conversations, five with recent customers and three with people who enquired and didn’t buy. The mix matters. Customers tell you what convinced them. Non-buyers tell you what stopped them, and that’s often the more valuable half.

• Recent customers, ideally from the last 90 days, while the decision is still fresh.
• A spread, not your favourites. Include an average customer, not only the ones who love you.
• Non-buyers who got as far as a quote or a conversation. People who never replied at all won’t have much to say.
• The decision-maker. In business-to-business sales, speak to whoever actually approved the purchase.

The Invitation

Keep it short, promise there’s no sales pitch, and keep the promise. If someone declines, thank them and move on. You only need eight.

The Script

Fifteen minutes, five stages. Use the script as a map and talk like a person, because nobody opens up to someone reading aloud.

One rule matters more than everything else here. Ask about what happened. People are poor predictors of their own future behaviour and surprisingly accurate witnesses of their past, so “What did you do?” will always teach you more than “What would you do?”

Opening (1 minute)

“Thanks for making the time. I’m trying to understand how people decide to use a business like ours. There are no right or wrong answers, and nothing you say will offend me. Is it all right if I take notes?”

The trigger (3 minutes)

• “Take me back to when you first started looking for [product/service]. What was going on at the time?”
• “What made it feel like the right time to do something about it?”
• “How were you handling it before?”

The search (4 minutes)

• “Where did you start looking? What did you search for, or who did you ask?”
• “Who else did you consider?”
• “What were you comparing between the options?”
• “How did you first come across us?”

The decision (4 minutes)

• “What nearly stopped you going ahead?” (For non-buyers: “What made you decide not to go ahead?”)
• “Was anyone else involved in the decision? What did they want to know?”
• “How did you explain the choice to them?”
• “What tipped it in the end?”

Close (3 minutes)

• “If a friend asked you about us, what would you tell them?”
• “Is there anything I should have asked but didn’t?”
• “Thank you. This has been genuinely useful.”

Getting Past the Polite Answer

First answers tend to be vague or polite. These follow-ups get you to the real one. Use them whenever a response sounds general, emotional or surprising.

Then keep quiet. The pause after a question feels awkward, and people fill it, often with the most honest thing they say in the whole call.

Lieutenant Columbo solved most of his cases with one more question on the way out of the door. The real answer usually arrives after the polite one, so plan to ask twice.

Five Ways to Ruin the Call

1. Selling. The moment you pitch, the interview ends and a sales call begins. People become guarded.
2. Asking leading questions. “Wasn’t our response time great?” gets you a yes and no information. Ask “How did you find the response time?”
3. Asking about the future. “Would you pay more for X?” produces answers people don’t act on. Ask what they did.
4. Defending yourself. If they criticise something, say “That’s useful, tell me more,” then write it down. Arguing teaches them to stop being honest.
5. Only interviewing happy customers. You’ll learn what you already believe. The non-buyers are where the surprises are.

Eight Calls, One Page

Within a day of the last call, while it’s still fresh, fill in this summary. It becomes the reference for everything from your landing pages to your ads to how you answer enquiries.

The “ten exact phrases” section is the most commercially valuable part of the page. Customers almost always describe their problem more plainly than businesses describe their solution, and their words are the ones that make a stranger think “that’s exactly my situation.”

Two Calls a Quarter, Forever

One round of interviews is useful. Two conversations every quarter, permanently, is far more useful, because it picks up changes in your market before they show up in your numbers. Add the answers to your summary, and check your positioning once a year against what you’ve heard.

It’s the cheapest competitive advantage a small business can have. Most of your competitors will never pick up the phone.

If you’d like an outside view to go with your customers’, the free 2-minute diagnostic shows which of your four walls is weakest and what to fix first.

Find Your Weakest Wall →

Businesses spending ₦1M or more a month on marketing also qualify for a free 30-minute Leak Check. Think of it as an interview where we ask the questions.

This script is free to use and adapt. If you record calls or store interview notes containing personal information, get the participant’s permission and handle the data in line with the NDPA.

This article covers one part of a bigger system. Our guide to digital marketing in Nigeria shows how the four walls fit together, and the order to build them in.