We’ve got Warhol vibes, a doubleneck guitar, and robots. It’s perfect. And it’s taken me down the best rabbit hole aka Discovery on repeat.

I’ve been helping a client with case studies and testimonials. Their customers love them but they haven’t had a way to capture that love. The goal isn’t just to hear nice things though, we’re going to use these customer quotes across advertising, social, and the website.

But most answers are generic and boring and don’t stand out and if you’re running into this, the issue isn’t the customer—it’s you. So what do we do? We ask the right questions.

Asking the right questions is the difference between good customer quotes and bad ones

Are there really such a thing as bad questions?

You better believe it! It’s not that the questions themselves are bad (unless they really are), it’s just that they don’t dig in, they don’t collect important details, and they don’t give the customer room to share.

On top of that, customers will have different motivations for participating in conversations with you—some love your company, some are getting a reward, some want to sneak in product feedback, some are mandated by their boss—so it’s really important to understand where they’re coming from so you can prepare. And the more prepared you are the less likely you’ll ask bad questions.

It’s more than just questions too

A big part of getting the right answers is putting your customers in a position to share good answers. While they may have volunteered to participate, the idea of showing up on someone else’s website, ads, social, and other channels can be scary. So before you even ask your first question, make sure you take the time to make this experience as not scary as possible.

And the experience doesn’t start the day of the interview but weeks ahead of time when you first reach out. Make sure you’re clear in your ask in the initial outreach, make sure you have a great calendar invite that reminds me them what they signed up for:

Your calendar invite should spell out exactly what’s going on

And if you’re using software they may be less familiar with (I use Riverside.fm for recording these sessions because the recording quality is better than Zoom’s), make sure you give them a heads up because nothing is more frustrating than running into technical issues moments before having to play it cool on camera.

Opening

To follow along, I created a cloneable template for you to use. On the day of the questions, you want to use those first few moments together to ease the customer in and build rapport. This is how I do it.

Don’t forget to press record!

Who am I?

Before I ask a single question I take the time to introduce myself and thank the customer for their time. The first part humanizes me—this random dude who they don’t know—and the second part shows them that I’m grateful for their time.

I then take a moment to walk them through what’s going on which calms the situation down and makes it feel more like a conversation amongst friends rather than a business transaction.

Recording Disclaimer

We’re recording this thing. People should be reminded of that. It’s just common courtesy. It also covers legal bases but… not a lawyer. By taking the time to remind them of this, you can cover potential use cases for the recording (web, social, ads, etc.).

It’s also an amazing reminder to hit Record ⏺️ so that you don’t forget to actually record the convo and you better believe I’ve forgotten.

FYI

Customer stories are weird because oftentimes the customer is eager to say nice things as quickly as possible. I let them know ahead of time that they may hear multiple versions of a question so that they don’t get frustrated. By addressing this ahead of time they’re prepared to potentially repeat themselves without thinking that you’re not paying attention.

Answer in full sentences

There’s nothing worse than thinking you have a great soundbite only to realize that instead of “Product X is wonderful because it saves us time and money” you only get “It’s wonderful. It saves use time and money.” That could literally be any product so I ask off the bat for answers in full sentences and using the product name.

Questions?

This is the last opportunity to put them at ease and I want to make sure I address anything the customer still has on their mind. Usually they don’t ask anything but it’s important to provide the opportunity just in case.

What did you think when you first got the invitation?

This is one of my favorite questions because it tells you exactly what kind of headspace they’re in. By now you’ve put them at ease and made this whole process feel more approachable but you still may not know what their motivations are. That’s what this question answers.

I’ve heard everything from “I love this company and would do anything to help” to “my boss told me I had to be here.” Trust me, the former is better! That said, depending on what they say, you’re going to know how much you’ll have to pull or whether or not you’ll need to ask follow-up questions.

Intro Questions

Up until this point, it’s been all prep. You’ve been building trust to be able to ask questions. Yeah, you might have a clip from the invitation question but this is where it really begins.

These questions are another opportunity to build rapport and are a lead in to the actual product usage questions.

Get to know who you’re talking to

Name, title, company, and industry

I always record these because you never know when it’ll be good to have a “My name is Dmitry Shamis. I’m the founder of The Creative Brand.” recording for a case study intro. On top of that you’re able to use this for filtering and organizing your quotes. This is especially helpful if you want to market to different verticals and want to get organized ahead of time—we’ll get to this at the end.

What kind [action] do you [perform]?

This is a fill in the blank based on your company, product, and function. Let’s pretend I work for a company that sends emails. The question would be “What kind of emails do you send?”

The goal here is to get a detailed explanation of their use cases and hopefully showcase the versatility of your offering. A common follow-up here might be “any other use cases come to mind?”

How much [action] do you [perform]?

This is part 2 of the above in that you’ve got the actions down, not you want to understand the quantity so “how many emails do you send?”

When someone shares this information it buys immediate credibility because we’re not talking in hypotheticals but in actual numbers that your future prospects will be able to compare themselves to, ex. “Oh wow, I send way more emails than they do, I should probably take a look at this.”

Product questions

This is the meat of the interview and is all about your product or service. Regardless of the answers you get to these questions, the most important thing you can be doing is listening.

While many testimonials are similar, they’re all coming from different people at different companies. Use cases might be similar but not identical. If you’re not paying attention, you can’t ask good follow-ups and your follow-ups will lead to Gold, Jerry. Gold (that’s a Seinfeld reference)!

Don’t forget to say thank you again

Before [product name] how were you [performing your product’s main offering]?

Or with context, “Before Dmitry’s Magic Email Tool how were you sending emails?”

This question reminds them of the pain they struggled with before encountering your solution. This question is a cheat code because even the person who doesn’t want to be there will turn it around when remembering how bad or difficult things were.

You ask this question because it gives you starting point for prospects to compare against.

Was that working for you?

Of course it wasn’t because they found you! You usually get some really funny sound bites here. If you just get a simple “no” ask for more detail.

How did you find [product name]?

You may not use this answer publicly but your growth team will love you for asking it. Are they following you on social? Did they see a paid ad? Did they Google you? It’s great that they’re using your product and about to say lots of lovely things about you but where are you going to share those things?

Use these answers to assess where you invest your marketing budget going forward.

Why did you choose [product name]?

You’re probably in a space with a lot of competition which means your customers probably did their homework. Let them share with your future prospects why those other products are trash!

You’ll probably use this footage. You’ll also use it to build out “us vs. them” content about your competition. This is the one for your PMMs.

What did [product name] offer that the competition didn’t?

This is going to be a more specific answer to the question above. The goal here is to get someone else to talk about how you’re better. If they can’t, that’s ok. Sometimes they just made a random decision. I met a guy literally today who said “I chose your client because the were the top search result.” 🤷

What does [product name] help you achieve?

We want a high level answer here like “Dmitry’s Magic Email Tool allows me to send more emails faster and with a higher open rate.”

I’ll always ask for an anecdote or example here because there was clearly a reason why they chose the specific solution(s) they chose. This tells us what they really care about and if they care about it then your prospects will too.

Harder, better, faster, stronger

The next three questions are about speed, enablement, and money. I’m glossing over these because they’re boring. That’s not to say they’re not important, they’re just standards that you always ask.

You may get some good sound bites, but ultimately you’re rarely going to win because of any of these alone, they’re just great support pieces.

What are your favorite [product name] features

Wanna build your feature credibility? This is where you do it. Push on these because a list alone isn’t enough. You want to know why those features are their favorites.

Are your happy you chose [product name]?

I hate yes/no questions because you usually get a single word response but if you’ve done the job up until this point your customer is about to start gushing about why they love you. If you do get a single word response, gently ask for more.

How would you describe [product name] in one sentence?

When people say you should use your customer’s words in your marketing, this is where the magic happens. Pay attention to these answers because these are your website, social, and paid headlines. I recently got hit with:

Is it the best quote ever? No, but the idea of “click, click, bam” gives me so many ideas to pursue and it was one hell of a soundbite.

What, if anything, would cause you to switch away from [product name]?

You’re not gonna believe me but the worst possible answer for this question is “nothing.” You don’t want pissed off customers but if they’re not complaining about something then something is wrong. If they don’t give you a real answer follow up with questions about feature requests or things they’ve called support about.

Collect the feedback, share it with product, and if/when you come up with a solution you hit them up immediately and let them know the impact they made on the product. They’ll love you for that.

What would you say to someone considering [product name]?

Another classic question because this is basically the ending of any case study video you create but there’s a reason you ask it. Unless they hate you—which you’ll know by now—they’re about to sell your product for you.

Any other thoughts?

This is open ended and may be somewhere they offer suggestions or ask questions. In terms of the case study or testimonials, it’s probably useless but by giving them an opportunity to openly share you’re creating a moment to show your appreciation.

And speaking of appreciation

Say thank you. Thank them for their time. Thank them for their insights. Thank them for being a customer. They didn’t have to do this. They may not have even wanted to do this. But they did it anyway. So please be grateful.

Let them know what’ll happen next and when you’ll be sharing the assets with them (yes, you should share where you’re using their words).

Get it together

The last step before you edit the videos, update your homepage copy, and create new paid ads is actually organizing your material. I know there’s a ton of AI* that will do this for you, but weirdly enough I’ve always just liked a simple database or spreadsheet for this.

*If you do want to do this with AI, the easiest way is to export your transcripts, upload them to ChatGPT or Cove.ai, and have it generate a similar table to the one below for you.

Customer Quotes database

Using a spreadsheet forces me to review the quotes and organize them. The beauty of this is that you’ll have an inventory of everything you just heard. It’ll be filterable, sortable, and you’ll be able to highlight if and where something could be used. This will make it easy for not just your Marketing team to use but your Sales, CS, and Product teams too. In time you’ll have quotes for literally any situation. If you like them to actual video clip, you can now reference specific clips.

Is doing it manually a pain? Oh yeah, but I still haven’t found a better way of getting this close to the customer—besides, you know, talking to the customer.

And I love talking to customers. It’s the best way to understand how you’re doing. It’s one of those unscaleable things that you can do for your Brand to create lifelong champions. That said, don’t just use my script because it works for me. Figure out what matters to your prospects, how you can put the customer more at ease to get better answers, and where you can add your own questions (Jess Cook shared her list this week and it’s 🤌).

I’ve been getting called into more one off’s recently. Quick convos about singular problems or questions. An extra set of eyes on a strategy or campaign. A neutral party opinion on how to grow a team or career. It’s been a lot of fun. I love consulting on deeper projects or hopping into coaching sessions, but sometimes all you need is a one off and I’m not looking to take advantage. If you’ve got a burning issue, let’s talk shop.