Why Every Marketing Strategy Engagement Should Start With Client Interviews
Knowing your customers and knowing why they chose you are not the same thing. Here's why talking to a handful of your best clients comes before any decision about positioning, messaging, or marketing channels.
Most business owners know their customers pretty well. They've talked with them, sold to them, solved problems for them, and probably worked with some of them for years.
But knowing your customers and knowing why they chose you are not necessarily the same thing.
That's why one of the first things we do when building a marketing strategy is talk directly with several of a company's best clients — not to collect testimonials, and not to ask them what your marketing should look like. The goal is to understand the business from the customer's side of the table before we start making decisions about positioning, messaging, ideal customers, content, or channels.
Because once you've been inside a business long enough, it's very difficult to see it the way a prospective customer does.
Your Customers See a Different Business Than You Do
Ask an owner why customers hire their company and you'll usually get reasonable answers:
Those things may all be true. The problem is that competitors are often saying exactly the same things. More importantly, they may not be the reasons customers actually made their decision.
A client may tell us they chose the company because the salesperson was the only one who explained the process without making them feel pressured. They may say another company looked less expensive initially, but they trusted your proposal because it was far more detailed. Or the thing you consider a minor part of your service may be the thing they remember and value most.
You don't learn those things by sitting around a conference table and asking, "What makes us different?" You learn them by asking the people who actually made the decision.
Client Interviews Help Replace Assumptions With Evidence
Marketing strategies are often built on layers of assumptions — who the best customer is, why they buy, what they're worried about, who the competitors really are. Then those assumptions make their way into the website, sales materials, advertising, content, and proposals.
A good client interview gives us another source of evidence before we start making expensive marketing decisions. We're listening for things such as:
- What was happening when the customer first decided they needed help?
- What were they concerned about before choosing a company?
- How did they research their options, and what alternatives did they consider?
- Why did they ultimately choose you — and what almost kept them from moving forward?
- What stood out once they became a customer?
- How would they describe your company to someone else?
Those answers give us something much more useful than a collection of marketing adjectives. They give us context.
The Language Customers Use Matters
Businesses naturally develop their own language. You know your industry terminology, your processes, the names you've given your services. Your customer hasn't. They describe the problem from their perspective — and that language is incredibly useful when writing website copy, content, or sales materials.
"A consultative, client-focused process."
"They were the first company that actually helped me understand my options instead of trying to sell me something."
The second version tells us much more. It gives us a problem, an experience, and potentially a meaningful point of differentiation — the kind of language we want to uncover before we begin writing marketing messages.
Why We Prefer Having Someone Outside the Company Conduct the Interviews
When an owner calls a good client and asks, "Why do you like working with us?" the client knows exactly who is asking. Most people don't want to offend someone they like — so they soften criticism, skip over awkward moments, or give the answer they think the owner wants to hear.
A neutral interviewer can approach the conversation differently. If a client says:
"Everything was great, but the beginning was a little confusing."
We don't need to defend the process. We can simply ask, "What was confusing about it?" — and that follow-up often reveals something far more useful than the original answer.
We're Looking for Patterns, Not Taking a Vote
One client interview is interesting. Several begin to become useful. For many strategy engagements, we like talking with roughly five to seven carefully selected clients — people who represent the kinds of customers and projects the business would genuinely like more of.
If one person mentions something, we make note of it. If four out of six clients independently describe the same strength, concern, or reason they chose the company, we pay much closer attention.
The purpose isn't to turn qualitative interviews into a scientific survey — it's to identify recurring themes worth investigating. And sometimes the most valuable finding is a contradiction: the owner believes one thing is the company's biggest advantage, while clients consistently talk about something entirely different. That's exactly the kind of thing we want to discover early.
Client Interviews Are Not Customer Satisfaction Surveys
It's important to separate this process from ordinary customer feedback. Those things are useful, but they're different:
Survey
Tells you if they were happyReview
Tells you what they appreciatedTestimonial
Gives you proof for marketingClient Interview
Reveals the decision-making processA strategy-focused client interview is trying to understand the customer's decision-making process — what happened before the sale as much as what happened after. Why did they start looking? What mattered? What worried them? Who else did they consider? Why did they trust you? That information helps us understand not just whether the customer was satisfied, but how someone becomes your customer in the first place.
Client Interviews Should Inform Strategy — Not Dictate It
Talking to customers doesn't mean handing them control of the marketing strategy. Customers don't need to tell us which advertising platform to use or what the homepage should look like. That's not their job.
Their Job
- Tell us about their experience
- Describe why they chose you, in their own words
- Flag what almost stopped them from moving forward
Our Job
- Interpret what we hear alongside company goals
- Weigh it against profitability and service priorities
- Combine it with competitive research, sales data, and market opportunities
Customer interviews are an input into strategy, not the strategy itself.
What We Learn Here Affects Almost Everything That Comes Next
This is why client interviews belong near the beginning of the process rather than somewhere in the middle. What we learn influences the questions that follow:
- Which customers should the company pursue more aggressively?
- What characteristics actually define an ideal client?
- Which problems deserve more attention in the messaging?
- What questions should the website answer, and what topics should content cover?
- Where are prospects experiencing uncertainty in the buying process?
Those are much easier questions to answer after we've listened to the people who already chose the company. Without that research, strategy has a tendency to become an exercise in internal brainstorming — and internal brainstorming has a predictable weakness: everyone in the room already sees the business from the inside.
Start With Listening
There is plenty of time later to talk about websites, advertising, SEO, email, social media, content, and campaigns. Those are execution decisions. Before deciding how to market the business, we want to understand why good customers chose it in the first place.
That means starting with research. And some of the best research available is sitting inside the heads of the customers you already have.