Continuing from the previous post on interviews and how to write them up into a white paper, here are 4 more customer interview questions for generating the information readers want to see.

4. What are some current approaches to solving this business problem? Why are they inadequate?

Your readers are already making do, but they’re not very happy with what they have in place because:

• it’s a chewing-gum-and-baling-wire hack
• it’s too slow/expensive/low-performing
• time is not on their side

That’s why they want to read your paper. This is also the opportunity to shake them out of their inertia by pointing out threats you’ve identified that haven’t yet occurred to them; e.g., “If another, less understood scenario of universal health care plays out, providers will also be on the hook for…”

5. Why/how can the approach you’ve chosen overcome these inadequacies?

This information forms the turning point for the paper, as discussion changes from listing problems to solving them. The SME’s time on this question is best spent relating how s/he has seen the approach work in the real world, in a variety of situations. Don’t soak up valuable interview time with a detailed discussion of the approach that already exists in other documentation, slide decks, technical content, etc.

Arm your readers with information and let them draw their own conclusions.

A true white paper will describe the approach rather than your product or service itself, then let readers figure things out on their own. If the paper needs to include a discussion of your product, label it a “technology overview,” “buyer’s guide” or similar. link to rant on mislabeling white papers>.

6. Which particular advantages do they get with your company’s implementation of the approach?

Again, in a true white paper, the goal is not to flog a product, but to build trust and educate. Describing a potential advantage to readers is more proof that you’re in their shoes, thinking of things that have not yet occurred to them.

For example, if the technology you’ve chosen for compressing digital movies also includes the advantage of encrypting them for protection against privacy, mention this in a clinical manner as a potential benefit, without naming it as a feature of your product.

7. Describe a few steps in adopting and integrating this approach in environments familiar to readers.

The white paper is not an implementation guide or a user manual, but this information anticipates the technology questions that will arise at the next level of scrutiny. The people responsible for installing, maintaining and living with the product or service have an itch that the white paper needs to at least begin to scratch, so don’t ignore that itch.

With the answer to this question, you can demonstrate your technical chops to all readers, even those with a business focus. Tell them about replacing the carburetor with fuel injection, but don’t go into which hoses to switch or bolts to loosen.

Once you see how to write customer interview questions that focus on real customer problems, you’ll begin to draw out the kind of information that builds trust with readers.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: DeepCwind

Related posts:

1. B2B White Paper Interviews – 7 Questions (Part 1)
2. Steal This White Paper Outline!
3. White Paper Projects That Don’t Go Well – Part III

“We want you to interview our SME, then write up the result into a paper we can use in our content marketing effort,” you say to the marketing communications writer.

Sounds easy enough. But most SMEs don’t think like a writer. They think like a businessman or exec or technologist or financier. And if they simply improvise their way through the interview, the content will suffer for it.

Not all writers understand interviews or how to write them up into a white paper. And not all SMEs give good interview. Send your writer in with concrete customer interview questions designed to tease out the information you need.

7 interview questions

Here (and in the next post) are questions whose answers make a balanced white paper easier to write.

1. Who are your ideal readers for this paper?

The better you understand this, but more readily you can make the jillions of small decisions that will go into the paper: word choice, technical depth, amount of background information to include, hypothetical scenarios and examples to cite. It’s easy to answer this question incorrectly – or to think you know the answer, yet be wrong – and end up with a white paper that misses the mark.

2. What do you want them to do once they’ve read it?

The short answer is, “Move along in the sales funnel,” which can mean a lot of things:

• click on a link
• pick up the phone and call you for more information
• think that you’re cool
• pull out their credit card
• discuss it with their boss
• Tweet/Like/share it

Make your expectation clear in the opening summary; e.g., “This paper will equip readers with a business case for integrating baseball card database management in their own companies.”

3. What keeps these readers awake at night? What are some of the biggest problems they face (that your product/service can solve)?

Readers will devote about 2/73rds of their attention to your product and the other 71/73rds of it to their business problems. If they’re thinking about your product at all, they’re trying to figure out how it would fit in with whatever is causing those problems and envisioning life afterwards. Given that, shouldn’t you write from their perspective?

Information about customer problems is what you and your marketing communications writer need from the SME to demonstrate to readers that you understand their predicament and, in fact, have been dealing with it in lots of variations. When readers see that you you’re thinking more about their problems than you are about your own products, they begin to trust you.

In Part 2, we’ll see customer interview questions that touch on your products, but only obliquely. Remember, nobody really cares about your products. They care about their problems and whether they can trust you to help solve them.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Sign up for his Content Buffet Newsletter and get the free eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: eren

Related posts:

1. White Paper Projects That Don’t Go Well – Part III
2. Want Great Case Study Interviews? Ask These 3 Great Questions
3. White Paper Projects That Don’t Go Well – Part I

How many times have you wanted to write up a textbook-perfect case study in your organization? Doesn’t it seem like just the kind of piece to populate your content marketing campaign, score points with the Sales team and show your customers how much you value their business?

But how many of those times have you hit a “Yes, but…” as you rolled your case study idea down the road?

A lot of case studies (or “customer success stories” or “application stories”) become shipwrecked on the reef of customer approval. Customers have three common objections to being identified in a case study:

1. “You’re one of our secret weapons, and we don’t want our competitors to find out that we work with you.”
2. “We don’t want to reveal that we have problems in the first place, let alone that we needed an outsider to solve them.”
3. “There’s nothing in it for us.”

Still, these case studies are powerful arrows in your quiver, so you don’t want to give up on them entirely.

Your marketing communications writer may tell the story in a way that makes you and your customer appear to walk on water, but if it doesn’t go over well with the customer’s review team – usually for legal reasons – you’ll spend money to have a piece written that never sees the light of day.

Breaking the case study in two

“This is a really good story for us and for our customer,” a marketing manager with one of my clients told me. “From the outset, we set the expectation with the customer that, if the data looked good, we would cooperate on a case study. But if they decide that the data don’t look as good as we think they do, they may pull the plug on the piece and decline to let us publish it.”

With that in mind, she asked whether I wanted to write it up.

“Unfortunately, we can’t set this up as an hourly project,” she added. “You’ll have to bill it as a project, but I don’t want to have to pay you for the entire thing if you end up not doing all the work.”

I thought about it for a bit.

“Let’s break the project into two pieces,” I suggested. “Normally, I’d estimate the interviews, outline and drafts as one piece, but let’s set up the outline as the first deliverable. Once we have your customer’s changes, I’ll finish the draft and that will be the second deliverable.”

She liked the idea, because it relieved her of some of the risk. I liked the idea, because it showed her I could think flexibly about the project. I set the interviews and outline as 1/3 of the total estimate, and the draft as 2/3 of the total.

Lesson learned

In fact, I should have anticipated that the interviews and outline would be the lion’s share of the work.

Usually, the outline merely serves to show the direction the piece will take, but in this case it did much more of the heavy lifting. It had to pass muster with the marketing manager, her legal team, her customer’s product manager and her customer’s legal team; in other words, it’s taking a long time to get approval on a little bit of work. I’m glad to run this gantlet early so that I don’t have to run it later, but I’d have done better front-loading the estimate as 2/3 interviews and outline, and 1/3 draft.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: Gargaj / Conspiracy

Related posts:

1. A Case Study That Didn’t Go Well
2. A Case Study That Went Well
3. 3 Reasons Why You’ve Got a Bad Case of Bad Case Studies

1. Tell the writer about the interviewee’s specialty and personal characteristics, the kinds of information to elicit, and what you want out of the interview. If I know that I’m trying to get information from an engineer on how the company’s technology was developed, I’ll steer him/her away from discussions of product marketing and trade shows. When you provide this kind of background, you save yourself time and money in the long run, even if you have to brief the writer a bit.
2. Tell the interviewee what you’re trying to accomplish in the interview and in the written piece. Most interviewees never get this picture. The writer can provide it during the conversation, but it’s awkward, and you as marketing manager are in a better position to describe the goals in terms that will mean something to your co-worker or customer.
3. Take part in the meeting or call. It’s a good idea to be part of the conversation yourself, especially with a new writer or a new project. If your writer has done six case studies with your customers already, and you’re confident about the work product, then there’s no need to attend. But if you’re asking your press release writer to interview an investor, you should plan to be a fly on the wall to keep the conversation going the way you want it to go and help the writer through unfamiliar territory.

Yes, of course, it makes perfect sense. But so does flossing your teeth, and a lot of people don’t do that either. This is really cheap insurance on the project for which you hire a new writer.

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I suppose some writers have remarkable memories and capture everything needed to write up the content into an article or paper. They’re a technical version of those waiters who can remember every detail of an order from a party of twelve, who wants the veal rare, who doesn’t want ice in her water, and which dressing everybody wants on his/her respective greens.

I can’t do that. Can you?

Some of my writers take copious notes and begin writing the piece in their brains while the interview is still underway. My father-in-law was a journalist who used to do that, then drive home and dictate the story over the phone to a transcriptionist. What a gift.

Other writers – like me – use a digital recorder. Interviewees don’t mind, as long as you observe their rights and let them know you’re recording them. We take notes furiously, jotting the time at particularly valuable utterances for verbatim transcription later, and fervently hoping that the batteries don’t die before the interview is over.

The hardware is relatively cheap and more reliable than tape, especially for writers who move the files to a PC. Sony makes excellent software for moving through and transcribing text quickly.

I talked to my colleague and high school classmate, Gene Gable, about using a recorder. “You’ve got to get out of that habit,” he counseled. “It seems like a good idea until – as happened to me – something goes wrong technically and you realize that you haven’t given your brain enough credit, and your notes aren’t sufficient and there’s a deadline on your heels. If you take good notes and you’re not distracted by things like today’s prime rate or your Twitter account, you’ll find it’s not that hard to build a good piece without the recorder.”

What do you think? Can you tell the difference between a piece written from memory and one written from a recording?

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