Find Customers for Friday
On Monday or Tuesday, we start the process of finding customers for Friday’s test. That means one person needs to do some extra work outside of the sprint. It takes all week—but only an hour or two a day—to screen, select, and recruit the best matches. Ideally, someone besides the Facilitator should take responsibility for recruiting, since the Facilitator will be busy enough as it is.
There are two ways to find the right customers for your test. If you have fairly easy-to-find customers, you’ll use Craigslist. If you have hard-to-find customers, you’ll use your network.
Recruit customers with Craigslist
Most of the time, to recruit people who exactly match our target customer, we use Craigslist. We know it sounds crazy, but it works. It’s how we found perfect participants for our tests with Savioke and Blue Bottle Coffee—and dozens of other companies. The secret is to post a generic ad that will attract a broad audience, then link to a screener survey to narrow down to your target customers.
First, you’ll write your generic ad. You want to be sure you don’t reveal what you’re testing or the kind of customer you’re seeking. We offer a small stipend or token of appreciation—usually a $100 gift card—to pique the interest of potential customers. Post in the “et cetera jobs” with something like this:
$100 customer research interviews on August 2 (San Francisco)
I’m scheduling 60-minute research interviews in San Francisco on Thursday, August 2. Selected participants who complete the interviews will receive $100 Amazon gift cards. Please complete this short questionnaire. Click here.
As you can see, this ad could be about anything—coffee, robots, coffee robots, whatever. A generic ad in a big city may attract hundreds of applicants, so with the right screener, you’ll be able to find five people who fit your customer profile.
Write a screener survey
The screener survey is a simple questionnaire for interested people to fill out. You’ll need to ask the right questions to find the right people. Start by writing down characteristics of the customers you want to test with, then translate those characteristics into something you can discover with your survey. Do the same thing for characteristics you want to exclude (for example, people with too much expertise in your industry).
Blue Bottle Coffee wanted to interview “coffee-drinking foodies.” To find these customers, we used measurable criteria like: they drink at least one cup of coffee per day, they read food-related blogs and magazines, and they eat at restaurants at least once per week. We excluded people who didn’t make coffee at home or drank coffee infrequently.
Next, write questions for every one of your criteria. It’s important to write questions that don’t reveal the “right” answers—some people will try to game the survey just so they can get the gift card. For example, rather than asking people whether they go to restaurants, ask: “In a typical week, how many times do you eat out?” Instead of asking if applicants read food blogs, try something like this: “Do you regularly read blogs or magazines dedicated to any of the following topics?
• Sports
• Food
• News
• Coffee
• Cocktails
• Parenting
• Gardening
• Cars
In each of these examples, we had a “right” answer in mind, but there was no way that the person filling out the survey could predict what it was.
After you’ve turned your criteria into questions, create your survey. We always use Google Forms—it’s easy to set up, and the responses go right into a Google spreadsheet that you can sort and filter.
Once your screener survey is ready and your ad is live on Craigslist, the responses will start rolling in. Look through the survey results and pick out customers who match your criteria. By Wednesday afternoon, you can start getting in touch with people and scheduling your interviews for Friday.
Craigslist works surprisingly well for finding customers who aren’t familiar with your company. But what about existing customers or “hard-to-find” professionals with uncommon jobs? You’ll need a different strategy.
Recruit customers through your network
Finding existing customers is generally pretty easy. You probably already have the means to reach them—consider email newsletters, in-store posters, Twitter, Facebook, or even your own website.
The hard-to-find customers are not actually so hard to find, either. Here’s why: If you’re an oncology company, you probably know some oncologists. If you’re working in finance, you probably know other people who work in finance. And so on. Your sales or business-development teams can help you get in touch. And if that fails, you can reach out to professional associations, community groups, student groups, or your personal network. When we interviewed restaurant managers for a sprint back in 2011, we got in touch with the membership director of a local restaurant association.
Whether you’re seeking out hard-to-find customers, existing customers, or recruiting a broad audience on Craigslist, there’s one part of the process that shouldn’t change. Make sure potential interview candidates match your screening criteria. With only five interviews, it’s important to talk to the right people.
The entire sprint depends on getting good data in Friday’s test, so whoever takes charge of recruiting your customers should take the job seriously. Even though this recruiting happens behind the scenes, it’s as important as the team activities. For a sample screening survey and other online resources, take a look at thesprintbook.com.
I. Jake learned the trouble with group brainstorms the hard way, but plenty of researchers have come to the same conclusion. One example is a study at Yale in 1958. Individuals competed with brainstorming groups to solve the same problem. The individuals dominated. They generated more solutions, and their solutions were independently judged to be higher quality and more original. In your face, group brainstorming! And yet . . . over half a century later, teams are still running group brainstorms. Perhaps it’s because “brainstorm” is such a catchy name.