Tag: interviews

When A Client Says No — Should You Do An Exit Interview?

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

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A friend of mine is a successful independent business owner with high-end corporate clients. After a few deals didn’t close — and she didn’t feel badly about the deals not going through — she wondered:

Should I follow up and ask them for feedback about why they went with another service?

Small business reality: you’re always interviewing.

When you’re a small business owner, a consultant, or a freelancer in the service business, you’re often interviewing new clients on the regular. Part of your marketing and sales allocation (whether it’s in time or dollars) is in networking, outreach, and meeting new faces to add to your business.

It can be a numbers game: you interview a certain number of people, and some percentage of them say yes, and others end up not working with you.

The question is: do you ask every single person for feedback every single time you interview a new client?

In my opinion, I think not.

You don’t need feedback from everyone.

When you seek out everyone’s opinion, you water down the quality of the feedback you get back. The average of everyone’s thoughts will trend towards normal, or mediocre. You want to stand out, to cultivate a body of work, to own your own grounding in who you are.

In writing practice, you don’t ask everyone and anyone to give you feedback. I don’t want someone who has no sense of grammar, style, or punctuation to give me final copy-edit feedback on my book. I’m looking for one or two of the best copyeditors. When I’m working through the idea stage, I want the right subset of people who are interested in similar ideas, with a relevant background, or part of the type of audience I’m looking to connect with.

In your business, you might start by asking everyone for feedback all of the time. Every new client is an opportunity to learn! Yay!

As you grow, however, you’ll learn a lot about what clients want and don’t want, and you can start to hone in on who you ask for feedback.

As your best clients for feedback.

And when you miss closing a deal and you feel really bummed because you think that was a great opportunity for leveling up your business game, ask them how you could do better.

Focus on the areas you want to grow, and the people you want to work with, and collect feedback from these specific people.

In-depth feedback from very specific people who are tailored to your idea or business is better than cursory notes from a wide range of not-so-interested people.

 

When working on your business, remember you are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you. If it’s not a good fit, and you know that they aren’t your right client, learn from it — by focusing on the types of clients you want to attract, and spending your time and energy on them.

What do you think?

Where do you look for feedback? When do you decide not to get feedback? How do you decide what feedback to listen to, and what to ignore? Have you ever had a time when someone gave you feedback and you decided to do something differently?

Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

The hidden power of doing interviews (and how to get better at them).

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

New York Building Fronts

I used to hate interviews. I stammered, I inserted words such as “like” and “um” a whole bunch, and my voice pitched up at the end of nearly every sentence.

I sounded exactly like what I was—a young 20-something female with insecurity about my ideas.

Then I started listening to the interviews and analyzing them. I paid attention to everything—from the sound of my voice, to the way it pitched up, to my breathing, looking at the construction of sentences, and trying to understand the moments when it felt like I got insecure versus when I was the strongest and most confident.

Each time, I focused on something I could improve. My voice lowered, which made me sound more confident and also feel more confident.  I slowed down. I added more breath, which built calm. I layered back in some room to giggle and rush through my words, because when I get excited I speed up—and I like that authenticity. It also occurred to me that I like doing interviews at a particular time of day—early afternoon, when I’m starting to feel very chatty and I want to talk to people. I started scheduling them for times that fit well with my brain schedule.

Getting better at interviews.

To get better at interviews, and presentations—the best way is to do them over and over again.

Grab a friend (or a video) and set yourself up with a mock interview. Chat for twenty minutes. Share your ideas. Let yourself ramble. Then, watch the tape. Ask for feedback. Where were you your best? What made you shine? What parts could improve? Work out each of the little stumbles until you feel comfortable with the sequence of changes.

Find out what makes you feel good. Set up a room, an environment, a location that you love. Maybe you scout out the person beforehand. Maybe you have your favorite cup of coffee–and your favorite glass of wine before hand. Maybe you need to warm-up to conversation with a trusted friend before you start.

Perhaps you write out ideas in advance so you have a cue sheet or you’ve done some advance thinking. I like to ask my interviewer for a general topic list and sample questions so I know what area(s) we’ll be chatting about. Sometimes I’ll write out an essay answer the night before to the questions–and while I won’t read it out loud the next day (it sounds terrible on tape, FYI), just the act of doing the thinking helps set me up for good stuff later.

Learn to love the process: self-reflection and being able to identify how to make changes is powerful.

Why I love interviews.

Now, somewhat surprisingly, I actually enjoy listening to the interviews I get to do.

Beyond the technical considerations and feedback, it becomes a place to test ideas and learn from the medium of voice. For some reason, the way I explain things out loud is different than in print—and so the spoken word becomes a place for me to learn more about my thoughts.

Listening to interviews is a chance to mine your mind for thoughts and ideas, and write out some of the ways you construct sentences, thoughts, and observations. You can pay attention to when you get excited, where you stumble, what you get frustrated or stumped by, and what comes easily to you.

A good interviewer will ask thought-provoking questions, and often I’ll stumble into a new area of ideas that I haven’t written about yet, yielding juicy content and rich ideas for future essays. I discovered that the ideas we unearthed were seeds waiting to be watered, new ideas to plant. I still love writing far more than I love interviews. I prefer to be alone, with my thoughts and ideas, sharing my brain through this pen-and-paper medium. When you read my posts and my books, you get my brain.

But interviews can be potent sources of discovery and idea generation.

This week, I was interviewed by Joel Zaslosfky over on the Value of Simple podcast. We talk about identity, how difficult it is to define yourself and what you do, the drawbacks of storytelling, and the power of addiction in both positive and negative terms. If you have a half an hour today, download it and take a listen and let me know what you think.