Customer Interviews for B2B Copy: Find the Words Buyers Use

"Robust scheduling automation for distributed teams" and "I just wanted everyone on the same page without sending ten emails" describe the same product. Only one of them sounds like a person.

The first line comes from inside the company, where someone chose words that sound professional. The second comes from a buyer who already paid. Buyers have already described the problem, the alternatives and the result, in their own words. Your job is to ask good questions and write down what they say.

If you still need to decide who to target and how to differ from competitors, do that first with a positioning process. This post is about the wording.

Why buyers' words beat yours#

A vendor says "workflow automation". A buyer says "I spend Friday afternoon copying numbers between three spreadsheets". The second sentence is better copy because it is specific and recognizable. Readers see their own situation and keep reading.

Interviews also show why people bought. The theory of jobs to be done ↗, developed by Clayton Christensen and colleagues, starts from the same idea: people choose a product for the job they need done in their situation. The situation and the job are what your copy should name.

Interview about one purchase, not about habits#

Nielsen Norman Group's guidance on interviewing users ↗ is a useful warning. It says the weak point of interviews is that they ask people to remember past use or guess at future use, and it advises watching what users do now. It also notes that people asked how they "usually" work often describe an idealized workflow, and that leading questions or pressure for answers make people invent opinions. The same article says specific, memorable past cases can still give useful detail.

A buying decision is a past event, so your interview data is recalled data. You can reduce the risk. Ask about one recent purchase and not about general habits. Ask for concrete details such as dates, people and alternatives. Then check what you hear against things you can observe, such as sales call recordings and the emails buyers sent.

Walk through the event on a timeline with four parts. First comes the situation before: what the buyer was doing about the problem. Then the trigger, which is whatever made them act at that moment. Then the search and the choice, including what they compared and what nearly stopped them. Last comes what changed afterwards, and how they would describe it.

These prompts work well:

Walk me through the day you decided to look for something new.
What were you using before, and what was wrong with it?
Who else was involved in the decision?
What else did you look at? What made you rule it out?
What worried you before you signed?
How do you describe what we do when a colleague asks?
What would you miss most if it disappeared tomorrow?

Avoid "Would you use…", "Do you like…" and "How can we improve?" They produce polite answers and little language.

A few habits matter more than any script. Record the call with permission, because memory edits and a recording keeps the exact words. Do not correct their terms. If a buyer uses a different name for your feature, write it down, since that is the name other buyers search for. When you hear a vague word like "efficient" or "messy", ask "what do you mean by that?", because the usable phrase sits in the follow-up. After an answer, stay quiet for a count of five. People often add the real point after a pause. And do not pitch. If you start defending the product, the interview is over.

Whom to ask#

Pick people who can remember the decision. Recent customers recall the trigger, the search and their doubts. Long-standing customers describe results in outcome terms. A lost prospect, or someone who chose a competitor, shows you which claims did not land.

Keep the groups separate in your notes. A buyer who chose you for speed may use very different language from one who chose you for trust, and you want to see that split. Ask for 30 minutes, say clearly that it is research and not a sales call, and offer a summary of what you learn.

Here is our view on one trade-off. For copy, we would rather have six carefully recorded interviews than a 200-response survey. A survey tells you which option people ticked. It does not give you the sentence they would say to a colleague, and that sentence is the thing you are after.

Turning transcripts into a language bank#

Use any transcription tool for a first draft, then listen once while you read, to fix names, terms and numbers. Note tone too: "it was a nightmare" said with a laugh means something different from the same words said flatly.

Then move the useful phrases into a shared sheet, one row per quote. Add columns for the speaker's role, company type, date, interview group and a tag.

Five tags cover most of what you need.

Read each transcript once to tag it, then sort the sheet by tag. The same phrases will repeat. Count them. Repetition across different interviews tells you a phrase is common and not one person's quirk.

With few customers, add other sources of real language to the same sheet: recorded sales calls, support tickets, review pages for you and your competitors, and replies to your outbound. Mark each row with its source, so you know how strong the evidence is.

From phrase to copy#

Use the sheet as raw material, not as a script.

Take the most repeated pain phrase and test it as a headline. If three customers said some version of "we never know which deals are real", that beats "Revenue visibility platform". Use the outcome and value language for subheads and page sections, and keep the specificity: "Know which deals will close this quarter" beats "improve forecasting". Anxiety quotes become your FAQ and the objection section of your sales script. If buyers worried about switching effort, say so on the page and answer it on the call.

This is an illustration of the pattern, not a client result.

Before (internal language)
Robust scheduling automation for distributed teams
 
Interview language
"I just wanted everyone on the same page without sending ten emails."
"The email back-and-forth was killing our week."
 
After (customer language)
Get your team on the same page without the email back-and-forth

The second version names the pain, uses the buyer's phrase and promises an outcome. You can also test it: watch whether people click, reply or book.

Edit lightly. Trim for length, fix grammar and remove anything that identifies the person. Do not stitch quotes together into something nobody said, and ask before you use a quote with a name.

Checking phrases against the market#

Your buyers' words matter more when you know what competitors say. Read the homepage and review pages of two or three alternatives, and add a column to your sheet: "Do competitors use this language?"

Three outcomes are common. If everyone uses the phrase, it is table stakes, so use it but do not lead with it. If nobody uses a phrase your customers use often, it is a candidate for your headline. If a competitor owns a phrase customers use, pick a more specific version or a different angle.

The same interview skills work on a different set of questions in a win/loss program, which asks why buyers chose or rejected you.

Keeping the bank current#

New copy is still a hypothesis. Show it to five people in the ICP and ask what they think the product does. Use it in outbound for a few weeks and watch which openers get replies. Do not read much into small samples: a few dozen visitors cannot tell you which headline is better, but a recurring confused reply can tell you which one is unclear.

Then make it a habit. Add one question about language to every customer call. Paste good sales-call phrases into the sheet each month. Review the sheet before you write any page, ad or email, so the site, sales and outbound all use the same message. The sales playbook is where that language should end up, so the calls and the website match.

Two warnings. Do not interview only fans, because the people who nearly said no teach you more. And do not leave the sheet with one person. A phrase that works for the founder of a small firm may not work for a procurement lead, and only shared notes show the difference.

If you want a first pass, book eight customers across the three groups, run the interviews with the timeline above, and rewrite one headline, one outbound opener and one FAQ from what you hear.