The interview that gets the story

Drafting a customer story used to take a skilled writer three days. Now it takes minutes. Everything after this inherits the conversation; nothing rescues thin material.

The interview is the part of this job that has not been commoditised, and these instincts are worth more than they were five years ago, not less.

This guide is about making each conversation count. But first, a decision needs to be taken: is this story volume, or value?

A story program has at least two lanes; all are valid. Let's focus on two: the value story and the volume story.

Value stories deserve your best interviewer, prepared to the teeth: the flagship transformation, the top-100 account, the advocate whose forty-five minutes is a trust transaction with your most important relationship. If only every story could be a value story.

Volume stories are more tethered to real world needs. They might come from some thoughtful questions sent out as a campaign, event recordings, existing videos, QBR recordings, a webinar the customer spoke on, or an interview you or one of your colleagues did.

These sources vary wildly, yet handled with brand context and real editorial judgement, they produce stories genuinely worth publishing; perhaps the long tail of stories that would not have been told following the full process, expensive in time and budget. I think that closing this gap is one of the better things happening to this profession.

The mistake is indecision: averaging the two approaches; a thin process for your biggest relationship, an expensive one for a story nobody needed. Decide early which lane a story is in, and make the experience excellent in both; the advocate who fills in a sharp, respectful set of questions that come with great comms and follow-up should feel almost as well looked after as the one who gets the call.

Executives grant real access to people who have done the homework, politely withholding it from everyone else. Forty-five minutes with a CXO is not just a diary slot; it is a decision they made about whether you were worth it and it impacts the next time you ask.

So do the homework: their last results, their language, their recent announcements, their competitors. Ensure you are briefed by the account team and draft your question list in advance; not because you will follow it exactly, but because the preparation enables you to abandon it and still cover everything off when things take a diversion.

More than one perspective is even better; just because someone has a senior title does not mean they know what actually happened.

Question quality beats question quantity. The interviewers who come back with the good stuff are usually the ones who got a third of the way down their sheet, because they followed the conversation instead of the list.

It's obvious but a question list can only retrieve the answers to questions someone thought of in advance. The story you came for might not be the best your customer has to tell.

Around minute nineteen, someone says something slightly off-script: the Friday afternoon it all went wrong, the decision they nearly did not make, the colleague who told them it would never work.

That's the story. It was not on the question list. Only a listener who is not busy composing the next question will spot it. When the voice changes, put the sheet down and follow it. Later, a good writer deliberates over the opening of a story. An LLM might miss the significance of the minute-nineteen comment. Watch for this.

Deliberately, past the point of comfort. People fill silences with the thing they were not going to say. It's the cheapest interviewing technique there is, and the hardest to actually do, because every instinct says rescue the pause.

Few volunteer it. Everybody has had a moment. The despair halfway through implementation. Authentic and yet hard to get approval for, overcoming adversity is the difference between a story a prospect believes and one they skim. A journey with no jeopardy reads like a brochure.

Remind the advocate that nothing goes out without their approval.

The last five minutes of a good interview are the warmest the relationship will ever be.

Before the 'thank you's, two questions: First: "When it's ready, is there anyone besides you that needs to approve?" Finding the potential veto in week one is free; discovering it in week nine is how stories die. Second: "What would you like to get out of this?" Then deliver it. Both questions take thirty seconds, and each has saved me more stories than any technique on this list.

The recording, transcript and draft should follow fast; a couple of business days. Momentum is everything; every week between interview and draft lowers the chances of story approval. Same thing applies to volume stories.

Volume stories have never been easier, and it's now simple to create as many as the product team can eat.

Before the interview there is the ask, and after the draft there is the approval; both have their own guides: An ask worth saying yes to and Approved in days, not months.

How long should a customer interview be? Calls are rarely longer than an hour; you can achieve a lot in 45 minutes. Expect more than one call for a value story.

Should we send questions in advance? Send topics, not a script. An advocate deserves to know the territory and to flag anything off-limits; a full question list invites rehearsed answers and closes the door on the unscripted moment that usually turns out to be the story.

Can we use a QBR recording instead of an interview? Yes, and for many stories you should; with brand context and editorial judgement a good recording yields a story worth publishing. What it cannot give you is what was never said in the room: the near-failure, the personal stake, the feeling. Match the source to the ambition of the story.

Who should conduct the interview? Someone prepared, curious and comfortable with senior people; journalistic instinct matters more than product knowledge, which the questions can carry for you. Whoever it is, they arrive briefed by the account team and leave the relationship warmer than they found it.