Deploy Empathy

Hansen wrote this after several thousand customer interviews conducted while bootstrapping a software business, and it is the most practical book available on the mechanics of the conversation itself. At the centre is a section on how to talk so that people talk, giving the exact phrases that get somebody to keep going, to explain what they meant and to admit a workaround they were embarrassed by. There are scripts ready to use for discovery, retention and cancellation calls, and a method for turning a pile of transcripts into something a team can act on. Read it the week before the interviews rather than at the start of a project.