> The responses that customers give to thoughtful, open-ended questions inform how customers think about their problems, needs, budgets, timeline, decision making process, fears, alternative options to your product, and the extent to which they perceive that your product solves their problem.
What I'd like to add here, since the article only indirectly says so, is that you shouldn't take any idea or request you get literally and start implementing it. Try to figure out what the underlying problem of the customer is, since often times they already have half a solution in their mind and just tell you what they need to make it work, when there might actually be a completely different approach to their problem that they didn't think of. I think that's the hard part of talking to customers.
And obviously, if your product does seem to be a good fit for the customer, but requires some rethinking of how to organize things or change workflows, finally selling the product is still hard, because they won't immediately see the benefit. In those cases, word of mouth really is your best friend, which somewhat requires you're selling in a sector where potential customers are strongly networked, so anything in the public sector is a good example here.
> Many engineers I've talked to report experiencing social anxiety and a sense of discomfort during sales conversations.
Something I can relate to. I really learned a lot in this field over the years, but I still leave selling to sales people. I'm often times joining our sales rep when he's visiting new or potential customers because of what I can learn, and just in case the customer has some specific technical questions. But when there's questions about feature requests or anything they dislike I'm easily tempted to always give honest answers like "uh I don't think this can easily be changed, I'd have to think about how I'd approach this", which, while honesty in general is a good thing, just doesn't work well in a sales conversation, like you have no clue about what you're doing. So I know when to shut up and let the sales guy fill in for me.
As of #3, we approach this by giving every customer a free trial of 6 month and then a 50% discount for the next 6 month. Since our product falls into the category of requiring some rethinking and restructuring, this has proven to be an excellent strategy, since we are often met with equal amounts of interest and hesitation.