What to bring to your first content interview

Sell in Public → B2B LinkedIn content agency → LinkedIn content creation → finished content from one interview

Twenty minutes of thinking the day before is plenty.

Stories from the past year

Small, specific moments make better posts than big wins. Jot down a line for any of these that bring something to mind. The examples are made up, to show the level of detail that helps.

• A deal that turned on one moment. "The prospect went quiet for six weeks, then came back because a competitor's rollout had gone badly."
• A customer who surprised you. "One customer started running their Monday team meeting off our reporting screen. We never designed it for that."
• A decision that didn't work out. "We built an integration three customers asked for. None of them used it."
• Something that broke. An outage, a missed deadline, a launch that landed flat. How you handled it often makes a better post than the success did.
• A conversation you keep having. The question new hires, customers or investors ask you again and again.

Three or four stories is enough. You won't use them all, and the interviewer will find others as you talk.

Opinions you'd stand behind

Posts people remember usually take a position. Before the interview, think through a few of these questions:

• What do most people in your industry get wrong?
• Which common piece of advice have you stopped following?
• What do your buyers worry about too much, and what do they ignore?
• Which of your own past views about the market turned out to be wrong?

A useful opinion is specific enough that a smart person could disagree. "Customer success matters" doesn't qualify. "Most onboarding fails because the customer's champion changes jobs in the first quarter" does. (Both are made-up examples.)

Material you've already made

Anything with your thinking in it saves interview time and gives the writer more to work from. Send links ahead if you can, so the interviewer can ask about them.

• Recordings: webinars, podcast guest spots, conference talks, an all-hands where you explained the strategy well.
• Sales material: your deck, the follow-up email you send after a demo, a recorded discovery call you're allowed to share.
• Writing: old LinkedIn posts (including the ones that flopped), blog posts, a long Slack message you were proud of.

Who you want to reach

Describe your buyer in two sentences: their job title, what they're worried about this year, and what they'd type into a search bar. The interviewer uses this to steer toward the stories that person would care about.

Your off-limits list

Five minutes on this saves rewrites later. Tell the interviewer up front about anything they should never use, or should check with you first:

• Customers who haven't agreed to be named
• Pricing, deal terms and revenue figures
• Roadmap items and unreleased features
• Fundraising, hiring plans and anything about specific employees
• Competitors you won't criticize, or won't mention at all
• Topics you simply don't want to post about

You can also say "don't use that" during the interview itself. A good interviewer marks it and moves on.

On the day

• Turn your camera on if clips are a possibility, and sit somewhere quiet with decent light. Wired headphones usually sound better than a laptop mic.
• Block the time. Ask how long the interview runs, and keep a few minutes free after it for anything you want to flag. Interruptions break the thread of a story, and the second half of a story is usually the good part.
• Talk the way you'd talk to a customer. Don't perform for LinkedIn. Shaping the words is the writer's job.
• Go into detail. The name of the tool, what the customer actually said, the number you're allowed to share. Specifics make posts believable.
• Expect follow-up questions. "What happened next?" is where most of the usable material comes from.

After the conversation, the writer turns it into a set of drafts for you to review. To see that step, read how one interview becomes weeks of LinkedIn content, a made-up example from transcript to published posts. For the bigger picture of formats and quality checks, see what a LinkedIn content creation agency makes.