When I write a thought leadership article with a subject-matter expert, I plan for two interviews. The first finds the story. The second gathers the material that helps the reader understand and care about the story.
The rhythm comes from journalism, where reporters learn that an interview changes shape as a story takes form.
Interviews move from wide to narrow
Kim Cross, a narrative journalist who teaches feature writing at Harvard Extension School, describes interviewing for story in a series for Nieman Storyboard. She compares it to searching a dark warehouse with a flashlight. You sweep a wide beam to get your bearings. When something catches the light, you tighten the beam and look closely.
Cross breaks her process into four phases. They start with pre-interviews that test whether an idea holds up and end with interviews for the details of individual examples, anecdotes or turning points. She describes the progression as moving “from broad and open-ended to narrow and specific.”
That progression works for B2B thought leadership, too. I compress it into two conversations: a framing interview and a content interview.
The framing interview
The framing interview uses the wide beam of light on the flashlight. Its purpose is to find the argument this particular expert is positioned to make.
Often the first part of the call is discovery: what the expert works on, which problems keep landing on their desk, which topics they return to. Then I narrow toward a point of view. What do you believe that your peers would question? Which mistake do you see customers make again and again? Who bears the cost of it?
The framing interview ends with a core claim, a specific reader and a working headline. That gives the article a direction. The material comes later.
I put the framing in writing and send it to the expert to confirm. Seeing a position reduced to one sentence helps experts sharpen it. Sometimes they adjust it, and that is easier to do before a draft exists.
Now experts can also have framing conversations with AIs that have the right AI skills (like ours). This doesn’t replace a human journalist supporting with the framing but can be a useful brainstorming technique.
The content interview
The content interview uses the narrow beam on the flashlight. Ideally, it happens on a separate call, after the expert has agreed to the framing. We both know what the article will argue, so each question can serve that argument.
This is where the specifics come from. Walk me through the last time you saw this problem at a customer. What happened next? What did it cost? When did you change your mind about this, and what changed it? What do you tell a customer’s engineer who disagrees?
Interviewing is not an art or a science. It is a social science.
John Sawatsky, a Canadian journalist who has made a lifelong study of interviewing, told a Poynter seminar that interviewing “is not an art or a science. It is a social science.” He advised asking questions that place people back in their work, where they tend to recount what they did.
For a B2B expert, that means questions like “Where were you when X, Y, Z took place, crystalized, or changed?” The answer might be at the plant, the project standup or the customer meeting. Those settings hold the examples and figures a reader can test against their own experience.
Sawatsky also told interviewers to have a plan: know where the conversation needs to go and what you need to learn. In my process, the framing interview supplies that plan.
When one call does both jobs
Expert time is scarce, so it is tempting to combine the two conversations. In my experience, a combined call tends to stay at the level of opinion. The expert and the interviewer are still working out the argument, and little time is left to gather evidence for it.
AI adds to the temptation. A tool can turn notes from a framing conversation into a readable draft. However, the customer story and the numbers may still be with the expert and not in my notebook or on my recording.
What marketing leaders can plan for
Plan two conversations for each longer piece, and protect the second one on the expert’s calendar. Tell experts ahead of time that the content interview will ask for stories and figures, so they come prepared. Record both calls.
When a draft comes back, read each paragraph and ask whether a competitor could have published it. Where the answer is yes, go back to the expert with more questions.
The framing interview tells you what they want to say. The content interview pulls together their evidence to say it.
Your company’s expertise sits with people who are busy doing the work. The framing interview tells you what they want to say. The content interview pulls together their evidence to say it.
Further reading: Kim Cross’s series on narrative interviewing at Nieman Storyboard, and Poynter’s notes on John Sawatsky’s interviewing method.