Unlock Your Company’s Expertise: SME Interview Tips

“How do I make my marketing content unique?” is a question we hear frequently from B2B marketers across industries. Standing out is difficult—especially in a marketing landscape where everything is more efficient, more optimized, and more innovative.

One way B2B brands can set themselves apart is by harnessing the unique perspectives of their company’s subject matter experts (SMEs), such as engineers, architects, developers, and sales teams. By working with SMEs thoughtfully and candidly, you can supercharge your content with expert tips, unique industry insights or observations, firsthand experiences, funny anecdotes, customer success stories, and so much more.

That said, SME involvement in marketing content development can often be limited to just an initial interview and a handful of draft reviews. With time at a premium, optimizing how your internal teams and agency partners work with SMEs is critical.

To help you do it, we’ve compiled some tips based on our experiences working with SMEs as we create B2B content, campaigns, and marketing strategies. These best practices will help you more effectively work with SMEs, regardless of whether you’re creating content with internal resources or through an agency partner.

Before the meeting: Setting the stage for success

1. Align on your marketing content’s goal. While you may need some help from the SMEs to dial in your approach, doing the due diligence to define your audience and objective upfront will help the entire process go smoothly.

For example, at CMD, we use a simple framework called Get-To-By to ensure our work aligns to client objectives at every step. Doing so, we keep the target audience, objective, and key tactics top of mind throughout every project.

For example, a Get-To-By for an IT services provider project might look something like this:

Get: IT decision-makers

To: Sign up for a free cloud assessment

By: Sharing key proof points and customer success stories while highlighting how easy the assessment is

2. Invite your experts—and sync with them before the call. You’ll want to match your SMEs to the purpose of your meeting. For example, if you’re focusing on highlighting customer challenges and how your offering solves them, you’ll likely want to invite a salesperson with first-hand experience working with customers. If you’re hoping to unpack how a product works and what makes it so innovative, you’ll want to invite an engineer or product manager.

Once you’ve selected your dream team, be sure to touch base with your SME group ahead of the call to talk through the project’s goals and what you’re looking for from them. This will help ensure the eventual interview discussion goes smoothly and stays focused on high-value topics.

3. Identify any available resources. With your goal defined and experts assembled, you can start gathering resources to get your agency or internal content specialists up to speed before the group discussion. Writers will welcome all relevant content—especially sales decks and messaging playbooks. A thorough review of all relevant materials will help determine the right questions to ask in step four.

If you find that you don’t have a lot of usable resources—or any at all—it’s important to flag this up front so the writer knows that the SME interview will be especially critical. A detailed brief or quick huddle to share important information verbally can also help counteract a lack of supporting material.

4. Formulate the right questions. With a clear picture of your objective, team, and available resources, your writer can build a discussion guide to help solidify the story and uncover insights that will supercharge your content. As you work alongside them to craft a list of questions, it’s critical to assess the existing materials for any areas that aren’t clear or gaps in the story and plan to have the SME group explain, clarify, and weigh in.

Additionally, try to ask questions that create opportunities for SMEs to share their unique insights and experiences. Depending on your objective, you could ask them about what they hear from customers or prospects on a daily basis, how solutions are used in the real world, adoption of best practices, myths that should be debunked, and many other areas of interest. Of course, you’ll want to add in follow-up questions and additional lines of inquiry as you go.

During the meeting: Facilitating the expert insights your content needs

1. Have a designated leader and a designated scribe. SME interviews work best with a dedicated MC who moves the discussion along and ensures the conversation covers all the most important content needs. The best candidate for the interviewer gig is likely the person who will be writing the content—which is how we work at CMD. Likewise, assigning someone else the task of taking detailed notes and jotting down action items can help simplify the process going forward and provide a “single source of truth” for what was discussed. Offloading this task helps the meeting leader stay active and engaged.

2. Start by reiterating the meeting’s purpose. Kick things off by revisiting your goal, target audience, and general approach. Talking through the Get-To-By statement, if you’ve chosen to use that framework, is a great way to do this. Reminding everyone why you’re all there helps reestablish some essential guardrails for the discussion and clarifies potential disconnects up front.

3. Stick to the guide but be ready to improvise. High-quality SME interviews can be fast-moving and spirited discussions, and the best bits of information often come up unexpectedly. Meeting leaders should think like journalists and chase down stories, investigate possibilities, and round out narratives as they appear. Be sure to balance this freeform approach with the discussion guide, which acts as a “must-have” list for everything the writing team needs to deliver great content.

4. Don’t spend too much time on the basics. When possible, try to avoid asking SMEs to explain fundamental concepts or “industry 101”-type topics. Much of this information can easily be learned online, though particularly challenging topics may require some SME assistance. As we discussed earlier, you should seek to prompt SMEs for their thoughts and experiences around industry challenges, solution benefits, customer best practices, and anything else that can help make your content richer.

5. Create a feedback loop. To help deliver a first draft that’s spot on, the meeting leader should check their understanding and bounce ideas off the SMEs as the discussion unfolds. We find that periodically encapsulating and reiterating what the team is saying helps ensure everyone has the same key takeaways at the end.

After the meeting: Maximizing results

1. Help your writer know what’s most critical. A quick debrief or follow-up email after the SME interview can help quickly circumvent issues or course-correct on any necessary items. You can also flag any insights or talking points you’d like to ensure get included.

2. Follow up quickly. You may uncover that SMEs have additional materials to share after the meeting, or they may even agree to take on some additional content creation to help support the marketing initiatives. Whatever the case, don’t delay in following up to get what you need.

3. Use the interview takeaways to quality check the initial draft. As you assess and edit the first draft, remember that you can revisit the meeting recording to review critical input or better understand stakeholder expectations. It’s a great way to arrive at a first draft that impresses everyone involved.

4. Look for ways to keep generating content from the initial discussion. There are likely to be a few ideas, insights, or fantastic sound bites that get left on the cutting room floor. These portions of the SME interview can help you generate more content going forward. Additionally, the insights you use to build your primary marketing deliverable can likely be repurposed in many ways to continue fueling your marketing efforts.

Turn your unique expertise into amazing B2B content

To cut through the noise, your organization needs a unique voice. Tapping into the minds of your SMEs is one of the easiest and most authentic ways to make it happen. At CMD, we take great pride—and have a lot of fun—in facilitating amazing discussions with our clients’ technical and business resources. These conversations provide information and inspiration that help us deliver outstanding content and great marketing results for our clients.

Want to chat about how you can supercharge your content with SME insights?

We’d love to help—from planning and hosting the initial discussion to delivering the final copy and design as part of an integrated strategy. We’re a full-service digital marketing agency that specializes in simplifying marketing for high-complexity industries. Get in touch today.