How to interview experts

3 tips for better SME interviews →

Author

David Broderick
November 20, 2025

Make Every Pitch Your Best Pitch

Enough feeling like a fraud. 

Enough guessing. 

Enough being ghosted by prospects as soon as you send your price.

It’s time to create the sales materials you need to feel confident every time you talk to a potential client.

Materials that scream, “I know what I’m doing—and I’m damn good at it.”

That’s why we created The Pitch Perfect Pack.

It’s a collection of templates, cheat sheets, guides, and teardowns that will help you create professional-grade proposals, case studies, and capabilities deck.

You’ll have all the tools you need to confidently pitch bigger and better clients – and win!

Fine I admit it – I’m jealous!

I’m jealous of any content marketer with a background in journalism. 

(And also of any man over 5’8”, but that’s a separate thing…)

Folks coming from journalism have been trained in how to interview experts and turn their insights into captivating content.

While the rest of us are out here doing our best impression of someone who knows what tf they’re doing every time we hop on a Zoom call with an SME.

Luckily, Tracey Wallace is here to help.

She’s spilled the beans on her top three interviewing tips in The Best Advice I Have on Mastering the Art of Interviewing.

Check ‘em out to learn how to take your expert interviewing game to the next level…

🕵️ Follow the pain

The best piece of interviewing advice Tracey has ever gotten is:

Follow the pain.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. 

“Pain? I write B2B SaaS content…”

But here’s what Tracey means:

Part of your job as the interviewer is to pick up on subtle cues from your interviewee about where something was harder than expected, more challenging than expected, annoying, etc. All of these cues lead to more pain, and pain makes for an interesting story, even when you’re writing about B2B.

🦸 Map your interview to the Hero’s Journey

Star Wars. The Lord of the Rings. Babe 2: Pig In the City.

Three of the most beloved stories of our age.

The one thing they have in common?

They follow the Hero’s Journey – the three-part storytelling structure that our predictability-craving brains can’t get enough of.

As Tracey explains, the Hero’s Journey goes like this:

  • The departure. The hero leaves the familiar world behind.

  • The initiation. The hero learns to navigate the unfamiliar world.

  • The return. The hero returns to the familiar world.

The closer you can map the expert your interviewing's experience onto this three-part structure, the more effective your content is going to be.

So, Tracey recommends asking these questions to end up with a powerful narrative to base your content around:

  • Asking questions about the before:

    • What were they doing / how were things before?

    • What was hard about that before? What was easy?

    • What caused the change – a need by the company to solve for some kind of pain or an external force like covid or economic uncertainty? 

  • Asking about the initiation: 

    • What was that change like? 

    • All change has a slog of time and confusion that comes with it––what was that like? How long did it take? How did the person deal with it? 

  • Asking about the return: 

    • What is the world like now? How is it better, and how did this person contribute to making it such? << This is where you really get into their heroness. 

    • How is this new world more resilient than the last? Why is it better? 

    • What did they learn through his process? What advice would they give others going through something similar? What would or wouldn’t they do again, with hindsight?  

    • What’s next? Is there another change on the horizon? (there always is!)

🥹 Make an emotional tieback 

There’s one last thing Tracey recommends you do before you end the call:

Make an emotional tieback from this storyline to the expert’s life in general.

Here’s how she sets that up:

Thank you so much for all of this, and getting so deep on how this all came together. I only have one last question, and its pure curiosity at this point. This was a lot. And you handled it so well. On a personal level, I’m just wondering, why? Why do this? Why get out of bed in the morning and work on this set of problems? What inspires you about it? What do you learn from it? Why this?

Tracey says you might not use what they answer to this question specifically.

So why ask it?

It gives you a sense of why – why they started, why they ended up here, why they approached it the way they did, why they are who they are. It adds depth, and soul, and humanity. 

It is that humanity that connects us all after all, and that interviewing is ultimately after – to tell a great story, yes, but to tell a story only a human could tell.

Want to go deeper on creating content that builds brands and drives sales?

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