AMA: Cortex Head of Product Marketing, Lauren Craigie on Market Research

If your buyers are reading their reports, I treat it with the same weight as competitor positioning. In that—even if it doesn’t align exactly with your view of the world (it’s probably 9-12 months behind where you WANT the majority of your market to be)—it’s still a message that your buyers are hearing.

Customer (as in they’re paying you for your product) research: * Google forms * Typeform (there’s a free edition as well as a super cheap team plan) * SurveyMonkey

For gut checks on messaging, or for unguided surveys like pains and gains I do it myself via SurveyMonkey or Wynter. $600-$1200 will get you 50-100 answers from folks that meet your target market (you can choose qualifiers like industry, title, seniority, location but each will shrink the size of your pool). The thing I love most about these tools is 1) you can ask a qualifying question to eliminate anyone who’s never even heard of your category, or doesn’t do the work you aim to improve, for example. And 2) you’ll get your fully results back over a weekend. In my experience surveymonkey is faster but I have a little more faith in the quality of participants via Wynter. For things that I plan to use in external comms like a report based on survey data I’ve used ESG. For very high stakes research like pricing or roadmap I’ve used consultancies that specialize in jobs to be done research. You can get 5 high quality 60 min interviews for around $2k. and finally for win/loss research I always outsource—Clozd is a good vendor for these. I personally think you’re more likely to get higher quality feedback with a third party conducting the interview.

* Product usage data * NPS (I always prefer the standard calculation here as a bench mark but there’s other questions you should ask to determine how much value your customers get out of the product) * Feature satisfaction ranking surveys * Customer product requests * Customer support requests * Customer expansion or renewal data

I love mixing a short term win with long term gain. For example, maybe I’m writing a blog or prepping a presentation—I’ll ask for budget to do a quick industry or customer survey to create some good punch points. That’s a short term win. But I’ll add questions into the survey that I know I won’t have time to fully absorb for months when I can do a much broader analysis. Then I’ll update the ICP, help the SDRs with new sequences, reconsider my content roadmap.. etc. For the analyst firms—I think you need to show you have a proven tactic for success, but let your managers know that it’s an unavoidably long play for most. For example you can brief Gartner for free, but to really get mindshare—to get them to rethink a solution—you’ll need to initiate lots of inquiries and content reviews—something only customers have access to.

One way to do this is to lean into surveys—where you won’t have direct contact with your audience. But even then you’ll need to strip questions down to very specific structures. If you look up System Usability Survey for example, you’ll find specific guidelines for framing and repeating questions to better under customer user experience. Wynter also provides precise templates for jobs to be done and value surveys. However, this is also why win/loss and jobs to be done vendors are so useful (and so expensive). They’re trained to reduce bias as much as possible.

I have an answer to this, but also a caution! Caution: Everyone likes to have a slide in their analyst briefing decks that shows all the adjacent markets you’ll eventually conquer. (We have one too so no shade). But I would caution that there’s a difference between building a narrative that gives prospects (and partners and investors) faith that you have a vision—and focusing too quickly on “could be” use cases too early. It takes a really, really mature sales and marketing motion to start solution selling. Too soon and you’ll completely dilute your message on your website, in sales convos, in campaigns, etc. Your most viable prospect will have trouble sorting what you do, and might even think you do “too much” for them. Answer: If you think you’ve nailed not only product-market fit but go-to-market fit (apologies to the person I’m stealing this concept from! It’s not mine and I can’t remember who coined it but I love it)—in that your marketing and sales machine is dialed in, it’s time to consider new markets and use cases. Where I think you’re likely to see this organically (customers asking rather than your founders asking whether this is something customers could want) is when companies in your ICP that do truly understand your product, start evaluating you against a “simpler” solution. It’s easy to quickly dismiss these—“oh they do a fraction of what we do”—but these are the solutions that are worth a second look. If your customer is comparing you to something simpler it’s probably because they have a short-term use case that they want help on right now. And they’ve decided you can’t help. That’s a great place to consider expanding your product or marketing motion. But you’ll need critical mass of interest. Interview those customers, and create a new market survey asking about the pains that those solutions solve and how they solve them today. Importantly: Make sure what you’re considering accelerates deals rather than slows them. Sounds obvious, but for example, if your buyer is the VP of Marketing and you’re considering adding something they thought would make the product more attractive to their Sales counterpart, you need to ensure adding that feature or marketing motion doesn’t just introduce one more stakeholder into your buying process. If you’re comfortable with that, for certain segments, great. Otherwise it could overcomplicate things.

Some ideas: * Free: Use polls on LinkedIn. You can see who responds (their title, positions held in the past etc) * Free: Unincentivized user surveys * Cheap: Incentivized user surveys * Cheap: SurveyMonkey or Wynter for market surveys * Cheap: Wynter for buyer interviews (compared to other consulting companies who source and interview I’ve found Wynter to be a fraction of the cost per interview)

Re: templates. Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn and I’ll share what templates I’ve used in the past for ICP and personas. Re: Synthesizing approach: I try to keep the majority of collection activities very public to the founders and team leads as I go. I don’t want my final synthesis to feel like a surprise to anyone-just a neatly packaged version of the conversations we’ve been having about new insights all along the way. Examples: * I have a zapier connection to Typeform where I collect NPS and satisfaction surveys. When a customer submits one it goes to my “customer and market research” slack channel. Good and bad reviews are seen and actioned immediately by the leaders in CS and Product. * I share updates from surveys I’ve run with the sales team in weekly enablement sessions. Nuggets about top pains per segment and persona so they know I’m constantly iterating on these things. * I aim to refresh the ICP every 6 months and use company all-hands as an opportunity to plug new data I have about what our customers want and what the market wants with my ICP and persona templates.

Oh I love that you have a UX team that does a lot of this work! TLDR your UX team is building for what your ICP expects to see in product. You (the PMM) are building the ICP that they’re building for. Here’s how I’ve worked alongside that group in the past, but I’m sure it could be different fro everyone. Collaboration here is key. In my experience the UX team is usually thrilled to know someone else cares about this work :) UX research-led (I attend or listen to calls): * Jobs, pains, gains * Jobs to be done * Onboarding interviews (looking for what’s difficult) * Previous alternatives (what bias do they come to the table with—how do they expect to use the product) * System Usability Survey PMM-led: * Win/loss analysis * New market validation * New persona validation * Org structure mapping (who has pain versus buying authority) * Language-market fit (what words do they use to describe their problems and solutions) * Adjacent market solutions * Competitive analysis (positioning rather than what the UX team might look at which is what their product experience offers)

If you’re collecting product usage data I would look for the sticky parts and the untouched parts of the platform that your data shows should be valuable. Where do people dwell—is it because that part of the platform is hard to understand or because they get the most value from it? What’s missing from their daily workflows? Why? Look at your support tickets as well. Where are people getting stuck or losing speed? Is there an education gap or a product gap? I would also consider a customer CAB or PUG (power user group) to get continuous feedback from your users.

Not segmenting insights appropriately. If you’re leaning too heavily on what your biggest customers want, or what an industry report of c-suites says, but haven’t organized those insights according to your ICP, target personas, and unique buyer journey, you may over-rotate your roadmap and campaign strategy.