AMA: Dovetail Product Marketing Lead, Alissa Lydon on Market Research

As someone immersed in this problem space for the past six months, the struggle of collecting and synthesizing large and disparate data sets is very real, but there are some promising developments. When trained correctly, generative AI can help uncover key themes in different data types. From summarizing calls and documents to pulling out emergent themes in larger data sets, some exciting new technologies can help make sense of various data sets quicker than any human can. Full disclosure - Dovetail is laser-focused on solving this problem for organizations of all sizes. If you want to learn how our solution helps you collect, analyze, and share customer insights at scale, check out our website.

I've already shared some ways that you can be scrappy with research, but one more thing I will add here is that even without some of these low-cost programs product marketing still has access to a mountain data that they can mine for insights. Sales and success are talking to customers every day, product are running their own research programs, support is sitting on a mountain of customer feedback via tickets, and the list goes on! If you don't have the budget or bandwidth to do your own research, find ways to tap into these sources to get some insight into the market. Even better, recruit these functions to help answer any questions that you might have. Looking for some messaging validation? Work with your favorite salesperson to test it out in their talk track. Want to explore new persona development? Customer success could be a great channel to access that persona in the customer base for qualitative interviews. Just like other product marketing disciplines, those who can effectively lead by influence are setting themselves up for long-term success.

If you have a large enough prospect/customer base, you can do some scrappy research yourself. Set up a quick survey, incentivize folks to complete it, and just like that you've created your own version of trend data. You can use a similar approach to do qualitative interviews with target personas and drill into more substantial topics. The best part? You can use those outputs not just as data to help inform things like product strategy, messaging, and other things, but they also make for great marketing content!

First understand the appetite level for research across the organization. If a lack of customer or market understanding is preventing the business from achieving key goals (closing more deals, delivering better products, etc.), and you can make that connection, then you might have an easier time unlocking the resources. If there are smaller pockets of need, or it's not a large enough problem across the business, then you might have to start with some scrappier tactics to prove the value. No matter which path you choose, it is critical to take time to speak with your stakeholders and understand where the gaps in market knowledge are, what those gaps are blocking the team from achieving, and diagnose what kind of research will help fill that knowledge gap.

Out of all of the frameworks I've tried, I think "jobs to be done" is my favorite. But in reality, I often end up riffing on it to build out a framework that is structured like the following: * Use case name (aka primary job to be done) * Persona(s) concerned with this JTBD * Pain points in trying to accomplish this job * Business impact of not getting this job done * The value prop of our solution in solving this pain * The differentiated features and services the solution provides to support the value prop * Customer proof I like this framework because it helps me compartmentalize the different building blocks for storytelling. But another downstream benefit is that it gives me a good roadmap for how I might organize my research roadmap. For example, perhaps when I first built out this framework I realized that I didn't have enough insight into how our solution is differentiated. That is a clear indication that I should focus on competitive research to help flesh that out a bit more.

UX research should be viewed as a valuable partner to product marketing. They are often researchers by training and can offer guidance on leveraging best practices to ensure that research data is high-quality. Just like any stakeholder, product marketing should strive to build a connection with this team and partner early and often. It's not that different from building relationships with product or GTM. Work with UX research to understand their goals, clearly share product marketing's key metrics, and look for those places of overlap to get some quick wins. Doing that unlocks future opportunities to bring new initiatives to the table, and increases the chances that product marketing can influence the research roadmap.

I think a two-step approach is best here. First, you need to make sure that people know these insights exist. That means meeting them where they are and creating rituals to share and consume insights. It might be during quarterly planning with the product team, or monthly enablements with the GTM teams, for example. At Dovetail, we do this as a company every month. We call it our "Customer Showcase." It is meant to be a rallying point for everyone to dig deep into what our customers think about our product. Whatever works best for your company, the ultimate goal is to start weaving customer and market insights into the DNA of your organization so that everyone becomes obsessed with the customer. From there, scaling becomes easier. This is when standing up an insights hub is valuable - a single source of truth for understanding your customer and the broader market. If you've successfully achieved step one above, you not only increase the odds that the content you publish will be consumed by relevant teams, but you also lay the groundwork for other teams to contribute to this body of knowledge. Sales should upload all of their calls, product has a place to store usability tests, and so on. But it takes a while to get to this place, so if you're starting from zero you have to make sure you don't skip the above step of creating reliable rituals to build that customer-centricity muscle.