AMA: Adobe Head of Lightroom Product Marketing, Mary Sheehan on Market Research

Firstly, know that there are ranges of budgets to create buyer personas depedning on if you go with an agency or do them in-house. I’ve worked for a company where we paid $100K to an agency to make buyer personas, and another one where I had to figure it out on a shoestring budget (< $1000). I honestly had so much more fun and learned so much more doing it the scrappy way! What did I use my scrappy budget for? I used budget for incentives to get clients, prospects, and churned customers to talk to me. I developed an interview script and trained others on HOW to interview so we quickly got 30+ customer conversations (recorded, too!). I used a little more budget to run an email raffle for customers that would take a survey. The chance of a $250 Amazon gift card gets people to answer your questions! But to answer your question directly, if you do not clearly know who your customers are - there is no way you’re being effective with your product development or marketing budget. One thing you might try is to ask 5-10 people internally in different orgs who they think your customers are. Chances are - the answers will be all over the place. Package this up and send it to your boss, or your exec team, wherever you have the best influence - and I bet you can make the case to get the budget and time resources you need.

Great question. When creating buyer personas, you’re ideally using data from current, prospective, and churned customers to create archetypes of your buyers. The goal is to understand more about your customers, design better products, create better marketing programs, and arm your sales team with the best talking points. The problem is, most personas suck! The ones I see most often have demographic info only (e.g. “Marketing Mary is 32, has a BA in Communication, and lives in a large city) or are really generic (e.g. “She’s hoping to increase her MQLs this year.”) Are these helpful? Not really. Understanding customer motivations is the key to better personas. I recommend surveying or interviewing 25 or so people and really trying to understand their motivations for using your product, or a product like yours. This will help you create much better personas. 25 sounds like a lot, but if you can train other team members, you can accomplish this quickly. Some questions to ask to uncover motivations: * What were the real pain points they had that led them to buy your product? * What were the alternatives to your product? * How did they get budget to buy this? Talking to existing and - even better - churned customers will give you the best insights. I wrote a blog post that dives deeper into this, and talks about a helpful framework to follow - “Jobs to Be Done” if you’re interested in learning more: https://yourgotomarketer.com/2017/05/01/why-traditional-personas-are-terrible-and-how-to-make-them-better/

I’ve had the best success with easy to digest “competitive battlecards” for sales. The simpler, the better. They should give basic company info, pricing, and how to handle objections. For larger sales teams, these are a great reference point for them to use on the phone. The ultimate goal of the battlecards should be for any salesperson - new or experienced - to be able to quickly articulate how you are different from the competition. If it doesn’t meet that goal, you’ve missed the mark. The design of this is important. I’ve used a Google doc with a grid and also a vertical PPT slide - it depends on what your company is most familiar with. I would try to update these at least once a quarter. Scrappy tip: If you’re in a pinch for time, use a service like UpWork to do the data entry for you - you create the framework, and they fill in the rest. For 5 competitors it should be no more than $100 if you pick a good freelancer.

I answered this in a similar post - see it here: https://sharebird.com/can-you-outline-the-best-structure-and-format-for-user-personas-that-are-useful-across-the-org

Once you’ve interviewed and/ or surveyed your customers, prospects, and churned customers - it’s time to put the personas into a digestible format. I recommend Google slides (or PPT, if that’s your jam) and hosting them on a central resource so all teams can use them. For example, at last night’s PMM meetup, Shyna Zhang, Director of Enterprise Strategy at Marketo, talked about how they whiteboarded the personas in a common space for product and engineering to always be able to reference, making it part of their daily decision making process. The personas should include: * A brief synopsis of who they are - i.e. “Marketing leader of 5-10 person teams, usually in the B2B space. Checks analytics every day and is obsessed with getting the maximum ROI” (B2B - make sure to use firmagraphic information. B2C demo information is more relevant) * What motivates them to buy your product or a product like yours * What their decision making power usually is (i.e. do they have the final call? Are they part of a team that decides?) * Quotes from actual interviews * Their real challenges and frustrations * Optional: What they love / hate about your product * Important: A catchy name to define each persona segment that people will remember (i.e. “Jack of all trades” or “Silver spoon” were ones we used for a prior project) The last bullet might seem random, but it’s critical to getting the personas used throughout your organization. If you do good work, and the personas have value, it won’t be long until you hear your CEO referring to one of the personas during an all hands meeting (true story!)

Market research on a tight budget, or what I like to call "Scrappy research" - my favorite! First, let me start with a quote - “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.” Many a research project hasn’t gotten off of the ground for fear it won’t be statistically significant or have thousands of responses. But guess what? Some market research is much better than NO market research. Here are some quick ideas: * Email a survey to your existing customer base * Message targets on LinkedIn with surveys * Conduct phone interviews with existing clients * Use Respondent.io for quick interview recruiting of non-clients * Bring an ipad to a conference with your customers / prospects and offer $5 or a starbucks gift card (right then!) to take your survey * Pull Google search trends to show the rise of certain key terms * Launch user testing on your website I also wrote a post on this - here if you want to go deeper.

Quick answer: Data. Bring them snippets of real customer conversations or data points that they haven't seen from customer interviews, surveys, CSAT, NPS, customer service feedback - you name it. This will show the value of talking to customers, and will leave them wanting more. To be even more influential, if your product or design team isn’t listening - make sure your exec team is. Get an executive sponsor who wants to champion the “voice of the customer” - and leverage their position to promote the customer insights you’re finding. It’s really dangerous when a product / eng team is building something “for themselves” - they will miss critical insights that could make or break the future of your product and company. It’s the PMMs job to show them the light!