AMA: Eventbrite Former Head of Product Marketing, Greg Hollander on Customer Research

This is a little meta, but the best advice I have is to treat your sellers as your customers.  What would you do to try to understand how to get a customer to use your product?  Do some research - via interviews, observations, surveys, etc, and learn their workflows, their gaps, their pain points, etc when it comes to how they use content to prep for sales calls (and for inside sales, while they’re actually on calls).  Then prototype (if appropriate), and get them to walk you through how they’d ...Read More

I’ve typically seen segmentation and personas fall flat in one of two ways: either they were purely based on readily available internal data (usually, transaction or product-focused), or they were purely based on external interviews and didn’t come with a perspective on how representative they were of our customer or prospect base.  The result: Sales uses one, Product uses another.  To drive towards maximum alignment of “who is our customer, and what do they care about”, it’s important to merge ...Read More

As they say, the proof’s in the pudding. If you work with folks who don’t see the value, it’s only once you get people using them and benefitting from them that they’ll be asking for more.  In general I think Product Marketing is about using your customer expertise to place smart bets on the places that are going to move the needle.  If you have a lot of conviction that personas are needed, you should place that bet.   Alternatively, if you’re not sure of the impact they’ll have, it might be wor ...Read More

  If you’re looking for specific titles, I think the approach you laid out makes sense. The screener survey is super important for making sure you’re find representative folks to talk to (based on your customer base or intended customer base), and not wasting your time. For sourcing the initial list, I try to make them a mix of current customers (sourced from our database) and potential prospects.  For prospects, I use an intercept on some of our web content, and sometimes tap into panels like G ...Read More

I have NOT found success testing messages out of context, like in surveys. It’s hard for respondents to truly put themselves in a buyer’s mindset. I’d recommend putting messaging into practice, in context, in ways that you can test and iterate.  For example, look at lift in conversion on landing pages, ads, or emails with messaging A vs. messaging B. Put pages up on sites like UserTesting.com to hear first-hand from potential customers (I’ve found a lot of success with the screeners they offer). ...Read More

For a full answer, check out my response to the question above about approaching segmentation and personas.   Specifically as it relates to launches, I try to keep of our "business-at-large" target customers in mind (ideally, we've already built product with one of those target customers in mind), but will often double click to understand the sub-segments that would be most interested in what's launching, so that I can further tailor messaging to the audiences that will best achieve the launch's ...Read More

The best way I’ve learned to think about it is that as Product Marketers you should be focused on researching the buyer, whereas UX researchers are focused on the User.  Sometimes this overlaps and results in different questions on the same content - for example, we might show the same landing page or in-product modal but they ask about whether the user found the information they needed, and I ask about how they interpreted names or messages.  That’s great, and creates a strong partnership.  Oth ...Read More

I don’t have any direct experience in this sector, but I’d encourage you to start by better understanding the segments of your market.  Whether through interviews, surveys, or product usage analysis (ideally some combination), you’ll need to identify the common threads between segments of your seemingly-fragmented base, and then create personas based on those segments.  Some dimensions to consider that span across job titles/industries/buyer types: “jobs to be done” (see Clayton Christensen’s wo ...Read More

This one’s a sensitive one, since it’s tough (and not necessarily good for the business) to get in the middle of a sales process. I’ve found most success reaching out to folks cold who are not in a buying cycle, and currently use a competitor, with the offer of just trying to learn more about their needs.  Even better if you have direct collaboration with Product and can tell the interviewees that what you learn from them will influence the solution you’re building, which would be available to t ...Read More