AMA: Intercom Product Marketing Lead, Platform, Sonia Moaiery on Market Research

It really depends on the stage/GTM motion your company is in. You might want to focus on the user if you are really focused on product-led-growth (PLG) and reaching that point of 'activation' - aka the aha moment when a new user gets the value of your product and why they need it. If you have no idea what I'm talking about I'd suggest exploring this article/site from the product-led collective- https://www.productled.org/foundations/product-led-growth-metrics. Other scenarios where you may want to focus on the user is if you're seeing typical product usage metrics declining (DAU, WAU, MAU, time spent, L21+/28 - percent of users are active more than 20 days of the month) Prioritzing research with buyers may be more helpful if sales if you're exploring a new sales/GTM motion like moving up market to enterprise, or down market to self serve, targeting new buyers outside of your core buyer, landing/expanding, cross-sell etc. It also can make sense to do research almost exclusively with buyers but also sprinkle in some power users who know your product really well and are a big champion of yours. 

I believe the best way to segment your market is to do initial high-level qualitative interviews to get a broad understanding of the market, followed by a robust quantitative segmentation, and then follow up with in-depth qual with what you believe are your priority segments. A quantitative segmentation leverages a cluster analysis that considers: * company/customer demographics and technographics (size/industry/revenue/region etc.) * Attitudes - how they think/feel/pain points and perceptions of you and your competitor set * Behaviors - what they do, how they buy, purchase journey (self serve vs. sales assisted) Many companies will just segment the market based on #1.#1. But, #2#2 and #3#3 are critical. A cluster analysis of all three factors allows you to find groups of similar customers based on the smallest variations. A large-scale survey across geos (sample sizes of 600-1000, depending on the market) will generally include a discrete choice model that forces participants to make trade offs between attributes or features so you can really pull customers apart based on what they value and not just their demographics or technographics. Once you have a sense of various clusters/segments and what defines them and how they differ, you can internally align and workshop which 1-2 segments are your targets and are priority. Your segmentation survey should help you understand not only the segments but also what is your company’s differentiated value (what can ONLY you do for customers that competitors can't) and what types of companies really care about that value (what characteristics do they have in common). Once you’ve identified the priority segments, you can move on to learning about the specific personas inside those orgs. With segmentation keep in mind that your goal is to be more targeted in prospecting to support sales and marketing, and also give Product a north star for who to build for. So at the end of the day the end output has to allow marketing to change who they target and with what message and for sales to get higher quality leads as a result. If your segmentation can’t provide that, it’s a big investment to make!

I always start with positioning ideas as hypotheses (a fancy term for your hunches). This approach is helpful to show stakeholders that you’re open to their input/feedback, and potentially being wrong. When you have hypotheses, you come to the conversation saying “here’s something I have a hunch about, but I don’t have enough data yet to tell me this is a good idea or the right thing, I’d love to hear your thoughts or help me poke holes in this” I think about building consensus in three stages to bring stakeholders along the journey with you so none of your ideas feel like a surprise by the time you get to the last stage: 1. Shopping around your idea / planting the seed - These plant-the-seed conversations are most effective 1:1, it’s a safe space to throw around hypotheses, pressure tests and debate with your stakeholder. This is your chance to understand their goals, potential push back they’d have and even potentially get access to systems or data that help you prove/disprove your idea. Before you have this conversation, try to understand more about this person's function, their goals, team vision etc. Use all of the insights from these conversations to refine your hypotheses and get really sharp on potential impact you can create and the risks since your data is limited. 2. Building a draft proposal or case - Write up a draft of your proposal - key word being draft. It’s best if you can follow up on those 1:1 on conversations with “hey stakeholder, I wrote a work in process proposal for that idea we talked about and I sharpened it up after talking to other colleagues too, I’m following up with it here to get your thoughts” The key is to ask for their input to progress to the next stage of Consensus Building. 3. Consensus building - this isn’t necessarily one meeting and you’re done. You may have to jump back and forth between #2#2#2#2 and #3#3#3#3 a bit. This might look like bringing together a group of stakeholders to review a more final proposal, asynchronous feedback etc. By the time you get to this stage, the hypothesis and idea isn’t new to stakeholders and you’re aware of any potential challenges your stakeholders will have. Lastly, data doesn’t always have to be charts and graphs from big surveys you fielded or hundreds of interviews. There is so much customer voice lurking around your org -whether it’s NPS data, sales feedback, anecdotal stories from customers, win/loss feedback, industry reports and trends, dashboards on user analytics/behavior. There’s a lot you can unearth with what you already have but be careful to not only cherry pick only things that support your idea, but take advantage of the existing data that might be siloed across teams in your org.

It’s no surprise since at Intercom we offer an in-product surveys tool, so I’m naturally a big fan of in-product surveys. Even before Intercom, I had always seen a 3-4x response rate to in-product surveys than email or any other channel. I think surveys in-product are generally more valuable for quantitative insight and tactics like interviews, a customer advisory board and focus groups are more helpful for those rich emotional or granular feedback. How does your customer feel about your product and which problems are most urgent to them are best revealed in a live conversation. The way to extract insights that are meaningful is to really make sure you write your survey questions or qual discussion guide questions with as little bias as possible. Good research is designed to minimize bias. I always have a friend or researcher review my discussion guides if I’m writing them myself to make sure I’m not leading the participant and stripping out bias. Here’s a few watch outs that are common: * Avoid asking yes/no questions - you want to actively encourage discussion by posing open-ended questions and understand the “why” * Confirmation bias - This is a tendency to find what you’re looking for and ignore any contradictory information that doesn’t support your hypothesis (the cherry picking I mentioned earlier) * Selection bias - it’s easy to get stuck in an echo chamber of your existing customers who love you. Be really thoughtful about who the target audience is for research and if you’re interviewing existing customers, make sure they’re not actively engaged in other betas or giving input on other product areas so as to not overwhelm them and remember you’re not building a product for a single customer. Give participants permission to be critical - Encourage participants to be comfortable sharing a critical perspective. If you’re showing them a new product concept, let them know it’s okay if they say their willingness to pay is zero or if they’d have no use for the product at all - in fact this is helpful information for you!

Interesting! I think it's always best to acknwoledge your stakeholder groups concerns. They're probably mostly worried about the following 1) overwhelming a client with too many asks and requests/wasting their time 2) jeopardizing a clients renewal or upsell that's in process and 3) signing up for more work themselves to coordinate your research. These are really fair concerns but you also need to do your research! Here's an example of a note that I would send that stakeholder to address all of the concerns above and ask them to help you identify customers so you're respecting their concerns. And, asking for their input always helps! _________ Hi internal stakeholder, You may have heard about X project/new product that I'm driving with X senior leader, it's an exciting project that will inform the strategy on XYZ. I'm eager to speak with a few of your customers to get further insight on this topic. I want to be cognizant of their/your time, so was wondering if you could help me identify 4-5 customers that I could speak with that don't have upcoming renewals and haven't been hit up too much lately by us. This is an opportunity to show your customer that we take feedback seriously as it will be going directly into the product we're building. I will handle all the scheduling (and include you on the conversation as optional so you're in the loop!) and here is a copy of the questions I will be asking, feel free to leave comments if you have input on the questions. I'd also be happy to offer your client the following incentive as a thank you for their time. If you have questions I've copied X senior leader who is quarterbacking this intiaitve with me!

It really depends on a few factors: time, resources and who the competitive research helps. I would answer these questions to help you gauge how deep you go. There are entire PMMs dedicated to competitive research and you may not have that type of time/resource so you need to determine the level of effort you put into this. * Time - is this an extremely urgent question that needs to be answered in the next week, three weeks, 6 weeks, 12 weeks? * Resource- do you have a budget, if so, how much is it? Can I do this myself or do I need an agency because it has to be run across several geos, segments etc. Or, do I need any other team's support to do it? Is desk research enough? * Who this research helps - Who is going to be using and consuming the research I do? Is it the sales team? Product team? Executive team? If it’s an executive team, it may need a higher burden of proof because it may be in service of really company-wide decisions. Once you’ve determine that there are various tactics you can explore but here’s a few tactics for common situations I’ve seen: * The sales team needs training on a new competitor on the scene and battlecards - This can be an urgent need and requires little budget. I would start to dig into a competitor's recent investor decks, webinars, YouTube channel, blog posts, new releases/changelog, messaging, set a google alert for them or use a tool like Crayon/Klue to track them. I’d also set a framework for your competitive set (who are top competitors, secondary competitors and up and coming) to determine how comprehensive the battle card needs to be. * You need a full tear down for execs / marketing take down campaign- You can do all of the above + collaborate with any internal research or competitor-focused teams, look into things like what roles/jobs they’re hiring, what conferences they’ve spoken at, what their executives are saying in press interviews / on LinkedIn, use a free log-in to their product or their customer community, identify customers who switched from a competitor and interview them! * Your product team needs to know a specific part of the product suite and what problems they’re solving in a certain space - A competitor help center / knowledge base often is a gold mine for how their product works and the technical nature of it that’s really helpful to product teams. Help docs can reveal a lot! Big announcement and launch events, webinars and customer newsletters are helpful ways to see what products are most important to a competitor. * Your sales team needs to know how to deposition your biggest competitor - Go really deep on their messaging and dig into win/loss data or G2 reviews to really zero in on where you win vs. this customer and where they win. Also interviewing customers who switched to you from a competitor helps here too.

Understanding the market landscape and how it breaks down is a good first step. For example, within the broader category of "customer engagement" there are sub categories like marketing and advertising tech, support/enagement channels, call analytics and contact centers and CRM. And then there are even more categories or sub jobs under each (read about the jobs to be done framework if you havent). To help create this 'market map' you can look to industry analysts or the Forrester / Gartner Magic Quadrants but I encourage you to not take these as boilerplate as it's really individual to your company and the way you uniquely view the world. Once you have the market map, I would identify where you play today and where there are potentially underserved markets. Are there few competitors, sub-jobs not well served, markets that would add value to your current offering, it could even be certain markets in certain geos. I would use this market map to connect with other teams likely already thinking about these questions like bizops and Product. The market map alone can be a good conversation starter. Ask questions like which of these areas do you think is underserved, where do you think our company is well positioned to play, how might we differentiate in these areas. I would then work with your bizops teams to size the TAM of your top list of 4-5 new markets and make some assumptions about how much share/revenue you could make in the next 2-5 years.

I think it’s helpful to have a customer advisory board - this is a select group of 5-10 customers who you meet with every 3-6 months to talk about big strategy topics like - company strategy, product roadmap and problems you can solve for them. This high-touch tactic generally requires a lot of prep / work but the relationships you build will pay off as these are likely the customers that will participate in future betas and other studies. A few other tactics outside of leveraging your CAB: * Incentives can help - they don’t necessarily have to be a cash incentive or gift card. In the past, I’ve offered, free access to a new product for a limited time, discounts on our product or higher-tier product, or free add-on implementation services. * Networking oppys- When I’ve run focus groups, a lot of participants will join because they’re curious what their peers in other companies are doing. For example, when we launched D&I ratings at Glassdoor, I hosted a small focus group roundtable for CHROs and Heads of D&I at various companies to get feedback on how we should approach a new D&I rating. But we also reserved the last 30 minutes of the focus group for them to talk to each other to learn what new D&I strategies they were running. They loved learning from each other and commiserating about the challenges they were facing. I believe two of the companies started partnering together on their approaches to salary transparency after this and were grateful to Glassdoor for facilitating the connection! * Invites from an exec/CEO- When I have recruited hard-to-reach Chief Executives, we had our CEO/CMO/CTO be the one to send out invites to ask them to join - these messages always got a higher response rate * Sign ups in product - In your product, include a self-serve option for customers to sign up to “participate in future research” or be part of the Customer Advisory Board. Make it easy for them to sign up for these things!

It depends on the company and if you have a formal research function or not! I've done everything from recruit participants, write discussion guides, field surveys, moderate research, synthesize insights. Or, I've given a researcher objectives and key questions and then sat in on a few interviews here and there. I think every PMM should have the experience of running their own research at some point - it keeps you close to the customer, helps you empathize with them and develop relationships with strategic customers (like if you run a CAB). But, as an org grows, you won't always have the bandwdith to do so. So, you have to find more scalable ways of staying close to the customer via Gong calls or collaborating closely with Research teams to make it easy for you to listen in on research or calls if you want. It can be hard to prioritize in the day to day but will make you a stronger product marketer and able to add more value to your product, marketing and sales counterparts.