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

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 yo ...Read More

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? ...Read More

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 t ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 wit ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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: Ince ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 ...Read More