AMA: Momentive Director of Product Marketing, Global Insights Solutions, Morgan Molnar on Market Research

We just went through this exercise at Momentive, focusing specifically on building buyer persona "packs" – a collection of materials to help our broader organization understand our target personas. Depending on your project timeline, you'll likely want to conduct a blend of primary and secondary research as well as both quantitative and qualitative research. Quantitative research (industry reports, surveys, etc) can provide great stats, but qualitative research (interviews, recorded calls) is where you'll understand even more context about your buyers. Sources to help you prioritize which personas to focus on: * Industry reports where you might find stats about your industry's TAM, you may also find intel about the top buyers. * Your own customer database, segmented by spend level, purchase frequency, or renewal rate. * A market segmentation study - especially important if you are earlier stage and your customer database won't reflect the potential opportunity. Sources to help you create buyer personas: * Existing research that's been done at your company - this could be UX research, brand health studies, pricing interviews, etc. * Customer & prospect interviews - the best source of information is directly from the mouth of a real buyer. At Momentive, we use usertesting.com and respondent.io to recruit non-customers for interviews; we leverage our Customer Success team to get in touch with existing happy (and unhappy!) customers. * Market research surveys - by surveying a representative sample of your target buyers, you can easily quantify top challeges, pain points, and purchase drivers. I'm #blessed at Momentive to have our own survey platform & integrated panel (including B2B targeting) for this: momentive.ai/insights/ * Recorded customer calls: We're big fans of gong.io to listen to sales calls with our target buyers. Discovery calls are the best for teasing out context/challenges/pain. * Job descriptions: this is a sneaky one, but I love browsing LinkedIn job descriptions for specific titles so you can start to understand the nuances in responsibilities/ownership across different roles in a department. * Win/Loss analyses: great for getting insight into why you win. If you don't already, I'd recommend making win/loss fields mandatory in your sales CRM. * Internal experts: Selling to IT? Interview your own CIO. Selling to marketing? Interview your own marketing leaders. Sometimes they're the best sources * A good ol' Google search using top keywords can help you see which sites/publications are serving content to your target buyers, to know where your buyers can go for education/information. * Industry organization sites or publications can reveal hot topics your buyers care about In my experience, buyer personas are most impactful for aiding strategy for marketing, sales, and product prioritization. Once you get deeper into product design and UX copywriting, user personas become much more critical. Most of the sources I've stated above would be great for generating user personas, espeically 1:1 interviews. You would focus your questioning and documentation less around the buyer journey/decision making and more about their expectations/needs for the product itself.

Hah! You kinda answered your own question here. Create competitive intel that is easy to read and applicable to how Sales will use it! Sales doesn't want a novel about each competitor. They want high-level bullets that help them understand how to put their own company in context of that competitor if it comes up with a prospect. And most likely, competitors come up in sales conversations when a buyer is evaluating multiple options or if you're trying to replace an incumbent. Consider including some critical information that would help a sales person in these situations: where you're better, where they're better, how you win, why customers switch from them to you. The competitive intel sources I mentioned in another question will help you answer these.

Qualitative research is purely a category of research methods, and can be used for a variety of business needs / research goals. Qualitative "qual" research methods are can include observation, ethnography, 1:1 interviews, focus groups, and more. Qual research typically deals with unstructured data like behaviors, audio, text, imagery, videos, etc unlike quantitative research that deals with measureable quantities (i.e. statistics; numbers) like survey data, transactional data, etc. UX research will likely leverage several qualitiative methods to uncover the underlying motivations, instincts, and preferences along a product purchase cycle (from awareness/discoverability, exploration, intent, conversion, usage, and repeat). For software companies, examples of UX research projects could include exploratory research to understand buyer mental models when making purchases or usability studies to see how users will interact with screens and flows within your product. At Momentive, we have UX researchers that support both product and marketing teams to ensure we have intuitive, delightful user experiences across our logged-out websites and logged-in product. Product marketing may be involved in a variety of these projects (both as a contributor and as a consumer of the insights). Other ways I use qualitative research as a product marketer include developing buyer personas, testing messaging or product names, getting feedback on new pricing models / packages, gathering perspectives for thought leadership, getting feedback on a new pitch, and more.

There are many ways you could segment your market for your marketing and sales motions: from industries to personas to company size to geographies (and for B2C companies, major demographics like age, gender, etc come into play). The questions you need to ask are "Do these groups of customers have fundamentally different needs for our product?" and "Would we acquire these groups of customers in different ways?". Wherever the differences are greatest, you'll want to start there. Another key consideration is resourcing: do you have enough people to create focus areas among your marketing/sales/post-sales teams? Do you have enough bandwidth to create personalized messaging and campaigns? Do you have sufficient budget to split paid campaigns into different segments? Market research data or industry reports may be able to tell you what some of the largest groups are that you should go after, but you'll also inherently start to learn this when you start running marketing campaigns & selling. For example, it was immediately apparent to our sales team that institutional investors (hedge funds, equity analysts) spoke about research differently and had different objectives than insights and marketing professionals. Then we started to notice that B2B SaaS companies had different research challenges targeting niche groups of professionals than consumer goods companies doing research with the general population. As our teams scaled, this is where we made distinctions and split up our sales and marketing teams into "pods" to focus accordingly. Market research will come into play again when we need to make a strategic decision for which vertical to take on next and how to position ourselves differently. It's also worth noting that you may use a totally different framework for customer segmentation to structure your post-sales teams. For example we have segments for self-serve vs sales-assisted customers. Self-serve customers are segmented by subscription type, and sales customers are segmented by spend level to determine the level of support/service they can receive so that our team can scale their efforts.

Organizations will typically have the most behavioral data on their own customers and visitors. They know what customers are doing (and not doing) on their platform... where they drop off in a conversion funnel, what they click on, how frequently they log in, the product/feature mix they have used/purchased. This wealth of information can inform where to focus on if conversion/renewal/repeat/expansion within your own customer base is the goal. In some cases, for example if you're experiementing with a new user flow using an A/B test, behavioral data may be all you need to make a decision to move forward. But behavioral data is limiting as it only deals with people who are on your platform and features/flows that already exist. Market research can be used to complement behavioral data to provide additional context. It can provide the "why" behind behaviors and decisions people make. There are also other benefits. For one, you can reach a more representative group of people you don't already have access to to get an un-biased view of what your prospects or the market at large think. You can also get feedback on ideas earlier on in the development process. A great example would be feature prioritization. You could survey people to understand which features from a list you're considering would make people more likely to purchase/use your product. I'd generalize this by saying market research is better for informing decisions around strategic direction and pre-development; behavioral data is better for informing post-development optimizations.

All the time! Again, I'm lucky to be a product marketing leader working on a market research product, so I have unlimited access to our own message testing solutions. We approach quatitative message testing a couple different ways: - Our live marketing assets provide a great testing ground for messaging: you can A/B test things like ad copy and email subject lines and copy. Click-through rates can be a great indicator of what resonates. (Keep the visuals the same so you know results are only related to the copy/messaging itself) - We also run copy tests on high-traffic webpages, like our homepage. We have our own home-grown experimentation platform for this, but you could also use a solution like optimizely.com - The above two methods really only work for short copy and require you to get something live in production. And depending on your traffic volume, it could take a while to reach statistical significance on your A/B tests. So we also use surveys as a faster way to test messaging. With surveys, you can get explicit intel on top challenges, most important value props, and can pit messaging statements head to head. I will almost always conduct a messaging survey when I'm building a fresh messaging framework for a new solution or target persona. An example from a couple years ago is we were starting to lean into professional services offerings, and I wanted to know which language would sound most impressive when talking about our team. I used a survey to test phrases like "market research consultants" vs "market research experts" vs "research scientists" and understand those terms across a variety of attributes like knowledgeable, trusted, and approachable. Here's more info on our message testing solution: https://www.momentive.ai/en/solutions/message-testing/ and a guide to doing this yourself: https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/concept-testing-guide/ Qualitative ways to test and validate messaging would be to get in front of customers (interviews, injecting a question or two in existing research the team is conducting), and establishing a feedback loop with your sales & success teams that are actively using the messaging in conversations.

There are several departments who currently share "ownership" of competitive intelligence at Momentive, but we have plans to hire someone dedicated to this in the PMM org. Some of the top sources, tools, and vendors we use for competitive intelligence are: - Crayon.co for our comprehensive competitive intel database/repository & news feeds for specific top competitors - Clozd.com for Win/Loss and competitive intel related to specific deals we've lost to competitors (and also where we've beaten the competition) - As I mention in another answer, we also use Salesforce and Gong to track when we're running up against specific competitors - Our bi-annual brand health tracking study (we use our own solution: momentive.ai/en/solutions/brand-tracking/ ) keeps tabs on our own brand + competitor awareness & perception - Competitor websites & PR newsrooms for product naming intel, competitive messaging, etc; their YouTube channels can be a good source for product demos as well - Industry reports, including Gartner MQs & Forrester, to assess overall market trends and dynamics

When you have no budget: If you already have a survey platform in place, conducting interviews and surveys of your own lists (customer & prospect databases) is free! You just need a way to recruit them. For interviews or smaller sample sizes, you may want to go directly through your customer success team who has relationships with your customers. For larger sample sizes, you may want to send a few emails to invite people to take your survey. When you have a small budget: You may not be able to afford a consulting or research agency, but there are a ton of software tools out there that allow you to conduct your own market research on a smaller budget (of course, I'm biased to favor SurveyMonkey.com for quantitative research, and there are great online qual tools too). Many research technology companies provide templates to help people who are newer to research methods, and some even provide pay-as-you go consulting services so you're not locked into a larger engagement. As your budget scales: Once you've proven the value of market research at your company and secure more budget, this is when you'll start playing the balancing act of time and resources. You'll need to weigh moving fast using software internally vs comissioning a full-service vendor that may take a few weeks to deliver results. You'll need to be aware of your team's skillset, bandwidth, and business urgency to know when to outsource vs conduct research in-house.

I agree with you - tracking market trends is not something I'm doing on a continuous basis. Mostly because in our category, the trends don't change that often. We will look into big shifts and market trends about annually as part of our company's annual strategic & operational planning process. Additionally, we may dive into trends whenever we're creating thought leadership content—whether it be written guides or presentations for events—to make sure we're on-trend.

I wrote a comprehensive guide to doing market research here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/market-research-ultimate-guide/ It walks you through planning & scoping, study design, data collection, analysis, and taking action. Note that it is mostly focused on survey research, but the guide does touch on quantitative and qualitative methods.

Here is where market research can and should fit into the GTM life cycle: Exploration / business case justification: * Market sizing; TAM analysis * Market trends analysis * Usage & Attitudes study (incl identifying use cases) * Competitive intelligence Product development: * Shopper insights * Persona development * Idea screening * Feature prioritization * Concept testing * UX research * Price optimization Launch / introduction: * Package testing * Name testing * Message testing * Campaign creative testing Adoption & growth: * Brand & product awareness tracking * Ongoing competitive intelligence * Market research to inform thought leadership content & proof points * VoC & CX research, incl recruiting for case studies * Feature prioritization for product improvements Tips for integrating market research into the stages above: 1. Make sure it is an agreed-upon part of your GTM process. For example, I just created a GTM launch framework that included things like product name research and validation, message testing, etc. I got input and feedback from cross-functional leaders and now these things will be expected to move forward with any launch at our company. 2. If your organization is newer to market research, you can start by creating a research plan to get buy-in. This would include things like the business context, research objective, how the research will inform a decsion you will make / action you will take, potential business impact, plus any research you've done on the tools/vendors you may need to onboard to make it happen. 3. Create a DACI (Driver, Approver, Contributor, Informed) for who will own each of the research projects you intend to implement. You may find that it will make sense for strategy, product, product design, UX research, PMM, growth, brand, etc. to share the load. PMM should definitely not be responsible for everything listed above! 4. If you get buy-in for a project, be sure to follow-up with leadership on the results and impact of doing the research. Consistent exposure of the work will start to make it an expected part of the GTM process.