AMA: Narvar Head Of Product Marketing, Jeffrey Vocell on Competitive Market Research

A few tips to get to the right decision makers: 1. Look in your own database and reach out! Existing customers, as long as they're happy with you, are generally low-hanging fruit and fairly easy to reach. 2. Look on LinkedIn for people who fit your ideal persona/customer, and reach out. Response rates are generally low, but the better your copy and CTA the more likelihood you get a good response. 3. Use a research audience tool like SurveyMonkey, QuestionPro or others to target a specific audience beyond your network. This can be a great way to reach specific target buyers if you have some budget. You can also use tools like GLG as well to get 1:1 qualitative interviews with your target persona. On compensation... generally speaking yes. Depending on the time-investment I find the response rate to always be better when compensating and valuing their time. 

I don't think it's a question of industry reports VS in-house research, It's "And" and looking at both to get the full picture. Oftentimes big publications, or analysts will run industry reports which can be great for broad market understanding and numbers but in-house research can help fill-in specific details. If you have a subscription with an analyst firm, I'd recommend checking out the research they offer for broad market understanding. Also, if you regularly connect with specific analysts ask for their input on competitors and the broader market -- they often have good feedback. For in-house research I prefer to use it to tailor that understanding of the market to your company and your position within the market. Whether that's deeper research on pain points, positioning, personas/ICP, campaigns, and user research.

There are a lot of great ways to drive participation, some more scalable (but generally lower response rates) and some more high-touch. Here are a few ways you can think about driving participation: * Customer Advisory Board (CAB): This is one of the easiest ways, and channel that generally has the highest participation. If you have a CAB, then you should be meeting every ~3-5 months and can use an upcoming meeting to ask for participation or share a specific message to them to ask for their feedback. * In-Product Research: We did this at HubSpot and each quarter a set of customers was randomly selected and recieved an in-app message to participate in a survey. The group selected was different each quarter to ensure customers didn't get survey fatigue and it worked incredibly well. * Executive Outreach: A message from one of your core executives is likely to get a higher response rate. While it may not be possible every time you do market research, for a key study consider getting buy-in from an executive and working with them for outreach. * CSM Outreach: Aside from just executive outreach, CSMs talk with customers really frequently and personal outreach from CSMs to participate in market research can help generate higher open and participation rates. * Incentives: This is one of the most common and does tend to generate a slightly higher response rate, but can be costly. There are other incentives beyond gift cards -- such as access to new features for a limited time. * Paid participation: This is separate from incentives because it involves generally reaching people beyond your customer base. If you have a market research tool (like Qualtrics, QuestionPro, SurveyMonkey, etc.) there is functionality built-in to pay for responses. This can get costly for a very targeted audience, but if any of the other avenues aren't working -- or you just want to get feedback from people outside your customer base it's a great option to consider.

There are a lot of great research tools on the market - QuestionPro, Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, and more that will all ultimately help get quantitative data you need. Whichever you select, make sure to align with other teams cross-functionally on the tools you are evaluating and what has been used in the past. It's possible that another team already has a survey solution you can use without having to purchase any new tool. For qualitative research since it's so varied and tends to be longer-form there's no single tool. This could mean listening to calls in Gong/Chorus, having 1:1 conversations with a Customer Advisory Board (which I've typically recorded notes in a Google Doc for), or more. Regardless of the method -- the important parts are a centralized place (folder, or tool) for all this research and sharing with relevant colleagues. The information you collect in research is pretty much always useful to multiple parts of the business so consider how to package and share it accordingly.

Great question! Voice of Customer programs are incredibly important to keeping a pulse on your customer base, and ensuring your product/service is meeting the needs of customers. Gaining buy-in can be a challenge, but I'd recommend a few things: * Set the vision for your VOC program. Ideally this can mean a few objectives to focus on initially, and some medium-to-long-term objectives to expand to once you see initial success. * Tie VOC objectives to core business goals and objectives. Great VOC programs exist cross-functionally, and impact a wide variety of business goals. As you start, ensure you know what those objectives are, how they're measured, and consider some of the ways VOC can impact those objectives positiviely. * Work with stakeholders to set appropriate expectations. Especially when starting a big cross-functional program, you'll need a lot of buy-in -- and part of doing that will mean setting the right expectations with how different people and departments participate. Think about the value to Product Management, Customer Success, Sales, Marketing, and outline specific needs and time investment for all the participants you're expecting. * Show each stakeholder the value they'll get from a VOC program. More specifically, talk through the ROI of the VOC program and how it will specifically help them and their objectives. There are plenty of ROI calculators and stats out there you can find with a search as well. Once you have buy-in, you should leverage tools you have to collect customer feedback like NPS/CSAT already, or evaluate tools if you don't currently have one. Then determine who will own collection, analysis, and dissemination of this data on a regular cadence. One part of VOC that's talked about a lot is the collection of feedback -- but just as important is the analysis and collaboration on that feedback to make change. Finally, the feedback loop back to customers is critical so they feel involved and a part of the process and that their feedback matters. 

I think being aware of and ideally staying ahead of trends that change the way you work, or impact your buyers is important. But some trends are short-term and don't change much at all. Seeing the difference and not chasing after every trend will be important to the outcome of your research efforts. Rather than doing specfiic research on every single trend, I think it's important to continue to do research on how your audiences work and how that evolves and looking at how this information evolves - along with the broader market will generally give you insight into broader trends happening. Let's take the current market (as of December 2022) as an example. The economy has shifted, decision makers in especially large purchases are changing, budgets are shrinking (generally speaking), and employees are being asked to do more with less. We have to be aware of this market shift because it affects our positioning, way we enable Sales, content, and more. Naturally if we continue to connect with buyers and users and understand how their process and day-to-day lives are changing we can be aware of this current trend and evolve along with it. 

Prioritizing buyer vs user research I think ties into broader business goals. Do you need to power acquisition efforts and broader brand teams? Then I'd prioritize buyer research. On the other hand, if you have an acquisition machine that is generating plenty of sales but retention could be improved, then I think looking at user research needs to be prioritized in this case. As with almost anything the answer is a bit grey, because there are plenty of examples where both types of research can help. If you work for an established software company, you may have a UX team which does some user research as well which can naturally help prioritize. If your company does have a UX team doing this research, I'd recommend building a strong relationship with that team and sharing all the research you are doing to help inform all the efforts across Product Marketing and UX.

I've found a few of the top methods for conducting competitive research: * Competitive Content - Starting with your key competitors and understanding how they're positioning themselves, what content they are creating and releasing is a great starting point. Based on your product expertise (of your own product), this should give you some high-level insight into key differentiators. You can also infer a lot between what they share versus what they don't (for example, is their technical documentation available or do you need to be a customer and log in? What about their pricing and packaging... is it live on their website?) * Review Sites - Such as G2, Trust Radius, and others. There is generally a lot of value in looking at the positive AND negative reviews of your key competitors on review sites. Being mindful of how those reviews are changing overtime can also give you insight into their focus and strategy. * Customers who previously used a competitor - It's likely that you have some current customers who have used at least one of your competitors. Hop on a call with a few each month/quarter to understand what they liked or disliked about that other solution and why they transitioned to your product. You can also do this in the other direction and look at customers who have recently churned and try to talk with them -- response rates for this is generally lower, but it can be a goldmine of information. * Win/Loss Data & Interviews - As a part of your sales process you should be collecting data on why you won, or lost, a deal. Aggregating these insights on a regular basis and tracking them can provide trends on why you're winning and losing for quantitative data. For a qualitative perspective, going deeper and conducting 1:1 "closed won/lost interviews". In my experience, these interviews are a valuable source of insight and depending on team size and bandwidth even conducting a few per quarter/year can equip you and your sales team for success.

With a lot of inputs, organizing key attributes or commonalities of each persona is important. There are plenty of templates and tools available on the market (and many free) -- but I've always used a spreadsheet to consolidate and synthesize data, and then a slide for the persona. I'll breakdown some details of what's in each below. Synthesizing persona data: Ideally you should have multiple tabs, or columns with data including... * Demographic data (age, generder, location, income, etc) * Psychographic data (values, interests, attitudes, etc) * Buying committee (who is a part of the buying decision, what role does each play, factors that influence their decision, tools they have today/have used, etc) Persona template/slide: There are a lot of free templates out there, but I like to include a sub-section of the above: * Name (i.e. at HubSpot we referred to our marketing persona for a long time as "Marketing Mary" which gave common language for everyone internally to use). * Key demographic details * Online behavior * Hopes & dreams * Fears & challenges * Brand affinity (brands your persona likes, resonates with) * Tools your persona uses As I like to say to my GTM teams, the persona is a map to the individual so including key relevant detail that your teams can use is critical.

First, I think you need to start at a broader level and look at the overall company and product priorities. If you have a yearly roadmap, marketing themes, then it should inform the types of research you are doing. After that, I think you can break down your research a bit more granularly... * Does this research tie to a theme, or major product launch/priority for the business this year? If not, then pause and consider whether you should be investing in the research. To be clear, there are very valid cases to do this research, but generally speaking they should not command as much budget or time as others. * What is the goal or intended outcome for your research? If you're conducting research for a major upcoming launch, then maybe you're looking to understand themes for positioning and the launch campaign. Whatever the case -- define this upfront to help set expectations. With that said, I would dedicated a a good chunk of the budget to research for major launches or campaigns. Let's say you have a $50,000 research budget for the year, with 2 major launches. This is an overly simplified example, but I'd break it down something like this... * $15,000 - Dedicated to each launch for positioning, campaign support, and data. * $10,000 - Overall persona/theme research. If you don't have personas I would increase this number, but especially with the state of the economy now (as of December 2022) and changes to how enterprises are buying software, most PMM teams should be thinking about changes to their buying journey and doing some research along those lines. If you already have all of this figured out, then this money could go to other research, or data for content. * $7,500 - Vision research. This is important, especially as you plan for next year or changes happen in the market that you want to stay on top of this part of your budget can be leveraged for that. It's ideal if you have a great relationship with executives and your product leader so this research can tie into that. * $2,500 - Ad hoc research. This is for priorities as they come-up, or research needs throughout the year. This can also be used if one of the above categories slightly overspends can take from this part of the budget a bit. Again, this is just a simplistic example and every business will be different but it's key to get cross-functional alignment and deeply understand the business priorities and themes before you start defining what your overall research budget is, and the breakdown of individual research projects.