AMA: New Relic Director, Product Marketing, John Withers on Market Research

Market research is a must-have for a product launch. As Marketers, one of the requirements for doing our job (well) is to have a thorough understanding of the market. That means 1) identifying the personas our product(s) are intended to serve, 2) understanding each persona’s pain points and needs, 3) analyzing competitors and their abilities to serve the needs of the market, including understanding how our solution is (hopefully) differentiated, 4) having a sense of customers’ willingness to pay for the solution we’re launching (pricing and packaging), 5) knowing what messaging will resonate with our intended audience, and…so much more. In other words, if we haven’t taken the time to research the market, doing our job is nearly impossible. In terms of which methods are most effective, it likely depends on what industry you’re in, the size of your company (are you a startup trying to build a new category, or are you an enterprise company with lots of paying customers), and many other factors. I work in B2B SaaS, so I’ll share some thoughts on what I’ve seen work for my teams. But know that what I’ll list below are merely sources of information, each with their own pros and cons, so ultimately it’s up to Marketers to sift through it all to separate the signal from the noise. - Customers: If they’re actively engaged with your product, they can be a great source of feedback. An engaged customer might be willing to demo your product back to you, showing you how they use it, where they find value, but also where they need you to improve it to meet their unmet needs. The challenges with customers are 1) getting a large enough sample size so you don’t over-rotate to just a few customers’ feedback, and 2) making sure your customer isn’t sugar-coating their feedback, because they’re a people-pleaser. - Sales and Pre-Sales: AEs and SCs (speaking from the B2B SaaS perspective) talk to your customers and prospects all day, every day. So they will have tons of insights about customers’ needs, product gaps, your competitors advantages and disadvantages, etc. - Analysts: Analyst firms speak with countless customers who (if you’re an established company) use your solution, and other customers who use your competitors’ solutions. The volume of input that analysts collect is very helpful, and the competitor insights are an especially useful piece that you might not be able to acquire on your own. But analysts have their own biases, so take their research and analysis with a grain of salt, especially if you’re an unknown startup trying to break into a space. - Competitors: Your strongest competitors have teams of talented Product Marketers, Product Managers, and executives trying to understand and serve the market, just like you. Read their press releases, their blogs, their product pages, their 10Ks, and any other collateral you can get your hands on. You’ll learn a lot about your shared market this way. - The socials: Where do your customers hang out and talk about your product (or your competitors)? Reddit? X (FKA Twitter)? Hacker News? Luckily, I've got a social media team who semi-regularly shares social media mentions of our own company, as well as our competitors. The unvarnished opinions and rants of some of these users can be very insightful (but also can be completely misdirected, so take it with a grain of salt).

I laid out in another answer that Product Marketers should be reading competitors’ press releases, blogs, product pages, 10Ks, and any other collateral you can get your hands on. By doing so, you’ll get a sense of the following: 1. Their company strategy (where do they see the market evolving? What are the biggest opportunities and risks?) 2. Their product strategy (where are they investing their resources when they build?) 3. How they go-to-market (How to they message? How are they launching? What campaigns are they running?) Depending on how successful they are, you might “borrow” some of their messaging and/or tactics to bolster your own, if you feel as if what they’re doing is resonating with your intended audience. As Product Marketers, hopefully we can agree that the companies that win in the market don’t necessarily win because they build better products (although that certainly helps). Winning is a cross-functional effort, and Marketing plays a huge role in that. So by analyzing your competition, you very likely will learn better ways to connect with your own customers and prospects. For example: * How does their website compare with yours? Do they use different language to appeal to customers? * Do they have an active support page or Slack channel with engaged customers? * How well read are their blogs? What about their social media posts or YouTube videos? * Do they attend more trade shows than you, or invest more in their booth? * If you google your own products, do your competitors’ solutions show up as “Sponsored” results. If so, how are they messaging their solution?

Understanding personas and ideal customer profiles is, in many ways, the foundation for all that we do. If we don’t understand our users’ and customers’ pain points, then there’s very little chance that we’ll build, market, sell, and support the right solutions to meet their needs. At my company, at a strategic level, we have done a rigorous analysis of our market, of our personas (broken down by users, influencers, buyers, and more), and we regularly reevaluate what we believe to be true about each of them. On a more tactical level, when we build positioning and messaging, campaigns, sales collateral, etc, we start by identifying the relevant personas. For example, at my company, Product Marketing has led the development of company-wide sales plays, and we built out a rigorous analysis of both user/practitioner messaging and buyer/exec messaging, identifying the following: 1. The relevant personas 2. What their pain points were 3. What their goals were 4. What messages would resonate the most with them (among other things). By capturing these items, formally in a 1-pager, we were able to align the entire org, from Product, to Marketing, to Sales, which drove clarity for everyone involved.

One of the fundamental skills a Product Marketer must develop is the ability to influence others across the organization. This includes their manager, other Marketing leaders, their Product Manager counterpart(s), and executives. This ability to influence others is highly dependent on one’s credibility within the organization. An experienced and trusted Product Marketer might be able to more easily influence others even without rigorous analysis to back up their point of view–this may or may not be a good thing! Conversely, a less-seasoned Product Marketer, or one who’s new to an organization, may need to over-index on rigorous research to influence others, even if they truly know the market–again, this may or may not be a good thing! Either way, you might loosely follow the steps below to convert market research into actionable PMM insights: * Do the research: Check out the other question I answered about how to do this. * Derive insights: This will depend upon your goals, but ideally you will have had some hypotheses that you intended to confirm or deny, based on your research. What did you learn? * Capture your point of view (POV): Write down your findings, using a framework of your choice, to capture the take-aways. Do this separate from all of your research notes, so you have a clean POV that you can share with others. * Pressure test: Share your findings with someone who can pressure-test your POV. Your manager is (hopefully) the obvious choice here. Depending on your relationship and credibility with your Product Manager, you might choose to start with them instead. * Share widely: Let’s assume you’ve learned something significant, which needs to be shared broadly to other teams and/or leaders. As a next step, you might advocate to share your findings in a regular Product or Marketing leadership sync, or perhaps a small meeting with some influential leaders, or via email or Slack. The right method will depend on your own organization, but regardless of the forum, the goal is to share your new insights with those who can steer the ship in a new direction (if necessary).

Create a template with a number of questions that are well thought out, in advance. The questions serve two purposes: 1. To guide the conversation in a deliberate way (one that you’ve mapped out in advance, without the pressures of coming up with questions in real-time), and... 2. To drive a consistent process, which, hopefully, will help you identify useful patterns. To emphasize the first point, you should approach every customer conversation with a very specific goal: Something you want to learn, or something you want to get feedback on, etc. Having tailored questions that guide you to getting the responses you need will help you. That said, you also need to be agile and let the conversation flow in unexpected ways. Again, you won’t have thought of everything in advance, and by allowing a customer to steer the conversation, you’ll learn things that you wouldn’t have thought to ask in the first place.

Start by building relationships with the field (and if you need help doing that, ask your manager). In a healthy organization, where Sales and Product Marketing work well together, AEs will likely be receptive to working more closely with Product Marketers. From an AE’s perspective, they tend to assume that Product Marketers have the inside scoop on the product roadmap, or how that cool new feature works (and can you demo it?). Here are some tactical steps that I’ve seen lead to success: 1. Determine what you can offer to an AE that will be of interest to them (eg, offer to talk about a new feature, or run a demo, etc) 2. Identify a dozen or so AEs, including their accounts, regions, etc (typical Salesforce data) 3. Download the items from #2 into a spreadsheet 4. Craft a message that you think will resonate with a given AE (see #1). Treat the AE as if they were your customer, and treat the message as if it was “messaging” → Emphasize the value to the AE, get their attention, be concise, and have a clear call-to-action 5. Reach out to each AE on your spreadsheet with the message from #4, and track their responses. Follow up, as-necessary, until you’ve reached your goal. 6. Bonus: As you do this, you will naturally build relationships with certain AEs that will serve you (and them) going forward