AMA: ServiceNow Director of Product Marketing, Don Fuss on Market Research

Alignment with product teams is essential to ensuring capabilities and features and positioned correctly. We leverage for following sources to derive potential names for new features and functions: sales, customers, outside agency, and our brand team. Additionally, we research out competition to better understand how our new features compare.

Focus groups and customer interviews are the optimal tools for voice of the customer research. We do leverage Qualtrics for specific survey feedback. It is critical to vet the key customer questions with the product and sales teams to ensure the feedback aligns to the specific goals of the research. We have leveraged our analyst relationships to gather voice of the customer feedback as well.

We incorporate our commissioned research into many of our product marketing decks, including first call decks, sales enablement decks, and go to market presentations. Competitive positioning and market data are critical to building out a strategic plan to capture market share and provide opportunity for upsell and cross sell of products and services.

Primary research can be executed through formal interviews with customers and sales teams. Additionally, tapping into any existing analyst research (particularly for Forrester, IDC and Gartner) from company subscriptions can be very useful. We continually leverage our product advisory council for feedback on features and functions, competitive positioning, and market trends.