AMA: Snow Software Director of Product Marketing, Jennifer Kuvlesky on Customer Research

I'd first understand the personas you are targeting-what problems do they have, how do they like to consume materials and find answers to their problems. You can have multiple personas, but for your home page, I'd stick to just one clear message that describes what problem you solve for your target persona. This is a good resource I've stumbled upon recently - Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller.  Using SEO optimization, digital advertising and sales outbounding, you can focus on other perso ...Read More

Start first by understanding what problems your product or service solves and the personas who are willing to pay for the problem to be solved. Then look at the alternatives in the market for solving those problems (products, services and DIY/free offerings) and how your product or service differentiates (or could differentiate by understanding your core competencies) against those alternatives. For instance, one company I worked at entered a well known market by providing a low cost, easy-to-us ...Read More

In my experience, the best way to communicate with sales people is to speak with them. They are so busy, and I find they don't read emails from PMMs, especially emails not directed to them personally.  In my opinion, the best way to share competitive materials is in a short team meeting, through the sales engineering/solution consulting teams and by directly responding to questions they have (where you can send links to prepared materials).  It also helps to be very clear about your competitive ...Read More

The good news is sales people notice when materials are out of date, and will let you know it is time for a refresh. :) Joking aside, here are some proactive tips on how to keep materials up to date. Market research: With Google alerts, you can capture trends, survey results and news for the topics your personas care about. If you subscribed to analyst research, be sure to have a look at new research on a regular basis. As PMMs, we write about many of these trends in blogs, and use updated stats ...Read More

The most common mistake I've seen in developing VoC programs is thinking too narrowly about the customers' voice. Often, VoC programs start with marketing or customer success with the goal of obtaining advocates for case studies, reviews and references. Advocates can be leveraged for so much more; for example: Participants in UX research Beta participants Participating in persona interviews or providing feedback on messaging In addition to obtaining case studies and references, VoC programs can ...Read More

Understanding your buyer persona, and their priorities will help you better understand your ideal customer profile. Your marketing team does not want to waste $ on generating leads that go no where, and your sales team wants leads they can easily convert. Are these complaints that exist at your organization today? There are only so many budget dollars available. If the problem you solve is not one of the highest priorities of your buyer, then it will make selling challenging, especially in tough ...Read More

In my experience, the main difference between UX and product marketing qualatative research is that UX teams are generally trying to understand user behavior for a specific product or feature where product marketers are trying to understand frustrations, motivations, problems, buying dynamics, etc. for both users and buyers for a speciifc product area or solution. PMM, UX and PM teams could do a better job of collaborating as all teams need to have a shared understanding of  the user personas, p ...Read More

There are situations where multiple personas might make sense. If you are just getting started, I'd focus on your primary persona and get that right. Does your product solve problems that multiple personas have? If so, you could extend your messaging to that persona. But don't assume the same message for your primary persona will land with your secondary persona. Do the persona research or risk throwing away marketing dollars. I had a product several years ago and the primary persona was the sys ...Read More

I've used VoC insights to improve marketing messages, campaign focus and customer experiences. Here are some examples.  Customer onboarding: Analyzing support case trends and feedback from product reviews helped reveal where customers were getting stuck on thier journey. Using this information, we created better onboarding guides and new onboarding services.  Website messaging: We got a download of all our customer reviews and analyzed these using manual methods (and natural language processing ...Read More

In my response, I'm assuming your company will be selling to professional services firms. I'd start with these questions:   Where are the dollars spent for professional services? What are the segments/industries/geographies/largest firms? Who is serving those segments? How are they solving the problem your app solves/will solve? Also think about how firms are solving the problem today (spreadsheets/DIY/manpower). Are there significant markets not being served by alternatives? Why? For markets be ...Read More

This one is tough because it is a lot easier to speak to people you have a relationship with than total strangers! We speak to our customers a lot but they are biased with how we solve their problems. We can also rely on speaking with 'friendly' customers and avoid speaking to customers who are not so happy with us.  Without speaking to people we don't know, we won't get to learn about perspectives of solving a particular problem, and we may fail to learn about other problems that need to be sol ...Read More