AMA: Square Global Head of PMM and Content Marketing, TIDAL, Agustina Sacerdote on Market Research

Most of the cost associated with research is actually the cost of accessing a sample, so if you can figure out that piece, you should be in a much better spot. A couple of ideas: 1/ Talk to your happiest, unhappiest customers, customers that churned, and "prospects", if possible. Use your budget for incentives. This sample will at least give you the "extremes" of attitudes. 2/ There are some helpful online tools that you can sign up for and "trial" them at no cost- Optimal Sort, UserTesting, SurveyMoney, GetFeedback all have some sort of free trial. You can even take respondents through design files on something like Figma if you're looking for product feedback. 3/ Figure out beforehand what you need for "significance". Some organizations really do need the quantitative, large sample required to get to statistically significant answers, but if you're looking for a "gut check", you'll be fine with a small (n= 30) sample! 

1/ always start with what you have. This can include product usage data, user data, customer support calls, sales calls, etc. literally anyone that is customer-facing can provide something of value. 2/ i use research to really undestand that primary motivators and constraints for my audience. the feature or product should fit in that specific context --> your product should solve for the motivation + constraint. qualitative feedback is particularly helpful here. Many people thinking about starting a business turn to Square. Their motivation is something like "I think my idea could be a real business; I want to make it happen, despite what people may say!". The constraint is "I don't know where to start and this is intimidating." So we position our product as easy to use and educational, for this particular audience. Does that make sense? 

I would start with getting information from Sales first. At Square, I rely very strongly on Account Managers to get a sense for the needs and attitudes of larger merchants. I'll talk to them directly first and then will try to partner up with them on specific conversations to close very specific knowledge gaps. Try to coordinate with your Sales / AM counterparts to make the 30 - 45 minute call with customers productive for everyone. 

To me, it's about creating a customer-centric culture, not just a "market research" culture. "Market research" is a bit of a stigmatized term - most of it is considered not valuable, not actionable, and an expensive "nice-to-have". I'd encourage you to re-orient around building a habit of listening and talking to customers - often. What I try to do, very tactically is: 1/ help make the case for "discovery" in roadmaps as an official line item. Make sure formal product development time accounts for talking to relevant audiences before anything is built or designed. 2/ i invite product, design, and eng to my customer calls. you'd be surprised on how many will take you up on these offers if you actually set them up. 3/ I specifically create examples in our GTM plans for how a feature or product would be marketed to different targets. you have to be explicit and bring it to life for people that don't live and breathe this stuff every day. 

I absolutely start with behavioral data first - assuming that by "behavioral" you mean product usage data, regardless of the question I am trying to answer. Behavioral data is unbiased (it is users in their "natural" environment with your product), and it is always much more valuable to observe behaviors vs. stated answers. You want market research to confirm or disprove a hypothesis, which you develop looking at the data you already have. After you understand usage patterns (ideally by your relevant segments) you can pinpoint the areas in which you're still not really sure about and design research against these. 

I don't actually use market research for that, is the short answer. If we believe that our solution is well suited for a particular vertical, we have the budget to invest in GTM to capture business in this vertical, and the vertical is fragmented / doesn't have a real clear winner, we will go for it. Additionally, you should look at your own customer data and overlay it with your product. For example, if Square is has developed a number of features that are suited for Restaurants, we will prioritize this vertical. If after a couple of months we are not well penetrated here, we have a problem. 

I'd make sure I have crisp answers to the following - 1/ Re-visit the "why" behind the new feature. Why did you develop it? What is it supposed to solve? 2/ Who has this need, more than any other segments? 3/ Who are these people (from #2) already turning to to solve this need? 4/ How well does our feature meet the needs of this new audience relative to the tools / companies identified in #3? What are these specific gaps?

This is an awesome question! I think PMM has a responsibility along several stages of market research development. At a high level, User Research experts know what methodology, stimuli and structure to use for reseach - aka, they should take over once the need for research has been established and agreed upon cross-functionally (PM, PMM, Design). I expect PMMs on my team lead the following: 1/ Validate the need for research. Do we have this data elsewhere? Have we conducted an extensive audit (covering competitors, experience, etc.) 2/ Define the sample. Who should we talk to? Current users? Churned? A representative sample of who we're trying to target? 3/ Help User Research develop the research guide. What pain points are we wanting to evaluate? What do we want to confirm / disprove? 4/ Turn research findings into implications for messaging and general GTM strategy and execution.

Involve these functions in the actual development and execution of the research. the worst you can do is give the impression that research is a "black box" out of which slides with percentages come out! This means make them part of identifying the key questions, reviewing whatever instruments you are using (to a certain degree, make sure you're not violating any best practices in the spirit of inclusion) and get a sense BEFORE launching what success looks like for a particular research intiative. Also, see my answer for creating a "customer-centric" culture! Helpful tips there, hopefully! 

Frankly, #1 is cost. Industry reports tend to be expensive and often times too generic. I find that they're only worth it when there's a large organizational (wider than Marketing) need for basic industry or segment knowledge, like when the company as a whole is assessing new markets. Start with your research question - what exactly are you trying to answer? You'll realize that often times you can take that report cost and allocate it towards research that can answer your question much more directly. In order to justify the cost of production for there reports, research firms need to cater to the lowest common denominator to make them relevant for the largest audience possible! 

This is a great question. A couple of tips - The #1 way of making sure that personas will be adopted and used as a resource across functions is to make sure you're including variables that these particular functions care about. So Finance for example, will care about something like Average Revenue or Average Ticket Size. Brand will care about "Key attitudes and motivators". Customer Success will care about "How do they ask for help". Sales will care about "How do they make decisions". Align your descriptions with what they care about. 2/ Use actual customer examples as a way to bring them to life. It's great to have Attitudes and Demographic data (if relevant), Business-graphics (if you're in B2B), but really what will bring it home is 2 - 3 examples of real customers that fit this persona. 

I've used a ton, mostly correlated with my budget :) On $0 budget you can always use Google Forms to send to current / former / prospective customers and export answers to a Sheet. I like the ease of use of Survey Monkey and GetFeedback for quant. I like Crayon for competitive analysis on execution. Really Good Emails is an unexpectedly helpful and free way of looking at what companies are doing on email (if you're at a large company). 

The competitive set is defined by your audience, not you. And it changes all the time. At Square, we compete against anything that enables anyone to participate in our economy, not just other POS companies. The "Jobs to be Done" framework is helpful here - anything (tool, company, resource) that enables one of these critical jobs, or COULD, enable it in the future is a competitor. Make sure you look at your audience and what they are trying to achieve from different angles, not just from a "share of wallet" or "share of mind" standpoint. In my experiences, these blindspots are big opportunities for disruption.