AMA: Tremendous Head of Product and Corporate Marketing, Ambika Aggarwal on Market Research

There are multiple parts to this question so I'll try to address this in 3 parts. For collecting customer feedback I like to break it into two approaches, one is "always on customer listening" and the other is "project or program related research." 1. Always-on is something PMMs should be doing constantly by talking to sales and CS, listening to Gong calls, attending conferences, running customer surveys etc. 2. Project or program related is when you have a specific goal in mind. It could be developing messaging and positioning for a particular launch, it could be a competitive sprint in which case a targeted win/loss analysis would make sense. In terms of analyzing the feedback, if it's in the form of surveys of win/loss analysis you get the benefit of the data being analyzed and synthesized for you. However, if it's based on customer calls and talking to the field team you'll have to find a way to jot down notes and observations and pick out key themes and categorize feedback in some way. You could use a tagging system with the following categories: Product, Competitive, Customer Pain Points etc. You can also probably run your interview notes through ChatGPT to analyze and come up with key insights. For disseminating and sharing customer feedback 1. Ensure clear documentation so anyone can access the feedback 2. Know your audience and tailor the insights accordingly (Product Management, Sales, Marketing, etc) and share the insights in existing syncs. 3. Create a slack channel with cross functional stakeholders and share within the channel 4. Incorporate during planning cycles (both at the business and team level)

In terms of creating personas, I would start by defining and aligning on the persona template framework first, and then doing your research and synthesizing accordingly. There are a number of persona frameworks you can use, some of the ones I'd recommend trying: 1. Hubspot (make my persona) tool can help you build a persona template 2. Miro has a persona mapping template as well 3. Canva also has some nice templates. All these templates will have a few things in common 1. Role in the buying committee 2. Demographic details 3. Pain Points 4. Online behavior 5. Success outcomes 6. Motivation To be able to fill out these frameworks you'll need to engage in customer interviews and ask a set of standard questions across the board so you can easily synthesize the answers into the above categories. Here are questions I typically like to ask: 1. What is your role and what are your daily responsibilities? 2. What are your biggest pain points and challenges? 3. How do you get approval on purchasing decisions? 4. How is your success defined? 5. How do you learn about new tools and technologies?

1. Market sizing, competitive & ICP - What does the market look like? Who are the competitors and who is your core ICP you want to go after? This includes verticals and firmographics. 2. Personas - Who are the personas you want to target within the new market? Are these existing personas or net new personas you need to craft? 3. Market trends - What's going on in your new market that you need to be aware of? Are there specific regulations or industry specific knowledge you need to have? Using the research above you can start to craft your GTM strategy for entering into the new market.

In my experience it makes sense to reevaluate your customer segmentation in conjunction with your annual or half year planning in the context of your broader business goals (i.e is your business trying to move upmarket? downmarket? are there new personas or industries you're trying to target) There can also be major company milestones like new product launches or M&A that warrant you to evaluate your customer segmentation. Additionally, if you're looking at segments for your campaigns and pipe-gen efforts and you're running targeted campaigns against certain segments and cohorts, you'll want to evaluate the performance of your marketing campaigns at the segment level to determine effectiveness and any changes you want to make.

I love this question because it's SO important to get early signals and validation that your messaging is headed in the right direction. Here are a few things I like to do: 1. Once you have landed on a few value props and benefits you want to test out, run it by the person in your organization who represents the key buyer you're trying to go after (i.e if you sell to HR, run it by your Chief People officer) 2. Test your messaging through focus groups made up of prospects and customers 3. Test your messaging through a customer advisory board (CAB) if you have one 4. And lastly, we have been using Wynter.com to test our messaging (headlines, landing pages, or buyer interviews) and it's been really helpful. 5. You can also run some paid ad tests with specific messages to see which ones perform better but this may take slightly longer to set up and run.

Market & customer research are critical to Product Marketing's ability to influence product strategy and build effective GTM. I'd say the following types of research are most important. 1. Market & Competitive - This means going deep and understanding the TAM, key competitors, points of differentiation and positioning, and where you stand relative to the competition. This type of research can heavily inform your positioning, messaging, product and pricing decisions. 2. ICP research and definition - Running an analysis to understand who your ideal customer is. This could be based on looking at your existing customers and taking into consideration factors like product/market fit, customer lifetime value, customer satisfaction, sales win rates. etc. 3. Voice of customer/ customer research - This is truly understanding your customers and key personas, what they care about, their pain points, the buying committee and how they make purchasing decisions. This research is absolutely essential for messaging, campaign strategy, new product launches, sales enablement and overall GTM. 4. Win/Loss research - You can work with a vendor like Clozd, Goldpan, Primary intelligence to conduct win/loss customer interviews to better understand specific reasons you won or lost deals.