AMA: Twilio Head of Industry Product Marketing: Enterprise & Public Sector, Surachita Bose on Competitive Market Research

Love this question and I’m often surprised by how underutilized customer research is within companies. The issue is that research takes time which explains why a lot of companies shy away from it. But the right intel can accelerate your business multiple orders of magnitude by informing - priority product bets, competitive differentiation, geo expansion, pricing strategies, strategic narratives, validating personas (and so much more)! First, tie the research hypotheses to defined P0 business priorities to demonstrate value quickly and tangibly. Second, the question you’re ultimately helping your organization figure out is this - how to design digital products that people/customers actually want? Align your business priorities and customer needs to demonstrate ROI (measurable outcomes aka KPIs) of a VOC program internally. Rule of thumb - always show value before asking for resources. Sharing some tangible ideas to build and scale a VOC program. MVP of a VOC program and Getting buy-in: * Carve time: Allocate a small % of the team’s time to understanding customers. Formalize it. * Run lean research: Join customer conversations through sales/customer success calls, run qual focus groups & quant surveys (free tools like User testing, Survey Monkey, Google surveys, landing page intercepts), engage with online user communities, review product analytics data (e.g. onboarding, engagement, churn) meet industry analysts, volunteer at your company’s events booth, run win/loss interviews ... you get the gist. Every chance you get, sit with the customer and actually listen to them. * Synthesize! Not everything you learn will be of value. Determining which insights could be potential needle movers is the secret sauce that skilled PMMs bring to the fore. * Socialize: Schedule time (e.g. quarterly cadence) for “Lunch and learn” sessions that anyone across the org can join to hear directly from customers/prospects (ideally) or for a shareout by PMMs. This could serve as a beta version of a future ‘Customer Advisory Board’. * Create a knowledge hub: Create a “Customer Insights” newsletter, build a wiki page, and socialize case studies with stakeholders to showcase insights and how the learnings were applied to strategic business initiatives to diffuse customer insights throughout the org. * Find X-functional champions to serve as ambassadors of the VOC program across teams. Involve them in sourcing customers, survey design, and interview sessions to keep them involved in the build phase of the VOC program. * Break org silos: A VOC program could be that trojan horse for breaking cross-organizational silos and push deeper thinking on target markets, ICP and messaging. Once the MVP version takes hold, then scale by investing budget and resources towards a more robust version of the program (ie. external agencies, paid reports, paid tools, dedicated Research team).

Ah the cross-functional socialization challenge! I've answered this in another section but adding my two cents here again just given how critical this is for value casting. * Socialize: Schedule time (e.g. quarterly cadence) for “Lunch and learn” sessions that anyone across the org can join to hear directly from customers/prospects (ideally) or for a shareout by PMMs. This could serve as a beta version of a future ‘Customer Advisory Board’. * Synthesize! Not everything you learn will be of value. Determining which insights could be potential needle movers is the secret sauce that skilled PMMs bring to the fore. * Create a knowledge hub: Create a “Customer Insights” newsletter, build a wiki page, and socialize case studies with stakeholders to showcase insights and how the learnings were applied to strategic business initiatives to diffuse customer insights throughout the org. * Find X-functional champions to serve as ambassadors of the VOC program across teams. Involve them in sourcing customers, survey design, and interview sessions to keep them involved in the build phase of the VOC program.

There are a gazillion tools (free ones if you’re budget-constrained) out there. The choice of tool is a function of what you’re looking to accomplish. But nothing beats sitting with the customer and listening to them. Some of the tools and platforms I keep going back to: * User Testing, Loop 11, Userlytics: UserTesting has been a very easy and useful tool for my teams for audience recruitment, message testing, usability testing, and even generating live video-based customer narratives. As they say, show don’t tell! I’ve also used Loop11 and Userlytics for A/B testing wireframe prototypes to assess the usability of product workflows. For example, at Intuit my team ran extensive customer testing sessions on UserTesting (100+) to test out multiple variations of a new platform narrative for the Quickbooks suite and pricing/bundling executions on Intuit.com - these insights informed the selection of design options that were then further A/B tested. Classic example of “go broad, then go narrow”. * Survey Monkey/Google surveys: Customer surveys are hugely beneficial in both B2B (fewer target customers) and B2C contexts (large customer base) to glean the right signals from customers and build informed hypotheses. At Twilio, we used Survey Monkey for messaging and claims testing with existing enterprise customers. * Hubspot’s “Make my persona”: Make my persona has been quite useful for generating alpha versions of Persona Outlines - auto-generates all essential components of your ICP (ideal customer profile) that you can then use to flesh out contextual details of your target customer. * G2 Reviews to keep a pulse on what users are saying about you and more importantly, your competitors. 

My bias is towards conducting in-house research first to establish the foundations and get crisp on the business subjective, research questions, target personas … what we need to learn, who are we targeting, and why. I’ve found that you can get a reasonable distance with a structured approach to customer research and the process can be a good gauge for formulating the research agenda before you bring in an agency and/or purchase industry reports. Your output is only as good as the clear framing of the objectives - you don’t want to send your agency on a wild goose chase!