AMA: Twilio Senior Director, Product Marketing, Vanessa Thompson on Market Research

Personas are the way you bring segmentation and targeting to life by understanding what ‘motivates’ the buyer. If you don't have a good sense of the motivators, needs, and wants of your buyer, then i’d make a bet that your marketing spend isn't optimized and your deal cycle times are longer than they should be. There is a meme going around on LinkedIn right now that compares the demographic information of Prince Charles and Ozzy Osbourne. They both fit the same demographic category, but they couldn't be more different. This is a good way to argue the point. If you look at the segmentation/demographic data only, you miss a huge opportunity to appeal to the unconscious urges of your buyer, the biggest of which is emotion.

Based on your question detail, it sounds like you are targeting some specific persona details. If you have the time and capacity to take the approach you described, then it's a good way to do it. The other is to use a third party. I've used a few in the past, SurveyMonkey and Respondent.io. They were both pretty easy to use and got us the insight we needed without the hassle of prospecting.

Competitive Battlecards are the best asset for sales but remember to KISS (keep it stupid simple). Sales are often pressed for time so how can you clearly pick apart your differentiators (vs the competitor), give the rep a compelling reason it matters, and even lay some trap setting questions. Depending on how competitive your market is, you may also want to add some more detailed resources: 1. An objection handling doc. If you have a lot of new reps or a more junior team, you may consider writing out scripts for each of the objection points. 2. Win library. Have a library of wins against the competitor with impact based results that show the details of why other customers chose you. 3. Training & enablement. The best enablement ive seen when dealing with competitors is role play based enablement. Teach your teams to have these conversations around objections in a safe environment before you send them out into real customer calls. 4. A pushback email. If you have aggressive competitors, consider giving your team some pre-baked email templates so they can respond to the customer quickly and continue the conversation about your product.

I have a 5-step approach that i've developed over time. It does change based on the situation, but the main flow typically stays in tact. I presented this at an event, so you can watch the full breakdown here. https://play.stuff.co.nz/details/_6208820879001 Vanessa’s 5-Step Approach for Successful Positioning, Segmentation, Targeting, and Persona Development. 1. Have an opinion 2. Know your customer 3. Know your use case 4. Persona Development 5. Build your winning position

You may be looking at a broader trust issue and its likely that the research and the data you are bringing back is likely only a symptom of this. One of the key soft skills as a PMM is to influence without authority. So think about what motivates your product team, and use that to influence them and bring them along with your ideas/perspective. Before you work on your next research project, spend some time working with your product team or engineers and find out what their goals are and what is driving their day to day work. That way you will understand what they are working towards and how you can be supportive to their goals, while also pursuing your own.

When looking to identify target verticals, I always prefer a data driven approach. I'd work up a detailed analysis exercise and build a vertical based TAM. I have a go-to bubble chart that I like to develop which is based on the growth rate of each (CAGR, y axis) vs the revenue opportunity (x axis). It gives you an easy visual that shows where the optimal use cases/verticals will be - up and to the right. Here are some other questions you can ask to focus your efforts: 1. Do we know how much revenue opportunity is out there in the key verticals? 2. What are the top five verticals based on revenue opportunity? 3. What does our customer concentration look like across verticals? 4. Do we have any strong differentiating features in certain verticals? If yes, which ones?

Build a mutual goal and you will be on a great path to a collaborative partnership. The main difference between the two is that PMMs need to think about the broader market which includes the buyer or the person signing the check (to build a strategic GTM model) and the UX team needs to think about the user of the product and their experience (to build a great product). In smaller companies, that can be the same person, in larger enterprise companies, they are different. Typically, PMMs have a unique view across the business so they can see across products, across customers, and across the market. PMMs can bring ideas to UX about what group of users you need insight into. Example questions you could work with UX on: Do we need to know more about early adopter customers? or laggards? Does the business need more insight into a specific target user group? Do we need a focus group to test new product naming? UX can also bring back information about user behavior that helps validate your positioning and competitive differentiation. There may also be information here that informs your GTM strategy.

If your company uses a tool like Gong.io that is the most non-intrusive way to glean insights from sales conversations. It's a great tool that lets you search key topics in an easy way. If Gong isn't an option to you, then work through your sales team. Be intentional about which customers you’d like to speak to and be clear about why you want to speak to them. Always get permission from your sellers to reach out to their customers. Depending on the stage of the deal cycle the sellers may or may not want you to be involved so it doesnt disrupt the sales cycle. You have to be ok with that, and keep moving. 

If you think about what goal you want to achieve, that will help you decide what documents to produce and own. A good goal at this stage is to be a strategic partner to your product team, and be part of the product strategy development. Based on this goal, you could produce a few things. One would be a TAM/SAM (the data). The other would be a document that unpacks details based on the TAM data. TAM - Getting your hands on real TAM data if your market is new or you are a small company with a tight budget can be a little tricky. If you’re in this situation, you can scrape the web for data to piece together a high level set of data for the model. Discussion document - You should treat the discussion doc as a detailed analysis exercise and think about breaking down the data by use case or industry (whichever is more important to your business). Think about answering some of these questions: Do we know how much revenue opportunity is out there in the key use cases/industry? What are the top ten use cases based on revenue opportunity? Do we already have customer concentrations in some of these use cases? What are the natural product-market fit type use cases?

Everyone in your business knows something about your market, and your customers. So its not only important to do the research but to make sure you share it with enough people in your business to validate that you dont have any blindspots or other elements that you’ve missed. You dont need to have all the answers yourself but your work does need to interpret what the research means, so even though there are unknowns, focus on being thorough around the ones your team/business has the most control over and responsibility for. There will always be things you cant control (the pandemic is a good example).

The outcome you are targeting with your competitive research plays a role in the efficacy of your research method. So have the outcome in mind before you start, that way you will already be on the path to success! Competitive positioning - There are plenty of tools around like Klue, that scrape the web and sources data and information about your competitors. But you will need to add color and context based on your specific differentiation. You may also want to do some primary research on your competitors here too, look around their website, documentation, and you may even want to sign up for a demo. GTM Strategy - Diving into win/loss data related to competitors is a great way to understand the gaps you need to message around or the opportunities you need to exploit.