AMA: Vanta Group Product Marketing Manager, Madison Springgate on Market Research

I think companies massively underutilize commissioned research. In my past life, Ive seen how teams will spend longggg time on a study, present it, and then the insights basically disappear into a slide deck graveyard 😅 The most valuable research usually has way more life than a single presentation! I really think that commissioned research can magnify your story to the market - use it to strengthen your messaging, AND bring more credibility into campaigns + pitch decks. One of the biggest oppor ...Read More

At Vanta, our product moves realy fast, especially with AI moving SO quickly. I’ve found that market research can’t be this giant quarterly project - it has to become part of your day to day operating rhythm. A lot of my research comes from staying really close to customers. Listening to calls, talking with CSMs and AMs, reviewing expansion conversations, and paying attention to the language customers use around risk, trust, and maturity. The signal is usually already there - the challenge is sy ...Read More

Maybe a hot take - but I actually think most PMMs already have access to wayyyy more customer insights than they realize! Especially in tech, there is signal flowing through sales calls, onboarding conversations, support tickets, renewals, implementation feedback, and customer conversations. So you really don’t always need a huge research budget to learn something valuable. I think one of the biggest shifts for me was realizing that research is less about running giant formal studies and more ab ...Read More

This is honestly one of the hardest parts of being a PMM. We all want to deeply understand customer pain, but also can’t treat every piece of feedback like a roadmap request. I persnally try to focus less on isolated requests and more on recurring patterns. If you hear the same friction point across segments, industries, or maturity levels, that’s usually where the real signal is. I also think empathy is about understanding the why behind feedback. Sometimes customers ask for a very specific fea ...Read More

Personally, I think one of the biggest mistakes you can make is going into research trying to validate the story you already believe instead of staying open to what customers are actually telling you. I think a lot of times we are looking for validation instead of staying genuinely curious. Some of the best insights I’ve found came from moments where customers were telling us something completely different than what we expected. Sometimes the value prop buyers care about most isn’t the one we we ...Read More

For me, research is most valuable when it can drive into decisions and messaging! Im usually less interested in research that just confirms something we already believe and more interested in finding the tension points - where customer behavior, messaging, or market perception doesn’t quite line up with our assumptions internally. A good (and maybe obvious) example is AI. There’s so much noise in the market right now, and one thing we started hearing consistently from customers wasn’t just excit ...Read More