Market Research

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 opportuni...

Here is the competitive intelligence mission statement I've used for several years (repeat from previous post but will add more detail).  “Define ourselves based on problems we solve and value we provide, not your competition. But also equip ourselves to stand out from competition and win against them.” Sales: Equip teams with knowledge and tools to win against the competition. Product: Equip teams insight into competitive product sets so we can build better, differentiated product. Marketing: Deep knowledge of competitive brand, message, and product so we can raise above with best in c...

Thanks for asking this question. The exercise of defining your competitive set is a critical, but at times under-emphasized aspect of conducting research. There are three primary modes for competitive research: 1) optimization, 2) growth and 3) exploration. 1) Optimization is the most narrow mode. This is meant to identify how you are positioned relative to direct competitors, who are in the same industry and product family as your company. This is where your win/loss interviews become important. 2) Growth mode is where you would look at direct and indirect competitors, who may share an in...

Interesting question about how I define "compeititor" in and of itself. I tend to look at competitors as barriers that keep people from buying the product I'm selling. Sometimes its a comparable product, sometimes it's an alternate type of solution and sometimes it's nothing at all. The question driving competitor analysis is always: Why? Why is it that customers are gravitating towards buying/staying with an alternative (including doing nothing new/different)?  I hate feature-for-feature comparisons when it comes to competitive analysis and do whatever I can to avoid them. The exception...

This one is tricky because I think there's a tendency to want to boil the ocean and do everything for every competitor. Some combination of market research and competitive win/loss analysis should help you create a few different tiers of competitors. My rule of thumb is no more than 3 competitors should be in your first tier and this is where you should really focus your efforts and train sales.  Everyone else can fit into a category of competition, and if your core brand/product positioning is differentiated enough, you can position against them more generically. Super important to be o...

I think competitors are important, but developing your own unique perspective of who you are, what makes you different, and who you serve is 10-100x more important. A short-ish anecdote: I used to work at AdRoll, which helps small businesses advertise on Google, Facebook, and everywhere else (e.g. Bing, Forbes, etc). Advertising is one of the most competitive markets ever, with Google and Facebook on an endless conquest for power. And yet, AdRoll was able to reach hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. How? They had a unique perspective: some small businesses don’t care where the...

"Competitor aware, customer obsessed" is something that I've internalized when thinking about competitors. Competitors are a good thing - it validates your space, your product-market fit and the market opportunity. The key is balancing the focus on competitors and the focus on customers. It can be really easy to go down competitive rabbit holes and chase every organization in your space but the best way to prioritize top competitors Is by looking at the impact they are having on your organization's growth (I.e. sales growth, win/loss rates, etc.). I've found attributing dollar amounts of co...

Depends on how competitive your market is. You can create a list of competitors and create segments based on different variables that are important for your product or business. For instance direct competitors vs indirect competitors, Or competitors by vertical, or competitors by use case, etc. Secondly, If you have a LOT of competitors, I would do a prioritization exercise to identify the top 3-5 that you track more regularly vs others that you passively track, as needed. For instance, prioritize the ones that come up during sales deals most often! Or if this competitive intel is to drive...

For smaller teams that may not have a built out CI team or CI PMM it can get tough to manage competitive research, positioning, creation enablement and dissemination of assets on top of everything else that you're doing as a PMM. This is why my philisophy is to really prioritize your top tier competitors and maybe even limiting it to the top 2 or 3 max. That doesn't mean you shouldn't stay on top of your industry and trends and what other players are doing, but that does mean that you aren't going to dive as deep or create as many assets for the majority of competitors in your space. Some t...

My primary philosophy around competitors is a little different than most: focus 80% of your energy on what makes you great as a product or service, and the rest on what anyone else is doing.  I've worked in duopoly markets (speech IVR in the contact center), highly fragmented markets (enterprise content and collaboration), and mature markets (enterprise networking). This approach works in all of them, because no matter how many competitors you have, you'll never have enough resources to properly track every move your competition is making. And that's a good thing, because if you spend al...

There are a few types of competitors to think about: Tier 1: Prime Competition - Those who compete for the same dollars for a very similar product. You often end up in feature battles with them and eat each other’s lunch. They look very similar to your offering in the eyes of prospects. They end up copying your features or vice versa. Tier 2: Patrial overlap - They have one or more similar products, common verticals, or solve the same problem in different ways. They are sometimes point solutions if you have a more comprehensive offering, or maybe your product is the point solution - w...

Yes!! Product Marketing isn't doing it's job properly without it. Also, it's a lot of effort, but doesn't always have to be a lot of money. It doesn't cost anything but time to get on the phone with customers, or listen in on sales pitches (these are some of the places you can get the most early stage information from).   One of my best outcomes of really digging into customer issues, was when I was working on a product that had something really weird going on in the customer base. Half of the customers loved and embraced the product, and half of the customers hated it. Also when I looke...

Absolutely worth the effort! A great example of where extensive qual and focus group research really was worth it was when we launched Uber Pro. In initial product strategy discussions, the internal team was exclusively looking at financial upside or discounts as rewards. But what we learned through qualitative research was (a) that they really wanted to feel appreciated for all their hard work and (b) their primary motivation for the hard work was providing for their families.  After unlocking both insights, those two became critical to the product, program, and marketing design behind ...

It's a healthy balance of both. We do smaller, qualitative user feedback sessions mostly internally -- especially with customers who are in beta programs for our new features.  But broader market research initiatives that require greater scale, we often bring on great partners like Forrester, YouGov, Suzy, and other survey/analytics tools to get us the level of responses we need. 

It depends on the company and if you have a formal research function or not! I've done everything from recruit participants, write discussion guides, field surveys, moderate research, synthesize insights. Or, I've given a researcher objectives and key questions and then sat in on a few interviews here and there. I think every PMM should have the experience of running their own research at some point - it keeps you close to the customer, helps you empathize with them and develop relationships with strategic customers (like if you run a CAB).  But, as an org grows, you won't always have th...

In my view, the goal is to  1. help define the objectives of the research based on business & user needs  2. support research as they execute the research plan to ensure the research methodology & questions deliver on the objectives  3. Once research is complete, help narrow and refine how to apply the findings. I can't emphasize this one enough. We live in a world where data is everywhere. Most reports I see come back with 20+ pages of insights, and as a PMM, you're looking at results from multiple different sources. One of the most important things a PMM can do is ...

Starting a new project can certainly feel daunting, especially when you don't feel you have the right tools or budget. But there's good news: When you have to be scrappy, there's data all around you. Step 1: Wrap your head around the problem as best as you can Whether it's bringing a new product or feature to market or developing a new marketing campaign, I like to start with an unbiased hunt for existing information because it may trigger ideas you wouldn't have if you defined scope too early. To best wrap your head around a market, audience, or category, start with desktop resear...

When you have no budget: If you already have a survey platform in place, conducting interviews and surveys of your own lists (customer & prospect databases) is free! You just need a way to recruit them. For interviews or smaller sample sizes, you may want to go directly through your customer success team who has relationships with your customers. For larger sample sizes, you may want to send a few emails to invite people to take your survey.  When you have a small budget: You may not be able to afford a consulting or research agency, but there are a ton of software tools out there that...

Absolutely! There is a ton of incredibly important data & insights in what you're probably already doing related to your product:  * Web - Look where people are spending their time, dropping off, what is getting the most clicks * Ads - Same as above. Target multiple groups with multiple creative, and see what drives the most engagement.  * Customer Support - Your users are telling you what they need help with.  * Product Analytics -- Retention & Happy Customers - Identify your most engaged, and happy customers, and do look back analysis. Where did they come from? How are th...

Nothing beats sitting with a customer and actually listening to them. I can't reinforce enough the importance of this. As companies grow, its easy to lean on reports / reporting to tell you "what the customer thinks & feels". But there is so much nuance in how people communicate -- and as humans, we're all naturally atuned to these signals. So as a baseline, I encourage all my teams to participate in live listening sessions, focus groups, sales pitches, etc at least 1x every quarter to keep their ear to the ground and stay close to the customer. Of course, the above doesn't scale and we ...

It always starts with the business objective, and then moves into user needs. What I find is that happy, satisfied customers most often move the business forward. So, I like to start with a long-arch view of what we are trying to achieve, quickly followed by what we hope our users will say / feel when using our product. If we can align on those two objectives and the time horizon, then market research is usually a great tool to help us work backward and figure out what steps it will take for us to create that experiecne for the customer. 

Understanding the market landscape and how it breaks down is a good first step. For example, within the broader category of "customer engagement" there are sub categories like marketing and advertising tech, support/enagement channels, call analytics and contact centers and CRM. And then there are even more categories or sub jobs under each (read about the jobs to be done framework if you havent). To help create this 'market map' you can look to industry analysts or the Forrester / Gartner Magic Quadrants but I encourage you to not take these as boilerplate as it's really individual to your...

Think about where the bigger pain is for your organization. In product marketing lack of resources is usually the case, so you need to prioritize based on the needs of the company. you have major issues with churn I'd suggest starting with user personas, on the other hand, if sales are struggling to close deals, the buyer personas should be your priority.

It really depends on the stage/GTM motion your company is in. You might want to focus on the user if you are really focused on product-led-growth (PLG) and reaching that point of 'activation' - aka the aha moment when a new user gets the value of your product and why they need it. If you have no idea what I'm talking about I'd suggest exploring this article/site from the product-led collective- https://www.productled.org/foundations/product-led-growth-metrics. Other scenarios where you may want to focus on the user is if you're seeing typical product usage metrics declining (DAU, WAU, MAU, ...

Data should always inform decisions, though it’s OK to supplement it with some qualitative insights driven by observations of market trends. It’s not good enough to simply let the most senior person define the segmentation. Segmentation is relatively easy if you are focused on one specific vertical but gets much more complex for companies that serve across horizontals. This is where the value of data comes in to drive your decision.

This is largely industry specific. Definitely research your market and listen to the data. An extremely important data point that should come your way is from your sales motions and how your plays work with each audience. It's important though to resist the tempation to over segment - that's a rabbit hole that is hard to get out of. In a vertical marketing strategy the most basic of segmentation comes from which audience in the ecosystem you're speaking to. The most basic example would be if you're marketing a Marketplace you'd segment based on Buyers and Sellers. However, segmentatio...

First, it's important to know why you need a segmentation. Is it about go-to-market and creating more effective messaging? Is it about changing your channel / sales strategy? Is it about product development? Media Targeting? Once you have an objective or objectives, a method for segmentation often becomes more obvious.  When thinking about messaging or product development, I often find it helpful to segment customers based on common needs. In B2B organizations figuring out what types of customers have common needs might mean talking to experts on your customers like sales people, doing d...

There are many ways you could segment your market for your marketing and sales motions: from industries to personas to company size to geographies (and for B2C companies, major demographics like age, gender, etc come into play). The questions you need to ask are "Do these groups of customers have fundamentally different needs for our product?" and "Would we acquire these groups of customers in different ways?". Wherever the differences are greatest, you'll want to start there. Another key consideration is resourcing: do you have enough people to create focus areas among your marketing/sa...

I believe the best way to segment your market is to do initial high-level qualitative interviews to get a broad understanding of the market, followed by a robust quantitative segmentation, and then follow up with in-depth qual with what you believe are your priority segments. A quantitative segmentation leverages a cluster analysis that considers: * company/customer demographics and technographics (size/industry/revenue/region etc.) * Attitudes - how they think/feel/pain points and perceptions of you and your competitor set * Behaviors - what they do, how they buy, purchase journ...