Customer Research

Great question! You actually squeezed 3 topics in here, which are all inter-related and important to buyer journey maps. In my experience, I start with segmenting my audience (total addressable market by country, company, vertical/industry, etc), identifying personas within my target audience (buyer/user), mapping the journeys for each persona, and then testing which content formats/channels work best. This means if I'm selling to Enterprises vs. mid-sized companies, IT vs. Finance buyers, I should understand the different journeys, budgets, and decision making processes and plan my content...

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. 

Well first of all, it’s always tough to be a team of one. You are definitely going to have to ruthlessly prioritize and as a team of one, it can be easy to get stuck as the sales content/collateral & product launch factory. So with the spare time that you have, I think a few things that can help you understand the customer a bit better perhaps in order of ease: 1. Sign up for daily newsletters from the industry trades that you’d want to cover your launches 2. In those newsletters sign up for the webinars that come thru, or webinars from competitors that you think your target mark...

1. Listen to sales/CS calls. As a team on 1 you can't be on every call but make it a weekly habit to listen to at least 5-10 calls (you can listen at 1.5 or 2x speed 😊). Be strategic about the calls you listen to - use keyword search or tagging for key topics of interest that are relevant to your business like competitors, pricing, implementation, ROI, etc. This will give you great insights into what your customers and prospects care about and how your team is responding.  2. Read G2 reviews. There's so much information shared in these reviews about what your c...

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...

Quick answer: Data. Bring them snippets of real customer conversations or data points that they haven't seen from customer interviews, surveys, CSAT, NPS, customer service feedback - you name it. This will show the value of talking to customers, and will leave them wanting more.   To be even more influential, if your product or design team isn’t listening  - make sure your exec team is. Get an executive sponsor who wants to champion the “voice of the customer” - and leverage their position to promote the customer insights you’re finding.   It’s really dangerous when a product / eng team...

I agree with Mary. Data. How you package that data, though, really matters. Some people are swayed by facts, some are swayed by process/method, and some are swayed by stories. Know your audience and package your facts accordingly. 

One thing I'd add to Mary's response is what I think is the hardest part of your question: identifying the questions that matter most to the business. Getting and using data is critical, but it will fall on deaf ears and undermine your credibility if you aren't getting the right data at the right time for the right decision-makers. How do you identify what data to go get? Look for one of the following: * Internal disagreements: Are members of the Product team regularly having a philosophical argument that impacts the direction of the roadmap? For example, does one camp think user...

While I agree with Mary's answer ("data") and the other great points that have been added here, I would caution against taking the exact same approach you would to influencing product as you would to influencing culture. If data were sufficient to change culture, the world would look dramatically different.  Culture is theoretically owned in people, HR, operations, and exec leadership. It's an intangible and can be attached to personality. That's a different audience and perspective than a group of product managers and engineers. Put your marketing hat on and adjust your approach accordi...

To me, it's about creating a customer-centric culture, not just a "market research" culture. "Market research" is a bit of a stigmatized term - most of it is considered not valuable, not actionable, and an expensive "nice-to-have". I'd encourage you to re-orient around building a habit of listening and talking to customers - often. What I try to do, very tactically is:  1/ help make the case for "discovery" in roadmaps as an official line item. Make sure formal product development time accounts for talking to relevant audiences before anything is built or designed.  2/ i invite product, d...

This is concerning to hear. Unless you have the next Henry Ford on your design team, this mentality will ultimately lead to a poor product-market fit. That’s not saying that your design team should not have a voice at all – they may have a solid product vision and if they are market experts, then they will have an equally strong understanding of the market’s needs. But that understanding doesn’t just randomly come to them. It is carefully honed by having a close pulse on the customer. For instance, there is one particular product leader at my current company who understands our customers b...

Market research is the most powerful tool for influencing product. I recommend applying your marketing skills to your internal stakeholders in the same way you use them for your externally-facing initiatives. If you have some great market insights in hand, consider these steps: 1. Understand your internal target audience: Why does product and design consider themselves as the consumer? Where are the largest differences between our internal teams and the actual customer? How do internal teams best consume information? 2. Create a messaging strategy for your insights: What are the key takeaw...

It is important for all functions across the company to build empathy for users. Regardless of your segment, small advisory boards are helpful for this, and can be set up to feature 10-20 key customers who meet quarterly (or more or less often) to review roadmaps and provide feedback on either new initiatives or existing products. The key here is getting leadership buy-in across the exec team, as they will likely be the main headlines to actually get key customers to attend these sessions. Depending on the level of budget you have, getting teams together to go onsite with customers and a...

I'd say lead the way. Use a traditional PMM responsibility like refreshing your buyer personas as a reason to kick off a joint research project and pull in your partners from the product and design team. Set up customer interviews. Get outdoors and do a workshop. Have some fun with it. Bribe them with candy and fizzy drinks :o) If you can't get buy-in for that, go talk to customers yourself and present a read-out of what you learned.  Get with the sales and client services team and use them as a proxy for the customers if there is too much red tape around direct customer interaction.  Co...

CABs are great. Customer advisory boards have several common objectives in mind, including: - To create champions for the brand - To validate product ideas and guide the product roadmap - To help shape marketing messaging - To gather market intelligence - Understand the buying triggers of the company’s market - Provide beta users for the company’s new products - Help the company identify new markets A customer advisory board can provide insights into how customers are actually using your products, what aspects of those products are most important or beneficial to them, and what other f...

It's best practice to create CABs with one specific business focus – and that focus could very much be to help inform your product strategy. The weight that member feedback carries depends on the makeup of your board. If you have diverse representation across all segments, use cases for your product and types of users, your CAB can be a key input for your roadmap. And because you have access to the members over an extended period of time, you might find that the feedback builds upon itself in a way that other feedback you've received from surveys etc does not. It should not replace any of t...

You’re describing a common situation. Customer advisory boards (CABs) represent an important channel for bringing VOC into your organization, not just for immediate product development but also to understand overall trends in the market. Before convening your CAB meeting, product marketing and product management should have a common understanding of what they want to achieve. Product management should be able to provide their input but product marketing should lead the conversation and be responsible for delivering the summary document. I would also caution that a CAB should only be one of...

A customer advisory board can be a great way to capture high level roadmap feedback from your most important customers. But to my mind, it's main value lies elsewhere: in giving your most important customers the feeling (and reality) that they are being heard not just by a CSM or a sales rep, but by the executive team; in giving your customers a chance to hear from each other, which validates their individual decision to be your customers and often also cross-pollinates ideas / use cases / product upsell conversations.

Customer advisory boards are great ways to bring product, leadership, and your customers face-to-face to really help everyone understand if what is being built will really solve customer needs. Along the entire product development journey, there are ways to involve customers that aren’t just focused on getting people to use a beta version of a product. I have found that customer advisory programs that meet semi-regularly and ideally at least once a year in person are helpful in building rapport both between product, leadership, and customers, but also between customers themselves–becoming t...

This really requires a dedicated effort and should be owned by Product Marketing. Different industries change at different paces – in some cases, a quarterly review process is needed, in other case, it might be less frequent. It really depends. Product Marketing needs to keep a close pulse on customers, talk to sales and product management, and keep an eye on the competition. There are other factors to consider as well that may trigger an off-cycle review: major industry news, significant new competitive offerings or new entrants, win or loss of a key customer, an upcoming key tradeshow or...

Your CMS (content management system) should have some sort of archiving parameters in place that should remind the PMM team when things get stale. With that said, all the reminders in the world won't matter if people ignore them, so I recommend you also have a "librarian" of sorts manage your content site - whether it's in a sales portal or in another tool, someone who is in charge of managing the site, tracking metrics, and also monitoring / organizing PMM when content needs to be refreshed/archived.  

Align on needs and get buy-in on the program from key stakeholders upfront, otherwise, you will just be reactive and the expectations will be that every request is handled and every asset is up to date. By setting a strategy upfront, defining the set of deliverables and the cadence at which they'll be updated, and creating rules of engagement and set venues / channels for to communicate with teams, you can create a scalable system. For larger orgs, you may have to create SLAs between your team and sales and product.  Specifically with competitive, I really believe you need to define ours...

In the "real world" this is a function of whose responsibility sales collateral is. If it's product marketing, the answer is simple: Supply new collateral when it's time for an update. However, if product marketing is responsible for informing, and letting sales create its own materials, then it becomes more complicated. For me, it all starts with the buyer personas (or, as I like to refer to them, stakeholder profiles). I have a particular way of approaching these, leveraging psychographic, rather than demographic, inputs and structuring outputs as stakeholder-specific business cases. T...

There's two parts to keeping all the above content up to date, including content creation and content delivery: * Content Creation: This is all about capacity planning of the Product Marketing team on the capacity of the team to update content vs. the amount of content that needs to be updated. First, you need to define what content must be kept up-to-date and how frequently these updates need to happen. For example, some product marketing content needs to be updated frequently (e.g. information about new products and/or features that have come out in each release), wher...

Make it jointly owned. Your team will (almost certainly) not grow as fast as sales, success, support, etc. Even talented PMMs struggle to keep these things relevant and useful for every season of the company’s journey. So rather than boil the ocean, make it everyone’s responsibility. If your best competitive and market positioning is in the sales onboarding guide, sales managers and VPs have an incentive to keep it accurate for new hires. Plus new hires can comment on/correct things over time. If you have personas, consider jointly owning them with the product team. Product teams have...

This really depends on your product and industry. Let me outline a framework with four elements: * The customer perspective * The competitor perspective * The technology perspective, and * The marketplace perspective Take a look at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/product-marketing-three-words-part-ii-rajendran-nair/ and https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/product-marketing-three-words-part-iii-rajendran-nair/. I have laid out the framework I use to listen to the market.

This is tough, but you can prevent foundational PMM assets from going stale by having (1) defined processes (e.g., establishing which components of your market intelligence are most important to update and on what cadence, and using what inputs), (2) quarterly prioritization to revisit key assets (e.g., dedicate budget and get buy-in from cross-functional partners to spend time and energy updating these assets as a part of quarterly OKR planning. If you don't dedicate and protect the time and budget, you're likely to let them fall by the wayside), and (3) cross-functional participation (e.g...

I'm big on updating information based on actions that need to be taken / decision that need to be made.  When it comes to market research and personas, clarify what decisions you need to make based on the information and the cadence to which you will make them. If you use market research to inform half-by-half planning then updating the information prior to the beginning of each half is a good starting assumption.  I recommend keeping a regular pulse on the competition, though. For example, by regularly read news about your industry. If there are public announcements that necessitate ...

Starting with the customer insight is always the #1 job of a product marketer. Ideal customer profile, target verticals, buyer personas, etc these are things that aren’t going to change on a weekly or monthly basis. However, as part of routine planning cycles – perhaps every 3, 6 or 12 months depending on your market or industry, it’s always good to re-evaluate with sales and CS leadership and understand if we’ve been seeing any shifts in user base or even with the demand gen team to understand how mix in titles might have changed in your inbound lead mix. Competitive insights are a sepa...

I have been a Product Marketer since 2013 and have built numerous VoC programs back when I worked at Medallia.  For one, generally speaking, PMMs don't always own the VoC program.  That being said, there are some common mistakes some companies make with VoC programs: 1. Score Watching: They only look at the NPS score and don't take any action. 8/10 companies will do this. The NPS or equivalent north star metric is only useful if the action is taken on the qualitative feedback and improvements made accordingly.  2. Surface Level Only: They don't measure key drivers of satisfaction i...

I think the biggest mistakes with starting a formal VOC program are 1) to do it without truly knowing what the goal is, and 2) to not secure CEO-level buy-in. If you don’t do the first one, then how will you know where to focus or how to measure the impact? And second, if you don’t get that commitment from the CEO, then you risk turning it into a temporary pet project that ends as soon as the exec sponsor departs the organization. I’ve seen it happen first-hand.

The two biggest mistakes I see are (1) not having a clear goal as to what you want to learn from customers and how this will inform product / go-to-market strategy, and (2) not truly prioritizing or resourcing the effort.  With regard to (1), I find it's really important to be clear about what you are trying to learn from Voice of Customer. Don't get me wrong, it's important to have broad discussions with customers that raise topics you may not have thought... however, I suggest gathering these type of insights should be 20% of the effort not the 80%. I recommend guiding the feedback you...

I think the easiest thing to miss when setting up Voice of Customer programs is alignment cross-functionally on the purpose of these programs. As product marketers, it’s easy to drive towards your goal of turning your customers into heroes and heroines via case studies and testimonials for your site. However, a strong VoC program needs to do more than just build a pipeline of case studies. You need to be able to infuse the customer voice back through all facets of the organization. So I think the best way to avoid common mistakes when building one from scratch is to: 1. Align with sales,...

VOC is used in a wide variety of ways. Some examples include guiding product development, building personas, message refinement, content development, targeting campaigns, sales training, educating customer support teams and much more. Most importantly, perhaps, is that it allows your teams to build customer empathy and help them understand customer motivations and needs.

Voice of Customer insights are a great way to 1) see trends among customers (if enough are saying the same thing) and 2) check our own collective understanding of what we do. Sometimes, VoC will suggest that our customers are seeing something differently than we intended. It may be a single interaction that turns us on to this, but it opens our eyes to alternate interpretations of what we do and how the market perceives us. In short, it's great for hypothesis formulation. 

Ideally, in everything :) Product Marketers should aim to approach our work from the perspective of the consumer, and frequently bring that view into internal conversations. This is why we closely evaluate their options (via competitive tracking), their experience (product and userflow), and their motivations (quant / qual surveys). At the most tactical level, we leverage those insights to inform positioning, messaging, and GTM execution. On a broader level, consumer insights fuel broader strategic discussions such as feature development, roadmap discussions, prioritization, and initiativ...

Any VoC insights/data should be shared internally, along with the “so what.” It’s not enough to just share results from a survey or what you’ve heard from your consumers - you have to package it up in a way for stakeholders to understand why it’s important, and what should be done with the information. More practically, we use data like this to help inform strategic roadmap/planning decisions, in board decks to help bring company goals and results to life, and to develop positioning, messaging and go-to-market plans.

We use voice of customer insights to inform messaging and positioning as well as our product roadmap. At Spotify, we have monthly syncs with our partnerships and sales team to just discuss feedback from customers. This helps us to understand if our product and / or go-to-market strategy is working and to prioritize changes.  Prior to formal planning (at Spotify this is quarterly), I've also found success in summarizing voice of customer insights and presenting these to product teams in order to inform roadmap development.  One last thing, I recommend using voice of customer insights t...