Why Most FAIL at B2B Customer Journey Research (And How to Fix It)

how to talk to your customers and actually learn something we are joined by customer research expert Ryan Paul Gibson he's the founder of content left how do you gather all those customer insights that are going to inform your positioning that's by talking to your customers but Ryan actually thinks that's horrible advice and that's because most marketing teams tend to treat this as friendly chats and that's where things go horribly horribly wrong Ryan's conducted over 2,000 customer interviews and he's going to show us exactly how to have the kind of meaningful conversations that uncover golden insights

about your buyers that you actually need all right Ryan well I know you've got uh so many great things to share with us you are the expert uh when it comes to customer research you really break it down into the most practical way that I've ever seen and so if you wouldn't mind bringing up your presentation Ryan we'll let you take it away thank you everybody um I'm not sure how they introduce me but just as a refresh um I've been in B2B 20 almost 22 years now uh and I worked almost every single role

you can think of had a small um reprieve as a reporter investigative reporter in TV and radio for three years and back in the marketing and my whole focus is customer research and it has been for the last few years what I'm hoping to share with you today are four four things so why you need to do this in the first place not everyone does why I think conversations one-on-one interviews are the best form of research there's a lot of things you can do I like them the best and I'm going to tell you why

I'm going to show you how to run these things um in a way that's really straightforward and I'm going to show you some ways that we've turned insights into actions because at the end of the day you got to do stuff with the data going to show you the a really simple process for doing that one of the things we have to realize is that interviews are really one subset of market research and they have been for decades there's a whole bunch of different things you can do um within the market research scope customer interviews

is just one of those things and market research is really bucket into a bunch of different categories there's really primary and secondary when you break it down secondary sometimes you call desk research primary is you go out and get it yourself surveys focus groups observational work so that would be you know watching how people do a thing or interact with something and then what I do which is 10one interviews also called um some qualitative research secondary desk research trade media associations research papers reviews online your own or other sites social media as a form of

secondary research like aggregating social media going to forums or networking groups and even sales sales calls and I call sales calls with an as Aster there because it's actually someone else going out and getting that data it's not you driving guiding the research another way we bucket these things too just think about it is there's quantitative and qualitative quantitative is what most of us are familiar with and that's usually hard data sets numbers it's an action happened this happened here at this time qualitative which is what I do is often answers the why behind quantitative

how did something happen and why did something happen and that's really where I like to focus my energies and we're talking research the reason I like interviews as a methodology is there's four reasons one is B2B purchas purchases are what we called highly considered it's another way seem like they're complex when we look at consumer purchases versus B2B there's a lot that goes into a B2B purchase as opposed to to consumer product you know if I'm buying a um bottled water there's not a lot of consideration that goes into that but if I'm buying a

ma a piece of machinery for a bottled watered manufacturing plant it's a big difference and the reason is the stakes are higher there's more people involved and um B2B buyers mitigate the risk perceived risk of making a choice there's things on the line like revenue and jobs so there's a lot of consideration goes into them interviews help us like navigate understand that environment of consideration the second reason is buyers EV valuate Things contextually based on what they do their business model their processes I'm going to show you a bit about what I mean by that

but that's the lens through which they evaluate what am I going to do about a problem um it's not they just look at necessarily just the use case they look at the use case through the lens of what they do and how they Sol how they do things within their business um it involves a lot of people typically right now it could be two people or it could be seven depending I've heard of deals where there's 15 people involved so you need to navigate you won't get that data of how these different stakeholders interact through

a survey or a dashboard you actually have to go and ask questions about how these people interact and how business cases are built to invest in a solution and why I like them the best is it really gets you the the mindset of how people think and why they buy something over all the other things they can do in the business one of the biggest I want to say lies that's harsh but misconceptions that I think we've been told is that the funnel is how buyers buy the funnel is a fine schema it's been around

for 150 years but it's not actually the way in which buyers move through a thing it's just a great tool for organizing our assets after we've figured out how buyers buy this on average is how B2B buyers make decisions so the first off they have to prioritize a process that they want to improve and prioritizes the key term there there's all of things happen in the business there's all sorts of problems but what has the what is the Tipping Point where they actually want to start investing money from their Capital into solving the problem that's

the key thing and what is that process and why does it exist and how does it work then they determine okay we want to improve this process how do we determine what we're going to do so to back up into a real life example HubSpot is not the marketing process it lives within the process of Revenue or marketing operations so if they want to improve that process what are they going to do next what are their options for improving their revops or the marketing Ops there's probably a bunch of things that they're looking at outside

of your solution could even just be hiring another person the next step is to build a short list of their options right they start whittling things down and that short list could be built quickly when they isolate a problem that they a process they want to improve or it can be built over months or years right and they'll revisit it and change it you need to understand how they build that list how do names and Brands and companies and solutions get on it and they'll evaluate it that's where they start to really put the microscope

in and take out peel back the layers what do they do there and why and then they select a vendor here's the key thing sales calls and surveys and dashboards often get you this data right that high consideration part of the journey but marketers have to influence here where most of the market lives and isn't ready to buy yet and you won't get that data from all the things you interact with on a day-to-day basis you got to go out and actually understand what's happening before people get to that high consideration side of things so

that's the key part of what we need to understand how and why buyers buy the type of interview we have with people can vary there's various things you can talk about because research objectives and the ways we interact with our business our customers over time are complex these are just four out of dozens and I saw some people talk the list of questions I have as my resource I think there's about 12 or 13 different types of research objectives and types of interviews you can have these I like because these deal with more of the

marketing side of things so there's buying Journey which is what I focus on in my business how and why buyers buy there's customer discovery which is evaluating new markets new segments evaluating new business ideas and those two are actually very closely linked but there's also distinctions because understanding why someone's buying something now versus would they actually buy something in a new market are are different exercises there's brand identity so that's the perception of what someone has of your brand or the brands in a market not what you think them to be and there's buying committee

understanding the various stakeholders that are involved in the process those are four different types of interviews you could spend an hour with a person just talking about those specific things right so there's really you have to understand there's a lot of ground you can cover and not all of it is going to be relevant to you so you need to understand okay what is it I really want to know we'll talk about it when we're setting objectives one of the things I talk about a lot in LinkedIn um is the cliche about talking to customers

um and it's not that that's a bad idea it's just how we frame the thought people seem to think that sometimes I've seen this happen that it's just like a friendly chat with people like it's networking call or you know you're catching up and that's fine because that's the vibe like it should feel that way but this is research so you're actually investigating how and why they do things and you have to structure the conversation as such so on the on the surface it's like you know friendly chat underneath the surface is an investigation so

you need to structure the conversation in a way that you're grounding it in a research objective or problem statement or something you want to solve you know something you want to know and you're not asking opinions hot takes some of that is fine for marketing for various reasons like testimonials case studies what have you but what you want to understand is facts behaviors actions how people actually move through a process and make decisions about things because those are the things you have to influence with marketing so you're Gathering all these facts behaviors and actions so

you can actually do something with that data to then then foring Marketing sales programs so again not a chat structured conversation I look at interviews in four parts so the first is you got to set the objectives and we touch touched on that a little bit but what do you want to know and what are you going to do with the data if you don't have a rationale as to why you're going to get this data then you don't you shouldn't be running research right you need to understand what is it I'm going to do

in the business and then you're going to reverse engineer what you want to no that's like one one of any design project whether it's ux research or any something else you start at the end of what you want to achieve you work backwards then you're going to find the best fit people not everyone is going to be a fit for what you want to understand customers who have been working with you for six years are different than customers who've been working you for six months and they are different than custo and buyers out of Market

who have no idea you exist all those people can give you CL ity and insights into different parts of the buy and journey and the relationship you can have with them who's the best fit and why and also who in a business and what type of firmographics and psychographics make sense and we'll talk a bit about that then you got to connu them remember not a conversation and then you're got to turn insights and actions I'm going to show you how I do that an objective is really the guiding force of how you're going to

discuss something with somebody when the questions I get is like well where do I start how do I build this how do I create an objective it really starts with the problems in your business or the things you want to improve yeah um goals kpis we want to increase the number of qualified deals next quarter by 5% um we want to increase traffic to our website organic traffic to our website by five percent no one is sharing their stuff on social we want to understand why whatever it is you want to learn uh and understand

that is sort of your starting point and you backwards and then that helps you understand the lines of themes and topics and questioning you're going to have I don't I know I have a list of like 184 questions that I give to people but it's really a starting point you have will want to really fine-tune what you're going to ask and what you want to understand based on your business and your customers's business models and what the data you need to do the thing you want to do in the business but a so a list

of like a thousand random questions ain't going to help be here you actually want what are the things we want to talk about at a high level and last is what would you like to do with the data right so what are we going to do with this because that's part of your objectives is again your reverse engineering what does you want to understand so those are the three things you to keep in mind when you're setting objectives these are objectives that clients came to me with um in various projects so the first was a

consultant who had worked in Pharmaceutical uh for 10 years started as a scientist moved into business development they wanted to launch a consultancy uh trying to understand if they could help pharmaceutical companies um launch digital Healthcare products so in essence are they going to pay me to help them do this and my first question to them was okay well how are they doing this in the first place how are other pharmaceutical companies doing this because this person had done it in hell so they were trying to take all their education and their learning and and

commercialize it and the answer to the question was like I don't know so well we got to figure out how pharmaceutical companies are developing and launching digital products because if we understand that process we understand how we're going to influence and support it and then probably commercialize their skill set second one was an a company built a software product for managing the physical life cycle of mobile devices they uh they were a managed service provider and like a lot of managed service providers they built their own tool in house they want to spin it out

and make money from it great first question I asked them so what is the process of how people are doing this they're like that's a great question let's go find out the first are not objectives they're things you want to have happen below here is like how we're actually going to design the research to go figure out if that those things are going to happen that's the difference between you know something that I think I want to have done in the business my problem versus okay well what is the research and problem statement that's going

to help us understand whether that's a reality or not and these are how it would look like for me in one of my projects right what is the objective we talk about the different themes and topics so here were the common pains and priorities of the ICP for this um it management software you can see who we're trying to focus on it's a senior manager director with a minimum of 200 devices in play and there's a reason why we did that because there's a hypothesis that before that no one's going to pay for software to

help manage the minimum number of devices below that and all the things we want to understand that's going to help us validate whether there's a business opportunity here and you can see this is the process that we believe they were um enacting right and we're going to try and understand if that process exists in aggregate across the sample size so if you have a research objective the next part of it is okay who's going to help me learn this thing right who is the best fit for that well to start you got to figure out

okay what is the type of business model I want to interview the person in this business interview and determine if they fit your research objectives so just to unpack that a bit I'm working right now with um um a manag service provider of it products they're trying to figure out you know who the best fit customer is well they have ranges from customers range from Municipal governments to state governments in the United States they also have large retail chains and food manufacturers we could go interview them all together but that is actually going to sort

of Cobble the data in a way that we won't make sense of it and giv us the insights we need about picking the best fit customer those are all different segments and you have to treat them as separate research projects because the way they solve problems as you mentioned is going to be um looked at through the context of their business model how they do things and and what they're trying to achieve in the business um another way to look at this is if I'm going to be launching or I'm trying to build a marketing

program for a company that sells into it an IT lead at a software company that is helping a 100 software Engineers solve day-to-day challenges is going to have a much different role and scope of responsibilities than if they work at a hospital and they're dealing with five software Engineers who are contract it won't be the same right like they'll have they'll have some similarities in carryover but how they solve problems will be different and the contextual lens of which they look through things is going to be different a much better approach where I say like

apples to apples is an IT lead at a software company with 100 Engineers maybe a CTO Chief technical officer that has 40 Engineers they working with because there's more overlap with them so if my uh if I had a certain objective of x i I would say okay this hospital it lead isn't make sense for me or vice versa maybe I only want to sell the hospitals then I would set I would have more congruency in my sample size of what they call it so you got to figure like who you're going to talk to

who's the best fit to answer the questions and not everyone will be it's your job to figure that out here's some two of the projects I've ran so a Target customer profile that we looked at for that um the device life cycle software head of IT director of it senior it manager uh and they're in these these industries we wanted to stay away from education government U and other types of nonprofits for various reasons this is probably even too much we probably would have wanted to start you know with one or two verticals right uh

and then we would refine from there this is for um a a company where I helped them understand if they there's a there was a market opportunity for Long Haul Trucking they were selling communication software for insurance companies so we put together firmographics and psychographics to figure out who was the best fit to inform whether that was it and we decided okay it was it was an owner operator business Long Haul Trucking business they had five to 20 trucks they were in North America and they only focused on Long Haul not last mile stuff like

Amazon delivery not large conglomerates that are doing multiple Supply chains across um you know re large retail locations they were a midsized operator so we're only going to focus on them so again you got to like really start fine-tuning who you're you're going to talk to and who you think is going to form what you're doing to find these people best way is your CRM best place to start and for existing businesses there's a treasure Trove of people and you'll have start to have firmographics and psychographics around who is a fit for that research objective

if you don't have them or you're trying to find someone that is outside of your CRM or maybe has different prographics just like Graphics Network referrals social media is a great one networking groups paid panels and expert networks I use now almost exclusively in my work it's paying for people's time now there's a cost to that but if you've done any type of recruitment or research you'll know that these areas here it can take a while to get the people that you need to talk to it's just my lived experience paid penel and expert networks

are great because you can use all those firmographics and all those objectives we just set put them into um an email that goes out to their population and people will come back to you that fit all those parameters and you can pay for an hour or 45 minutes at their time to talk about whatever you want to talk about so there's a cost to that but it's very fast and reviews are third party sites great place to sort of do some of that desk research we talked about where your aggre how people are thinking about

things and you can throw that into some type of AI um llm and just go through all the results and figure out like what are pattern themes are I even used Reddit so this was a company that was selling into Structural Engineers I posted in the structural engineering subreddit asked two questions you can see them here and I said to them hey I if you want to talk to me I'll compensate you for your time and you can see how people were already answering the two questions that I dropped into the subreddit and I was

dming these people and ask them if they wanted to participate in the research there's another great way that you can s get the ball rolling to try and get access to people and also use these answers to inform your objectives and how you're going to have the conversations with people and the common question I often get is like well how many people should I talk to there's a a lot of research in qualitative research around the best sample sizes and to give you like the co the the too long don't read version what you're aiming

for when you do qualitative research is something called thematic saturation sometimes called Insight saturation and that's where the new learnings that you um have are starting the tip over on the bell curve so what that means is you stop learning new things you can continue to have more conversations at this part of the bell curve but the amount that you're learning is negligible like there's there's a limited turns and and the the data collection that you're doing so what's the magic number the belt curve starts to tip over around seven conversations once you get to

12 you're probably here once you get to 15 you're probably here so that means around 12 conversations you've probably captured 90% of the learnings that you're going to learn overall now you got to actually get them agree to talk to you a lot of this is like called calling cold emailing methodology um which is uh can be a challenge I'm not going to sugarcoat it this is often recruitment is often the hardest part of getting in front of people so how do you increase the odds of you actually getting a customer there's a few ways

one is you got to be specific about what you're talking about this is not a sales call this is you trying to understand a lot about them right it's research and what you're going to be talking about because people don't want to be surprised or they might be anxious about these things so you really want to um set the stage of what is you're going to try and talk to them about and what you want to understand how are you going to talk to them what's the length what's the methodology phone in person that still

happens or video chat like this and send some type of personalization if appropriate you don't have to not everyone's comfortable that could be I saw this in your company I saw this news happen I just saw you got promoted um XYZ right the key thing is you want to be very transparent about what you're doing and you really want to focus on them so why they're skill set why they're the best fit you want to help them you want to give them a better experience you can see that's what we did with Randy here we're

focusing on them and they're going to be the ones that help us understand you know how we get to that outcome all right so Randy says yes what do we do next well we got talk to them there's a lot of methodologies and um psychology in this environment I used it when I was reporter investigative reporter um people use it a lot in any type of investigative work legal um um law enforcement um therapists have their own methodology the good part is we're just trying to understand how people make business decisions so the 101 type

of approach can really help us here and move move the needle from like zero to 100 really quickly I'm going to show you some ways you can do that some some tips and tricks the first is you want to create an environment where they feel like it's a safe space and they can share and a lot of that is really just how you conduct yourself you want to speak clearly and calmly not slow you want to practice active listening so that's like paraphrasing really seem like you're engaged um that does two things it triggers your

memory helps your memory but also helps them um understand that you're actually paying attention to them don't take notes um I want you just says sorry don't write down answers I just want to take notes people get tripped up because they're trying to write everything down well we have technology now that can record conversations and we don't have to worry about all the great things people are saying you need to be more engaged on what what are the answers that they giv you and how can you dig deeper into what they're telling you don't offer

any conclusions or try to um try to put words in their head and this is research you're you're an objective participant right and you're just sort of guiding them through a process try not to interrupt them and ask one question at a time which is actually a very tough thing to do we have a natural tendency in conversation to ask a few questions at once triple and double up questions an example of that would be when did you think when did you prioritize this being a problem and who did you speak to to about it

and what were some of the things you looked at those are three questions but that's easy it's easy for us to sort of bundle them together the challenge is you're going to confuse the person on the other end either um you know from a subtextual standpoint or conscious standpoint so you want to separate all those questions because those are actually three questions and allow space to breathe in between them one of the things you want to do when you're talking to people is you want to dig into vague or abs abolute statements the reason for

that is a lot of the responses that they give you in the beginning are just going to not have a lot of detail in the first like zero to 10 minutes and that's just because their memory hasn't really activated yet it's really hard for us to recall things instantly you know we need time for a brain to make these soft connections about like what we did the actions we took so you can use probing questions to follow up on these things uh when people make vague or absolute statements I like the packaged aspect of it

of how it was just it was a really straightforward value prop you know it's your it's your product High service where we're going to write x amount of articles for you it's going to cost this amount it's something that I could budget for it took away a lot of the unknowns um and I felt like it was a the I'm on the every every other week plan the the the weekly plan for me frankly is just it's just too much content it's too much responsibility and it's just too much of a of a thing um

that every other week seemed like a really and I think at the time they had a monthly plan they might have dropped that um but uh every two weeks was seemed like a really good Cadence of okay that's going to be enough content that's going to get out there but not overwhelm me um uh in trying to try to manage that and um so I I don't know I think I think ultimately just came back to it just it seemed like pricing was right the the quality was right it was just all those things kind

of combined that it was easy enough to to to give it a try for a quarter and um you know a year later still there you said um it addressed the unknowns what walk me through what you mean by that yeah so I mean just address the unknowns vague statement what does that mean our job is to unpack those things because people are going to say those types of things when you talk to them this is a drum I beat constantly actions over opinions what did they do you know what did they do next facts

there's a few reasons why we want to this do this facts stories narratives and timelines are easier for people to talk about we're much better telling stories than we are about recalling data and when you go to then compare these facts stories narratives and timelines you'll actually have a better um um you'll have a much easier time comparing these things because you'll see the trends and the themes emerge much easier than you will if you're just asking them hypotheticals or opinion based questions or subject of questions so you really want to you really want to

focus on these type of things and one of the the tricks I always have one of the tips I have for people is what did you do next is often one of the best questions you can ask because if we're looking for timelines and stories and a buying process that we need to influence you can just start with where they the process began and asked them as they get to one step great what did you do next what did you do next because as you do that you're going to build out that timeline and that

narrative like all the actions they took to go from we needed to prioritize solving the thing to we chose you as the vendor yeah I mean between 2017 so we started in 2017 um and we were just like super busy with sort of like the initial load of work um that we had gotten just through our own contacts um and then uh yeah like basically we were just like go go go all the time so we had a really crappy like onepage website for the longest time um it was probably just like a one pager

and uh yeah and so really um it was really on like early 2020 you know like Co hits and then um a couple of our clients had sort of like slowed down their spending that those early weeks and so um if you're like okay like now's a really great time I can like I can take a breath and focus on marketing for a bit so that's yeah this seemed like a good time to do it so what did you do you so you have the thought okay so clients are slowing down spending I need to

get more in my pipeline or at least get some more thought process I think content marketing can help what did you do next right so um see I think the first thing I did was I actually went to a different firm to do um to so a few things there I paraphrased so I was doing that as a recap I went I stuck to a timeline I actually pushed them back a bit because I want to understand what we have a habit people people have a habit of jumping ahead in the timeline right we cover

a lot of ground quickly so I'm always pushing people back and I I'm starting to get like that narrative what' you do here what' you do here what' you do here because if I can get that in the aggregate then I know how to build a marketing program to influence it yeah I mean between so last thing I want to show you everything is unpacking decisions and processes which I just sort of touched on we will people will truncate years and months of their mindset and the things they did within seconds or sentences of speech

we have to really unpack how these things unfolded because they're just going to gloss over it naturally it's a story andell telling technique right we do that our job is to dig in and really pull back the layers of things um so dig into their motivations behaviors why they chose to make an they chose a certain action or chose a certain path here's the thing though why can start to feel like an interrogation and this is not what you're trying to achieve here remember the vibe we want is friendly space even though it's research but

it's safe space they can share feels good so you want to ask why without asking why which is why I have a list of probing questions in that document that we're going to be sharing it's a way of rephrasing things such as that's interesting I haven't heard that yet can you expand on that we're asking why and we're unpacking things are actually making it feel like it's an interrogation were there any anxieties or concerns you had as you're talking to them about sort of how they talk what they did price okay walk me through why

what's what's the issue with price and when I looked into everything it had appeared to me that this was going to take some of the workload off M um and that was our main reason um to go full on 100% with when you say take some of the workload off can you just walk me through a bit of that like what what is the work what is the workload hey I'll take you from beginning to end of what happens is yeah yes please that'd be great what was the workload and that's so many times where

we stop in marketing oh we helped with workload well what is it how did we help why did we help and the reason why that's important is because as buyers start to look at Solutions like yours they're going to look at things that are relevant incredible within the context of that workload so you need to understand how these things unfold and the best way to do that is help unpack it and have them walk through it all right so let's say you have your 12 convers ations now you got to organize the data one of

the most common ways we do this in qualitative research is an approach called thematic analysis there's a few ways to do it this is really one of those straightforward ways and it's basically what it sounds like you're Rel listening and or reading the interviews you just had I do both I relisten and I read the transcripts back and you're starting to now get the patterns in your brain and the the ways that you want to sort of bucket the data we call it codify in qualitative research but it's really just like this answer belongs here

this answer belongs here and if we go back to our research objectives if we've done a good job of bucketing the things we want to learn and why this becomes really straightforward to do because you start to look at the answers and you say oh that belongs here that belongs here there's lots of qualitative research tools uh that that you can use out there I've used dovetail this is one called condens but you can just use a notetaker and Google or word to start highlighting things you can make it and then drop things in a

spreadsheet you don't need the tools what matters is the process and if you do this I guarantee you you're going to have such a really in-depth Rich knowledge of how people make decisions and you're really going to start looking at your Marketing sales in a whole new way and the way you can socialize these things is you can whether it's you're building a Persona or some type of buyer story whatever the framework is that you want to use you can start sharing these things in these documents um and sorry and documents are socialized to your

colleagues into your teams right and this is one where um it's a bu we call business trigger and jobs be done some people call it the category entry point but it's really like what was the Tipping Point for someone to make a buying decision you can see how we summarize different parts of the conversation and this could have been at different part points in that dialogue right so this could been minute five minute 10 and minute 27 but we've put them all together like a puzzle and they're all voice of the customer driven quotes they

are helping us uh understand why we've come to a conclusion or a code or a theme right and we've done that over and over again to share that with our teammates but like why do we believe this to be true this is how we do that we transcribe we listen we parse we put put all back together and these are the ways that I like to organize um my research reports um and is very much like a Persona driven um um methodology so roles responsibilities and business model the process that they're looking to improve because

remember all Solutions in B2B live within a process so what's that process how these Pro how problems manifest in this process the buying triggers and catalysts for change sources information they trust not where they go what do they trust there a big difference how they evaluate a short list how they evaluate the considered approaches the solutions they can pair you against buying committee members and why they win deals is another very straightforward example of how I would do this for a client and how I've done it in house and how I think you can do

it yourself if we go back to the example of that pharmaceutical consultant this was how companies that we interviewed pharmaceutical companies launched digital health care products what's interesting interesting was the consultant thought they were going to build their business around here which is helping them companies understand what their opportunities in the market were to either acquire or build new digital Healthcare products what was interesting though was this is where people fell down because these are all scientists and pharmaceutical companies who would never asked the board of directors for $5 million to build an app a

software uh product they were terrified so messaging positioning what we LED with in our marketing was here now as a service based business model this consultant still helped with all these things but this is what they LED with and this is what their marketing really focused on to drive qualified leads into the door this is the trucking um uh one that we worked on where now we know the process of dispatching loads and how they communicate in within that process because that was the piece of software they've built so now you can see what content

pillars you can start to build because this is the process that all these ideal buyers actually care about and whether they use the tool or not they're still going to want to improve this process but this is the process that we have to help them improve and influence for them to put us on the buyer consideration set so we're actually first around if they want to evaluate us they will as an option to improve this process and not only that I know all the tech stack they use and how it integrates together and who the

competition is because I asked them very straightforward right so now I know how to position against these things and where we're going to fit in the mix and finally um one of the companies I've done a lot of work with over the years great company in Canada called rewind they had an acquisition of a GitHub product their value proposition is they you backup and recovery for cloud application software products so lassan Shopify GitHub you name it they've built a backup for it what was interesting is when they acquired the GitHub um product and they'd folded

into the product portfolio we used all the business intelligence from the founding team about how to go to market and nothing was really happening so I got tasked to understand look what was happening here why are we not getting the leads we anticipated well it turns out we contextually had the problem wrong we're talking about it the wrong way and we had the buyer wrong which is a whole other different story but for this purpose of the conversation we were positioned as a backup solution that they can plug into uh to to save their code

repositories or back up their code repositories that's not where the pain lied the pain lied with the IT department who was trying to build backup scripts or a version of rewind in house and they didn't want to do it anymore so we changed a lot of the messaging in the marketplace and we tested this in ads and we built New pieces of content to support a larger process that doubled the installs in just a few weeks because we started talking about it in a way that made sense to these people before we weren't this is

why I like to do this whole process because it gets us to this end state where we're influencing how people buy why they how they look at things in textually and then we can build marketing programs that are relevant and credible these are some resources that um I think everyone's going to get George um this is my list of questions great stuff a lot of this is customer Discovery um you know customer development but marketing and customer development are like vend diagrams in my opinion so if you figure a lot of this stuff out you're

going to do really good at sort of understanding how you can sell into a market how do I do for time perfect you you you've you've nailed it absolutely technical difficulties even with technical difficulties we have a couple of questions from the audience uh Ryan the the first is from Robert and he's asking if you use a particular platform um for doing those paid panels like do you use winter is there a group that you use um so the short answer is yes um two I'm using right now one's called Emporia uh which is very

interesting they crawl LinkedIn um and I've been successful with them I've used user interviews in the past they're great respondents great I also there's a great one called nx1 um which Aggregates various expert networks here's the thing um panel where you call whether you call them panel recruitment expert networks whatever there's hundreds of them all with different flavors of different expertise right some are just it focused cyber security right Winter's winter which is great it it really skews towards marketing and sales great a lot of is just finding the right fit for who you want

to talk to because one of the challenges you'll find is the population base is limited so if I want directors of it cyber security at Fortune 1000 you know one this expert Network here might not work but this one does right and it's all different costs associated with that too because there's DIY and there's white glove service where people go and find them and just hand them to you on a silver platter um so I can follow with people there but user interviews respondent Emporia and INX one are great ones to start getting your feet

wet um in in this world and or talk to your product people if you're with them they do this stuff all the time you a lot of marketers are shocked to see how many times product people are just talking to in Market users they have like some of them have like 15 conversations a week with strangers in Market but marketers not so much amazing uh another question from Alex what do you do if no one is interested in speaking with you you touched on that a little bit already but if you could kind of revisit

some of the the key points there it's tough recruitment's tough right um and especially if you don't have a large customer base to pull from one is um look at your messaging um see if it's it's if it if it has any whiff of sales not gonna happen lean on your networks um and people you know to make introductions best thing you can do because the average per think how much your inbox gets blown up George or your DMs in LinkedIn right you have like what 20,000 connections now LinkedIn I'm sure your DMs are bananas

so people are inundated with stuff and they're filtering it out like we do with everything else our brain right so think about how how you're reaching out how can you get a leg up either by through a personal connection or you're part of a community like George's Community like George might even know someone you could he could introduce you to right um Last Resort pay for their time and it's not much like if I just did a project now where we're speaking to directors director level people in large companies and we paid but $300 for

an hour of time USD so not a crazy expense still part of a budget but if you can an hour with a director who's buying software that you want to sell to them $300 ain't too bad R what if uh if marketing is able to get buy and for this and they make this customer interview kind of like embedded in their process so maybe they get looped in by customer success once a customer kind of has like their first big win and then they pull them into a conversation is that something like that kind of

system or timing does that help get in front of these people and have those conversations yeah but customer success is probably facing the same battles as you um right everyone everybody in an organization wants access to customers in some way so that becomes sometimes a a friction in itself the politics of that sales doesn't want you to talk to their Accounts customer success wants them for case studies product wants a piece of them so that's hard because then it's just like so there's a few ways around that um one is yeah have good relationships get

in a room talk about what everyone needs and identify who's willing to do that people have been building customer panel groups internally for decades I've worked inside I've been in house where that's happened we've had customer uh buying groups customer panels there are customers that represent the voice of the market they're a fantastic tool um or way to get insights so help work with your colleagues isolate and identify these people and do handoffs where needs be um or like I keep saying try and build some things outside of the scope because remember you have to

still influence the market your customers only have one contextual lens of like how they work with you and they might not even be in tune with how things are shifting and new things in the market that they might be evaluating you against out of Market in Market buyers are doing that so if you have to influence how they think you probably are going to want to go and try and talk to them I hope I don't know if I answered your question but that's yeah absolutely thanks so much Ryan uh we do have to move

on to the the next session now um if people do have questions I'm sure they can connect with you on LinkedIn and um I'm sure you'd be so kind is to maybe answer them there yeah man I answer all the DMS so I tried to anyway it's get gets harder with every month but yeah please just reach out and always happy to help if I can