Archives for "Market Research"

This is the final installment on how to gather and use relevant product feedback. In an earlier post I laid out this three-step framework:

1. Go get it.
2. Share it.
3. Live it.

In Step 1 I offered advice on how to collect good market information, and in Step 2 I described the importance of sharing that information with the rest of your organization.

The premise behind Step 3 is that it’s one thing to have a conceptual understanding of the buyers in your market, but it’s another to walk a mile in their shoes. In order to truly understand your buyers, step away from your desk and go see them in action. If you can, go live a day in the life of your customer.

Step 3: Live it. See what your customers see. Think what they think.

There are a lot of ways to get a better understanding of the buyers in your market. Here are some of my favorite ways to live it:

• Take a field trip. Visit your customers and talk to the people who made the decision to buy your product. Watch them use your product and ask them to articulate the value they get from it.
• Attend the same trade shows and conferences as your buyers, even if you’re not exhibiting. Have casual conversations at lunch or between sessions.
• If applicable, attend your company’s training classes and listen to your new customers’ expectations for your product.
• Create in-person focus groups or advisory boards.
• Cultivate relationships with key customers who are representative of your greater market.
• Perform in-person product testing.
• Give out samples or free trials, observe the behaviors of people who use them and talk to them about their experiences.
• Don’t forget to pick the brains of the subject matter experts in your own organization.

Nothing takes the place of in-person interactions, but as a matter of practicality, we can’t spend every day in the field. Keep up to date by leveraging the web to listen to the conversations in your market. Follow your market’s LinkedIn groups, newsletters, forums, blogs (including the replies!) and industry events.

Listen for the nuances in your buyers’ language and adjust your own to make sure you’re truly speaking to them. Be observant when their problems change and adjust your understanding of what your solution needs to provide. Do this often and make sure you’re feeding any updates back to the rest of your organization.

Soon, you’ll all be looking at your product through the eyes of the customer. The beauty of this approach is that making product decisions ultimately becomes easier. Once you know who you’re building for, you don’t need to guess.

Further reading:

Taking product research to the next level

In the start of this series, I laid out a framework for gathering and using relevant product feedback:

1. Go get it.
2. Share it.
3. Live it.

Gathering the information is the critical first step in the process and it can be very rewarding. It’s great when people validate our ideas and it’s even better when they improve on them.

Collecting this data is important, but it’s still just data. It only becomes valuable product feedback if you actually do something with it. And this brings us to…

Step 2: Share it with your entire organization.

You’ve collected the data, you have some product feedback and you think you know the right thing to do…but people around you aren’t listening. How do you overcome their resistance?

At Arena, everyone knows "Brad," the VP of operations.

The answer: Put it in the voice of the market. Share the information you gathered. Point out trends in the market. Relay the product feedback, highlighting the praises and the criticisms. One of the most effective ways to do this is to give a name and a face to each of the key buyers in your market.  This is often referred to as “buyer profiling” or creating a buyer persona. (Note: This is different than creating a user persona.)

Here’s an example of buyer profiling. At Arena, everyone knows “Brad,” the VP of operations. Brad is 44 years old. Brad went to a state school. Brad gets frustrated with engineering. Brad gets fired if his product ships late.

Brad is not a real person.

Brad was created from the aggregation of dozens of conversations, hundreds of survey data points and a lot of product feedback. Through our analysis, we identified his top responsibilities and the main problems he encounters in trying to get his job done. We also gained insight into his personal and professional goals. Further, we learned where he gets his job-related information and what his preferred methods of communication are.

After we created Brad, we introduced him to everybody in our company through a series of presentations, conversations and printed materials. We made sure that each group had the information it needed to make the best decisions about how to serve this key buyer. For marketing, for instance, we made sure the team knew that Brad hates email but trusts his LinkedIn groups. For our developers, we described how Brad is a pretty savvy user (he’d be comfortable approving a change order from his Blackberry) but not a hardcore technophile. We went through our findings with sales, support, training and all of management.

The results have been great.

Now, everybody understands Brad and the problems that we solve for him. We hear it in meetings all the time: “Yes, but would Brad care?”

What happens when times change though? How do you keep up with product feedback in a moving economy?

The answer: Live it.

More handles are better, right?

In my last post, I laid out three steps for gathering market data:

1. Go get it.
2. Share it.
3. Live it.

The idea, of course, is to collect information that helps you make a great product that the market wants. Nothing irks me more than when a “cool” feature finds its way into the products that I use – often at the cost of the usability of the product (and in my case, a cut finger and loss of temper).

Getting the right market information is one of the easiest things you can do. It’s also the hardest. It’s easy because your potential buyers are all around you – via phone, email, in person…and they’re probably all over your website. It’s hard because it takes time you don’t have.

My advice? Just do it.

Step 1. Go get it. Figure out what to ask — and ask it.

Before making any final decisions about what product to build or what new features to build in, ask yourself a number of questions: Is my idea valuable to the market? Does it appeal to the primary buyers and decision makers? Does it map to our company goals?

Then turn these into interview or survey questions and pick up the phone or build a web survey with a free service like SurveyMonkey or Survs. Here’s a sample of how those questions might look:

Once you know what to ask, find the right people and start asking. This is difficult. Nobody wants to get an unsolicited call from someone they don’t know. It’s hard to incentivize anybody to complete your survey. You don’t want to spam the members of your LinkedIn group. Yes, these are tough objections, but it’s even tougher to explain to management why you spent $1 million on product development and nobody bought your product.

How to find people to talk to:

• Leverage your network – you might be surprised who knows whom
• Dig into your CRM system
• Use LinkedIn (ask a contact to make an introduction)
• Advertise on the website of a relevant organization (I’ve used APICS in the past to advertise a survey)
• Post questions on your website (a simple yes/no may be all you need)
• Hire an army of cheap or free interns to do online research
• Go to where your market is—trade shows, conferences, etc… even if you are a lurker
• And if you have the budget—there are a number of excellent market research firms out there

Be relentless. Track down your buyers and decision makers, ask the questions and record their answers. After a time, you’ll be able to aggregate their responses and determine clear trends.

Great—now you know what your market wants. But what about everyone else in your company?

Step 2. Share it within your company.

Step 3. Live it.