How Product Marketers Armed with Customer Insights Can Fuel Your GTM Motion
WRITTEN BY Lyle Burns, Fluvio Consultant & Mark Huber, VP of Marketing at Userevidence
Customer Feedback Drives Success
Every company should strive to better understand their customers. Effective customer feedback influences strategy across the organization and makes sales, marketing, product, and customer success teams more effective. Without strong Ideal customer profiles and personas informed by customer insights, product marketing and the organization at large are often flying blind and making their best guess on what will land in the market.
Building an effective customer feedback loop requires positive relationships with customers, easy to use processes and systems, consistent outreach, and a way to ask the right questions to uncover valuable insights.
Product marketers are often at the forefront of this customer outreach process because they don’t present the pressure of a sales person, helping customers open up. They have an understanding of goals across the organization that allow them to ask the right questions to customers to get insights for multiple teams.
Even with the critical impact across the organization customer feedback has, product marketers often aren’t given direct access to customers. Relationships are often owned and safeguarded by sales and customer success requiring introductions and often product marketers are told “now is not the right time” or “just wait until next quarter”. So rather than a customer feedback loop being created that fuels the company and the go-to-marketing motion, a barrier is created and effectiveness is reduced.
More Customer Insights = More Effective Product Marketers
Product marketing works across marketing, product, sales, and customer success to serve as the voice of the customer. If a product marketer does not have a line into customer insights from multiple channels, then their effectiveness can be constrained. A line of insight and feedback from customers should inform messaging frameworks, sales collateral, customer journey maps, personas, GTM strategy, and any other foundational product marketing materials. Beyond that, as a product marketer being able to provide sales and product teams with customer feedback and insights brings tremendous value and makes product marketing teams an invaluable part of the organization.
As an in-house product marketer and as a product marketing consultant, I’ve worked with sales and product teams that felt that they were already knowledgeable and plugged in with customers. However, perspective and relationship can influence the feedback, insights, and data a team is able to collect as it changes the questions asked, the goal of the process, and even how forthcoming respondents are.
Even in cases when I or other product marketers brought back data and insights directly from customers to teams that felt they had strong customer understanding and connections, it has been an eye-opening experience. It has led to strategy changes, product developments, and an overall deeper understanding of customer wants and needs. As teams became more aware of what customers were thinking, they were able to drive positive impact across the organization.
Give Sales What They Want and Need
Product marketers are not only trying to influence strategy, we’re also trying to impact revenue. As we work with revenue generating teams, especially sales teams, the number one requested piece of enablement material is always customer stories and testimonials. They understand most customers want to see proven success and have evidence of how other competitors in their space have implemented a product.
Not only do they want anecdotes, they also want them to be backed by hard evidence and specific examples. Customer evidence, including case studies and testimonials, are often the fastest way to provide leads with a frame of reference on how to successfully leverage your product, build trust, overcome objections and obstacles, all of which accelerate the closing of a deal.
Product marketers need to collect qualitative data that highlights the customer’s problem, how they’re solving them with your product, and the overall experience. They also must obtain quantitative data that shows true impact and ROI. With both they can weave that information into truly effective case studies and customer stories. Lacking qualitative data strips a customer story of its relatability and human-centric touch that creates creation with leads.
Without quantitative data, trust in and effectiveness of these stories diminishes. Enabling product marketers to consistently speak and collect data and stories from a variety of customers allows product marketers to supercharge sales enablement and support revenue generation in more ways.
How to Get Customer Insights
There’s multiple ways for marketers to connect with customers to get the critical customer evidence they need to create key materials and empower teams across the organization. Some examples include
Interviews
Reviews
Surveys
In-product questionnaires
Product usage data
Each of these channels and formats provide different levels of data and insight, and should be utilized for different purposes. Together they give a full view of customer behavior, needs, and desires for teams to leverage.
Putting a focused and consistent process in place across multiple channels is an ambitious and challenging process. It can require careful planning and coordination across teams, real manpowers, budget for incentives, or even investment in different technology.
However, it can be difficult for product marketers to find enough time to properly gather user insights at scale. That’s where technologies such as Fluvio partner, UserEvidence can help drive these efforts.
UserEvidence is the Always-On Feedback Loop for Product Marketers
Product marketers can finally capture the voice of the customer at scale with UserEvidence.
UserEvidence’s customer voice platform delivers surveys at key moments throughout the customer journey that capture feedback from end users – in their customers’ own words.
Surveys can be delivered using email, in-app messages, and anywhere else you can include a link when communicating with customers.
Product marketers can review all survey responses, at the individual or aggregate level, and quickly generate verified customer evidence like case studies, testimonials, product stats, and ROI data.
Direct customer feedback helps product marketers back up big product claims, nail new messaging, and create stronger competitive intelligence. New customer evidence can be pushed directly to critical tools their GTM team already uses every day.
Game-changing B2B companies like Pendo, Workato, and Gong rely on UserEvidence to boost buyer confidence, shorten sales cycles, and increase win rates.
Final thoughts
No matter where you sit in your organization, take some time to consider how well you and the rest of your company understand your customers. Is your knowledge coming from one team or channel? Is it based on assumptions? Or, is it truly informed by market research and customer feedback?
Every company should be striving to be more customer-centric and can benefit from doing so. Ensure you have the right team members, technology, processes and strategies in place to fully reap the benefits of customer research and advocacy.