What if You Don't Exist?

Katelyn Bourgoin is a marketer by trade and founder by choice. She is CEO and Lead Trainer of Customer Camp, where she helps teams make smarter marketing decisions with buyer psychology. A marketing powerhouse, Katelyn has been nicknamed “The Customer Whisperer,” and called an “influential entrepreneur” by Forbes; she is also one of the Top 20 Wonder Women of SaaS Marketing and Growth. In this episode of Unlearn, she and Barry O’Reilly discuss her customer discovery journey and where she found breakthroughs where others have struggled. Effective Customer Discovery After a brief, failed venture into making a tech company, Katelyn discovered something about customer discovery she previously misunderstood. She knew the importance of understanding and targeting your audience, but was left stumped when she did things as she was supposed to and achieved poor results. She underestimated the true value of market research, and tried selling a solution at the start, instead of starting with the customers’ needs and working backwards to the solution. Job to be Done (JTBD) Your ideal customer profile shouldn’t be based solely on demographics, but on the job your customers need your product or service to help them perform. Katelyn learned the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) philosophy at a webinar by Forget the Funnel and it has influenced her approach to marketing ever since. Essentially, JTBD posits that people hire products and services to help them get a job done. They will continue to use that product for as long as it fulfills their needs and circumstances, and helps them move closer to where and who they want to be. “People don’t buy products and services willy-nilly,” Katelyn explains. “...We actually have a job we’re trying to get done.” Once that solution stops working, they will find a new one. The Buyer Journey Interview Integrating JTBD into buyer journey interviews -also called switch interviews - is the next step in elevating your market research. Katelyn’s mentor Bob Moesta was the one to make this discovery, and it happened by accident. Due to his dyslexia, Bob would draw a timeline of his clients’ stories instead of jotting down notes since this visual method was more effective for him. While drawing these images, it hit him like a brick: customer researchers were doing interviews all wrong. They had a siloed approach to solving customer problems, focusing on a specific issue under specific circumstances rather than getting the full picture of what led a customer to them in the first place. Who Are Your True Competitors? Katelyn talks about April Dunford’s exercise to understand who your real competitors are, and what the real job to be done is. If your product didn’t exist, what alternative solutions would people use? What are they using right now, if not your direct competitor’s products? Getting into the layers of who your real competition is and deeply understanding the job being done helps you see your solution in an innovative way, Katelyn shares. ConvertKit is one company that is successful at this: they don’t see themselves as email marketing software, but as a platform that helps creators make a living creating. Their concierge service and their recent sponsor network program demonstrate their mission, and sets them apart from other email service providers. Looking Ahead In following her dream scenario of building a scalable business that doesn’t require too much of her time, Katelyn is building out her newsletter, Why We Buy, into a media company. She has halted her consulting work to focus on this new venture, which she is doing with an amazing team of contractors as opposed to individual employees. Read full show notes at BarryO'Reilly.com Resources Katelyn Bourgoin on the Web | LinkedIn | Twitter Customer Camp