5min chapter

Customer Show cover image

From Listening To Launch: How We Do Customer Research

Customer Show

CHAPTER

Is There Demand for This Method?

The majority of the workshops were being done in Atlantic Canada. The people who took to this, you know, interview method the most and the people who were able to just kind of go and run with it tended to be people that were coming from a marketing background. "I knew that demand was there because I kept getting asked for it"

00:00
Speaker 1
And so we kept getting, I in particular kept getting asked by people outside of the region if I could host a workshop for them or if I had any resources I could sell them to help them learn how to better understand their customers. So I knew that demand was there because I kept getting asked for it. And I didn't have something to offer people because we didn't do one off workshops at the time. The majority of the workshops were being done in Atlantic Canada. And if you weren't local, you weren't able to participate. I remember I had a workshop going on and there was a company based in Boston. He was like, I'll fly. I'll come. Can I just come? And I was like, I'm sorry, you can't. You have to be an Atlantic Canadian company because of who the partner was. They only fund and support training for Atlantic Canadian companies. So I knew that a band was there. The question was, who is this, you know, who should I develop this product for? Because depending on which audience we were going to focus on, the product would look very different. So as I was doing more of my training and out delivering these workshops live and of course talking to the participants and learning more about their businesses, I started to see an interesting pattern. And that was that the people who took to this, you know, interview method the most and the people who were able to just kind of go and run with it. And most importantly, really be able to pull amazing insights out of the people they were interviewing and figure out exactly how to action those insights tended to be people that were coming from a marketing background. So they might be founders of companies who had a marketing background or they were the marketers on the team. And they really just understood kind of innately how to have these conversations with customers once they were given the method. And when they would be conducting these interviews, they'd be able to hear things and know how to action that in their marketing plan. And that made me think, you know, at the time I was like, well, maybe this is something that we can teach specifically to marketers. So go back to about 2018. And I ended up doing a number of interviews with agency owners wanting to understand maybe that's the audience that really needs to learn this method. And from those interviews, heard a lot, learned a lot, a lot of the agency owners were hungry to understand their clients customers better. But there was this huge roadblock for them in that their customers, their clients rather often didn't want to pay for research. They were unwilling to pay for research. They just wanted the services to start right away and the agency to start producing creative and research was often something that was very hard to get onto the line item of their budgets. And so that kind of maybe backpedal a little bit. I started to wonder maybe marketers aren't really the audience. And maybe I need to actually do some work in educating marketers and companies around how important this is. So I really spent, you know, a couple of years building up my following, sharing stories of people who are going through our training, who are getting great results, sharing data from companies like Profitwell or co-schedule who are doing a ton of research into this kind of thing and showing the types of results that research driven marketing can get and trying to basically be a cheerleader for research being an essential step in marketing. And that, you know, through the process of doing that, I get a lot of marketers DMing me and being like, Oh my God, I'm drinking the Kool-Aid. I just need to convince my boss, like somebody, you know, needs to tell my bosses because they won't let me talk to customers. They never want to do research. And so, you know, just in having interviews with, you know, people who we thought would be a fit in having detailed conversations with participants who are going through my workshop and in listening to what people in my social sphere were saying and the challenges they were having, it helped us to continue to refine what this product was going to be, who was going to be for and how we were going to deliver value. One thing I'll say too is that in talking to a lot of these marketers and in being one myself, there's so many demands for your time and there's so many people out there promising the silver bullet solution. You know, if you just knew this one quick trick or, you know, you just buy my, you know, 10 hour video course, you're going to get all the answers you need. I knew that marketers had experienced the letdown of these disappointing products. And experienced the friction of buying something and then realizing very quickly that just to kind of learn it was going to take 10, 15 hours that they didn't have. And so that insight also led to what this was, which was it was framed as a cheat sheet. This is to help you kick, like get off the rep ground and running quickly. It's at a glance. It's skit like skimmable. It's a resource that you can get and run with right away as opposed to having to put a lot of time in to learning the methods before you can actually get value out. So that was really important too.

Get the Snipd
podcast app

Unlock the knowledge in podcasts with the podcast player of the future.
App store bannerPlay store banner

AI-powered
podcast player

Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features

AI-powered
podcast player

Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features

Discover
highlights

Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode

Discover
highlights

Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode

Save any
moment

Hear something you like? Tap your headphones to save it with AI-generated key takeaways

Save any
moment

Hear something you like? Tap your headphones to save it with AI-generated key takeaways

Share
& Export

Send highlights to Twitter, WhatsApp or export them to Notion, Readwise & more

Share
& Export

Send highlights to Twitter, WhatsApp or export them to Notion, Readwise & more

AI-powered
podcast player

Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features

AI-powered
podcast player

Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features

Discover
highlights

Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode

Discover
highlights

Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode