6 Steps to Building a Customer Insights Program with Shoshana Kordova

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Hey everyone, Matt here, head of community at Exit 5. In this episode I talk to Shoshana Cordova. Shoshana is a three times founding product marketer and former journalist who specializes in launching what she calls customer infused messaging for B2B tech startups. She now runs a product marketing consultancy called Peel Product Marketing and in this episode she walked me through the six steps that she takes to start a customer insights program from scratch and how to infuse that into your messaging. We talked about the benefits of starting a customer insights program, how to get company buy in before starting a program, and some of the biggest challenges that marketers face when starting a program and how to overcome them. So I'll see you inside the episode. All right, how's it going everyone? I'm here with Shoshana Cordova. Shoshana, how's it going?

It's great. How are you?

Yeah, doing good, doing good. Appreciate you coming on. We'd love if you just started us off with a little bit about yourself.

Yeah, sure. I'm a product marketer. I've been a founding product marketer at three different startups and I actually come from a journalism background and right now I specialize in customer infused messaging for B2B tech startups through the product marketing consultancy that I run, which is called Product Marketing.

Cool. And what do you define as customer infused messaging? That's an interesting term. I don't know, I've heard before.

Yeah, so I'm really, really big on talking to customers, which I know is something that a lot of people talk about, but I actually find that many people find it hard to know how to get started or how to actually hold that conversation. So I'm really big on actually talking to the customers, creating like a whole program around it and using those insights all across the organization. So, yeah, I actually just wrote a customer insights playbook for Jason Oakley's PMM Jetpack, if your listeners are familiar. And if not, they should be because it's like a treasure trove of templates and playbooks that can be used, you know, at startups, especially for founding PMMs, but really for anybody. And it kind of walks you through the process of building a customer insights program.

Awesome. Love it, love it. Yeah, I've heard big things obviously about JSON in general, but just about his jetpack too, so that's super cool. Sweet. So, yeah, let's get talking about customer insights. You know, obviously a lot of people, any company, all over lensing people will tell you to go ahead and talk to customers. It's always something that someone says, yeah, go talk to customers. It's kind of like the catch all phrase for learning what to write and how to write and learning what campaigns to run. But what are your thoughts overall on customer insights? How you think they can use some of the issues you see with them?

Yeah, well, I think people often face a bunch of common challenges when they're trying to get started doing customer insights. And one of those challenges that I've seen is that often, even though we see it on LinkedIn, talk to customers. But actually your boss is usually not telling you to talk to customers because they want some pretty deliverable that they can send to the sales team or put out into the world and like that directly goes to the market. And so they're often more focused on that. Like those Market facing deliverables. But actually the customer insights are what is really the foundation of building a good deliverable. Because it's how you actually find out the information that's really interesting to your customers. Like the real pain points that they're facing, the real challenges that they have, the real goals that they're trying to reach and how your product can help them reach it. That's the goals that you get from talking to customers. So I do think it's a mistake for people to be focusing only on those, that those market facing assets because there's so much under the surface that builds the foundation so that those assets look really good.

Yeah, totally agree. Okay, so you know, let's say there's a marketer, product marketer listening to this right now and either they've been given a direction to go talk to customers or you know, they're smart enough to know that talking to customers is going to help them do their job better. Like what's the first place that they look? Like what do they, what do they do? How do they start?

Yeah, so it kind of speaks to another problem that I think people have, which is that oftentimes marketing team is not the team that owns the relationship with customers. Usually it sits with customer success, sometimes with sales, especially at an earlier stage, startup, but it's usually not with marketing. So there's kind of the like stepping on toes, fear and like boundary crossing, et cetera, that it's like, well, how do I even get to the customers? So like actually one of the templates that I built out is a pipeline for customer interviews where the underlying concept is you do it collaboratively. Right. I think almost everything with product marketing, probably with all of marketing, but certainly with product marketing is like if it's not collaborative, it's not going to take off because you can sit all day in your silo and think about what you think the customer's challenges are, what you think the best words should be. But it's not going to resonate the same way as it will when you're talking to the customers. And in the same way internally collaborating with like the customer success team, that's going to be the best way to do it. Because they're the ones who already have a relationship with the customers and they're also the ones who are aware of like sensitivities because the last thing you want to do is, you know, like you're talking to the customer at a sensitive point and like, cause the customer to churn. Like that's bad. You don't want that to happen. Right. So for sure. So you want to be like sensitive to that. And the best way to do it is by doing it in collaboration with the relationship owner.

Cool. So what does that mean? You say collaboration, Is it like you're getting on a call with someone from customer success? Are they just making the intro? Maybe it's not that binary. There's different ways to do it.

Yeah. So the way I've done it, I mean it could be either in person or a call or whatever, but just kind of touch base with them and let them know like, hey, I'm looking to speak to some customers. Often the best way is to kind of align on company goals that like your stakeholders share. So for instance, very often companies really just want more case studies. So that's like an easy kind of goal to align on because you'll often have like the sales team wants case studies. Maybe the sales team has been haranguing the customer success team like hey, get your customers to give us case studies. And they don't know what to do. So maybe you're like actually helping everyone. But if you have a line on a goal that like that the stakeholders in the company share, then that's going to go better than if you're like, I have this personal project, you know.

Yeah.

So if you're talking to them and like, hey, you know how the sales team has been asking for case studies. So I was thinking I was going to jump in here and help you guys pick, you know, the customers that it would make the most sense and then I can conduct the interview and of course, you know, I'll share the recording and the insight that we get. Right. And that way you're kind of, you're aligning incentives and you're getting their, their intelligence. Right. Like what they already know about the kinds of customers and, and who's they know who's most excited about the product, they already know that. Right. Like, so you may as well take the low hanging fruit and start there. If they have NPS surveys like they can easily figure out like who gave it a high score, etc. It's pretty easy to start there. And what I usually do is I have the customer relationship owner. So let's say it's the customer success manager, they'll send out an initial email or maybe they'll bring it up if they have a weekly call or something, maybe they'll bring it up in a call and they'll say, hey, we have a product marketer who's interested in interviewing Customers about how they're using the product, Are you open to talking to them? Usually the people who are excited about your product are open to that. Right. Like there might be like scheduling issues, but if they like your product, they want to talk about it.

Yes.

And then after that it's like they see me in that email and then they're kind of out of the picture. Like I might keep them in cc, but like I just schedule time with them and boom, we're off to the races. And then you. All you have to do is interview them.

Yeah, right, right. So how about the, you know, the other side of the coin? Because, you know, it's definitely great when you can align incentives, but what if there are some competing priorities? Like, you know, at past companies I've been at, we were maybe more of an enterprise product or motion. And you know, we don't have a crazy amount of customers. We have a couple handfuls of big customers. And you know, it's like product wants to talk to the customers. So does customer success want to talk to customers. So does executive leadership, so does marketing. So how do you, when there's competing priorities, how do you get marketing? How you wedge in there and get a seat to the table to extract some of this?

Yeah, well, I would say that the customer success calls with customers are usually very different because they're usually very engaged in the day to day and like, you know, let's say they're onboarding and they're like, hey, how's that onboarding going? And it's like really in the trenches. And that's a very different type of call than you want to be doing when you're trying to get insights. So I would say that there's not really overlap there. However, if they are reluctant, you can ask to like, hey, can I join one of your like scheduled calls and maybe you could just introduce me. Sometimes they want to be in on the call, sometimes they don't. Just include them as optional invite. But if there's like some kind of conflict, like you can try to work with them. I've also asked the product team. I'm like, hey, I'll let you know when I have a call with customers. Can you also let me know if you have a call schedule with customers? So sometimes I'm the one running the call, like interviewing them and maybe the product manager might have like a couple questions at the end. Sometimes they might be running the call and I'll be sitting in on it and if it makes sense, I might jump in. So there's a lot of room to, to work together if you're, if you're just have a collaborative mindset.

Nice. I like that. Yeah, I like the doubling up because you know what I found is like almost less about the confliction in information. Come again more just like how many times are going to ask the same person to jump on a research call or some kind of call. So I like the idea of like you know, either jumping in with customer success or with product or something. Hey, I'll bring you along if you bring me along. Because even from my perspective like I've been on the other side where I've been getting interviewed and like I'm totally okay just answering an array of questions like if one's about like more of my day to day problems and one's product like that's okay. So I like that tip. And how about one step before this? How do you, let's say that again, you're a smart marketer and you want to start doing this. How are you convincing leadership or your higher ups that this is something you should A go invest your time into and then B like bug the customers to do with you and like what are you pitching as like the deliverable and the benefits of doing something like this?

Yeah. So I think this comes back to aligning with your stakeholders goals. Right. So it can often be case studies. It might be either the sales team or other components of the marketing team might be saying hey we really want some like ROI metrics to put on our website. We want like testimonial quotes that we're going to use like across our website. We're going to use in socials. We're going to you know, stick it in the sales deck like whatever it might be like an issue with the sales team is realizing that they're not like they might be getting people on the initial calls but actually they have a large percentage that don't want to keep going through the pipeline. And there's something, maybe they're seeing that there's something there where like there's something that's not clicking with the messaging where it's like they might come on the initial call but then they're like eh, it's not for me, like I don't think I need this. There's some barrier, there's some obstacle. If you can align that this project to that other thing that the stakeholders in your company really want. I think that's really like the easiest way to kind of just go ahead. I also like I had a company as an Example that really wanted software reviews of the product. Like they wanted to like, you know, have more reviews. And I actually, they also wanted case studies. So it was like two for one, right? But I use those customer interviews. Like at the end of the call I'd be like, oh, and hey, by the way, would you mind leaving a review? Like they've just spent at least half an hour, half an hour to an hour like talking about how great they think the product is. Right. Usually when you're talking. So they buy these low hanging fruit of like the people who are really into the product. So the truth is like they're already in that mindset and if you make it easy for them and you spoon feed them, you like, you know, right after you follow up with like the link to the review site that you want them to leave it at, maybe you even like put a few snippets of like the things that they already said about your product and just like to remind them that kind of thing. Like it actually had a really high success rate. It's not super scalable because it still requires the actual interview. So it takes time, but it's a good start. It gets the ball rolling and it's something that if that's what your stakeholders want, then you're aligning, you're aligning with that. Because often no one is going to say I want the customer interview. But what they want is they want the outcome of the customer interview. So they want the insights that are going to lead to better messaging. They just may not realize that the best way to do that is through the customer interview. And that's where you come in usually as a product marketer to kind of say like, oh yeah, there's a messaging issue, let me help you solve that. The way you're going to solve it can be through interviewing customers, but it's all about aligning on the incentives that other people in the company have.

Well, that's very tip. Yeah, and I like the point about they have a goal, but they don't necessarily know that the customer interview is going to help them get there. But a lot of the time, you know, I'm not a career product marketer, guide marketer, and whenever I pitch the idea of talking to customers to get to a certain point, it could be to get us some more testimonials, it could be to get us more feedback on or some more talking points for our website, whatever the case may be. Leadership is usually really happy about that. They're never mad about it. So I like that. All Right. So what I want to get into now is like, how do you actually build a customer insights program? Because I feel like most B2B marketers, including me in the past, like when we've been either tasked with starting a customer insights program or we've wanted to talk to customers because we feel like we need to fill some knowledge gaps. The steps are, let me just get a list of like our 10 to 20 most happy customers. Let's work with customer success to reach out to them. And then I'm just going to create a list of like 8 to 10 questions from ChatGPT to ask them. I'm going to get them on a call, run through that list of questions, maybe record it or not, and then report some of the findings back to the team. And then typically those findings are like buried somewhere in a Google Drive that I rarely will refer back to. So what would you say? What are the steps that you would go through to create a program like this?

Yeah, well, I would say there are six basic steps. So I'll give the steps and then we can go into each one. Basically the first one is to set goals that align with your stakeholders needs, which we already talked a bit about. Then the second step is to build a customer interview pipeline. Step three is interview the customers. Then step four is to keep your internal stakeholders in the loop. You want to make sure that you let them know what's going on. Step five is to document because like you said, sometimes you're documenting, sometimes you're not. You always want to be documenting. And step six is to leverage those customer insights so that they can actually have an impact on the org, which ultimately is what you want.

Sweet. So, so yeah, let's, let's get into step one of setting goals and aligning with stakeholder needs. And before we get into step one, like really quickly, like the difference between just like talking to customers and an insights program in this case is a program is something that is like ongoing and something you could actually refer back to, whereas talking to customers like one off is just like something you do that doesn't really reap the same benefits. So I just wanted to make that clear and maybe you have a better definition. But with that being said, let's get into step number one and how you'd go about setting goals and aligning with stakeholder needs.

Yeah, I think that's right, what you said, where like you could definitely just interview customers on a one off and have it going on an ad hoc basis. Like you definitely could do that. The goal of Having a customer insights program is to make it more efficient and repeatable so that it's not such a big deal to kind of go find another customer to interview because you already have a system in place and it just makes it easier to keep going.

Cool. Makes sense.

Yeah. So the first step, right? Set goals that align with your stakeholders needs. We talked about that a little bit. Like a lot of times it's case studies. You know, the sales team wants case studies. A lot of people, a lot of teams are looking for case studies. Another example is competitive analysis. Right. A lot of times the sales team, the marketing team, they obviously want to know about competitors so that you know you can make your own pitch better. And one of the overlooked places to get competitive intelligence is actually talking to your current customers because they're the ones who know best what the differentiator is for your product that compel them to buy like they actually bought because they thought your product was better, they like your product, they're the perfect people to tell you why. And they've researched other competitors, they've maybe like gotten pitched by them, seen demos by them, they might have used them in the past, and there's reasons that they didn't go with them, they went with your product instead. And so like, they're the perfect people to find out more about that. And then you can use that in your messaging and in your battle cards and talk about that to prospects.

Yep. Love it. Yeah. I think it's so important, like this first step of like the setting goals to align with stakeholder needs. Like you said. We've talked about it. In the marketing world, it's like popular to hear the phrase go speak to customers, because when you speak to customers, you magically gain this insight that's going to make you write the perfect compelling copy. But you know, in the worlds of other stakeholders in the company, the CEO, sales, customer, success, whoever, like that may not be as obvious as to why the marketing person specifically should go talk to customers. So it's really important that you understand. You try and like, put yourself in the shoes of other stakeholders and be like, okay, what are some of the things that they want to achieve and how can I help them do that through this project? Like, how can I help kill two birds, one stone, for lack of better words. So I love that part of it. Yeah. What's step number two?

So step number two is to build a customer interview pipeline. So I have a template on this and it's basically, it's like a project board that you can have you know, in Google sheets or on Monday or asana, whatever you're using. It's basically a way to be working collaboratively with another team. So it's usually going to be the customer success team, whoever owns the relationship with a customer. And they're the ones that, like, might tell you, okay, these are the customers that we recommend you speak to. And then they might fill that part in. Then either they can or you can kind of see, like, okay, is this customer somebody who fits into our ideal customer profile? So if you're targeting small, medium businesses, then. So that's a yes, they fit into our ideal customer profile. Okay. So they're the ones that I want to talk to first because I want to make sure that our positioning and messaging is speaking to our target audience. And then the rest of it is basically, you know, like, you're kind of project managing. So, like, what state are we in? Did, like, the customer success person already request the interview with the product marketer? Yes. Okay. You know, did the interview take place? Yes. You know, it's just kind of like managing the process. But this is part of what makes it repeatable and efficient because you're not starting from scratch every time to like, okay, now I have to find the customer success manager. I have to figure out which customer success manager, you know, like, works with this client. Like, you already have a process in place. You've already built a pipeline. Maybe you already have 10, 20 possible customers that are already there. You start going through that list, it's so much easier, so much more efficient.

Yep. Yeah. Yeah, I love that. So, yeah, it's almost like thinking about it like a sales or marketing pipeline. It's like you have people that you want to talk to, people that you have a call booked with, and you just kind of move them through the stages. Would you recommend that? Because one thing I found with a customer insights program is like, and I know you're going to get to this instead for, like, keeping people in the loop. So maybe I'm jumping the gun a bit. But, like, with this customer interview pipeline, like, do you have a regular call that you're doing with people to walk them through where you're at in the pipeline or sending it in Slack? Like, is there some kind of communication that comes with that?

Yeah, so we can skip the four, because I put it as number four. But the truth is, keeping your stakeholders in the loop is actually something that is really throughout the whole process at every point. So it sort of doesn't matter where we talk about it.

Yeah.

And yeah, like, what I found really great is, is actually for each interview, like, just kind of Slack is great for this. Just, like, throw it in. It could be like in the customer success Slack channel. It could be in the company Slack channel. Basically, hey, we got an interview bugged and, like, get people excited. Then the customer says something good, right? Like, great. Like, throw your, like, top two takeaways into the company channel. Everyone in the company wants to know that their product is helping someone. And, like, we often don't think to update, like, R and D because, you know, that's often maybe the team that we might have, like, the least contact with, but actually the people who are developing the product also like to know that it's being used and that people like it. Everyone in the company wants to know that. It's like, good vibes, you know, why wouldn't you share that? They love it. It's great. So, yeah, I definitely recommend just like, kind of keeping everybody informed all along. And I would say it's kind of like the classic, like, restaurant thing. Like, if it's good, tell other people. If it's bad, tell us. Right? So if someone's going to be like, oh, my customer success manager is amazing. Like, you know, like, you give them kudos and, like, publicly in front of the company. Great. Like, if they have complaints, you might want to take that. Like, they're complaining about the product maybe. Okay, you definitely should take that information because it's useful. But then you take that, like, directly with the product team. That's not what you're going to share. Maybe, like, on the company's lack of. So you do have to kind of think about, like, where's the most appropriate place to share it. But you definitely want to constantly, like, be keeping people in the loop because they should be excited about it and they will be once they, like, hear, you know, what's actually coming out of these interviews.

Love it. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's so important, like, I was talking about, oh, should you do a monthly call or some kind of recurring call with the team to share these insights? And, like, that could be good. But I just love the advice of, like, just pop things into Slack as you get them. Like, it's so much easier on the individual doing interviews. It's so much easier on the team. Not, like, putting another call in the calendar for people to review another thing. Right. So I think throwing stuff into Slack is super great. And, like, I love the idea of, like, sharing the good and the bad. Right. Like, it's so easy to do a customer interview and then you get 30 minutes of talking and in that 30 minutes you pick the best thing, the peak and highlight of the call and you share that with everyone and be like, know, look, here's what people are saying about us. Or like, look at this thing I learned. And everyone's like, oh yeah, that's amazing, that's awesome. But there's also like a lot of people usually like give some kind of nuggets of bad feedback or areas for improvement. I think it's important to share those as well and especially share them from like the perspective of it's. It's not me saying these things like somebody else is saying this about us and I'm just the person surfacing this to the rest of the company.

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Yeah, and it's super valuable, like speaking as a product marketer. So you're kind of in between like the product team and the marketing team and the sales and customer success. So a hundred percent, like part of what you should be trying to get out of this is any kind of feedback that can be used to help any of those teams is for sure something that you should be passing on. And you know, if they tell you something about like the product that why it's not helping them reach their goal, like a million percent, the product team should know that because that's something that they may want to fix, especially if they're hearing it from multiple customers. But if you're not telling them, then they don't even know. Right. Or like maybe it's something that they're saying. You know, it would be great if this and like not every customer suggestion is going to turn into a feature that's being developed. But if they keep hearing that over and over and they understand why customers want that and how it's helping them reach their goal, that's something that, where you could be influencing the product roadmap because you're bringing the insights back from the market and that's extremely useful.

Yeah, agreed. Agreed. Okay, cool. So you know, we've talked about setting goals with stakeholders. We've talked about building this customer interview pipeline. We've talked about how to keep people in the loop as well. What are some of the other steps? I know step three was interviewing customers. So why don't we talk a bit about the interview itself?

Yeah, so the interview itself, it's actually really interesting that you mentioned before, like going to ChatGPT and asking ChatGPT a bunch of questions and you know, just kind of asking those questions in the interview. Because that's actually a really common thing that a lot of people do when they're gonna be interviewing someone. And I don't think it's the best way to do it. And the reason why is when you're just going through like each of those questions, you kind of got a checklist in front of you and you're just like, bam, bam, bam, bam. Okay, done. What you're not doing so well is actually listening to the responses. And that's the number one thing to do, is to really listen carefully so that you can build like a conversation and a back and forth. Because what happens really often is that the first answer a customer gives or anyone, like as someone who used to be in journalism, like this, not just for customers, it's like for anyone I've interviewed. Right? Like the first answer, it's almost like the throwaway answer. It's the first thing that pops into your head. It tends to be like very generic, vague, no details, doesn't really tell you much. Like, yeah, it's a great product. Okay, that doesn't help me at all. You know, so if you just stick with that shallow answer, then you're not really like digging, mining for gold, the goal that's there to be had. So what you want to do is like, you want to listen to the answer and then keep asking follow up questions about that. So you don't need 10 questions. It might be one starter question or two or three or four, and the rest are all follow up questions. And by follow up questions, I mean things like, can you tell me more about that or are you able to give me an example? A lot of times we kind of want to assume that we know why they're saying something's important, but actually when they say it, it's so much more effective. Because first of all, our assumptions might be completely wrong and that's pretty useful to know. And second of all, sometimes they're validating our assumptions, which is also useful to know, but they're saying it in the way that a customer would say it. And then you all of a sudden have a way to phrase it that you can then use in like your copy and on your homepage or whatever. So kind of surfacing those things that might seem obvious is super important. So like another follow up question is, hey, can you explain why that's so important? Or sometimes we even want to say like, hey, this might sound obvious, but I just want to make sure that I totally understand what you're saying. Do you think you could Explain why that's so important for you.

Yep.

Like, another example is like, can you walk me through what that looks like? Can you walk me through a time when that happened? The idea here is that, like, the details, everything, like the life is in the details.

Yeah.

And so you want to ask these follow up questions to bring it to life. So it's not just, oh, yeah, it's a great product, I love it. But like, you actually get the details of how the product is helping the customer reach their goals. That's really what you want to get at. And the way to do that is to just keep asking. And sometimes it might feel like you're asking the same question over and over. And that's fine. That's fine. Yeah, you just, you want to get the real meat of the answer. And it's often under several layers of superficial answers.

Yeah, yeah, I love that. Yeah. Like I said, I've been guilty of being someone who shows up with a list of eight to 10 questions. And you will get some good stuff out of that. Like, anytime you're talking to a customer, you're going to get a couple sound bites or things that are great. But what this really comes down to and, and like, I view this as like a secondary skill is like just the skill of interviewing. And it's coming with a list of some things you would like to know or like to figure out. But then it's a matter of like, where's this conversation going? And how can I, like, not let it totally derail, but how can I just let them go down the path that they want to go down? Some people are going to give much shorter answers and just say a couple words and then stop. And those are people that, you know, maybe you want to ask prime questions to get more out of them. Then there's going to be people who go on tangents that are so long, it feels like, is this even going the direction I want it to anymore? And it's kind of finding the sweet spot of both in between. One thing I've found that has worked really well whenever I've talked to customers is like I said, having maybe three to five things that like, I'd like to get out of the conversation. And five may even be too much. Like maybe it's just three and then it's just as they're talking, literally on a notepad. Like I do at this interview. I just write down like, follow up questions that I have so that in the moment I could just like, listen. But I have this stuff on paper and I don't need to think of it. And then as the conversation's going, I can just look at that piece of paper and be like, you know, you said this, like, how about that? Right? So it's just asking those follow up questions within that. Cool. So what else about interviews?

Yeah. Well, another thing that people often do is when they're talking to customers, they focus on talking about the product, how the customer is using the product, what they like about it, all that kind of thing. Now that's important, but it's really the middle of the story and we really want to focus on much more on the problem than on the solution. Because if you think about it, ultimately what you want is to get into the mindset of a prospective customer and figure out why they chose your solution. Because you want to use that information and those insights to be able to talk to more prospective customers. But if you just start from when they're already using the solution, then you're kind of starting too late in the story. What you want to do is try to capture the whole customer journey from the beginning, before they were even maybe considering you. You want to understand what was the problem that they even had that made them think that they might need a solution. You want to go all the way back there so that you can reach other prospective customers who are in that state now and might be thinking they have a problem or have not even yet realized they have a problem. And then you want to bring them to understand, to explain, like, okay, I had this problem. These are the kinds of solutions I looked at. This is why the problem was so important, because I couldn't reach this goal for my company or for my team or for myself. These are the kinds of insights that really get you into the mind of a customer throughout the whole journey. And it's a lot of times things that go overlooked in our rush to understand how they're using the product.

Yeah, I love that. I think it's a really important point. I think it might take a bit to rejog somebody's memory on what got them to start using you in the first place or take a look at your company. But once you start like prying backwards and trying to go back in the story, people usually remember, oh yeah, we were using spreadsheets and it was super annoying to do it that way. So, you know, we found your tool because we had searched on Google or somebody in our circle. One of my friends, my peer group had told me about it. So I think it's really important to try and like Go back to the beginning of the story, like even before they knew your company existed. And it's like, what were they even doing beforehand? I think that's a really important part because I think that also once you jog someone's memory on that part, the rest of it starts to flow and they start to like use the problem statements throughout the interview even more so. It's really good tip. Yeah.

And also what you were saying, like, oh, we used to use spreadsheets. That's great. Like, that's a great segue because you always want to be looking at like the comparison between now and then. Yeah, so they used to use spreadsheets. Don't let them stop there. Right. That's like the superficial first answer. You want to dig in and ask follow up questions and be like, oh, really? How long did it take you when you were using spreadsheets?

Right.

You know how many people were working on that? Oh, it was like three people working on it and it was the equivalent of one day a week. And how long does it take you now? It takes me five minutes. Oh, okay. Well, like you put those things together and all of a sudden you have an amazing ROI metric that you didn't have before and that the customer actually might not have been able to tell you because often when you ask them like, what's your, you know, ROI from using our product? They're like, I don't know, we're not measuring that. But actually once you start digging in to these comparisons of like, what were they doing before and what are they doing now, you can often dig up these ROI metrics, especially around like time savings and cost savings. And all of a sudden you have these great stats that you can use in so many parts of your marketing.

Yeah, and I said it, I'm going to say it again. You're so right. Like the big part of this is just the art of interviewing. It's like you can do all the right things leading up to it and all the right things leading after, but if you didn't do a great job at interviewing that person in the moment, your insights are just going to not be that great. Right. So it's really important that as you're going throughout this, you are doing what you said, where it's like you're stopping and, and you're double clicking on things and you're actually trying to get to the bottom of it. And if that requires you to mid interview, like pause for 10 seconds, write something down and think like, wait, should I be going deeper here or Next question. Like, even if you just use that mental model every time, that's fine. The person is not expecting anything. They're expecting you to pause and take notes and think, think. So if you need to do that just to, like, get to the bottom of something, I think that's a really, really great piece of advice.

Yeah.

So, yeah, let's keep moving through the steps. So we've got the setting goals that align with stakeholder needs, building a customer interview pipeline. We have the interview itself keeping people in the loop. What's step number five?

So you talked about not always like documenting or recording or taking notes. Like, you always, always, always want to do that. You want to be documenting the whole thing. Yeah, and definitely, like, you should be recording. But I personally, I always take notes as well as record. And then I sort of use the AI transcript as a backup. It's a very useful backup. But I actually find that my notes tend to, like, give more context. They don't warble the words as much as I look back, like at the AI transcription, and I'm like, if I was just relaying on that, I wouldn't even know what that meant because it's like so bent out of shape. So I like a hundred percent recommend doing both. And that's one aspect of the documentation, like in the interview itself. But another aspect is actually like, documenting the insights so that they don't just get lost. Right. We talked about as it comes, like putting it in Slack channels or whatever. But, you know, another good place to do it is to actually have a dedicated spreadsheet or wherever you're doing it. And this is like another one of the templates or in the playbook. It's basically a customer insights template. And in addition to some guidelines around the interviewing that we just talked about, there's also a tab where you can put down, like, the excerpts from the conversation that you want to retain, whether they're direct quotes or paraphrase, and just kind of have a label like, oh, this is a differentiator. Right. Because that came from the part when we talked about what solutions they were looking at. And they said the reason I chose yours is because, you know, X, Y, Z, which you're never going to use in all your marketing. Right. So you can tag that as a differentiator or you can tag that as like an ROI metric or as a testimonial, because it's like a great quote that you can just use, you know, in case studies as well as, like on your website or, you know, anywhere. So it Just kind of lets you label the different insights that you get. And then you can filter and just say if you have multiple interviews in there. And now you want to see like all the testimonial quotes, you just filter for testimonial and you see all them in front of you. Just take your pick. So it's not just getting lost in the ether somewhere and like, or you hope it's retained in your memory or whatever. You're actually, like, creating a database that not only you can use, but the whole company can reference.

Yeah, love it, love it. And what tools do you have? Like, multiple tools you'd recommend somebody uses to keep this database and use a tagging system. Like, what are the best actual ways to do this?

So I created it as a template. It's in Google Sheets. Right. Obviously, you know, you can use airtable, you can use whatever, but if you kind of want like a preexisting template that's, you know, in the Playbook and the PMM jetpack, but it can be built anywhere. You can kind of like just get ideas from it and build it somewhere else. But, like, the concept is that it is somewhere that everyone can reference. And what it also means is it's not always going to be like the product marketer, let's say, who's doing the interview. Sometimes the product team might be doing interviews.

Right.

If you can get them to also use it. Well, even if you're not in that call, you now have access to those insights. So, yeah, it not only like, brings your insights to the rest of the company, which is super important, but if you get other teams on board too, it can bring their insights to you, which is also super important.

Yep, exactly. Yeah. And, you know, it's one of the most impactful things that I've done post talking to customers is, you know, because you said you like to take actual notes with a pen or type and you also like to record it. And I agree with you. Like, the recording is good and the AI transcript is great, but that's just like more of a backup and secondary. All the gold is in those, like, summary notes that you take and like, your interpretation of things that give you the, like, easy stuff you can pick from at any time. And one of the most impactful things that I started doing after interviews that I never used to is like just taking five minutes right after the call to write up all the notes and thoughts. Like, I have a bad habit of, or used to have a bad habit of. Like, after a call, I would just be okay Like, I'm, I'm tired of being in a zoom and I'm just going to get up and like, go get a glass of water. And then one thing leads to another and now it's the next day. And now you have to summarize that interview that you did and you're kind of like, wait, why did I read that again? Or like, you're writing really surface level notes. So it's really important to, at least in my opinion. I don't know. If you agree to write after the call, that's when you're like, okay, it's all fresh in my mind. And now I'm going to write up all the summary notes and just lock that in forever. Because once I do that summary once and I don't need to do it again.

Yeah, it's definitely. It's one of those things that's like, whatever works for, for you, works for you. There's always that bit of trial and error. If I have that time, then, yeah, it's amazing. Unfortunately, like, it's often back to back.

Yeah.

So, you know, now a little bit less because I'm independent, but when I was in house as a product marketer, like just, you know, totally blocked, calendar all day fair.

Cool.

But yeah, if you can. That's amazing.

Absolutely awesome. Okay, cool. So take us to the next step. What's the last step to launching a customer insights program?

Yeah, so the last step is leveraging those insights that you've just painstakingly collected. And basically you kind of probably already have an idea from having aligned with stakeholders. Like, at least one of the things that you're going to do with these customer interviews. So, like, let's say you've already agreed that it's going to be going for a case study. So your next step is going to be like, okay, taking this material, turning it into a case study. At the same time, maybe you're also, you know, repositioning the product or, you know, redesigning the website and you need new messaging or looking for more ROI metrics or whatever. Like, maybe you're trying to figure out if actually the company is addressing the right ideal customer profile or actually, no, like, maybe it's not a great fit. And from your interviews, you see that actually the people who are, I don't know, an example from one company I worked at, like, the people who were on corporate finance teams were actually much more excited about the product than other people because it was a product that involved Excel. And finance people love Excel. So, you know, like, sometimes those are the things that come up, it's a little bit more big picture and strategic. Like, you know, how do you refine your ideal customer profile? So those are all different kinds of ways to use these insights and they're not mutually exclusive. Like, you can do case studies and then also use that for your positioning and messaging. So it's basically like just taking it. You've executed on the interview, now you have to execute on the insights. And that means like producing the deliverable that you're going to bring either to the market or to other teams in the company.

Love it. Love it. That makes sense. One thing I wanted to ask you, you know, I've talked to some, some people, companies before who kind of do this externally. So they do like customer interviews on behalf of your company. Obviously, a lot of the stuff that we're talking about today are from the lens and perspective of somebody doing this in house. You know, I think if I were to choose my preferred path, I'd prefer to do this in house. Like, I prefer not only to be the person, but to have somebody in house who's like, is that ear to the customer? But I don't know, what are your thoughts around like, hiring an external company to do something like this for you? Because I could see that side of it too. So. So what do you think? Do you have an opinion there?

Yeah. Well, let me just state my conflicts of interest here. I have done this in house. I now do it externally. Right. But I mean, if I had to choose as a head of marketing, I would probably prefer to do it in house if I had the capacity, because there are definitely advantages to keeping that knowledge internal and kind of continuing to use it not just on, like for the case studies, but maybe you didn't hire the external person to do positioning and messaging. But if it's someone in house, then the knowledge is like aggregated and it accumulates, you know, so then they can start using it for things that you didn't even foresee. So I think if you have like endless capacity and bandwidth to include this, then I think that's great. I think the reality is that a lot of marketing teams, and especially product marketing teams are very restricted in their bandwidth. Yep, I know. Basically, I think every product marketer I've ever spoken to has been overwhelmed because there's so many things on their plate. So, you know, while ideally one of those things would be interviewing customers, in practice, that's not always going to happen. And then I think that bringing in someone who has the interviewing skills to do it well, and to document it well so that you can use it for those insights can definitely be a solution.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. I think it's the first thing you said of like, if you have the bandwidth. Great. Because something that in practice is like, oh, you know, I'm just going to talk to some customers every now and then. And it seems like a light practice, but then in theory, like in the thick of it, it's so easy to skip it that week or to skip it for a couple weeks and then like maybe pick it up again or maybe not. So I've definitely seen it die off pretty quick. With that being said, like, what kind of cadence do you recommend? Like, I've been tasked with doing this internally and what usually happens is like, you know, you do the initial blitz of interviews. Maybe it's like you go talk to 10 or 15 people, let's just say as an example. And then, you know, after time you get busy and you don't really do it as much anymore. So what is like a realistic amount that a marketer in house should be doing every month or week?

Yeah, well, I think the thing with customer feedback is that they're sort of like the top tier source of customer feedback, which is the customer interview. But there are also a lot of secondary sources or even like other ways to get similar information that can complement that. So for instance, if you're at a company that has gong or like another platform to record sales calls, you can go into existing sales calls, listen to the sales calls, or even search for like competitor names, see what they're saying about competitors. I would say it's not, you're not going to get the same level of insights as when you talk to customers. But it can be a way to kind of get some feedback from the market without necessarily like having the actual interview. And it can be a good way to compliment it so that you're not too overwhelmed by it. But I would say a lot of it may revolve around like, how you're going to use those customer insights. So I think practically it's often going to be like, okay, we need another, like five case studies. And then you have a blitz and you get your five case studies. There's maybe a pause that you fill in with complimentary sources, like, okay, I'm going to be listening to gone calls, blah, blah. Maybe it could be like in another, you know, month or two or next quarter you have like another blitz. Like, I don't think there's any one cadence that's necessarily the Right way. But I do think it's important that you're constantly getting input from the market and that at least some of that input is going to be direct. Interview.

Love it. Love it. Yeah. On the topic of like other places to get information, one thing that I found that has worked well too, because sometimes, you know, like, if you have gong, it's amazing, but if you don't, then it's like, I don't, you know, you don't have a call recording or you don't have a sophisticated one, so you don't have that information. So one thing that I found has worked really well or one is like going into adjacent industry online communities and like picking out information there. And you know, I say that as somebody who like, obviously, you know, we have the Exit 5 community, which is a place that people could do that, but even outside of that, like, you know, Reddit threads, Facebook groups, like whatever communities you can join even as a fly on the wall in your industry and just like pick some information language out of there, I think is like a really, really good strategy if you could pull it off. Another one I really like is mining customer reviews. So the last company I worked at, we didn't have any call reporting software at all, which don't know why. And you know, we just worked with customers who weren't that socially active. So, you know, you couldn't really follow them on LinkedIn or Instagram and get information. There just wasn't a lot online. But what there was one of our customers, our biggest or one of our competitors, sorry, our biggest competitor had like 60 reviews on their GT. There was a good mix of good and bad reviews. So that was a really, really great place for me to go and just be like, okay, like what are people actually saying about our biggest competitor? And like, you could assume that they may have some similar thoughts about some other competitors or companies in the industry. So I found that was really a great place to get some insights and, you know, infuse them into what I was doing.

Yeah, those are totally great places. And I've Definitely use the G2 sites, like to just kind of beef up like competitive battle card. Even if some of it is maybe from customer interviews, other pieces may be from what they're saying in software reviews and also competitor webinars, trade shows. You see there's a lot of people at trade shows. Talk to them, right?

Yeah.

And if you're not there, get a debrief from the sales team. Because the sales team was talking to them, Right? Somebody was talking to them. So a lot of times this information is also like in the heads of other people in the org. Maybe the CEO was just at some conference somewhere and gave a talk and corner him afterwards or her and be like, hey, what were the main questions that they were even asking you? Like, what do people want to know about? To sort of like be in touch with the other teams and debrief them and increase that knowledge so that you can then put it out into the world and like positioning and messaging and you know, all kinds of other like sales enablement materials, et cetera. Also from your own webinars, you can ask poll questions of like all your attendees. You kind of get a pulse of the, the market, like what they're thinking.

Yeah. Love it, love it. Cool, cool, cool. All right, well, Shoshana, it's been a pleasure. Thanks so much for all the insights you've given. You know, I know if it were me and I'm, I was an in house marketer, you know, who wanted to run customer interviews. This is an episode that, you know, I'd love to listen to and, and stop and write notes and stop and write notes. So this is great. I'm sure you talk about this a bunch on LinkedIn so people can connect with you there. Really appreciate you coming on today. This has been a pleasure.

Yeah, it's been fun.

Thanks so much. See ya.

Bye. Bye.

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