How to gather customer insights

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How to Gather Customer Insights

The team at Wynter and Peep Laja, the CEO recently hosted a workshop series on gathering customer insights.

I took time to listen to several of the experts share key methods they are using to gather and implement customer insights into their businesses.

Below is the list of VPs of Marketing from whom I extracted insights from the series.

• Palmer Hourchins, G2

• Suzanne Kagan, Anyword

• Will Devlin, MessageGears

• Andrew Mattock, Demand Gen, Apollo io

ICP Analysis - There are several ways to gather insights from your existing customers or the lists of extended networks of potential customers.

The team at Apollo executed user testing heavily on their websites and landing pages. The goal here is to understand the friction points being experienced by buyers and find ways to improve the conversion rate through optimizations.

Additionally, they dived deep into the look-like lists from the existing customers. One thing they realized is that most of their potential prospects were geographically located in areas like San Francisco, Texas, Dallas, and Houston.

Armed with these insights, they pushed billboards in those regions and hosted executive dinners in the areas to help build relationships with them and eventually close them.

Another notable ICP analysis is one of the MessageGears conduct. First, their target audience is large consumer-facing enterprises like retail outlets. Manually scraping data from the executive profiles on LinkedIn and company pages like job postings, new hires and more helps them develop a consultative prospecting approach when reaching out.

Interviewing - You can start by asking existing customers periodically about their sentiments about your business.

The G2 team executes this method by first building an executive advisory board of ten to fifteen super customers at the enterprise level, and customer councils at the SMB levels.

Second, they host digital events quarterly and in-person events yearly and invite these customers to ask them about G2 products. The goal for these is to determine the opportunities and gaps in the market.

Another notable interviewing method is one done by the Anyword team. Armed with an extended network list of potential customers, the team reaches out to hold interviews with them.

One key insight they gathered was that some prospects from the list were anti-ICP simply because of their strong objections against using AI for content for reasons like it produced generic content and their company policy forbade it.

Using these insights, the Anyword team built content collateral showing how its solution helped companies train their model to produce branded content. It also amplified the same message in their ads for the unaware prospects.

Self-reported Attribution - This can easily be executed by inserting a mandatory form on the onboarding process or running automated surveys 90 days after conversion.

Anyword team added an onboarding form to determine where their customers heard about them. The form had ten choices with no default, and the most common answer was YouTube ads & referrals ( from Slack communities) hence they doubled on these two.

Another is Apollo which runs 90-day surveys with questions like how would they describe Apollo to a friend. First, the survey offered a $100 Amazon gift card as an incentive and second the insights obtained from this helped them position Apollo better ( 11%+ in conversion on baking the insights into the homepage).

3 Proven Product Marketing

Integrated PLG (Keap: $90m ARR)

The Chief Product Officer, Ammon Curtis at Keap recently presented at SaaSOpen on their latest strategic growth move dubbed hybrid product-led growth.

By adding a human into the product onboarding process promptly, they saw a 106% conversion and retention rate.

Founder/team-led growth ( Dealpad io $1m pipeline)

Adam Baker presented on SaaSOpen on the impact LinkedIn has had on his latest startup - Dealpad.

A while ago Adam shared a post sharing sales templates they used while he was VP of Sales at Salesforce. The impact was a $1m in pipeline and $240k closed ARR.

SEO & Free Tools ( Ahrefs $90m ARR)

I have written on leveraging free tools to drive organic traffic before, but Ahrefs is the master at it. For a fact, their Technical SEO Patrick Stox shared several content strategies including 50% of organic traffic coming from free tools.

1/ Blog content; build a glossary( 65.2k), exhaust comparison content (1.55k), translate content

2/Use first data studies to build backlinks

3/Leverage on video content consistently (Ahrefs TV on YouTube)

4/Build or acquire free tools (acq wordcount .com)

LinkedIn Growth - ABC Framework

Most of you in this newsletter came from LinkedIn. It’s a given considering it’s my primary social media channel. However while many still underrate the platform, it has proven to provide tremendous upside for me and most startups leveraging it.

While Peep Laja was interviewing Suzanne from Anyword on gathering customer insights, he mentioned that they too at Wynter have a form asking; How did you hear about us?

To Peep’s surprise, the leading was his organic LinkedIn content. Just because your post barely gets any engagement does not mean your ICP isn’t coming across it.

Similarly, Adam Robinson recently hopped on the Exit Five Podcast to share insights on scaling his latest startup RB2B on LinkedIn ( $1m arr in 8 weeks). Adam emphasized the need to get your ICP right first.

At RB2B they are focused on Leag Gen agencies, startup founders, and VP of Sales as their core target buyers. Getting in front of these personas requires a deliberate effort in your connections.

Borrowing from ABM, I coined the term ABC framework to stand for account-based connections. For RB2B, Adam for instance has connected with startup founders doing lead generation for their startups, while the growth lead is partnering and engaging with lead gen agency owners.

Level Selling - A similar framework where the exec team engages with someone with a similar role in the target company.

As I was listening to Adam Baker from Dealpad, he shared this framework. The goal of connecting with team people is not to sell them on the go, but to build trust and buy-in with the team, and when the right time arises, you will easily close the deal.

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God’s speed.

 Okerosi