[S2E1] How to make research (like JTBD) a part of your company’s business processes with Eric White, ponder*
(instead of treating it like a too little, too late bandaid)
In this episode:
What exactly product roadmap exploration and JTBD research can look like
Should B2B take into account (messy, squishy) feelings when researching JTBD?
How to make sure customer insights actually get used
Why sales teams shouldn't run win-loss analysis
Tips on how to balance the need to move fast with research (it's not impossible!)
ponder* website: https://www.letsponder.it/
Eric White on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericmatthewwhite
Episode Transcript
Eric White
My name is Eric White. I run a broadly what I would call a market research company called ponder*. And usually my work is with growth-stage tech companies who are starting in on some sort of a challenge of diversification.
So that might mean moving into a new type of market, pursuing a new segment for growth, or it may mean launching a new product or finding a new use case for a product, usually something that's something where there's a little bit of variation.
And in addition to that, I help with some type of baseline understanding of customers and why they buy, and so that could be core jobs to be done research.
Sometimes that looks like win-loss research, but usually all of my work involves having conversations with customers, people that should be customers, or I like to also describe sometimes as people who were almost customers, people who considered the product but then ended up going in a different direction.
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Ekaterina (Sam) Howard
You have probably seen dozens of posts saying that you need to talk to your customers. Totally fair, but I think we're doing ourselves and startups a disservice when we frame this as a conversation instead of a learning opportunity. Conversation is very easy to misinterpret and to assume that, for example, having a sales call counts as talking to your customers. But what is the difference between a quote, unquote, learning opportunity and a conversation? Keep listening to find out.
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Eric White
One of the things I've learned through doing this is I think that most companies have good practices around talking to their customers.
Usually where they end up lacking is in actually studying their customers.
And I think a lot of the jobs to be done work, a lot of the win-loss work, that type of thing, comes from a need to step back and study and really deeply go into what's driving customer decision making, behavior and desire today.
And so it's that difference between just having a conversation, but actually studying what they say. So, you know, if we get to speak with, if we get to have a conversation with some great historical figure, what do we talk to them about?
Do we study and do we try to learn from them, or do we try to teach and educate and explain?
And I find a lot of times the conversations just either aren't structured in the right way to learn the things that we really need to learn, or we just have the conversation check the box and then move on without really thinking deeply about what we heard and trying to connect that with what we've heard in other conversations with other customers.
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Ekaterina (Sam) Howard
As you can imagine, even if startup teams do shift their mindset from talking to customers to studying customers, there's still the question of how to build a culture of customer research that consistently helps them sell better, convert better, be more relevant and build a product that their customers want. There are two challenges that make it especially hard to build that culture.
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Eric White
I think the doing of it consistently is the hard part, and so I think a lot of that work ends up being sporadic.
I think a lot of times the conversational work ends up happening in a very siloed manner. So in other words, the sales team are talking to customers, or then the product team is doing some work, and so then they go out and they have conversations with customers, or the marketing team tries to go out and do it.
And so if it's being done a lot of times, it's being done in a siloed way, which doesn't always allow for a good flow of information to come back in and have everybody in the company operating off of the same set of insights.
Ekaterina (Sam) Howard
So the answer is, silos versus anything else?
Eric White
Yeah, I think silos, and then I think just the consistency of doing it. Because when it is siloed, it tends to be sporadic rather than consistent, ongoing, and then also methodical.
Ekaterina (Sam) Howard
So that leads me to the case study we wanted to discuss first place. Something you mentioned is team activation. So is that the missing piece?
Eric White
So I have a trainer that I've worked with, and this trainer is always telling me, you know, do that, do that last lift, that one that's really hard to do, just do it, because that's where most of your muscle gain is going to come from.
And when we do customer research, I find that it always ends up being more complicated than you think. It always ends up taking longer than we expect, right?
And so, for example, if sales team decides, hey, we're going to do win loss, we're going to go out, we're going to run some win loss interviews, recruiting people for win loss research is very difficult, very time consuming. People are willing to talk to us, but they can't talk to us for three weeks.
And then things just, things just get delayed, such that when we get to the end of the project, we're out of steam. We're out of time. We've gotten into this situation where we've over committed, and we just need to figure out a way to wrap this thing up and move on to the next thing.
But that activation work then ends up being the thing that gets skipped, which is the most important part, right? It's the last rep in a weightlifting session or in an exercising session, that really gives us the muscle.
So yes, to your point, I think that the activation, the wrestling with it, the getting it in front of the team, and really challenging and pushing and seeing if we can stretch what we know and understand. By the time we get to there, we've run out of steam, and there's a way that that has to be solved.
A big part of that is that we wait until the very end to do that, when that should be a part of the DNA of what the entire learning process is about.
So we should be activating from the very beginning and at the beginning that can include more asking questions, exposing gaps, getting team engaged and curious and talking and working with the learnings along the way.
So activation should be something that's woven into the entire project, but ultimately it's something that gets pushed to the very end and we've run out of steam by the time we get there.
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Ekaterina (Sam) Howard
If you have one or two customer research projects under your belt, you will agree that involving folks in research early on and then sharing the takeaways with them is extremely important. But if you haven't done this before and are not sure this is really the case. We're about to discuss how win loss analysis results when done right benefit not just sales and marketing, but also product teams. And as an aside, I have seen this in my projects as well over and over again.
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Eric White
For example, doing win loss research. A lot of times it's thought that it's the sales team or maybe the marketing team who's the beneficiary of that. But win loss should also influence product and so when, when a sales or revenue team is trying to give information back to a product team to persuade them to prioritize something on the roadmap or or take some sort of action, they don't always bring the best case forward to try to convince the product team to prioritize what it is that they're working on.
So a lot of times, the win loss should point to, hey, we did this work, we ran the survey, we ran these 10 conversations, and we found that there's this specific barrier and the product that is causing this audience to not buy from us, we really need to fix that. That's going to hinder growth. And then when we have compelling evidence that maybe even is approaching the realm of proof, then that becomes very persuasive.
And so that goes back to that silo thing. So when we're doing customer research, if it's just simply to benefit sales or just to benefit marketing, we're really missing out.
And to your point, product is going to look at this and be like, this doesn't this doesn't involve me when it very much should.
Ekaterina (Sam) Howard
So that kind of brings me back to Arlo again.
So the project happened way back when, but they're still benefiting from it. Is it just this one kind of baseline project, as far as you know, that just like was the gift that keeps on giving, or is there a little more to it?
Eric White
So we did two projects with Arlo, and so the first project was, I think, in 2018 so that's been six years. And this is relevant because I think I had shared with you, I recently got an email from our primary point of contact, and just out of the blue, he said something along the lines of “Arlo continues to leverage the research you helped with in 2018 and he pointed to a new product that they had launched that was based on that research.”
So on the one hand, as a business person, I think, well, that sort of stinks that we did this project with them six years ago, and they're still getting value from it, and we haven't stayed around and continue to, you know, earn services revenue off of that, but at the same time, also extremely proud of that work, that it's that it has really stood something that they've been able to to get value from over time.
So to answer your question, we did two different projects with them.
And so the first one was just simply a core baseline, what is the job to be done that people have when they're buying Arlo. My work tends to be, I'm a little bit more interested in the, I'll call it social, emotional side of the purchase, rather than just simply the functional side.
So we looked and we found two real core reasons, and one of them had to do with keeping your home safe, and the other had to do with making your home more welcoming.
For anyone listening who may not know, Arlo is a camera that you install, usually outside of your house, and so it points down your driveway, or it points in your backyard, and it alerts you when it finds something that you may be concerned about.
So if it's three o'clock in the morning, there's a person walking up your driveway that may be something that you want to know about before the doorbell rings or before something else happens.
So these two big use cases that we found, the first was very much about parents who have young kids in the house. There's been some sort of crime in the neighborhood recently, or something has changed, and they feel a little bit less safe in the environment, and they just simply want to be sure that they're more aware of what's happening.
The second use case, which is very, very different, is people who are constructing some sort of a smart home, and they were using Arlo to, like, in one example, a person had an Arlo camera pointed at their water heater, and it was so that they could monitor and see if there was a leak, so that they could address that sooner.
Some people had their Arlo set up to an inside lighting system, and so that when their mother would come over to visit, it would turn on a series of lights, so that their mom was able to, you know, see their way and find their way into their home.
Two very different kinds of things, right, like one protecting from bad guys, the other, make my house more welcoming and enjoyable to live inside of.
So from that, the next engagement that we did with them had to do with them facing the reality of they had about 20 different items on their roadmap that they could choose to manufacture, and they had to pick which one of these good ideas do we actually pursue?
And so their question was the way that they framed it was, what are the features that we could build that people are willing to pay for?
We spin that just a little, we twist that just a little bit, and we say, what are the features that would really create value, and that would help us get this product hired for a job to be done.
And so with this second project, what we did is we set up a series of user storyboards.
We developed a hypothesis, and we said that we think that people who fit roughly this demographic, who are in roughly this type of situation, would be, would be very interested in this set of features.
And so we built out some I'll call them broadly, UX storyboards, but they had a little bit more to do, rather than usage of the product, the storyboards had more to do with this is type of change that we can offer. So when you go away on vacation now, you have to just hope that your neighbors are watching out for your house and alerting you to anything that would happen.
Now, you can use this Arlo camera so that lights go on and off based off activity that's happening outside of the house. Or you can pop in and see what's happening. Or you can get alerts if there's some activity around your house that you may want to know about.
So we're studying not necessarily what is the sequence of events that happen when you're using the product, but what's this transformation that you can experience in your life and your way of living.
And then we put those storyboards in front of people.
We just have very simple conversations with them about testing to see, first of all, do they understand what it is that we're even promising to do for them? Do they see value in what it is that we're offering? Do they have a need, and can they see how this product would help them solve that need? How are they solving that problem now?
And as we start to explore things like that, we can start to see where certain types of people get excited and would really want that, or where people reject it for various reasons.
If people get excited and want to pursue it, then that's something where we can then go and do further testing, like maybe that's where a landing page test can can come up, and we can do more high resolution things if people aren't interested in it, because we're studying in this certain way and we're having this certain type of conversations, we can figure out where the problem is, and we can say, “Oh, well, this group of people rejected it, but they didn't reject it because they thought it's a bad idea. They just simply didn't understand what we were talking about. This is new and innovative, and we had to give them a little bit more information so that they could really, truly grasp what it's about.”
And then we can go back and decide to have more conversations and see if we fixed the problem and got a different type of response.
So then going back to what was in this email that I got where the research had continued, you know, five or six years down the road, it wasn't just the findings from that research, although that was that was relevant.
It was that new way of thinking about, how do we, how do we ideate new things to help solve problems, and then, how do we then go out and test to see if our ideas are actually viable?
And that, that pattern of hearing from customers, coming up with new ideas, testing them, that's something that for them has persisted in a very simple and natural way, so much that they haven't needed to bring me in for another project.
Ekaterina (Sam) Howard
I have way too many follow up questions. So let me start with like, the tiniest one. Is it applicable for B2B? Like, do people still have feelings when they buy B2B products to the same extent. Do we need to care about that?
Eric White
Yeah, people very much, very much, have feelings. And there's this really interesting book called empathetic marketing, and it talks about six core emotional needs that every buyer has, and two of those that are extremely relevant to B2B are control and recognition.
Every business person, when they buy something, they want more control over their situation, and they want to be recognized for their contribution to the business, so that they can be promoted, have more opportunities, make more money, expand their influence.
And so I would say almost every B2B product is delivering value for the specific buyer, at least in those two ways. And it's really our job to figure out what's a better word for it than control and recognition. You know, what's a word that we can come up with that really describes their unique situation.
So I've got a client who makes quality assurance software for startup medical device companies. And a huge challenge that you have if you want to do a medical device is you've eventually got to go and make the case to the Food and Drug Administration that your device is safe and that you have processes in place to ensure that it's safe and respond to any sort of risks or problems that may come up.
So you've got to be able to prove to the FDA that you've got your processes under control. So not only do you need to have control, you need to have the FDA recognize in a very official, methodical sort of way, that you've got control over your situation. So therefore the software becomes about those two things.
And so when people are buying it, there's this thing that says, I've got all these investors, and we're spending all this time on it. We're going to put three years into getting this product to market, and if we screw up our process on day one, and three years down the road, the FDA is saying no, because of some mistake that we made way back in the day, that's gonna that's gonna end my career, that's gonna end the process. That's gonna end the product. A lot of people are going to lose their jobs. I'm gonna have investors that are very angry at me.
So yeah, I mean that that's a pretty emotional sort of thing that's happening right there.
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Ekaterina (Sam) Howard
If you are an early stage startup founder or marketer, you're probably thinking, well, it would be nice to be able to create storyboards and dive into research and do series of interviews and all of that to unlock the emotional and social motivations behind our clients' decisions. But this is just not feasible. We need to move fast.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to ask you to suspend your disbelief for a moment, and here's some ideas on how you can balance studying your customers with moving fast.
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Ekaterina (Sam) Howard
I'm not sure this is the right question to ask, but I'm curious. Have you found ways to balance this need to move fast with the need to study, as opposed to kind of pull things out of conversations to make the next best guess.
Eric White
That's always tricky. And so I think you, you and I both work with startups at various stages. And there's, there's always a need to to move quickly and move decisively.
So what I would say is that a lot of times we use heuristics to help us move quickly.
And so if every single product decision, or every single design decision that we're going to make requires a research process, we're going to move way too slow.
Nothing's ever going to get done, and some competitor’s going to come and steal our market share.
So what happens is we end up forming heuristics that help us anticipate customer reactions to certain things that we do, and it's those heuristics, when they're right, that allow us to move very quickly.
Now sometimes those heuristics get named different things. But there, these are shortcuts that allow us to jump, jump the process and not have to do research every time. And we absolutely have to do those.
The problem is that those heuristics sometimes are wrong, and they're wrong for very predictable reasons.
Number one is the founder of the startup, because that founder has spent so much time having conversations, trying things and failing at them. The founder really knows a lot of this stuff, but heuristics are very hard to transmit to a team. Once you start hiring product managers, product marketers, designers, you may have all of these things in your head, and you don't even recognize where you're using shortcuts.
And therefore those shortcuts don't get don't get passed down to the next generation.
And so a lot of times it's really important to have new people coming in, having some of these conversations, not because they're doing research, but just because, simply, they need to be in the practice of having that slightly stressful set of experiences of going out and talking to customers and understanding what's right and wrong.
So that's something that I want to emphasize is: a lot of times the research is about forming new intuitions and new heuristics that do let us move fast.
The other thing is that in a startup, we're constantly not just trying to be more efficient and more effective in attracting the same types of customers, but we're also expanding, and we're expanding into new customer segments.
We're thinking about new products.
We're maybe moving into new use cases or geographies.
There's a lot of different ways that we may expand, and when we start to move into some new territory, those hard earned heuristics and intuitions that we have now become biases and assumptions, and we don't always know when we've crossed over into that territory.
So there are certain times that we need to recognize, hey, we're making decisions in a new domain. Now we actually need to step back a little bit and do some work to be able to figure out what needs to change about how we're thinking about this.
And this is again, where sometimes I don't like the word research, because research sounds really slow sometimes, just simply, in fact, I just did this with a client last week. You and I were supposed to speak last week, but I couldn't, because I ended up spending a week in New York with the client, and they're trying to do an up market motion.
So they've been selling to very small businesses. They want to start selling to slightly larger businesses, and they're having a hard time figuring out, like, what's wrong with our value proposition.
So rather than taking three months or six months to do some big, huge quantitative analysis, their decision very rightfully was, let's take a week and go sit in the room and have a bunch of conversations, and then have conversations about those conversations, so that this new team are learning these new types of things.
And so a lot of times, conversational research is not necessarily research where we're going and analyzing and picking apart and, you know, spending months looking at things at the atomic level, we're just simply going out and having conversations with people and allowing ourselves to be surprised, and that's the type of thing that helps us move quickly.
So taking a few days to go and have conversations, that's usually not too big of an investment, stalling a new initiative for three months while we go out and run a survey and do all the quantitative analysis and and that type of thing that that's the that's the type of stuff that can stall us and interfere with the momentum that a startup just simply needs to have.
Ekaterina (Sam) Howard
Well, something that immediately comes to mind is that the allowing ourselves to be surprised thing is hard. Is it a skill that can be learned if startups want to keep doing this themselves or want to start having those conversations?
Eric White
I think that this is where just having some conversational skill becomes very important.
So it's as important as any other skill that any marketer or product person or designer needs to have, is the ability to have an open ended conversation that allows for the element of surprise.
And so what I have found to be most effective is what's been commonly known as the jobs to be done interview, or the switch interview.
And what that is, is it's studying the process that it's so rather than talking to your best customers, who you've had for six years, you've got nothing to learn from them. They're already your customer. They've been your customer for a long time. They like your product, they know you, they know your language and how you talk and all about your product. Nothing to learn from that group of people.
If the goal is to be surprised and find out new things, what you really want to do is be talking to people who have adopted your product for the first time in the last six months and study that story.
And I say study, meaning really go back and push them even to explore hidden forces or hidden desires that maybe they weren't even aware of.
And what happens is we, as we go back and slowly march through the story of, when did you first start thinking about this all the way through until right now, how are things going? Customers themselves will be surprised. So if you just simply ask somebody, why did you buy the product, they're going to give you a very rational answer that is probably something they've told themselves, or it just makes sense. And they're not thinking very deeply. Sometimes when, when we ask questions like that, I will literally hear customers almost pull language off of their memory of the website. And so they'll use language and words and value propositions that were from the website. But when we go back and we start saying, “When did you first start thinking about this, and who else was in the room? And how did you get from point A to point B, and why did you decide on the day that you signed up for the product, why did you decide that day rather than a week before, or rather than waiting for another month?”
And as we start going into that level of questions, the customers themselves have not even reflected on that they're not even necessarily thinking about why.
And as we ask that the customers themselves start to get surprised and excited, and they'll start to open up and elaborate on on the forces, sometimes social and emotional, that we're weighing on them that led them into the decision, and that's where the surprises come from, and it's simply by having open ended discussions about an experience that a person just had.
Ekaterina (Sam) Howard
To switch tracks on you yet again. For win loss research, especially if sales teams run it, wouldn't it be exceptionally hard for them to go from the selling mode into open question mode?
Eric White
Yeah, I strongly recommend that sales teams not do win-loss, that either they get someone else from the company to go back and do it, or they hire someone outside who's going to have a more neutral third party perspective.
And there are two reasons for that.
The first is what you're alluding to, which is, if you've been in a sales conversation with someone, it's almost impossible to go back and say, I know I've been selling to you for the last six months, but let's go back and now have a step back conversation.
And the customer is not going to want to give you feedback if you did something that rubbed them the wrong way, or if you miscommunicated like you're even if, even if you can muster the guts to ask them that the question that would expose that the customer is very likely to tell you to to your face, like there's just, there's going to be a wall up.
But there's a second and even more compelling reason why a sales team should not do win-loss, and that's that the sales team is good at selling.
Any moment, any opportunity you have to have your customer in front or have your sales team in front of the customer, they should be selling, not researching.
And so it's just simply a wise deployment of resources to have your sales team sell, have other people in your company do the process of data gathering and getting feedback.
Ekaterina (Sam) Howard
Well, I can see the argument of if the sales team does it, then they will be invested in implementing the results.
Eric White
Um, absolutely. Yeah, sure, they would be.
The problem is that it's very easy for us to hear the things that we want to hear.
So if the sales team is coming in and in their mind, the problem is that the marketing team didn't give them good sales enablement resources, or that the product is missing a couple of core features, or that the pricing is off, then it's pretty likely that they're going to so there's just a certain amount of they're really close to the situation.
I would say sales teams that I've worked with are extremely motivated by being successful financially, and if there's feedback that can be brought back to them that's very relevant, that's going to help them be more effective in their sales process, they are very receptive, at least your good sales people are very receptive to hearing that and adapting to that.
But that goes back to what we were talking about earlier, related to activation, and that whole entire research process needs to be oriented around “Why are we doing this?”
And if the reason that we're doing it is to solve some sort of the sales problem, sales team needs to be involved right up front. I want to hear from them up front. Like, what do you think the problem is?
And therefore, when we come back, we're either able to give them evidence to help them better make the case for what they've already perceived, or we’re able to come back and say, “Hey, you were hearing that customers were pushing back because the price was too high. The problem isn't that the price was too high. The problem is the value proposition was focused on something that they didn't find as as valuable. So the price would have been fine.”
So it's really coming back and giving them the information that they need to be able to adapt. And because sales teams are rewarded by making sales, they're usually pretty, pretty interested in, in hearing what, what they can be doing to make more money.
Ekaterina (Sam) Howard
So what I'm hearing is just get everybody involved early on, so it's clear why they should care in the first place?
Eric White
That's right. Something that happened early on was I had a customer who agreed with this perspective that the sales team shouldn't be doing it, went out and started reaching out to customers, but didn't let the sales team know that this work was being done.
And so once the sales team started to find out about it, it created this Incredible amount of suspicion, where they started to interpret that as we're being watched, we're the ones who are being put under the microscope. And it really torpedoed the whole effort.
So to your point, yeah, having people involved up front not only helps with the back end activation, it also helps with that buy in up front, so that everyone, as the team understands we're going and we're really looking at, what do our cut, what feedback can our customers give us, so that we can take our whole entire offering and make it more compelling to the to the market, so that we can be more successful.