Avoiding Common Customer Research Traps (and What Good Research Looks Like)

12/18/23 • 32 min

In this episode of the Forget The Funnel Podcast, Georgiana and Claire discuss what happens when SaaS businesses prioritize customer research but screw it up, and how this can lead to perpetuating the vicious cycle of resistance to research in the first place.
They dig into why this happens, from misaligned goals between teams, wasting time with research that isn’t actionable, and why looking to win/loss analysis, big quantitative surveys or even UX research to guide product and marketing decisions can leave teams feeling stuck.
Georgiana and Claire also share an outline of what good customer research looks like - research that gives SaaS leaders the clarity and confidence needed to turn insight into revenue growth.
Discussed:

What bad research looks like - and what causes it in the first place.
Why not all research methods will get you the answers you need, especially when teams lack a foundational understanding of customers.
Why it can be problematic to rely on internal resources to run homegrown research projects - even if the leads have the word ‘research’ in their job title.
What good research looks like (it should be obvious what to do next after it’s done) and how to make it super actionable for your team.

Key Moments:

[1:58] Claire shares a story of a Product Manager who fell back into bad habits by working on assumptions.
[7:25] Georgiana and Claire talk about botched customer surveys.
[11:33] Georgiana unpacks why not all research is equal, and assigning the wrong kind of research to a project can leave you with more questions than answers.
[13:38] Claire shares an example of a team Forget The Funnel worked where a UX researcher led a customer research project - and how the end result didn’t give the team the insights they needed.
[16:46] Georgiana and Claire discuss how research done well should feel immediately actionable - and this starts with setting a clear goal at the start of the project.
[18:32] Georgiana breaks down the importance of having an internal sponsor and stakeholder in any customer research project who can help champion the work.
[20:10] Both discuss what good research looks like - from setting the right expectations, staying focussed on the best customers, clear segmentation, and asking the right questions.

Follow Georgiana on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgianalaudi/
Check out the Forget the Funnel website: https://forgetthefunnel.com/

What bad research looks like - and what causes it in the first place.
Why not all research methods will get you the answers you need, especially when teams lack a foundational understanding of customers.
Why it can be problematic to rely on internal resources to run homegrown research projects - even if the leads have the word ‘research’ in their job title.
What good research looks like (it should be obvious what to do next after it’s done) and how to make it super actionable for your team.

Key Moments:

Follow Georgiana on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgianalaudi/
Check out the Forget the Funnel website: https://forgetthefunnel.com/

Previous Episode

Data-Led to Customer-Led: How Invoice Simple Leverages Customer Insight to Drive Product Growth

On this episode of the Forget The Funnel Podcast, Georgiana & Claire are joined by Dan Stuart, President of EverCommerce companies Invoice Simple & Joist.
Dan shares the moment he realized that the data his team relied on to make growth decisions about their 400,000 customers wasn't helping them make real progress, the importance of continually validating core beliefs about your product, and the advice he would give to other SaaS leaders to get out of their own way and capture business critical insights.

Discussed:

Dan shares how overreliance on assumptions stacks over time and how critical it is to re-evaluate and retest the customer experience you’re building continually.
How Invoice Simple drastically improved their GTM experiments by transitioning from being a ‘data factory’ to incorporating real-world customer insight.
How Invoice Simple measures success across key metrics like user acquisition to customer churn.
Dan’s advice to other business leaders for how to support their cross-functional teams by providing them with the time, capability and expertise, not just for short-term success but to help them level-up overall.
The importance of integrated planning within functional areas of your business and strategic pillars, and how an external team is often better equipped to handle internal competing assumptions and priorities.

Key Moments:

[3:51] The Invoice Simple product and the broad range of customers they’re targeting.
[5:15] Dan talks about his growth from product and engineering to President and the ever-evolving need to adapt to new customers while keeping their long-standing customers happy.
[7:59] Invoice Simple was a data factory whose early success was primarily due to being data-driven and making experimentation-based decisions.
[13:33] Why Dan decided data wasn’t enough, his desire for more specific roles around research, and his belief that customer research has so much value.
[17:31] Finding cross-functional alignment within teams and across strategic pillars.
[21:15] Dan explains how his internal team decided which customer segment to go after, shifting, reorienting, and aligning teams towards this new segment.
[24:47] Dan talks about uncovering this new customer understanding and what it meant for onboarding new customers to Invoice Simple.
[27:21] Dan shares an example of customer messaging that he and his team prioritize now, thanks to customer research.
[32:40] What Dan thinks are the most significant results from using customer insights.
---

Check out Invoice Simple
Connect with Daniel Stuart on LinkedIn
Follow Georgiana on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgianalaudi/
Check out the Forget the Funnel website: https://forgetthefunnel.com/

Next Episode

How Stillio Unlocked More Effective Product Messaging by Understanding Their Most Powerful Use Cases

On this episode, Georgiana and Claire are joined by Steve De Jong and Diego Richards, the CEO and CCO of Stillio, who started working with Forget The Funnel earlier this year.
Steve and Diego share their journey from blindly experimenting with marketing tactics and dangerously slow growth to a renewed sense of optimism for the future. With a new understanding of their amazing customers, they learned that growth doesn’t have to come from spending more on top-of-funnel marketing.
We unpack the importance of understanding the use cases for your product, honing in on the ones that matter most – in this case, gaining Steve and Diego the clarity they needed for positioning & messaging their niche product inside a nearly limitless, horizontal market.
Discussed:

Problems with copying the marketing that works for other SaaS companies and relying on guesswork without clearly understanding the unique value you provide to a unique set of customers.
How effective research allowed Stillio to quickly uncover its best customers and develop a more focused, effective messaging strategy with clear, practical outputs.
Being open to seeking out external expertise to help guide you to a more customer-centric approach quicker - especially when the skillset is missing internally.

Key Moments:
[2:57] Steve and Diego explain the problem Stillio solves, their roles within the company and how they came to work with Forget The Funnel.
[6:51] Georgiana, Diego, and Claire discuss the dangers of copying what seems to work for other SaaS companies and running marketing for marketing’s sake.
[10:52] Steve talks about the product marketing challenges of building a product for so many potential customers with many potential use cases.
[13:26] Diego shares some unique insights they discovered about their best customers through their research efforts - from understanding which segments were signing up for the long haul and others to set up and forget.
[15:47] The group discusses the different types of Jobs the Stillio team identified from the research and how this impacted practical decision-making across how they present themselves through their marketing.
[20:46] Georgiana explains the huge short-term opportunity in identifying the customers who implicitly understand the value of your product.
[23:03] Diego and Steve share practical ways customer research influences their priorities, from reconsidering their overall messaging to updating the company homepage and emails.
[27:07] Diego talks about the value the Stillio team found in working with an objective, external partner that could provide focus to their research efforts.