AMA: Eventbrite Former Head of Product Marketing, Greg Hollander on Customer Research

As they say, the proof’s in the pudding. If you work with folks who don’t see the value, it’s only once you get people using them and benefitting from them that they’ll be asking for more. In general I think Product Marketing is about using your customer expertise to place smart bets on the places that are going to move the needle. If you have a lot of conviction that personas are needed, you should place that bet. Alternatively, if you’re not sure of the impact they’ll have, it might be worth prototyping with a single segment or two and getting them into the hands of potential users. To do this, you only need small budget to reward folks for their interview time - a few hundred dollars should get you moving. Once you have a draft persona or two, put them in front of users and ask what they find valuable (or not) and iterate from there. As you have those conversations, find your advocates and ask them to help you build momentum. The other thing I’d add is that it’s super important that you are VERY specific about how other teams will find value in personas. I’ve found it often doesn’t resonate to just talk about “making personas”.

If you’re looking for specific titles, I think the approach you laid out makes sense. The screener survey is super important for making sure you’re find representative folks to talk to (based on your customer base or intended customer base), and not wasting your time. For sourcing the initial list, I try to make them a mix of current customers (sourced from our database) and potential prospects. For prospects, I use an intercept on some of our web content, and sometimes tap into panels like Google Surveys. For specific titles, you could also try LinkedIn targeting which I think allows you to target professional groups.

This is a little meta, but the best advice I have is to treat your sellers as your customers. What would you do to try to understand how to get a customer to use your product? Do some research - via interviews, observations, surveys, etc, and learn their workflows, their gaps, their pain points, etc when it comes to how they use content to prep for sales calls (and for inside sales, while they’re actually on calls). Then prototype (if appropriate), and get them to walk you through how they’d use it or not. Only when you land on a format that’s useful should you cascade to multiple competitors. It’s also important to note that sometimes, even though sales folks are asking for competitive intel, it’s actually just not a high priority thing to spend time and energy to create. I’ve typically found that there’s only ROI on this kind of work when it’s hyper-targeted - at the top 2 or 3 competitors in a given segment, for example. Otherwise it’s information overload and your time might be better spent focusing on what your offering does well, vs. what others are weak at.

I don’t have any direct experience in this sector, but I’d encourage you to start by better understanding the segments of your market. Whether through interviews, surveys, or product usage analysis (ideally some combination), you’ll need to identify the common threads between segments of your seemingly-fragmented base, and then create personas based on those segments. Some dimensions to consider that span across job titles/industries/buyer types: “jobs to be done” (see Clayton Christensen’s work), decision criteria, substitutes, level of pain, willingness to pay, etc.

I have NOT found success testing messages out of context, like in surveys. It’s hard for respondents to truly put themselves in a buyer’s mindset. I’d recommend putting messaging into practice, in context, in ways that you can test and iterate. For example, look at lift in conversion on landing pages, ads, or emails with messaging A vs. messaging B. Put pages up on sites like UserTesting.com to hear first-hand from potential customers (I’ve found a lot of success with the screeners they offer). Ask sales reps whether they’re having success with your materials, and where they’re hitting friction. As you learn what works, you should feed that back into your understanding of the customer. Did the messaging that flowed from your customer profile resonate best? If not, why not? Reach out to a few more customers or throw some more tests up on UserTesting with specific questions, and continue to iterate from there.

The best way I’ve learned to think about it is that as Product Marketers you should be focused on researching the buyer, whereas UX researchers are focused on the User. Sometimes this overlaps and results in different questions on the same content - for example, we might show the same landing page or in-product modal but they ask about whether the user found the information they needed, and I ask about how they interpreted names or messages. That’s great, and creates a strong partnership. Other times it takes us in totally different directions. Regardless of the format (survey, observation, interview, etc) I try to focus my product marketing research on what drives perception and behavioral change, while our UX folks are focused on whether users can find the information they need and get to an intended action.

This one’s a sensitive one, since it’s tough (and not necessarily good for the business) to get in the middle of a sales process. I’ve found most success reaching out to folks cold who are not in a buying cycle, and currently use a competitor, with the offer of just trying to learn more about their needs. Even better if you have direct collaboration with Product and can tell the interviewees that what you learn from them will influence the solution you’re building, which would be available to them when their contract’s up. If you think there’s a lot of value in talking to folks that are close to their sales cycles, I’ve found it really helpful to bring in a third party so they can aggregate information, so that you’re not viewed (internally or externally) as manipulating the sales process.

I’ve typically seen segmentation and personas fall flat in one of two ways: either they were purely based on readily available internal data (usually, transaction or product-focused), or they were purely based on external interviews and didn’t come with a perspective on how representative they were of our customer or prospect base. The result: Sales uses one, Product uses another. To drive towards maximum alignment of “who is our customer, and what do they care about”, it’s important to merge both of these approaches. My recommendation would be to start with one or the other, depending on whether you have a mature customer (start with internal data) or nascent (start with market data/interviews), but quickly merge the two and build from there. For example, if you see clusters of product behavior, what hypotheses do you have of the needset that would drive that behavior? Source a few interviews, and test whether you’re hearing that in the market. If so, keep pushing in that direction. If not, you should refine the way you think about that specific product data. And so on. In our more mature customer base, I work across 4 steps: 1. Feature usage analysis to shape quant/qual market research (sampling and questions) 2. Quant market research to identify coherent segments of the population, and what makes them in common 3. Qual market research to bring those segments to life and develop product personas 4. Deeper dive with sales to make those personas about specific buyer types (as necessary)

More than one persona can definitely make sense. It just depends on the business. Ideally you want to have one persona per “target audience”. The balance is having enough to create coverage across the segment(s) that are strategically valuable to the business, and not too many that they become information overload and are not actionable.

This one’s all about sourcing. In a survey, I typically ask the “who are you?” question directly, and make sure I get over-sample of each crucial role. In interviews, I try to make sure I’m talking to a mix of “above the line” (only cares about ROI) and “below the line” (product user) buyers, as appropriate for the questions. Ultimately, you may not be able to get perfect information from all sides — it’s up to you to uncover clues and connect the dots as best you can.

For a full answer, check out my response to the question above about approaching segmentation and personas. Specifically as it relates to launches, I try to keep of our "business-at-large" target customers in mind (ideally, we've already built product with one of those target customers in mind), but will often double click to understand the sub-segments that would be most interested in what's launching, so that I can further tailor messaging to the audiences that will best achieve the launch's goal. For this, focus on the launch's goal is crucial. Sometimes we launch things that apply horizontally across our base and our goal is to drive broad adoption, so understanding how to message and appeal to each "business at large" segment is important. Other times, the focus is a lot more specific — either because the product is targeted at a small portion of our base, or because we have intermediate soft-launch type goals. For those, it helps to go a level deeper. But in all cases these target audiences should ladder back up to how we think about our business at large.