AMA: Instacart Director, Retailer Product Marketing, Nikhil Balaraman on Analyst Relationships

I think the mistake here is making it too long. I’d suggest an inverse triangle approach, and keep it short depending on the length and purpose of your briefing, probably no more than 5-10 slides. My typical lay out is: 1. Company slide (founded in, team, key logos, etc) 2. Market context (TAM/SAM/SOM as needed) 3. Problem statement: Key persona & pain points 4. Unique perspective: What’s your thesis/why you 5. Product overview: Perhaps a traditional marchitecture slide to start and then some screenshots or even better a 10min product demo walking thru a fictional user problem 6. Customer case study, ideally with metrics 7. End on questions/discussion points you have for the analyst As you think thru your talk track, make sure to really frame your language in the same language that the analyst your talking to uses. Talk about the category the same way they do, and just be honest with them about your products strengths and weaknesses. Analysts are curious people and enjoy learning about new things, they will ask you lots of questions. Make sure that you’re giving them the right path of questioning to go down so that you can also take away valuable insights from the conversion!

It is important for all functions across the company to build empathy for users. Regardless of your segment, small advisory boards are helpful for this, and can be set up to feature 10-20 key customers who meet quarterly (or more or less often) to review roadmaps and provide feedback on either new initiatives or existing products. The key here is getting leadership buy-in across the exec team, as they will likely be the main headlines to actually get key customers to attend these sessions. Depending on the level of budget you have, getting teams together to go onsite with customers and actually see customers in their natural environment was something I did early in my career and our cross-functional team which included sales, partnerships, product, engineering, and operations loved seeing and meeting our customers in their offices to really understand how our products were being used in the field.

Starting with the customer insight is always the #1 job of a product marketer. Ideal customer profile, target verticals, buyer personas, etc these are things that aren’t going to change on a weekly or monthly basis. However, as part of routine planning cycles – perhaps every 3, 6 or 12 months depending on your market or industry, it’s always good to re-evaluate with sales and CS leadership and understand if we’ve been seeing any shifts in user base or even with the demand gen team to understand how mix in titles might have changed in your inbound lead mix. Competitive insights are a separate topic. Overall kill sheets probably need quarterly refreshes, but understanding your competitors and what they’re doing can be a daily task depending on how crowded your space is. For this, I’d definitely recommend setting up Google News alerts for all your competitors, and if possible, writing a weekly digest for key stakeholders across sales, CS, product, PR/comms and others to see how/what competitors showcase themselves. Also if you have the budget, listening tools like Chorus.ai that can scan sales calls and alert you via Slack or email when competitors’ names are mentioned on calls also help you hear the context of how prospects and customers are discussing other players in your space.

Customer advisory boards are great ways to bring product, leadership, and your customers face-to-face to really help everyone understand if what is being built will really solve customer needs. Along the entire product development journey, there are ways to involve customers that aren’t just focused on getting people to use a beta version of a product. I have found that customer advisory programs that meet semi-regularly and ideally at least once a year in person are helpful in building rapport both between product, leadership, and customers, but also between customers themselves–becoming the foundation for a true community program. The end goal of the advisory board program shouldn’t just be to influence the roadmap. It should really be to improve customer satisfaction/NPS, and NRR. You might find that a customer advisory program actually helps you identify a product marketing gap – such as not enough onboarding collateral – that has nothing to do with the product roadmap. So go in with an open mind, and keep your eyes on the goal of improving the customer experience.

I think the easiest thing to miss when setting up Voice of Customer programs is alignment cross-functionally on the purpose of these programs. As product marketers, it’s easy to drive towards your goal of turning your customers into heroes and heroines via case studies and testimonials for your site. However, a strong VoC program needs to do more than just build a pipeline of case studies. You need to be able to infuse the customer voice back through all facets of the organization. So I think the best way to avoid common mistakes when building one from scratch is to: 1. Align with sales, product, customer success, even engineering, finance, and other functions you might not immediate think of to see what their objectives might be in hearing from the customer 2. Start small, perhaps with a quarterly meeting with 10 of your top customers, or a survey a quarter the results of which are analyzed and shared out and might form the basis of your NPS 3. Document customer requests and follow up with them even if it’s a simple email to send an email with a documentation link…they’re giving you their time, respect that 4. Give these customers a sneak peak of what’s upcoming…don’t just use these forums as a way to collect ideas or hear their list of issues/bugs, but also give them a sneak peak on some of the cool stuff they can expect in the next quarter or two and make product a partner in this…some of the best and most exciting customer interactions we’ve had in previous advisory/VoC programs has been thru the roadmap previews 5. As you have more success, you can expand this program to various parts of the funnel to help inform product marketing work…is there a prospect stuck in a stage for 2 or 3x longer than average? Send a survey, find out why, expand to voice of the prospect/market as well. One of the most impactful things you can help the organization do is get into the shoes of your customer. If it works for your product, consider doing what companies like DoorDash recently announced, and drive cultural change within the organization by making people actually become a customer for their products even if it’s only a day a month/quarter/year.

Honestly, this is a GREAT problem to have. If there’s no Wave or MQ for your category, then all the more reason for you to be in the top right quadrant once one comes out :) The first thing I would recommend is identifying which analysts are covering your space generally. Whether or not it’s specific to your category matters less, but having a mapping of who the 2-5 analysts are who might care about your space, and ultimately who might be the ones to create a Wave or MQ is what matters. Next, understand their research. Get your hands on whatever material you can, sign up for a license, attend webinars, and start to think like that analyst. See the market like they’re seeing it, but then also start to work with the analyst, brief them on what you’re building, on how you see the market, ask for feedback on positioning, and especially on competitive positioning. Make their job easier by bringing them customer stories or insights, or even by introducing them to your customers if appropriate. Ultimately, the relationship you build will hopefully help inform the analysts about your viewpoints on the space and help them understand the market from your perspective, but also their insight will help you build more compelling positioning for the market.

Analyst relations programs are best run as a partnership between PR/Comms teams and PMM. The PR and Comms teams will be helpful in driving longer term thinking and time horizons. How do we start to influence the narrative in the market today for the future, how do we position the company today for where we want to be in 3-5 years, those type of questions. For PMM, the value is in getting feedback on how you’re positioning products for buyers today, and driving awareness especially for enterprise buyers (CxOs) with the analyst community on what you have to offer. The best way to really do it is to make sure that key executive stakeholders from the C-suite to your head of product are all involved in either shaping or presenting analyst briefings. When drafting press releases, the comms team should be utilizing analyst quotes as available to include in coverage, and over time, using analyst reports as a source of validation for your positioning (as well as highlighting message pull thru) will hopefully serve as a measurable source of demand generation in your pipeline.

I think the mistake here is making it too long. I’d suggest an inverse triangle approach, and keep it short depending on the length and purpose of your briefing, probably no more than 5-10 slides. My typical lay out is: 1. Company slide (founded in, team, key logos, etc) 2. Market context (TAM/SAM/SOM as needed) 3. Problem statement: Key persona & pain points 4. Unique perspective: What’s your thesis/why you 5. Product overview: Perhaps a traditional marchitecture slide to start and then some screenshots or even better a 10min product demo walking thru a fictional user problem 6. Customer case study, ideally with metrics 7. End on questions/discussion points you have for the analyst As you think thru your talk track, make sure to really frame your language in the same language that the analyst your talking to uses. Talk about the category the same way they do, and just be honest with them about your products strengths and weaknesses. Analysts are curious people and enjoy learning about new things, they will ask you lots of questions. Make sure that you’re giving them the right path of questioning to go down so that you can also take away valuable insights from the conversion!

Well first of all, it’s always tough to be a team of one. You are definitely going to have to ruthlessly prioritize and as a team of one, it can be easy to get stuck as the sales content/collateral & product launch factory. So with the spare time that you have, I think a few things that can help you understand the customer a bit better perhaps in order of ease: 1. Sign up for daily newsletters from the industry trades that you’d want to cover your launches 2. In those newsletters sign up for the webinars that come thru, or webinars from competitors that you think your target market would be interested in 3. Set up and automate reports from your CRM to your inbox anytime there are deal notes…things like competitors mentioned, closed won or closed lost reasons – obviously this is dependent on good CRM hygiene, but try and get sales folks to put notes in the system and help them see how it will help you better position products for them to sell 4. Get on calls, or listen to recordings if you have the tools…this is usually the most helpful way that I’ve found to get into the mind of a prospect/customer whether it’s to sit on calls with sales or customer success and hear how customers are articulating their needs/pain points 5. Go to industry conferences either as an exhibitor or as an attendee to hear sessions and meet customers in real life! Good luck!

At a B2B company PMM and Product cannot function without each other. There’s simply not enough time in the day for either team to do the other team’s job. I think the best way for PMMs to stay connect as a valuable partner to product is to help Product with understanding the market context and customer needs in a way that goes beyond just the job to be done or the pixels on the screen. A great product marketer will help set a vision and narrative for everyone – sales, product, engineering, the whole organization – that helps to contextualize the roadmap in terms of what the customer’s business needs and objectives are. It’s great you’re building some awesome AI feature…but if all I need is your current product to work on my mobile device, I’m not going to care. Another way to drive trust and accountability with Product teams is by building a GTM roadmap. Similar to a product roadmap, the GTM roadmap would include both new product releases, as well as ongoing awareness and activation campaigns that PMM is running to help drive product growth. I think this can also help to show product how missing a release date can have a cascading effect across the GTM roadmap as well, and hopefully get PMMs embedded in the process sooner.

Depending on your target marketing and how active they are on these type of review sites, you may end up finding that G2 and TrustRadius are actually more effective than analysts. This is more likely to be the case if your economic buyer and your user personas line up more often than not, as it is not uncommon for buyers, especially of single seat tools or point solutions, to buy that software similar to how one might choose a restaurant for dinner in a city they’re visiting. As you start to move upmarket and your buyer personas turn into committees it does become less likely that G2 and TrustRadius are going to be the sole source of information, however, creating programs with yoru customer success team to encourage users to leave reviews on those sites is always a net benefit as those companies have done tons of work to build great SEO and site reputation so the referral traffic they might generate for you could be a meaningful input to your demand gen strategy.

These things are bound to happen, but the good news in today’s world is that customers are likely getting their information from multiple sources. If I were in rapid response mode, I’d probably start by lining up some blog posts and customer testimonials that address the perceived weakness. Perhaps even hosting a webinar and running a counter narrative that goes directly in the face of the report…something like “Analyst X says we’re terrible at this…attend this webinar to find out why they’re wrong!”. Longer term, it comes down to communication. The analyst community can only write about what they know. So if you’re not communicating early and often with them, then do not expect things to change. Ideally, you bring them along on the journey when you’re launching new product or updating your positioning so that they can both feel included, but also so they’re not surprised when you launch and one of their clients calls them on launch day to get their take on what you’re up to.