AMA: Spotify Associate Director Product Marketing, Creator Promotion, Alex Lobert on Customer Research

When gathering competitive intel, I find the most important thing is to have the goal for it clearly mapped out. Why does Sales (or product) want the competitive intel? What will they use it for? If you start from a clear understanding of how the intel will help, it is easier to provide useful information. I recommend being as prescriptive as possible with regard to how the info can be used to help your team achieve a goal. Assuming you have intelligence that achieves your stated goals, you may need to "market it". How can you drive awareness of new info? A newsletter? A webinar? Is there a piece of collateral / approach that has worked in the past? If not, ask your colleagues about their preferences and then test an approach. Test until you find something that works. Generally, I recommend making competitive intel really easy to use. You may even want to build competitive intel into sales materials. This could take the form of a comparison between your product and competitors on key points.

When testing messaging, I like to start simple and practical by first talking to the people closest to the customer. That could be a sales team or a partnerships team. I typically bring hypothesis messaging to these experts and evaluate if changes need to be made for a given customer segment. After working with internal experts, it is usually time to bring messaging to customers. This often takes the form of interviews with target customer personas to get reaction to website / product copy. If your product has a B2B sales component, you can also do live testing of messaging in a set of client meetings. This approah is typically low cost (just editing some slides) and gives you data on whether or not your messaging works in the real world. With any customer test, I recommend that prior to any testing, identify the metrics or data you will use to make a decision about if your messaging is working. This will help you stay objective in your analysis. After user research, Alpha Testing / Pilots are a way to see if your messaging holds up in the real world. Can you actually get customers to use your product / commit to your pilot? If not, it may be back to the drawing board. 

First, it's important to know why you need a segmentation. Is it about go-to-market and creating more effective messaging? Is it about changing your channel / sales strategy? Is it about product development? Media Targeting? Once you have an objective or objectives, a method for segmentation often becomes more obvious. When thinking about messaging or product development, I often find it helpful to segment customers based on common needs. In B2B organizations figuring out what types of customers have common needs might mean talking to experts on your customers like sales people, doing desk research, or conducting customer interviews. In B2C organizations, this probably means interviews and / or surveys. Sometimes a behavioral segmentation is the right tool. Especially if you are trying to cross-promote or upsell products, you may want to segment customers - and in-turn your strategy - based on how they interact with your products. Finally, demographic segmentation is useful because it's usually easy to understand and action on. It's rare that demographics are all that precise (all Millennials don't do anything as we all know), but you can easily make decisions that are "pretty good" based on this type segment. Plus demographic segmentations make for easy targeting in the real world given they are often observable characteristics of people or businesses. PS. don't forget to take a look at how others in your industry / adjacent industries have segmented customers. Even if you are creating a new category, there are likely people you can learn from / build off. 

I'm big on updating information based on actions that need to be taken / decision that need to be made. When it comes to market research and personas, clarify what decisions you need to make based on the information and the cadence to which you will make them. If you use market research to inform half-by-half planning then updating the information prior to the beginning of each half is a good starting assumption. I recommend keeping a regular pulse on the competition, though. For example, by regularly read news about your industry. If there are public announcements that necessitate changes to claims you make in sales materials - update the materials as soon as possible. The same goes for if you hear and can corroborate intel sourced by industry facing teams. Some changes don't need to wait. 

We use voice of customer insights to inform messaging and positioning as well as our product roadmap. At Spotify, we have monthly syncs with our partnerships and sales team to just discuss feedback from customers. This helps us to understand if our product and / or go-to-market strategy is working and to prioritize changes. Prior to formal planning (at Spotify this is quarterly), I've also found success in summarizing voice of customer insights and presenting these to product teams in order to inform roadmap development. One last thing, I recommend using voice of customer insights to help motiviate / show the impact of your team's work. Especially when you hear something is working, share it. It's important to connect what product teams are diong to real-world impact. This will pay dividends with regard to positive sentiment amongst the team.

The two biggest mistakes I see are (1) not having a clear goal as to what you want to learn from customers and how this will inform product / go-to-market strategy, and (2) not truly prioritizing or resourcing the effort. With regard to (1), I find it's really important to be clear about what you are trying to learn from Voice of Customer. Don't get me wrong, it's important to have broad discussions with customers that raise topics you may not have thought... however, I suggest gathering these type of insights should be 20% of the effort not the 80%. I recommend guiding the feedback you get toward problems you know you need to solve - whether that is design, messaging, customer education, or something else. Create discussion guides, surveys, or other structures that will get you there. And then (2), getting insights from customers takes a lot of time! It's easy for this work to get deprioritized when compared to go-to-market needs. I recommend either making voice of customer a formal part of people's goals or making it some people's full time job. At Facebook / Meta, we made sure that everyone on the PMM team had insights projects as a part of the goals. We also had a team with a primary responsibility for managing many of our voice of customer (as we called it hyperloop) processes. You may need to start small with your efforts until you can justify more time / resoucing... but if you don't prioritize it, it won't get done.