AMA: Vanta Head of PLG Product Marketing, Madison Leonard on Customer Research

This really depends on the leadership team and company culture. Some organizations have a culture of "execute and iterate" first, whereas others will like to be more throughout from the beginning. This culture is unlikely to change with the viewpoints of one person, so I recommend choosing the company you work for very wisely! However, there are ways you can set yourself up for success in any company: Start talking with customers BEFORE you need to. Chat with 1-2 a week. Enough to get a pulse, but not too much to the point where you can't get your weekly work done. Compile notes (and record to pull snippets), then highlight some key findings to your manager and product/sales teams. By delivering this value proactively, I promise you'll find key nuggets that make an impact. Then, when you have a big project come up where customer research is needed, you can point to your casual customer interviews and the value you provided from that. Just imagine the value once you kick it into high gear and talk with a specific cohort of users! 

This all depends on your company stage and customer size. In the early stages (less than 50 customers), I would honestly try to talk with all of them. Offer free coffee, a heavy discount, or whatever you have to. This will help you understand your early adopter target audience - once you have this, you can double down on marketing channels and an early distribution strategy. But keep in mind, your more mature product will have more segments, so this is only good until about 500-1,000 customers depending on your TAM. Next, your hyper growth stage customers will depend on whether you are primarily PLG or SLG as well as your TAM. PLG has a higher influx of users, and therefore should be easier to acquire customers for interviews (and even more helpful... churned users). I've typically used product analytics tools such as Amplitude, Mixpanel, or Pendo to segment users based on usage then reach out via email. You can also ask via in-app popup. I might stay away from prospecting since this could have a negative effect on your brand. If you don't have product analytics, ask your CSMs to gather a list of folks who match the segment you're looking for! 

3 words - length, ROI, searchability. Length: Sales reps and customers alike want things to be short and to the point. I like to keep it to a punchy header with 2-3 supporting bullet points if possible. ROI: The benefit to the customer should be clear in the header. For example, "[Customer] saved an average of 10 hours per week and $250,000/yr by switching from [competitor] to [your company]". Searchability: Sales will forget 90% of the things you present in enablement. Not to mention, new reps have possibly never seen enablement training on your material. I like to include things in 3 places - slack, cloud storage (GDrive or whatever you're using), and training (onboarding/enablement decks). This ensures your material is easily findable in a pinch. Bonus points for organizing your material with tags so reps can search by persona. 

Yes I see them as completely different! UX research is more around the product usage. You're likely guiding the user through a prototype, MVP, or new feature and watching how they figure stuff out on their own. All your findings are around product usage and adoption. However, with customer research for product marketing your end goal is usually centered around building personas, crafting GTM strategy, and sharing the voice of the customer with product and sales teams!

Buyer research comes in two forms - existing customers and prospects. Tap into your existing customers to learn what really sticked during the sales cycle and what their 'aha' moment was in the product. The key is to find the PAIN they were in before this product. Then, do some networking on LinkedIn. I usually will offer free coffee or some kind of incentive and ask for feedback on messaging for a product. These folks really have nothing to lose, so they'll be upfront with any hesitations they have!

Most companies will have multiple personas. There are two distinctions here - user personas and buyer personas. If you're selling mostly to SMBs, you may only have 1-2 buyer personas (usually CEO or COO) during your sales cycle. The more you move into mid market and enterprise, the more people will be involved in the buying process and therefore you'll need to know how to sell to each persona. For product-led growth companies with a freemium or trial product, you'll also have user personas. For SMB, the buyer persona and user personas often overlap. However, in enterprise deals the user is usually never the buyer. Your segmentation for product adoption and retention will revolve around your user persona, whereas your buyer persona sticks to the sales cycle. 

Compensation will depend based on the size of the organization and their role. For example, a Director of Product at a 25 person company will be a lot easier to get a hold of and compensate than a Director of Product at Meta. There are some agencies you can use, but I recommend doing LinkedIn prospecting if you can. 

This all depends on the stage of your company and whether you're a PLG or SLG company. Product-Led Growth companies: You won't be able to truly segment effectively until your product is mature and you have product analytics set up. In the early stages, you should be able to identify who your early adopter target audience is through customer interviews. Then, based on the roadmap, you should have some hypotheses about the various use cases your product will be good for and the personas that would get the most benefit. As you grow, test these hypotheses and measure with qualitative feedback (surveys, interviews) and quantitative feedback (CAC Payback, conversion to paid, etc). As a quick win - as 1 question in onboarding to help tag users based on their persona. Sales-led Growth companies: For SLG companies, you may not have as many customers coming through the pipeline as PLG so you'll have to get a bit more creative. Your first priority should be to include persona, company industry, and company size as a mandatory field in your CRM. This way, you'll get data on which segment is the most likely to convert to an account vs churn during your sales pipeline. Then, use product analytics to track the various personas in the platform to identify which personas expand/retain vs churn. This data may take a while to get in a SLG company, so I recommend supplementing with customer interviews while you await product usage data.

Talk with at least 1 customer a week and you'll never be surprised by any changes! I like to follow Gartner and Forrester for changes in the market, as well as keeping a pulse on new PLG companies who are bootstrapping (don't underestimate those folks). The truth is, most companies do these items once a year at best. If you're able to spend time every 6 months, I think you'll be ahead of the curve. It's a lot of work up front to create, but shouldn't be much to update. I like to check them any time a new product is launched or a new competitor enters the market (usually sales will notify you). Also keep an eye on your competitor for news surrounding funding or new product announcements. 

In order to understand your ideal distribution strategy, you have to know your ICP extremely well. Your company growth strategy will also play a role... product-led (PLG) with a freemium or trial product or sales-led (SLG) with sales locked demo. If you're in a sales-led organization, all content should be TOFU or MOFU aimed at your buyer persona. Rarely will you have good performing BOFU. All CTAs are gearing towards talking with sales and getting a demo. If you're in a product-led organization, your content will likely be focused more on BOFU (especially in early days) because you're trying to attract users. All CTAs will be geared towards creating an account or signing up for a trial. Social channels work great for both PLG and SLG, but mostly with PLG. Thought-leadership content across events and podcasts typcially do better with SLG. Qualitative feedback via real-time customer interviews will yeild you the best results for identifying where your target audience is. As for segmenting and personalizing - yes 100%! That's why it's so key to know your ICP and segments that do really well for you. If you can narrow down company size, company industry, and user/buyer persona then you'll be golden!

The best use of VoC is usually with informing the product roadmap with PLG companies. I find that customer advocacy programs are better for more Enterprise-level roadmapping and selling. Great example: I once launched a new feature and had a hypothesis of who my target audience was. Upon talking with customers, I found that I was wrong! The ICP was completely different! Quickly, I pivoted my GTM strategy and launch strategy to be more targeted, which ultimately did really well in the end!

Not getting enough feedback from stakeholders on missing value. VoC programs are amazing when implemented well, but if they are created in a silo or without solving a problem then it will not get the internal traction it deserves. For example - are you marketing, sales, or product teams HUNGRY for more customer input? Where? Why? Dig into what pain it would solve if they had more insight. Then, deliver that value first when building out your VoC program. If your stakeholders say something like "oh yeah that would be cool, we could probably leverage that" - then stop and reassess. VoC need to provide value fast in order to be established internally. 

Customer advisory boards are best when you keep the customers under 10 people and ask them to stay on for 1-2 years. Strategically hand-pick your advisors from the markets you want to break into or dominate. For example, if you want to go more into Enterprise, you shouldn't have 9/10 people from SMB companies on your board. While advisory boards can certainly help with retention, I'd argue they are better suited for roadmap planning and keeping them happy customers. For product retention, I'd pull in PMs and growth PMs to lead the charge on improving user retention and activation.