← MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
Transforming Client Feedback InTo New Product Features
00:17:22
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- [00:00]
Benjamin Shapiro
The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the iHear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, iHear everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com.
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Juan Mendoza
From advertising to software.
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Iwan Mendoza
As a service to data, across all.
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Darren Lloyd
Of our programs and clients, we've seen.
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Iwan Mendoza
A 55 to 65% open rate. Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.
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Juan Mendoza
Typical life span of an article is about 24 to 36 hours.
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Darren Lloyd
If we're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just.
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Juan Mendoza
A matter of timing.
- [00:54]
Benjamin Shapiro
Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.
- [01:15]
Juan Mendoza
Welcome to the Martech Podcast. I'm Benjamin Shapiro, the executive producer of the Martech Podcast and today we've got a special episode for you which is going to be guest hosted by Juan Mendoza, the author of the Martech Weekly Newsletter. Juan is a recovering Martech consultant turned creator who writes an amazing weekly newsletter about the Martech industry and I'm thrilled to invite him and some of his friends to take the mic and share their knowledge with you, our loyal Martech Podcast listeners. All right, here's a special episode of the Martech Podcast guest hosted by Juan Mendoza, the author of the Martech Weekly Newsletter.
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Iwan Mendoza
Welcome back. Welcome back Martechers. My name is Iwan Mendoza from the Martech Weekly, your guest host here at the Martech Podcast. Joining me today is Darren Lloyd. He's the CEO and product owner at Simple Marketing Solutions. Simple offers intuitive marketing software designed to optimize creative workflows and improve project management for creatives, ad agencies and marketing teams. Darren is one of those fascinating guys that he's the executive of the business, the leader of the company, but he's also deeply involved in the product, the design, the development, the execution of product in the business. And it's absolutely fascinating talking with Darren in the past about his vision for how he thinks about how marketing teams and creative teams can be more efficient and optimize how they do the marketing work in large companies.
- [02:40]
Juan Mendoza
But before we get to today's interview, I want to tell you about what I'm listening to. Ever wanted to sit down to a candid conversation with marketing leaders from the world's Biggest brands. The Current podcast is your chance. On the Current podcast you'll find exclusive interviews with the experts and trendsetters who are on the front lines of digital advertising. And they always leave the ad tech jargon at the door. So subscribe to the current@www.thecurrent.com or anywhere you get your podcasts today.
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Iwan Mendoza
Yesterday, Darren and I went deep into how technology can really improve the creative process in marketing. But today we're going to be talking a little bit more about the process of transforming client feedback into new products and features. So I'm very excited to welcome Darren Lloyd back. He is the CEO and product owner at Simple Marketing Solutions. And we're going to talk about this whole world of how do you take feedback into new products and how he does that in his own company as well. So, Darren, thank you for joining us.
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Darren Lloyd
Thanks for having me back.
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Iwan Mendoza
So let's dive right into this. When we've had conversations in the past, you've kind of said, I'm a product guy first and foremost. That's what I love doing, is developing awesome products for customers. Now tell us a bit about what actually got you interested in product management, product development, and that whole role around develop new products for customers.
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Darren Lloyd
Wow. Where do I start? Well, I was an IT guy in an ad agency and I saw lots of inefficiencies and I went looking for a platform to solve these inefficiencies. Everything was happening by email and when someone leaves the business, guess what? You get told to nuke their machine and get ready for the next person. And there goes all the work that they've done that started a journey for me. And once you start something, you're essentially opening a can of worms. But what I love nothing more than is when you visit a business, a brand or an agency, and you see their users using the software, it's a goosebump moment. And it's like a tool that they use to do their work. So that's what inspires me. Obviously I'd let you know the user experience has to be spot on, has to be efficient. So that's what gives me a buzz, is when I can improve something that we have been doing, make it better, or start something new that we haven't done before, but do it in a way that saves user time or make sure they actually do what they meant to do.
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Iwan Mendoza
So it really is identifying a problem space and then building something, creating something to solve that that problem, whether it be in your own workflows, in the work that you're doing or identifying that out in the market as well. And I guess that's where a lot of this is coming from, which is when you get feedback from customers, usually they're talking about their problem. They're like, I'm struggling with this or I'm not sure about that, or there's something where they're trying to solve their own problem in some way. And so where do you start with customer feedback? Let's start the front end here about the whole process. Let's talk about collecting customer feedback. When it comes to understanding what customers need, what's wrong with your product, things that you need to improve, where do you actually start? When it comes to customer feedback, I'd.
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Darren Lloyd
Like to break it up into two areas. So the best and the most comprehensive feedback comes when someone's in market looking for a platform. They in the sales exercise, they are open minded, they're looking for something, they got the requirements written down. And I often join these sales situations because I know that's where you get the gold, where someone is going to be thinking of something differently because their minds are open. Now it's very different to our existing customers who they use the software and they're more in BAU mode. And no matter how often you meet with them, it could be monthly, quarterly, annually, and you review and you ask feedback. Their minds are never as open as someone who's in market looking for something new because they don't know what they want, et cetera. So that's where the gold is, that's where the nuggets are, that from a product perspective because they're open minded.
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Iwan Mendoza
So that first step of I'm looking for a solution is where you're sort of thinking, okay, what questions they're asking, what things they want to know. And that's just really just an exercise in listening.
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Darren Lloyd
Exactly. And then when you show them what you have got, they sometimes see things very differently because they're seeing it for the first time, they go, oh, it would be good if we could do that, etc. So that new customer opportunity is where more than 15% of our features come from. And then of course, the existing customers are another good source, but it's harder to get the really good stuff out of them because they're so busy. As we just said in our last podcast, marketing is busy. It's nonstop, it's always on, keep going. So they very rarely have enough time to extract themselves out of the process and to give you that feedback. So what I do encourage is a product session with Our customers every quarter, if they can dedicate two or three hours, that'd be great. And the first few minutes they struggle to why am I here? But then once they start talking and you. We use a lot of prototyping, whether it be XD or figma, to present concepts back then. But when they see something visual that we're working on, it's like a light bulb goes on. So one of the best ways we get features out of our existing customers is to show them concepts and prototypes of what we are doing, where we are going, and they're having something tangible to discuss, and then all of a sudden they start engaging. So it's not easy getting feedback from existing customers because they're too busy. Well, they're kind of happy with the way things are. Humans don't like change. We say we like change, but we don't.
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Iwan Mendoza
Yeah. Well, that's a really interesting point you raised, which is great for a marketer to think about how to process feedback, is that when a customer has bought something and they're using it regularly, they're probably blocked off to change.
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Darren Lloyd
At that point, their muscle memory just kind of starts behaving in a way. They like that if I do this and I do that, then that happens. So they like that consistency. But if we always kept on doing the things the same way, we're never going to improve. So it is challenging.
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Iwan Mendoza
Exactly. And there's always. Of course you always want to be improving your work, but it's just. I think that's a good insight about human nature, I think, because as an example, we bought a house about eight years ago, and I've been living in this house for about eight years. In the first two years, I did a lot to fix it. I ripped up the front fence, I put a new front fence around the house. I painted the house a different color. We had these big ugly red walls fixed up. The bathroom and the kitchen did a bunch of fixes there. And then the past, like five years, I've done not much.
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Darren Lloyd
Because you're happy.
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Iwan Mendoza
Pretty happy.
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Darren Lloyd
I mean, you've hit a cup inside.
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Iwan Mendoza
Yeah, but there's still things to fix, right? There's small things, there's big things, you know, stuff to fix. But you just get into a rhythm where you're in that space and you don't really want to make a change. Whereas the customers that are asking all these questions when they are in a season of making change say they want to replace their technology or they want to buy it for the first time. That's when they're asking all the important questions to your point. So actually understanding where the customer feedback, at what level is this customer speaking from? Are they speaking from the level of a repeat customer that is using a product or brand new coming in? All the questions it would really be like worthy to separate that feedback out. When it comes to identifying trends and insight, we often think as marketers think about demographics or lifetime value and all these other types of metrics. But the situation in which the customer is in is something that is often neglected. We could talk about this all day, but I want to talk about the next step which is okay, let's say you've got a bunch of feedback, you've got recordings from sales calls, you've got testimonials, you've got surveys, you've got one on one email interviews with folks. When it comes to collecting all that data, how do you tend to manage it? Is there a way in which you prioritize the feedback in certain ways? Is it more of a gut feel or is there more of a methodology to how you sort of look at the things you should prioritize or not?
- [09:50]
Darren Lloyd
It's a little bit of everything. Obviously we're an agile organization, so we've got a product backlog so things get added to the product backlog. We use user story so we don't go into boring requirements. We go as Joe the marketer, I need to do this, et cetera. So we write a user story, just kind of like a problem statement and then we let the developers respond with a solution. So we go out of our way to make it real life, personal, a real business challenge. And then we've got a UX team and the UX team will the next step they will prototype using Figma. That then gives us something tangible to discuss as a product team. We look at it and we start refining it. We make sure that we consistent with behavior in other parts of the app because the app's pretty big and if there's something we're doing differently, we go, okay, we either need to do it like we do it elsewhere or do we change, make this change for us. So we critique that and then we share it with the source. So which customer asks us or customers? We get their feedback and then once they've given us their feedback, we start coding. Now probably the fastest we've had something from an idea to delivery has been two months we developing sprints. But more often than not, from the first time we hear about a requirement from a customer, probably three, four months away from Them seeing it. If it's something we want to do. You mentioned gut feeling. That does come into play because you just know if you've been in the scene for a long time, you know, okay, that, that then you've heard it and you've heard the problem many, many times and it's now time to do something about it. So there's a bit of gut feel slash experience related there. But then there's also commercial. Is this going to make our product better? Is it going to allow us to charge more for our product? Is it going to make our product stickier with our existing customers? So there's all of these questions you need to ask yourself and we do, but for me, that is the last thing I ask. If something feels right and you know it's going to make it better, the commercials will take care of themselves.
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Iwan Mendoza
That's interesting. If it feels right, you think you're going to solve a big problem, then the commercials will follow. I like that attitude because I think a lot of people, particularly in product, they'll optimize towards certain metrics. And the metrics are usually around revenue and growth. And often that could be to the detriment of the experience of the customer. They could have a bad experience, but the app or the product is making good revenue. And there's a misconception in this industry which is being customer centric means that you listen to the customer about everything. The customer is always right. Okay, when you get this feedback, okay, you're going to go build a product, right? And you're going to build the ship a feature to solve that problem or improve the existing product. Right now that's just common knowledge. Everyone knows, okay, you got to listen to your customers and get feedback. But then sometimes you have to ignore customer feedback and you have to go with your gut, with what is right and what's wrong. Sometimes the metrics that you want to pursue are kind of at odds with the feedback from the customer. Sometimes there are things that you just cannot do because they're not technically feasible. Sometimes there's things that the customers want but are not really aligned to what you want to do in your career or for your company. So there's all these different layers of complexity when it comes to making these decisions. And so that's why I ask about the gut feel, because I think you're still creating something for a customer. If you let your customers come in and build your product for you, guess what, it's going to be a hot mess, isn't it? And it sounds Great. Co creating sounds lovely, but at the end of the day, you're the person that's shipping the vision of the product. You're the person that's actually delivering something that's valuable and tangible. That judgment that you hold in the business, perhaps the most important part of which feedback you listen to and which you don't.
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Darren Lloyd
Exactly. And there's some features which are simply a can of worms. It might seem small, but you know that once you start going down that road, it's a can of worms and you just don't want to go there. It will overcomplicate your product and it's something that you're not an expert in, so stay away from it. And it's hard to say no. You're right. But you have to say no. Sometimes you go, that's not what we do. It's not our core ambition.
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Iwan Mendoza
Yeah. Even though you could make a lot of money, even though the opportunity's there, you're like, that's a distraction or not the right time for the business or whatever. Right.
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Darren Lloyd
Distraction is the right word. Because what you take away, you're going to lose on another area which might be a core height of your business. And going back to the feature versus whether you charge for it or give it away. For me, I think the sentiment is the feature has to be good and add value and then there's less pressure when you give something for free or included versus if you want this, I'm going to charge you for it because then it comes with a lot of pressure and it just kind of ruins the vibe you have with your customer. So our preference is to include things, make the product better, and then when they want to renew, we go, well, the product has been better. We've done all these things since you last renewed. We're going to up the price by a little bit and that way they get a whole lot of improvements for a little price and they're going to be with you longer. So we prefer to play the long game than a quick short game and it's worked for us.
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Iwan Mendoza
No, that's great. And I think the opposite of this would be, say the example I use frequently is Facebook. So Facebook is a product, a social media app that has ruthlessly prioritized what people want. And when you look at it, you know the metrics that would you be engagement time on site, time on the app, overall time spent, the overall time spent in different types of content. All they're trying to do there is maximize the amount of time people are using on the apps. But what that ends up happening is that you just get a lot of clickbait, you just get a lot of random videos. It's like the fast, fast food of information and content. All the junk that people want. And guess what? A lot of people just want a lot of distracting junk. Look at TikTok, same deal. There's so many people creating on that platform, but they're really just creating a bunch of random junk. Like there's nothing really super intellectually interesting and there's nothing super helpful for people as well. So when you think about it optimizing for user, what users want, sometimes customers don't know what they want. Sometimes they know what makes them feel good. But it may not be what exactly what a customer actually needs in a product or a service service. So again, it takes that curation, that judgment and obviously like the experience of figuring out what's right and wrong for the product and the customer, which is a great overlay to this, I think. Not all feedback is treated equal. I think is what we're getting to here is that some feedback can be totally life changing, incredible for your business, unlocks a bunch of value and then some feedback could be disastrous if you follow it. But the choice is yours. The choice is absolutely yours. So Darren, absolutely fascinating talking about yesterday, talking about all of the things around improving, streamlining the creative process and marketing. But this time around I love just talking to Darren as the product guy and how you think about collecting feedback, using it in your business and of course to continue to develop the product@simpleio. So thank you for joining us. Now that was Darren Lloyd from Simple Marketing Solutions. He's a CEO and the product owner there. If you'd like to get in touch with Darren, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or you can visit his company's website at simple IO. So that wraps up another episode of the Martech podcast. I'm Martin Mendoza, your guest host for today and Darren, thank you so much for joining us for another great episode.
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Darren Lloyd
Thank you again.
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Juan Mendoza
Okay, that wraps up this episode of the Martech podcast. Thanks to our guest host, Juan Mendoza, the author of the Martech weekly newsletter. If you'd like to get in touch with Juan, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or you can contact him on Twitter. His handle is Juan Mendoza, but it's spelled crazy pants. It's J U4N Mend 0Z4. Or it's a little easier to just visit his company's website. Which is themartekweekly.com A special thanks to the Current Podcast for sponsoring today's interview. If you're looking for candid conversations with marketing leaders from the world's biggest brands, then give the Current Podcast a listen. On the Current podcast you'll find exclusive interviews with experts and trendsetters who are on the front lines of digital advertising, and they always leave the ad tech jargon at the door. So subscribe to the current@www.thecurrent.com or anywhere you get your podcasts today. Just one more link in our show Notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to martakpod.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletters and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is martechpod M A R T E C H P o D on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Or you can contact me directly. My handle is benjshap B E N J S H A P and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day this year, so hit the subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.
- [18:45]
Benjamin Shapiro
Thanks for listening to the MarTech podcast and I hear everything. Production Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit Iheareverything Combat.