← The Marketing Millennials
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- [00:01]
A
Some social tools are too basic while some are too bloated. Sched Social is the best of both worlds, built just right for fast moving teams who need power without the price traps. Get 20% off a full year with code millennials@skidsocial.com that's s k e d social.com what is up Marketing besties. We are kicking off a brand new miniseries called Go to Marketplace where we break down one go to market move in under 10 minutes. Real tactics, zero fluff. Just the kind of stuff you actually use to launch smarter, grow faster and win your market. And joining me for this whole series is someone who lives and breathes Go to Market, Tamara Graminski. She's an award winning product marketer, former VP of Product marketing at Kajabi, and one of the sharpest minds in the game. Let's get into it. We are back with another Go to market play in 10 minutes or less. This one's for every marketer who's heard you need to talk to customers, but no one tells you how to do it, who to talk to, or what to do with all the feedback once you have it. I've got Tamara back with me, founder of PMM Camp, and she is a pro at turning customer conversations into real strategy. So we're excited to break this down. Welcome back, Tamara.
- [01:38]
B
Thank you. Super excited for this episode. I am crazy about customer interviews. I talk about them all the time. I really believe that if you want to make your messaging better, your product launches better, if you want to just improve your strategy, the content you create, you need to talk to your customers and you need to be doing it consistently. Now, as you mentioned, a lot of people kind of know they should talk to customers, but they don't know like how to do it properly. They just immediately skip straight to getting on the phone with them without answering what I think is the most important question. What are we actually trying to learn? Right. So before you book a single interview with a question, you need to get clear on what decision are you trying to make based on the outcome of this conversation? What information do you need in order to move forward and who actually has that answer? That's how I think you go from just doing interviews to actually getting real insights that you can act on.
- [02:37]
A
I think that's such a good filter because you're not just gathering feedback, you're reverse engineering it from the decision you need to make. But I want to get tactical with this. So how do you actually figure out what decision you're trying to make in the first place. And how do you make sure you're talking to the right people to get those answers?
- [03:02]
B
Yeah, we're going to cover all of that today. The first step is actually to identify what type of interview you want to do. We often talk about customer interviews as, like, one thing, but there's really two types of interviews. There's generative interviews and concept testing interviews. Generative interviews are interviews where you're exploring. Right. In these interviews, you want to surface unmet needs, patterns that you're seeing across customer segments, maybe voice of customer, how customers or prospects are communicating certain things. Concept testing is when you're validating an idea or a concept. That's where the name comes from. So you actually have something that you want to put in front of the customer and you want to know if it resonates and actually get feedback on something. So each one of those has a completely different purpose and a different set of questions. So before you even start to identify what questions you need to ask, you have to figure out what's the purpose. Right. You're not going to ask what's your biggest challenge right now in a concept test. That doesn't make sense. And you're not going to test mock ups in a generative interview. And so I think the first step to getting clarity is actually identifying which type of interview you need.
- [04:12]
A
I think that's a very helpful distinction. Generative versus concept testing. So the move is, before you even book a call, ask yourself, what am I going to do with this info once I have it?
- [04:26]
B
Exactly. So that's really how, as we mentioned earlier, you align research to business needs. It's great to talk to customers and it's great to be curious. But we want to go beyond just curiosity. We want to actually be focused on decision making. So I'll just give a couple hypothetical examples. Let's say your churn rate is spiking and you want to know why people are leaving.
- [04:50]
A
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- [05:19]
B
Great. Who should you talk to? Well, probably people who just cancelled. You don't want to just talk to random users. You want to keep talking to people who still pay you today. You also don't want to talk to folks who churned over A year ago. So I typically recommend speaking with someone within 30 days of the behavior that you're investigating. So whether that's buying, churning, even adopting a feature, because even if you're trying to understand buyer behavior, so someone's now purchased your product, or maybe they haven't purchased your product, you want to talk to those closed or lost prospects right after the decision, right? That's when something's top of mind. If you talk to them three months later, they might be a happy customer, but they probably are going to forget why they bought you in the first place and exactly what helped them convert. So I always say you want recency, you want relevancy, and you want alignment with your target customer, right? So like if you're repositioning, you don't want to just talk to like an old power user. You want to interview the new ICP that you're trying to understand and reposition for. Does that make sense?
- [06:24]
A
Yeah, I think it's very tactical and I love the 30 day rule. It's such a simple way to make sure you're getting fresh and relevant insight. So let's say a market needs to run a few interviews this week, maybe churn spiking or they're working on repositioning. What do they need to do to make sure those interviews actually lead to useful takeaways?
- [06:49]
B
Here's how they can run interviews that will actually help them drive that go to market forward. First, as we've mentioned, align with the business question, right? What is the team trying to figure out right now? Is it positioning, Retention, a new Persona? Actually write that down, right? That's kind of like what you're solving for. And then let that business need guide the type of interview you're doing, whether it's generative or concept testing. If you do not know what the team will do with the insight that you get from those interviews, you're not ready to run the interview yet. So that's number one. Next, you want to pick the right people at the right time. So this is where relevance actually matters more than volume. I would actually rather you talk to four people who are timely and in the moment than like 10 people who are 90, 120 days old. As we mentioned, if you want to learn about churn, talk to people who churned this month. If you want to improve the onboarding, actually talk to users who are in their first 14 days with your product. You get it. I always like to say what you ask is only as good as who you ask. And then finally, and we hinted about this earlier. You can't just finish the interviews and like hand off all of the raw notes to your team. You need to synthesize, right? Don't just drop those transcripts in Slack. No one's going to read them. They're going to be super overwhelmed or everyone's going to interpret the findings differently. Right? So what I love to do is after the interviews, highlight key quotes and then tag those by theme. You want to look for patterns across all the calls. That's why that tagging and highlighting is really important. You then want to take everything and summarize it into three to five insights. And then this is kind of my like what I call a power move for people because most people will stop here. But always include the so what, right? This is your recommendation and your opinion as a marketer on what we should do next based on the learnings. And so you want to give your team something to act on, not just something to read.
- [08:47]
A
Tamara broke this down really well and this is it for this interview. But if you running your own interviews this week or this month, just remember a few things. Start with the business decision. Talk to the right people, not just more people, and turn what you hear into action, not just airtime. So go run smarter interviews today or this week or this month and we'll catch you next time. Thank you Tamara.
- [09:12]
B
Thanks for having me.
- [09:16]
A
Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.