Hi friend! 👋
In September, we're focusing on customer research, the Holy Grail of marketing.
We typically start the work with our customers by talking to their customers.
As a matter of fact, we are doing research for Advance B2B right now, and you can test our level of appreciation from 0-Malmi by filling out this survey here, I wish it would be a short one, it isn't 😢. And although we talk about customer research, this is survey is for everyone.
In the process, we uncover quite a lot of internal workings in the company.
Interestingly enough, the question of who owns the customers is more debated than how to create sustainable business growth. (In some companies, that is).
Don't worry; this is the Advance B2B, not Gossip Girl, and we won't name any names xoxo.
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Everyone Hates Marketers — How to choose the right value proposition
Customer research goes all the way back to messaging; it's about how your customers are using your product, what value you provide to them.
In this episode of Everyone Hates Marketers, the second greatest French person (the first one is obviously our Content Marketing Strategist Clem), Louis Grenier, interviews Hiten Shah on how to choose the right value prop.
Our key takeaways:
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Ideal customers
When we talk about customer research, we need to really stop and talk about whom we should talk to. We have often talked about the leaky bucket system. Think of a bucket with holes — you can keep pouring in water, but it won't stay.
In the same way, if you keep on creating bad-fit customers (potentially even for loads of ad dollars), you will still have a retention problem. This is why you should focus on your ideal customers.
Vainu has written a comprehensive guide on ideal customer profiles.
If you only read one sentence in these articles, which one should it be? So glad you asked:
Don’t sell to someone who you believe will not be successful when using your product or service.
This really is the essence of ideal customer profiles. It's about creating value for the customer.
If you look at us, we focus on a specific type of customer because we know we can help them.
We don't, for example, work with B2C e-commerce as this is not our expertise. If we took those customers on, they would churn relatively quickly because (arguably) we'd have no idea what's going on.
Our ❤️s beat for B2B SaaS, tech, and subscription businesses, and that's where we can help best.
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Knowing your customers is only part of the equation
Ideal customer profiles become powerful when you pair them with the Jobs to be Done framework. The Harvard Business review covers this topic in an in-depth article.
Key takeaways
We all have jobs to be done. Some are bigger, some are repetitive, but we use services to help us do these jobs. And here we go back to the value proposition.
You must understand the job to be done that your product does for your customers. Spoiler alert: what you think and what it actually does sometimes might diverge, just like those two roads Robert Frost talks about.
Our biggest aha moment of the article?
Of the more than 20,000 new products evaluated in Nielsen’s 2012–2016 Breakthrough Innovation report, only 92 had sales of more than $50 million in year one and sustained sales in year two. (Source Harvard Business Review)
And what did those 92 companies in common? According to Nielsen they all really honed in and solved a specific job to be done.
Keep in mind that a job can be small or large. The size of the problem you solve doesn't matter, but how well you solve for your customers does.
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Our take on customer research?
In our opinion, it's the most powerful tool in the marketing toolbox. Forget about all the searchdisplaysocialwhatchamacallithacksandtricks; if you skip customer research, you skip the customer. In this blog, we provide a step-by-step guide to customer research in B2B SaaS.
In our strategy phases, we usually first talk to our customers to understand how they see themselves and what aspirations there are.
Then we talk to their best customers (the customers they want more of), and in the end, that creates a sort of Venn diagram where you see current understanding from the inside, aspirations, and how customers perceive all this. This becomes the basis for all the work going forward.
Remember, you can always send us your greetings, ideas, and thoughts by replying to this email. We’d love to hear from you, and we really appreciate your feedback! 💌
Bye!
PS. You should also totally check out the latest episode of our Growth Hub podcast.
Anna Holopainen, Head of Growth at Kide Science, joined Edward to discuss some typical growth and marketing-related reasons for not getting results. 👀