gtmPRO

Buyer research with a little "r"

February 16, 2024 Gary, Andy & Tiana Season 1 Episode 11
Buyer research with a little "r"
gtmPRO
More Info
gtmPRO
Buyer research with a little "r"
Feb 16, 2024 Season 1 Episode 11
Gary, Andy & Tiana

Happy Friday PRO!

In this episode, while missing our superstar Gary, Andy and Tiana take a deep dive into the essence of customer-centric exploration. 

What do you think when you listen to the word "research"? 

Expensive? Huge team? 
Well not this time.

Join us as we explain our research methods, lower middle market edition. Without the capital R. 

Thanks for listening, go be a PRO!

Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Happy Friday PRO!

In this episode, while missing our superstar Gary, Andy and Tiana take a deep dive into the essence of customer-centric exploration. 

What do you think when you listen to the word "research"? 

Expensive? Huge team? 
Well not this time.

Join us as we explain our research methods, lower middle market edition. Without the capital R. 

Thanks for listening, go be a PRO!

Gary:

Welcome to the GTM Pro Podcast, your essential audio resource for mastering go-to-market discussions in the boardroom. Here we share insights for revenue leaders at B2B Software and Services companies, especially those with less than 50 million in revenue. Why? Because the challenges faced by companies of this size are unique. They are too big to be small and too small to be big. This dynamic pushes revenue leaders into executive leadership without a lot of help or support. We are here to provide that support. Your journey to boardroom excellence starts now.

Gary:

Live from Disney World. It's GTM Pro, actually, just kidding. We're not really live at Disney World, but that's where I am right now. As we record this, we took an impromptu trip to take my 10-year-old son there because we realized that we were very quickly running out of time for him to see Disney World as a boy and not a teenager. We made the trip, but I leave you in the very capable hands of Andy and Tiana. I look forward to seeing everybody next week. Thanks, bye.

Andy:

Welcome, welcome. We're missing Gary this week. We can honestly tell you Tiana and myself are not the dynamic speakers that Gary is, but we're going to do our best this week to really actually bring a fairly cool and enlightening topic that we all know a good deal about, which is research, in this case, research with a little R. What does that mean? The little R means it's not a big, big old, gargantuan research, expensive research project, cap from Winter Winter with a Y.

Andy:

He shared an email kind of on this very topic, which was definitely the inspiration for it, which is he called it competitor research playbook. What we would do for GTM in our lower middle market world is we would blow that out into saying that it's really not at all about competitors. The competitors are a piece, they're actually an influence on what we should be researching overall, which is the entire buyer journey, that's starting from when somebody hasn't heard of you at all and all the way to hopefully that they're a repeat, happy customer that continually re-ups your subscription or contract with you because they're happy. Everything that happens between those points has an aspect that you could be doing research against.

Tiana:

Exactly, yeah, we're getting into everything that is around that process to actually make sure that you're listening to your customer in every single stage of its journey to actually get to you, because there is a lot of things that can be unraveled from only from those conversations and everything around it. Who should be doing this? Remember every part of this stage. Of course, the buyer journey interacts with a lot of different departments. Through it, it's not only sales. They first probably see something, so that's marketing, and then they book a call, so that's probably sales. Then, once they actually, or if you get to make a deal with them, then that's customer success. Who exactly does this and at what stage of the buyer journey do they do this? What do you think? Tell us more.

Andy:

The short answer is whoever you can get to do it. The interesting part is that there are big companies that probably don't do this honestly nearly as much as they should. When you talk about companies in the lower middle market, you need to beg, borrow and steal for someone to do this. Ideally, you'd want a product marketer, a fairly seasoned product marketer, to do this on behalf of the company. We love the term. An investigative journalist, somebody that's literally their job is to be a reporter in the company, tuned in and I think of it like a radio frequency tuned into the customer and the customer's mindset that they're listening for all of those little things or big things that would influence a customer.

Andy:

I use chatGPT for trying to use this more and more for everything we do and I simply said what does a product marketer do? Chatgpt it spit out seven functions, but the top function was market research. Under that it says conducting research to understand customer needs, market trends and competitive landscape. Based on that, I would say definitely you'd want a product marketer to do that, or somebody who gets that sort of function Ideally.

Andy:

Again, tough to do in a small company is have somebody who they have a fair amount of their job carved out to doing just this, because and again with a product marketer we think it is so inherent to that job to really understand voice to the customer and hear what they're saying about all facets of the journey. It's not just, hey, what should be the value proposition to entice someone to get in the door, either through marketing or sales or some combination, and then, hey, we close the deal and we're done, it's everything. And we could really talk about onboarding and customer success here as well, because I think that's, first of all, one that's underappreciated in a lot of this and one that could have a huge impact, especially to retention and the fact that people are happy with the product and making more people happy. We can talk more about that here in a little bit.

Tiana:

Yeah, I think he also has to be pretty aware of the customer's journey in order to understand which questions to ask. How do you know what to listen for when you're listening to these people and asking these questions? I feel like they should be people that have enough experience in order to really find these insights. How do you know what to listen for exactly on these conversations?

Andy:

The booty is in the eye of the beholder there what to listen for. So I'll just give a quick example. In the case of that, customer success, in the case of onboarding, a recent example was we were on a deal review call and so there's all the AMs and the CEO happened to be on the call as well as well as the head of sales. It started to get into closed deals, closed one deals and then the handoff to onboarding, to customer success, and we realized they realized and they were kind of saying this in so many words that that process was broken, that there wasn't a clean handoff, that there wasn't a regular expectation to set with new customers as to how soon they were gonna be talking to a CS person. What were some things they could do in the interim to get them going? Were there physical things they could do on the platform to set it up, to get them ready, where there videos they could watch and so on. And it was like pretty enlightening and totally the intent of that call was not research with a little R, it was a deal review and it certainly wasn't about onboarding and customer success. But that shined as something that came out of it that we should address. That should be looked at. So there's a whole number of things If we look at like the top of the funnel oftentimes that's, we look at competition and that's fine and we absolutely think you should have a pulse check on the competitive landscape.

Andy:

But it's not who you think your competitors are. It's who the potential customer thinks are their options, and in some cases we've talked about this a number of times before it may not be a company product. It may be the status quo for them. It may be a spreadsheet or something they're doing, you know, manually. That's what you're competing with because, like they're used to it, this is how we do things. We've always heard that and that's your that's what happens.

Tiana:

when you're better than a spreadsheet Like you have to show them how you can compete with it, even if you don't think it's your competition. If they do, then that's the only thing that matters, because they are buying from you, not you.

Andy:

So that's what you'd be listening for. Now there's a number of places you could listen for those things, but you know, as far as competitive research, it doesn't need to be this big, expensive thing. I love this notion of a like if I'm a noob to this product and I'm coming in and I've known nothing about this, but I know I have this pain and I'm gonna research around this pain. So what am I gonna do? I'm gonna do a Google search and I'm gonna ask something around that. Not, I'm not gonna look for companies, because I don't even know any company names. I may know one, you know, that generally does something similar to what I'm looking for, but I'm gonna search on my problem.

Andy:

And then what do I see? And what you see there? This is literally what you should do. You should walk through. What do I see? Who are those companies that show up in the top of search results? Who are the companies that show up around the G2 crowd or the Captera?

Andy:

So these competitive review sites that hopefully you're on, but where does it put you? Where does it put different companies based on what you are like looking for? It's not again, it's not on brand names, because you have to take the perspective of, like you don't know that market, like you do as someone who exists in the market. You're coming in as a potential customer and you don't know any of that. So it's worth walking through from that perspective, like what do I see?

Andy:

And then there's a whole, you know, different number of approaches, and we love the one from Patrick Campbell who did a really cool competitive matrix. He did a whole big article on this. That kind of gives you perspective on where you reside, where your competitors reside in terms of the resources they have in the market presence and who you might be able to attack, which is a different story altogether. But that's you know, it's not. It doesn't have to be this big, crazy, expensive thing. You can proverbially get the milk through the fence on competitive research just to keep a pulse check. You know, one of the things you'll look for as well is like how much do they cost? Are they lowering their prices? You'll wanna look at that pretty regularly. Not that you should react, you know, in a knee-jerk way to what you find there, but it's good to know.

Tiana:

Yeah, exactly. Well, so we have established a lot exactly to listen for, or some of the things that you might want to listen for, and how you have to be very observant of any of your conversations. But now let's talk a little bit about where to listen to. Like these insights, like what are some examples of the places that we could do a research with a little R, that will basically make it what we just mentioned.

Andy:

Well, that's like where to start there. Well, I'll just I'll start with kind of what we do from a diagnostic perspective, so so, where analysis ends and research begins is its own question, I suppose, but we definitely make sure we try to understand who a client's best customers are. So you're going to want to and again, this is sometimes sometimes people really think they know their customers and it's always worth kind of re-exploring and saying who are my happiest customers that pay me every single year, whatever benchmark retention might be for your industry or for yourself? Who are they Like? Identify them, because, guess what, you're going to want to talk to them.

Andy:

Can you identify some very long-tenured customers as a sample set to talk to, and can you find some newer customers that look like they're really happy and getting value out of your product? Because that notion of being happy and being a happy customer can be very nuanced, right Like what happened and this again speaks to the whole journey what happened from when they didn't even know about you to finding about your product and about you and what you can do to help them, to the sales process, if you will, starting with marketing to onboarding and getting to a moment of value quickly, which is everything getting to a moment of. Well, you know what this product really is helping me in this problem that I had and I didn't realize was exactly my problem. They helped me figure it out. So going through that with customers is massive. Like you, honestly, you couldn't do too much of that.

Tiana:

Sometimes they don't even have an idea of what their exact problem is and sometimes, when they think they know what their problem is and they use your tool to fix that problem, that sometimes unravels different parts of their system that are broken and you have to help them figure their way into their actual happiness within what you're selling them, even if it's just advice, even if you can open their eyes up to different things, that your product can do that and help them during that area. It's just really important to listen to them, so okay, so it's listen to your product.

Andy:

You just talked about an unlock and that's a buzzword I'm hearing more out in the world, but an unlock on what this can tell you is, and someone I believe it was Tito from Koala talked about it from a product perspective, which is he talks to customers and looks at what they're doing.

Andy:

I think he starts with looking with what they're doing with the product and he's like man, they're really using the heck out of this product and so he's looking at product usage metrics to inform that and then talks to them and realizes whoa, they're like a super sophisticated customer. They're doing things with this tool like they're like they've built on to it and they're doing this crazy thing. He's like I'm going to build that. I'm not only going to build that, I'm going to then tell my customers to do that with this product. And, like you can see, even if you take the product roadmap portion out of that equation, it's like my happiest customers are doing something. They're getting great value out of this product and then maybe they're using it in a way that I didn't even totally think through. Why wouldn't I extract that from them and get other customers doing that same thing?

Tiana:

Yeah, exactly, If you know your customers, you should know the people that might be in the same situation of someone that's using your product in a different way. So you can even suggest that method within even your marketing communications, like within your or even personally to them, if you have, like customer management or customer success agents that dedicate, or account managers specifically. But if you don't, like I believe you can even just show it around like oh, I realize that our product can also be used for this specific use and just share it, communicate it to the world, just put it out here, because more than one person might be in that situation, but they might not know about it, they might not even know what questions to ask and if you're putting that in front of them, it'll be easier for them to realize where to go for information.

Andy:

What you just said. One thing I kind of left out as well is the pattern matching. Right. So the pattern matching is people who look like that person having a field day with your product, right, is that's the best. That's the best. Next person to start with is someone who looks you know their company, their situation, maybe it's size, growth, industry, whatever they look a lot like that and before they started going nuts with your product, they were using it in a similar way to this other company or whatever. That's who you say okay, I'm going to take this and do it over here and hopefully the idea there of pattern matching also is you've got a number of potential customers that look like that that you can roll this out to.

Andy:

The other piece is people that are having a bad time with your product, people that just left you right, so, former customers. They left for a reason. So you want to get that juxtaposition from. Here's your happiest, best moment of value customers, and here are the ones that just left. You definitely want to interview them as well. Right, to get that other perspective, to say what was what broke here. What broke from you know, did they never get going on the product? That happens a lot right Like people never really got going and never got value out of the product. Why not? Sometimes it's just they never. They were always going to be tire kickers. Someone signed up for the product. They just never were. Their hearts weren't really into it and there was nothing you could do about that. That can happen, but a lot of times there are things you could have done about that.

Tiana:

Yeah, it's true. Yeah, and also, well, the people are in the middle, right. So there's like the happiest customers, the ones that aren't, that weren't happy at all so they left you, and the ones that kind of are in the middle because you convinced them. Well, like you were convincing enough to get them to a call, and then, like they, they just never really bought the product. Like prosperous, who did not buy, like why were they interested in the first place? And what did you do that did not Convince them to actually like get the full on product? And like what, why did they call and not actually get the product?

Andy:

Yeah, that's a, that's a real common one that that companies do more often than not is that when loss analysis for sales calls right, like so. That would be a common Common Version of little our research. That is done and you know. Another version of that too is is you know the reason code that you'd find in the CRM oftentimes sales force, there's a, there's a closed-loss reason. That's okay and it's a data point, but it lacks a ton of context, right? So I think, to your point, the best thing you could probably do there is grab a handful of these Customers that chose not to buy your product that look like they probably were. You know, pretty good prospects, not the ones that were obvious not fit non fits.

Andy:

Like you know, ideally you get good at weeding those out before you ever have a sales call or ever get really far down the line and you know they're just not going to be a good fit. But the ones that would have been a good fit and if you can detect that, then those are good ones to talk to to try and figure out what you were missing.

Tiana:

Yeah, and just like. Well, something that is important and I think is just making this part of your everyday conversations with people, because, like, just calling to Like get this information out of them is not something that probably would interest them because of your. If you're just asking something that is for your own benefit to know, of course They'll like probably people sometimes think they have a lot in their minds and they just don't have enough time. But if you subtly introduce like these, like little our research questions into your daily conversations and the win-loss analysis, and Whenever you talk to your happy customers or when you realize that Someone like is just leaving you, you just you should always be really aware of what you're doing. You should always be ready to ask these questions. It's just something that should be part of the, the everyday process, not something you do like isolated from From these conversations.

Andy:

Yeah, and you know someone it might have been pep use the term test Testing this stuff, and I think that's a great way to think about it is your it's a test and learn Agenda. Because because what you want to do is you want to come up with a situation where you have regular I Call it a hardened process, right, like you have regular conversations either, that's, you know, internally, interviewing your, your sales and customer success teams as just like what they're hearing, but asking them the right way and Having it be a regular process. Whether you do that, you know every other week, you know, totally up to you. As far as, like, the volume of of Sales and customer success meetings that they have, there's only going to be so often that they have new information, but you want to capture that. And then the whole other side of that as well is Is are all the calls they're having. So the intent of those obviously are what they always are, which is sales is trying to sell. Customer success is trying to get success, the customers having them have success, I should say.

Andy:

And they're recorded a lot of times, right. So you, you know you, you can listen to those. That's that's actually what we found. So to the point right about tuning tuning into the right things and getting the nuance out of that. It's sometimes just something you have to listen to. You can listen to it at one and a half speed a lot of times. That's how we speed up some of that process, but it's something you just kind of need to hear to get the real just out of. We'd love to use Some of these cool new AI tools, but what we just found is that's that's often good if you're you know, for example, with sales training, you have some, you have a script if you will, or a set of things that you're trying to do in a sales call, and those tools can listen for those things and say, yeah, they did this.

Andy:

But what they're not good at because we don't always know what we're listening for we know when we hear it, but we can't really inform the tool to say listen for this because we don't know is what are those subtle things that a customer saying to say like, or a prospect saying to say you know, this is really my problem. This is really the thing I'm trying to solve for, and it's just not something that AI can just say, hey, this is the job to be done for XYZ prospect. Like it doesn't summarize.

Tiana:

Yeah, like hey, I remember you wanted this so they talked about it. But you can definitely use them. So sometimes it's just a little overwhelming to watch the call over and over. Sometimes you know that you listen to something, that you need it, but you don't really know in which part of the call it is. Sometimes they get long. So, like chat PDF is a good example, you can upload the whole transcript and then just ask it for a specific like something specific that happened within the call. So I think like they're good enough for that. But I definitely do believe that it's a tool, right, so you have to do the hard work and it can help you get there easily. You can.

Andy:

So to your point in chat GPT, specifically in a sales call transcript, the only issue there is the length of the length of characters. Like there is technically a limit, although I've seen fluctuations in terms of what they'd allow me from one day to the next, which is interesting. I think I've had 6,000 one time and it said, well, 2,500 is the limit here, but it varies. But it has done a good job of summarizing. So when you prompt it really well, so that I think this is the point you're making, which is that you can say, like what is and I think this is more or less the exact prompt I use what is the summary of the problem that speaker one or speaker two, depending on the transcript is having relative to their needs or whatever. Like you get really specific about who in on the call from the transcript perspective and what their problem is. Like what are they trying to solve for? And it actually did a pretty good job extracting that out.

Andy:

And then you can ask things around, that If it gives you something to give you direction on, you can actually expand from there. But it is, it's your point, tiana, it helps, it can help speed things up, but it's not gonna. It just doesn't know what to listen for.

Tiana:

Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah, you also mentioned about, I think, intel channels, so like Slack, and for customer success, like feature requests. Tell me more about it.

Andy:

Yeah, so we. So that's an actual example of things we've set up, which is having the sales team on a Slack channel to say like you're doing deals all the time, what are you hearing from a the perspective of the customer on like pricing or what are other objections you're hearing? So, and what it does is the sales people. That's one thing is they're gonna be pretty happy to say why they either won a deal or why they didn't win a deal, Like they wanna get that out there, they wanna look good, Like that's everybody's motivation. So when they lose a deal they wanna be like this is the reason, like this is like and it's very understandable and it's useful. So they're giving a kind of a summary on this particular Slack channel to all of us to kind of be able to look through. And it's another avenue to say, like what are the patterns? Are we seeing things here?

Andy:

And one thing that's come out of that, for example in this particular industry, is people are looking for consolidated vendors. So fortunately, this particular client has just acquired multiple pieces of this equation in this particular industry. They were doing one piece and now they have a lot of other pieces and good timing because the market is seemingly starting to look for more consolidated solutions. So they're hearing this more, and so a couple of things that come out of that is you can lead more with that approach to say, hey, we have this more comprehensive solution if that's what you're looking for, and then in doing the discovery with customers is trying to feel out, is that something they're looking for? And so on. And then always if pricing was an issue or if not having a particular integration was an issue, you can hear that. And then in those cases, if you see a pattern, you say, well, like this, we should probably get this integration as opposed to a product person, a product development person, so like a product manager and or a product developer, when they're looking at building new features and they build out the product roadmap and so on, and same client, we've actually run into a situation where they just want the data. They wanna know what product does this customer integrate with that?

Andy:

We may or may not have an integration. So like what are the stats on that? And whoever has, whoever is our customer who has the most integrations with this particular vendor like that's who we wanna build that integration with because there's the most of our customers with that integration. But what that doesn't tell you is a lot of what we just talked about. From the perspective of that customer, the consolidation or having that integration may not even be an issue.

Andy:

That particular type of customer who has that other product just may not. It just may not matter In that particular case, in that kind of use case, it just may not matter. So just looking purely at the raw statistics is potentially a pitfall, as opposed to the customer said no, this is, I'm looking to do this, I'm looking to consolidate, I need this to integrate, Not just integrate. There's another great example is what does an integration mean? What does an integration mean to you, customer? What do you actually want that to do? That's something you should drill into and understand, as opposed to I'm just gonna pick a box and say I have an integration with XYZ vendor.

Tiana:

Those are two different things. Completely Okay, great. And what about, like the point of view of like the buyer exploration so competitive? Until well earlier today not in the podcast, but you mentioned it about what like does a new customer see?

Andy:

Yeah, that's kind of what I was alluding to earlier, which is, you know, when you do, if you do competitive intelligence as like a major project, you can get pretty deep in that right Like that can be a very robust, very deep project and you know, and honestly, might be warranted. And again, we pointed this, patrick Campbell, who has a great article, and we have that in our resources available to people, we share that and we give them all the credit for putting together a very extensive process for basically how to do that. You wouldn't do that all the time, though. You would do that, you know, I would think maybe once a year to do it to that extent.

Andy:

But there's a lot of other things you can do to kind of keep a pulse check on what just competition's doing. So one of them is what you know, what we just mentioned as far as the sales team. Sales team will tell you a lot. One of them is the point of view buyer journey, like if I'm totally an noob to use that term to this type of a product, I just know I have this pain. How do I?

Gary:

do the research. Could you try again?

Andy:

Sorry that was a.

Tiana:

That's okay. Siri gets in the way Siri does.

Andy:

I'm afraid to say her name again. I must have said something that sounded similar, but yeah.

Gary:

Yeah, that will do.

Andy:

So you want to do a pulse check on that sort of thing with competition, has one popped up that hasn't been there before, that you're a brand new person looking for this type of a solution has, you know, is likely to see now and what is you know? What are their value proposition? Another thing I really like to do is, when you're doing that type of research, you get a short list, not your short list, but that with that perspective of the buyers short list would be like, if I'm just going into this blind, what are five companies that come up? A lot or three, there may not be that many. And then what do I? If I go to their website, which I might very well do as a prospect, what are the value propositions they see? What's what stands out there? And then that's, of course, something you can action on and then try to, you know, figure out ways for your ideal customer, what really makes you different and makes you stand out.

Tiana:

Yeah, sure. So the main five or four people that you would think well, a lot of people, competitors, of course, that you would think I do the same thing. And how, how to stand out like between them.

Andy:

Absolutely Well, that's ideally. That's buyer led growth and that's, you know, that's what manifests itself in your, in your go to market. Is all of this all of your you know? Your research should culminate into your positioning and your messaging, which you know. Then your job is to figure out where your potential buyers hang out, how to get it distributed there, and so on.

Andy:

So that's a whole. That's a whole buyer led growth process and this is a this is a key piece of that. So, in doing, in doing it as a hey, I want, I want, you know, I want the best customer success I can get from all points of my buyer journey. I want it. I want, I want to stand out as a benchmark against all of that, or who I would deem to be roughly my ideal customers. I want to be the best I can be across all facets of that. That's what you're trying to do. When you're talking a little bit about more upwards of the funnel, which is obviously very important to attract all the eyeballs in the first place, it's all going to inform that.

Tiana:

Yeah, so key thoughts here. Well, I think we already mentioned this before, but that this is not like something that you should consider doing. This is something that should be integrated in your jobs, to be done like within the company constantly, because if not like you, who are you listening to to actually like create all your contact, to know what to sell for it, to know what to communicate, to know what to build like from a product point of view? If you don't like constantly, consistently listen to like your customer during the buyer journey, then who are you really listening to? Like yourself, what you think Actually?

Andy:

yes, you listen to yourself. A lot of times. That happens a lot. A lot of really smart people at a company, product people and so on. They're really smart, and a founder especially, who built this company and they've built it to how big it is. They did that a lot of times on their own intelligence and sheer determination. Not saying they didn't do. They obviously must have done research in some way, shape or form along the way, but probably you know that can be a lost art at times where you do rely on yourself and you do rely on your own intelligence to come up with things, as opposed to the voice of the customer.

Tiana:

Yeah, also. Well, this is a lot more about internal processes from the customer perspective, and some are more than we might like to believe Like these also, maybe a lot more broken than we like to believe.

Andy:

Yeah, yeah, that's the whole journey. That was actually the example that we just re-in into, which is like, during a deal call, we kind of heard that you know, this onboarding thing, this handshake between sales and customer success, wasn't going so well. There was people I want and literally an actual example was a customer who signed up, who signed a contract, was like reaching out to the salesperson over the weekend multiple times like saying like what, what, what am I doing next? Like upset, almost. It sounded like. It was like, well, that clearly isn't how things should run. Yeah, so you know when.

Andy:

So, when you do think about it like that, we would call that kind of maybe working from the middle out, which we do oftentimes with you know, true, go to market motions this is part of that. Like you, you're a lot of those things that are, you know, you, you wouldn't think our go to market as much because they're not as high up in the funnel are absolutely part of go to market and they're absolutely part of this, which is like getting a person to that moment of value and having them be a happy and repeat, a repeat customer and not churning. That is all part of this process and it you know it requires, I think, having a very keen understanding of what makes for a happy customer.

Tiana:

Yeah, yeah to our point. Like this is just not about not only about competition, but it's a sanity check, like from your whole company's point of view and your customers point of view and what's going on everywhere. Of course, you need to know about competition, but not like that. That's not the only thing that matters. The most important thing is the customer and what, what, what they are feeling right now towards your company, your product. So consider it for it like a competitive Intel, but also like, and more specifically like from a buyer Intel or point of view.

Andy:

Yeah, I mean it's kind of a mindset right. So, knowing you may not like to hear some of the things you're going to hear, especially when you're looking at churn customers, especially when you're looking at close loss deals, you're going to hear things that you know you're going to kind of cringe at, but those are really important to hear, especially if you hear them repeatedly, like if you hear the same theme of like this isn't working for someone for some reason, that's what you want to attack and think about the gains that you can make on that. If you really solve for that and that isn't a thing anymore Either you retain all those customers or you have way more close one deals because you just you just resolve that gap, which, again, was very hard to hear. It hurt, it actually hurts, but that's going to make you better.

Tiana:

Yeah, exactly, and well, if it hurts, then make it stop hurting, right, like so, get better, so that you don't have to hear it again. It doesn't take it very different ways, but I think the best way to take it is like okay, I heard this, I didn't like it, and let's make it stop.

Andy:

That's it. That's it. Just, you know, make the bleeding stop. And you know again that one example of sales saying hey, I don't know if this is working, that's going to help, that's absolutely going to help and everybody should embrace that.

Tiana:

Yeah, it's not. It's not an attack. Like listen to it objectively, no feelings attached, which is hard, but like it's important and well. Also like test and learn right.

Andy:

Yeah, what's what's what's what's what's something we can do about it, like, what's what's kind of the what all comes together? How do we, how do we do more of this? And that's try to insert into as many places where you can. You can gather these types of insights and, again, at all points of the journey, right. So where can you set up these places to its test and learn?

Andy:

It's like listen and process, and if you can, if you can do that, you may find that you do it 1010 times over the course of a few months and you're just, you're just feeling it out and like, three of those are ones that you're like I'm going to, I'm going to keep doing this and I'm going to do these on this interval and that's key, right. The key to that is figure out where you're getting insight from regularly and make it a rinseable, repeatable process, right, and make it always on we call it always on voice of the customer. That is research with a little are and it's going to. You know that's that's going to be the. You know, the ultimate goal is to have many of these, like many feedback loops, set up in your company as process, regular process that you're always listening into to better the overall company, better the overall buyer journey in the process that that customer goes through.

Tiana:

Yeah, absolutely Okay, so I think that's all for today. Thank you so much for being here, for listening to us. As always, will put the all the resources that we talked about below in these episodes description and well, hopefully next week. Well, of course, we'll have Gary back with us, so you won't have to miss him that much. Bye, bye.

B2B Buyer Journey Research
Importance of Customer Research and Listening
Customer Feedback for Buyer Led Growth
Resources and Upcoming Guest