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Chapter 3 Ambassador: Connect Customer and Market Insights

When Julie Herendeen was VP of Global Marketing at Dropbox, her team thought they knew their customers. With users in the tens of millions and all the data that came with them, they felt confident customers were divided broadly into two categories—consumers who acted like microbusinesses and larger companies that had more enterprise-style needs—and marketed accordingly.

She decided it was important for her entire team—not just the product marketers—to get out of the building, pack their bags, and visit customers at their home offices or office parks. Similar to the jobs-to-be-done framework, she had her team focus on what customers were trying to accomplish and what was motivating the why behind their choices.

Julie immediately got calls from her team saying, “This is amazing. I'm learning so much” and “I couldn't see any of this in the data.” When they got back and crunched through their learnings, they realized some of their assumptions missed the mark on why customers valued Dropbox.

Yes, they were smallish businesses, but they needed to easily collaborate on big jobs—like sharing daily video shoots with a client on a commercial production—and Dropbox gave them the way to do it.

The customer visits also revealed important aspects of how Dropbox customers liked to feel. They valued the freedom to work with whomever they wanted, however they wanted. These much more nuanced insights made clear how her team needed to market differently. They shifted messaging and marketing channels and created all new advertising campaigns.

The experience of Julie's team is precisely why connecting customer and market insights is Fundamental 1 of product marketing. While it is often funneled through product marketing to other marketing functions, in Julie's case, her entire marketing team benefited from their in-depth experience understanding customers.

Most underestimate how nuanced and layered both customers and markets are today, and just how much time and work it takes to truly understand them.

Market Sensing

Markets and the customers swirling in them are never a monolith. Yet they often get generalized into broad categories—like small businesses. Modern go-to-market requires understanding nuances around not just what customers are trying to do, but their entire journey toward product consideration—like which products they already use and compare a product to.

At a minimum, here are some baseline product marketing practices to stay connected with customer and market realities:

 Have direct customer interaction—ideally weekly.

 Develop a standard set of open-ended questions to ask customers or prospects.

 Reflect insights into product and go-to-market team discussions.

 Write the most important insights down so they can be easily shared and used.

Because every market is crowded—sometimes with thousands of companies in adjacent spaces—it makes defining the precise customer or their journey really challenging. To understand what people actually do, use, or value, you must test market assumptions in real life situations.

This is clarified through customer discovery work. Think of it as the market side of product market fit. It must be probed right from the start just as product is being explored. Market fit work is not the sole purview of product marketing. Everyone in a product team (product managers, designers, researchers in some organizations) and the go-to-market engine (marketing and sales) can do the work and shape what is learned.

But not all customer insights are equal in unlocking markets. Product marketing is responsible for deciding which key learnings help go-to-market and product teams do their jobs better. Will an insight help a team make a decision or tradeoff on what to say or do next? If the answer is yes, it's additive. If the answer is no, archive it. Strong product marketers help teams stay focused on what matters most.

Product marketing should try to answer market-sensing questions and understand their implications across the entire buyer's journey, including both rational and emotional motivations:

 What are they trying to do?

 Do they recognize and prioritize this problem?

 What is motivating them to solve the problem?

 What compels them to take action?

 What in this product delivers the most value?

 Who is most likely to value and buy this product?

 What starts the journey toward acquiring the product?

 How might a product get discovered and become more desired over the entire journey?

 How might we reduce friction in acquiring the product?

 What do people need to see or hear to become customers?

 How can we delight customers so much that they want to talk about the product with others?

Although the answers inform every aspect of product go-to-market, rarely are they clear or complete at the start. As with products, learning the market side of product fit is a dynamic process. Start with a reasonable hypothesis and use everything in market—websites, emails, sales conversations—to iterate toward answers. Adapt based on what is learned.

Chapter 11 goes into more depth on specific techniques to deepen customer insight, such as customer interviews, sales call shadowing, or leveraging any of the ever-growing number of tools in the marketing, sales enablement, or product analytics space.

Third-Party Insights

A market is shaped by more than what teams observe directly. It is influenced heavily by the ecosystem surrounding it.

This requires developing a regular practice of gaining insight from third-party data, research, reports, articles, websites, reviews, press, and social media. Third-party content has the benefit of revealing competitive insights and is a great way to tune into public perception.

Google search trends over time show the natural tendencies of how one set of words compares to another to discover something. When trying to assess topics audiences engage in more deeply, check one of many content services that show the top-read content on a subject.

If you're in a more mature company, you might be lucky enough to have a dedicated customer insights, customer research, or data analytics team. They are a meaningful shortcut in gaining market and customer learning. Use them!

A product marketer's job is to intersect what is learned from direct customer feedback with what is learned from third parties and use it to inform internal conversations. Then, direct the market approach accordingly.

Remember at the start of Pocket's journey when it was Read It Later, despite having many more users and supported platforms it was still not thought of as the category leader? Their product marketing challenge was to move the ecosystem's perception toward their realities; it was part of a bigger shift in behavior and used by more people. It is very different work than needing to convince users a product has value. Understanding and directing activities according to the market challenge based on customer and market insights is what product marketing does.

The Competition

The role of the competitive landscape can never be underestimated. The impact a competitor can have on changing market circumstances often takes companies by surprise. Take these real-life examples:

 A competitor—with no changes in product—adapted their sales process and started winning more deals in head-to-head competition.

 A competitor hadn't even released a product but wrote about their point of view so well and often, if people searched for a solution, this competitor's points of view topped all search results. They were perceived as the market leader before they even shipped a product.

 A company in an adjacent category put on an event that got press coverage promoting features the category-leading company didn't have. It left them scrambling to respond with their sales team and in public forums, making them look like they were playing catch-up, even though they were the category leader.

In each of these examples, the company's product was unchanged. Yet the market reality very much had. While you can't let the competition dictate your course of action, you can't ignore how much they can shape perceptions.

That said, beware of over-rotating toward competitive response. Companies can lose their own way if overly responsive to competitors' agendas rather than staying focused on what's best for their customers or market. This is a place where product marketing response can and should be much more dynamic than product's.

Meet challenge with challenge. Outplay the competition whenever you can. But think of this as chess; move ahead of your competition, don't just respond.

Product marketing helps the company stay the course for what is most important and exercise judgment on what merits response.

Ambassador of Insights

Product marketing is the ambassador for all these customer and market insights, so they must be a part of the right internal conversations. They can accelerate a product feature or make sure an engineering blog gets written to diminish a competitor's approach. Product marketing directs appropriate response, whether it's through product, marketing, or sales.

Customer insights can sometimes be heard as customer requirements. These are two distinct things. When product marketers bring customer or market insights to a product team, it's important to see them for what they are—a way for the team to make smarter decisions based on market realities, not just technical ones. How any insight impacts product priorities falls to the product manager to decide.

Customer insights also often get translated into artifacts—like Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) stories (often used by product), Personas (often used by design or product), Ideal Customer Profile (ICP, often used by sales), and customer segmentations (often used by marketing). Each has a purpose that is specific to the function.

For example, an ICP might have overlap with problems the customer is trying to solve in a JTBD story. But the ICP is used to determine account fit and likelihood to buy, a function of the technologies already in use, the size of the organization, budget availability, and the presence of an internal champion—none of which appears in a JTBD story.

As the ambassador for customer and market realities, the product marketer ensures the most important attributes that drive customer and market adoption are known and documented so teams can do their jobs better.

Market and customer insights can add gas to a burning marketing fire. Anything in customers' daily lives, news, or trends can be a propellant if the right moment is seized.

That's why a deep understanding of customers and markets is Fundamental 1 of product marketing. It is simply the foundation on which everything in a product's go-to-market gets built.