The Overview #15

This week: talk to your customers + others in the market, ask why - and a new framework for customer discovery?

Aug 13, 2021

👋 Hey there. This is The Overview, a weekly roundup of noteworthy B2B SaaS stuff. You'll find interesting tweets and articles from around the internet, plus highlights from my personal swipe file.

Dig deeper, ask why

James Doman-Pipe @JDomanPipe

Increased customer expectations is not a world change. WHY have their expectations increased? THAT is the world change.

Something I’m seeing a lot is positioning and messaging that stops just before it gets to the juicy bits. Always dig deeper. That might be the Five Why’s, it might be using Situation-Problem-Implication-Value - whatever you find works well to dig into the motivations and ultimate consequences that customers are hoping to gain or avoid.

How to talk to your customers

Joel Klettke @JoelKlettke

“Talk to your customers” is the new “create great content” in terms of extremely vague statements touted by ‘experts’ who fail to really get into the most important question: HOW.

If you’re finding it difficult to a) get customer conversations setup, b) have conversations that generate useful insights, then get in touch - I’m working on something to help.

The biggest growth opportunity is outside your pipeline

Andrew Allsop @AndrewAllsop

You *need* to talk to people in your target market that aren't in a sales cycle. So many people rely on Sales for feedback. People don't tell the truth when money is involved.

Just like your top-of-funnel competitors, the best way to understand your ideal customers is those that aren’t engaging with you.

While this can make accessing those potential customers for research more difficult, you’ll get a broader understanding of the root gains and pains they’re hoping to solve - uninfluenced by your current sales messaging (and those evaluating your competitors).

A product marketing framework?

Tristan Harward @trisweb

The standard double-diamond UX process we all know and love is incomplete—there's another model at the conceptual level (rather than the process level) that's more valuable. It has to do with how we approach users and problems—rather than how we go about making designs.

I love the Usage Model represented in this tweet, as it summarises nearly everything that product marketers do to understand their customers.

User: Who is the customer?
Context: What’s their current situation?
Outcome: What are they trying to gain/avoid?
Goals: What does this look like?
Tasks: What are their common jobs and responsibilities?
Journey: What’s the buyer journey look like?
IA (information architecture): What is the thought structure and language that they are using?

Super interesting, and a good way to think about our customers and the relationships between solving problems and taking action.

That’s the Overview for this week

I hope you found something of interest.

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Thanks for reading, and here’s to building momentum.

James

Building Momentum (has moved to BuildingMomentum.io)