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The Keys to Really Knowing What Makes Your Customers Tick: Ryan Gibson
64 Plays3 years ago
Sadly, most marketers don’t really know their customers.
They have buyer personas and ideal customer profiles.
But these tools barely scratch the surface.
The only way to know your customers is to talk to them.
Yet many marketers don’t do it because:
- They claim to have no time
- They have bigger priorities
- They’re afraid doing hard work
- They don’t get why it matters
That’s not good enough.
Ryan Gibson not only believes in the value of talking to customers, but he pivoted his consulting business to focus on “customer investigations”.
It is insightful and often surprising, he says, what customers and prospects will tell you if you ask them questions.
Recommended
Transcript
The Importance of Understanding Customers
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Marketing Spark. Knowing your customers inside out matters. The better you know your customers, the more successful your marketing and sales efforts will be. But truth be told, many marketers don't know their customers well enough. It means they're making educated guesses rather than decisions based on insight and knowledge.
00:00:23
Speaker
And one of the keys to truly knowing your customers is simple, talk to them. On the podcast today, I'm excited to have Ryan Gibson, founder at Content Lift, which does investigative customer interviews, also known as customer
Ryan Gibson's Journey to Customer Research
00:00:38
Speaker
research. Welcome to Marketing Spark. Thanks Mark, thanks for having me.
00:00:42
Speaker
Before we get into it, I wanted to talk about your career path and how you have evolved from being a fractional CMO, a job that I do, to being focused on customer research. What triggered the change in direction and did you have an epiphany or was it something that evolved over time?
00:01:02
Speaker
Yeah, how far back should we go? Well, you could go far back enough, but why don't you give me the Reader's Digest version? Yeah, that's a good version. So I started in marketing at the beginning of my career, worked in food service B2C, and I had done a lot of market research. I worked as a director of marketing, and I was doing market research, customer research as part of that role.
00:01:27
Speaker
I loved it. I was so brazen. I would even go into the lineups of competitors and start pulling people. We have a chain in Canada called Tim Hortons. I work for a competing coffee chain, so I just go and start talking to the customers in real time. I just need to understand why. What was it about them? What was driving their decisions?
00:01:49
Speaker
And I really enjoyed my time in that industry, but I sort of, I burned out a little bit and I made a career change and I ended up taking broadcasting in college and I became a TV and radio reporter at CBC here in Canada. And that was amazing. It was a fantastic job. And, you know, that really got me into storytelling, communication, but also the interviewing side, right?
00:02:14
Speaker
how to structure an interview, the psychology of interviewing people, how do you get to an objective, especially if you're doing something that you're trying to get to a certain point of the objective of the interview, and also just having a fun time telling stories. So I did that for a few years. I decided I wanted to go back in marketing, worked for a few companies, worked for some nonprofits, worked for some tech companies running marketing.
00:02:42
Speaker
But I lean more into the content and PR side of things and branding side of things. I sort of abandoned my research background. And when I left tech, I was like, well, I'm going to be, I think, a fractional marketer, fractional CMO and help companies out that way. And that was fine for a while. But what happened was I just wasn't feeling a lot of the same love that I was for marketing over the last 20 years. And then out of the blue, I got a call from
00:03:11
Speaker
An old colleague who said, I remember you used to do customer research back in the day. Do you do that still? I'm like, yeah, I still do. So I worked with other clients. We went through that whole process. They loved it. I loved it. We did some more. And then it started getting all these calls about wanting to do people asking for this service. And that's when you asked for an epiphany.
00:03:35
Speaker
I tell you, for the life of me, I never put the two together like, wait a second. I used to do this. Then I used to interview people for a living. I really like it. Why don't I just do this?
The Shift to Customer-Centric Marketing
00:03:47
Speaker
So I niche down from being a fractional. I'm still doing that work.
00:03:52
Speaker
But now all I do is what I call investigative customer interviews. And my whole goal is I just want to understand why, because that's really if I just hear what I've just described, that's all I've ever wanted to do. I just want to understand why. Like, why are people making decisions they are? And that's, to me, just the most fun part. I hope that answers the question. It does. And was that what is that the Reader's Digest version?
00:04:19
Speaker
Yeah, that's the religious digest version. There's a couple of things that I draw off in your answer. One is that one of the things that consultants need to focus on, and it seems counterintuitive, is the idea of focus. The more you focus, the more successful you are. In my case, the focus on B2B SaaS companies has been
00:04:41
Speaker
Really successful and effective move because it eliminates any ambivalence about what you do and who you serve so I can totally empathize with Your direction and falling into a place where I guess falling is the wrong word But getting to a place where you're doing what you love you're doing the work that excites you and that you're passionate about and I think that's awesome I Think you have a good point. I mean I
00:05:06
Speaker
I thought that the broad aspect of my business before I niched into customer research was going to be the way to go. But I found there was just too much for me to focus on and I couldn't really enjoy a lot of it because it was
00:05:24
Speaker
How do I say this is almost like it was restarting every single time with every client. But now I have a really good framework that I like to follow. And it's I get more out of the work because I've narrowed down on something that I really like.
00:05:38
Speaker
Does that make sense? Exactly. And I have my own methodologies and frameworks that I developed over the last year that have really made my business more efficient. Shifting gears towards knowing your customers on LinkedIn, and I may be getting a skewed view of the world, there's a lot
00:05:56
Speaker
of conversation and many posts about the value of knowing your customers inside out. A lot of marketers are talking the talk, but I wonder how many marketers walk the walk. And the question to you or the questions would be, do you think that marketers fail to talk to their customers enough? Why is there so much focus on the importance of knowing your customers? And what does all the chatter say about the state of marketing and marketers?
00:06:23
Speaker
Yeah, so that's almost like three questions, right? The first one is, I think you asked, are people failing? I don't know if I'd use the word failing, but they're struggling. When I decided I was going to pivot into this, I had been interviewing customers my entire career. That was always my go-to. Even when I was running technology companies, even when I want to work for nonprofits, my first step was always, I want to go talk to people that are the
00:06:52
Speaker
they're at the end game of this and they get our services or product and I want to understand what they're saying. When I started talking to VPs and marketing and CMOs and other marketing leads, the answer is varied. But at the end of the day, we'd like to do more, right? We're not doing enough or yeah, we're not doing it at all. And when I've worked for tech companies, I've worked with tech companies for the last five years, and I'm not sure if this is what you've seen,
00:07:19
Speaker
Where I find the conversations happen is either in customer success, which is great, sales, or product, but more around feature sets.
Challenges in Conducting Customer Research
00:07:30
Speaker
You know, how do we build the next thing within the product? And that's great. You should do that.
00:07:37
Speaker
where I find people really struggle, and maybe it's just since I'm a marketer, and this is what I've noticed is, they're not really getting a good sense of why, why are they choosing us? And how did they actually even come to find us? You know, and what was the logical thought process they went through and the emotional thought process they went through, at the time they had no idea we existed.
00:08:00
Speaker
And they just know they had something they maybe wouldn't throw money at to solve a problem. And what was every step they took along the way to before they actually closed the deal and bought our product. That's the part I like to understand because that's where marketing lives, right? How am I influencing that person?
00:08:19
Speaker
Sorry, the question would be, I mean, it's a product-centric versus customer-centric view of the world. And I guess what I'm asking you is, what's stopping marketers from talking to customers and prospects and getting that insight into their needs, their wants? And as you say, what are their motivations and triggers to actually consider making a purchase? Because when people buy a product or service,
00:08:42
Speaker
Many of them are switching from one solution to the other and like you, I'm fascinated with that journey and why that happens. Yeah, so I'll tell you what people have told me. One is they don't have time, right? Their priorities lay elsewhere. It's hard work. What I do is not an easy lift. It takes time and you have to distill the qualitative data.
00:09:07
Speaker
It's a lot easier to do surveys and MPS scores and go to your CRM and look at the data of what's happened since they've hit your website. It's a lot easier to get that prioritized and invest time in that. I think people struggle with doing it. I'm working with a client now and I'm doing co-interviews.
00:09:31
Speaker
you know, just my tactics of how I can extract things are a little further along. I think there's a whole host of reasons that people there's never one silver bullet reason of why, right? And they just all seem to struggle with that part of it.
00:09:48
Speaker
When I think about your approach to customer interviews and the way that I look at customer interviews, the common denominator is that we were both journalists. I was a newspaper journalist for 15 years. So asking questions of people that you don't know or you've barely met seems very natural to me. The ability to ask them things that may seem uncomfortable or things that you're curious about.
00:10:13
Speaker
to me is easy, it's just the way that you talk with people and maybe a lot of marketers don't have enough experience asking hard questions or trying to get dig into the real answers. I guess maybe that might be one of the biggest reasons and biggest barriers to entry to getting the insight that marketers need.
00:10:31
Speaker
It's funny, I was watching, I saw Mark Roberge, who was at HubSpot years ago. He was their chief revenue officer. I saw him at a talk two years ago. And one of his first hires, he said, was a journalist. And for that very reason, he's outlined.
00:10:47
Speaker
You have a certain set of skills as a journalist that your whole role is, okay, I have an objective and a hypothesis. I have to go and see whether that's true or false. I have to eliminate as much of my personal bias and cognitive biases as I can.
00:11:05
Speaker
And that's not easy to do when you're inside a company and you're feeling pressure to fill a pipeline, you're feeling pressure to decrease churn, you're feeling pressure to cross sell new products, you're feeling pressure to hit growth metrics of 100% because you just raised a series A or a series B and you have two quarters to hit, right? Like going out and asking customers, how did you feel about that?
00:11:34
Speaker
It doesn't often get prioritized. It's the other things that do.
The Power of Customer Interviews
00:11:38
Speaker
But what I find is, you know, let me take you through like I had an interview yesterday with it's one of a client, one of my clients are in tech. It's a marketplace, a product like so it's an app that's in a SAS tool.
00:11:55
Speaker
And we talked to, we had one conversation with a client that recently bought, which is who I like to talk to. I really like to talk to people that just converted. Not so much who are using the product, because then the buying journey is very fresh in their mind of all the things they did. As fresh as it can be.
00:12:10
Speaker
And in that one conversation, I was able to get really deep content, educational content ideas. I was able to get some business development ideas because there were some ways that he talked about how he used the product from where he came from to where he is now that we weren't thinking of before.
00:12:30
Speaker
Interesting those are that's a whole new type of company that either I could cold outreach to or I could talk about in a profile in some of my content. I got copy ideas. There was one a few things that that person said I sent right away to the creative team because they can put ads around it in real time.
00:12:50
Speaker
And there was also influencers that they talked about. And one that I had no idea existed. So I went right away to their YouTube channel like, Oh, interesting. And then I sent that to the performative person. Maybe we can, there's something to use here because this person who bought us said they listened to this other influencer and their words where everyone else is full of nonsense, but I really like this person.
00:13:14
Speaker
So I want to capitalize on it. I wouldn't have known any of that if I hadn't gone and had that 45 minute conversation in depth with that customer. And that's just one. But if you repeat that over 10, you'll see trends and patterns emerge, but all sorts of things that you can do.
00:13:31
Speaker
Let's get into the nitty gritty of customer interviews. First question, how many customers should you interview and how often and what type of customers should you be talking to? The rule of thumb that I've always seen myself and other researchers talk about is eight to 10.
00:13:49
Speaker
Because I think, again, this is not a five minute conversation. This is, you know, half an hour to four to five minutes, and you're repeating over time, and you're just doing the data. So you want to find a balance, there's a middle of the bell curve there. And the reason for that is, if you don't have too little, it's not a high enough of a sample size, too many, you're just sort of going over the same things. Eight to 10 seems to be sort of the sweet spot.
00:14:14
Speaker
If it's hard to get people on the line, and for some products it is, especially if you're early stage, you don't have a lot of customers, I think you can get away with five to six, I've done that before, but I think eight to 10. And then who you should talk to, I think it depends on your objective. So if I want really good case studies, if I really want to understand the impact,
00:14:36
Speaker
I've had on their business economics where I want to understand, I want a good social proof, I want to talk to super fans because I can engage them for my content, what have you. I probably want to talk to someone that's been around for quite some time. If I really want to get a true sense of the current buying journey, I want to talk to someone that's just closed because
00:14:57
Speaker
If I have a client, the customer has been around for three years, and I just talked to them now about their buying journey, a lot's changed in that three years. I mean, the landscape moves so fast now, that there could be things that are influencing your customers now that did not influence that customer from three years ago.
00:15:15
Speaker
but with the current customer, I'll know that, hey, I just joined a Discord group three months ago, and they mentioned your product. I just came straight to the demo. That's how stuff gets done now. So you need to sort of understand all the different ways people are coming to you. You don't have to be experts and leverage every single one, but I think you should have an understanding. So I would talk to, I think it depends on the objective to your question. What do you want to get out of the interview? And that's who you need to talk to. Here's a tricky question.
00:15:45
Speaker
What about interviewing X customers people who have left you because they're no longer satisfied for variety of reasons or they found a different or better solution that kind of insight strikes me as extremely valuable but it's also tricky going back to someone who.
00:16:04
Speaker
departed for whatever reason, should you talk to them is the first question. How should a company approach them in a way that doesn't seem defensive or why did you leave? You want to have the right approach or the right attitude when you approach somebody who's no longer a customer.
00:16:23
Speaker
I mean, I think there's value. There are companies that all they do is focus on win-back or close-loss conversations. It's not where I live, but I can understand how to do that. I think it's important because you learn a lot of things. You learn, one, why was the experience not matching what we want to give them?
00:16:43
Speaker
What did they have a perception of what the product could do that didn't map against what we actually delivered, right? Were they expecting something before they came to us and we didn't be, we weren't able to get that. Now some of that's product related, but some of this is experience related. I mean, when I talk to a lot of customers, Mark, and I don't usually hear a lot of issues with the product, it's usually how they treat me, the support I get, and whether it solved my problem or not.
00:17:10
Speaker
But to your point, yeah, you should I think you should talk to them. And then how do you approach it? You know, there's win backs and there's close loss. So I think you need to understand if is this a client that I can probably get back? Or is this a client that they're gone for whatever reason?
00:17:26
Speaker
So if it's a win-back, I think there are tactics and tricks that I'm not fully up to speed on about how you can get that back, but from a close loss, it's almost the same conversation for me. And how I approach it is, I'm not here to convince you to come back to us. I respect this as you made. What we want to understand is,
00:17:46
Speaker
where we dropped the ball, how we can do better for other customers, or anything we need to improve on. And I would really love your insights and feedback. It'd be so valuable. I'm just hoping I can take up 20 minutes of your time. And then I wish you the best of luck in your career. And thank you for being our customers so long.
00:18:03
Speaker
I like that approach. It's a very positive approach. It's not defensive at all, and it really is asking people for their insight.
Strategies for Gathering Customer Insights
00:18:12
Speaker
Surprisingly, when you talk to people and you ask them questions, they will tell you things that you may have not known before. Here's another question. It sounds like a straightforward question, but the answer probably has some nuance here.
00:18:27
Speaker
Who should talk to your customers? When I do consulting engagements, usually what I insist upon is that I talk to them independently. I don't want the head of marketing or the CEO to be on the call because I feel the person's answers are going to be biased because they don't want to offend the company. They don't want to say things that may seem out of turn or overly critical.
00:18:51
Speaker
But I'm wondering about your approach should the marketer be talking to customers directly or should it be somebody else within this organization or somebody external or a combination of all of the above.
00:19:05
Speaker
The answer always depends, which is always a horrible answer. But it does depend because different parts of a company are going to want to have different goals when they talk to a customer. So I think everyone should talk to customers. But if I'm in customer success or I'm in sales, the context of how I want to talk to a person and what I want to get out of that conversation is different.
00:19:25
Speaker
I mean, I see user research teams talk to everybody. I've seen that before and it's incredible who they want to go talk to because they want to talk about the psychology of design and sort of how people move through products. So for me, I always think marketers should talk to their customers, especially for what they need to get done, right? Because of what we talked about is the journey doesn't just start at the website, it starts much farther along.
00:19:48
Speaker
But to your what you just said about bias. Yeah, I think if you want an objective opinion, you want to try and eliminate as much bias as possible or have customers feel like there's a safe space. I definitely think you should talk to have someone externally do it. I've had my clients customers say to me,
00:20:07
Speaker
when I talk to them because I do things anonymously and I say, well, you're just customer seven. I'm going to pull out your insights and it's going to go into a report. They won't know it's you. I've had them say to me, oh, that's great. I've never said this before, but this. And I think it's a fantastic way to do it because you'll get so much richer insight when someone feels they can be fully honest.
00:20:30
Speaker
about their experience or how they came to you, who else they talked to. It's very eye opening when you go through that process. But I think everyone should talk to customers because if you're not, then I think you're really doing yourself a disservice because I guarantee your competitors probably are.
00:20:47
Speaker
Here's another tricky question. What happens, and I'm dealing with this personally with a client, when a company has few or no customers. So there's nobody using the product. No one has gone through the customer journey and converted over time. No one has interacted with the sales and marketing collateral and you're dealing with a blank slate. What's your approach to that kind of situation?
00:21:13
Speaker
That's a tough one, but there's ways around that. If you are creating something and you think it's going to be competitive in the market against XYZ and you've positioned it so when you've done all your research and you've mapped out sort of where you think the company's going to fit, go and talk to your competitors' customers if you can. I've done that. I've found people through LinkedIn, Facebook,
00:21:35
Speaker
So, I told you, I used to do it when I was in my old days. I used to walk into people's lines like, hey, I don't know why you buy them. It sounds really brazen, but it is actually, people love to talk about this stuff in my experience. And you just approach it the same way that we talked about a close loss. I'm not trying to sell anything. I'm just really trying to understand the industry, understand you and what you care about.
00:21:59
Speaker
There's other ways too. I've sent out surveys if you can't get qualitative information through SurveyMonkey for their paid audiences. There's a great site called User Interviews, which I'm a member of it. And what they do is they create boards or they create customer groups. And you can find people in a certain space to go and interview. So if I want to understand the buying journey of people in B2BX,
00:22:27
Speaker
I could probably find those people through maybe user interviews or other, there's other companies as well. I think Winter, which is Piplaj's company, they do a lot of testing of messaging. I think he's starting to build user groups in those different spaces and verticals. Try and find those people. That's, I think, a really interesting way to get at people who could use your product and understand how they buy, how they evaluate what's important to them.
00:22:53
Speaker
and where they go to do all these things and how they research if you don't have anyone that's come through your funnel, your pipeline yet or your funnel. One final question.
00:23:02
Speaker
After you've interviewed customers, ex-customers, the competition's customers, how do you extract value and insight from all this information? Like how do you share that information within the organization so that you can turn conversations into actionable items? Because it's one thing to know what your customers are thinking, understand what their needs are, problems, aspirations, and all the insight that
00:23:31
Speaker
will raise your game from a marketing sales and product perspective, but what are the keys to making sure that that information is shared and proliferated? So I'll tell you what my how I do it. I look at blocks of Okay, what was the journey? So there's always I follow a lot of the jobs be done methodology, but
00:23:50
Speaker
And people aren't familiar, that's Clayton Christensen who created that innovation framework quite some time ago now. But I look at it through a lens of marketing as opposed to innovation for new products, but they work sort of hand in hand. So I look at, okay, what was the first point of the pain and what was their thought process around it? How did they move from passive searching for a product, which is top of funnel type stuff, or even now prior to that, if we're looking at the current landscape,
00:24:17
Speaker
active search. So you know, I'm, I'm looking at the comparisons between products, and I need information to do that. And how would it fit into my business, and now I brought in people, more people into the deal, if there's a buying committee, I brought in more people, and then to the user side of things, and did it did it map against what I was expecting to happen. So I sort of pull out insights
00:24:36
Speaker
out of the interviews to map there. And then what I'll do is for each segment of a company, so I have customer success at this development, I have marketing and the subsets within those, I'll take out all the insights that I think and all the trends and patterns I'm seeing emerge and plop them in and say, here's what you can maybe do next. Case in point, I'm working with Ashley Marketing Consulting Agency. And one of the things that's coming out is they're really good at this.
00:25:05
Speaker
but they are not really good at this. And I'm hearing they're not really good at this consistently and they're very good at this consistently. So already I'm like, you might want to consider about reducing your service offering. We talked already about, you know, niching down, right? And getting more focused. They're killing it here.
00:25:21
Speaker
Here, they're running to that traditional trap of, well, we need another revenue stream here. Maybe you just need to try and increase the amount of people you get in this pipeline for this core service you do really well. And I wouldn't know that. I wouldn't have seen that pattern emerge had I had not talked to age 10 people.
00:25:40
Speaker
But I'm also getting really good copy and camping ideas, the channels that people are finding them, how people are deciding that over them versus their competitors. That influences sales. So there's, I take all these things, I put them to each function of the business. And I say, here's a possible next action for you. Because to your point, yeah, it's easy to go and talk to people. But a lot of what I get in discovery calls with clients is, well, then what?
00:26:08
Speaker
Well, this is then what? And the customers drive these things. It's so much easier rather than just sitting in the boardroom looking at the whiteboard and trying to figure out your next steps. Like you're doing that in a vacuum. Your customers are really going to give you a good
Building Customer Advocacy
00:26:23
Speaker
roadmap. Now, you still need to have the intuition and the business acumen to understand how to apply all that. But the veil gets lifted, so to speak, when you start going out and talking to customers. I hope that answers the question.
00:26:38
Speaker
Yeah, it does. If anything, I hope that this conversation motivates or inspires marketers to talk to their customers and talk to them on a regular basis because like you, I see huge value in getting their insight and the more you talk to them, the more content ideas that emerge, the more
00:26:55
Speaker
feedback you get about what they like about the product and what they don't and it really sort of build stronger relationships and. Helps turn customers into evangelists and advocates and I think that's the most important thing. So there's, there's all kinds of reasons why you should talk to your customers. I just confused or puzzled by why marketers aren't doing it all the time. It's just a no brainer thing to do.
00:27:21
Speaker
You know, I don't begrudge them for that. I understand sometimes it's even just anxiety, you know, picking up the phone and talking to people. I think there's all holes and reasons. But to what you said, all those great things. And one of the things I've learned that was really surprising to me, customers love to have to get asked their opinion. And I've heard them say this in interviews, you want like, this is so great. I'm so impressed that you were doing this. None of the other companies that I buy from do this.
00:27:51
Speaker
This makes me have so much more respect for you. So just the fact that you're talking to them changes their perception of you. Just the fact you're doing it. So if you can just get into that muscle, exercise that muscle of starting to talk to them, imagine what you can do if it becomes a regular part of your marketing and sales activities.
Contact Information and Closing Remarks
00:28:11
Speaker
Well, this has been great insight, Ryan. Where can people learn more about you and ContentLift? Yeah, they can go to ContentLift.io. I'm really active on LinkedIn, just like you. I'm always happy to chat with people there. I have a free list of questions broken down to the areas that I just talked about, which is, you know, first thought, passive search, active search.
00:28:31
Speaker
Some customer success even branding questions a conversation around brand identity isn't necessarily the same as you know Why people bought you sometimes are similar? They can go there and they can download that they can email me reach my LinkedIn. I'm always happy to chat I'm just always up for that and just tell people I love this like this is so much fun for me So I just want to help people get better at it if they want to do it well, thanks for listening to another episode of marketing spark and
00:28:55
Speaker
If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review, subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. If you'd like to learn more about how I help B2B SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic advisor and coach, send an email to mark at marketingspark.co. I'll talk to you next time.