We're going to let you in on probably one of the crucial tips you can receive when understanding how to go to market and grow. Two words. Customer Research.
Whatever your preconceived notions about customer research are, we kindly ask you to put them aside for the duration of your reading. We see too often startups who have created entire strategies based on assumptions.
Were they the right ones or the wrong ones? You'll have the answer to that question when it's probably too late. We hope they were right, but to avoid making significant mistakes for your business, we aim to demonstrate what customer research isn't and why it will benefit whatever kind of product, services, and business you have.
What is customer research?
"An ongoing process in order to find out who your customers and users might be," defined Dan Parry, co-founder & Head of Product @ Tectonic, a customer research company that provides hyper-targeted customer insights to B2B companies and nonprofits by collecting quantitative and qualitative data through surveys, video interviews, and customer analytics.
Customer research is not a one-time project to determine how to sell your product, and it will enable you to uncover ways to keep your current customers engaged, acquire them, or figure out which customers you'll need to scale with.
Yes, you'll be able to answer the following questions:
.png)
So customer research and market research aren't the same. You'll first want to start with customer research, and once you've understood who your customers are and who you should be scaling with, market research can be helpful.
But we won't highlight this enough; it is not a one-time thing. If you believe it'll only support you to finalise your ideas or your MVP, that's not the case.
The market and customers are constantly changing. If they didn't use your product in the first place, and you managed to convince them to use it now, they have changed—what they've tried to use to solve their problem has changed, for example.
Dan explains how you'll want to continue figuring out what value you are continuously providing (if that's the nature of your business), what new value you can offer and what value you need to add to the market to be defensible and grow your business.
Why is customer research so important?
Your customers have all the answers ultimately — they know what challenges they have.
The success of your go-to-market strategy relies on your understanding of your customers to build a product people want and need and understand how to sell it. Unverified assumptions aren't the key to your growth. It's normal to feel you know who your product or services serve and how to deliver it.
By dedicating time and resources to continuously nurture a direct conversation with your customers, you'll be aware of all the changes in your market. New competitors arrive, and people's feelings change. So customers will choose to stay with you, choose a different product or stop using altogether. Customer research will ensure you continue to provide value in the best way possible.
We've also consulted Jon Evans, our lead copywriter at Launch Mappers, on the importance of customer research and what one can achieve. He shares that "you'll be able to identify crossovers with the same research as the product team, which will support your marketing and sales team. But it will all depend on how well you know your audience already."
You'll build relationships over time by having continuous conversations with customers. Can we associate a price in terms of ROI? Not really. But if we take the case of Netflix, for example. It's clear that over the last couple of years, people have grown to love Netflix worldwide, outside of the fact that they offer TV shows. But this platform isn't the only one out there providing TV. But nobody's riding for Amazon Prime that way.
A customer profile can potentially grow along with you. But you can't do this once and expect nothing to change about them. So whilst you're growing and scaling, you're reverting to this old version of your ICP that could not be valid anymore which is why you need to talk to your customers continuously.
Dan shared, "the old customers that got you to where you are now may not be the customers that you need right now. Or they might be. But it's a reasonable guess." So align your assumptions and identify your customers' needs based on data.
How to get started with customer research?
So how should you gather this data?
Let's start with the first step. Have you already built customer profiles based on your business goals? If not, rest assured, we have an entire guide dedicated to helping you with this task.
The key to receiving valuable answers to your questions is to ask unbiased ones based on your customers' past experiences. Dan confirms that it is a much better indicator of what's really happening because if you ask them questions like "Do you think our offering is really good?" people might feel inclined to lie to not hurt anybody's feelings.
So here are some questions to kickstart your brainstorming process hopefully:
.png)
If it seems that you are getting desperate information from people, you might be asking the wrong questions or asking the right questions to the wrong people.
As part of a go-to-market strategy, understanding how to best express your solution to a general audience and your ideal customer profiles is highly beneficial.
Once you've gathered all your findings, Jon recommends identifying and organising your data into themes, such as where they start and where they want to go? He shares that "as a result, you'll have the specific voice of customer data around specific segments and aspects of your solution."
Summary on customer research:
As an organisation, your market and customers are always changing. And as a business, make sure that your assumptions are the right ones every single time, because you can’t really be wrong if you’re listening to your customers. The truth will be the key to your success.
This article is part of a series on the overlooked aspects of go-to-market strategies. If you'd like to follow along, subscribe to our mailing list to get the rest of the story straight into your inbox.
