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Why marketing research Is more than just 'talking to customers' w/ Ryan Paul Gibson · We're Not Marketers

0:00
We are a podcast for product marketers and B2B SaaS who feel misunderstood of what they do.
0:04
From someone who truly gets what you do and help you feel less like a misfit to be an animal in the world.
0:20
Gab,
0:22
let us know who's joining us today.
0:26
Yes,
0:26
so...
0:27
Very interesting guest,
0:28
I think,
0:29
for PMMs.
0:30
Today,
0:30
we have Rand Paul Gibson.
0:32
This guy is the founder of ContentLift.
0:35
And if you think customer investigation and customer interviews,
0:38
this is the person that should come to mind.
0:41
He has a background as a TV reporter,
0:43
as a consultant,
0:44
as a marketing manager.
0:46
And today,
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he's helping everyone to run B2B market and buyers investigation.
0:51
Rand,
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we're very excited to have you.
0:55
I'm excited to be here.
0:56
impressive.
0:57
Thank you.
0:58
It's all about the fact that we're just a couple of weird guys and we don't have a rule book.
1:02
So that's probably why.
1:03
Ryan,
1:03
we have a very important one to ask you.
1:06
Are product marketers actually marketers?
1:08
Why or why not?
1:10
Like anyone who says no,
1:13
they have no idea of the history of marketing that's existed for like millennia.
1:18
I understand why they would say no.
1:20
But if you look at the historical context of how marketing has existed,
1:25
then yes.
1:26
You are a marketer.
1:28
You definitely have a journalist background.
1:30
Yeah.
1:30
Has anyone talked about like where the term came from?
1:35
Well,
1:35
the closest person was Harvey.
1:36
But Harvey was talking about the brand man.
1:38
Now it's on season two.
1:39
But he didn't talk about the specific term itself.
1:43
There's no real lineage there.
1:45
If you try to go back,
1:47
it's like where terms come from.
1:49
Because you could say like demand generation came up around the
1:53
50s in some type of academic studies.
1:55
Whatever.
1:57
The person they can contribute to is Neil McElroy from Procter & Gamble around the
2:02
30s.
2:05
And he worked in consumer markets.
2:07
So if you think about it,
2:09
it makes sense because if I'm a B2C company and I have 20 product lines,
2:18
the idea of,
2:19
okay,
2:19
we should probably understand this product.
2:23
More specifically and how it fits in the market rather than just generalist take to stuff.
2:27
There's Peter Drucker 50s
2:29
60s Phil Kotler
2:31
McKenna Reese McKenna Jeffrey Moore crossing the chasm There was a natural even Ogilvy has stuff where he talked about like channels of products versus a general marketing
2:40
So so at least like a hundred years people have been talking about the sense of how product marketing fits into marketing
2:47
So yeah,
2:48
like I have a I tend to take a longer view with these things
2:51
And then the whole thesis is like why product marketing exists.
2:54
First time I met Gab,
2:55
I'm like,
2:55
I don't understand the term.
2:56
But when I went to the B2B,
2:57
I was losing my mind.
2:59
People,
2:59
product marketing,
3:01
that's like calling it like product coding.
3:05
Yeah,
3:07
we do the product coding.
3:08
What else are you coding?
3:10
Come on,
3:10
man.
3:11
So it's just,
3:12
yeah,
3:12
I have this whole thing.
3:14
But I understand where it comes from because I've experienced the things that you talk about on the podcast as a PMM.
3:20
So,
3:20
yeah.
3:21
So Ryan,
3:23
coming from a journalist's background,
3:25
how did you stumble into B2B marketing land?
3:27
Okay.
3:29
Hopefully not the
3:32
30s, right?
3:35
Back in the Bronze Age.
3:37
So this is my dad behind me on the wall.
3:40
For people who can't see this,
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this is a podcast,
3:42
but who knows,
3:43
maybe it'll be a clip somewhere.
3:45
So I started working for my dad when I was
3:47
12 years old.
3:50
We ran a franchise company up here in the great white north where Gab and I live in Canada.
3:55
It's called Treats.
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We had about 120 stores across the country.
4:00
Started working the stores really young.
4:03
By the time I was 17,
4:04
I could run a store with my eyes closed.
4:06
And then went and took my commerce degree.
4:08
I'm getting to your questions,
4:08
Actors.
4:10
It's coming up.
4:13
And then did a bunch of stuff in hospitality management because my commerce degree was actually in hospitality.
4:20
is actually marketing is one of the core focuses of that commerce degree.
4:26
I went to a bunch of stuff in hospitality world.
4:30
And then my dad says,
4:31
you know what?
4:31
My VP of ops and marketing is retiring.
4:34
You want the gig?
4:36
It's 26.
4:37
I was like,
4:38
okay.
4:39
I had no idea what I was doing.
4:41
But I was eager and I was hungry.
4:43
So
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I went in and that was the start.
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Because for a franchise system,
4:49
The whole point of it is you have to create a marketplace so a turnkey business exists that someone buys into.
4:56
I don't have to start from scratch and understand the marketplace and build the infrastructure.
5:02
I drop down to $500,000 in my McDonald's franchise,
5:05
and I get instant revenue the day the door is open.
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It's the whole point of the thing.
5:10
My job was to create the marketplace that consumers buy into.
5:14
So I had to do all the research myself.
5:16
I did observational work.
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So one time I spent two hours timing how long people took to put cream in coffee with a stopwatch,
5:24
because I wanted to see how quickly people would do that.
5:28
I did all of this.
5:29
person on the street interviews,
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I'd go into the stores of competitors,
5:32
I start talking to them and asking why they shop at Tim Hortons.
5:35
Why do you buy here not there?
5:37
Have you ever bought there?
5:38
And people thought I was out of my goddamn mind.
5:40
But
5:40
I wanted to understand how people made decisions.
5:43
Because if you don't understand how people make decisions,
5:45
how in the world are you going to market to them?
5:48
I did all that.
5:49
And I should say,
5:50
the reason I have a certain view of this is that I had the operations and marketing hat.
5:55
And then in the B2C world,
5:57
if we're going to use the four p's as like the marker most of that exists with marketing and operations and it's like a synergy in b2b it's much different we can talk about it later if you want where the four p's are like spread across an org and that's where a lot of the breakdown happens so
6:13
i own the whole thing then i went and i took i went and i changed my careers i went to broadcasting and i became a tv and radio reporter for three years it's great it's a good gig
6:23
So I learned really how to navigate like the environment the four of us are in right now.
6:27
How do you ask questions and get to the heart of things?
6:31
And then I went back to B2B because I was like,
6:32
this is not my thing.
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I'm going to go back.
6:35
And the very first time
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I wanted to talk to a customer,
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you should have seen the looks I got.
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I've been doing it my whole career.
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And now all of a sudden,
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it's like,
6:47
well,
6:47
sales does that.
6:48
Product does that.
6:49
What do you mean you want to talk to customers?
6:51
No,
6:51
just go write me a landing page.
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And I'm looking at them like they're out of their goddamn minds.
6:56
What is going on?
6:58
And that was my first experience,
7:00
which I think is the essence of your show,
7:04
right?
7:04
Nailed it.
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And
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I know the battle.
7:08
And there's all sorts of ways that I've hacked my way around that.
7:11
Because I am paramount in saying that if B2B,
7:15
it's a team sport and no one owns the customer.
7:18
We all do.
7:20
So we all have to understand how it fits in the mix.
7:23
So yeah,
7:24
the reporter thing was great.
7:26
You can Google my name,
7:27
Ryan Paul Gibson,
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CBC News,
7:30
and you'll find some TV pieces that are above average.
7:35
Ooh,
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hit us with the social proof.
7:39
You hit on a vein.
7:41
What you are saying here is that this is like a huge challenge for product marketers.
7:48
It's that...
7:48
We're brought in house,
7:49
we are expected to deliver collateral,
7:51
and we ask the question of,
7:53
I want to talk to customers to understand their frame of mind.
7:56
So I'm curious,
7:57
like,
7:57
when you are working with clients,
7:59
for a lot of executive leaders and other departments,
8:02
they're like,
8:03
just go build a damn thing.
8:04
Why do you need to talk to customers?
8:06
Like,
8:07
so I'm curious to get more of your perspective on that.
8:11
How in the world do you get access?
8:12
There's a few ways.
8:13
The ways I've done it is do it in big forgiveness.
8:17
pick up i've like literally picked up the phone and called customers without permission had sales just start reeling at me and i didn't care because it's just you except to do my jobs i'm gonna go do it and that's not for the meek you gotta be like really you
8:32
gotta have some spice in you and i was always okay with that the other way is you gotta do you have now have to then educate the executives on why marketing exists and what a horrible position to be in
8:48
It's like that's what they don't they just don't get it if you talk to a b2b
8:53
If you talk to a sales team or an executive that's understand why you need the voice of the customer in the room
8:58
That is a tough battle to fight and the odds of you winning are low what you can show them
9:06
It comes down to unit economics,
9:08
right?
9:08
You have a budget you got to spend it how I've always phrased it is
9:15
You want to?
9:17
Increase the number of qualified conversations with the sales team by 20%
9:22
over the next two years.
9:24
Because that's how they talk in those terms,
9:25
right?
9:25
When we really get up to the high level.
9:27
Great.
9:31
I want to understand what's happening before they even talk to sales.
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Because that's the mindset I have to spend money on to influence.
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Spend money is the key one here.
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And I want to de-risk the chances.
9:46
of our marketing budget getting lit on fire and doing nothing.
9:51
So is that perfect?
9:53
No.
9:53
But that's the start.
9:56
Because executives,
9:57
if they understand anything,
9:59
it is resource allocation.
10:03
So you need to understand,
10:04
you need to talk in their language.
10:07
And that's hard for someone who maybe came up the content marketing track,
10:12
who is now a PMM,
10:14
who's never understood financial statements,
10:16
how cash flows determined,
10:18
how to calculate margins,
10:19
how to compete in a market.
10:22
Like,
10:23
whoa,
10:23
dude,
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you're putting a lot on them.
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That's where I always start with people is,
10:27
you have to make the business case of why you want to do it in the first place.
10:30
And that's hard for marketers who've never done that.
10:33
take the phone and wait for sales to basically be pissed off at you.
10:39
Like our mutual friend,
10:41
Zach Messler said something.
10:42
Oh,
10:42
I listened to Zach.
10:45
He had some good thoughts.
10:46
Keep going with your point.
10:47
But he said basically that to be good in product marketing requires you to have guts.
10:51
Yeah.
10:52
And that's exactly it.
10:53
Sales won't come at you to save your job,
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right?
10:55
They have a job to do.
10:56
If you are missing insights,
10:58
call them.
10:59
But this is bringing me to another question.
11:01
I know we had none of the back all but
11:03
You almost roasted me online on this,
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but a lot of people,
11:07
especially early stage,
11:08
when we want to get insight,
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the junk food advice is just talk to customers.
11:14
Why would you say that this is considered bad advice on a surface level?
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Conversations with customers falls within the bucket of market research,
11:27
historically,
11:28
over the last...
11:28
Let's go back to 1930,
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because I know that's Eric's favorite time.
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Market research,
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qualitative research,
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primary qualitative research,
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and the specific term in the,
11:39
and if we're looking at sociological studies,
11:42
it's in-depth interviews,
11:44
qualitative research.
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And the whole point is you have a thesis or hypothesis,
11:51
an objective you want to learn,
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and you structure the conversations in a way that it's driving every single thing they talk about towards
12:01
understanding your objective and getting the data and insights you need to meet the objective.
12:06
What happens is people get on a call,
12:10
which is great.
12:10
And they're like,
12:11
do you like our thing?
12:13
And like,
12:13
how are you using it?
12:14
And is it good?
12:15
And it's all subjective opinions.
12:17
It's all like outputs.
12:18
It's all stuff that is helpful,
12:22
but it's not help you make decisions about how to do marketing.
12:26
That's the distinction.
12:29
It becomes like a really basic case study conversation.
12:33
And that's fine.
12:33
You need that stuff.
12:35
Sales enablement conversations.
12:37
But that's not your job is a marketer.
12:42
And you have to influence a market.
12:44
Like it's in the name,
12:45
people.
12:46
Like,
12:46
come on.
12:47
So you have to go out and talk to the 90.
12:51
If you buy into the Einenberg,
12:56
how do you say it?
12:57
The institute there.
12:58
have a 95 95 rule do you guys know how to say it i haven't heard of it but what podcast am i on here we're not marketers good one oh heisenberg yeah um greg they
13:17
have the 95 five rule right
13:19
95 of your markets not in market at any given time that doesn't mean they don't know you that means
13:27
They have a concept of what the solutions are in the market,
13:29
but at this point,
13:30
the business conditions do not exist for them to make an investment.
13:34
Why?
13:37
That's the majority of your market at any given time.
13:40
And before that data came out
13:43
10 years ago,
13:44
20 years ago now,
13:44
I think,
13:46
if you worked in B2B for some time,
13:48
you instinctively knew that.
13:49
You intuitively knew that even without the data.
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When I was a buyer back at a franchise company,
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I once sat on a company for three years before I bought from them.
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I knew the day I met them,
13:58
I wanted to buy from them,
13:59
but I had to wait three years.
14:01
Where's that going to show up in your dashboard?
14:03
So if you look back over the course of that's what we've had to do,
14:07
we've had to understand how people get start somewhere and then get to sales.
14:12
And if you can't do that,
14:14
then you can't actually build a marketing program that's going to influence these people further up the field.
14:19
That's stuff I want to talk about in a customer interview,
14:23
not to like sales enablement stuff,
14:25
the stuff that.
14:26
Gab has to do in his sales deck job.
14:28
One day he'll be director of sales decks.
14:30
It'll be good.
14:31
But that's the stuff I have to know because that's what marketing is.
14:38
Not the sales.
14:39
The sales enablement stuff's already happened.
14:41
Like they've built their consideration set.
14:43
They've probably already picked the winner.
14:47
So the sales enablement is just them.
14:50
Oh,
14:50
yeah.
14:50
Okay,
14:51
good.
14:51
I'm not wrong about anything.
14:53
That's not convincing them.
14:54
That's just them.
14:55
doing a sanity check with the stakeholder and buying group to say see i wasn't wrong see it works
15:03
The decision was probably made months ago and you as the marketer have to influence that.
15:08
So how in the world are you going to understand that if you talk to them about just what their life was like after they bought the thing?
15:15
So customer interviews,
15:16
yeah,
15:16
don't just talk to them,
15:18
have a plan and objectives.
15:19
But that's a good answer.
15:21
After working with a lot of startups,
15:22
this is when you realize that research altogether and especially trying to get those customer investigation in the way is so helpful.
15:30
bought your
15:31
DIY customer investigation guide.
15:34
And it helped me so much just contextualize everything.
15:37
Because it's fine to talk to people,
15:39
as you said,
15:40
either from a case study perspective or trying to understand,
15:42
okay,
15:43
why did they choose us compared to the competition?
15:45
But it's very easy to get out of scope and then ending up in a situation where it's like,
15:50
oh,
15:50
cool,
15:51
but we don't have any discovered insights that can just help us market to that market better.
15:57
Yep.
15:59
I want to go back to the one third of us.
16:04
So I came into tech for manufacturing where it was like where they sold B2B,
16:08
but then that went to B2C.
16:09
So it was straight distribution.
16:11
Yeah.
16:12
And what was interesting is I started in the customer success.
16:17
So obviously I'm talking to customers all the time.
16:19
But when I went into product marketing,
16:21
I was training customers like directly in front of them or get on roofs.
16:29
because that's what the products were.
16:30
And we were like doing all of that stuff.
16:33
We were going to their warehouses,
16:34
seeing how distribution worked,
16:36
seeing how when they sold to the actual contractors.
16:39
And it felt so normal,
16:41
right?
16:46
Anytime we had customers come in,
16:47
because they were huge.
16:48
So we had an onsite thing that customers would come visit.
16:51
You try to integrate other teams across the org,
16:54
normally wouldn't be hanging out with customers.
16:56
So like point blank,
16:57
it sounds like we've had a very similar experience before coming in here.
17:00
Why do you think it is so different?
17:02
And there is just this dynamic of a one third of us or more are not getting that access.
17:09
Yeah,
17:10
I think about this a lot.
17:12
And what I'm going to tell you is,
17:14
is like a lived experience,
17:15
a bit of is the data.
17:17
So I'm also curious to know what y'all think after
17:20
I give my spiel.
17:24
So.
17:26
B2B is an interesting world because if you look at the distinctions between the two,
17:35
so at a foundational level,
17:37
you open up any textbook,
17:39
they don't discern between the two models.
17:42
They're talking more about consumer models really in the 101 textbooks that I was studying
17:48
30 years ago.
17:50
And consumer markets have large total addressable markets.
17:54
right the categories are generalized and well defined they fit mostly into everyday lifestyle type of things right so i ride motorcycles i'm a gardener i'm a snowboarder whatever they're what we call less considered purchases so that there's not a lot of thought that goes into them typically the
18:13
ops they act more like b2b decisions where they're highly largely heavily considered house car college education right b2b's different were
18:23
It's all hyper niche.
18:25
There's smaller total addressable markets.
18:28
It's all contextualized through business models because it's another layer of depth.
18:33
So it's the person in the business and in the business processes.
18:37
And how you would have done manufacturing,
18:39
Eric,
18:40
would have probably been different than maybe one of your competitors.
18:42
There would have been differences in how they do manufacturing processes,
18:45
even with just-in-time delivery.
18:46
Like what's their supply chain?
18:48
That's different than when you're trying to sell liquid death versus Perrier.
18:53
Like it's just,
18:55
so why am I saying all this?
18:56
There's a few things happening at once.
18:58
One is most founding teams are,
19:01
most founders are the subject matter expert of it.
19:03
And they're a technical subject matter expert.
19:07
Not always,
19:08
but they see the opportunity and then they want to build the thing,
19:12
but they don't realize.
19:13
And this is what I see with founders that there is their perception of one,
19:16
like their lived experience of one data point.
19:19
And how do they know that how they want to solve this problem is how others want to solve this problem?
19:24
Probably is true.
19:25
It holds some weight.
19:27
But they're just using one vantage point,
19:30
right?
19:31
But that becomes the proxy for what they think marketing should do.
19:37
And then once the company grows,
19:39
it becomes the sales team if it's very much like a sales-led conversation.
19:45
And sales is great.
19:46
Like if before the internet.
19:48
That is how most deals got closed and most information wasn't controlled by the vendors.
19:54
I remember what it was like to try and get information on stuff.
19:57
It was a nightmare before the internet.
19:59
Everything's flipped now though.
20:00
I can build a consideration set in five minutes from Reddit.
20:05
That didn't exist 20 years ago.
20:07
But the mindset is still,
20:10
we'll go talk to sales and tell you everything they know.
20:13
But all we're doing is operating what we see.
20:16
It's like the founder.
20:17
We're only looking at our own little bubble rather than looking from the outside and looking in.
20:22
So that's part of it.
20:24
There's just a misunderstanding of what marketing does in B2B.
20:27
Again,
20:27
it gets back to the four Ps.
20:28
In consumer markets,
20:30
it's very well established.
20:32
Marketing drives a lot of the decisions.
20:34
Look at your wall there.
20:36
Marketing in that world for a good reason.
20:40
Gartner will tell you and the people in those large and selling companies will tell you about all their work to do in consumer research and the modeling they do.
20:48
That's harder to do in B2B where it's actually qualitative research,
20:53
which is the key driver of our understanding because like small markets and niche applications.
21:00
The sales team and the founding team,
21:03
unless you're in like a product-led consumer type thing like Calendly or Chili Piper,
21:14
they think that what they see in front of them is the data that's going to unlock how you talk to the market.
21:21
So why would I go do that?
21:22
Because marketing is just the arts and crafts department that's going to help us sell more of this stuff.
21:30
But because they don't understand that the majority of a market's not going to buy them as soon as they see the ad,
21:37
like they might for an impulse buy if it's Perrier versus Liquid Death,
21:41
it's actually probably a two-year cycle.
21:44
They don't understand how to manage marketing for that one-third because they just don't understand how that part of the business world works.
21:51
I don't know if I've answered it well,
21:54
but they just don't get how marketing fits into the history of business development in B2B.
22:00
And that's the big gap.
22:02
I have a follow-up question related to persona.
22:05
And this is a specific challenge I've noticed with some clients and just prior work in sales.
22:12
Persona research.
22:13
You mentioned earlier in the conversation,
22:14
Ryan,
22:15
is that how do we tie that work to this specific value?
22:19
Because how I've seen persona research today is a team goes behind closed doors,
22:25
climb up to their ivory tower,
22:27
and they write this elaborate story.
22:30
about this hypothetical person,
22:32
about why they love our product,
22:34
what our product delivers,
22:36
with zero context as to what are they looking at?
22:40
What are the problems they're looking at?
22:42
And if I'm a salesperson talking to this person,
22:45
how much value,
22:47
i.e.
22:47
dollar signs,
22:49
how likely will this person help me close this deal?
22:52
So I'm curious from your work,
22:54
how are you talking to your clients today to tie the number?
22:58
to the research that you're delivering to say this is the impact that we're going to deliver for you today and i don't have a journalistic uh background degree this is just all off the top of my head you're
23:13
great though i appreciate you you come a long way i look at research design as you start with what is it you want to do in the business what do you need to know to do that thing who's going to give you the information that's a really
23:29
simplistic way to look at it but if you look at any academic work on like research design that's really the crux of it most of the clients i get are the converted to right so they're on the train of we need we need more insights and
23:45
they've gone through the the landscape of or the hellscape of we're not getting our pipeline filled fast enough or sales always has to educate people on what We're doing...
23:58
We're not hitting their targets to struggle to find the right people.
24:01
Even when we're having conversations,
24:03
they don't not qualified people.
24:06
Outbound's not working.
24:07
No kidding.
24:08
Some of the stuff you probably all hear.
24:12
So my job is to show that we are going to increase the chances of you talking to the right people,
24:19
which sounds really fluffy.
24:21
But that's marketing because you're just increasing the opportunity.
24:28
for sales to close.
24:31
I talked to a client yesterday.
24:34
We're just starting to look at doing some work.
24:39
And very smart person.
24:40
I'm very excited to work with them.
24:43
They said to me,
24:44
when we were talking about their sales,
24:46
said,
24:46
I feel like we need to actually,
24:48
the first thing I want to do is some sales enablement,
24:50
some case studies.
24:53
Okay.
24:55
What's your conversion rate from like qualified opportunities to close?
24:59
Oh,
24:59
we're closing 40%.
25:00
I'm like...
25:04
And they thought that was bad.
25:07
Because in their minds,
25:09
it should be 100%
25:11
of all the conversations we have.
25:14
Because we have a product that fits this buyer group.
25:19
I said,
25:19
okay,
25:23
what makes you think that they're ready to buy even when they talk to you?
25:28
I don't know.
25:29
We have a thing that works for them.
25:31
have you ever analyzed your sales calls to figure out why they might not be buying or some clothes lost oh yeah no are you recording your sales calls well not really but 40 is bad whereas
25:48
the benchmarks i think to my extent y'all can educate me i thought it was 20 to 30 and that's good so it's a perception thing with a lot of my customers zach where it's like
26:02
They don't know what they don't know.
26:04
And there's a lot of anxiety in the business world to get shit done.
26:10
I'm sure you all have felt it.
26:12
There's pressures,
26:13
anxiety,
26:14
especially when money's involved.
26:16
Especially when founders are looking at the cash flow statements.
26:19
My dad,
26:20
he only looked at one number every single month.
26:23
Actually,
26:24
weekly cash flow.
26:26
Can we pay our obligations this week?
26:30
Everything else was just noise.
26:34
So my clients come in and they already have an idea of what they want to do with me as a market researcher.
26:44
But how I often now phrase it is like,
26:46
how quickly do you want it?
26:49
Because now I'm of the thesis that
26:53
I don't always want to talk to customers.
26:56
And talking to customers actually can take a long time.
26:59
Do I want to talk to in-market buyers and maybe be able to recruit them in a matter of a few days to understand why people who fit my ICP are not buying me or are waiting
27:12
X number of time to buy because I need to influence the market.
27:16
That's a whole other thing.
27:19
When I work internally with clients,
27:20
it's a challenge,
27:21
but when they come to me,
27:23
hopefully they've been seeing my stuff,
27:24
they've listened to smart people like you.
27:27
And they're starting to realize that there's market research,
27:31
there's more depth to it than they give a credit for.
27:34
That's a welcome sight.
27:35
Like seeing people for something that is not necessarily urgent,
27:39
like making them see and realize that it's actually,
27:43
I don't want to use a buzzword,
27:44
but like super crucial to their business.
27:47
I think we're seeing that with messaging a lot,
27:49
especially in the last few years where people were like,
27:51
I don't want to spend money on that.
27:53
We're seeing a lot of people taking in that.
27:56
specific field of expertise.
27:58
Guys,
27:58
I would love to maybe do a quick 180 and tackle a subject that we've been tackling more during that season.
28:04
But before that,
28:05
do you have any follow-up questions for Ryan?
28:10
You guys are good?
28:10
Perfect.
28:11
So you said that you're working right now with a client and you ask them,
28:16
hey,
28:16
are you recording your sales calls?
28:18
Oh,
28:18
not really.
28:19
One of the key use case of AI,
28:22
and it's something we've been recurring talking on season four,
28:25
is leveraging those color recordings for analyzing customer insights,
28:31
interviews,
28:31
and as someone who created his own custom GPT that I used,
28:35
by the way,
28:35
to interview people and just give guidance.
28:39
How are you seeing
28:41
AI evolve in the direction of customer investigation,
28:45
buyer investigation?
28:51
The quick answer is it's made it so much easier.
28:55
So I'm what you would call a qualitative researcher.
28:58
I didn't even use that term like five years ago.
29:00
This has been a learning journey for me too.
29:01
In qualitative research,
29:04
they have a process.
29:05
There's a few ways they describe it in every type of discipline.
29:08
There's different methodologies,
29:10
but there's a process called thematic analysis,
29:12
which is like the most commonly used one.
29:14
And it is what it sounds like.
29:16
You talk to a bunch of people,
29:18
you find the themes,
29:20
the analysis of the themes,
29:23
and then you...
29:24
really bring up the insights.
29:25
They call it codifying in some circles.
29:29
If anyone really wants to understand this type of work,
29:32
go talk to your UI UX people.
29:36
They are doing this stuff in the software world.
29:38
They're doing this stuff all day long.
29:39
I didn't realize that until I started talking to UI UX people.
29:42
They're talking,
29:43
they're recruiting people and customers all the time.
29:46
That's another way,
29:47
Zach,
29:47
that you could probably position it.
29:50
The design and product team are talking to
29:53
customers and users all the time to make the product better ai has been really interesting because
29:59
The process I would have followed before is,
30:02
okay,
30:03
let's just say 12.
30:04
I interview 12 people.
30:05
There's a reason I interview 12.
30:06
It's not 7.
30:08
It's not 15.
30:10
I go through the transcripts,
30:12
and I start highlighting things manually.
30:13
I even use software.
30:14
There's lots of different tools out there for qualitative research.
30:17
Again,
30:18
UI,
30:18
UX people often use,
30:19
but I,
30:20
as a qualitative researcher,
30:21
I use their tools for what I do.
30:25
And you'll highlight things,
30:26
and you bucket things,
30:27
and you group things.
30:29
Now,
30:30
with ChatGPT or Gemini or Cloud or whatever you want to use,
30:36
I can upload the transcripts.
30:39
And what used to take me two weeks,
30:40
I can do in two days.
30:43
It is so good.
30:46
And so I worked with Zach Messler on a project a few months ago.
30:51
He brought me in to work with a client.
30:52
He's wonderful.
30:53
I love him.
30:53
He's a wonderful man.
30:55
And when I showed him what I did.
31:00
I recruited a sample of 12 people and did all the thematic analysis from start to finish in five weeks.
31:07
Sometimes it takes five months in-house.
31:11
You should have seen this drawing on the floor.
31:16
It was the depth of what I could do now.
31:19
It would have taken me two,
31:20
three weeks to get on what I just had,
31:21
and I did in a few days.
31:23
And I probably even got way more.
31:25
So AI is great.
31:28
Here's the thing,
31:28
though.
31:30
And everyone,
31:31
I think you all will probably understand this.
31:34
Insights are only as good as how reliable your data is.
31:38
So it goes back to just talking to customers.
31:40
Don't treat it as research and just like a friendly chat.
31:43
It's supposed to feel like that's the vibe,
31:45
right?
31:45
It's supposed to be like,
31:47
we're having a good time,
31:48
really digging your stuff.
31:49
But what they don't realize is I'm doing is I have a structured intent to the conversation.
31:54
Same way you would here,
31:55
right?
31:55
It's just even more thorough and more focused.
31:59
So I have to guide that conversation properly because people don't answer in ways that are in the ways we want,
32:06
to put it short,
32:07
necessarily.
32:08
There's lots of things happening in their memory recall.
32:10
They can't recall information instantly,
32:12
and it's really hard for us to give answers quickly.
32:16
So if you don't conduct the research in the right way,
32:19
even if you drop all this stuff in chat GPT,
32:21
it might give you directional signal in the wrong way.
32:24
And it's the risk of AI.
32:26
I always tell people...
32:28
when I'm doing this work,
32:29
either I'm teaching it at the customer discovery stuff or now I'm talking to clients is just still do it manually for the first one.
32:36
It's going to take longer,
32:38
but you'll appreciate the how it all unfolds.
32:43
So yeah,
32:44
AI is great.
32:45
I built that custom GPT just as a way for people to like frame their own questions,
32:50
right?
32:50
Because that's sometimes it's one of the top questions I get is what questions should you ask?
32:54
And the answer is,
32:55
what do you want to learn?
32:57
I really love that example because I think there's something you're hitting in the nuance of AI and marketing today.
33:05
Is that for a lot of us that get jazzed about AI,
33:08
they're like,
33:09
oh,
33:09
thank gosh,
33:09
I can use it to write my sales emails.
33:12
I can use it to do this data analysis.
33:14
But what you're hitting on is that there needs to be a level of contextual expertise to know what good looks like.
33:22
One quick example is that
33:24
I was working on.
33:26
a competitive cheat sheet for a client and i was like hey you can repurpose this to write your emails for sales outbound gpt was writing it like a marketing email and we know what i'm talking about it's here's a paragraph about the product benefits here's why you should be interested in it but if you're using that on a sales like engagement buyers
33:46
don't have time to read that long so knowing that insight i could just say hey this is what the parameters of what a sales emails should look like.
33:54
It should be less than 50 words.
33:56
It should...
33:56
hit the main point and it should ask for interest around the call i really love that you're sharing that yeah i've interviewed over 2
34:04
000 buyers and if you draw a line through what makes them gravitate towards any marketing or sales stuff and i'm not a lonely you can find in any type of gartner mckinsey long longitudinal study it's
34:24
relevant and credible
34:26
That's it.
34:28
But you don't understand what's relevant and credible to people unless you understand how they think.
34:33
Yeah,
34:34
the context is...
34:35
I was going back and forth with Anthony
34:38
Fletch today.
34:39
Because he's,
34:39
should I call things workflows or should I call things business processes?
34:42
And like both work because it depends on the context.
34:45
Right?
34:45
Because their whole thing is whittle it down to the one key thing.
34:49
Sure,
34:49
but you have to have the context to be able to whittle it down.
34:54
It's the same with AI too,
34:55
right?
34:55
You need to bring context and you need to bring it into a bucket for things to be understood.
35:00
If you write stuff and then it doesn't work and then you keep scrolling different pages,
35:04
I don't exactly remember,
35:05
but you can add prefix on Google to find exactly which source of website it's coming from.
35:11
Like when you bring that context and especially like with AI,
35:14
like possibility are infinite.
35:16
You can just come in a situation when it might take more time,
35:20
but ultimately at the end,
35:21
you're saving thousands of hours,
35:23
right?
35:23
convert
35:23
what's your example of five weeks versus five months i'll use perplexity or google deep research and to find things there's a tool i use called gigabrain which is the aggregator of red threads so
35:40
this is all desk research really what they would call it secondary desk research and marketing nerd circles what's in those threads is contextually relevant to me because the ai
35:50
can hallucinate like it's just picking stuff and putting together so you have to be very cautious with how relying on the machine too much because it can steer you in the wrong direction i mean the i robot and
36:06
it's properly structured interviews and just to a loose conversation and there's other ones like it reddit has opened up their api massively it's a bit of inside it is like a great place.
36:20
If you want reviews,
36:22
go to G2.
36:22
If you want the real reviews,
36:24
go to Reddit.
36:27
Because that's what people...
36:29
It's all people's unvarnished opinion about what works and what doesn't.
36:34
It doesn't mean they're right.
36:36
It just means it's what they believe.
36:39
And they're very honest about it.
36:42
I was asking for my own personal...
36:44
Yeah,
36:44
I was going to say,
36:45
going with a flashlight,
36:46
it feels good.
36:49
There's Gummy Search as well that exists.
36:51
You can basically create personas by combining different subreddits.
36:55
And then you can pay either a day pass or a subscription monthly.
36:59
But you can basically crawl specific pains,
37:03
specific questions,
37:04
looking at trends.
37:05
And the cool thing is,
37:06
this software is showing you how much time you're saving.
37:09
Because instead of going to all of Reddit manually and finding the right trends and everything,
37:13
it just shows when you're saving like 45 minutes looking at those trends.
37:18
in a matter of seconds.
37:20
But you still have to remember,
37:21
you have to contextualize the data because remember,
37:25
it's still not necessarily your customers and how they think.
37:28
It's helpful.
37:29
It's a holistic picture.
37:30
It's right tool,
37:31
right job.
37:31
Sometimes you need a hammer,
37:32
sometimes you need a wrench.
37:34
And I think the term you described right there from UX classes I take is like the micro persona.
37:39
But sometimes when marketing kind of falls flat,
37:41
we take that micro persona and we throw it to sales like,
37:44
this is the official persona.
37:45
And what you're saying,
37:46
you've got to validate that research.
37:48
You do because it's,
37:48
remember,
37:49
B2B transactions are complex because you have a business partnering with a business over the course of years.
37:57
And business models are not a monolith,
38:02
right?
38:02
And people's roles are not a monolith.
38:04
What an IT director does in a hospital is different than what an IT director does at a Fortune 5000 software company,
38:13
right?
38:13
You can't just assume that what they do,
38:14
they might have similarities.
38:17
But how they think about things are different.
38:19
I got a selfish question I got to ask.
38:22
Hopefully our listeners care too.
38:23
Keep up behind you.
38:25
Yeah,
38:26
yeah.
38:28
Grogu was reading it last night,
38:29
it looks like.
38:32
So yeah,
38:32
I've noticed when I do my research,
38:37
I struggle with leading the witness.
38:40
And I know you touched earlier,
38:42
go in with a hypothesis.
38:43
So I think
38:44
I probably overextend that.
38:47
So how can you help people like obviously one get buy-in to be like hey we actually have to go in with some intent and then
38:54
I think more important is how do you get people to like okay you've got your hypothesis but don't lead the witness just make sure you're getting answers to the questions you need.
39:02
Can you explain what you mean by intent?
39:05
It's still the essence of what do you want to do with the business and why.
39:10
You can have conversations about people on all sorts of stuff.
39:13
Brand perception,
39:14
brand identity.
39:16
their user experience,
39:18
how they build a consideration set,
39:20
a closed lost.
39:22
There's different types of ways.
39:24
So it's on my site,
39:25
Content Lift,
39:25
and I bucket them there as a way for people to get started.
39:30
And I think you start with what is it we want to do and where's the gap of information to help us make a informed decision around that.
39:40
And that can be all sorts of stuff.
39:41
We want to increase
39:43
NPS conversions.
39:45
Why are people not answering it?
39:48
Why are people not filling our MBS survey?
39:50
It's a valid question.
39:52
I know it's a highly debated.
39:54
metric.
39:55
Some people love it.
39:56
Some people hate it.
39:56
But if your business says,
39:58
yeah,
39:58
this is a key thing for us.
40:00
Why is only 5%
40:01
of people we send you send it out?
40:03
Let's go find out maybe.
40:06
Leading,
40:07
not leading is hard.
40:09
I struggled with it when I was a reporter.
40:13
It's one of the few things that are challenging.
40:15
I go through a lot of that in the guide that Gabe mentioned that he used that I built.
40:22
If you look at any type of investigative discipline,
40:26
so let's just say law enforcement,
40:30
legal,
40:31
medical,
40:33
medical being more like social sciences,
40:36
therapeutical,
40:37
even what I do as a journalist,
40:41
and you look at sort of the essence of how people gather data,
40:45
they don't care about subjectivity,
40:48
they care about actions,
40:49
behaviors,
40:50
facts,
40:51
timelines.
40:52
The jobs to be done,
40:54
folks,
40:54
are great at this.
40:56
Where did you start?
40:58
Tell me about every single step in between.
40:59
Where did you end?
41:02
And you don't ask things like,
41:05
you sound frustrated about that.
41:08
Why was that your reaction?
41:10
Sounding frustrated is leading the witness.
41:13
It may not sound like it,
41:14
but you are,
41:16
right?
41:17
I don't know if that answers the question,
41:19
Eric,
41:19
but it's...
41:21
Really about trying to remove yourself from you have an objective right of thing you want to understand but your goal is to naturally organically get the data then
41:34
Feed gets the naturally in or gonna get the data to help inform that objective and understand it
41:41
Let me click another way Josh Braun sales guy.
41:44
I don't know if any of you follow Josh Braun.
41:46
Yeah,
41:46
no
41:47
Yeah, I knew Zach would good
41:50
At Customer Discovery,
41:52
he calls it a jobs-be-done methodology.
41:55
But his whole thing is detach yourself from the outcome,
41:59
right?
42:00
From a sales perspective,
42:01
it's the same thing as a researcher.
42:02
You don't care about the outcome.
42:03
You care about an objective truth.
42:07
That's it.
42:08
So behaviors,
42:09
actions,
42:09
timelines,
42:10
narratives.
42:11
What did you do?
42:12
Why did you do this?
42:13
Tell me more about that.
42:15
What did you do next?
42:17
A clarifying question.
42:18
This is my last one for you,
42:19
Ryan.
42:20
is that from sales books I've read in the past piece of research that's about 50%
42:25
of the decision comes from the buyer's emotion.
42:29
So when I heard that piece of not asking about like that feeling,
42:35
it runs contrary to what I've learned from sales of like,
42:39
Hey,
42:39
if you're talking to a buyer and you notice this underlying irritation,
42:45
call it out.
42:47
Because it might be something there that's influencing that decision.
42:51
I'm curious,
42:51
is that,
42:52
how might that differ from what you're talking about right now?
42:56
That's a fair question.
42:57
So
42:58
I'm not saying don't get emotion.
43:00
Maybe another thing I should say is these things naturally come up in the conversation.
43:04
People will tell you how they felt about things organically.
43:07
You don't need to ask them.
43:09
They will tell you.
43:12
Oh,
43:13
I really struggled with that part.
43:14
The onboarding.
43:16
could have been better why do you mean what do you mean by that i felt this and this happened here interesting what is it about that um that makes why is that so memorable for you tell me more about like why that those were your feelings so
43:32
i'm not leading anything right what um happens sometimes is was it frustrating using our stuff what challenges did you have with our stuff
43:41
I mean you can ask that it's not wrong but
43:45
You often want these things to come up organically if you can,
43:49
or at least just how did you feel about the onboarding process?
43:52
Maybe they loved it.
43:54
Because if you ask them,
43:54
what was challenging with the onboarding process?
43:56
Now they're like,
43:57
okay,
43:57
now I got to answer this.
43:58
I got to give them something now.
44:00
It was actually great,
44:01
but okay,
44:01
what?
44:02
Tell me the one thing.
44:04
Not wrong,
44:05
but is that helpful?
44:07
That's super helpful for me because I know I've given the wrong line of questioning more times than the right.
44:15
Not wrong.
44:16
You coach shameless plug.
44:17
Do you coach folks on this?
44:18
Yeah,
44:19
I do.
44:19
You hear that everybody,
44:22
you hear that you need to be in Ryan's DMS.
44:26
Give you an hour for free and that's it.
44:27
The rest,
44:28
you got to go directly to Ryan.
44:30
I answered that.
44:31
I answered,
44:31
I answered them all.
44:32
My DMS too.
44:33
Seriously.
44:33
People want to message me.
44:35
Yeah.
44:35
We talk shit,
44:35
but it's always valuable too.
44:38
Yeah.
44:40
Ryan wants to be respectful of your time.
44:42
And I feel like you just gave us.
44:43
and everyone else like a huge masterclass on buyer and customer investigation where can people learn more about you when can they discover more and just get better and brighter at this
44:55
I'm like all y'all LinkedIn is where
44:57
I spend too much time and everyone thinks I'm weird.
45:01
I always say it pays the bills.
45:02
That's it.
45:03
Just two places.
45:03
I'm pretty easy to find and I'm always willing to help.
45:07
I like helping.
45:09
This stuff's hard,
45:10
man.
45:10
I think people don't understand how hard that it is,
45:14
especially for marketers who I was very privileged that I got taught in business.
45:19
I grew up in business.
45:22
So I have it.
45:23
very privileged position it's super hard so if any of y'all feel like frustrated you're not alone you're in good company and you're doing a good job amazing that's an amazing way to get in contact with you ryan
45:41
merci beaucoup we're very excited to have had the chance to have you on the show and thank you thank you everybody it doesn't be great love it that's not a problem right
45:51
We're not marketers.
45:54
See you guys.
45:55
See ya.
45:56
Later.
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