But before you build and grow a product-led business, you need to first take a step back to understand your users. Because ultimately, knowing and understanding your users' motivations and anxieties is the foundation of delivering value to your end users.
In this course, you will:
Ramli John:
Really, your customer holds the keys to success. They hold the answers to what it is that they sign up for. What is the promise that they were perceiving? What is it they were feeling when they signed up for your product and they achieved that aha moment? They achieved that result that they were looking for. What kind of things did you hear from the colleagues? All of that answers lie with your customers. It doesn't come from experts like Wes Bush or your CEO, or even your investors or other expert advisors out there. The answer lies with your customers. They hold the keys. And instead of hearing it second hand or third hand from somebody who knows a friend of a friend, or the friend of a friend of that car customer, let's go directly to our source. It's so important, but the problem is marketing and product folks, according to this study by GoSchedule that I'm going to link in the learning portal, 65% of marketing and product teams, rarely do audience research. If it's so business critical, why do we avoid this? It could be fear of talking to our customers. It could be, "Oh, I don't want to bother my users."
Ramli John:
But really the upside to this so much more higher. A study by Profit said, "The customer research leads to two to three times higher in growth just before doing customer research." The upside is here. And that's the reason why we're here, is to talk about customer research and user research. Really, our challenge wasn't our challenge, it's to get you to talk to your customers because the reality is that they don't bite. Imagine your most active users. Chances are they want to talk to somebody. Imagine somebody from your favorite tool. What is that fear of? Netflix? What is it that you use? Canva. Imagine if somebody from the product team and reached out and said, "Hey, we want to jump on a 10, 20 minute call with you." I would say, "Heck yeah." Your customers want to talk to you. They want to provide their input and their journey. They really do. That's a reality. That's the truth, even though originally I'm scared. I thought they don't want to talk to me.
Ramli John:
I'm talking about active users, your best customers, but there's actually five types of customers you should be talking to. First one is new users, people who just signed up or just are either trying or somebody who just talked to your sales. Second, customers who left you. Why? You want to find out what that. One of the challenges like, why would they want to talk to you, that's a good question. One thing you can do is you want to tell them that you're not in sales. You're not trying to sell them up. And you could also offer an incentive like a 25 or $50 Amazon gift card. For me from past experience, has really worked. Three, talk to shoppers, people who are just evaluating a product, who haven't committed yet. Fourth is your active customers. And fifth is your inactive customers, people who are paying, but they're not really active anymore.
Ramli John:
And if you want to start out of this five, the first one you will really want to start off is your active customers. These are your best customers. Really, according to April Dunford, she wrote this book, Obviously Awesome. The key, the step one to her 10 step in nailing your product positioning so customers get it, buy it, and love it, is talking to your best fit customers, because she said ... and I agree with this, they hold the key to understanding your product's value. They're the ones that are paying you. The ones that are coming over and over again. And our task is, "Why are you using us? What made you come?" I'm actually starting to lead to where I'm trying to go. So talk to your best fit. That's the easiest one to talk to because they already want to talk to you. So for best results, you also want to talk to people who just signed up. One thing to keep in mind, once again, is you want to reaffirm you're not there to sell them, or you're not in sales. You're doing research. And if that doesn't work, find out if you can offer an incentive. Really, you want to make them feel comfortable that this is not a sales pitch or you're not trying to "gotcha" them, kind of bait and switch, trying to peer pressure or pressure them into buying.
Ramli John:
So I want you to make that commitment to talk to your customers in the next week. One of the questions you might ask, well, if the eager ones, it's like really, I'm so eager I just want to talk to a lot of people. You might ask, "How many should I talk to?" Really, just research from Google, typically between five to 10 is when you start hearing the same thing over and over again. That's the point where, "Okay, I've heard enough. I'm starting to hear the same story, the same journey, and the same points, the same pain points." Then that's when you can stop interviewing. So to reach out to your customer, we've provided a templated email that you can send out, super easy, that you can send out to your active customers right now.
Ramli John:
And I know for bigger companies, you have to go through approvals to go through this. That's okay, but I'm challenging you to start going through that process. Send this to two to three people. If you really want to take action, we want to help people who are ready to take action. So the question I have for you is, who is actually going do this by end of the day? Because remember, this program is not for people who just want to learn. Yeah, you just want to learn, but we are here for people who want to take what Wes has written in this book that we put together in this program to help you. Our success is taking your business to the next level. And that requires action from the both of us, including you. And this is not just about transferring knowledge. You ready? All right.
Ramli John:
I'm going to share with you the four step process to user interview. If you've done it before, this would be a good refresher, especially for product folks, user experience folks. This is just a refresher. This is something that we've put together after going through different types of content around user research. Here's the four steps.
