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Ramli John:
Yeah. So just today, how to truly understand the end user. Right now, where we are in week three. So May 6, 2021, hopefully, that's the right date. In terms of just some basic announcements. Just one second.
Wes Bush:
Thanks Alex.
Ramli John:
Just some announcements, please complete the PLG Certification Program halfpoint. We're going to send out a survey this afternoon for everybody, just for me and Wes and make sure that we are providing success. They're still halfway through the program and we want to make sure we hit it out of the ballpark for all of you and make sure you... I've been doing a lot of calls around success for you, so that we want to make sure that [inaudible 00:00:43] Second tomorrow we're doing an intro to PLG. So you can invite your whole team. A thing I hear over and over again is how do I get buy-in from my team? Well, one of the ways to get buy-in is to get somebody, an expert like Wes, to tell them that they need to do this. So we're going to do it particularly invite your whole team.
Ramli John:
The link is there. I'm going to email this as well. lu.ma/intro-to-plg. And I also want to let you know that we're here to help take advantage of any consulting line or live expert Q and A's. We are here to help and also in the dashboard, I don't see enough people taking advantage of the direct consulting line. I've only had one person fill that out to give feedback on their website. We love to be overwhelmed with requests. That is a good problem to have for us. And we are, like I said, I've told a lot of people, this I'm here as a connector. I'm here to connect you to resources, to people, to consultants, we will get you... My job is to make sure you succeed with whatever to your journey with ProductLed. So don't hesitate to reach out. I'd love to hear more from you. Send me a stocks. Send me an email. Send me a DM. As well as today where this whole fits in, I'm just going to pass it off to Wes, how understanding your end users really does fit in with us?
Wes Bush:
Yeah, definitely. So whenever you think of like, "Okay, where does user research really fit into this whole PLG approach?" Is really comes down to just understand the end user and why that's really the core and crux of building a successful product at business is because when you really understand why is someone coming to our site? Why is someone wanting to use our products? And you're able to communicate that effectively and then actually deliver on that result as soon as possible within the products. You create this incredible feedback loop where people are able to actually experience to dive your product very quickly, but none of that is going to happen. You're not going to be able to deliver on your value of the product. You're not going to be able to actually communicate what your product's value is all about if you don't truly understand what the core value is.
Wes Bush:
So that's why I'm so excited for today. It's a super important topic. It can be a lot of work though. So just be prepared to get your hands dirty whenever it comes to your user interviews. And what I'm really excited about today is in the activity that Katelyn is going to take you through, you're going to be able to actually get some hands-on practice of how to actually do this because I think user research interviews when done right, that can be super effective, but when done wrong, obviously they can lead you down some wrong alleyways. So Ramli, why don't you just quickly introduce Katelyn.
Ramli John:
Yeah, but before I do, I just want to reiterate once again. I know a lot of folks here come from product backgrounds, from marketing that you've probably done a few user interviews. When I saw Katelyn do jobs to be done MTV, I was like, "I've been doing this for years wrong, like literally." And I'm like, "Man [inaudible 00:03:53]" Like I said, I've been in marketing for 10, 15 years and she does this full time and she really schooled me on this. I mean, just a little bit about Katelyn. I just want to hype her up. She is the founder and CEO of Customer Camp and really this is her specialty.
Ramli John:
She helps marketers and product teams figure out triggers for customers to buy. This is her... She's an expert at this. If you follow her on Twitter, I suggest you do. This is all she talks about. Leaders like Rand Fishkin, [Headon 00:04:26] Shaw, other leaders are actually listening to Katelyn to talk about customer research. She's been featured in Forbes, Inc.USA today, a bunch of other places. So I just want to give it up. If you can give a reaction of round of applause right now, I know we're not in in-person, right now for Katelyn. Please welcome Katelyn to the virtual stage.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Thank you everybody. This is awesome. I'm just going to share my screen and I love what Ramli said about, "Oh, I've been doing this wrong all this time." Because you're going to hear in my story, that's exactly what happened to me after doing hundreds of interviews and realizing, "Oh, shit. This is not the way this is supposed to be done." So I'm really excited you're all here. We're going to have a really actionable workshop. The goal is not just for me to talk about how to do this. I want to show you, I want you to practice listening and seeing what types of questions I would ask. And then I want you to practice doing it yourself so that you can walk away with more confidence and feel like, "Oh yeah, I've got this." And if you've done interviews with users and customers before then you might be like, "Okay, I feel like I'm pretty good at this."
Katelyn Bourgoin:
If you haven't done it, you might be really nervous. And this is a good safe space for you to practice it with other peers. And so I'm thrilled. So let's dive in. Now, in addition to this workshop, I know that you also have access to two short videos from me and to a workbook. So I'm going to actually just pop a link in the chat now because you're going to use that workbook during today's session. So let me just open that up. I'm going to pop a link to the workbook. You can get this from a Google drive that's shared with you already via ProductLed. And I'm going to give you another link. We're going to use an interview summary today which I'll get to in a minute, but this is for a fillable PDF version of that.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So I'm going to drop both these in the link, grab these because we're going to be using these. Okay. So the agenda for today, we're going to do a quick introduction to customer discovery interviews. This is a really kind of light introduction. Again, the videos that you already have in the ProductLed program, I would watch those as well. Go back if you haven't watched those yet, because they're going to fill some gaps that I'm not going to cover right now, but I'm going to then demonstrate an interview and you're going to have time to practice actually doing an interview and then we're going to do some Q and A. So as the team hyped me up and mentioned, I'm really nerdy about customer research. And I have been nerdy with this for quite a while. So back in 2019, I tweeted and I said, "Prediction: In 2020 audience research will be hotter than... Automated nurture funnels in 2016, chatbots in 2017, micro influencers in 2018 and AI powered everything in 2019. Why? Without it, none of that stuff works anymore."
Katelyn Bourgoin:
And you can see that some people agree with us and one of those people was Sarah Pion. And at the time Sarah was over on the growth team at Drift. Drift happens to be one of the fastest growing software companies in history. They also happened to make chatbots. So the fact that they're agreeing, yes, without audience research, none of these tools matter. It just goes to show you that this is really core to what growth focused companies really believe. And so I'm going to introduce myself a little bit. So I started my first business at 25. I started a branding agency and grew that, got to work with some awesome clients like Target and Holiday Inn. I then launched a second company a year later, which was a restaurant consulting business, sold that within a couple of years.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
And I was like, "All right, this service business thing is cool, but I want to do something bigger. I want to do something that can scale." That's what a lot of founders start up software companies for. And I said, "I'm going to start a tech company. How hard could that be?" Well, as it turns out very hard. So this is the day that my co-founder and I were celebrating because our company, Vendeve, had just been called the next LinkedIn for women by Inc magazine. And so we were really pumped and excited and of course, sharing with people how excited we were. But if you could see what was happening inside the company at that time, it did not look nearly as exciting from the inside. So it looked a lot more like this. So some of you might recognize this journey. You might feel like you're on this journey right now, but long story short, we were not a ProductLed company.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
We were really good at with acquiring new users because that's my background in marketing, but our product wasn't sticky. We couldn't get people to hang around. It was a network. So we needed them to be active, invite their friends, engage, and they weren't taking the actions we needed them to be taking. And at the time we were going out and we were talking to users and we thought we were doing the right thing. But as it turns out, we just weren't actually asking the right questions or gathering information for them in the meaningful way. And I'm going to talk more about that shortly. But basically I then had to close the company. It was heartbreaking, had to tell all my investors I'd lost their money and had to figure out what the heck am I going to be when I grow up? I thought I was going to be a tech founder.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
And now I have no idea. I was lucky because I had built this amazing community in the startup ecosystem here in Atlantic Canada. And actually our lead investor came to me and said, "We saw that you were really good on the marketing side. Your team was good at getting people to know about you, get the word out, that sort of thing, not so good on the product side, we've got all these product founders that are building really interesting and exciting things, but they can't get people to know about them. Would you work with some of them?" And I was like, "Yes, I need money. Absolutely." And so I would go and I would sit down with these incredible teams. Many of whom had raised tens of millions of dollars were building products for Tesla and like big, interesting solutions, real innovation.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
And I would sit down in their boardroom and I'd ask them the question that as a marketer I needed to know, which was tell me about your customers. And I was surprised by how often I wasn't able to get a really clear answer. So either they would say things like, "Okay, we target this audience, but also we're thinking about this one and this one and this one." Or I'd hear the founders kind of arguing about who the audience was. One team told me that they sold to companies that sell on the internet with anywhere between 10 and 500 employees. So I was like, "All right, clearly there's this gap." People are not clear enough about who their customers are and what drives those customers. And I was like, "How common is this?" And so I put a survey out on Twitter.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
I like Twitter. And I asked, "Hey freelance marketers and copywriters. When you first start working with a new client, how often do they need help zeroing in on their right fit customer segments?" And the answer that came back was almost time or more often than not. So I was like, "Okay, teams need help better understanding their customers." That's work that I'm interested in doing and that's what I do today. So I work with companies, organizations like ProductLed and I help them to better understand their customers. I did that through the workshops like this one and some on-demand training. We do a little bit of consultant work, but not a ton. So this is kind of like my backstory to how I got to where I am. But here's what I'm going to tell you. I didn't get here quickly because I was actually a really big research skeptic coming out of my startup.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So I had done all the things that they tell you you're supposed to do. We went out and we did 300 customer discovery interviews before we launched the product. I thought that I was validating the people wanted what we were building. And then when we brought it to market and it wasn't working and we weren't seeing the results that we wanted to see, we did more and more interviews and more and more customer discovery, trying to figure out what needed to be fixed and ultimately never got there. And it's because of we had been doing that research all wrong. And I don't want you guys to make the same mistake. So here are four lessons that I learned really the hard way. Number one, discovery is not selling. And when I say it's not selling, I don't mean it's not about selling your product.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
I mean, it's not about also selling your ideas. So oftentimes we'll go into discovery, wanting to kind of like pitch the users on things that we might want to be working on, getting them to like see the value in things that we think are awesome and unintentionally be trying to sway them to say, yes, this looks good or I'm excited about this. And really that can lead you in the wrong direction. Number two, opinions. Opinions are dangerous. So we all have lots of opinions and we will freely share them. And we will share them at length and with great kind of like gumption. But when you actually dig in, and then you ask people about their behavior, oftentimes their behavior doesn't align with their opinion. And that brings me to point number three, which is the people lie. They will lie to you unintentionally sometimes, wanting to paint themselves to look better or different than they actually are.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
And oftentimes they're lying to themselves. So if you ask them about some hypothetical future, they will tell you what they think is true. So if you were to ask me before I was pregnant, if you were to say, "Hey, Katelyn, I know that you're trying to lose that last 10 pounds. It's January 1st. Do you have any new year's plans?" And I'd be like, "Yeah. I'm going to the gym five times a week and I'm going to try the keto diet. And I'm going to give up booze for two months and like all of that, I believe to be true." And then if you say, "Okay, Katelyn, tell me what you did in the last month to try to lose some weight." I'd be like, "Oh, well I sat and watched Netflix and ate a million hamburgers."
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So asking people about some hypothetical future, asking them to give you their opinion, it can lead you in the wrong direction. And this is the big one that I learned that is really different than what I was expecting. So who you talk to is important, but when you talk to them actually matters more. And this might sound really counter-intuitive since people like me are always saying, "You've got to understand your customers. You've got to understand your users." But ultimately this is an insight that comes from some really, really smart people. People who've spent their whole lifetime, trying to figure out why people buy things and how innovation can be more than a hit a game of hit and miss. So one of those people is Clayton Christensen, and I'd love to hear in the chat if people are familiar with Clayton, but Clayton was a Harvard business professor.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
He's the author of a bunch of amazing books. And the most recent one that I had discovered, I wish I discovered it when I was still doing my startup, is Competing Against Luck where he introduces the concept of jobs to be done. Sounds like everybody knows him. So Clayton says, "Our long held belief that understanding the customer is the crux of innovation is wrong. Customers don't buy products or services. They hire them to do a job." And so this really changed my way of thinking about customer discovery. I had been thinking that the goal was to really understand the users and to ask them questions and to get them to validate that we were building the right features and that they want to what we were building. And really what I was missing out on was understanding what was the actual job that they were trying to get done.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Mike says also Tony [inaudible 00:16:54] work is also fantastic. I actually had the pleasure of working with Bob Moesta recently. We did a presentation about how to do customer interviews and Bob Moesta is one of the architects of Jobs To Be Done. He's actually the one who brought it to Clayton. And so I can actually share a link to that interview that Bob and I did. Bob led the interview and you get to see how Bob takes notes, which is a really interesting process, but I'll share a link to that as well so if you want to see another Jobs To Be Done interview, but yes. So understanding jobs to be done, getting a clearer picture on what the real goal of understanding users were. It changed the way that I thought about customer discovery and interviews. So with that said, if it's not a boat, who you interviewed, but it's about when then here's the question.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Who should you interview? Well, ideally you want to interview who've recently bought from you, right? People who actually will remember the triggers that were going on in their life. They're going to remember what led them to seeking a new solution. You're going to get a lot of really great insights from those folks. So the other people you can interview are people who bought from a direct or an indirect competitor. So when I talk about a direct or an indirect competitor, I mean, direct competitors are businesses that do the same job, the same way you do. So for a simple example, McDonald's could be a direct competitor with Burger King. But if you're trying to get something quick to eat on the go, you want to satisfy your hunger on the go. A secondary competitor could be a vending machine, right? So they do the same job in a different way.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
But oftentimes when companies are trying to do really innovative things, they come to me and they say, "Oh, I can't talk to customers. We are building this new thing. Nobody else is doing it yet." We'll guarantee you, there are people out there that are doing the same job in a different way. And those people you could learn a lot from as well. And lastly, talk to people who are currently in the buying journey. So people who put their hand up and say, "I'm looking for a solution for this problem." Those people you're going to learn a lot from too because you're going to learn what else they've tried, why it didn't work for them, where their dissatisfaction came from with other solutions. So these are the folks who should be talking to not some aspirational person who breaches like you, who matches some persona that you think that your customers might be.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So the goal of the interview is to understand the customer's buying journey. Again, this is very different than what I was taught about how to do interviews. And the reason why this is so interesting is because when you really dig in and understand the whole journey that led them through I've got a problem I'm trying to solve to starting to search for solutions, noticing solutions that might work right through to hiring a product and or signing up for that product, trying it out, having that first experience, getting a sense of whether it's working for them. There's so much intel in that buying journey that you cannot get through any other method. There's lots of ways to get data on your customers, you can run surveys, you can look at chat logs, you can have click tracking everywhere on your site.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
You should use all of those. Those are all awesome. But there's things that you can get from an interview that you can't get in any other method. And that's the real value is deeply understanding the buying journey. All right. So thinking about the buying journey, interestingly, this comes from Bob's team. Most buying journeys actually follow a very similar like a timeline. So it starts off with what I call the triggering event. So the triggering event is something that happened in that customer's life that made them first become aware that they had a problem to solve or job to be done. So it could be that something that they were using before broke, it could be that they had a new requirement, whatever that might be there's a triggering event that happens in their life, where they go from not having a job to do, to having a job to do.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
And at that point they will start passively looking at solutions. They will start noticing things that before they may have been blind to. So think about if you've ever bought a vehicle, you might notice how you didn't notice all of the other makes and models of that same car that are on the road. And then all of a sudden, once you buy it, or you're thinking about buying it, you see them everywhere. That's what happens with the triggering event. Suddenly you start seeing possible solutions everywhere that you weren't paying attention to before. Usually then, there's some type of catalyst that's going to push that person into actively looking for a solution. And the actively looking stage, they are asking friends for recommendations. They are maybe reading G2 Crowd reviews. They're really trying to get a sense of what their choice set entails.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
And they might be trying competitor solutions or secondary competitor solutions. Things that you don't think of as your direct competitor, but they're using to get the job done. Then there will be a catalyst that will push them into decision mode. At that point, they're making kind of like a short list of these are the things that I could use and they are deciding what their trade offs are. This one looks great, but it's more expensive than this one, but this one doesn't have that feature and that's the most important thing for me. That's all happening kind of in that deciding mode. They will then buy your thing and use your thing and in the case of a lot of you, that means maybe signing up for that free trial and getting a sense of what the experience is like. And then they'll start using it and they will start evaluating it.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
And they'll ask themselves, is this working for me? Is it getting the job done? And if the answer is yes, then they're going to be satisfied. They're going to tell their friends about it. They're going to invite their coworkers to join. They're going to keep using it, being an active user. If it's not quite doing the thing, maybe they'll try to find something else to use it in conjunction with to get the whole job done or if they're disappointed, then they churn and they go elsewhere and they look for something else to hire. So this is the typical buying journey. And the purpose of the interview is for you to really map out this whole journey. And that's what we're going to show you right now. Okay. So before we start this mock interview, I know that somebody had volunteered to let me interview them, which I'm really excited about.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
You all have the workbook that I provided. And in that workbook, you'll see a template, which is what I call the note taking template. I have found that taking notes by hand is really helpful because it helps you to avoid trying to madly type down everything the person is saying verbatim. And you should be recording your interviews anyway. So you can go back and relisten to them or share parts of them with your team. So don't worry about having to madly take down all the notes, but you can have your note taking template. I've got mine right here. I do it in a notebook or on a piece of paper and you have one in your workbook. So what I'd love for you to do is take out that note taking template right now. And as I do this interview, I want you to be trying to listen for the things that I'm listening for.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So what I'm listening for is I'm listening for the buying journey. So I'm listening for, what do I think the trigger event was? What was the catalyst that moved them into actively looking? What are the catalyst that moved them into deciding? I'm also listening for their stories. So oftentimes somebody will tell a story. And rather than trying to, again, write down everything they say verbatim, maybe they'll say I got into a big fight with my coworker because we had a disagreement around when something was due and so I realized we needed a better collaboration tool than what we were using. So rather than trying to write down all of that, I would just write down, fight with coworker bullet point. I'll write down what are their unmet goals? So what is it that they're trying to achieve that is motivating them to seek something new and what are the alternate solutions that they considered, tried or used? So that could be, again, it could be a spreadsheet, it could be hiring an intern to do it. It doesn't necessarily mean other-
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Hiring an intern to do it. It doesn't necessarily mean other direct competitors. So I'm excited to interview, was it Victoria who had agreed to let me interview them?
Speaker 1:
Victoria from Predictive Index, please show yourself to the virtual stage.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Awesome.
Victoria:
Hi everyone.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Hey. How's it going?
Victoria:
Great. Caitlin, I wanted to say I'm nine months out. I have a nine month old, so congratulations.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Okay, good. So I mean, you're rocking it, doing stuff in the world again. This is good. [crosstalk 00:25:34].
Victoria:
Exactly. Yeah. There's life afterwards.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
I love it. I love it. So for everyone who's watching, I'm going to interview Victoria about her decision to join ProductLed. And the reason I decided to do that style of interview is all of you have made that same decision. So you're all going to be able to resonate with this buying journey. Then when you go off into your practice round and you interview each other, I want you to interview each other about your decision to join ProductLed. And what you'll find is that even in just a couple of conversations, the one that you're going to see me do, and the ones that you're going to practice, you're going to start to notice some really interesting and compelling patterns. So Victoria, if it's okay with you, I'm just going to open up my notebook here. I'm using the same workbook that you guys have access to.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
I've got the same script of questions. You'll see that I don't stick to the script. I have done a lot of these interviews. I've gotten very comfortable with the process. So I'm going to jump around a bit. And as you do more of this, you'll feel just as comfortable to jump around, really follow the story. But when you're first getting started, you'll see that there are 10 questions that I have in bold that I call the starter questions. And if you just start off by just trying to ask those 10 questions, you're going to be able to pull at a lot of the important details.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
All right. So the other thing that I'm going to do as I'm interviewing Victoria, is when she says something that's particular interesting, I might go okay, time out, and I'm going to draw attention to it. So you guys hear what I heard and why that was interesting. Sound good? All right. So I want you to get your note taking template, have it in front of you. This is an active thing. Watch, but also be listening for the right things. All right. So I'm going to dive right in. Any questions before we get started? See, thank you, Ramli for continuing to drop the link to the workbook so people have access to that. All right. Okay. So Victoria, thank you so much for making some time to chat with me today.
Victoria:
Thank you for having me here. It's a pleasure.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
And I'm really excited to hear more about what led you to join ProductLed. And of course, I'm really excited to hear what you think about it. And I want to dive into that as well, but I'm also really curious about all the events that were going on in your world that motivated you to commit at this time. So this interview might be a little bit different than maybe a phone or interview done in the past. I'm not just going to read a scripted question list to you. It's really more of a conversation. At some points you might find that I kind of dig in and ask you for some followup details. And the reason why is, I just want to make sure that I'm hearing everything in your own words. I'm not kind of assuming anything. Sound good?
Victoria:
Sounds like fun. Let's do it.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
All right. Let's do it. So tell me, what is your job title? And beyond that, tell me about a bit of the work that you do and your role at the company?
Victoria:
Yeah, absolutely. I'm the Vice President of Product Marketing at The Predictive Index. And we're a SAS platform company that really aims to connect business strategy and people strategy, talent optimization. That's the category we're building. And I've been here for two and a half years or so. And in January is when I transitioned from a sales customer success front of the house type of role into product marketing. So I'm new to the product marketing world, and my job very quickly transitioned from really executing to a lot more strategy.
Victoria:
And so my team works very closely to connect marketing product and accommodate our client base, which mostly are our trusted network of partners. So there's a lot of collaboration, navigation that's happening, but more than anything, I find myself in a very different position where I'm really doing longer-term planning, strategy planning, thinking about much bigger things and trying to connect the right pieces together. And again, it's kind of a newer muscle for me.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Awesome. Okay. And so what are some of your top priorities right now in this new role?
Victoria:
Sure. I'd say the two biggest priorities I have is setting the pricing and packaging vision for the organization, for either new products that we're releasing or just rethinking. So in our journey to PLG, we're really going to flip everything we're doing on its head. That's one thing. The second thing is really standing up that research market intelligence, part of our go to market strategy and putting in motion the development of new product or augmentation, evolution of some of the existing products we have.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So just to reiterate, what you just shared there. So setting pricing and packaging vision is a big one right now, owning the product strategy. And then you said new product, so like innovation, informing innovation, is that right?
Victoria:
It's more about informing the innovation with market strategy, competitive intelligence, really trying to understand where are we trying to go, and then partnering with the product team to separate, inform the strategy.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
What does success look like for you in this role personally?
Victoria:
Well, the first three months were just about surviving. So I think that really the success will be seen in the money, the way I think of it. So we have very aggressive goals for how well we want some of the products we're launching to do. And I think when those results come in, that's the true testament of success. I think along the way, there's probably going to be a lot of markers and milestones to help inform whether we're headed in the right direction. And some of those milestones could come in the form of sentiment coming from our partners, coming from our clients saying, oh, we really love the new direction you're going in. Or even, you don't like the direction you're going in and some of those things and how we react to them will probably be milestones for success.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Got you. Okay. So tell me about like joining the ProductLed program. What were you hoping it would do for you?
Victoria:
So I think there's a few things. The first is I had, I think a light bulb moment when I was speaking to a colleague Elisa Shane, who's in this program and she actually said, she was like, "Hey, did you read ProductLed?" And I was like, "Yeah, yeah, I did." And she's like, "Well, there's this really cool chapter on pricing and strategy and did you read it?" And I was like, "I did." And then she's like, "Okay, why don't you go check out this chapter again?" And so I re-read the chapter that night and I just reminded myself of something I knew a long time ago at university, which is for me to truly learn something, a class just does it, I need to talk it out. So for me, just reading something doesn't always drive it all the way home. So I think it was a combination of that.
Victoria:
And then getting a bunch of emails over and over, not just about the program, but I mean, we just get PLG spammed, but I don't mind. I read them. I like them, much like other things where I just delete them. These are the emails that I read. So think of as that, and then just, I guess the reality, which was, I was new to doing something and I knew just learning in the job wasn't going to be enough. So I was already in store for something. I think what I was in store for though is different than PLG, I was asking friends and colleagues for recommendations for product marketing classes. And that's what I was looking into.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So you were asking, so to paint this picture for me, you're having this conversation with your coworker. You said her name, Alicia, is that right?
Victoria:
Elisa.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Elisa. Okay. And so you guys are talking about thinking forward to the pricing strategy and she says, have you read the ProductLed book, like go back and read this chapter and how do you feel when she says, go back and read this chapter? What are you thinking?
Victoria:
Oh, it was like, oh my God, I missed something that can help me? Let me go back and check it out. I want to solve this problem.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Right. And so you go back and you reread it. Was there something you missed?
Victoria:
Well, I don't know if the book necessarily has the answers. I think what it's doing is trying to get you to think in a different way or ask different questions. So I think in that respect, I think it was the realization that I needed help or I needed more depth. I had baseline understanding, but what now? How to action the things that you're learning. I think there's a few ways of doing that. And so before I even knew about this program, I was like, okay, I just need to talk to someone about it. I think that was what I was trying to do is talk it out with someone because that is my learning style. It's also just very much how I communicate.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
That makes sense. I'm very much the same way. I always tell my husband I'm a verbal processor, which he's not that way. He needs to think about something and then he'll come with an answer, I'm like, "It's all right now, we can figure this out." Yes. I totally get that. So you haven't found your way to ProductLed quite yet. I mean, obviously you know about the team and the concepts, but you had this aha moment where you're like, I want to be able to talk about this with somebody else. That's the way I learn. So you said, you mentioned asking about other courses or programs. How did you get there? How did you get to that might be the best option?
Victoria:
Yeah, it was when I thought about taking on a brand new role in especially part of the business that I had not been at, I feel like there's a few different ways to learn. You learn on the job, you learn from books or classes, and then you learn by doing and getting the feedback. And so I knew that sometime this year I wanted to take an actual course or class or do something that was outside of the organization. And I think the real need here was that I want to be a change agent. A catalyst.
Victoria:
I really want to drive and help my organization to achieve success, to get to new ways of thinking. And I'm in a position to do so. I think it was really truly understanding how much of a fundamental change moving towards this journey of PLG would be. So I think combined with my need and desire to want to do well, want to learn and then understanding, okay, actually when I thought about it, I was like, I could take this class in product marketing and maybe I still should, but what does my organization actually need right now?
Victoria:
And I was like, I think what we need is leadership to guide us through the journey of PLG. And then it was like, by the way, couldn't articulate it that well at the moment. This was just things happening to you throughout the day. But it was like lots of these mini events, and then Ramli, was bombarding me. So I was like, there's the sign here. Something's happening. So I started getting curious about it, and I think at some point I just clicked on the email and I was like, "Fine. Show me about this certificate." Plus certificate just sounds really cool. I'd be like, "Yes, I want to be certified."
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Tell me why certificate sounds cool. Tell me more about that.
Victoria:
Yeah. Well, I think that in a sea of information and wanting to stand out, there's this desire for credibility, and especially when you're in a new space. I mean, I'm not in a new company, so great. There's at least some people that believe in me in the organization that was a win, but why would someone listen to me? I have never been in marketing and being in product marketing was really new to me. And so certificate almost lends you to that level of credibility, let alone that. But I thought, wow, if everyone in our organization right now is really trying to crack this nut on PLG, wouldn't it just look so cool if I said I had a certificate. That, and yeah, I wanted to learn something.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Got you. Looking like a bad-ass.
Victoria:
Exactly.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So be seen as credible, one thing you said you wanted to be this change agent. You wanted to actually be able to help move the needle in your company. You knew that a book wasn't necessarily going to get you there. You needed something more than that. So when you actually, taking me back a little bit to the moment, so you said Ramli is bombarding you with emails. Do you even know how you got on the PLG email list?
Victoria:
Yeah, I signed up, so I first read the book in early 2020. And I think from reading it, I mean, our company is just like this is sort of the Bible. Everyone has it on their desks and if they haven't read it, they've probably signed up for the newsletters, whatnot. So I got on the list and I skimmed it through, but I don't know how much I understood again, how fundamentally is to change our organization. And you have to remember that for up until the beginning of this year, I was very much in this execution mode of like, oh, PLG stuff is coming at me or information is coming at me, let me internalize it and do something about it. I then found myself in the beginning of the year at the tip of the spear of this. And I'm like, "Oh, shit, I have to actually know what I'm talking about now. So then I'm like, I'm really going to read these emails now.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Got you. So before it was like, okay, it seems like what the company believes, but it's not that critical to my role. And then your role changed. And now it's like, "Oh, shit, now it's actually pretty important to me." I want to put your memory to the test. So you have this conversation with Elisa, you go back, you read the thing, you start to be like, oh, okay, I need something else to help me to step into this future me that is this bad-ass, this change agent. What other things did you consider or try?
Victoria:
The only other thing that I really was considering was taking, again, like a product marketing type of course, that was the competitor in this. Because again, I was consuming so much information either from my colleagues or articles, what not, but I was looking for more because I really wanted to interact with something to get to a layer of depth I wasn't getting to on my own. Intellectually, I can understand things than philosophically, but it's very different when you try to put them into action. And for that, I wanted either a partner in crime to help me digest the material or a class, because again, I love being a student. The word certificate sounds cool.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So you mentioned you considered maybe a product management course. Tell me, did you look at any, did you consider any?
Victoria:
Yeah, I got a link from a colleague of mine for product marketing course, but I went on the website and honestly, I got really overwhelmed by all the offerings. It seemed there was 12 options and I'm like, I don't know where to start. So I abandoned that. My intention was to go back to this person that had recommended it and be like, "Can you help me navigate this thing?" But never got to it.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So you asked a colleague, did you reach out to that colleague directly? Did you ask a bunch of people and she's the one who responded and he's the one who responded or?
Victoria:
Yeah, I had asked a few people in my network for recommendations. They sent me a bunch of things and it was always like on my to-do list. So my strategy was like, survive the first three months of not only being a new working mom, but in a brand new role, in a brand new year, everything like that, brand new department boss, all of that. And then it was like, and if I survive the first three months, then I'll really double down on educating myself, more reading, more outside expertise.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
You mentioned this to-do list that you had, it was always on your to-do list. Is it an actual to-do list? Is it a mental to-do list?
Victoria:
Yeah, I track my goals and to-do's and use a mixture. Mostly I use Asana. That's a really helpful tool and have that on. And then I just have a running list of notes. So if I see cool things, cool links, cool images, I put that all into really high tech Google Doc. Then when I'm in conversations, I'll either can quote something or send a picture out, whatever it is.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Neat. And you said this really intensive goal doc, what do you use to manage that? Is that Asana or is that something else?
Victoria:
Yeah. Asana for tracking, goals, to-do's, future projects, ideas, anything like that goes into my personal Asana board.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
I'm just going to take a quick time out here and say that it's so exciting to talk to Victoria about this because she is identifying a lot of the common triggers that also are reasons why people join the programs that I do. So it's like funny to see this overlap because of course, when it comes to self-development and training, there are moments in our potential customers' lives, where they are going to be more likely to be searching and open to a solution than other times. And she's giving us some really great insight here.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
We'll go until about two o'clock typically a interview would take anywhere between 25 to 45 minutes, because of the structure of today's workshop I don't want to go too much over because I want to make sure that you guys have time to interview each other as well. But lots of really interesting things that we're learning here. What I want to get into now a bit more is understanding once Alicia became or sorry, once Victoria became aware of this potential solution, the certification, what happens next? So we're going to dive into that a bit. I'm just going to have a little bit of water because I lose my voice all the time [inaudible 00:45:24]. It's fun.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So Victoria, you have explored this other course that was recommended to you by somebody at the company, got on their page. It felt overwhelming. Didn't even know where you should start with it. Now Ramli starts assaulting you with emails. Tell me about thinking back, do you remember the first email you opened, where you learned that the certification was even a thing?
Victoria:
Yeah, I think I was in between meetings trying not to multitask, but I was like, all right, this sounds interesting. I have a minute to look it over. I just skimmed it. I think at that point I was like, I might as well try it. I think I had made that decision right there and then. Again, it was very simple. I think like PLG, I'm not trying to be like too much of a fan girl here, but I just love the branding and the simplicity of it. That was a stark difference from, I don't know, other things that I looked into. So it didn't seem as scary to me. And I think that the one thing I didn't know is I was like, I don't know if anyone else has done this at the company before. And I don't know if it's going to be too elementary, because remember, for me, I was like, but I've read the book, but people here talk about this a lot. So it's like, I really want some [inaudible 00:46:49] type of stuff.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Got you. Okay. So you'd read the book and you're concerned that maybe this is not going to be at the level that you need it to be at, but you said there were some other things that were more scary. What was scary about some of those other options?
Victoria:
Well, so I think for me it was, and I only really have that one thing to compare it to, which was like product marketing classes. There's too many choices for someone that's looking for something to level them up. I wasn't looking for an entire journey procession of what the next two years of classes could look like. I just needed a little help to get to the next step. Now, I do think I would like that in the future. You get in there, you're like, oh, this is comfy. What comes next? But I don't necessarily want to see all of it upfront or at least at that point I didn't.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So the other one seems too intensive, am I framing that properly? It was just like there's too much here.
Victoria:
Yeah, it was like too much. I didn't know how to navigate it. This wasn't very clear. It was like, there's this free one hour thing you can do, and then there's a class.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Very clear what the next step is that you're going to [crosstalk 00:48:19].
Victoria:
Yeah.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Okay. So you discovered through the email, you've got a minute in between things, you're trying not to multitask. What's wrong with multitasking?
Victoria:
You got to stay focused on one thing to get it done right. Then you move on.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Got you. So you go over to the website, you said you loved the website. You love the way that they communicate. You love the brand. What do you remember reading? Walk me through what you remember as you're first exploring the certification.
Victoria:
I just skimmed the bullet points. The reason I did is because I had made my decision to try it out already. I don't think I needed to be sold on the content or agenda. So honestly, not too much stands out, but what I did do at that point is two different things. The first is I brought this up to my boss and I was like, "Hey, do you know anything about this?" And he was like, "Nope." I was like, "Cool, I'm going to try it." He was like, "Go for it."
Victoria:
And then I was like, I wonder if anyone else knows something about this. That's when my good friend Alex [inaudible 00:49:32] name came up, who's also part of this course. So right away, I was like, "Alex, do you know anything about this?" Because I go to Alex all the time with questions. I know he won't judge me. And he's like, "I do. I actually applied and never heard back. I think it's a tough program to get into." He was joking about it. But I reached out to Alex to see if he knew something about me and right away when he was like, "I'm interested." I was like, "Alex, you got to do this thing with me." Then I was really convinced. At that point-
Victoria:
And then I was really convinced. At that point maybe if I had not talked to Alex, I may have gone back and really read through the bullet points. But then I was just so excited to take a class with Alex, didn't go back to read the bullet points.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Got you. Okay. So Alex had applied. So you go, you quickly skim the page and then you get excited and you're like, okay, before I even go in-depth in this crap, I want to know if anybody else thinks it's good or if I could even do it. So you said you reached out to your boss, what's the timeframe between you being on the ProductLed site reading about it to this conversation with your boss how does that happen?
Victoria:
It was that day, it was over Slack. Everything's immediate now over Slack, right?
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Right.
Victoria:
The truth is, if this thing isn't in front of you, if whatever isn't in front of you, your mind share starts going to other places. And so I knew that if I wanted to do this I needed to just bring it up right away. And so I think I brought it up in a standup and then through Slack we did the rest. I think between, there's a few other things that transpired because Alex then was like, Hey, we can get a discount if we get a third person. And I was like, what, we can get a discount? I was like, let's find a third person and we literally could not have found a better person because not only did Elisa then jump on board, the person that's unknowingly set me on a learning motion in the first place. But then Elisa got like 30 people from our company to join. So it was like fireworks, everything totally just worked out.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Amazing. And I'm going to speed things up a little bit here. I would probably spend more time wanting to dig into this if we had it but I want to move to, so there is some momentum and enthusiasm the company, everybody's pumped up like emojis slop, like flying on Slack, how are you all deciding who's going to come and, tell me about that.
Victoria:
I honestly don't know how things transpired there. Elisa's here so if you actually want to know the answer, you can find out but I don't know how she was able to rally everyone around it, she rocks. So I think that's just what happened. But there's a lot of interest in our organization. It's not surprising that a lot of people raised their hand. So there was a Slack message with a whole lot of people on it and it was like, Hey, who's interested in taking this class. So I think some of them probably just got signed up anyway like, Hey, you're part of the product org, you're coming. Other people maybe were interested. I knew that what I really wanted to do is I wanted to make sure that all parts of the organization were represented. And so I saw a really heavy attendance from product and operations. And I was like, wait a second, we really need some people here from demand gen, marketing, sales and so there's a few other people I called out and I was like jump on this train, PLG train.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Why was that important to have people from different departments represented?
Victoria:
So, I mean, the bit that I was able to independently learn from the book is PLG is not a departmental game, everyone has got to be on board. So it's got to be from the start to the finish and every person has to understand it, has to know it. And I also think the nature of my role is to ensure that there's a balance between product and marketing and partners. And so I saw it as an extension of something I could do which is connecting all of our teams together so we're less siloed. Again also, if we're all on the same train it's a lot faster to get the momentum, get the flywheel going.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Right. Yes, that's a big deal. Being cognizant of time I'm going to spend a little bit of time asking Victoria about her experience so far. And again, I would love to spend more time here if this was in a different session, you guys won't have a tight time window with your customers every time. So you might feel like you have lots of time to ask the things. So if you had to narrow it down, what would you say is the number one reason that you decided to try it?
Victoria:
I think I have a deep desire to make an impact by bringing valuable, tangible experience or expertise to my organization. That's a really fancy way of saying I want to do really good at my job because I really believe that our company's out to do great things. And if I can just be a little bit better and I can just bring a little bit more, I feel like maybe in some way I can help us to get to where we're trying to go.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
I love that. And so now that you're actually in the program or in week three as barely said in the beginning, how does it compare to your initial expectations?
Victoria:
Isn't that what the survey is going to be about? I mean, I think it's exceeded my expectations, honestly because all I thought it was going to be was this live class and this portion. One, it's a lot larger than I thought I was like, it's probably going to be 20, 30 people. But all of a sudden there's this exposure to people all over the world, such different backgrounds. It's so cool. There's so much content. I mean, there's these live Q&A sessions, I joined one yesterday with Kyle and my mind was blown from open view. I was like, oh my God, it's so good. Ramli has connected me with someone else from just a kickoff we had. So to talk through some persona questions I had. So I just feel like it has this networking component that I wasn't expecting. And it's really personal, I love how real it is.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
I love that. And why is that networking component important?
Victoria:
I mean, I don't kill Jesus new in the B2B space, let's call it. New world and journey and all of a sudden I feel like I found these fellow people marching towards the same goal, I think that's rare. If you try to do something that's already been done maybe it's pretty easy to network but I don't feel like it's so easy to be like, really? You're moving to PLG too, tell me more, let's connect. Now I feel like I have some outlet to do so.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Yes. And now that you've been in it for a little while, you'd like to experience some of the benefits, you're impressed with parts of it. But if you could wave a magic wand and make some part of the experience different or better in some way so it better serve you what might you change? Assume anything is possible.
Victoria:
I think I would like a one-on-one extensive session with the leadership team and Wes and Ramli. That might not be for them, the ticket. But,
Katelyn Bourgoin:
One-on-one with the leadership. And what would that do for you?
Victoria:
So a lot of work or a lot of the concepts that we're talking about still require so much alignment and education internally. I mean, I think even if our whole organization went through this, there's just so much to work through and do. And some of that is just time and naturally we're going to get there and scrape our knees and learn but that would be like having consultants come in and really pinpoint like, wait, do this before this, or hold on, pause before you do this. This is a common pitfall. I think those are things you can only figure out by doing. And so there might be some value in bringing someone in and being like, okay, this is our strategy and our game plan. What do you think?
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Right. Got you. And my final question because we are out of time would be, who is this program right for, who's the perfect person that should join this program?
Victoria:
I think that specifically companies that are maybe more in the beginning of their journey or thinking about PLG, probably benefit from this because there's just so much to learn in terms of a person. I do think that someone with a level of influence could benefit from this versus maybe just someone that's executing. I'm not saying it wouldn't be valuable for them but I think specifically someone that's able to have the discussion with decision makers I think could really utilize a lot of the content well.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
That makes sense. There's so much more I would love to dive into with Victoria. There's been so many really incredible insights that she shared throughout this journey. Before we start evaluating this a little bit together, does anybody have a question they're dying to ask Victoria? Maybe we'll just take one or two if you have ones that you're dying to ask her, I'd love to have you post those in the chat. And if not, we'll start extracting some nuggets from this together before we actually go into practice interviews. So Sarah says, great job, great interview.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Awesome. Okay. Thank you so much, Victoria. I am going to do a screen-share again. Talk about their very specific personalized experience during the interview, how to bring this information to more abstract level applied to the majority of visitors had understood. That's what we're going to talk about a little bit. So let me show you how we do more of that. So there, do a screen-share here. Okay. So there's some really interesting things that were heard during this interview. Again, things that stand out to me and from a buyer journey perspective, there's, I'll just show you, here's my notes. It's a lot of scribbling and the notes themselves, it's awesome when you can do these interviews in pairs. And the fact that Victoria has more team members participate in this program is fantastic. The fact that the PLG team is encouraging multiple people at the company to participate is fantastic because then you could do the interview in pairs.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
And after the interview you both compare notes. One person's leading the interview, one person is taking notes and you'll find that you'll both hear really different and interesting things. So it's really good interview in pairs. But some of the things that stood out to me in this interview a big one was, I'd say the initial trigger was that even, and starting with the company, when she first started with the company, she knew about PLG but it wasn't necessarily something that in her role was critical for her to be executing on. So while she could understand the theory and get why it was important it was like this doesn't affect me all that much. When she moved into this new role suddenly then it was like, okay, this is actually something I need to start paying more attention to, need to go back and rethink about what I know here.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
But I'm drinking from a fire hose right now and I'm too busy to do it right now. So I'm going to give myself this three-month window to basically get acclimated to my new role. And then I'm going to start thinking more about this. That was a really interesting trigger because it was like that trigger happened but she had decided, I'm not quite ready yet. Her talking about her Asana, gold tracking document, I thought was really interesting. There's some magic in there from a marketing perspective that you could work with. But this idea that this was something that she kept seeing, it was a priority for her and she knew she wanted to make it happen. It wasn't something she wanted to forget about but she had to prioritize a lot of other things that were happening.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Let's just move over to here. Another thing that stood out to me was the idea that we think when we're working on our landing pages and our sales pages, we're like we want to make sure that all the right information is there. She went through and she just read those bullet points because that's as much time as she wanted to commit to it. And then before she committed more time, it was like, okay, well let me go and check with my boss, number one, to see if I'd even be able to do this before I get too excited about it. And then let's see if anybody else wants to do it. And the idea of being able to do it with coworkers, that was a huge catalyst. It was like, okay, this is way more exciting that I had initially realized and I'm excited to move forward and make this happen.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So what we would do after an interview is you take this hen scratching that you have and you'd sit down and you start to think about, well, what did I actually hear in this interview that was useful and you can put this into your interview summary. And you're going to start as you create a couple of summaries and have a couple of conversations, you're going to start to see a bunch of stuff that overlaps. You'll identify the buying journey, like what were those key stages along the buying journey? The ones that I heard in this conversation or that the job change, that was the number one. It got her into thinking about needing to understand product marketing more obviously and Product-Led Growth more. Then the catalyst that pushed her into actively looking for a solution was this conversation with Alicia where she said, well, did you read that chapter?
Katelyn Bourgoin:
And she was like, yes, but maybe I need to go back and revisit that, maybe I didn't understand it properly. And then the next kind of catalyst was getting that email from Ramli and seeing the certification and realizing, I want to be certified, that sounds appealing. Now I'm not just somebody who knows this stuff, I'm an expert. And the winning value proposition, I think she talked about being a change agent in her organization. See how she didn't get as much into specifically, it was about meeting all of these company metrics. Well, of course those are really important. The winning value proposition for her is being that change agent and she's already stepped into that role in being the one that brought this offering to her team, being the one who actually got everybody excited and on board and all these people joined.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So even within just deciding to move forward, she's already getting that value before she even signed up. And in terms of the next milestone, this idea that, okay, we are learning but are we implementing it right? There's definitely an opportunity there for the ProductLed team to think about how do we help people with that anxiety that they're still not 100% sure that they're applying it right or that they're not doing it in the right sequence or the right order. So this is the binder and you fill this out then you identify what are the drivers that are pushing people through the buying journey. That's the pains that they're having with current solutions, their desires, what I would sometimes call it the selfish benefit. So how they want to be better, who influenced their decision?
Katelyn Bourgoin:
What channels are they are they searching for solutions are and what delights them about the product. You then fill out the barrier. So barriers are things that are going to stop or slow the buying journey or stop them from adopting the solution. So it could be alternate solutions that they're using, it could be objections that they have to buy or trade offs that they're unwilling to make and it could be friction with the overall experience. One thing that really stood out to me with this interview was how Victoria said, she'd looked at this other program, it was too intensive. She didn't know where she was going to start with it and just immediate was like, no, I don't have time to go that deep. I want help getting to this next step. It's like, what's the next step.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
But then when she described what was really compelling to her about ProductLed it was that it seemed really simple that it seemed like she was going to be able to jump in and get going right away. But the thing that actually delighted her and exceeded her expectations was that there was so much more than she anticipated. So I think that's really smart because you can see that the ProductLed team was like, we're going to give them what they need because we know that they need all of these things but we're not necessarily going to communicate that in our marketing collateral because that might scare them. So there's this wisdom there where it's like, we know that people need this deeper thing, they need more than what they might think that they need but they are afraid of that.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So let's not show them everything that's under the curtains, let's get them into it first and then let them experience that depth, really good product insight there. So before, and then the next section of your interview summary, you write a job story. If you went through my content within the ProductLed curriculum, then you already know about a job story and how to write that. So you'd write that here, and this I want to, like this I want to be a change agent in my organization. I would say that is the job Alicia is trying to do and if you think of it from a jobs to be done perspective, there is a lot of different things that PLG is competing with to help Alicia get that job done. And they can also fundamentally shape everything about the product and the marketing experience, knowing that that's important. They can make it easier for Alicia to bring this to our team which I'm sure that they've done with the discounts and things like that. So, so much good insight there from a product perspective.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Now I want to give you guys a chance to, usually we take a five minute break here but I don't think we're going to have that time. But I want to give people a chance to practice doing interviews. So at this point, sometimes people drop off because they're nervous and I get that. But if you can stay, I very much encourage you to stay, if you can't stay to actually practice the interviews then I'd encourage you to say goodbye now so I don't end up putting you in a breakout room with somebody and then there's nobody actually in the room with them.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So if you can't stay, thank you for coming to this portion and you can maybe do some practice interviews with your team. Michael says it's because he's got a meeting, not because he's nervous. Totally cool Michael, all good. Now that you have this amazing cohort of people, for those of you that might need to jump off, reach out to the cohort and schedule a one-on-one to do this practice later. So if you have to go take advantage of the cohort and do this practice later with them, but I'm just, sorry, go ahead.
Wes Bush:
I just wanted to mention too, for Michael too, if you are feeling nervous, this is honestly the best group to practice on because this isn't a customer. This is other product folks who are really interested in this topic and they're going to give you feedback on that too. So would encourage you to stick it out if you can. And then one of the thing, Keavy, I had a question just so people can get a good time estimate, how long are you expecting these practice sessions to last?
Katelyn Bourgoin:
I would say 20 minutes. 20 minutes each and we can all send a note and it'll be a very speed version of this. So 20 minutes each and then you'll switch, switch roles. And the goal is you're going to interview each other about your decision to join ProductLed. So again, you're going to start to see patterns overlapping because you're going to hear each other's stories and it will all be very contextual to you because you've all gone through that journey yourself.
Wes Bush:
Okay. Awesome. And Ramli, do you know how to set up the breakout rooms for this?
Ramli John:
Yes. Are we ready to go?
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Yes. So you'll just, Ramli just make sure that you don't put me, you or Wes in. Victoria, I guess you could go in again if we need somebody extra or if we have the numbers that we don't need somebody extra, then you could stay out because you've already, unless you want to practice and then you don't mind being interviewed again and let somebody go even deeper in your journey.
Ramli John:
Okay. Let me figure this out, apologize. Here, 14 rooms that should get everybody in groups of, there's 27 left.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
This is a pretty common thing and it's like we want to do the work, we believe it's important but when it comes time to actually try it, people, for some reason, it's not an important priority. And once we come out of the breakout rooms I'll give a little bit of some stats to the people that are still here that are going to make you feel like super heroes because you are outliers and awesome.
Ramli John:
Great. I think 11 rooms, there's 23 of us. Sorry. If you are by yourself, I will, some more people dropped off. Just want to make sure.
Speaker 3:
I'm good for like 15 more minutes. If anyone wants to do a super speed run.
Speaker 2:
I can do it quick while I'm in D.
Speaker 3:
Cool.
Ramli John:
How do I manually assign you guys? I'm going to try kicking off in through room source and then I will reorganize from there. Okay. I'm going to have to remind some people here.
Wes Bush:
That's okay. So everyone, you should get the join now button on your screen.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
I'm seeing a join now. Should I be seeing that?
Ramli John:
Don't worry about that. I'm moving it around right now. Adam should go somewhere else.
Wes Bush:
Sam is the only one in, I'll put in room six.
Ramli John:
Yeah. Okay. You got it. There you go. Okay.
Wes Bush:
And room three only has, well, I guess Matthew is still trying to.
Ramli John:
There's Monica trying to get in, should I,
Wes Bush:
Yes. If you put her in that one. It might be a bit confusing if she's just first time though.
Ramli John:
David is by himself. Well, no.
Wes Bush:
Hey Matthew, are you there?
Ramli John:
No, it just shut off.
Wes Bush:
So room three just has David.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
I can jump in with David and he can interview me about some other buying journey. We'll just need to, so we're at 2:18 now, so in 20 minutes just send a message out to everyone and let them know that it's time to switch and David and I will just come back at that point or I'll just let David keep talking.
Wes Bush:
Yeah, that sounds good.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Yes. If you want to invite me to that one, I can jump in. So his name's David?
Wes Bush:
Yes.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Okay.
Wes Bush:
All right, you should be able to join you. Do you see a join now button on your side.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
It's not come up yet.
Ramli John:
Let me try to move you back.
Wes Bush:
[crosstalk 01:15:00] side.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
It's not come up yet.
Speaker 4:
Let me try to move you back through. [crosstalk 01:15:04].
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Gotcha.
Speaker 4:
That's the wrong one.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Okay. I'm joining now.
Wes Bush:
Okay. Why don't I pause the recording? I ask your hardest questions around customer research. We're going to stick around at the ends and are happy to answer any questions you have. Kaitlin, you're on mute.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
We will do Q and A one second, and before we jump off, I just wanted to share one thing with you guys. So you've had a practice round, of course it was a super speed round. So the benefit of this program is that you have access to each other. So if you still want to go and do this again, reach out to each other and give yourself more time. Maybe take this offline and have another conversation. I think that the more you practice, the better you're going to get. If any of you have ever had the joy of doing sales calls, you suck at it the first time you do it. And you don't just stop doing it, because you still need to drive sales. So this is the type of thing where it's a skill, you're going to develop it over time.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
And the approach that we taught today is being used by lots of other companies, like Intercom, Eventbrite, product companies, like Ikea and Amazon, and McDonald's using a similar approach. What you probably noticed is that there's not a lot of people left. That means that you are outliers. And ProfitWell knows that people like you exist. Actually, they did a big study, I think in 2018, and they asked a bunch of product teams and marketers, they said, "How often are you talking to customers, not to sell them something, but to learn from them?" And they found that 70% of the companies that responded to the survey so they were talking to fewer than 10 customers a month from a learning perspective.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Well guess what? The ones that were talking to those customers are growing two to three times faster than the ones that aren't. So this is the kind of work where people can make lots of reasons why they're not going to do it and they can justify not doing it, and that's okay for them. Don't be one of those people. You'll be one of the people that actually commits the time and it can be a huge differentiator for you and your company. So thank you all for coming today, and for joining me, and I'm here for Q and A and happy to answer any questions as they come in.
Fraser:
I've got a quick question, Caitlin. Hi. Fraser.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Hey, Fraser.
Fraser:
So you've got the 12 participants who really matter now on the call [crosstalk 01:17:43]. So when you go sit down for an interview, you would actually have some background information on the person already, right? You have the LinkedIn profile, the company. Do you find it's more valuable to roll with that and keep those as assumptions? Or is it even worth going back, not taking the assumption of, "Well, I know what the company does," for example. Do you still have them explain that, so get more out of that?
Katelyn Bourgoin:
I do. And the reason why is that it's about building rapport with them. And it's about asking them questions that are easy for them to answer so that they get comfortable answering questions. So it helps me to make them comfortable with me and it helps them to be like, "Oh, I have all the answers." And then as they get into a roll, then you can start asking them some more of the personal questions. And you've kind of done some of that rapport building. So I would say always ask some of that stuff. It's not just because you need the answers. It's more so because you're building intimacy with that person so that they can start sharing a bit more of their personal and interesting stuff, that under the surface stuff that you might not get if you jumped right into the nitty-gritty.
Fraser:
Yeah. Got it. And if you ask them about competitors, do you have some tricks about how to, sorry for the background noise, how do you help them be candid about that? Because I find people usually try and make you happy and they'll say, "Oh, your competitor's awful. You look great." Do you have some tricks around good questions to get them to open up and be more off it more?
Katelyn Bourgoin:
I would say that it's really about, most of them are going to probably talk some smack, cause they're also trying to build rapport with you, or we have this innate desire to be likable, but they're going to talk some smack, but you can frame it from the beginning and say, "So now I want to talk about some of the other things you've tried." And you can say, "I know that we've got some competitors out there that you might've checked out, and some of them are really darn good. And don't be afraid to tell us what you love about them, in addition to what didn't work for you. And I really just want you to be super honest with me. Pretend that I have no emotional connection to this company and just give me the straight goods."
Katelyn Bourgoin:
And that can really help, because of course, when you're talking to a user or customer, especially when you're a small team, maybe you're the founder, and they know that they're telling you positives and negatives about your company and competitors. People will by nature, try to be kinder. And so you can just add a little bit of an intro and say, "I really just want you to be as transparent with me as you can be because it's going to help us be better. So if there's things that you think that we are doing poorly, things that our competitors out shine us in, you are not helping me by not telling me those things."
Fraser:
Thank you.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Awesome.
Speaker 5:
Hi Caitlin. I have a question about how do you get started within [inaudible 01:21:01]? So what's the best way to get users to agree to this type of interview, and is it a good idea to incentivize this? And the reason why I ask is we ran this campaign to get more reviews on G2. And there was a lot of friction, obviously, because we'd never done that before. We did learn a lot about our users and how they use the product. But if we were to do this in-depth, what would you suggest? How do you go about this?
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So there's a couple of different ways. So ultimately, oftentimes, when we are doing interviews, it is because there's something specific that we want to learn. So there's some type of trigger in our organization, where we launched something and it doesn't quite work, it's a flop, or we miss a sales target, and we want to figure out how to improve the sales page, whatever the triggering point is, whatever the motivation is for you to say, "I want to start doing some of this now," there's probably some specific people you want to talk to. So maybe they are people who churned, if you're wondering why people are churning. Maybe they're people who are power users of this new feature that you launched that's working well. So first be like, "Okay, what do we really want to learn? What's the goal and the output of the research that matters to us?" And then identify who those people are.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
And once you know who they are, I always recommend just reaching out, and with a personal email, not sending a mass email out to the 500 of those people who fit that criteria, try to identify a top couple and reach out personally. Make it short, share with them why you're interested in learning from them. When it comes to an incentive, I've got a couple different ways I'd approach that. Oftentimes, our users are very busy and sometimes they will talk to you just under the goodness of their heart. Sometimes you might feel like you do need an incentive. So what I would do is I'd send a couple, I put a couple hooks out, without an incentive, and see if you get bites of people that come back and say yes. If you write five people and none of them respond, then what I might try to do is reach out to another five, and offer an incentive. Don't make the incentive your product. Don't make it an upgrade. Don't make it a free something, that doesn't always feel like much of an incentive. You can make the incentive an Amazon gift card.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Those are incredibly easy to send. Just all you need is somebody's email. The one that I like that tends to get people to say yes, is I'll either give them a $25 Amazon gift card, or make a donation to their favorite charity. That one tends to work really well. Cause even busy people are like, "Okay, I'll give a little bit of my time. It's going to go to a good cause." So that makes them a bit more altruistic and then they'll say yes. So I'd say to summarize that, be specific about who you want to talk to and reach out with a personal email, don't offer an incentive right away. Just say you're looking to learn. I'll often say that I can give them a call. It takes the pressure off of having to do another zoom call in your day, we're all zoomed out at this point. So I'll say, "It'll just be a quick call. I can call you on your cell." That helps sometimes. And then if you're not getting traction without offering incentive, offer one that isn't your product or a discount on your product, and offer something, the charity thing seems to work really well.
Fraser:
Well, one thing that worked well for us, just to share, is we have custom socks. You'd be amazed what people will do for pair of socks. They are very cool.
Speaker 4:
We've got stocks, too, at Product Line [crosstalk 01:24:47]
Fraser:
Eventually, the world will no longer need socks, but for now it's working really well. The other thing I'll mention is, so I would send out an email to make connection. If the person came back and said yes, I would provide them with a Calendly link or one of those to say, "Look, I want to respect your time, so you tell me when you want to meet." And that avoids all the back and forwards of [crosstalk 01:25:10].
Katelyn Bourgoin:
But don't send a Calendly link right away, cause that's too presumptuous.
Fraser:
Yeah. That feels a bit like you're not so important, but I would say establish contact here. Calendly saves some time.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Yeah. What I will say too, is that in larger organizations that have a huge customer base, for instance, Shopify, I've gotten emails from outside researchers that Shopify is hired to help them. And in Shopify's case, they can say, "Okay, we're going to give you X dollar gift card. And we only have a limited number of spots, so grab them." And in their case, that mass email works. But I've found that if you're having trouble getting people to say yes, go as personal as possible.
Speaker 6:
Hi, Caitlin. I'll tell you one thing. Maybe it's not the focus of this type of customer, but when you talk about the hardest customer actually interview, let's say their first customer's internal to try to convince them to actually do PLG. And I was talking to on the breakout room about that. We talk about the customers, sometimes we will talk about internal customers. The rest of the [inaudible 01:26:26] team that you have to tell them, "Get on the same boat as Wes. The ship is leaving. I'll say that's the hardest customer to convince.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
It totally is. And I loved what Victoria said too, she gave a really good insight there, cause she talked about how the chances are, the people who are going to be the right fit for this program are going to be the ones that have that influence already. So they can go to leadership and they can get the yes. So if you're not that person that has that influence, rather than going straight to leadership, maybe you can connect with that person who has influence, and then you guys decide together that you're going to do this. So really good insights there on what might create an objection before you even get a chance to get your product in front of somebody.
Speaker 6:
It's very interesting what you said, because if you think, I'm thinking about it internally and some of our customers is the bottoms up approach of winning customers. [inaudible 01:27:28] then you go all the way up, you can actually think about the same situation internally, where you gain all the teams, all the middle management, and then you started going up, and say, "Hey, everyone bought on this product growth, and everyone's got to talk to the boss about it." And then eventually you're going to be like, "Well, maybe it's the only way to shut you all up, to just jump on board." It's kind of the same slide methodology of bottom up, but internally, to win that customer.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Oh, a hundred percent. It's interesting. I have a blog post on my website about why marketers must fight for buy-in to talk to customers. And I divide that blog post into two sections. One's like, "I'm a marketer looking to get buy in." The other is, "I'm a leader who wants to know why I should let somebody talk to customers." And I write two very different arguments, but there is a resource there for the marketer, which is my buy-in script. I call it the buy in burger, and it's an email template they can send out to their leaders that basically tells them exactly what to say to get those leaders to say yes to a conversation about audience research. It sounds like the ProductLed team is very aware of this problem, has already created lots of resources to try to help internal teams overcome it, so it just goes to show when you really are talking to those customers, long before they get to you and they're on your website and they're checking out your thing, there's all these other things that are happening that are stopping them from even making their way to you. And if you don't know what those things are, you can't help them overcome them.
Wes Bush:
Yeah. And I really liked this conversation too, around the bottoms-up approach, because it's not just for ProductLed. Think of Slack, for instance. It's the same kind of buy-in process. You just start with one person and then they send it to someone else and then they grow it organically. And then it eventually gets to the decision maker, who decides let's add 30, 40, 50 people onto this particular team and make the best use of it. So it is going to be very common. Any tips on how to approach that, Caitlin, because let's say even with that example today with Victoria, so she was the instigator of the ProductLed there, but then the end decision maker was Alyssa. And so how would you manage that specific customer research approach? Would you then start with Victoria and then be like, "Okay, I need to have a conversation with your boss, Alyssa," and go from there. How would you approach that?
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Ideally, yes. Especially with complex products that do require multiple layers of buy-in, you want to talk to a couple of those different decision makers. The value that you're going to get from talking to users is going to be really important. But if the users aren't the ones that ultimately get to even bring the solution to the table or say yes to it, you want to talk to those people, too. And so does it add more time? It does. Is it worth it? A hundred percent. And so if there are multiple decision makers, first, figure out who they are typically, and spend a little bit of time understanding the jobs that each of them might be trying to get done. It was so fascinating to me when Victoria said that the ProductLed Growth book is a Bible at their company and that everybody had it on their desk, but that she, in her previous role, it wasn't something that mattered to her.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
In that previous role, it was a resource that was given to her when she started, it was on her desk, but she didn't need to execute on anything that was relevant to that. So she just needed to understand the philosophy so she could nod and look smart in meetings, and she didn't need to go deeper. And it was the trigger of getting this new role, where now I actually need to implement some of this philosophy in the company. That's trigger of getting that new job. That's often a trigger for people who come to my customer research workshops, as well, because they're like, "Oh, fuck. I just got a new job where I got promoted, and now I'm seeing that my team really doesn't know who their customers are or know much about them, and I need to help them figure that out." And so when you understand what the triggers are, it can really help you to get in front of people sooner, in less crowded channels, and to put together solutions inside of your product to help them.
Wes Bush:
For sure.
Victoria:
Hi, Caitlin. I'd love to ask you a quick question.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Of course.
Victoria:
Yeah. So this actually came at such a great time because I had just finished reading the mom test and started [inaudible 01:32:16] customer discovery calls, so this is perfect alignment. So I noticed that the very end of the interview with Victoria, you had asked, "If you could wave a magic wand and make anything happen, what would you change?" And I'm curious how, for these kinds of questions or whenever in an interview, when it gets more towards the opinions, how do you anchor it back to the facts and back to their previous experience? I wonder if you had strategies with that.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Yeah. Great question. So typically, they would say the things that they would change and then you want to dig into, well, what would that do for you? And what else are you using because you don't have that? So bring it back to actions versus, it's nice to know, but then you want to take it that level deeper. Okay, so tell me, what else are you doing? Or what else have you tried? Because people will ask for the sun, the moon and the stars. So you'll see that afterwards, I asked her, "Well, why would talking to them matter?" And it was like, "Oh, well, because it would help us to make sure we're putting everything in the right order and we're doing it in the right way." And it's like, "Okay, well, you don't actually have to talk to a Wes and Ramli to do that." There's other things that they could do to give people that confidence that they're doing it in the right order. Does that make sense?
Victoria:
Yeah. So it seems like it's just recognizing when it strays away from facts and being able to bring it back with more specific questions on why.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Yeah. That's right.
Victoria:
Awesome. Okay, cool. Thank you.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
My pleasure.
Ramli John:
Hey Caitlin.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Hey, how's it going, Sam?
Ramli John:
Good. Thanks. I've really enjoyed the talk. I had a question building on the discussion you just had with Wes around trying to do these conversations with senior stakeholders. So to give a bit of context, we were building a platform that helps managers develop their team. And the first niche we're going after is sales managers who are particularly time poor, let alone chief revenue officers who are even more time poor. So do you have any tactics or techniques on how to get someone, like a C-suite, on a call like this or a senior manager? Because I'm not sure if a 50-pound gift card may sway those individuals.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
They are harder to get. And there are services that you can get people, but they're not necessarily your users, which is always better. So you can use something like User Interviews or respondent.io, and they'll go and find them for you. What I would say is that they are harder to get, so think like a salesperson. How do they get that call? They go on LinkedIn, they see who their mutual connections are. They try to get an introduction from somebody else that that person trusts. And so, yes, it's going to take a little bit longer, but it's totally worth doing. And so with your sales team, ask them how do they get those people on calls? What do they incentivize them with? What seems to work to get them onto a demo? You might be able to apply some of those same learnings to Discovery.
Ramli John:
Cool. Thanks a lot.
Victoria:
Hi, I had another question pop up in my head. But I'm curious, how long are your customer interviews generally lasting? I realized that sometimes when I schedule a time, it's really incredibly awkward if it may run over and I don't want to [inaudible 01:35:45] sometimes they're really happy to keep going, but just wondering how I can smoothen out that process.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Absolutely. So I would say the average interview for me is about 30 minutes. Sometimes they'll be a little bit shorter. You've got people who just don't have a lot of information they want to give. Sometimes, you'll have people who are so delighted to share their whole buying journey with you, because it's almost like therapy, where they're just getting to share all the challenges that they've had with solving this problem, and they will go on and on. So I always schedule 30 minutes with the meeting with them, but in my calendar, I make sure I block off the next 30 minutes, so then if it goes longer, I have the time. And then I also have time built in to create my summary. So I'd say if you're using a tool like Calendly, it's really easy to have that 30 minute meeting, but then actually have a 30 minute buffer before anything was could get booked.
Victoria:
Okay. Yeah. That's a good point. Thank you. Thanks.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
My pleasure. If we don't have more questions, this pregnant lady really has to pee. [crosstalk 01:36:55] This is the joy of pregnancy. You have to pee all the time.
Wes Bush:
All good. And for everyone else too, if you do have any future questions, there's the PLG certification [inaudible 01:37:12] channel. So feel free to ask it there, or take advantage of the direct consulting line on the dashboard. And we're happy to dig into any specific questions you have around this.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
And I'm on Twitter. I'm super active there. Reach out to me, too. Ask me any questions you have. I'm @ Kate Bore. I'll write it in the chat, and happy to answer any follow-up questions, since I am jumping off a few minutes early to pee.
Wes Bush:
It's all good.
Speaker 4:
Thanks everybody.
Wes Bush:
Yes. Thank you. [crosstalk 01:37:39]
Katelyn Bourgoin:
It was so nice to meet you all. [crosstalk 01:37:43]
