This course will give you the growth skills, knowledge, processes, and frameworks to confidently build and grow a product-led business.
In just six weeks, you'll be able to:
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Hello, hello, I'm Katelyn Bourgoin, and this workshop is all about mastering one-on-one interviews. As you are about to learn, interviews are extremely powerful, in fact, interviews can be the best way to uncover this missing insights you need to drive more growth. So let's jump right in.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
As you'll see, I am a total research nerd. In fact, I think audience research is one of the hottest topics in marketing. This was something I Tweeted out in 2019, 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 other stuff works anymore." And this is so true. Now, this Tweet got a lot of love, and one of the people who liked it at the time was Sarah Pion, and she was on the growth team over at Drift.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
As you may know, Drift is one of the fastest growing software companies in history. And guess what else Drift is? They make Chatbots. So the fact that Sarah liked this post, it just goes to show how important audience research is for driving growth.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So let's kick things off, a little impromptu research of my own. I want you to ask yourself, what do you want to learn about your customers or prospective customers? So give yourself a moment to think about that. Now, I have asked this question to thousands of participants in my live workshops, and some very clear patterns have emerged. It usually boils down to something like this; they want to understand what will motivate somebody to seek out, to try and to love their product. Now, this is a big question, you need to get the answer to this question, because answering this question correctly, it can be the difference between building the next billion-dollar tech company or wasting years on a business that flops.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Here's Steve Blank, some of you may recognize him. Steve is known as the father of customer development. He is an award-winning author, and he's one of the most sought-after consultants in Silicone Valley. Steve says, "No facts exist inside the building. Only opinions. You need to get outside the building to learn." So clearly talking to customers is important, and that might sound pretty obvious, but figuring out how to do it the right way, that part can be tricky. Many companies, big and small, they don't take the time to talk to customers.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Too many teams rely primarily on surveys, user data, and internal brainstorming to solve their problems. These teams are fooling themselves into believing that they're making smart decisions. They think they're being really data-driven, but they're often missing very valuable insights. In this workshop, I'm going to teach you how to use one-on-one interviews to better understand what triggers customers to buy, so that you can start marketing smarter and sell more. Now, this is something I am very passionate about.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
A little quick back-story from me. I started my first company when I was 25 years old, founded another at 26, which I sold a year later. So at the time, my first business, it was a branding agency and I worked with clients like Target and Holiday Inn. But like a lot of service-based business owners, I wanted to scale. I wanted to stop exchanging time for money, start working smarter not harder, all that good stuff, and I decided to launch a tech company. I built Vendeve, Vendeve was a business network for women entrepreneurs. I brought in a partner, we raised venture capital, this was the day that Ink Magazine said that Vendeve would be the next LinkedIn for women. So you can see that we were pretty happy on this day.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
But since I am sitting in front of you today and not sipping a Margherita on the beach, unfortunately we did not become the next LinkedIn. So my startup journey went a little bit more like this. So a long story short, we didn't make it work. We were good at acquiring new users, but our product wasn't sticky. Meaning, we couldn't get our users to keep using the network. In other words, we hadn't figured out how to take a ProductLed approach. And we were talking to users and prospective users at the time, but now knowing what I know now, we had been doing it all wrong. Now, I'm going to talk more about that shortly, but let's just say that it's my own struggles with customer discovery, that are a big contributor to the work I do today.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So I closed down Vendeve, and I tried to decide what am I going to be when I grow up now, what should I do next. Luckily for me I had built an amazing network in the startup community in my city, and actually, my lead investor came to me and said, "Your team was really good at getting new users, getting attention, driving growth on the backside, not so good on the product side." We've got all these amazing product entrepreneurs, people who are great at building products, but sucky at getting people to learn about them and discover them, can you help them?" And I said, "Of course, I would love to."
Katelyn Bourgoin:
And so I started doing some consulting work, working with primarily SAS companies. And I would go and sit down in the boardroom with these brilliant founders, founders who had raised tens of millions of dollars in investment, and I'd ask the question that myself as a marketer needed to know. I'd say, "Tell me about your customers." And what surprised me, was just how often I couldn't get a great answer to that question. So sometimes I would hear that they served multiple types of customers, sometimes there would be arguments from the founding team about who mattered, or who they were really going after. It was clear that a lot of these teams didn't have a rock solid understanding of who their best customers were, and I wondered, is this common.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
And so I put in another Tweet, I said, "Hey Freelance Marketers and Copywriters, when you first start working with a new client, how often do they still need help zeroing in on their right-fit customer segments?" The answers that came back was that, 88% of the time they almost always needed that help, or more often than not they did. This made me realize there's a big problem here. A lot of teams are struggling to get the growth that they care about, because they just don't understanding their customers well enough.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So today what I do is, I work with product teams to figure out who their best customers are, and to understand what motivates those customers to buy. And the workshop you're seeing right now, this is two years of evolution working through helping teams apply these methods.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
All right, so let's talk about what we're going to cover in this workshop series. In this first video, I'm going to give you an introduction to customer discovery. We'll talk about why it's so important, and then I'll share details about how reading one book actually helped to make a mindset shift that changed the way I thought about everything. Everything from marketing, to sales, to product design. I wish I would've learned about this sooner in my business journey.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
In the next video, we're going to actually talk about interviewing customers. We'll get into the nitty gritty, and I will share some best practices with you, so that you know how to approach your first interview. And in addition to this pre-recorded content, we're going to host a live workshop as well. During this workshop, you're going to get a front-row seat to see me do a mock interview, and we'll analyze that interview together to spot the actional bits, and you'll actually get a chance to get some hands-on practice applying what you've learned. Because like anything in life, when you develop a new skill, you get better when you practice.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
All right, so let's start off with some bad news. You are not going to like what I say next, but it is actually really important that you hear it. If you are in charge of helping your company grow today, chances are your job is getting harder. And if you've been working in marketing for a while, then I probably don't have to tell you that, you probably already know it. You can feel it, and it's why you're here.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So growth, it's just never been harder. We know that competition has sky-rocketed, 18,000 new companies launch every single day, and that's in the U.S. alone. And more competition for people's attention, means that people are just getting overwhelmed by marketing messages. And we don't like being marketed to, therefore a lot of the big companies that marketers used to rely on to generate traffic, those companies are changing. So it is harder than it used to be to get organic visibility. That's true across most of the big social networks, it's true on Google, Google is actually stealing web traffic. It's just harder than it used to be to get your message in front of people organically.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Most marketing channels are becoming pay to play. And also, B2B buyers, today they prefer to self-educate. They don't want to talk to your sales person or your SDR, they want to go out and understand what the best products are, get some feedback from their peers, before they're willing to have a conversation. That means that outbound sales aren't as effective as they once were. And all of this means that it's just getting more expensive to acquire new customers.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
ProfitWell did a bit study back in 2018, and they saw that it was costing roughly 55% more to acquire a new customer then, than it had been five years earlier. Now that study is from 2018, so I'm assuming that number has only gone up.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
And even when your business is the hard work of acquiring a new customer, they are not as loyal as they used to be. With so many options for them to choose from, customers are just always on the lookout for new solutions. They have really high expectations, and if your business can't meet them, they're going to find one that can.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, well, he's been fighting it back and forth with Elon Musk lately, he shares in this message their number one tip to what's made Amazon so successful. He says, "The number one thing that made us successful by far, is obsessive compulsive focus on the customer." Now, you'll be wondering why is the world's richest man giving away his secret sauce. Why would he share this insight with the world? Isn't he worried that his competitors are going to go out and steal this method? Well, you would think that they would be, you'd think that every company was trying to be obsessively focused on the customer. But as you're about to learn, they are not, and that is good news for you.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Okay, so enough doom and gloom, now it is time for some good news. Here's the good news; Yes, it is true, markets and channels and tech, that all changes rapidly, but people, people don't change. If you want to understand what triggers prospects to look for products like yours, you don't need to obsess over the newest technology, tactics or marketing channels. The stuff that actually matters, it's not new, in fact, it's ancient. As Seth Godin says, "Innovative marketers invent new solutions that work with old emotions."
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Now, the goal of our workshop today, is to talk about how to use interviews to understand the underlying emotional triggers that are at play, that drive customers to seek out and try products like yours. Now, you would think that knowing that people buy for emotional reasons, that a lot of people would [inaudible 00:11:34] if they're talking to their customers trying to learn from them. The fact of the matter is, unfortunately they are not.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So again, according to ProfitWell, 70% of subscription-based companies that they surveyed, were not regularly talking to customers for research purposes. They just weren't doing it. Maybe they were talking to them for sales calls, but they weren't talking to them to learn from them. Now, that sucks for those companies, those seven out of 10, but it is great news for you, because a lot of marketers are really guessing about what their users want, that gives you a better chance to stand out. And the teams that are actually doing that work, the ones that are frequently talking to their customers to learn from them, doing more than 10 interviews each month, they actually reported growing two to three times faster.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Now I want you to let that sink in for a moment. So there is a proven approach out there that could help you to grow two to three times faster. And chances are, seven out of 10 of your competitors aren't doing it. This is really good news, and one-on-one interviews, they're the absolute fastest method for understanding your audience.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
In our next video, we're going to get into how to actually do an interview, but right now I want to talk about the mindset shift that I mentioned earlier.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So as Peter Drucker famously says, "The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it's selling." This is the real problem for so many product teams. There is this disconnect between what the customer needs, and what the company delivers. And if we want to understand why people really buy products, we need to stop thinking about them from our own perspective and we need to become customer obsessed.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Now, I'm a nerd for customer discovery today, but as I said earlier, I wasn't always this way. In fact, I used to be a bit of a research skeptic, and here's why. I had done 300 discovery interviews before we launched our tech company. And when things weren't working, we went out and we continued talking to customers, trying to do that work, trying to understand them. I thought that we were doing the right thing, but it turns out we'd actually been doing it all wrong. And I want to save you from some of the mistakes that we made.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Now first mistake was, discovery is not selling, period. So if the person that you are talking to thinks you are trying to sell them on something, they're going to clam up and go on the defensive, and you're going to miss a lot of good insights. It's not about selling your ideas either. You might be working on something new and you want to get their feedback, and you want to promote why this is a great idea, it's not about selling.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Next, opinions are dangerous. So we all have lots of opinions, and I used to think that the goal of doing interviews, was to learn about those opinions, was to learn and get feedback from our customers. Now, while feedback could be helpful, it can also bias you and lead you in the wrong direction. The interview technique I'm going to teach you, is going to help you avoid falling victim to the opinion trap.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
The next thing, people lie. They will tell you things that aren't true, or they'll leave out key information. And they don't always lie to you on purpose, and sometimes they're not just lying to you, they're lying to themselves too. They're thinking that they did things for a particular reason, or that they would do things a certain way in the future. So it's really important to understand when you are talking to customers, that you don't want to ask them about things that they might do, or what they think, you really want to get into the nitty gritty of actual past behavior.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
And here's the really interesting one, who you talk to, of course that matters a lot, but when you talk to them can sometimes matter more. Now, this might seem counterintuitive, especially since marketers like me are always telling you how important it is to focus on the customer, but stay with me because this insight comes from some very smart people. People who have actually spent their whole lifetime trying to understand what triggers people to buy products.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Now one of those people, is Clayton Christensen. Clayton is a business professor at Harvard University, or he was, he unfortunately passed away recently, and about 10 years ago, Clay and a team of researchers from Harvard, they sought to answer out some of the hardest questions in business. They wanted to know, how can companies know how to grow? How can they create products that they're confident that their customers want? And can innovation become more than a game of hit and miss?
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Now to answer these questions, they went out and they studied 20,000 product launches, some from big companies like Apple and IBM, and some from small startups. They wanted to know why do some companies succeed, where others fail? And what they learned, it was really quite a shock to both marketers and innovation teams. As Clay 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."
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Now this way of thinking has become known as jobs to be done, or jobs theory. And it's really quite simple. The idea is that, when we have a problem that we're trying to solve, or there's progress that we're trying to make in our lives and we can't do it on our own, we'll seek out solutions to help us get the job done. Now, if those solutions work well for us in our particular context, we'll be happy, we'll use them over and over, we'll tell friends about them, we'll keep buying. But if they don't, we'll fire them and look for something new to hire. And the opportunity lies in understanding the jobs your customers are trying to get done.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Now, this way of thinking, it's really changed things for me. I want to show you a quick video where Clay explains this, that hopefully will really make it clear for you.
Clay Christensen:
Hi, my name's Clay Christensen, I'm a professor at the Harvard Business School. I've brought with me the Seven Peasants, all related to innovation. We decided that the way we teach marketing, is at the core of what makes motivation difficult to achieve. The most helpful way we've thought of it so far, is that we actually hire products to do things for us, and understanding what job we have to do in our lives for which we would hire a product, is really the key to cracking this problem of motivating customers to buy what we're offering.
Clay Christensen:
So I wanted just to tell you a story about a project we did for one of the big fast food restaurants. They were trying to goose up the sales of their milkshakes. They had just studied this problem up the gazooh. They brought in customers who fit the profile of the quintessential milkshake consumer, and they'd give them samples and ask, "Could you tell us how we can improve our milkshakes so you'd buy more of them? Do you want it chocolatey, or cheaper, chunkier, chewier?" And get very clear feedback. They would then improve the milkshake on those dimensions, and it had no impact on sales or profits whatsoever.
Clay Christensen:
So one of our colleagues went in with a different question on his mind, and that was, "I wonder what job arises in people's lives, that cause them to come to this restaurant to hire a milkshake?" So we stood in a restaurant for 18 hours one day, and just took very careful data what time did they buy these milkshakes, what were they wearing, were they alone, did they buy other food with it, did they eat it in the restaurant or drive off with it? It turned out that nearly half of the milkshakes were sold before eight o'clock in the morning. The people who bought them were always alone, it was the only thing they bought, and they all got in the car and drove off with it.
Clay Christensen:
So to figure out what job they were trying to hire it to do, we came back the next day and stood outside the restaurant, so we could confront these folks as they left, milkshake in hand. And in language that they could understand, we essentially asked, "Excuse me please, but I've got to sort this puzzle out, what job were you trying to do for yourself that caused you to come here and hire that milkshake?" And they struggled to answer, so we then helped them by asking other questions like, "Well, think about the last time you were in the same situation needing to get the same job done, but you didn't come here to hire a milkshake, what did you hire?"
Clay Christensen:
And then as we put all their answers together, it became clear that they all had the same job to do in the morning, and that is to have a long and boring drive to work, and they just needed something to do while they drove to keep the commute interesting. One hand had to be on the wheel, but somebody had given them another hand and there wasn't anything in it, and they just needed something to do while they drove. They weren't hungry yet, but they knew they'd be hungry by ten o'clock, so they also wanted something that would just [inaudible 00:20:48] down there and stay for that morning.
Clay Christensen:
"Good question, what do I hire when I do this job? I've never framed a question that way before, but last Friday I had a banana to do the job. Take my word for it, never hire a bananas, they're gone in three minutes, you're hungry by 7:30. If you promise not to tell my wife, I probably hire donuts twice a week, but they don't do it well either. They're gone fast, they crumb all over my clothes, they get my fingers gooey. Sometimes I hire bagels, but as you know they're so dry and tasteless. Then I have to steer the car with my knees while I'm putting jam on them, then if the phone rings we've got a crisis. I remember I hired a Snickers bar once, but I felt so guilty I've never hired Snickers again. But let me tell you, when I come here and hire this milkshake, it is so viscous, that it easily takes me 20 minutes to suck it up that thin little straw. Who cares what the ingredients are, I don't. All I know is, I'm full all morning and it fits right here in my cup holder."
Clay Christensen:
Well, it turns out that the milkshake does the job better than any other competitors, which in the customer's minds, are not Burger King milkshakes, but it's bananas, donuts, bagels, Snickers bars, coffee, and so on. But I hope you can see how, if you understand the job, how to improve the product becomes just obvious.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Such an interesting way of thinking about why people buy, right? This really did change things for me, and you might notice that the computers that were in this video are a little bit old. And it was really after doing some of that groundbreaking research, that MacDonald's, as I'm sure you've guessed, went out and made a heavy play to move into breakfast. And what is a chocolate frappe, other than a socially acceptable morning milkshake?
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So when you really understand why people buy your products, you can innovate on those products, and you can market those products more effectively.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So here's the deal, understanding customers, that's not what drives innovation, understanding your customer's jobs do. And if you want to figure out why people buy, you've really got to understand the nitty gritty of those jobs.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Now Clay describes a job as the progress that a customer seeks in a particular context. Now as human beings, we are driven to make progress, it's really in our DNA. And as I said, when we want to make progress but we're struggling because of some sort of friction or frustration, we then will seek out new solutions, things that can help us get the job done. And often times, we will think about understanding customers, they think about understanding who their customers are. But as we've seen, that's really not the most important information you need. Let's look at an example.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So I recently bought a new alarm clock. Now, I am a 36-year-old woman, I am married, I don't have children yet, although I am pregnant right now as I record this video. I live in a small city in Canada, I like drinking wine and listening to business podcasts, and using social media. I like bring-ons like Apple and I drive a Volkswagen sports wagon. These are all attributes that tell you who I am, and this may be useful when it comes to targeting more people like me. But even if you can get in front of me and you sold alarm clocks, what are you going to say with your message? After all, none of this stuff actually tells you why I bought the alarm clock in the first place.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So when I bought my new alarm clock, technically what I was buying was this. But what I really wanted, was this. So I've made a New Year's resolution to get fit, and I hired the alarm clock to help me become a better version of myself. The kind of person who wakes up early in the morning, to go for a morning run.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Now, in the past I had used my cellphone as an alarm clock, and that had worked fine. But when I decided to start getting up 90 minutes earlier, suddenly my phone became a problem. With my phone sitting by my nightstand, I would end up scrolling on Twitter in bed rather than going to sleep on time. And when the morning came, I was just way to groggy to click that big snooze button and stay in bed.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
This old school alarm clock, it does not have a snooze button, and it definitely is not connected to the internet, so I can't scroll Twitter at midnight. What it does have, is a loud bell that is so jarring, that it nearly gives me a heart attack every time it goes off, making it way harder for me to go back to sleep.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Okay, so now that you know a little bit about the context of my situation, and what triggered me to begin the buying journey, what job was I trying to get done? Well, it might look something like this; force me to get out of bed earlier in the morning. Now, this is neat right? Rather than focusing on who the customer is, which doesn't tell you anything about why they buy, understanding their job helps you to know what they're really trying to achieve. And if you understand your customers jobs, you'll start seeing who your real competitors are.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So let's pretend that you had the same job to do, but you didn't hire an old school alarm clock, what else might you hire? Well, if you lived in medieval times, you might hire a jug of water to do the job. Because in the 1400s, people didn't have alarm clocks, or electricity for that matter, so if they wanted to force themselves out of bed, they would drink a bunch of water before going to sleep, because it's pretty hard to sleep in when you really have to pee. Or, maybe you could hire something like this, an alarm clock rug. That could help you do the job.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Now, this clever alarm clock, literally forces you out of bed, because the only way to turn it off, is by standing on the rug for 30 seconds. Or, like me, maybe your problem was that you were spending too much time scrolling on your cellphone in bed. If that's you, then maybe rather than hiring an old school alarm clock, you could hire a cellphone lock box. These are a timed lock box that forces you to put your cellphone down for a set period of time.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
So as you can see, there are many different solutions that you could hire to get the job done, and the one that's best for you depends on the progress you're trying to make and the context of your situation.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Customer jobs are complex. There are many functional, social and emotional dimensions that you need to consider when you are understanding your customers jobs, but it is worth it.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Now here's the thing, if you want to better understand why customers really buy your products, how are you going to get that information? You can't just ask your customers, "Hey, what's your job to be done," like in a survey and expect them to give you clear answers. Most people don't actually think about their purchase decisions in that way, so they might really struggle to give you clear answers truthfully. Plus, research shows that 95% of buying decisions are driven by unconscious urges, the biggest of which is emotional. So we buy for emotional reasons, and we often look to justify our decisions using logic. And this is true in all product decisions, whether it's a B2B product or not. So you can't just expect your customers to tell you the answers quickly, because they often haven't thought about them deeply in the moment.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
Now, if you want to market smarter, you've got to dig below the surface level stuff, the stuff that might come from a survey or a sales call. What you really want, are their detailed stories, that's where the real gold is buried. One-on-one interviews, those are the best ways to understand the jobs your customers are trying to get done, and the best ways to gather those stories that can be so valuable for driving growth.
Katelyn Bourgoin:
In our next video, we're going to talk about exactly how you can use interviews to gather those valuable stories. See you in the next video.
