But before you build and grow a product-led business, you need to first take a step back to understand your users. Because ultimately, knowing and understanding your users' motivations and anxieties is the foundation of delivering value to your end users.
In this course, you will:
Ramli John:
The first step is to reach out to your active customers. That's what we're going to talk about. Second is to conduct a interview. Third is to organize your interview transcript, and categorize the insights. And four is to turn the data into action, because it's all about the action. Data is useless if it's not action-oriented.
Ramli John:
So, let's get into it. First, what should you ask your active customers? So, you're preparing for this. What's some questions you should ask? I want to remind you that the goal interview isn't to decide on features and to build. That's a problem I find with, I jump into... As a previous programmer turned growth marketer, when I jump on an interview with a call [inaudible 00:00:53] product, they're so excited about the features that they came out with, and stuff that they have on the product road map, that the discussion becomes about the features that they have built or are about to build, and getting feedback on that.
Ramli John:
The goal of this interview is not for that. Really, we want to know three core things. The first is what pain exists in that customer's mind? Second, what caused those pains? It could be their boss. It could be their spouses. It could be they need to do this job that we just previously talked about, or anything else. The third is, how are they solving this pain right now? Or if they've already solved it. We're trying to figure out the journey of this customer.
Ramli John:
Remember that we're not trying to find causation here. We're not trying to find, "Well, because they did X, Y, then they're going to adopt our product, which is zed." Causation is rarely mentioned in science, much less in marketing and product. It's more about correlation. Correlation is they're more likely to do something. That's a correlation. So, just something to keep in mind of.
Ramli John:
And as you're asking these questions, a few things that you can ask. We've put together a resource for this that's already in the learning portal. It's, what other solutions did you consider when making a decision? What made you say, "Oh, you know what? This solution will work for us, or it won't work for us?" With your current solution, what is working really well, and what are pros? What's still really painful at this point? And I'm going to give a few more, but if you can think of any other questions... You know, if you've done customer interviews, just type it in the comments. Just type it in the section below.
Ramli John:
But the other ones are, are there any new problems that have popped up, or are there some problems that you thought your current solution was going to solve but it actually didn't? What are those? Another question is, if you could no longer use your product name, what would you miss the most? Just really trying to figure out what is that thing that they love. And what is the one thing, if any, that made it difficult to get up and running? This is more about onboarding and getting started.
Ramli John:
Like I said, we put together a full list of questions to ask that's available in the learning portal, that you can ask your active customers and anything else. Really, I've mentioned this before, but I want to visualize this. It's that what you're trying to do is create a mental timeline of your ideal customer's decision making process. There's that first trigger when they said, "This current thing that I'm doing for this is idiotic. It doesn't make sense."
Ramli John:
What was that first trigger? Was it somebody telling them, "That's dumb," or, "That doesn't make sense"? Was it they just got fed up? What was that first trigger? And then they started looking for it in the first event. The next event, that caused them to start actively looking for a solution. The next event started helping them decide what to choose, and evaluate and buy, and finally to satisfy that need. And you're really trying to figure this out, to try to figure out the problems that they're looking to solve, and what... In that deciding and evaluation stage, you're trying to figure out what solutions did they consider, and which ones didn't work? That's essentially the goal of this.
Ramli John:
One last thing before I send you off. The first class I did for this program, I forgot to hit the record button. Thank goodness for Wes, who recorded the class for me. Make sure you record every call, and ask permission. "Do you mind if I record this call? It's only going to be used internally, and we're not going to use it for anything outside." So, that's conducting the interview and understanding existent struggles.
Ramli John:
The third step is organizing the interview transcripts to find insights. Really, this is where it can get really messy. You have all these interviews, five to 10. What you want to do is to transcribe the interviews. If you have the resources, go to Rev.com. I'll link that in the learning portal. Or if you have very few budget, you can also use something that I've been using called Descript. I've been using it for my podcast for the ProductLed podcast, and it has AI to transcribe automatically your interviews, whether that's video or audio, automatically. It's about 95% accurate, and it's $15 a month for 10 hours of transcription, which is crazy.
Ramli John:
What you want to do is listen to your customer recording, and look for six things. You want to categorize sections of your interviews into six different buckets. The six elements that you're looking for are struggling moments, motivations, driving forces, perceived value, experience value, and existing solutions considered.
Ramli John:
The struggling moments are moments when the interviewee explains to you a struggle that they were facing that caused them to seek the new solution. It was that first trigger. An example that you might hear is, "When I've tried to improve how the number of leads generate each month, but I'm not sure how to set up campaigns in Facebook." So there's that word, "not sure." There's that uncertainty, right? You're trying to understand what they are struggling with.
Ramli John:
The second thing is motivations. What was it they tried to accomplish with a new solution? An example of this in the same thread is, "I want to figure out how to build out a Facebook lead file to automate the whole process of lead generation." So just that word, "want to figure out." What is it that they're desiring with their desired outcome? What was it that they're looking for?
Ramli John:
The third thing is driving force. What were the emotions that the person you're interviewing felt, and that really made them look for that solution, instead of continuing the way things were? Words like "frustrated," "haven't hit my [inaudible 00:07:39] goal," or, "I was angry," or, "I was tired and exhausted." For this perceived value, how did the person you're interviewing experience the product, and what drove them to upgrade? So, how did they know they were successful? An example of this, "So I can convert and retain more paying customers without hand holding each one." So, they describe what success looked like for them.
Ramli John:
The fifth is experience value. Here they're trying to envision life being better than the new solution, and they're describing this in emotional or social level, whether they're saying how they felt or what they heard. So, an example. "I felt I had an easy, scalable way to convert and retain more paying customers." So, there is that state that they described.
Ramli John:
The very last thing is you can ask what they checked out. This is an interview. You're doing research. You know? Did they check out your competitors? You can even find out which ones they tried. And for a lot of B2B products, the competitor is actually two things, according to April Dunford. One is to hire an intern, and second, another competitor that you might not consider is Excel sheets. So, just to keep in mind of.
Ramli John:
So, what did they look at? What did they use? What were they using before you? I know this can get really messy, really, really messy. So we've actually put together a spreadsheet that you can compile all of this information together in different categories, so that you can figure out really what words they're using to describe the problem they're facing, and the solution.
Ramli John:
The very last thing is turning data into action. This is my favorite part, and often skipped in data analysis. Action is everything, right? So, how do we turn the data into action? There are several ways. One is to focus on really driving forces into your advertising campaign. So, using the words that you heard in your interview just directly out of it, and just using it as an ad campaign. If they said they were frustrated with blank, use that. "Are you frustrated with blank?" Create compelling calls to action as you create your onboarding experience, your product-led experience. You want to be making sure that you're using what they created right into your copy.
Ramli John:
You can also [inaudible 00:10:12] moments that people might have when they're first identifying the problem. This is more for whether that's your sales team or for your marketing team. When they're creating content that's top of funnel, they can use those frustration to describe the problem, so you're empathizing right with your customer, using the exact same words that you heard from your best fit customers.
Ramli John:
One thing to be aware of is you want to make sure your perceived and experience value match right up. Right? When they sign up for your product, what they envisioned it, did it match with what they experienced? Because if it doesn't, those are opportunities to improve your onboarding.
Ramli John:
And there's one, two other things. The second to last thing is to make sure that you're using feedback from your recent customers to make sure you're trial experience helped people accomplish the poor outcome they may have struggled with in the past. Really that's driving them to that a-ha moment, really driving them to that experience that causes them to love your product and use it over and over again. Is there anything else you can think of to apply this research? There's a ton. You can use it for product, to really figure out what features to use. For marketing. For sales. For customer success. If you figure out where the struggles are and creating content for that, creating help articles for that. It really is the upside, like I said, of customer research and user research. It's tremendous, and you can apply it across every team, essentially.
Ramli John:
We've created a user research interview worksheet that's up in the learning portal now. You can use this to get started with this, and do interviews for research, and getting you growing faster with your business. Like what Profit Wall said earlier, companies that do user research grow two to two times faster, on average, from the research that they've seen.
