B2B Marketing Executive Teaches Customer Research (Tutorial)

I'm going a quest to uncover the secrets to the perfect SAS website in each episode I talk with product marketing professionals sharing their hot takes on the future of B2B websites as well as tactical breakdowns on how to better understand your customers and activate buyers faster today I'm joined by Alex gamard a product marketer for over 13 years working at companies like active campaign and twilio we discussed the jobs to be done framework what makes it different in comparison to Conventional personas mistakes to avoid and how you can use AI to move faster so Alex uh in your own words tell me a bit about what you think um or how do you define jobs to be done how how are you thinking about that yeah so I mean really any jobs to be done personas it's just a framework for understanding you who it is you're trying to get in front of and what do they care about so you know I think it's not something that you need to be extremely rigid about but you know if I were to Define when I think of personas I think that can be a little bit more of a sort of like psychographic profile a lot of b2c companies use them obviously and in a lot of cases that's not as necessary for B2B so I think you know jobs to be done is looking at what are people hiring your company to do basically what jobs are you are you completing with your product um it's a little bit more barebones brass tax but I think in terms of getting to core what is the value of this product I think it's a helpful framework of just looking at literally what are they hiring you to do and then I think personas can kind of go over the top of it of you know is this person you know what are these other things that we want to add to it um so those are kind of just at a super high level how I think about it yeah the the word the kind of buzz word I've been using recently um because I've just found myself doing a lot of messaging recently is the word functional is like like practical functional you know you can kind of describe it however you want but like how are people going to use this product like what are they using it for um and yeah I find like when you think through that lens it almost becomes crazy for you to you know be talking about highle business outcomes all the time because in most cases that's not like the functional reason why somebody's using your product particularly if it's like you know um an internal Champion or or end user um you you talked to the about layering on the sort of personas over the top like where do you think these two sort of connect like the jobs to be done and the the sort of traditional personas I mean I think in marketing you know it's as marketing moves across the full funnel you know we're responsible everything from top of funnel all the way down to conversions you know customer referrals testimonials so really you have to be looking at everything I think the top of your funnel maybe you're looking more at some of these buyer personas so uh you know that is where I think you get into more of the you know why am I buying marketing automation why am I looking at it kind of high Lev buyer goals and then as you go through the funnel you're going to start bringing in some of these people that are actually using the product uh that really need to understand at like a brass tax level as you said functionally what are we doing with it so then you're starting to get into okay how am I communicating what jobs are actually going to be solved and done with this so it ends up blending you know high level value all the way down to In The Weeds of what am I actually using this for and I think it's important to look at both because you know what I found in some companies those two things don't actually match when you get down to it you know maybe you're selling that's a really common problem people have you're selling this story and then when you get down and maybe you're in marketing not actually paying attention to what users are doing and I found a lot of times this can be where people fall off after a demo or maybe people buy the product and then don't actually start using it it's because you were so focused on the highle business story and kind of the high level value of the product but overlooked what functionality does this product actually provide and are those two things aligned yeah one another thing um I've because I feel like yeah again I've just been in the weeds with messaging recently what I like about uh jobs to be done is the situational element of it it um I think situations and triggers are for me personally how you take like your targeting your your customer targeting or whether you're building like an ICP to the to the next level of you know everyone's looking at the sort of thermog Graphics um psychographics uh demographics but like what's the actual situation that would motivate somebody to look for a solution you know what what's that unique thing that's happening I think that just that when it comes to mapping that to your messaging I just feel like it um it just makes everything so much more like potent like and relevant it's like you know okay when are we going to be at the top of the priority list rather than like you know halfway down or at the bottom I think if you're able to understand the situational aspects or or those triggers that you know um motivate somebody to move in Market or look for a solution then I think that's where you end up with like really really targeted messaging um which I think think traditional personas sometimes Miss I agree with that and also I think it's a good case for why you can't just set and forget your personas and you know in jobs to be done research because I mean to your point the climate is changing constantly um you know I think about tech over the last couple years you 2021 digital transformation was everywhere everybody was moving online um you know now I would say we're in sort of a a weird constrictive climate that's very different than than what it was before so people are really focused on cost savings consolidation so you know whereas a couple of years ago if I'm in for example marketing automation you know there's a 8,000 10,000 players in mtek and maybe I'm buying all of them and I've got the situations right where I'm willing to spend money to solve that Niche problem with this Niche thing now fast forward I'm in a situation where I need to solve the same problems but the way I have to solve them and the compelling events are going to be much different because I'm focused on like good Lord let me keep the tools I have I'm not I'm not focused on buying new things so maybe a consolidation or you know cost story is going to be more resonant versus you know growth and enthusiasm a couple of years ago so you really do kind of need to constantly be thinking about to your point how are events how are current events and the climate changing those things nice I like it um so I know you had you had like a perspective on bringing AI into the picture of course the the Hot Topic of probably the decade um H how are you using aial like throughout the this sort of research process so I think AI is a great tool for hypothesis generation and a great tool for validation um and you know actually let me maybe not validation but AI is a great tool for finding deficiencies in the work you've done I think people who are using it to Outsource critical thinking and kind of getting to the heart of it or making a big mistake you know the same people that are kind of write you're not going to write your best piece with it but you know what you can do with AI so I'll give an example at iy guy we were doing just that you know uh we solve we uh our product is essentially patented large graphical models out of MIT uh very brand new they can do a million things um you know we know that it's some combination of it engineering uh operational Business Leaders that are kind of solving a specific problem with AI but that's as far as we know so you know we're able to kind of use AI to describe some of these and hey what job titles what things do you think that this might be related to and then from there you need to go out and validate right so um it'll give you a really generic kind of way to get started um and maybe some start questions to ask but then you know you need to go sleuth it out and then at the end you know what I like to do is when you have a really defined job set of jobs to be done set of personas I actually like to keep that as a template and I put that into my AI prompt anytime I'm doing anything um you know and one thing that we've been doing recently is looking at like website Effectiveness so if you have this really defined set of you know jobs to be done um understanding of you know what are their hopes and dreams what are their barriers to buy what decision criteria matters to them um you know what are they trying to do this year what climate are they operating in you know you can go pull a website you know screenshot the whole thing and go to a prompt and say hey I'm a you know I'm a website conversion person and I'm trying to understand how effectively does this speak to all of these points what's missing what's particularly effective and you know give me your best objections as this Persona so once I have the persona to document it out I mean you could chat with it at any point in time to kind of evaluate how what you're doing is working so those are the two places that I I probably use it the most um you know other things I might do could be you know asking it to generate some sample quotes to kind of get an idea of voice uh but I think kind of hypothesis development and um uh you know using it as a prompt later are really the best places that I've found to use it yeah I like that I agree you know again can't Outsource critical thinking but it it can get a project off the ground you know especially sometimes when um there's a lot of mental work that goes into like getting a a project up and running I think it can help with that and like you know in the context of content I think it's helpful for that uh but not to write the content itself um you know just get the creative juices flowing and then yeah like I I kind of refer to it as the sort of sparring partner like hey I've done all this like I have all of these inputs like what do you think about these inputs um you know here are some assumptions I have what do you what do you think about that I think it's quite useful for that as well um I love that and also one thing I'll say is you know AI like I use Claude that's my favorite model um but it's so differential and it's so positive that I feel like sometimes I prompt it like play Devil's Advocate you know pretend you know pretend you're trying you be like I you have to kind of encourage it sometimes to be a little combative because its tendency is to say you that was great this is all the things you did right so you know I think sometimes if you really want that harsh feedback you have to specifically ask for it but sometimes you know in like like like maybe saying what's something my competitors you know what's how am I leaving myself open to this competitor with this messaging um you know and kind of asking those pointed questions to really get in there uh and I mean I think that's fun anyway but it tends to give you more uh really useful information no I like that yeah I think sometimes it's just trying to get the job done it's just trying to you know give you a response do its job um and and so there's it's not really challenging any of your assumptions I have found that I'm not sure if you've you've tried it had a chance to try it track gbt's new model 01 has this reason in feature um seems to work okay um you know where it'll actually quote unquote think um and you know I found the output from the 01 model is far better than um all of the others but when it comes to creativity yeah ief I prefer um well I use perplexity which I think plugs into Cloud 3.5 um okay yeah so I think AI can can definitely help but I think when it comes to things like research I don't know I just don't think there's any avoid in the hard work which is speaking with customers going out there and rolling up your sleeves but I think it can um make you more efficient in in some ways what do you think are or or what mistakes have you seen um people make whether it be like product marketers or or people just um conducting job to be done research yeah I mean gosh there's so many um you know I'll start with kind of you know when you mentioned the research piece because I think that's one area where you know there's three groups you can do research with one one is your existing customers and I think that's important to understand what people are actually doing with the product um uncover maybe interesting use cases opportunities to include something in your top level messaging that maybe you know your product managers might not know they're doing with the product customers will always find strange and unusual and interesting things to do that you didn't intend with the product that happens every single company so I think getting their sense of how am I using this where am I getting the best value what functionality and especially what functionality I do I hate what's the highest value what's the lowest value that's kind of how I position it um and then you also need to talk to people in the sales funnel and I especially like talking to recent loss deals I think that is the single biggest um value activity that you can do in product marketing is why didn't you buy what were the competitors doing better why did you believe this could or couldn't get these jobs done um was this job even valuable to you you know were you seeing something that's oh that's interesting but not actually useful so you get that kind of information from them but then you need to talk to people who are have nothing to do with your product they've never heard of you you know maybe they've vaguely heard of you um because you can also get locked into your view of the world and that happens a lot especially at earlier stage companies where everyone's kind of singing the same song book right straight down from the founder um but the actual early you know the early adopters versus people out in the world they may be thinking about the problem completely differently and you may find that you know you thought your problem you're solving is huge and Universal but it actually it's quite Niche so you know getting that perspective from people who are not colored by your view of the world people who are in the trenches evaluating and you know poking holes in what you're saying and then people who are using the product and love the product that gives you a much more kind of well balanced view of what is the reality here so I think not I think focusing or over optimizing on one of those groups is a mistake that a lot of people make yeah sure that's a good one definitely I think when it comes to research you just need to di diversify where you're getting your information from because it's very easy to just be in a an echo chamber um almost you know confirmation bias starts to creep in where you have these assumptions and people are just like maybe telling you what you want to hear which uh and it makes you feel like you're productive and maybe makes you feel good because your assumptions aligned with what you're hearing but I think good research is actually going out there and sometimes hearing the hard truth or having you know your assumptions broken down and and you know changing your perception um so yeah I totally agree with that almost every company I've joined when I'm trying to come up to speed you know first thing is you interview all the internal people um and that's super valuable but then almost every single time when I've gotten out into the market I've found you know sometimes big and sometimes small discrepancies um this one company I was at they did uh AI based recruitment so you know Finding really hardto Place engineering talent and the company had started going after CTO looking to hire Engineers kind of it startups and they were just hitting a a wall on you know we've sold to the reality was we've sold to all of these people and you know we've kind of hit a cliff on on what we're doing um and so then you know obviously this is a recruiting tool so thinking about HR uh I started going out and interviewing HR personas and like what was very fascinating there was the job to be done was kind of the same it's bringing on hard finding hard to place Talent hard to find Engineers diamond and the rough candidates but the way the people thought about it and the things that they valued were completely different so you imagine a CTO they want a rock star you know it's very masculine like that we like the bidding war we want to bid over talent we want top people in D then you're talking to some like 45y old woman in the midwest who runs an HR department that is so off-putting and ter like what we would never B they're human beings and we you know they think about it totally different so they cared about is this a fair candidate experience is this you know D D D D D so that we really had to take kind of a you come come to you know come to terms with the fact that all of our messaging was designed for this one buyer and you know we assumed well they're all doing the same thing they're bringing on quality talent but the way these two groups thought about it and how they were gold and skilled and like their values were completely different so um that was one of the more interesting findings I found I think just kind of doing the research yeah the Nuance right again I think that's what creates eventually good messaging is that Nuance like being specific to what the Persona cares about rather than just being vague and and generalizing um like that's why that's why we do it right is to get those golden nuggets those those sort of aha moments when you interview someone and they say something in their own words and you're like yeah that's it that's that's the thing we we we need to talk about for sure and you know chck gbt probably wouldn't get either there um yeah so I'm I'm on board with that one thing I think's interesting about that sorry but um when part I don't know if you've run into this challenge but say you go out and you do 10 jobs to be done interviews and you come back and you have this great hypothesis and then you go to the sea level and they're like well that's only 10 people or that's only like I feel like one of the things I've run into is kind of push back on that qualitative and thinking that you know we need to survey a thousand people for this to be right and what I've found is you know what you find across 10 to 15 people 85% of that is going to be like you you've nailed it especially if a you know fair amount of them are saying the same thing but sometimes I run into that so you know what you can use it for too is you get your hypothesis and then okay we'll do a survey you know we know the things that we think now we can go get some more quantitative information on that I personally don't think that you really need that but I feel like that's more about EX stakeholder management a lot of times I'll incorporate that just so that people can feel okay this isn't just Alex's 10 interviews she did this is now you know we've done a survey at 50 people and they more or less validated it so I think that can be one thing if you're struggling to get Buy in that you can do um to kind of you know get it over the line sometimes you're surprised but usually you're not nice yeah know I like that um sort of your adding your experience in there um okay so I do you want to share the um the the website you you wanted to walk through it' be good to to to show the the viewers what this potentially looks like in practice well and I I'll kind of give a little context to this because this was the first company I started thinking about jobs to be done versus personas um and you know I mean a lot of times okay we sell to the VP of engineering we can do a Persona kind of template on that we know you know what what their goals are you know what they care about more or less what they're trying to do and it's it can be generic you know you incorporate like the current climate those kinds of things as we said um but I was working for a company and we sold marketing automation which you know very competitive space but it wasn't to like B2B tech companies or companies where there's a marketer or CMO it was marketing automation for small businesses so small businesses when you're looking at that that could be someone who owns a flower shop and all they know are flowers it could be a chef at a restaurant it could be a a franchise owner that's got 20 different franchises an Ecom site so when you're looking at that group of people it is so diverse there isn't really anyone way to make a Persona template because it's all flavors you know I think there's uh I mean we had 180,000 customers at the time I left so just you know across that it was you know it's a huge audience and that's not even going global so we had to kind of come up with a new framework for how to look at it and it really was okay what are the jobs that you do with marketing automation regardless of who you might be um and then you know through doing that and kind of uncovering that the second layer that we layered on was um trying to get because you you when you're in that situation you can't boil the ocean you have to find some patterns so we ended up kind of boiling it down to there's a few buckets of people trying to do these jobs but oriented it around the kinds of businesses that they're that they're working on so I'll share what we we ended up with um uh to try and make some sense of it so I'll share what we did at active campaign around that so you know we sold a platform solution effortless email and marketing automation um you know this was because we learned that across all of our users the reason they bought was ease um there's a million email marketing automation tools that you can use use you know if you're a certain kind of business you want you know flexibility customization but I mean most of our businesses this is small business the single biggest thing that they cared about in life is marketing is not my full-time job I don't care about marketing I want to be a florist I want to be a chef I have to do this um this especially was during covid when you know full digital transformation so you know I have to do this it's a job I don't want to do it I'm not passionate about marketing the way you know someone like myself might be um so really kind of leading with the ease of use was across the board um but then when we thought about who are our personas um rather than it being a title it ended up being more of like a business type um so you know for we had small and medium business we had what we call solopreneurs and we had you know your more typical Enterprise buyers and then we had people running franchises and across all our interviews we learned that you know across those four categories um the hopes and dreams what they're gold on you know what it means if they're successful or not successful all of that was very different and the functionality that they thought was really useful and cared the most um like the jobs to be done were different so we were able to bucket across a huge diverse platform of users like I said we had 180,000 um Global users we were able to kind of bucket those groups into these business categories and kind of make that the Persona and then within each of the personas catalog what are the most important things that they need to do so you can kind of see that on the web page where you know for small Med medium business the big thing was punch above your weight you know we're a small company we're strapped with resources and then our website really actually featured um flows that we thought were really critical that our that our customers were telling us were the things that were the most important um what were their most used tool stacks so what when they're coming and they're like I need to get going what are they using today um you know kind of highlighted some of our core values but again focusing on the flows and the jobs that they were actually using um and you can kind of see like so you know solo preneurs I mean you're one person be as productive as a whole team um so walking through what is someone most likely going to be doing as a solopreneur and then for Enterprise you know it was more of kind of like the traditional typ typical story and then you know franchise same um so you know really we geared our whole site up towards talking to these audiences like the key and what we were able to do um was really we understood the at the customer level what are the flows they're trying to accomplish what are the jobs they're actually using it for and then at the buyer level and more of the you know I'll say like Persona kind of psychographic level what are these people what is what is their daily and in and out what are they trying to do um as a business and we married those together so the site ended up being um you know pretty effective that we were growing I think 60% uh month over month while I was there um so really kind of going after uh what do you care about as a business type and a person that's responsible for this and then what are the things you're using in the product that are getting the most value and just going with that front and center uh to bring people in um and you know at the end of the day it wasn't like we didn't have a marketing buyer it was you know kind of our own flavor of how to how to tell these stories all right so that's it for this episode on the jobs to be done framework wherever you're watching this video there will be a link to Alex's resources on the page somewhere if you have any questions feel free to shoot me a message otherwise I'll see you on the next episode