How to read your prospect’s minds 🪄

You'll not fear competition anymore →

Hey there, 

Happy New Year — it’s nice to see you back on the ship of Marketers that Convert :)

Talking about navigating and ships, it's always nice to have a marketing compass with you. Indeed, many are the teams that spit out content just for the sake of it.

With no confidence at all. 

That's why, over the years, I found many ways to develop my product marketer gut feeling. 

One strategy is to subscribe to the most popular newsletters in my industry (e.g., StorageNewsletter). This helped me stay on the same page regarding how the market moves, seeing what competitors and complementary services are doing, etc. 

Reading — in this case, storage-related articles — every day, collecting news and reports in an Excel repository, and sharing them with the team with daily bulletins was one of the critical pillars of getting where I am right now. 

Yet, today, I'll not talk about this (but I'll probably deep-dive on this in a future newsletter). 

In this issue, I'll talk about the process that helped me, most of everything else, to read prospects' minds and grasp little-known insights on our competitors. 

This was accomplished by talking with our customers, once they signed the contract. 

First of all, if you work in B2B, I'd love to specify that you're not just selling to a customer but also to a whole buying committee personas (see point 3 here).

Then, once you've asked your customer to talk, you need to ask the right questions.

If you search on the internet, you'll find thousands of free templates — spoiler: most of them are shitty. Yet, no one is perfect. I've crafted mine by adapting it, interview after interview. 

One inspiring video on this is by Eric Migicovsky of Y Combinator. He provides 5 questions you should ask and many valuable tips:

1. What's the hardest thing about [doing this thing]?

2. Tell me about the last time you encountered that problem...

3. Why was that hard?

4. What, if anything, have you done to try to solve the problem?

5. What don't you love about the solutions you've tried?

I made some twists to this and got even more valuable info:

1. I changed the first question to 'What's the biggest issue in your life/work that brought you here to [product-name]?'

2. I added 3 questions to the script:

   1. What are the value propositions that [our product] helps you with?

   2. What resources do you use to inform and update yourself in your work/everyday life? Is there any influencer you follow?

   3. [B2B-only] If you identify a need for a new product in your department, what steps and processes is your team taking to acquire the solution?

Here are some tools that can help you along the way:

• OBSstudio: Before the interview, ask the customer for permission to record, specifying that it will never be published. 

• SonixAI: A fantastic tool that will help you transcript everything perfectly, in a few minutes.

Before closing, here are some more tips:

1. Only some of your customers are your ideal customers. Try to identify common patterns among happy clients in these interviews (Some ideas with Supergeos & product-market fit).

2. Don't be scared about asking your customers for an interview. They'll be happy to help you, even if they're not 100% satisfied with your product. If you want, you can also incentivize them with a gift.

3. If you don't have customers yet, recruit prospects and people you think will be on target. Then, offer them a coffee.

4. To scale qualitative interviews into quantitative data, make every customer fill in a survey right after buying your product (with the same questions mentioned above). Provide free add-ons for filling in the 5-min survey.

5. To simplify the process, coordinate with your sales and customer success team so that you get a customer discovery intro as soon as the contract is signed. 

Once you've done this for a few months, you'll better understand the whole industry landscape. 

It happened to me that our customers had already considered different alternatives during the buying process (our competitors included). They told me specifically why they preferred our solutions vs theirs. Also, we were able to better know what the key decision points were, how to position our solution in terms of VPs, and how and where to intercept our prospects during their buying journey. 

Last but not least, we discovered what content to focus our energies and time on, from long-form content and webinars to ads and email marketing.

That’s it. See you in the next issue,

Francesco (Linkedin)

P.S. Enjoyed the newsletter? Forward it to a friend or colleague (or just hit reply and let me know. I read and respond to every email :D )