Leverage Voice of Customer Like an Intuit PMM

27:55Are you trying to automate more of your workflow? well. And they'll normally talk for two to seven minutes about this thing. And so based on how long they take, I'll know when to get back to the topic at hand, or when they're kind of feeling comfortable. And it's almost like warming up before an exercise, you know, you're getting them warmed up, you're doing your best to eliminate that say do gap and bring the best out of them. And that's going to be the way that you get the best responses. Last thing to note on that one. the discussion guide is nothing more than a guide like sometimes you work with different cross-functional partners and they'll say they'll be slacking you on the side and say hey we still got like seven questions left and there's like 10 minutes like are you sure like we should probably move on but i think the key in these sessions is to identify when is someone just rambling and when are you going super deep on a customer problem that you haven't gone before because what I say is that at the end of the day, you're never gonna remember, oh, when I talked to Rick from accounting firm Y, we got through all the questions.

29:04But you might remember when we talked to Rick from accounting firm Y, I uncovered that little inkling of an idea and that's where everything started for this broader initiative that unlocked a lot for us. Right, I know exactly what you mean. And it sounds like you ask a lot of open-ended questions too, which helps keep it conversational. It's not just like a yes, no, or here's my direct answer. And then you can dig in, you know, based on how they respond. I think you can relate by having a three-year-old. Everything goes back to the five whys. And so nowadays I'm in taking a hundred why questions a day.

29:41So I'm just trying to model that right back in my customer sessions. Yeah. Anyone who has little kids or has had little kids in their lives are probably pros at that. You got it. Okay. So can you talk a little bit before we move on to the next one? Last question on this one. What types of topics do you typically cover? I think you mentioned a little bit about quantifiables and, you know, what your business priorities are. Are there any kind of like last, like just a few standard questions that you ask or that you would recommend that a PMM would include in their interview guide, not a script, but a guide for the interview?

30:17yeah i think it's tough to like generalize across industries you know because we have such different customers sure but the things that i would challenge and always try to keep in your mind and if possible like put it at the top of your guide big red letters you want to make them remind you of a previous customer or prospect and so like ask the quantifiables until you can say oh, that reminds me a little bit of this person I talked to last month. And once you get to the point. Then you get the repeatable stuff. Yeah, exactly. Like I think I sometimes call it putting them in a box, you know, that like you want them to fall into a box that you're happy to move them out of it, but you have a starting point and you know roughly where they are and how you should be kind of tailoring your guide moving forward.

31:11So once you're at that point, that's when you switch into the qualitative and allow more of their personality to come out. Because I find if you can get a little bit of personality out in the first 10 minutes or so, that's how you're going to eliminate a lot of say to you guys. I love that. Okay. And with all these great questions that you're asking the customer and just the sheer number, the volume of interviews that you're having, you have a mountain of notes, right? So I think step three in your process was all about making sense of it all, leveraging AI. So tell us more about what AI tools you use and I guess like your process for analyzing this mountain of data that you've just gathered.

31:50Yeah. So AI tools is so fun right now because I feel like every two to three months, it just shifts, you know. Totally. So like I was a hardcore cloud truther and then like a new version of ChatGPT comes out and you're like, oh, have to. get away from it. This is better. And so like rule of thumb with defining what tool is right for you. Obviously you have a budget from your company and so you may have to be using something in particular, but if you have the freedom, just try this stuff, you know, make it a bi-weekly hour long timeframe that you have on a Friday to go try some different tools out.

32:27And I found just connecting with different product marketers on LinkedIn is super helpful because they'll be posting about like what they've seen is helpful and what isn't. And for me, I can go from a list of 30 different tools to three different tools to try out and then determine what's right for my workflow. With that being said, for customer interviews specifically, right now I'm in a committed relationship with the Google AI tools. So I love Notebook LM. It just can unlock so much. And I think one further thing that's been really helpful is normally I'm running these. Normally, I would say like 95 % of the time I'm running the sessions and asking the questions.

33:09And when you have to take notes while you're doing a session, it just leads to bad habits where you're typing down. Then you say, OK, let me remember what my next question is. And so with like these recordings that we have nowadays, I'll have the template of questions. and then after each one, I'll download those transcripts and then get AI. One, I'll upload it to Notebook.m as my library after I strip out PII information from the person. The other is I will ask one of my Gemini gems to take the transcript and fill out all of the questions to the best of its ability on what was answered and what wasn't, because sometimes that can be a helpful pattern too.

33:48You might want to say, hey, like we're going super deep with these customers, but there's an important topic that normally comes up in the last third of these discussions. And this week, I've only been able to get to that question twice. Let's mix around the format and move it up top. But anyways, with Notebook Outland, it is just like so helpful. And it has gone in the last year from being this static library to a separate brain that you can really riff with, you know? Scale your brain. Yeah, 100%. And so like, I'll go to it with like, hey, here was my biggest takeaways from these sessions so far.

34:27What can I be missing? And it'll come up with things like twice as good of what I was thinking. Now, I remember when it first happened, maybe four or five months ago, I was just like, whoa, like, this is for real. Like, I need to make sure this is a core part of the process moving forward. Because this brain over here is out thinking me and I need to be working more closely and trusting what it's given me. And so for me, that's super helpful. I like making the custom GPTs or the Gemini gems. And so like for my product marketing life, I will make them very specific for like, here is gems for a white paper or fitting in the right type of testimonial.

35:09here's gems for our messaging for a specific type of cohort of customers maybe our highest value or here maybe is a lower value or a smaller one that we still care about we want to make sure we're segmented properly and so i think there's just so much you can do that i think it makes me probably 10 times more productive with doing this process than i was like a year ago and so So finding the scale is so fun for me. Yeah. Okay. So for you, your top recommendation is try all the tools, figure out which ones you love and work for you. But it sounds like you gravitate at least lately more toward Notebook LM, which I've heard another person recommend recently.

35:53And then Gemini Gems. Are those kind of your top two? I'm going steady with them, but like haven't committed to anything at this point. I love that. Okay. So moving on to the last step in your process, your system was around cross-functional feedback loops with your stakeholders. So what does that look like in practice? Yeah, I feel like I mentioned it before, but we're point guards, you know? And so like our – and someone might say, oh, you're like a quarterback. I would disagree. I don't think a PMM is a quarterback. They're a point guard. You're not going to get the flashy statistics. you are going to be passing the ball and setting your other teams up for success and for those wins down the road.

36:41And so like with me, you're passing to you get this juicy insight and you're like, wow, that's something I need to learn more about. I like setting up a call with someone on analytics and talking through and saying, you know, this is something I'm very interested in that I'd like to prove that further. I think a lot of people might jump to like put in a Jira ticket or try to like prove out what the dashboard but I think it's important to note when you're a subject matter expert when other people might be better suited and to bring them in as a thought partner so like I like bringing analytics in and saying more from a qualitative lens this is what I'm seeing how do you think we could best solve this and those guys are so brilliant like they're able to very deeply solve these problems in ways that I never would have thought of, you know?

37:33And so I call that kind of like juicing up your sample size or your N, you know? Love it. And then I'll turn to sales and product because they're having a product conversation. Sorry, they're having customer conversations or prospect conversations, but in a very different lens than we're used to. There's normally some amount of say, do gaps on the product side. People were not wanting them to say like, I don't like this product. on the sales side you got a big guard up you know and so like you have to take everything they're saying with a grain of salt but a lot of these topics will touch these different groups and that's where you can kind of hack that n or sample size and try to get it larger to say how time sensitive is this thing you know and so once you get to that level you end up crafting a presentation, aligning with stakeholders, you do the share outs.

38:24And I think we have a pretty fun culture of like people challenging people on things. And so I really like like nothing makes me happier than doing one of these share outs with our senior leadership team. And someone says, like, I get what you're saying there. But I disagree based on this, this, this, like, that's fun for me. Yeah, it's like, okay, I can do some legwork to figure this out. Or I can pull up some slide from the appendix that just digs deeper on specifically this topic. And so I love that. That's where it gets small. Okay, so it sounds like you can maybe test further on various maybe bits of insights that you get with your analytics team or, you know, maybe other stakeholders, then you do a formal readout, you know, share outs with with the team.

39:09How often are you doing those readouts, would you say? Totally dependent on what type of initiative I'm doing. I would say like at least quarterly. Okay. Yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah. Because for accountants specifically, as you can imagine, their lives are highly seasonal. So if you're trying to talk to accountants from mid-January to the middle of April, you're probably not well set up for success. But if you're going about it in a little bit different ways and trying to meet them during the timeframes where they are able to speak, I think you're going to have a lot better success. Yeah, makes a lot of sense.

39:47And you mentioned a really big number up front, like something like nearly 100 customers per year, factoring in seasonality. So only certain times of the year that you can actually get some like really strong conversations going. how many customers would you say on average you're talking to up on a monthly basis to keep this muscle strong yeah i think like on average i try to set a bar of like 300 customer or prospect conversations a year sometimes you get higher and sometimes you're a touch lower but like the ways that you can really hack those numbers up is you go to these industry events you know And I don't have an agenda when I'm going.

40:29I'm not trying to sell to anyone. I'm just showing up to an event. I'm going in the sessions. I'm talking to accountants. And like the most beautiful discussions happen over a meal. And I will be able to talk to 10 different accountants that are all contributing and actively asking about these things. And the piece that always cracks me up is I'm not normally advertising like, hi, I'm laying into it, you know? Yeah, I'm just there trying to learn from people and how they work with their workflows and stuff. And so sometimes 30 or 40 minutes into a conversation, they'll say, hey, how do you do this for your firm?

41:03And I'll say like, oh, no, I actually work for one of the softwares just here trying to learn. And most of the time, they're so cool about it. They're like, what? You just had that old conversation and talking about this like deep thing and you're just trying to learn. I'm like, yeah, it's just like fun for me. Wow. So those are the pieces that are really fun and we can take back those learnings. And I've had many times coming off of a lunch conversation. And before I jump into some other learning session at a conference, just wanting to jot down like two pages of notes of like, oh, this was good.

41:35I need to act on this. I need to talk to this person from Prana to validate, you know. I love that. This is all so much great insight. It's just pure gold. So quick recap for our listeners. your system has basically four steps. You've got the setup where you are defining the topics, landing with stakeholders, building the interview guide. Then you have the actual step two being running the sessions with the customers, making sure that you're mixing in both quantitative and qualitative bits in the conversation. Step three is your analysis with AI, which I love that. And then finally, to that stakeholder feedback loop internally, where you're doing the readouts and potentially doing even more testing.

42:21Such great insights. So my last question for you on this topic, what last piece of advice would you have for a product marketer who's trying to build out a voice of customer initiative for their product? Yeah, so I think when I started in my role, I had a really great mentor. And how she told me to approach things was, hey, first six months, you need to become a subject matter expert on the software. Next six months, you need to be a subject matter expert on the customer. From there, you're really trying to like deeply understand how the business makes money. And I think when I got in that second six months, really learning the voice of the customer, I think I kind of fell in love.

43:02It was just really fun for me. And I think the voice of the customer is like the engine for my work in any given week. And anytime where I'm feeling like, oh, motivations lacking, or my daughter had a bad night's sleep last night, you know, that like a customer session is something that can really like snap me out of it and get you the juice you need. Yeah, exactly. Get you back on track. I love that. Yeah, that voice of customers, the engine. I think that's so true for everything in product marketing. I couldn't agree more. Okay, so I want to switch gears a little bit. We talked through that case study and it's super strong case study about customer.

43:46I want to move on to the second segment of our show, the messaging critique. So this is where we as product marketing experts get to analyze real world messaging. And the fun part is Lang, you get to pick the company that we look at in terms of their messaging. So quick ground rules before we get started. You're going to pick a company that either is a consumer-based company or a company where you understand their customer really well. Wouldn't be fair to pick on a company that we didn't know their customers. And then you're going to tell me what you're loving about the messaging, something you wish the PMM would have done differently.

44:22And then we'll have a quick brainstorm around how that PMM can take it to the next level. So again, all about learning and refining our craft. No negativity, just a thoughtful, constructive critique. Yeah, 100%. Let's get to it. Let's do it. Okay, tell us the reveal. Who's the company we're going to analyze today? Today we're talking about Eight Sleep. So some of like the tech brethren might be tracking, but Eight Sleep is essentially like a cooling mattress cover ecosystem to help you sleep at. I love it. Okay, so for those of you who want to follow along, go to eightsleep.com it's e-i-g-h-t-s-l-e-e-p.com okay so i'm already very intrigued tell me about their messaging you know who do you think their target customer is just based on what you're seeing on their website and then just just kind of walk us through like what is the messaging kind of like read aloud for for the listeners yeah so first off i think the target customer could be me.

45:27And especially given like my Navy background, I just had a lot of experience being sleep deprived for months on end during long deployments. And when I got out of the Navy in 2020, my sleep was very broken. And so I was very much in the market of like, how do I just make sure I have the best sleep hygiene possible. And so that's something I'm still on the journey on today. So I'm now one of their customers. But when you look at their page for the target customer, They clearly have premium pricing and their website kind of speaks to like a tech audience. They try to back things up and have like really cool design going on.

46:05So you can kind of tell off the bat like it's you would guess it to be like young professionals that are investing in personal health. It's kind of a best guess. Yeah, I completely agree. So when you go to their website, it's a really, I'll say, like sleek animation sort of, you know, video background of the product itself. It's very sleek, nice coloring with the black and the high contrast. And then like big letters across the main screen says, Exceptional sleep without exception. And I just, I love that so much. And then the small letters underneath that, it says, Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, wake up energized.

46:48I really, really like that. It's resonating a lot with me. So maybe I'm also part of the target audience having two toddlers. So tell me more. What are you loving about this messaging? Yeah. And as a quick aside before I jump in is like, isn't it kind of fun being a product marketer nowadays? Like when I used to just hate like commercials for like you're watching a football game or something. Yes. But nowadays I find that I go from if I'm not totally locked into like a Steelers game, for instance. and something is on, the commercials come on and my wife will see me like critically watching commercials and then like muttering to myself like, that's a pretty good commercial.

47:31Right, or like, oh man, they botched it. Or like, oh, they should have done this. Or that was a mistake. Yeah, I'll say like, who's their target customer here? Right, same, same. It always cracks me up. But back to Aidsleep, yeah, I think their messaging is really crisp. Love the design. I love how they back things up throughout it where they're saying like members experience up to 25 % more deep sleep where I'm just like, oh, okay. I could go for 25 % more. I love that. And can I just comment really quickly that they refer to their customers as members? Members. It sounds so exclusive. It's like a club.

48:09Yeah. So they do that and then they say clinical grade accuracy, matching ECGs for heart rate monitoring. and you see that and you're just like okay this is legit so they then call out some like big names in this space which like it's kind of hard to listen to like a podcast or watch a youtube video nowadays that's something like andrew huberman or brian johnson thing and so they say like 550 million hours of sleep analyzed wow pretty pretty big sample size to then be claiming 25 more deep sleep and so my quantitative brain is saying like this works so it's validated that that for me was like oh i i gotta check this out okay loving the proof points um what's something you wish that pmm would have considered to do differently yeah i feel like sometimes when you're looking at market sizing you know the price range is high um and so like i think there are ways and maybe they have separate like types of landing pages you know i'd love to see like different landing pages or even different segments within this page where it maybe spoke to like uh a couple you know and how like don't fight over the thermostat anymore type of thing and i think maybe having different like entry levels you know of hey maybe here's like our basic version and the basic version might be pretty great but doesn't have these additional add-ons and for 25 of the market they might say oh that's worth it for better sleep for me where other people might say oh i need this like data backed and all these extra things to make me the best me I can be.

50:06Right. And so for me, it really just gets to like try to meet people where they are, especially when it's a premium product on this end. If you want to say, hey, we're premium, we're sticking to premium, we'll let people find the less expensive piece that's going on. That's great. But like, for instance, I showed my wife this page. So in a lot of circumstances, there's multiple stakeholders here, especially for like a large purchase. So I don't know how most people's households work, but like I showed my wife and was shown with all these cool things, 25 % better deep sleep. That's not bad. um so yeah like i think trying to involve both partners on the journey and trying to make sure that anyone that could come to the site could even have like some parallel journey that is going to make them think i either could see myself as a customer like in the near term or like here's an offering that this could be helpful for me you know yeah i completely agree with you so i have an interesting pro cons to consider with the proof points.

51:10So while I am a huge fan of proof points, even with, you know, this can even apply to any like a SaaS company, even right, that like 25 % more sleep, having context around what that means, I think is really important. And for example, I do not track my sleep. And maybe that maybe that eliminates me as part of the target audience. You don't? Like, yeah, I don't I don't like most people, I would say 1 % of people maybe. Yeah. Yeah. So like, I don't really know what that means. Like, I'm guessing that's a lot more. So I would love to see some storytelling around what that means for up 25 % more sleep.

51:51I could imagine, and maybe we're kind of getting into like the next, like our last little, like the creative brainstorm bit here. But I could imagine doing some storytelling around what that means. Because then you can double down and like really invest a lot more in that like fantastic proof point. But then build more context around what it means for your customer. Curious on your thoughts on that. Yeah, how about we beam in their creative team here. and the thing that i'm i'm already trying to think of like how can we use these disparate pieces to make it more tangible and so maybe take the 550 million hours of analyzed sleep take the 25 percent more deep sleep and bubble it up to like how much better rested would you be if you slept uh i don't know if you just did over a year or something like next year you could sleep 120 hours more of deep sleep type of thing.

52:46I think if you like try to quantify it in terms that people can understand, like that might be more helpful. Yeah. Is that, are you kind of going at like, let's hear actually your, I guess like creative idea for their team. Like you talked a little bit about that, but what about like taking it to the next level? Yeah. I think like, you see this with some of their competitors. I only say this because I've looked at all of the competitors and being I've like been a member of different ones, member. But like in the ads for I'm going to say like sleep number or something it'll show like on one side of the bed it's 85 degrees and on the other it's 65 type of thing and I think a lot of partners find that funny and relatable you know yes um and so I think it could be helpful to up level something like that but to give them like fair credit maybe they're trying to differentiate from others in their space and saying we are premium this is what we stand for and we believe that like our tech is better so like that's our competitive differentiator we know our icp we're gonna keep drilling into them you know awesome yeah totally agree yeah that's funny i literally sleep with an extra blanket versus my husband i i'm on the the weighted blanket game have you gotten to weighted blankets yet i have it i should check it out better sleep a couple of christmases ago my wife got me she asked how heavy of a weighted blanket would you like and i asked how heavy do they come and so this thing is a beast it's 50 pounds and so like it is yes oh whoa yes so i am putting myself in a hyperbaric chamber and like throwing away the key each night and just like I couldn't get up if I wanted to.

54:32And so for me, it leads to deeper sleep. So I like it. I love it. Okay, Eight Sleep. We are so intrigued. If there's any Eight Sleep PMMs out there listening, you've got some fans here. Nice messaging. All right. So Lang, one thing I like to do on this podcast is to take a moment of gratitude. Because in product marketing, none of us get here on our own. We're always learning from each other, building on each other's work. And I personally believe we're better for it. So before I wrap up, I have a big thank you for you, to you especially. First, for being a veteran. Thank you for your service to our country, for me, and everyone else who lives here and benefits from you.

55:14And then taking that further, and even as a PMM and into your more B2B tech business role, all the time that you're sharing with veterans and PMMs, and then the prep and everything that went into coming on this podcast today and sharing your insights with the PMM community. Thank you so much. Really appreciate you taking the time. Yeah. I mean, first off, thanks for having me here. I think like if I get an invite to come talk about product marketing for an hour, like that's the highlight of my week, you know. But when I look at like some different shout outs, I would say when I first came on it into it, a lady named Angela Doheny just connected me at her hit and just let me follow her around like a little wandering duckling as I first learned the product and then learned the customer and then learn how the business makes money and like was so extremely helpful and was really supportive of every step of the way so that was fun for me my current boss Shanna Scott she is so wonderful she just allows me to really do my thing she knows that like when I have more autonomy, I'm gonna do better work than if I was being like heavily supervised on everything.

56:29And so she trusts me to just go uncover these unknown unknowns, pushes me to think a little differently and then really just like empowers me to do transformative product marketing, which is the goal for me. And then lastly, another person within Intuit, Jessica Chang, she's been super, super helpful and like a real supporter as I've kind of reached outside the boundaries of my group to say, what does best in class product marketing look like? Because at the end of the day, I think it's really easy to get hung up on, I don't know, like generic praise or our dashboards are green. So like things must be going well, but like, that's just not how I'm wired.

57:09Like I want to know what's the next thing. How can we lock in? How can we just be doing like really transformative work? And so for me, I'm always hungry to learn and she's always been there to support me on whatever I'm trying to learn about next. Yeah, such great shout outs, Angela, Shanna, Jessica, you guys are awesome. Thank you so much. And my last question for you, Lang, is where else can we access your expertise? Is it best for our listeners to find you on LinkedIn? Yeah, probably LinkedIn. So you'll see I'll post about product marketing stuff. I think I'm a little bit of an outlier that like a lot of the people in the space that are posting are kind of like consultants.

57:49And so I like shining the light on like internal PMMs because that is the majority of us and kind of working through some of the struggles and some of the triumphs that we see. and then just kind of learning and growing together. That's someone reached out to me the other day and said like, you're posting as like an in-house PMM. Like, why do you do that? And I thought about it and it was like, I don't know, for the love of the game. Like, I think I just really enjoy learning deeply from other folks. And like, it's a really cool place to learn. The other thing you'll see on there is like, I'm big on just trying to democratize learning, whether it is from a product marketing lens.

58:28I'm trying to share what I've learned and best practices and also ask questions because that's a place to learn and also try to share those learnings for military veterans because I've been in their shoes and boy it's hard when you get out you go from like this train track with these predetermined stops at every point to like just a boat in the open ocean and you could do anything but that feels really suffocating when you're not used to it and so I think when in doubt and when you have like the right mindset you can actually ask your veteran network for help, you're in a lot better spot. But yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn if any of you guys want to.

59:06I'm always happy to chat. Awesome. Again, thank you so much, Lang. And thank you, PMM listeners, for coming on this adventure with us today. I hope this episode leaves you with inspiration to take the next step in your own journey.