Hi, I’m James. Thanks for checking out Building Momentum: a newsletter to help startup founders and marketers accelerate SaaS growth through product marketing.
One of the toughest lessons I’ve learned in product marketing is that customer research doesn’t matter if no one uses it.
Product marketers love doing research. We geek out over customer interviews, win/loss reports, usage data, surveys, you name it. We spend hours synthesizing insights, finding patterns, and integrating it into our work.
And then?
It sits in a Notion doc. A slide deck. A beautifully crafted report that no one reads. It feels awful, knowing the effort that went into the research execution and detailed analysis… only for the business to just keep making decisions based on gut feel.
Research without action is wasted effort. The research we do as product marketers only drives impact when it’s impossible to ignore. So, here’s how you do that.
In this post:
Make customer research essential by design
If you want customer research to matter, you need to connect it to real business needs from day one. Here’s how:
Tie every research project to a business decision
Customer insights aren’t useful in isolation. Before you do any research, ask:
- What decision does this research need to influence?
- Who will use this insight, and how?
- What’s the business outcome if we act on this?
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
❌ Weak research goal: “Let’s run interviews to learn more about our ICP.”
✅ Strong research goal: “We’re seeing slower sales cycles in mid-market deals. Let’s interview prospects to uncover specific objections and refine our messaging.”
❌ Weak research goal: “Let’s validate our persona assumptions.”
✅ Strong research goal: “Sales is struggling to close deals with finance leaders. Let’s talk to buyers in that role and identify what they need to justify purchasing.”
Research should be a means to an end, not an academic exercise. If you can’t map your research to a critical business challenge, reconsider whether it’s worth doing.
Create demand for your insights
If your research isn’t used, it’s usually because it wasn’t designed to be useful, necessary, and aligned with advancing key business initiatives.
The easiest way to guarantee your work gets ignored is to spring it on stakeholders after the fact.
Instead, make your research process collaborative from the start:
- Talk to your colleagues in sales, product, and success teams before kicking off research. Get specific: What patterns are they seeing? Where do deals get stuck? What objections come up most often?
- Engage product early. Go beyond just asking what behaviors are blocking adoption,work together to identify what research could help inform roadmap decisions, improve retention, or eliminate friction.
- Align with leadership. Don’t just ask what they wish they knew. Identify the strategic decisions they’re struggling with, and structure your research to give them the clarity they need.
This isn’t just about gathering input, it’s about making your research indispensable by directly influencing critical business decisions. When stakeholders help shape the questions, they’re far more likely to use the answers.
Validate assumptions, don’t just explore
Research focused on pure discovery is a distraction. You already have internal assumptions, use those to focus on research that validates what you believe to be true while uncovering what you don’t yet know. This ensures your findings are not only actionable but also drive real decisions that help you move faster and with confidence.
Instead of starting from a blank slate, begin by outlining key hypotheses based on existing data, customer conversations, and team insights. Then structure your research to confirm, refine, or challenge those assumptions, leading to clear next steps.
Discovery and validation shouldn’t be separate; they should work together in every research initiative. Don’t just ask open-ended questions; use the end of an interview to test different messaging options, show a mockup of a webpage, or present alternative value propositions. Ask customers how they perceive them, what resonates, and what feels off. This approach ensures that every insight isn’t just theoretical: it’s immediately tested, refined, and ready to drive action.
Translate research into decisions, not just insights
The fastest way to kill momentum? Deliver a 20-slide research report that no one has time to read.
Instead, make it stupidly easy for decision-makers to take action.
Try structuring your research deliverables like this:
- One-pager format: Summarize key insights, clear takeaways, and the action items that matter.
- Make insights instantly usable: Don’t just document customer pain points, turn them into real, testable assets. Convert research into ready-to-go sales decks, refined pitch scripts, or A/B testable website copy that teams can implement immediately.
- Decision-based recommendations: Clearly outline what should change based on your research, and why. Example:
❌ “Many customers say they are confused by pricing.”
✅ “50% of lost deals cite pricing complexity. We should simplify our structure by moving from per-seat to usage-based pricing.”
People are overwhelmed with information. Your job is to simplify and operationalize it so it actually drives decisions.
Keep insights relevant and embedded in every day use
Customer insights aren’t static,they should evolve with real changes in market dynamics, competitive shifts, or strategic priorities. If research becomes disconnected from business needs, it loses value.
To ensure research remains impactful:
- Create a centralized, living research hub (Notion, Confluence, etc.) where insights are easy to find and updated as needed.
- Refresh research only when necessary. Don’t update just for the sake of it. Refresh when something has materially changed that impacts your understanding of customers.
- Share insights in context. Make them a natural part of sales enablement, product roadmap discussions, and strategy meetings so they directly inform key decisions.
- Use the right research type for the right job. Qualitative research is ideal for discovering new patterns and exploring the customer landscape, while quantitative research helps validate those patterns, segment audiences, and measure impact at scale. Knowing when to use each ensures that insights are both rich and actionable.
Customer research isn’t just a box to check… but only if it’s plugged directly into your company’s biggest challenges and priorities.
Because the best research is the research that gets used.
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