The Overview #41

Hey there. This is The Overview, a weekly roundup of noteworthy B2B SaaS stuff. You’ll find interesting thoughts, articles, and more from around the internet.

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Where do your buyers learn?

If you’re not asking your best customers where they go to learn about work, you’re missing out on a ton of useful insight about:

  • Who your customers are influenced by
  • Where you can prioritise paid marketing
  • How your competitors are reaching the target market
  • The community and education partners you didn’t know you needed
  • Opportunities for your business to organically join conversations

… and much more.

“Where do you go to keep up-to-date with the X industry?”, “When you’re learning about Y, what resources do you use?”, and “What websites, communities, and industry influencers do you regularly follow?” can all work.

Earn insights through conversations

I loved this phrase so much. 1:1 conversations unlock earned insights.

It’s a great reminder that surveys should help to validate the themes and patterns that you’ve identified through customer development. Don’t use surveys as a primary way to ‘learn new things’ from customers – you’ll end up with superficial insights that aren’t really useful.

Go and book some customer interviews now. You’ll thank me for it later.

Smart marketers are moving to JTBD marketing

Scott Brinker, the grandaddy of the martech industry, tweeted about this article from HBR. Borrowing from the ‘jobs to be done’ theory from the product management world, the authors state that their survey of over 1,000 B2B buyers identified that most purchase processes fall into four main stages:

  1. Problem Identification
  2. Solution Exploration
  3. Requirements Building
  4. Supplier Selection

For sales reps and marketers, this means having a really deep understanding of your buyer journey and ensuring you support prospects through these key stages in the mediums they desire.

I’ve advocated a buyer-journey first approach to the sales process for a long time, so I’m excited to see how companies can elevate their marketing and sales process around a single and unified customer-centric experience.

Swipe File: Entering B2B markets, and dealing with tablestakes

???? When you become a free Building Momentum subscriber, you get access to my exclusive product marketing swipe file! Click here to find out more.

This is a great post from VC Guy Turner and I love how it illustrates the things we know, but don’t really acknowledge.

Tablestakes matter more to larger customers. There, I said it.

The post then offers a few suggestions on how you can enter markets by positioning your tech as a feature, product, or platform… and things to watch out for. I also like the clear definitions of what drives success at each of those stages – lots of food for thought (and something I wish I’d paid more attention to back in May 2018 when I first found the article!).

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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