USING YOUR RESOURCES TO FIND ENTERPRISE CUSTOMERS TO INTERVIEW

Interviewing customers is perhaps one of the most important things you need to continually do as product manager. The voice of the customer is your number one most valuable piece of ammunition when make a case internally to support, build, kill, or modify a product. As a PM you do need intuition, but absent customer input, your intuition is just your opinion based on one person’s input (yours). Over time you’ll simply be making it up and your product will suffer as a result. Interviews are how to you get to intimately get to know your customer and discover new needs, new problems, and new areas that only get revealed across many conversations as you reveal undiscovered country.

FINDING INTERVIEW CANDIDATES IS EASIER THAN YOU REALIZE

Buying enterprise products is infrequently done with a credit card. It’s most often done with a Purchase Order (PO). Therefore the purchase cycles can be long and include many touch points. It’s equally common to see a deal take 30 days or 300 days. While a consumer Apple App Store purchase might be $0.99 or $3.99, an enterprise product may easily be $50,000 or $300,000. It’s a very different world.

This can help you as a product manager because long sales pipelines create many opportunities to find and speak to these current and future customers. Even lost deals provide great learning opportunities. It’s the learning that you’re after in the end. You can learn a lot when customers don’t select you too.

Ultimately you should cultivate a pocket team or stable of customers you can always reach out to.

Here are several resources you can tap for reaching out to your customers:

EXISTING CUSTOMERS SOURCES

These are the actual customers who have purchased your product in the past. Look up these customers in win alerts, your CRM (e.g. Salesforce), or ask around.

• Known customers you’ve met or interacted with
• New customers you just learned about via Win alerts from your salesforce
• Questions from the field
• Ask your sales team

SOCIAL DISCOVERY SOURCES

Social platforms can be good places to hear from customers you were unaware of. Some customers will post their experiences here because they don’t know who to contact for product feedback, or they want other people to hear their perspective and start a conversation. Look in here, or set up Google Alerts.

• Twitter
• Reddit
• Company community sites
• Customer fan and technology blogs
• VAR/SI/Reseller blogs

INTERNAL DISCOVERY SOURCES

• Listen to your salespeople. Sometimes they reach out for help with a deal.
• Listen to your sales engineers. They often reach out for clarifications on product functionality and futures as they work with your customers.
• Other teams at work (other PMs, support, customer success)
• Talk to employees who used to be operators of your product at other companies
• Trade shows
• Volunteer and attend Executive Briefings for Customers (EBC)
• Ask the people that run the EBC

GO LEAD HUNTING

Do your customers have commonly assigned titles? E.g. Admin, DBA, help desk, support engineer, etc? Use the search provided by different sites and tools to find people that match these roles. You may need to further tune in by industry or technology in use.

• Go hunting on LinkedIn
• Go hunting on a community site
• Explore your CRM. E.g. Salesforce. If you’re a PM, you may already have access to this. NOTE: If you’re in a big company, don’t email customers directly. Contact the sales team (account manager, SE). Enterprise accounts can bring in millions a year, and those sales cycles can last a year, or budgets may only open once a year. Be friends with the account team. Don’t go around them and maintain a positive working relationship. They will bring you back in the future.

KEEP A PERSONAL CUSTOMER REFERENCES FILE

• Keep an escalations file. When you fix a problem for a customer, they may remember you fondly if it all turned out well. Reach out to them.
• Keep a questions file. Customers reach out for Q&A. Use that to forge a relationship.
• Keep a list of customers who’ve asked for features. Either get back to them when you’ve built it, or when you start and you want UX or design feedback. Some customers love being part of the process. It also gives them confidence that it’s actually coming to life.

LEARN FROM YOUR LOSSES

• Sales loss alerts from people that didn’t choose you. They might tell you why which can inform your planning. Reach out to them.
• Customers that used to be your customer and then changed their mind in favor of the competition. It’s a pretty strong negative signal. Reach out and find out why.

GET MORE CREATIVE

• Create a company Slack group with external, trusted customers (may require NDA access depending on your company security rules)
• Send a Survey… (if you must). Surveys validate signal you’ve already received. They aren’t that good for detailed feedback or primary research which is why I’m not a strong fan of them. When’s the last time you spent a lot of time writing feedback to the faceless person on the other side of the ‘Additional Comments’ box?

Ultimately you should cultivate a pocket team or stable of customers you can always reach out to. Build this informal team and add more to it over time. Sometimes you’ll need to take one out. These people are your insiders and a very valuable source of intel, and you are one of their trusted advisors.

Customers who like your product, or who are considering it, are often interested in hearing about what’s coming up.

PRO TIPS FOR PRODUCT MANAGERS

Getting customer feedback isn’t always easy. In the process you’ll have to reach out over and over to get these meetings on your calendar. You’re not always the most important conversation for a customer. I find that a ‘give for get’ is useful when it comes to the near-term roadmap. Customers who like your product, or who are considering it, are often interested in hearing about what’s coming up. Trade that access to your access to their feedback. Pro tip: Get your feedback first and save the roadmap Q&A until the end of the call to maintain focus.

• Keep on asking. You’ll hear a lot of crickets with non-responses. People are busy and it may not be the right time for them to speak to you. Perhaps there is a big deal in the pipeline and now is not the time for a new face in the conversation by the account manager. You may need to ask 20 customers to get 5 interviews. YMMV.
• Be time flexible. Enterprise products are global products. If you want feedback from a customer in Europe and you’re in California, you may need to take a 7:00am call. You customer is in NYC and only has a standing account team meeting at 8:30am? Wake up in time for coffee and a fresh mind for that 5:30am call. Do what you have to do.
• Dig when you hear no. If you ask about Acme Company to your account manager and she says they’re too busy, ask who else is in her patch. Every account manager has multiple accounts. You might not realize it, but just hearing back from the account team is half the battle sometimes. Find additional opportunities.
• Double tap your customer contacts. Did you get great feedback from a customer? Keep them on file and do it again a year later. A lot can change in a year.
• Take and share notes. You want to be respected as the source of customer truth inside your company? Take detailed notes, clean them up and share them out. Enable your peers and your engineering team with insights and opinions direct from the customers’ mouths. By sharing customer feedback with engineering, they will know that you understand the customers, and they will have confidence that you do in fact represent the customers so the engineers can trust you.
• Support ride-alongs. Engineers often want to hear what customers say directly. Invite them to listen into a phone call. Some will and some won’t, but those that do are often illuminated. Customers don’t always use your product they way you intended. Insight creates better products.
• Sometimes a sticker or a t-shirt goes a long way. Your fans want to rep your brand. Bring them something fun to show off. Many engineers love a new, cool sticker for their laptop. Let it be yours and let them be the exclusive person in their company to have it.
• Develop a customer following and a brand. Whether it’s because of a customer interview or another reason, you will get Googled. Show your customers, your industry, your peers that you have opinions or are a thought leader. Do videos of you speaking at trade shows come up? Writing? Company blogs? LinkedIn posts? Show them you’re the person to speak to.
• Have a great rapport with a customer? Invite them to connect on your LinkedIn profile and make a professional contact you can call on in the future regardless of which company you’re at.

ABOUT LUKE

Luke Congdon is a career product manager living and working in Silicon Valley since 2000. His areas of focus include enterprise software, virtualization, and cloud computing. He has built and brought numerous products to market including start-up MVPs and billion-dollar product lines. Luke currently lives in San Francisco. To contact, connect via luke@lukecongdon.com or https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukecongdon/.