Katelyn Bourgoin, CEO at Customer Camp, shared her insights with BonBillo Impact Bootcamp teams on why and how startups should navigate the customer discovery journey. Customer Camp helps startups get inside their customer’s heads so they can market smarter.
Katelyn shares that companies who conduct research grow up to 3 times faster. 🚀
"ProfitWell did a huge study and found that 70% of teams admitted that they were talking to fewer than 10 customers a month to learn from them. They were doing sales calls, perhaps they weren't talking to customers to learn from them. They were saying things like customer interviews take too much time and they weren't making time for them. But guess what was happening to the peak teams that were making time for them? They were growing two to three times faster than the other 70%."
As a marketer, Katelyn found that 88% of the time her clients hadn’t yet figured out who their best customers were or spent any time understanding their needs.
In order to see growth, you have to know who your best customers are and spend the time to understand their needs. It not only helps with marketing but also helps companies with creating the right products.
Katelyn quotes Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen: "Customers don't buy products or services; they "hire" them to do a job. Understanding customers does not drive innovation success, he argues. Understanding customer jobs does."
According to the "Jobs to be done" theory, there's something blocking us from making progress in the way that we want to make progress. And we essentially hire products or service providers to help us get our jobs done. And when those things work well, we will keep using them and we'll be happy. When they don't work well, we will fire them and look for something new to hire.
Hence, the goal of customer interviews is not about pitching your product, but is really about understanding the customer’s jobs to be done.
Katelyn recommends doing this by understanding the buyer journey. You want to understand what led customers to begin pursuing a solution in the first place because there's so much valuable insight there that can go into product design and marketing.
The customer buying journey starts with a trigger event. The trigger event is something that happens in your customer's life that makes them first realize they have a job to be done, that they have a problem that they need to solve. If somebody has not been triggered, they could look like an ideal customer for you, but they're not in the buying journey.
"The biggest mistake that people make with customer discovery is they talk to people who look like their ideal customers, as opposed to people who are actual buyers, people who are actually buying products from them today, or people who are looking for solutions, like the ones that they offer."
Katelyn recommends prioritizing who to interview in the following order.
Katelyn Bourgoin conducts a mock customer interview with Vedant Kanoi about his experience buying a knife set.
In the mock interview Katelyn demonstrates an interview method used by some of the world's biggest brands such as Intercom, Eventbrite, Ikea, Amazon and McDonald's. They're using this customer buying journey interview to really understand their customers.
Watch the full mock interview below.
Here are some of the questions that they dive into:
Get Katelyn’s Clarity Call Cheatsheets to understand your customer’s buying journey and get marketing results worth bragging about!
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