The secret behind Calendly's early marketing wins
The secret behind Calendly's early marketing wins
Marketing Powerup #39: Claire Suellentrop (Author of Forget the Funnel) breaks down the 5 steps to her customer research process for marketers.
Hello, and welcome to Marketing Powerups! ⭐️
Today's powerups include:
Lead capture forms are dead.
Create visual slides with text prompts.
Claire’s customer research process for marketers.
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⭐️ Claire Suellentrop’s customer research process
Customer research could be a tedious and time-consuming process. But it's one of the most impactful activities marketing teams can do.
Claire Suellentrop, Author of Forget the Funnel, knows this first hand.
She was the first marketing hire at Calendly, where she helped build a team that drove double-digit revenue growth using the power of customer research.
After Calendly, Claire worked with high-growth companies like Autobooks, Appcues, and MeetEdgar to level up their marketing using customer research.
Here is Claire's customer research process:
Step 1: Define your research goal. 🏆
According to Claire, defining the research goal involves considering different types of users and specific objectives. Clarifying your goal ensures targeted and impactful research outcomes.
“Depending on your goal, you would be talking to different types of users. So it could be current customers, or it could be new users, or it might even be on a specific type of product rather than another type.”
Step 2: Choose the right format: surveys or interviews. 💬
Claire highlights the importance of considering the size of your customer base and the nature of your product when deciding on the research format.
Surveys are particularly beneficial for high-volume, low-touch offerings and products. However, she advises that surveys may not be as useful for enterprise companies with multiple buyers and slower sales processes. In that case, doing user interviews might be more valuable.
Step 3: Key questions to begin with. 🤔
Claire recommends two essential questions to kickstart customer research. her two favorite customer research questions are:
1. "Before [product], what were you using to do what [product] does?"
2. "What happened that made you realize your old way wasn't working?"Step 4: Analyze the results. 🔎
Claire filters everything with the second question, "What was going on that caused you to realize you needed something new?"
"We start with the pain because then the pain influences everything else about their decision making. By segmenting customers based on their specific pain points, you can tailor your strategies to address their unique needs."
Step 5: Prioritize by pain points. 🥇
Claire highlights the importance of prioritizing pain points to make informed decisions. She explains, "Whose pain feels the most urgent? Who has the most willingness to pay? Who's least likely to be a big burden on support?"
Free powerups cheatsheet
I’ve created a powerups cheatsheet exclusively for Marketing Powerups subscribers to apply Claire Suellentrop's customer research process.
You can download and make a copy of it here (a direct link with no email required).
In the latest Marketing Powerups episode, Claire further explains her customer research process.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcast and Spotify now, or watch it on YouTube.
✨ Mini powerups
Fun-sized blurbs, links, and tools to boost your marketing.
🔗 Gamma: If you’re more of a writer than a visual creator and need slides created for a presentation, you can use this tool to generate presentations using text. Then export them as Google or PowerPoint slides.
🔎 Ahrefs Webmaster Tool (sponsored): This is the only free SEO tool that can go through up to 5,000 of your web pages and find 140 common SEO issues that could be costing you valuable traffic.
😵 Lead capture forms are dead: Anna Tutt, Chief Marketing Officer at Oort, thinks it’s time for marketers to ditch lead capture forms. She gives 6 reasons why she thinks it is.
If you enjoyed this, you’d love this Marketing Powerups issue from the archives featuring Georgiana Laudi (the co-author of Forget the Funnel book) about building a customer-led growth squad:
That’s all for now, friends!
Have a powered-up day,
Ramli John
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P.S. If you found this helpful, would you share the love by tapping the heart below? ❤️
I have loved Forget the funnel project from the start, making marketing more human.