Talking to customers more often: proven techniques for non-customer-facing teams to better understand their audience

“Our CMO and Marketing team really need to spend more time with customers.”

Oh, have I heard that a few times from SaaS CEOs…

Product, Marketing, Design, and Growth leaders need to be customer experts: know who they are, their goals and metrics, their challenges, how and why they buy and use your products, etc. 

While Sales and Customer Success talk to customers every day, Product and Marketing professionals don’t have channels to do that on a regular basis. A team that is not in tune with its audience can quickly roll out products and programs that lose relevance and impact. 

Below are some proven tactics that will help your teams develop deep customer empathy and understanding. You don’t have to use them all. Pick what feels right for your team and watch the magic unfold.  And if you have used other techniques that worked well, please comment and share them. 

I have noticed that when teams talk to customers more often, they gain tremendous energy, conviction, and motivation to solve customers’ problems It makes the job “real” and more fun. 

1. Listening to xDR and Sales Calls Recordings

That’s the easiest technique to implement. Many Sales teams now record their calls via Gong or similar tools for coaching, analysis, and more. That represents a wealth of information that non-customer-facing teams should tap. 

They can select the calls based on Sales stage, segment, outcome, product line, specific keywords, etc. 

The keys to success there are:

• Feeding your team a selection of insightful calls 
• Motivating individuals to listen to them on a regular basis

Here’s what we implemented between a Marketing and B/SDR team to achieve that:

1. Call selection: every week, each BDR would select the 2 or 3 discovery calls they believed were the most insightful or representative of the customer segment we prioritized for the month
2. They would drop the recording links in a spreadsheet with a few details about the customer and call
3. Team members would listen to the calls of their choice and add a checkmark and/or date by the calls they listened to
4. During the weekly team meeting, I would do shout-outs to both the BDRs who shared their calls and the team members who listened to the most calls. I’d also ask for the new insights they gleaned 

What’s great about these recorded calls is that you can listen to them during your commute or workouts and listen to them at 2x the speed. You also hear how SDRs or Sales pitch and where they need support.

2. Joining - and helping with - live Sales Calls

This is a popular new employee onboarding technique. But why should it be limited to new team members? Why not ask your team to do a sprint per quarter together and join a minimum number of live Sales calls?

1. Find a few Sales reps or xDRs ready to help (or to receive help) 
2. Ask them to give visibility to their Sales calls calendar to your team and to add some details about the upcoming calls so your team can select which calls to attend
3. Tell your team members to help the Salesperson with the Sales call: either the call prep, presenting a case study, asking a few discovery questions, helping with a product demo, or simply taking notes and listing decisions and next steps. This way Sales will keep inviting your team members to join their calls.  

3. Talking to one customer per week

Customers like sharing their stories, especially with someone who’s not there to collect their feedback and not sell them anything.

When I was leading Marketing at Udacity, we simply made a point of talking to “One Student a week” - the name of our program - for 30 minutes once per week. It ended up being our favorite part of the week. Students really appreciated that someone was taking the time to genuinely understand their motivations and experiences with our courses, coaches, support, and even marketing.

After a few weeks of doing that and sharing notes and stories, we developed a profound and intuitive understanding of our customers. We wanted to be their champions even more. 

Here’s how it worked:

1. We ran a simple intercept on the Home page: “We’d love to get to know you better! Game for a video coffee chat with a Udacity employee?”. It took them to a simple questionnaire to screen them
2. If they passed the screen, we’d send them a self-scheduling link
3. We offered a gift card to thank them for their time
4. We’d get on a video call with them for 30 minutes with a simple script to get to know them and get their feedback 
5. We’d take ample notes, write an exec summary, and some recommendations. Then we’d share them with the rest of the team and other teams when relevant

When a team member couldn’t make their scheduled call, I’d try and find an exec in the hallway and would offer them the interview slot. The feedback was always the same “Well, not sure I have time for that”. But I would insist, they would then take the video call and - every single time - they would find me after the call and enthusiastically share: “thanks so much for making me do that! I got some new insights about XYZ. We all need to do that more often.” Yup…

4. Running Customer Advisory Boards

I love customer Advisory Boards. It’s an opportunity to develop meaningful and lasting relationships with a group of 8 to 15 well-screened customers. You will collect phenomenal insights for your Product roadmap and Marketing and hear customers' questions and best practices to feed your content engine. Done right, it also creates long-term ambassadors for your company. 

There are various formats possible. In my guide to running effective CABs, I detailed how we ran them at LinkedIn and Twilio (don’t miss the great comments at the bottom). 

A few key things:

• Screen customers well and don’t hesitate to pass on even very large customers if you don’t believe they will be constructive
• Invest heavily in the kick-off - money and time - for the initial relationship building
• Involve your Product team from beginning to end. Customers especially want  to know and influence the product roadmap
• Give the group an expiration date to avoid entitlements and diminishing returns 

5. Inviting Customers to your Team’s and Company’s All-Hands

At Twilio, I was fortunate to run two marketing offsites per year, where our entire marketing and DevRel team would come to SF to spend 2 days together. Our “marketing hackathons” and team lip-sync contests were popular. But the most popular sessions were the presentations by customers followed by an open Q&A.  

One format that worked well at Twilio for instance:

1. Invite 3 customers with different profiles to join a 60-min session at our offsite
2. Each customer had 5 to 10 minutes to deliver a “lightning talk” about what they built with Twilio, why, their challenges, why they selected Twilio and what we could do better (products, docs, programs, whatever)
3. Then we would open it up to Q&A with all 3 customers in front of the team

We always ran long. The team was super hungry to hear feedback and loved hearing about their customer journeys. As if all the things we were working on were finally becoming real to them.

That’s so powerful that I am amazed that so few companies regularly invite successful - or even difficult - customers to share their experiences at their all-hands. It’s a surefire way to signal customer-centricity, have fresh content every time and provide inspiration to all. And how do you feel customers feel when they realize they are the center of attention of and get celebrated by an entire company for 10 to 30 minutes?

You should consider asking one leader in Customer Success (or in Customer Marketing or Comms) to bring 1 customer once per month to your all-hands. 

6. Writing Customer Case Studies as a Team

You probably need more case studies. Whether they are a traditional 2-pager, a blog post, or a video. So why not ask every person on the team to create at least one? This way, the team will hear directly from customers about their challenges, why and how they picked your solution, what results they drove, what’s next for them, etc. All the while producing essential content for you.  

You can use these simple steps:

1. Ask Customer Success to create a list of successful customers likely to have good stories and metrics
2. Share that list with your team so each member selects 3 customers to contact
3. Before they contact the customers, have them interview the Customer Success Manager (CSM) to get more context and even write a first outline of the case study 
4. Each team member reaches out to their 3 customers, after an intro by the CSM, offering to write a case study about their impressive results 
5. Provide both a script that team members can use for their interview and help from an editor to finalize the content and deliver it in your brand’s voice
6. Ask team members to do a readout at your team's all hands. Or, better, invite the customer for a Q&A there

Conclusion

The five techniques I shared are far from an exhaustive list of course. You can also do focus groups, “shadow-a-customer” sessions, in-depth interviews, win-loss analyses, etc. And there are various ways to execute each.

What else has worked well - or not worked well - for your teams, so they talk to customers on a more regular basis?