Leaning into Qualitative Customer Research with Ryan Paul Gibson

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Speaker C: Madeline. I'm Madeline Reeves.

Speaker B: And I'm Jeff Mead. And today we're here to talk about the importance of market research as a key way to understand your customers with Ryan Gibson.

Speaker C: Ryan Paul Gibson is a marketing leader, father, and husband who holds an amazing claim to fame that he has interviewed more than 1800 people in his career. With over 20 years of working with brands, from small startups to major enterprises, Ryan makes his mark on the world through working with marketing teams to help them understand the behaviors, motivations, and psychology of their core customers. Ryan brings his passion for customer research go to market strategy, business development, and brand storytelling to life through content Lift, a boutique agency that leads curated customer interview processes to help companies understand and, uh, truly align with their target markets. We're really thrilled to have you here, Ryan, and I can't wait to learn more about your approach to market research. So let's get into it.

Speaker D: Ah. Uh, thank you. That was great. I don't know if, like, it's. He said it's like, amazing that I've interviewed 800 people. I don't. I don't know if I ever feel it's amazing, but I appreciate that.

Speaker C: I feel that's a lot more than I've done. I don't know about you, Jeff. That's a lot more than I've done.

Speaker D: Some of them think maybe I'm just crazy and I can't. I'm like adhd, hyper focused. That's all I want to do. But thank you. Very nice introduction. It was very nice. Yeah.

Speaker B: Ryan, it's great to have you on the show. Just looking over your bio and I'm sure, uh, our audience and we want to know more. Your career path has been really interesting. Right. Like, you started in Marketing. Then you went on the reporting media side. Now uh, you've come back to marketing. So could you kind of explain how that all worked?

Speaker D: Well, that'll probably take the whole hour, but I'll give you the convinced version. Yeah, I, I started off in B2B but I, I started off in selling franchises, so restaurant franchises. I'm up in Canada and it was a chain of coffee shops similar like Dunkin Donuts.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker D: And my job was to sell the businesses, the turnkey businesses to French. And it was great. I was very lucky. I was early uh, on in my career, I was weighing over my head. I made a ton of mistakes. But what I, the thing, the part I owned the most and the part I liked the most was marketing. And my big, that's where the research actually started. Because for anyone who's not familiar with consumer markets, because we would sell restaurants that served consumer markets, research is like the gold standard. Like they know their customers more than almost any other type of industry. Right. The consumer product. Mhm. So I used to go in and do all that work myself because it was, it cost, it was a big chunk of my budget. It would have been a big chunk. So I did it myself. And I do everything like the men, people on the street, interviews, I would do surveys, I would go into competitors and I would start chatting people up in lines pretending I was a customer and ask them why they bought here. People thought I was insane, but uh, it was great. And that influenced all my marketing and all my business development and all the operation. And the reason I left is I hit like my early 30s and I was like, I don't know if I would do this anymore. So I went back to school, took broadcasting and I thought I was going to end up in the business side of media. And it I just, through a uh, whole sequence of events I found myself being a TV and radio reporter at CBC in Ottawa, which is, we call it the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Be similar to npr, BBC uk. I did that for three years and that was really where I learned my investigative interview in Chops. And then that just wasn't my calling after a few years just for a whole bunch of reasons. And I was like, maybe I'll go back to marketing. I really liked it and maybe, but I'll do something different than what I was doing. And that's when I started working with entrepreneurs. Early stage startups run marketing teams for software companies. And now in the last four years I've been on my own and I focused solely on customer research and we'll probably get into that a bit.

Speaker B: Absolutely.

Speaker D: But that's like always where my passion has been. Understanding customers. Why they do what they do, how do we give them what they need so they can improve their lives.

Speaker B: So in that whole pathway, what, what triggered you? Why did you become interested in becoming an entrepreneur?

Speaker D: Yeah, I think like, uh, most entrepreneurs, you always sort of have the bug. You just, it's always there now, whether when it starts to become a reality is like a different story. Right. I post about this, like I have, I have a laundry list of failed ideas. Um, and I think we all do.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker D: And I think I got to the point after I ran marketing, you know, I was getting, later on in my career, I'd worked for people for my whole career. I was like, I think I really now want to do it for me and control my time. That's uh, I think the biggest part. The money was never really the thing for me. It still isn't. Is like how much control over my day do I have? And that's really my sort of guiding light. I just never really found a fit before. And then the reason I, I was working with few clients and the pattern I had seen was a lack of research, um, to really inform their go to market strategies, how they build products and services and so on. Right. And. Or just the lack of how to do it very well. So I was like, I wonder if this is going to be the thing. Can this be the thing? There's no way this can be the thing. So then I just used my own approach to validate whether this could be the thing. And I got enough feedback from the market to say, I think this is the thing. So I looked in the landscape, saw who competitors were saw, looked at. Okay. I think this is how I can position my strength based on the feedback. And where I started two and a half years ago to where I am now has evolved. Right. It's. But I got enough data from the market to say, okay, I think there's a path forward here. And I've been going ever since. And it's uh, best M decision ever made.

Speaker B: Wonderful.

Speaker C: I want to turn our direction towards that, that conversation about research because that's the heart of what you do. And I think you probably saw in your data that a lot of folks were getting it wrong. I've seen in my experience that everybody thinks that, oh, the way that you get, get important information is you're just going to send a survey. Right. It's this quantitative process. Answer these, these five sets of, you know, questions Check these boxes and we'll have the insights we need. And you have a really different approach that's got a lot more nuance and a lot more qualitative conversations that you're having with customers of these companies. And it's been fun because you and I have collaborated here and there on projects. So I've gotten insight into your process. But, but how do you position that to companies, Ryan, who think that, oh, I just got to send another user survey.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker D: So there's a lot to that. I'll, um, try and keep it as concise as I can.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker D: I think the short answer is if you are selling to another business or another person, you know, how they make decisions about solutions is not something that they consider in a day. Like, they don't wake up and buy something. No one wakes up and buys a thing. Even with commodity products. Right. If we're talking coffee or pair of running shoes, we don't just wake up and decide who we choose. There is a gradual affinity we develop for solutions over time. So your job, in my, my opinion, is as either an entrepreneur, founder, or what have you, is understand how your ideal or best fit customer progress through those stages of affinity or how they, they move towards your solution. What is the information they're looking for? How do they, you know, they build preference for you. What is that process they went through, what convinced them? That's not something you're going to learn in the survey. Right. You'll learn very basic binary questions, yes or no numbers. But why did those things happen? Why are those the data points you're getting in your survey? What motivated them? What pushed them, what triggered them? Why did they choose you over something else? That's what you get at with qualitative, um, research. But, you know, talking with customers in a specific way that you won't get, and that informs everything you do from a marketing and sales strategy and often a retention strategy. Right. And you can make better choices. You have more informed data to make better choices about where to, you know, throw the dart in your business. Does that answer the question?

Speaker C: Totally. Totally.

Speaker D: Okay.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: I just want to jump in and just remind the audience, please, if you have any questions for Ryan, just, just write it in the comments so we can shoot it to him. M. Ryan, I, I think it's really interesting because when I think about just the clients I've worked with, or even my clients, their clients, which are usually larger companies, they're so fixated on surveys. Right. Because they want, they want to know that. Well, I guess for the most part, when they get the information back, they want to have 98% confidence that this is the way we should go. Right. Like they throw all those terms around. So how do you convince them or what's really to sell that qualitative should be in the mix? How do you get into that conversation?

Speaker D: Well, part of is what I just talked about, you know, that's one of the best ways to understand that more holistic journey that can happen over weeks, months, sometimes years. Right. Of how people build affinity for solutions or products or services. The second is you need to understand what the best way to manage your time and your money in your business. Like where a business is a bet in a market.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker D: And you need to de risk the odds you're going to lose that bet. So I, uh, often will structure it around capital, cash flow, you know, the ability to generate new revenue. Right. How do you know which. There's only so much time and money that you have. Especially if you're um, an entrepreneur with a small team or you're by yourself. How do you know where to put your time? That's limited. And then specifically to the survey side of things. Yeah, I get that question because some people think that quantitative is more statistically relevant. But the reality is if you do the work right from a qualitative standpoint, it can be just as statistically relevant. It's just like anything, you need a formula and a process where you're not creating an environment where you're creating bias. Right. You have rigor in your process, but you have to put all those elements into the research from a qualitative standpoint to then get things that are statistically relevant. There's a whole academic field on qualitative research that's existed for decades, right. And they've been able to prove out that the findings they get from certain processes and approaches are pretty bang on. And I know that from my own work too. So yeah, that's. But I tend to, I tend to say surveys are great, don't get me wrong. Fantastic. You need to understand some quantitative, um, elements to your business. We've been using quantitative numbers in, in the business world for decades. Totally fine. But that, going back to that qualitative side of that subjective journey that people have, how do you create objectivity around it so you know where to invest your resources and time? And that's sort of how I like to phrase the conversation.

Speaker C: And so, so say, I say I'm the client, right? And I'm like, okay, uh, I'm, I'm willing to give it a try.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker C: Like I'm, I. And again, it's. Right, it's a challenge because a lot of people wait to have these kind of conversations, I feel like, until it's almost too late. There's a lot of entrepreneurs, there's a lot of companies that fall in love with their idea or their product and are just like, it's going to hit, it's going to, you know, people are going to go for it and are not even willing to do some validation upfront. But, but say a company's kind of like, okay, this is worth the time, this is worth the investment. We're not living in the way that we thought. How do you then go about designing a customer interview process for that brand? And um, you know, feel free to come up with a mock scenario because obviously every brand is different. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker D: Uh, and there's two different parts. Right. Your question, there's before you launch, do I have something that's valid or okay, I have some traction. Am I targeting the right people? M. Right. The before stage is really about understanding the pains and problems people have to achieve a certain outcome. Right. So most people do not buy solutions, product services for what they do. They buy them for the outcome that they can achieve. Or one of the really classic ways we think about this now in product and service development is called jobs to be done.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker D: I won't get into it too much. There's a lot out there. But if you Google it, it's really just understanding that process from how did they identify and prioritize to solve a problem? Why did they choose the solution they did and what is the progress that that solution allowed them to make? So just to break that down, like some of the classic examples they give are, you know, people don't buy drills to hang a picture or uh, sorry, they don't buy drills to drill a hole. They buy drills to hang picture or build a house. Right. If we want to take a marketing view of it, um, we don't buy HubSpot. Ah. Um. Because we think that's marketing. We buy HubSpot because maybe we want to have better data around who our audience list is and then we can segment and send them customized messaging. Right. Because that frees up my time from doing X. Right. So there's all these reasons why people want to buy things to progress. So your job at the validation standpoint is understand, okay, if they're here, they're, they're here with a problem and they want to end here with a solution. What are all the pains in between? Right. So your m job is understand all those pains, map them out and figure out, okay, which one of those one or many do I want to solve a solution, whatever that solution might be. When you have revenue, it's uh, then you have to understand, okay, I might have a smorgasbord of different customers. So my objective is to understand, okay, who's the best fit? Uh, or you're going back to, okay, they all share these pains somewhat. Who has the most pain, who's finding the best, who's finding the most, uh, progress in what I want to do. I'm not sure if I'm directly answering a question, but that's how I start to think about these things. I have an objective in mind about what I want to understand. And then I go and I go and I try to prove or disprove that hypothesis.

Speaker C: And what one of the things that I think is most challenging is then if you're a brand that hasn't necessarily had open lines of communication with their customers in the past, how do you get people to say yes to even talking to you? Like, how do you get customers? What's in it for them? Right. Because I think that's the challenging thing. And we know this, if you've done surveys, you're lucky to get a response rate of 10%. But to get somebody to sit down and have those kind of conversations, what does that take? And I also think like here for me, uh, what can companies be doing to open up those lines of communications with their, with their customers? Because I think a lot of people are not creating space for that feedback to just come through organically.

Speaker D: Yeah. So a few lines of thought there. The first is often we are having conversations, but sometimes it's just, it's client management or customer management. Right. So we're asking like, how do you like the things, the thing going? Well, we're doing a good job and we don't do a lot of that, this deep discovery conversation around, like, why did you come here in the first place? Uh, tell me more about your business model. Mhm. You know, like those types of things. That's the best place to start. If you're having you, you have access to those people already. If you don't, then you want to find some of your power users, some of your clients that you know have been around for a long time. Maybe if you want to understand like the impact you've had on their business, if you want to understand more about how you market to them better, maybe Someone that just closed.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker D: Right. You can speak to them, getting them to talk to you. How I always. Everyone's always busy, right? Getting people to talk to you is actually a very challenging scenario. Most people are busy. Most people are. You're not their priority. They have many other things in their lives they're trying to get done. They still even. And that's if, even if they still want to help you. Like they might actually be open to having a conversation for 30 to 40 minutes about the depths of their business and how you've helped them, but they might just not have a lot of time. So uh, how I like to structure it is. Listen, it's not a sales conversation. We're not going to be pitching you. We just want to understand more about how we've helped you, your business, you know, how you solve problems, how we've maybe helped you. And you can incentivize them if you need to. I do that a lot of my work, more and more than ever before, which is offering them either some type of gift card donation, charitable donation works really well sometimes for people. Uh, because most companies have some charity of choice. A lot of people really like that, sometimes a free gift. Right. If you have a relationship with this client, you probably have some information and things they like send them something. Right. As a thank you, either before or after. So those are some of the ways. But it's really, I think the language is about making it about them, how you want to learn more about their business. That's going to form how we can help them better and really keep it like a casual, informal conversation. And that should come when you're reaching out and contact and that vibe should resonate.

Speaker B: You know, listening to you, I'm reminded of. And it feels like a lifetime ago. But once upon a time I used to moderate focus groups.

Speaker D: Right. And. Oh, fun.

Speaker C: I didn't know that, Jess. Oh my gosh, what a fun thing. What a, uh, what a way to spend your days, my friend.

Speaker B: Yeah, it was exhausting. I mean, tiring, but. But I'm sure, as you know, Ryan, it's so fun to just be in a room with so many people and getting so many different perspectives.

Speaker D: Absolutely.

Speaker B: And so when I think about qualitative, automatically I go back to focus groups because that's what I used to do. But what are you doing now? Like when people think qualitative, I think they just think qualitative focus groups. Are there new things popping up or are you doing just one on one interviews?

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: What are people asking for? And and better yet, what are you recommending um, to get that insight?

Speaker D: It depends. Right. Which is like the common answer and the worst answer. But so because qualitative research is, is vast, you touched on one focus groups. I do one of my specialty is one on one interviews. There's M and there's actually moderated versus unmoderated interviews. So moderate interviews is what like a focus group is moderated but it's just a one on one interview. Unmoderated interviews is me actually maybe going through a website and I'm recording myself answering questions about the website or a product or service.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker D: That sort of thing exists. There is now there's software you can use out. Uh there, there's a few companies where people will type long form answers in to different parts of your product or your website or your messaging. So it's not like a sur, it's sort of like a hybrid. It's surveying qualitative. But I might write a whole paragraph about this was my thought on your website. And first is my impression of your messaging. And uh, it didn't land from me here because of this. It's like very deep those. I think it all depends on a few things. One is time. What, how much time do you want to take to do the research and draw out insights? I'm a big fan of what they're starting to call agile research, which is how do you do quick sprints to get specific insights then test in the business so you can learn faster. Big fan of that because some ac, some researchers uh, will tell you oh it takes at least four to six months to get deep insights. Maybe the challenge for most businesses that's almost 2/4 and a lot of happens in a market in two quarters. Mhm. Right. Maybe the whole thing has changed.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker D: Now we've seen a lot of that in the last four years where there's just, there's constant shifting. I mean AI wasn't even really around uh, to the extent it was two months ago. Now it's everywhere. How has that impacted your business? So I like agile research and then it's a matter of cost because I. For you to pay me to do your, to do the work for you is a lot more expensive than you say doing unmoderated interviews, like I just said, where maybe you send people five questions and you record them answering these five questions and they get sent back to their software piece of software to do that. Both are great but there's limit pros and cons to both and limitations to each. Right. So it's really just understand like uh, what do you, the time you have, the depth of insights you want? Cause I will go deeper on one on one interviews than someone who's going to answer five questions on a recording and what's your budget? So those are like most things, those are sort of the trade offs. I hope that answered the question, Jeff.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah it did. And when you say quick, what is, what is quick? Because we, we think four to six months for research. People always think research takes forever. And what's a quick sprint for me

Speaker D: how I've, the fastest I've ever turned a full research project around is four weeks. But that's due to a certain specific process and rigor of uh, how I approach it. Right. Especially because let's just take interviews. People will sometimes ask me like how many people do I need to talk to? And there's actually a lot of data and debate around that. But if you want to get super nerdy about qualitative research, which I tend to at times, there's peer reviewed studies that qualitative researcher uh, researchers have conducted over the best sample size for qualitative research. And the average consensus is that you can get away with talking to seven people. Seven. Wow. Seven. What happens is there's a term called insight saturation that a lot of researchers will use in the qualitative sphere. And what that's just a fancy way of saying when do I stop learning new things? What happens is if you plot all the new learnings on a bell curve, by the time you hit seven, the bell curve starts to tip. Mhm. You're going to get probably hit 95% insight saturation. 95% of new learning of all learnings by the time you get to 15.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker D: So it's really like managing your time. So that's why I say to some companies where okay, we just want to know this one thing. Let's be very specific about who we talk to, what we talk about, the lines of question we're going to ask them. Let's talk to seven, see the insights that come back and maybe we can action some things very quickly into the business.

Speaker C: So, so one of the things that I love is like that if you take that quick sprint approach in theory, you could turn around and integrate that into your content, into the way you're presenting things on the site, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker D: Absolutely.

Speaker C: But you, all of us here on this call know uh, that this is where brands struggle most is great. I got this insight, I got this reporting, I got this feedback. But then it's the matter of how do you spin that into your marketing, your content strategy, your brand narrative, et cetera. And so I'd love to just talk more about the ways in which brands can use this sort of research to transform their approach to marketing in an actionable way. Because I think we've all been a part of those scenarios where you bring in the data, but it doesn't really, it doesn't and doesn't really turn into anything from uh, from a, from a content perspective because brands don't know what to do with it sometimes.

Speaker D: Yeah. So I, uh, can come at it a few ways, right. Because I work a lot with software company companies, as you know, Madeline. Like you and I have worked together on a few projects. I also work with a lot of high end consultants at times, right. So they have like really high average contract values, sometimes as high as like a hundred thousand dollars for one customer. So there's a few ways. Let me give you a few examples. Like one, one consultant I worked with was trying to um, build out an agency where they helped pharmaceutical companies launch digital healthcare products. The challenge was they didn't, weren't sure, like where do they struggle, right? Like where do they actually need help? So how we approached the research was, okay, well let's map out all the stages of how a big pharmaceutical company creates id, you know, ideates, develops and launches a digital healthcare product. And then we can figure out like where they fall down in that process. So we figured out, okay, these parts they're okay with, these are the parts where they need help. And then, so to your question, now we knew what to lead with on the website and we knew what to lead with in messaging. When he did networking calls, he's, you know, he would say, this is what I see companies most struggle with. Tell me about, this is where you struggle, right? So you start to choose where you pick and choose where you start to invest your time and your energy. Another example would be I've worked for years with a company in Canada called Rewind. They're a software company. They do backup recovery software for cloud platforms like Jira, like uh, Shopify, QuickBooks and what we, we did a research project after they did an acquisition which was for GitHub. And to keep it short, what we found was Persona we were marketing to really wasn't resonating with their messaging. And we couldn't figure out why because we were using the intel that the founders had given us who had built this product that we acquired. So I got Tapped to go and talk to some of the customers. And what we found was they were actually just trying to create their own version of Rewind on their own because they're all developers and IT people and they had the skillset to do that. We'd heard that, we sort of knew that, but we didn't understand the extent of the which they were trying to do that. And the problem and what we found was 99% of the time they failed at it because there was a whole bunch of technical limitations that they couldn't build the product. So uh, we were leading with backup your data, protect your data. We switched a lot of our ad campaigns and paid ad buys to stop building your own backup system software because that's what they were doing. And that led to double of installs for the software product over the course of a month.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker D: So that's. Those are the ways I think of these things to like inform your marketing how that'll work for each business is going to be different but you'll find where people get stuck the words they're using. We call it voice of the customer work. You know, what are the words that they use to describe the problem they use to describe your product, uh, the words they use to describe the outcome. And that gets infused into your marketing and you become more credible. You become, they start to see themselves in your marketing and they build more affinity sitting before you over time.

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Speaker B: I know, I know where you're going, Madeline.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: You know what I mean? Because you teed me up perfectly. Okay, cut customer Personas. So I, I, you brought it up. We got to talk about it. I, I have a process. I'm sure we all have a process. And I have a huge bone to pick with people that just build them out of thin air and, or, or anything that's like, ideal client avatar. And I'm just gonna pick demographic attributes based off of what I've got in my head, and I'm gonna make a little picture. I believe that it's like, I'll even go so far as to say when people do it in that way, I find it to be very dehumanizing and very disconnected with an understanding of.

Speaker D: Disconnected's a good word. Yeah.

Speaker C: Yeah. And so I'd love for you to talk about your approach to Persona development and why. Because I feel like this is something so many companies miss the mark on, and it drives me crazy. Right. Because I'll be in an initial strategy moment with somebody, and they'll, um, be like, no, no, we've got our Personas, and they'll come to the table with this stuff that they've just pulled out of the woodwork, as opposed to having any landing in reality, any connection to, to the customer. So will you talk about this a little bit? And Jeff chime in too. Cause I know you care about this as well.

Speaker D: Yeah, Very much a debated topic in my career over the last 20 years. Right. I, I think first, I always like to think of, like, where they came from. And I think people need to keep in mind that they came from the consumer environment where, like, Personas, where they informed advertising, uh, channels based on, like, things like Nielsen ratings. Right. That's the historical path of Personas. And it made sense at the time because my path to the market was these types of channels where I knew X number of people were watching, you know, some sitcom at Friday night. Right. And I, ah, marked him Super Bowl. Very good example of how to, uh, use those types of things to inform Personas. But that's different than understanding why people would buy the thing in the first place. If we get back to quantitative versus quality, I think Personas are just a, uh, victim of, like, garbage in, garbage out. At most points. If the data you put into it is very high level. It's, it's, there's not A lot of depth to it. It's subjective. It's not going to give you a lot of the really good insights you need to to then where do you throw the dart in marketing and what do you do and why? So I mentioned just a few minutes ago something called voice of the customer work. And a lot of researchers will lean into that, copywriters lean into that type of work. Content people will lead into that right of work, that type of work. And that's really just capturing in the customer's words why they do what they do. So my Personas are probably a little different than people typically see over accounting and M and engineering. Ellen. Uh, whatever. Right, right. What I will have is often like these people's roles and responsibilities within their company or their, what they do in their life and their some of their interests. I work in mostly B2B so it's usually, you know, what they do, what their responsibilities are, what they're on the hook for, how they measure success in their role, how they measure success in the company, and then some firmographics. Right. Company size, team size, so on. Right. Because that stuff still is somewhat important. Mhm. But what I really care about more is their pains and anxieties. So pains I look at as what are their challenges and blockers to getting all those responsibilities that are on the hook for done. Anxieties or fears around them not getting them done, or fears they have about maybe not hitting the mark. I care about triggers. Right? So business triggers, uh, and how we define those often in say the jobs be done world, which I mentioned a few minutes ago, or just business development is what are. If there are specific catalysts that took place that drove them to action, and whether that action is just to casually look for a product or to actually go and talk to a salesperson about, hey, I saw your thing, I want to buy this. Are there things that, you know, innate, like specifically happened that we can pinpoint? And then I care about how they research, which I equate to marketing. Like what is the process of them, you know, going through solutions, finding ways to solve problems. One of the things people need to remember to keep in mind is we often don't compare apples to apples when it comes to solutions. We compare approaches. So I might use, I said HubSpot earlier. Uh, I might use HubSpot or I might use Google Sheets to keep track of my lists of customers. Both are acceptable approaches. Why would I choose either of those? Right. And maybe I did look at each of those. So I want to know the research Process, who I talked to, what was I looking for? I'll ask people in interviews. So when you went to the website, what did you think was a lie? You know, things like that? Um, what is a red flag for you in marketing? What is the information we didn't have that you needed? Things like that. Then I'll have them, they'll evaluate, I'll ask them about their sales process, their evaluation process, from when they have a short list of options. So you have two options. You've whittled it down, now what happens? And they walk me through that. And then we get outcomes, business outcomes, all of that. What I just said in the last few minutes is in my Persona that's much different than what you often typically see. And it's very, uh, There is like an executive summary version and then there's like an in depth version with like clips from people talking, audio snippets, real life examples. Like it's very in depth. Now you could say, well, that's a bit overkill maybe. But if you don't deeply understand your market and your, your ideal, best fit customer, then your, your chances of winning are so low. So you need that depth of research. Doesn't mean you're gonna ingest it all right away and get it all right immediately. That never happens. But my clients, when I talk to them, cause I interview my own clients three to six months after we've done the work. Cause I wanna see like the impact. And they'll say, I always go back. I always go back. I learn something new each time or remember something or before I make a decision about something, impact that I think might be impactful. I go and I revisit the research.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker D: To make sure I'm on the right path. So that's to me, to me, that is where Personas should be. So, you know, uh, so I get the beef, right? Because I share the beef. How I, how I try to rephrase it for people is you just need better information in that.

Speaker B: Yeah. What you described, I don't usually see. I usually see the engineer and Ellen or it's really pulled out of thin air. So. So I definitely commend you.

Speaker D: Um, I once. Yeah, sorry, it means you can interrupt, Jeff. But like I once spoke to someone, they ran an agency. Oh, well, they're a boutique agency, digital agency. And we're just having a chat, right? Just getting to know each other. Businesses.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker D: We're talking about a client they had. They said, yeah, we did Personas for them. Oh, great. Like tell me These Personas. Where'd you get the information? Oh, I just went into Google Analytics and I pulled all the data from the website and that was the Persona. I'm like, oh my God. And they're, they're, they were spending money based on. And I just like

Speaker B: yeah. And that's, I'm glad you said that because that's actually where I was going to go. I see people do that a lot. Right. Instead of building a Persona, it's actually really looking at who your customers are and then just modeling after that. And so now we'll do that. What do you say to that?

Speaker D: I say that's great for targeting. Great. You might now, you know, maybe you'll know like where to maybe deliver ads. But what should be in the ad? Right. Let me, and let me give you one more example. I'll take it to maybe consumer version. Uh, I did a research, uh, project for a coffee shop chain here in Ottawa, Canada. Very small shop, they have about nine to 10 restaurants. And it was good to fit in with like my old career back in the day. So it felt really at home. And what they wanted to understand was okay, do peop were they were having debates within the leadership team about why people chose them.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker D: So some, half the leadership team thought they're choosing us because they want their coffee aficionados, they're experts in coffee. They want really high, really exquisite roasts and that type of coffee snob type stuff. Um, right. And the other half of leadership team was like, no, no, no, no, they just don't want Starbucks. But they want a consistent cup of coffee. And that sort of, they still want the corporate, they want the corporate service without the corporate feel. Mhm. And they were, they were paralyzed about making decisions about what to do in the business. So like Ryan, come break the tie. Like okay, so when we interviewed their clients or their customers, it was really interesting because when we talked to the coffee experts, they would say things like I'm always in search for the perfect cup. You know, it's just that, it's just the adventure of coffee. I'm always out there trying to find it. I'm like in my mind I'm like, that's churning.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker D: That's not a loyal customer. And then when I interviewed the people we identified as other regulars that fit maybe that non Starbucks and people were saying that actually in the interviews they're saying, I uh, don't want, I just didn't want Starbucks anymore for whatever reason. Right. They would say things such as I found them And I finally found my home. Um, I'm like, there's your customer right there. Yeah. So then what we did was we built out, we did some of that brand identity, work Persona work, what they cared about. And their best fit customer was a working mother, two children, this type of salary, but cared about these things like outdoor activities, hiking, cycling, being involved in the community, cared about corporate responsibility, things of these, this nature. So guess what influenced their. We knew what in Google Analytics, how to target them. But guess what influenced the ads? All those qualitative things I just talked about. Right. So the ads are no longer a cup of coffee. The ads was, Was a woman sitting in her chair in her house, drinking her cup of coffee with the equator bags. She just pressed in her coffee press and she's like, ah, I can finally start my day. Right, right, right. You know, so you. All those things about targeting analytics, like that stuff's helpful for delivering that ad copy, but you need to understand, like, what has to go into those ads and that messaging. And you only get that by talking to people.

Speaker C: Yeah. And I think this is where a lot of smaller agencies struggle because they are, they're, they're in the business of creating the content as opposed to talking to customers, as that first step. And you just shared. Having these conversations then unlocks other agencies work. Right. We can work on the brand identity, we can redo the ad campaign, we can redo the messaging, and we can have it be successful. But, you know, I, I'm wondering if you have, you know, advice that you would pass on to agency owners, especially smaller ones, who don't feel like they have the capacity or maybe their clients don't have the budgets to do this kind of research. Because small shops, I think, need to focus more on bringing this into their wheelhouse because like we're saying, it informs the success of all these other things that come after. But I think that a lot of us, myself included, sometimes jump in and say, okay, well, let's just start working on execution, the new site, the new ads, whatever it is, rather than figuring out how can we have this data to be informing the deliverables we're creating.

Speaker D: So the question is, like, how me as a limit, um, with limited resources, how can I try and do this work?

Speaker C: Yeah, and a lot of our audiences is, you know, smaller agency owners. You know, maybe they have a team or maybe they've got a contractor model, but they're oftentimes like, I don't, I don't know how to sell this or integrate this into the Work that I'm doing.

Speaker D: Yeah. Uh, it is tough with agencies. When I was doing my own due diligence around this work, I talked to a few agency people who had done B2B historically and they said trying to sell research was super hard. And I was like, oh, that's great. I'm so excited to try and start this as a business now. But I knew there's a way anything. It's all about conversation, how you frame things. Right. So how what we. I try to do now with partners because I actually work with a lot of partners. I work, I'm starting to work with more and more agencies, demand agencies, fractional CMOs, because they understand the value of the work because it's sort of. It sets the stage for everything.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker D: And so I, I think part of it is if it's a question of buy in from the client, which I get, then I think it's again under. Go back to what I said earlier. Where you're setting, you're trying to communicate, okay, this sets you up for success or your best chance for success. This is going to be a better way to spend your money over the long term. Right. Depending on their business model. If you're working with a sales team, you can say I want to increase the chances that you get in the best fit prospects to work with and see have a higher chance of closing. If you're working with an executive, it's I want to make sure you're spending the company's capital effectively. Right. Because there's only. All the money in a business is from one. One pot. Mhm. Right. And we all debate where it should go. I mean you worked in house before Madeline. Like you, your money is coming from the money that everyone else has to put. Get within the company. You have to, you have to debate about who gets the biggest lion's share. And then for marketers, I always say we want to maximize the chances of your success. Right. And then if we continue to get friction, what I often do is I'll show to like you know, if we have examples of where you've worked with our clients or you've done work where research is informed the activities. That's the best way. My whole uh, I, I talk about rewind. If you go to my site contentlift IO I have one case study. It's called, I call it my one case study. And it's a bit of a riff on like sales teams always want another case study. Which I get. I understand why they want. Mm. So it's a bit of tongue in cheek. But I walk through my entire process and I show the results that I talked about with rewind. Because what I try to do is show other marketers and other entrepreneurs and founders. This is the net result, this type of work, the depth of it, right? So that's like the pushback side if the challenge is like access to customers. Because sometimes that's the challenge too. We talked a bit about, okay, uh, how do you do the messaging? You might only need to get talked to seven. If it's just a content messaging, you could probably get away with five, right. If it's not like a deep dive into the DNA of the business, even five conversations with customers could work, right? Or what I use more and more my work now are paid panels. So we talked a bit about like different options for qualitative research just a few minutes ago. There's companies called, there's companies like user interviews, Respondent on Respondent I.O. and what you can do is in these communities is you type in a list of firmographics and some qualitative type qualifiers. I want someone that works in this industry and they have this experience and they've done these things and you can incentivize them to talk to you for what, $75 for an hour anywhere, uh, up to $500 an hour based on their experience and their title and their, their uh, role in the company. Right. So the more typically the more experienced you are and the more specialized you are, the higher the price. But what they're acting as is a consultant about how they buy things and what is their view of the market. Now they aren't your customer, but they give you a, ah, lens into people like what people who are like your customer and your ideal buyer. It gives you a lens into what they like, what they prefer, how they make decisions. So those are some ways that we can do that. And you can sort of build that into your price structure, right. As part of your own. So if I have to run five interviews and it's going to cost me $250, um, that's 1,250 US. You actually just build that in right into a package and no one will ever be the wiser, right? Because you're going to say, and part of this is some research we're going to conduct on your behalf or you can just say part of this is the development of the creative. Right? So yeah, that's one way to, it sort of hides it and it's a little sneaky, but it's, it's One way to get around it, right?

Speaker B: Yeah. And even the way you packaged it, right. Like when you first started out and said, you know, you talked to between five and seven people, I think anyone listening is probably mind blown in some ways, right? Because you always think the number has to be so high. Right. Like back in the days I felt like the number I heard was like 30. So you always feel like the number has to be really high. So the fact that you can talk to five or seven people and be confident in that direction is, is really helpful. And, and you know, if I may

Speaker D: though, Jeff, there's a caveat to that, right. Which is you have to be very specific with your research, right. And who you're talking to and why. So I wouldn't talk to. One of the examples I give uh, to people is I wouldn't talk to a chief technical officer at a startup and an IT manager at a hospital and ask them the same line of questions because they've totally different business models, they're doing different things. There'll be some overlap, but those are different Personas.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker D: So you have to be very, you have to be very specific in how you do this research. But you're right, historically I've heard as high as like 50, I've heard as high as a hundred.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker D: But if I talk to a hundred people at an hour each, even half an hour each, say it's half an hour, that's 50 hours of audio. If I've recorded everything that I gotta go through again. Right. And you're not gonna, and I always record everything because you are not gonna remember everything someone says in a, in a one on one interview. You think you're gonna take good notes. I guarantee you. Your brain is your enemy. There you're. Because there's so many things you're juggling in your, your, your mind at once as you're conducting this interview. I record everything. Go back.

Speaker B: Yeah, you're giving me flashbacks to when I used to listen to my uh, focus groups. Like.

Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, like how often did you retain everything that was said? Probably very little. Right?

Speaker B: Very little. You just have to uh, you know, listen to the recordings and then each group is like 90 minutes, two hours.

Speaker D: And yeah, I, I always advise people, five to seven people to start. As long as your, your parameters around your research are very tight. Mm mhm.

Speaker B: That's really, I mean, yeah, that's, I, I think that's going to be a huge takeaway for people because that, that small amount, that small sample size is just, and especially if you start saying at 75 per person, then you can really go somewhere with it. I see this comment from Frank. Some, some. I guess the question is some good AI tools that are in the space.

Speaker D: Feels like more of a statement. Yeah, but I get it. Yeah. I mean there are, there are one that. There are ones that aggregate insights from recorded meetings. I know Fathom is one of them. I don't endorse them in any way, but I've seen them and I think what they do is fine. How I'm trying to explore AI in my work and I've seen other researchers, more on the product side do this. So product researchers, UI UX researchers, they'll take qualitative interviews, they'll cut it up and throw it into some type of chat GPT thing and it spits out aggregation because I do it all sort of myself manually. So I'm interested in seeing that and seeing how effective that is. But the challenge with the AI AI stuff is you lose nuance. Mhm.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker D: So I always advise people. Nothing wrong with aggregating insights, but you still need. Should go back. Yeah. Statement. Thanks Frank. You should always go back and relisten because there could be really specific nuggets of wisdom or really powerful insights. Uh, I've, I've conducted interviews. I've seen a statement by a customer that I thought this is incredible. And we've tested that in ads that day just to see. Because the hunch was, you know, we got towards the end of the research, I'd seen it enough. This one was like a banger. And I'm just like, let's test this. I want to see this in an ad. And you can spin that up in five minutes if you have canva. So that's the power of this work for me is how quickly you can test things if you really start to deeply understand your customer. But Frank's right. There are some really interesting ways you can probably leverage AI now to help with this work.

Speaker C: I think, I think that we're going to see a huge uptick in this in the next year. So which, which I appreciate because it then makes this more accessible. Right. It makes it more accessible to, to folks who are running smaller shops to integrate in. And I love that strategy that you offered Ryan, um, of don't give the client the option, instead just bake it into your process and say the first step that we do is to, is to validate or is to talk to, you know, the customer so that we're on the right track by the time we get to the uh, creation.

Speaker D: I've seen a lot of content agencies that's in their terms, that's in their packages now. I've seen a few online. I talked to a few of them. He's like, this is part of the deal. They can relieve. Right. And they have enough conviction. Yeah, we'll move on. So it's a powerful statement. Right. But they're so adamant that they will not be effective and they'll deliver you a poor service if they don't have the ability to do that. M mhm.

Speaker B: Frank noted he did 10,000 surveys a week. I think he's trying to one up your, your 1800.

Speaker D: That's wild.

Speaker C: Yeah. Uh, a lot of data to dig through.

Speaker D: God bless you, Frank. I, I would never be able to handle that. But I'm glad you survived. Yeah. Nuance is lost. Yeah.

Speaker B: So what's interesting with, with Frank's statement though is, you know, outside of AI, any other trends you see coming up in the industry that are really going to affect market research in the future, Things that you're, oh wow. You know, excited about or that you see are just going to be interested in your world?

Speaker D: I mean I feel like it's early days still for what I do. You uh, know, keep in mind, I've only done this, I've only focused on this work for two and a half years as a business. I've been doing it my whole career. Mhm. I think like most disciplines, the technology just allows you to move faster. You still need critical thinking and a strategic mindset and the tools just help with that. Right. I same thing. Like I remember the first time I saw Salesforce when I went back to B2B after being a reporter. I had no idea Salesforce existed. And then I went back into the business world. I'm like, what is this Salesforce? Where has this been? This is the answer. Problems are all solved. And it's like, but then you, as you dig into it, you realize, oh no, okay, this just helps with the piece that we didn't have before.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker D: So I, I think I'm just more, I'm just, I'm just more excited about the fact that people seem to be more interested in qualitative research. LinkedIn is really interesting just to see sort of how, uh, it's almost like a real time conversation. A very, and a spectrum of where people are in their understanding of, of business and how to build out, go to market strategies and how to build, build products and develop them. I, I, I, I feel and maybe it's A bias of mine because my eyes are always sort of glued to seeing those types of conversations and I'm invested in them. There's a bit m more dialogue around trying to understand your customers in a qualitative setting. Uh, but there is more tools I use. Uh, the tool I use the most right now is a tool called Dovetail, which is designed specifically for researchers. Right. Um, again, mostly traditionally UI ux. Um, I'm a marketing researcher and a sales researcher. I think I see more of those. So I think I'm just more, um, I don't really answer your question directly, Jeff, but I think I'm just more excited about what seems to be more embracement of research in general. Right. That's sort of what I'm excited about.

Speaker C: I want to, I want to ask a follow up here. I'm stealing one of Jeff's questions, but I think it's important. You know, there is this saying that we always, we always throw around. Right. It's like marketing. It's one part art, uh, it's one part science. Right. And so these are two sides of the coin. And I'm curious to know for you, the more you do this work, how much do you feel like you are finding that balance between these data driven insights that you're gathering and intuition when it comes to making strategic marketing decisions? Because to me there's also this thing of like, sometimes you just know, right? Sometimes you just have a feeling, uh, or an understanding of the market or, and, and it's hard, right, because then we can't explain these uh, things to clients and maybe then we're just going out to gather data to back up our hunch. Right. But how much of this work do you feel like also has an intuitive element to it that comes out of just really understanding people?

Speaker D: Yeah, that's a good question. I haven't asked that one before. I don't know. I mean I've always, my, how I've always seen intuition is sort of like that's just learned experiences over time that sort of bubble up quickly without you almost being cognizant of them. That's um, I don't know if that's a great definition, but yeah, I, I find like as I do more of this work, it actually informs the creative. I'm one of those people believes that lack of options is a forcing function for creativity. So like a white canvas, you can do anything, but if you have limitations around what you can put on the canvas, you start to think more about how, uh, you approach problems. So yeah, No, I, I find it. The balance still holds true and they sort of inform each other. But I would say I think the research makes the creative the art, the science makes the art better.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker D: That's what I find. Um, and it's more fun because what I really like, because I am competitive about these things. When I find, when we really start to understand a customer and a buyer and we see it out in the competitive landscape, people doing things we used to do that we know we should not do anymore, I'm like, I did that. Best of luck to you. Right? And I was like, I'm on the right track. So yeah, I'm, I don't know, it's. I like this work so I can be more creative, I guess. Is that what I'm saying?

Speaker B: That's great. Well, I'm looking at the time. Ryan, thank you so much for spending time with us. Any, ah, any. Thank you. Thank you. Any projects you're working on that you want to plug, tell us about?

Speaker D: Oh, not really. I mean I'm just, I'm always around Matt. Matt and I have known each other for years now and we'll talk on occasion. It's great. We always get to catch up. So I invite anyone, they just want to reach out on LinkedIn. Just reach out. I'm always happy to try and help. I might not have all the answers, but I'll help where I can. And if they want to find me about Contentlift IO LinkedIn. I do have a guide and um, I don't want to plug anything hard, but I mean the people are more interested in like my process. It's there. I know I, I'm working, I'm doing more and more coaching I find now, which is interesting and that's fun. Like it, it's right. It's sort of working side by side in tandem with business owners and entrepreneurs. But how they approach this work, because everyone gets the value of it that I speak with. Cause I get high intent people coming in. Yeah. Thanks Frank. So it's like, it's fun for me to, to, to work with them and I get jazzed with them getting excited about it. So yeah, please just reach out. I'm always happy to find out. Wonderful.

Speaker C: Thank you.

Speaker B: Madeline, what are you working on these days? Anything you want to tell us about?

Speaker C: Well, I'm going on vacation, so I'm working on gearing up for that. I haven't done one of those in a while. Jeff got lucky and got to do one a little while back. So I'm, I'M I'm working on that today, but in August I'll, uh, I'll make sure in the show notes we, we plug this more thoroughly. But we're gearing up to do a social media ask me anything. And I've been thinking and writing a lot, especially this past week, about threads new social media platform on the scene. And I'm excited, Uh, I think that it'll be a really good place and space for, for, for these kind of conversations to happen in a different way and to, to get a pulse of a customer in a different way. And so Alina, who is our head of social media strategy at ah, Fearless Foundry, she's going to be leading kind of an ask me anything style session in August where people can show up and, and talk about the changes that they're seeing in social media and how they should be taking action in terms of their business. So we'll be doing that next month. What about you, Jeff? What you got going on?

Speaker B: Well, nothing new right now. I am excited. After this, I'm, I'm headed down to Dallas. One of my clients just shouting them out. They're celebrating 20 years in business. So super excited about that.

Speaker D: Very nice. Congratulations to them.

Speaker B: That is huge, huge, huge milestone. So that should be fun.

Speaker D: That should be a lot of fun, man. If any, most. If you can make it 20 years.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker D: That's gold star. That's five gold stars. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker B: So I want to thank everybody for tuning in. Um, this recording, as many of you know, will be available on LinkedIn as soon as we end and we'll be live again in two more weeks.

Speaker C: You can also tune into last month's episodes on all streaming platforms and keep an eye out for this month's episodes, which will drop on your favorite streaming platforms the first Friday of next month. And of course, you can always go to creativefriction.com to learn more about the podcast and see anything about past episodes. Thank you so much, Ryan, for being on with us. I hope you all have a fantastic weekend. Take care, everybody.

Speaker B: Bye, guys. You just listened to Creative Friction. Please leave us a rate and review if you enjoyed the show. And if you want to learn more about Fearless Foundry or the Mead Company, go to our website at, uh, Creative friction dot com.

Speaker A: All audio and video recordings are owned by Madeline Reeves and Jeff Mead and are recorded live every other Friday on LinkedIn and released once a month. Creative Frixion is produced by Fina Valenzuela of Fearless Foundry. Music is by Premium Beats.

Speaker C: Five.