Chapter 4: From assumptions to real customer insight

Speaker A: Welcome to another episode of the uncut podcast, a B2B SaaS marketing series that takes listeners from A to Z in demand generation. In this show we'll teach you how to build, execute and scale a modern demand gen engine from scratch. It's brought to you by myself, Jasper de Geif, and my friends in tech, Ted Van de Berg and Jasper Hissink. Good morning, gents.

Speaker B: Good morning.

Speaker A: In today's episode we'll talk about customer research. So, so in short, what it is, its importance, how you should do it, and last but not least, some examples. You guys good with that?

Speaker C: Let's go.

Speaker A: All right, lads, the inevitable question. What is customer research to begin with?

Speaker C: For me, it's the act of understanding who is your ideal customer. So trying to find out what the problems are that they try to solve. Uh, learn more about their world, their beliefs, um, the behavior, what communities they're in, where did they get their information. So to really try to get into the skin of your, of your customer.

Speaker A: Awesome. Anything to add, Jasper?

Speaker B: No, I'm just picturing getting into the skin of someone you said. Well, it's, to me it's like decision psychology. Not to add anything, but to exclude something. I'd say customer research is not, um, Personas think Personas are pass. It's old.

Speaker C: Um, why do you think it's old?

Speaker B: Using Personas, using, uh, my buyer is a 30 year old just turned father with a dog at home. But kind of.

Speaker A: Don't you want to know whether he drives a Ferrari or a Fiat?

Speaker B: No.

Speaker A: Me neither.

Speaker B: No. I guess in a sense there's some basic need for demographics. But, but the whole old Persona which comes from B2C. No, that is something that is for me, not customer research. It's what Ted said. It's the decision psychology.

Speaker A: Yeah, Ted had a bit of a grisly way of putting it, but at the end of the day you want to put yourself in the shoes of the potential buyer so you'll be able to reach him or her successfully over time. Yeah, right, cool. Moving on to, uh, to the why. Um, if you were to put it like in just one sentence, why would you say it's, it's important or perhaps even essential in order to craft a successful strategy.

Speaker C: If you don't understand your ideal customer, you won't be able to message them effectively, you won't be able to talk to them effectively because you're just going to sound like everybody else because you don't really understand what they're going through, what their pains are, uh, their workflows the matches up.

Speaker B: Yeah, I guess in previous episode, um, we talked about market research that sort of. Right. One of you was it that said market research is shows you what the playing field is like or where to play. And I think customer research is really what to say in that field. So in that sense for me it's super important. Customer research is the best tie into your messaging strategy. What do you say to them? Right.

Speaker A: So the outcome of it is really just if you don't do it, your marketing is going to be vanilla.

Speaker B: Yeah, vanilla, yes.

Speaker A: You're going to sound like everyone, you're going to look like everyone else. It's just going to be a boring.

Speaker C: Sometimes vanilla is perfectly fine but not uh, if you want to try to be different and you want to capture the market.

Speaker A: And being different is better than being better. Right.

Speaker C: Who said those famous words?

Speaker A: I'm just going to coin it. Um, from you guys experience do you feel like this whole topic, this whole exercise, does it get overlooked a lot?

Speaker B: I think the question is a bit deeper. I don't think it's always overlooked but it's not as done as often as, or as coherent as it should be.

Speaker C: Uh, I think it's made more complex than it should be to what Jasper is saying is like the old way of uh, writing Personas and that whole exercise and that there's like a 20 page slide deck that needs to follow from all this research makes it very complicated. Meaning that it's going to get done like once every two years and then of course loses uh, the total value of this exercise.

Speaker B: Right. What did you think?

Speaker A: Yeah, I can kind of picture like various scenarios in which it kind of gets overlooked just because other things are being prioritized. Um, ironically here at the agency for a long time we didn't get to do it despite us wanting it.

Speaker B: Oh yeah.

Speaker A: Um, yeah because we at that point in time happened to work with like smaller customers who only had the financial means to provide us with relatively small retainers. And the pressure to get something in return for that was so high that you instantly needed a very tangible deliverable. And doing research to them was just not a tangible deliverable. They wanted something for which they get an instant return such as Google Ads or LinkedIn Ads if you were to see that as a get a demo channel. Um, but that's just really often how it went and only when we started doing business with more powerful businesses financially, um, we somehow dared to propose uh, this in the first place and even then it required quite some convincing up until I guess we just nailed our pitch and the strategy part as to why we needed it in the first place.

Speaker C: In the past it was also hard to gather the information right. Just to actually do customer, uh, research or audience research. You had to do actual interviews, you had to go out there, talk to real people at events. So it's a very costly strategy. Then you had like the winters where you could just uh, tap into panel conversations. But nowadays there's no strong argument to actually not do continuous customer research or audience research because of all the tools like the gong call, uh, recordings, there's a lot, a lot more easy ways to actually get uh, the real results.

Speaker B: It is easier nowadays, but you already mentioned it just now as well, is that people often make it very, make it such a big project, but if you just make it a consistent project, recurring project, it doesn't have to be that big. But yeah, indeed, you have way more tools to do it easier now in

Speaker A: your opinion, it's more like a working document than someone, something that you go about in like some sort of huge manner, but then take it off.

Speaker B: Yeah, because your question just now is pretty interesting. Is it often overlooked? And in my experience it's often done in key moments like you have a new marketing leader, you have a new person in charge for this customer research, or you launch a new feature. Those are the moments you do it. But it's not never a, um, recurring part of a process, something that you agree to do quarterly or whenever.

Speaker A: So if you get in the skin, if you put yourself in the shoes of a VP of marketing at some mid sized SaaS company, how would you actually go about it and how often would you go and do it then given your own feedback there?

Speaker B: I would, if I'm the VP of marketing, I would give ownership to an individual or a team within a sub team within my team. That just makes this a part of their process. Right. And I think you need to have a, by now you need to have an ongoing way of using sales calls and recordings and using AI summaries of that. So that needs to be recurring. If you're, let's say a VP marketing at a software company, you launch features probably on, on a quarterly basis or monthly basis as well. So those are fixed moments to do customer research as well. Um, um, maybe I'll save it a bit for, for later about how to actually go about it. But I start with giving ownership of customer research to a product marketer or, or GTM team. Yeah, great.

Speaker A: Nice cliffhanger. Y' all hear that audience he's coming back to it later.

Speaker C: What you said is interesting in terms of, like, build it into the flow of work or like, make it part of the process so it doesn't have to be complicated. It can be like, for one client, it can be as simple as just opening up a Slack channel. And to make sure that on a regular basis, every meeting or first meeting, uh, goes through a prompt. And then like, the top five things are shared, uh, in that Slack channel so that you have access to it. They make it visible for everyone. And it could be as simple as, like, hey there, pain points, how they got to know you. Uh, what is the biggest aha moment Just to have this continuous feed of customer, customer insights, uh, through that. And that's like, you set it up in like 30 minutes.

Speaker A: So just to recap that, you're basically suggesting some sort of continuous loop so that the team that should act one way or another, um, gets the information that it needs on a continuous basis. For instance, in a Slack channel, yes,

Speaker C: but in a perfect world, let's say you sit together with sales every week and you get to discuss, like, hey, what's going on in the market, uh, what's trending, what's not trending? What are the biggest pain points? That's the perfect world. But like, what normally happens in those meetings? Like, hey, we need more pipeline. What should we do? So these questions go to the background versus being, uh, front and center. So then it's better to build this kind of a workflow in there so that there's, you're not dependent on what's, uh, on the agenda in those sync meetings.

Speaker A: I love this whole train of thought. So hold to it. Um, I'm going to ask one question in between and then we'll go back to it. What does customer research have to do with the buyer journey? You guys view?

Speaker B: Um, what customer research has to do with the buyer journey? Well, if you do customer research as well, it understands you, first of all, where they get their information from, where they hang out. That is maybe a bit of the demographics, the thing that I mentioned to avoid in the beginning, the Persona thing. But understanding, doing customer research and understanding customers also tell you, do they hang out, uh, on LinkedIn, what influencers do they follow? Where do they get the news? And that will give you a lot of input for your distribution strategy.

Speaker A: I fully agree with that. I think it just gives you, um, some sort of picture into their world so that you understand, okay, where am I going to place my bets? And that will especially come in Handy when you just joined the company as a VP of marketing and you're looking to get your first couple of wins on the board. So if you do that exercise, you simply, I mean you can never fully stay away from doing the uh, sorry, from, from, from placing bets without knowing everything. But at least this kind of allows you to get a couple of quick wins on the board. That will probably give you the time to uh, yeah, do the stuff that will uh, turn out to be like more long term bets.

Speaker C: Especially most of the work. Right. If we're thinking the demand generation and the demand capture most of the work and magic happens on the demand generation side. And as you're saying, like, if you really understand what's going on and where they play, you're a lot better at influencing them or becoming the brand of preference, um, in that part of the journey.

Speaker B: Yeah. Although to me still understanding where your audience gets the news from, who they follow, etcetera, is a way smaller part compared to actually understanding the languages that they use. And to me customer research in that sense is way more, um, understanding the pace that they have. And they use their own languages, their own words, their own sentences, and you copy that in your own messaging, which makes your marketing more powerful indeed in the channels that you learn from them. But for me, that connection between customer research and your messaging strategy is the strongest part. Totally.

Speaker A: All right, um, obviously in case you don't do it, there's going to be a consequence to it. There's always a price to be paid. You just had this whole process of, okay, how do we get feedback into the hands of the people that should be acting on everything that is happening in the space? Um, yeah, what happens when they, when they just don't do it and such information is not available.

Speaker C: Vanilla. Different stories like what I've seen happen is that if the um, insights from what's happening with customers are not shared between marketing and sales, that sales and marketing telling a totally different story. So for example, marketing, if they don't do great audience research or customer research, they create something or they create messaging that is totally removed, uh, from this world. So they create a, uh, great deck, uh, and great email messaging, send it over to sales and sales looks at it. It's like this doesn't talk at all about what we need. And then they start tweaking and then every individual rep, for example, starts tweaking their own deck or their own messaging. And then you get like 10 different stories and then everything is, well, once the uh, product is sold. But then afterwards like the product is actually delivered and then everybody has a different opinion on like what it actually is. And that's where the problems, uh, the problems start.

Speaker B: Ye, yes. And I think one extra layer to that, which I've seen wrong in many of our clients as well, is that if you don't do customer research, your messaging is off, your paid ads don't work and you blame it on the channel or you blame it on the tactics rather than you actually understand what the issue is.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Which is poor messaging and just not understanding your, your audience.

Speaker A: Totally. So in summary, I think I heard three things. A, you're going to be throwing darts in the dark because you pretty much just don't know where is my audience spending their time. So you can't at least not to the extent that it's possible, um, you know, define where you're going to make impact the quickest. Then your point was all about tonality. If you don't know what they're looking for, you don't know what messaging they use themselves. You don't know what is important to them, confirmed by them. In a way you're just, your messaging is probably just not going to resonate with them and it's going to turn out to be vanilla.

Speaker B: Yeah. You don't understand what the problem is. So you say, uh, my audience doesn't like LinkedIn because there's no conversions taking place, but the problem is in the messaging.

Speaker A: Exactly. And then the last one, and that is kind of to your point, is grip. Because obviously what is trending in the industry and what is considered relevant right now will probably change month over month for at least quarter over quarter. And if you don't have like this sort of continuous loop of feedback that your team also has access to, probably over time, you'll very much so lose grip. Yes.

Speaker B: Maybe one tip for the, one tip for the listener. If you're in marketing or sales and listening to this episode, if you go to your website right now and you see what are the benefits that we outline of using our products? And you see, save time, be more efficient, uh, be more productive. If it's these kind of, how do you call it, like fourth level benefits, whatever, you know something is already wrong. Right. That is almost never the, the words that your, your customers will use themselves.

Speaker C: If it's more revenue, you can directly start the exercise.

Speaker B: Exactly. That's it.

Speaker A: It's beautiful because there's still a lot of websites out there that are only like talking about these super high level benefits that the sales team will probably Use at the very end of building their use case. Just never the reason that someone requested a demo or got interested to begin with. Uh, yeah, classic problem when there's just no product marketer in place and it's sales. Writing the website.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: All right, um, time for the next chapter, which is doing the actual work. I can imagine that the audience showed up for this podcast in order to get to know. Okay, you know, how should I. How should I go about this? So, yeah, what are some good questions, um, to get answered when you're starting out with this exercise?

Speaker C: For simplicity, I always like the jobs to be done. It's a simple framework everybody understands, has a set list of questions. So that's where I would start.

Speaker A: Yeah, I can see that. Okay. Understanding from their view what it is they would need to get done.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, and kind of understanding that, okay, how do I make that whole exercise or that whole job just a lot easier through my software?

Speaker C: Well, so go deep, like, so the job to be done, starting point number one. But then also look towards, like, look broader and say, like, what is the workflow? Like, what is the, um, added value of your product within that workflow? And outside of it, I would go even deeper in terms of, like, how their entire tech stack looks like. So to understand what kind of tools, uh, they use and where this fits in, uh, into their world.

Speaker A: So you want to get an understanding of, like, the landscape. Yeah. So, okay, for this task, they deployed this tool and this person and this God knows what. But then on top of it, they can use our tool for this specific part of the total task, which then reduces whatever.

Speaker C: Yeah, just help you get an insight into, like, what are the alternatives? Like, how is the world looking right now for them?

Speaker A: Gotcha. What's your take?

Speaker B: Um, we all went to, uh, International Business School in marketing, so we all know the traditional four P's, uh, which is like in Dutch. Um, and I think the four questions I need answered are pains, process, priorities, and perception. So, uh, of course, what are the jobs to be done? But what are the pains that they actually have? Um, what is the process for them to start looking for a solution? What are the buying triggers? Um, what are the priorities for next year, for next quarter? How can we sort of play a role in that? And one thing that is pretty important that I like is what is. Are we perceived, um, for the fourth beat out of perception, are we perceived the way that we want to be perceived?

Speaker C: One distinction here and there's like, are we talking about, like, the potential prospect or are we talking about, like these are questions you asked your best customer?

Speaker A: It depends on it depends who you would ask probably. But at least in my view, you're supposed to get like a full picture of the whole buyer committee because at the end of the day they will be making the decision. However, there's always the initiator, of course, the champion. But you probably want to get a best view of his or her sort of, um, considerations because that person will be, like I said, initiating the whole journey.

Speaker C: Um, but that person, like, let's say if you're practical, you're in a company, you got inspired to do uh, bio research. Now after this episode, do you then call up your customer like a champion at one of your customer customers, or do you go broad and say like you find the ideal companies that you're at and then find the champion there or potential champion?

Speaker B: I'd say both.

Speaker C: Right, Both.

Speaker A: I would also say both. I think you first of all distinguish um, desk research from field research. Obviously the field research part becomes a whole lot easier when you have a lot of customers. Um, as a matter of fact, it doesn't even have to be a lot. You can start with just five and get them on a phone or in a zoom, call extensively and just ask them whatever you want to ask them for like an hour or so. Then, you know, get the intel share that uh, with the rest of the company. Make sure that it actually gets understood how people buy, where they spend their time and so on. So that doesn't just live with marketing, but also sits with, for instance, the product team, even the CEO. Probably because you want to ensure that your marketing strategy as a whole is going to make sense and that you're not at the end of the day over indexing on demand capture or demand creation for that matter. Just because there's some people that do not understand how people buy. So that's where I'd start before I'd go to the, the desk research. Um, yeah, we touched uh, a lot upon, okay, how to get these answers, answers questioned, uh, these questions answered. Pardon me? Some other, some other questions that might uh, be good to realize just for the audience is okay, um, when they read your website, does it click? Do they get it right away? If not, what is it that they miss? So you can kind of like go over that with your product marketer and adjust the messaging if needed.

Speaker B: And do I would you then do a usability test with someone and go on a call and have them just browse the website and homepage?

Speaker A: That's exactly What I do. Yeah. And then basically see where they stop and where they click and you know, if they're going to ask for like a clarification as to what that means and that sort of stuff. Um, because there's going to be a whole lot of other people that would find such a thing relevant, but are definitely not going to take the time to actually sit down and do that with a customer. So if you can get footage of that, it really goes a long way internally in order to get to some sort of understanding as to why certain messages works versus yeah, other.

Speaker C: Don't you also generate the ammunition to uh, uh, bring to discussions. Right. Because these things is. It's always very subjective. So let's say you're in a room with the CEO and head of sales and yourself as head of marketing, uh, coming to a conclusion is just going to be based on taste, prior experience, uh, subjective input. Uh, so bringing the actual voice of the customer to those discussions by doing exactly what you said, like reviewing uh, what they think of the website, capturing their real voice is going to level out those, those discussions a lot quicker than, than without.

Speaker B: Yeah, to me it was always a cheaper alternative to Winter because it was, was a bit over my head. And if you then redo the homepage or redo the website and just get a few of your actual customers or prospects, uh, on a call, record them and then to see what they say now, and then you sort of know what to improve.

Speaker A: I mean the fundamentals of marketing at the end of the day, right, Just taking the time to do your research. You mentioned a tool like Winter. Do you think you actually need a tool to do this successfully?

Speaker B: No. Thinking that someone disagrees, I think it can help. But I don't think you need to have a paid tool to do customer research. No, I don't think we should now discourage people to not do this without buying a tool for this.

Speaker C: No, if you have the time, you don't need a tool. If you don't have the time, you need a tool.

Speaker B: And that's a good answer.

Speaker A: What if you. What if you don't have the time nor the money, you're fucked.

Speaker C: Then you need to find a new job.

Speaker A: I mean, at the end of the day, time is just a matter of priority. Right? There's always time. So should this be prioritized over other stuff?

Speaker B: But it could be tools that are worth the investment compared to how much time you would have to invest otherwise. That I can imagine. But you don't have to start with it.

Speaker C: Uh, it's an impossible. Like, it's always. It depends for like, uh, the situation that you're in. But, uh, I would recommend taking, uh, taking the tool to try it out and see how the, uh.

Speaker B: Do you have a tool in mind then?

Speaker C: No, like the winter tool I've used in the past. And, um, that's been super, super helpful.

Speaker A: All right, um, we thrown out a couple of questions that needs answering.

Speaker B: Now.

Speaker A: How do these questions actually contribute to gaining an understanding of how people buy software? What is it that we are looking to know that at the end of the day will help us shape our strategy? Right.

Speaker B: I'd say. And, um, it's not the only thing, but a very important one that I want to highlight already is you're going to hear exact words and sentences about how they describe their pains or how they experience their pains that you should actually copy the way that they say it. So that's already one thing. Right. So don't throw marketing copywriting over customer research. Actually use the sentences that you get out of your research. There's a lot more, but I wanted to have this one already out there.

Speaker C: Nice. Uh, you've done that like with customers here at Muted, right? Yeah, like using exact voice of the customer in ads.

Speaker A: Yeah. For me, it's all about the initial couple of bets and making sure that we're going to be reaching people, um, wherever they're spending time. So with that being said, I would say that it's about repetition. So let's say you do 10 interviews and you find out that six of them happen to spend a lot of time on YouTube. And that's my instant hit. And that's where I'd go if then 80% happens to be on LinkedIn. And that's another hit. And I would definitely go there, depending on, according to them, how much time they spend there, yada, yada, yada. And perhaps you're also going to find out that at least half of your market happens to go to one specific trade show and then occasionally to a number two and a number three. And depending on the budget that I'd have, I would simply prioritize the one that everyone goes to and see if the ROI is going to be sufficient in order to also do the other two. And I guess that would, uh, make my first couple of bets in order to get the confidence in from M. The CEO and to kind of prove that the strategy that we laid out is already working to an extent after, well, ideally as quickly as possible. Right. 3, 4, 5, 6 months in that the first um, rewards are being reaped.

Speaker C: I think that's a very interesting way to look at it. It's like doing customer research to increase the likelihood that the bets that you're making will actually pay, uh, pay off. I hear you saying interviews. You also, Jasper, interviews. What do you guys think then of surveys to collect this data? Like, would you stay away from them?

Speaker B: No.

Speaker C: Yes, I would stay away from them.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: All right. Why not? The combination of interviews and surveys. Quantitative. Quantitative. And quantitative, yes.

Speaker C: But I found them uh, very tricky as like, as in you can scale go to 100 people, but maybe uh, just having an interview with your top three or top four champions at customers that you want to get more out of is way a way stronger signal than did you take the average from like 100 people.

Speaker B: Yeah, you're talking about what to prioritize, not what not to do and what to do. Let me put it this way. When in previous role I was um, in GTM and I was uh, in charge of launching certain features and I would launch a uh, insights feature like uh, let's call the HubSpot dashboarding feature. And for that you need to do like product marketing and a GTM strategy. And I would and have interviews with clients asking for this feature. So qualitative, uh, ah, data. But I would also send a survey to 20, 30, 40 other people just to ask them, okay, what kind of pain are we solving here? Why do you need this blah, blah. Just so I have more data in their own words describing it. Very useful.

Speaker C: What happens? Like was the data on the qualitative and quantitative side the same or did you spot differences there?

Speaker B: No, I didn't really spot differences. No. I can imagine that maybe written language could be a bit different from spoken language. Um, but no, it was super useful for me. Use both.

Speaker A: Did that change your mind?

Speaker C: Um, no.

Speaker B: So you would avoid doing surveys at.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: Even if you have the time to do it?

Speaker C: Yes. Because you never have the time to do it. So I would focus uh, on like the interviews and take that as the input for like the next bet. Also to make it simple for yourself, say, hey, what are the top two, three, five people that I want to talk to? And use that to improve your bets versus getting distracted by a lot more information and the server that you need to set up and then you're like three months later.

Speaker B: Now I think if you do the survey well, you already have a survey tool in place to get this kind of research, to do this kind of research, have a standardized way of asking these Kind of questions. No, I would always use it the same way I would use M. MPS surveys or CSAT surveys as well for customer research or what comes out of that.

Speaker A: Sooner or later this was bound to happen. This was going to have to happen. So I'm liking it. Um, do we have any examples of companies that are doing a great job in this regard? They understand the market, they understand uh the potential buyer and as a consequence they just have a great strategy that continues to evolve and that just allows them to win. And you guys experience or from what you were able to see like from the outside.

Speaker B: You said a continuous process. Right. So I, I have an example that comes to mind that I would like to share in front of our clients. But it's just a one time thing that they did pretty smartly. The people from content to in the summer they wrote a. They wrote a big report on the state of content teams in 2025 and they just spoke indeed I think they only did interview so that uh, they probably agree with uh with that but they did this huge research spoke to a bunch of people that are their ICP and basically they got a lot of their pain problems that they actually solved them. Well perfect customer research but they launched a huge report out of that as well and brought that to market as kind of a benchmark report which they did super smart because one wasn't even perceived as wasted time by anyone internally because they came out with this huge marketing um campaign and they probably used a lot of the data for their own intelligence as well. I think there was a very smart play on customer research.

Speaker C: It's doubling up so like getting the information, they're putting the effort but also like making it visible. I think it's the hard. Why it's so hard to answer your question Jasper all normally if rate marketing this is like you don't see this like any, any company that does great marketing has done um great customer research but it's not something that you see from the outside.

Speaker A: That is probably very true and thought of it that way but they all

Speaker B: did surveys as well I believe.

Speaker A: Nice.

Speaker B: Do you have an example?

Speaker A: Yes and I'm um, um trying to think of a company that did this phenomenally but nothing comes to mind. There is one that comes to mind that uh pretty much just forgot to do it altogether and I have to say due to a lack of resources because earlier um, this session we touched upon okay what are some reasons for companies not to do it and then we talked about the agency context and then kind of small companies that just don't have the budget and need to see ROI for everything right away. I can also think of another example in which companies just don't prioritize it. And that's just because they don't have the resources in the sense that there is a product marketer. But let's say that product marketer happens to be American, but then the classic European problem happens to be okay, but we're active in France and in Germany and in Croatia and you know, mention all of these markets and in a lot of industries it just is what it is. The audience does not speak English well enough to conduct such interviews, um, in English, and therefore they just place their bets based on a gut feel rather than actual proper research. To be fair, in this example that I have in mind, not even the desk research was done. So there's also some blame on them. But I think, you know, the whole resource thing that that comes in kind of.

Speaker B: Yeah, but that the guy or girl that, um, that they do the research, customer research in the US because that person was based in the US and they just didn't have the means to actually do this, to replicate that research in the EU countries. They were, they were marketing.

Speaker A: No, as a matter of fact. Well, product marketing at the time was also not as big of a, of a domain as it is now. So for the first couple of years it was definitely overlooked. And then at some point this whole role kind of became trendy within SaaS, so that person was brought in. Um, I still didn't necessarily see a whole lot of interviews right away. It was more so just closely working with the sales team and making sure that the deck was updated with like the latest features and that the story altogether became more aligned. But I still think that the whole research part, both desk and, um, field very much lacked a conversation here and there at a trade show would have, you know, definitely took place, but not the type of research that you would want to see in order to truly, you know, craft a strategy that you can rely upon. And I think the result of it was just a mix that didn't allow for results in a lot of countries. So this is a bit of a combination between, um, market research, so last week's topic and customer research, because from a sales point of view you would just see that in markets that are typically a bit more hierarchical, they would essentially just put like a sales intern aged 20 on the phone with some CEO age 60, just because there was no one else that spoke the language. And as the market is so hierarchical, the software may have been the perfect fit, but that person was just like, you put me on the phone with who? Like how can I do business with this kid? Right? And I guess in the Netherlands that is a bit more accepted, um, but in a lot of countries it just isn't. So from a sales point of view there wasn't a fit. And then there was also just a strategic mismatch in marketing in which the trust was missing because there was simply no face of the company. You can't make this intern the face of the company for a whole market just because the person happens to speak the language. And there was not enough FaceTime to begin with. And that trust could have um, been gained by going to trade shows or organizing a road show or just visiting customers on site, uh, at their facility. But none of it was really part of the strategy and instead they over indexed on Google Ads just because it's very easy to see an roi. And that obviously, I mean that more so ties into the topic that we discussed last week. It worked to an extent because you're getting some leads and yada yada, so you see some initial traction. But at the end of the day you're never able to win the entire market just because of this insane strategic mismatch. All right, um, takeaway for the episode. Research drafted strategy. No research is at the end of the day just putting yourself at greater risk and you'll need to research to avoid irreversible long term damage.

Speaker C: All true. And I think what Jasper said to add on this, the invisible part, like this is a very uh, strategic exercise that don't, you don't see uh, in real life, um, and you want to avoid making decisions like making the wrong assumptions. What you're saying like hey, LinkedIn doesn't work. So maybe it's not LinkedIn that doesn't work but it's the uh, messaging.

Speaker A: Totally. Yeah, I think uh, this is the perfect bridge because what's the next episode about?

Speaker B: Positioning and messaging. There we go, the fun stuff.

Speaker A: All right, more to come. Thanks everyone for listening. Thank you gents for joining in.

Speaker B: See you next time.

Speaker A: See you next week.