Since then, in every company I worked in, I’ve tried to create programs that helped us as a marketing team develop a “talking to customers” habit.

This week I did a talk at Communitech’s Strategic Marketing Peer2Peer meeting and my topic was how to develop this habit, what questions I think marketers should focus on in these interviews and how you can use what you’ve learned in ways that go way beyond the traditional customer case study. Here are the slides (and scroll down for a summary of some of the key points).

How Do You Make Talking to Customers a Habit?

Startup Marketers are busy folk dealing with shifting deadlines and priorities. Setting aside time to interact with customers and prospects can easily get pushed to the bottom of our priority list. Making customer interaction a habit often involves taking a programmatic approach. Here are a some ideas of how to make talking to customers more of a habit:

1. Start a Customer Advisory Council or User Group
2. Make it a habit (or a rule) that travelling employees must visit at least one customer or prospect
3. Organize customer dinners at tradeshows or events
4. Institute a Win/Loss program to debrief with prospects/customers
5. Kick off a Customer Reference program
6. Assign key accounts to employees and start a program where those accounts must be called/visited at least once a quarter.
7. Give employees a monthly number of prospects/customers they have to speak to

What types of Questions Should Marketers Ask on Prospect/Customer Calls?

In my experience doing a great customer call is a skill that gets better with practice. There are three key areas that marketers need to explore in these calls: Customer, Market and Buying Process. These question are different from what the Lean Startup folks would call “Customer Discovery” mainly because they are less focused on product feature and function and more focused on how customers communicate, how they describe value, how they view offerings like yours, how they make purchase decisions and what motivates them.

The exact questions will depend on your target market and offering but here are some sample questions:

Customer

1. What does your typical day look like?
2. What other products do you use?
3. What do you love? What do you hate?
4. What kind of person are you?
5. When do you read your email?
6. What device do you read email on? What device do you surf on?
7. What events do you attend?
8. What sites/publications/ newsletters do you read?
9. Who do you admire?

Market

1. Who do you think we compete with?
2. If you weren’t using our product what would you use?
3. Describe what we do.
4. How would you describe the benefit of what we do?
5. How would you measure the value we provide?
6. What market are we in?

Buying Process

The audience for this talk was a mix of big company marketers and startup marketers. My goal was to show the folks at the larger companies how small, agile, high-growth startups are managing their marketing operations. At the same time, when I think about the startups that I hang out with not all of them are doing everything that I talk about in this deck.

I decided to post this deck over here to get some feedback from you folks. If you are a startup marketer – does your group operate in the way I’m describing in this deck? If you are at a larger company do you see these types of things being adopted? How do you think this will evolve over time?

If you have been following my presentations over the past year you will recognize some of the content here but are some new additions and refinements from previous decks. I’ve also added some additional notes on this presentation over on the RocketScope blog.

This week I also had a related set of conversations with startups that went like this:

“We know media coverage works for us because when we first announced we got a bunch of media coverage resulting in a slew of new signups. Now we have nothing to talk about. What should we do?”

The solution to this problem is in changing the way you think about what is a newsworthy story versus what isn’t.

Audience First, Story Second

The first step is to list the blogs/media outlets that your target prospects read and pay attention to. Next you can categorize them into the types of stories they cover. For example you might have a small business payments solution and your media list includes sites that cover startup news, sites that cover news related to small businesses in general and others that cover e-commerce related things. The stories for these sites may have some overlap but there are probably big differences too. For example the startup site might be interested in a story about how you assembled an advisory board for your startup and your lessons learned from that. The Small Business site might like a story about what your customer data tells you about how different small businesses are doing payments. The e-commerce site might be interested in a story about best practices for lowering cart abandonment rates through better payment options. Different outlets, different audiences, different story angles.

Story Angles are Everywhere

Beyond the obvious stories related to funding and launches, you might think you don’t have any stories to tell but stories are everywhere and they don’t always have to be directly about your company or your offering to work. Here are some ideas of categories of stories that startups can use:

1/ Tying into current events. Even if you weren’t paying attention to football the past few week, you could probably have smelled how desperate media outlets were to cover superbowl stuff even when there was nothing to talk about. One of my favorite bits of “news” came from the National Chicken Council that put out a press release announcing that 1.23 billion chicken wings are going to be consumed during the game. This tidbit of “news” got coverage in both in my national newspaper and my local radio station and oh yeah, pretty much everywhere in North America. Later in the day I was brainstorming on story angles with a company that sells a fitness app and I thought it might be fun to convert those wings to calories and then create an graphic talking about how many times you would have to hit the gym to wear off that many wings or how big a tower of fat 1.23 billion chicken wings would make. I could do the same thing for chocolate on Valentine’s day or beer on St. Patrick’s Day. Just remember the point of doing this isn’t to just get folks talking about the Superbowl or a 16 story file of fat – it’s important to make sure that there is a tie back into your product with a clear call to action.

2/ Customer data giving rise to insight into a market – For Saas companies this is becoming a really interesting source of stories. As an example of this, LinkedIn did a nice one a while back analyzing Startup Founder Profiles. If you look at what your data is telling you about how certain types of customers behave (or how your customer’s customers behave) and you can provide insight into that, you have yourself an interesting story.

3/ Customer use to illustrate a trend or change in a market – Your new product or even your new customer isn’t really a story but what your customer is doing with your product is. You’ll earn bonus interesting story points if what your customers is doing or why your customer was motivated to do it provides proof of a trend or change in a market and you or your customer can provide insight into that.

4/ Startup lessons learned – I hesitate a little to put this one in here because I’ve seen great examples of this and not very great examples. In general if one of your key target markets is startup folk than you can pitch a story about how you got your first 100 customers, how you raised money, how you made mistakes, how you built a team. The caution I will give you is that the competition here is stiff and when new voices try to tell their stories they are often judged much more harshly than the dozen or so founders that are regulars on the startup speaker circuit. In general we’ve heard these stories before so yours is going to have to be pretty special to rise above the noise.

Tactics Versus Strategy and Operations

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you know that I write a lot about the difference between strategy and tactics. Tactical execution can often be efficiently done by an outside expert. There are an increasing number of possible marketing tactics that a company can use and it would be impossible, particularly for a small company to have deep expertise in all of them. Working with experts, even for a short period of time can rapidly accelerate learning and save companies from making painful rookie mistakes. We are now seeing a crop of great agencies/consultants that specialize in tactics such as email marketing, content marketing, SEO, Social Media marketing, influencer marketing, etc. that are clearly meeting this need.

Marketing strategy and operations on the other hand are different. The head of marketing for a business (either a dedicated marketing executive or the founders themselves) is left to grind through these deeper marketing problems alone. Tactical specialists are in no position to advise the companies on how to determine which markets to target, what the optimal routes to those markets should be and how best to operationalize an overall marketing plan. Very large companies often work with strategic advisors for other areas of their business but in the area of marketing and sales, where best practices have changed dramatically in the past 5 years, remains an underserved space. Mid-sized and smaller businesses in particular have no option but to attempt to bring as much senior experienced talent in-house as they can afford and learn the rest through trial and error. This is often an expensive, inefficient, risk-laden process.

Introducing RocketScope

While I was thinking about how it might be possible to help companies at a deeper level, I had coffee with another experienced marketing executive, Amrita Chandra and we decided to put our heads together to create a service we wished we had had access to as we matured as marketers.

What if you had access to a team of highly experienced marketing executives that you could rely on to advise you on your thorniest strategic problems? What if those executives could share with you and your team not just their practical experience but also their tools, processes and best practices? What if you could use them as an experienced outside sounding board, an insurance policy when you don’t know what you don’t know, and a high octane injection of marketing smarts to accelerate your strategy?

This is the idea behind RocketScope, a company that we’ve formed to help businesses improve their marketing. We’re not a marketing agency or marketing consultants. We are providing practical marketing counsel and advice on best practices, based on our decades of practical marketing experience. You can learn more about our services here.

We’re working with a small number of companies in a private beta mode. We expect to be taking on a new set of clients shortly. If you are interested in finding out more about what we can do, drop me a note at april at rocketscope dot com.

We’ve launched a marketing best practices and strategy blog over at the RocketScope site that both Amrita and I will contribute to so you should register for updates. We’ll also do a monthly newsletter covering a wider range of strategic marketing topics so feel free to register for that as well. Don’t worry though, this blog isn’t going anywhere and I will continue to write about startup marketing issues in particular over here.  And while I’m at it I want to says thanks for reading. I’m amazed everyday at the people I’ve met through this blog and what I’ve learned from mixing it up with you. Thanks again.

In the past couple of years I’ve been trying to do my part to give back to the startup communities I’m part of. This blog has been part of that, I’m an active mentor for a couple of startup accelerators including the excellent FounderFuel in Montreal and InCubes here in Toronto, I give talks and probably do about a dozen calls or meetings a week with startups looking for an hour of advice and/or therapy from a senior marketer.

As of this week I will also take on a part-time role as an Entrepreneur In Residence at Communitech. Communitech has so much going on right now it is almost difficult to describe it. It began in 1997 as a non-profit regional hub for the commercialization of innovative technologies and an a support organization for the other 1000 technology companies in that region. In 2010 the Communitech Hub opened its doors and today is 44,000 square feet housing over 120 companies mixing startups with innovative larger companies like Google and expansion-stage companies like Desire to Learn. Last year Communitech launched HYPERDRIVE, a 30M+, 24 month Accelerator program designed to take startups from seed to Series A. In addition, Communitech runs over 50 programs and events per year, has established North America’s largest peer network, and has coached over 1000 companies through its Venture Services Group.

Communitech also has a group of EIR’s that work with Startups offering advice and mentoring and as of this week I will be one of them. My role and my goal is to spread around my marketing knowledge as broadly in the Communitech community as possible. This is a part-time role but I plan to be hanging out at the Hub 1-2 days a week. You can drop me a note at april.dunford at communitech.ca and we can schedule a time to meet. Also, head over the the Communitech blog where there’s a post with some video of me chatting about startup marketing.

It’s a honor to be chosen for this role. I did my engineering degree at the University of Waterloo and spent a few years working at a startup in Waterloo early in my career. Back then we had nothing like the Hub or the resources that Communitech provides. It makes me happy to be able to provide something that I wished I had access to when I was at my first startup trying to figure out what the heck I was supposed to be doing.

1. Branding is THE most important facet of startup marketing
2. Branding is about how your offering resonates EMOTIONALLY with the buyer NOT the benefit you provide. The example used was home cleaning products where the benefit was “cleaning the house” where the “branding” focus should have been “creating more family time”.

This a classic example of advice that would be very good for a company in an established market but disastrous for a startup.

Positioning in an established market is very different from positioning in one that isn’t. Startup prospects are starting at a different spot on the purchase path. If you are selling soap, you don’t have to worry about defining what soap is, what it does or why you might want to buy some. The biggest worry the soap seller has is differentiating themselves from the other soaps out there. Since soap is all pretty much the same it’s going to be hard to do on technical merits (although there are loads consumer products that attempt to do just that such as dishwasher soap with “breakthrough multi-chamber technology” and  toilet paper that doesn’t leave little bits behind) so getting to the intangible stuff right away might be your only hope.

Most startups don’t operate in established markets – they are either breaking ground in new markets, operating at the intersection of markets, or trying to re-define a market. Selling in markets like these is a bit like trying to sell soap on a planet where nobody uses soap or really understands what it is. Selling Martians on the whole family time thing is nice but they aren’t going to buy if they can’t figure out what the heck soap is in the first place.

You can think of it like a cascading set of questions like this:

In a well-established market you can skip the first 2 or 3 questions. Startups have to start at the top.

That doesn’t mean that the focus should be on features. Coming back to the soap example, telling Martians about the percentage of phosphates isn’t going to make much sense (unless they are rather scientific, which could be true). You have to start at the beginning. What the heck is this thing? -  Soap cleans things! Is this for me? – This is soap for removing Martian red dirt! If I never talk about that Martians would be left scratching their heads trying to figure out just exactly how is this stuff going to help them hang out with the family. I’ve seen the equivalent of the branding first approach used at startups and what you get is a lovely home page filled with vague platitudes that nobody understands and doesn’t convert.

I am not saying that branding isn’t useful and powerful and important for some companies at some stages of their growth. However I think early stage companies first have to figure out how to survive before they (and their markets) get established enough where branding can be an important differentiator.

• How to get started in building the basic structure of a marketing plan and why planning is important
• How to asses your who your best target customers are and what you need to know about them to effectively market to them
• How to develop a value proposition and messaging around your offering
• How to assess your customer’s buying process in order to optimize it
• How to choose a starting set of marketing tactics to build and fill your marketing funnel
• How to measure the results of your marketing activities so you can analyze and improve your programs

I’m going to use a set of templates that we will work through together so come prepared to work on your plan for your business. This is going to be a highly interactive session so I also expect you to bring your thorniest marketing problems and we will set aside time for group discussion and working through specific examples.  I’m NOT planning on doing a deep dive on how to blog/do content marketing/market on Facebook/run advertising/do web events or any other of a host of specific marketing tactics (although I do have some pretty firm opinions on all of those things) – the goal of this workshop is to lay out a framework for a marketing plan that makes sense for YOUR business and how you can decide which tactics to focus on.

If that sounds interesting, you can register right here:

We are trying to keep the group small and spots are filling up quickly so if you are interested, do it now and see you on Saturday!

(Also, see that nifty on-page shopping widget I’ve got there? That’s from Shoplocket a startup I’m also an advisor for. If you sell stuff on the web you should check them out)

Discussion around the premise for first creating the term is what first started to make me question it. Growth hackers keep saying that they are differnt from “traditional marketers”, where “tradition” means – “measures nothing.” The TechCrunch series on growth hacking for example describes traditional marketers as being allergic to data and overly focused on PR/promotions without closing the loop back to growth. I’ve seen marketers like that for sure, but I wouldn’t say they were “traditional”, just lousy at their jobs. Certainly there’s no “tradition” of startup marketers that look like that – at least not at any of the startups I’ve been with. We tended to get rid of those folks pretty quickly. I could get into my opinions about how marketing operates at bigger companies but we’re talking about startups here. So where are the startups with this tradition of inattention to measuring results?

I’ve spent my career working at B2B companies rather than consumer-oriented ones. Perhaps in B2C startups, the tradition is more mass-media branding-based and less metrics-oriented (heck, maybe after I fired those puffball marketers they got jobs at B2C startups in the valley – I always wondered what happened to those people). That would make sense given the different dynamics of working to get a massive subscriber population on board quickly in order to make money from it. The more I read, the more I understood that the “growth” in growth hacking stands for B2C user growth and not necessarily revenue growth. The TechCrunch series on growth hacking for example, never mentions the word revenue once and most of the specific examples mentioned (i.e. the Facebook growth team) are focused on driving user signups not growing a (paying) customer base. I can only assume a different group at Facebook worries about the growth in paying customers.

Does Growth Hacking apply to B2B? I believe that it could. But B2B growth hackers would speak a different language. If I were to talk about it there would be a much, much bigger emphasis on customer learning than I’ve seen in what’s been written about growth hacking so far.  I can’t hack B2B growth without getting a deep understanding of who my customers are (and they aren’t everyone), who the buyers are (and there are often more than one per deal), and how the buying process works. Most of my early experimentation is oriented around figuring this out. Experiments around channels and referrals and spread work much, much better if you are basing them on what you know about your targets and how they buy rather than just trying random stuff based on intuition. That is a very B2B view of the world where the universe is segmented into folks that are likely to pay you and folks that aren’t. Most B2B startups aren’t in a “f@#$ing landgrab” as the Facebook growth team describes it. We are in a targeted f@#$ing landgrab. It’s different.

I’m starting to feel that the debate around growth hacking (the TechCrunch comments show that startup folks either love the term or hate it) is more a debate around styles of marketing. For B2B folks, the whole measure, iterate, learn part doesn’t look all that different from what we’ve been doing for a while now (at least us folks that don’t suck at our jobs), while the B2C folks see data collection as something new that they can finally do at scale. On the other hand B2B folks look at all the focus on users and wonder where the revenue is while the B2C folks hope that revenue comes after the user base is large enough to make money from it (or to sell the company to someone who can).

So what the heck do we analytic, B2B, revenue-oriented marketers call ourselves so we can get some respect, huh? Marketing doesn’t do it justice but we aren’t just hacking growth for growth’s sake either. We’re smart folks, surely we can come up with something?

This might seem obvious but in my experience this is often a difficult process. In every startup where I’ve been the head of marketing, getting a crisp definition of our targeted buyers was a process of discovery, testing and revision. I realized that it was very important to capture what we knew and what we assumed about our target buyers so that we could have a working record to guide our marketing efforts. Below is a generic version of the customer worksheet I’ve used for years.

What This Template is Not

This is NOT a buyer persona exercise which some companies do as part of their product management process. I believe in marketing doing a deep dive on personas in some cases, (where you sell to complex buying teams or you have a large marketing team that doesn’t have deep customer knowledge). If you want to learn more about personas I highly recommend you check out Adele Revella’s Buyer Persona Institute where she has a ton of resources available and knows more about that stuff than you, me and everyone we know piled together.

A Worksheet for Startups to Document Assumptions and Focus Their Marketing Efforts

The context here is to think about buyers purely in terms of what you need to understand in order to build a marketing plan in a startup environment. The goal is to outline enough about your segments and buyers to begin to build marketing programs that target them. This worksheet might be filled with more assumptions than facts on the first try but that’s OK.  Part of the value of using a tool like this is that the team can get a shared understanding of what is REALLY known and not known about buyers at a given moment in time. You’ll be coming back to this document after you’ve got new marketing program performance data that will help you refine it.

Like everything else on this blog, it’s based on my experiences as a head of marketing at a series of startups. My background is B2B so the template is biased toward that (but that said, I think it works for B2C as well). Here’s the template and some notes on how I use it:

A Startup Customer Worksheet

Offering Name and Date – The reason I’ve included a date field is because this is not a static document. This document is an input to the overall marketing plan and is reviewed regularly when you have a new set of marketing statistics to analyze. In particular you are looking for potential shifts that would impact what you have on this sheet (either confirming assumptions or calling into question the accepted facts). Therefore it’s important to know when this document was last reviewed.

Segment Name – I would have a worksheet for every target segment. For example I talked to a startup this week that had an offering related to student loans with 2 distinct segments – Universities, and Banks that handle large numbers of student loans.

Company Characteristics – Obviously this one is for B2B companies only. The key here is to capture in as much detail as possible, who your ideal target companies are. This will include the obvious stuff (geographic region, language, company size) and things that are more specifically related to the solution you are selling such as organization structure, supply chain, technology used, risk tolerance, compliance environment, etc.

Buyer Characteristics – You might have a single buyer or you might have multiple people involved. Here I am using the word “buyer” to represent anyone who has a good deal of influence over a purchase. For example, if you are selling toys for young children you will have to worry about marketing both to kids and parents. Technically parents are the “buyer”, but kids still have a lot of influence over what toys get chosen. Similarly when selling to larger enterprises you might be selling to a single buyer or a decision-making team. Deciding which of these buyers you will need to focus on depends a lot on how influential they are in the purchase process, which is why you will see a spot to capture that on the template. The characteristics you capture here need to be as specific as possible. Job titles alone for example are usually insufficient to describe who you are really going after, you need to get into facets of what your buyers know and have experience with, their tolerance for risk, and sometimes their desires and worries.

Purchase Motivation – Sometimes this is really related to a specific pain that the customer has (project failure rates are high, our order entry process is too slow, our employee retention rate is too low) or it could be more oriented around a desired outcome (I will look smarter, my friends will be impressed, I will get promoted). Sometimes there is a specific purchase trigger (such as a specific product/process failure, a pregnancy or engagement, a new regulation to comply with), if so those need to be captured here as well.

Gathering Spots – Generally if you can describe a group of target buyers in a very specific way, you can identify places where they gather. This could be online in specific communities or on specific social networks, or in person at events, conferences, association meetings, training or certification meetings, etc. This will serve as a starting point when thinking about marketing channels and where to get in front of your target prospects.

Information Sources – This is where your target buyers go and who they look to when they are looking to learn, do research, get inspired or simply find out what’s new. This will include online and offline news sources, experts, celebrities, industry review sites, vendor information sources, their peers and places where their peers share information.

Facts versus Assumptions – The Magic Happens Here

Companies fail for lots of reasons but in my experience most bad marketing happens because of poor assumptions about target buyers. I’ve had times where we were blowing our budget marketing to the wrong person in the organization or trying to reach them in places they just weren’t. I see this a lot today with startups spending a lot of effort building a profile on social networks or working to get coverage in certain publications that their target buyers simply don’t know about (shockingly not everyone reads TechCrunch or uses Pinterest). Color coding the information in this template helps highlight what is known and not really known but assumed. Here are some important points about this:

• Anecdotal information from your sales team (or anyone else, including you) is not data – Your sales team will tell you that they understand your target buyers better than anyone else in the company but without data to back it up, they simply have an opinion – one informed by the last handful of customers they spoke to granted, but simply an opinion. Data comes from campaign results, sales data from a larger number of customers, survey data (but only when the survey was smartly executed in the first place) or when all else fails, data compiled from having conversations with a TON of prospects. If I’m doing it the last way I start feeling comfortable after 20 conversations, I feel like I’m really good after 50.
• Some Assumptions Need Immediate Testing, Others Don’t – Some assumptions, if they turn out to be wrong could be disastrous, others not so much. For example if you have assumed that a particular buyer is the budget holder in an organization and it turns out they often are not, you could waste some serious budget trying to market to them. I would want data on that before I got started. You will have to make a call on which assumptions need to be explicitly tested and which you can simply mark as assumed and look for data that gives you clues about whether you assumed correctly or incorrectly.

I would really love your feedback on this one. Does this work for you? Are you using something similar? Are there obvious holes?