Customer Conversations

Jeff Ignacio is the Head of Revenue and Growth Operations at UpKeep, managing the Go To Market Systems and Enablement teams. Prior to working at UpKeep Jeff spanned a variety of roles at both large tech firms such as Accenture, Intel, Google, and high growth ventures such as Vizier (viz-ier) and PatientPop. In this episode of the Customer Conversations podcast, Sean and Jeff cover

• The difference between product fit vs. go to market fit
• Expanding from early adopters and engaging the early majority
• Monitoring a customers risk profile
• Defining and managing a post-sales cycle
  

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Ryan currently leads product at Basecamp, is the author of Shape Up and the host of the Synthetic a Priori podcast. Here are a few of the topics we’ll talk about on this episode of Customer Conversations:

• The role and goals of customer research in the shaping process
  
• The workflow breakdown of the ‘jobs to be done’ framework
  
• Using research in your pitch
  
• The main goal of prototyping your product
  

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Lucas currently leads product marketing and strategic partnerships at Gorgias and has previously founded successful companies including Venngage and Treats Happen. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Customer Conversations:

• Actionable steps towards improving your customer support
  
• Generating profit from customer support
  
• Reducing friction to purchase
  
• Why you should always have an offer or promo for customers
  

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Ben is the CEO and co-founder of Tuple (the best pair programming app for remote teams). He is also the host of one of my favorite podcasts the Art of Product, a former Thoughtbotter and the creator of several educational products for Rails developers. Here are only a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Customer Conversations.

• An update on progress at Tuple
  
• Keeping your finger on the pulse of your customers needs
  
• Building a product for developers and the importance of understanding your audience
  
• Soliciting feedback from customers from different channels
  

Connecting with Ben

Nikki Elbaz is a persuasive copywriter and email specialist at CopyHackers who’s written revenue generating content for brands including Shopify Plus, Doodle and Resident Home.  She’s an expert in using research to understand why customers buy (and writing emails that make them do just that) and has shared her research knowledge for Product Led Institute, Bossitude Academy and CXL.  Here are just a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Customer Conversations.

• How to be a persuasive copywriter
  
• What it means to be data driven in copy
  
• How to get Voice of the Customer (VoC) data
  
• Getting emotional data from customers
  
• How to know if you VoC data is representative of your customer base
  
• Different strategies to leverage to get customers to speak with you
  

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Lorin is the Founder of the Customer Intelligence Institute.  She has worked with dozens of high-growth companies including best-in-class startups, emerging market leaders, and unicorn companies to contribute to successful exits and record quarters.  Here are only a few of the topics we’ll discuss in this episode of Customer Conversations with Lorin.

• Early warning signs for companies that may have a positioning problem
  
• The first step towards repositioning around your customer
  
• Finding the customers, getting the conversation started and what to ask them
  
• Making sure you’re actually getting valuable data from your customer conversations
  

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Lomit is the VP of Growth at IMVU.  He is also the best selling author of the Lean Startup series book, Lean AI as well as a public speaker and startup advisor.  Lomit has a ton of experience getting companies to and through the rocketship growth phase.  Here are just a few of the topics we discussed in this episode:

Jessica is the Co-Founder and CEO of Wonderment.  Wonderment helps e-commerce merchants grow and scale their businesses.  She has tremendous experience in marketing and startups.  Her career expertise has included working at HubSpot, InVision and Techstars.  Here are just a few of the topics we discussed in this episode:

• How Wonderment came to be
• User journey, pain points and why coding can wait
• Mastering customer research for product
• Avoiding bias in your research
• Operationalizing your product research
• Understanding the why behind what your building
  

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Chip is the Manager of Strategy and Planning at Uber Eats.  He has tremendous experience in pricing and partnership strategy.  Here are just a few of the topics we discussed in this episode:

• Being data driven with your team
• When do you know when you have enough data and are ready to make a decision
• Using search data to augment your inventory of customer selection
• How to make the business case once you have the data
• How to get started with data driven decision making
  

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Claire is the Co-Founder of Elevate & Forget the Funnel.  She has tremendous experience in SaaS marketing and growth.  Here are just a few of the topics we discussed in this episode:

• What customer-led growth means and how to nail it
• The difference between customer-led and product-led
• The importance of creating the experience the customer needs
• How to get started leveraging customer insights
• How to think about the volume of customer insights you need
• Getting started with better understanding your customers
  

Connecting with Claire

Caleb Elston is the Co-Founder and CEO of Delighted.  Charles Studt is Head of Marketing at Delighted.  Together they make a rockstar team of experts passionate about making your product better through customer feedback.  Here are just a few of the topics we’ll discuss in this episode:

• The awesome story of how Delighted started
• Why you should dog food your own product (dogfooding)
• How to build a B2B product with a B2C mindset (and the pros & cons of this strategy)
• Why you need more than NPS data
• The importance of qualitative data to drive your product forward
• How to increase the mindshare of your team by getting to the customer
• Why Delighted funnels customer data back into their Slack account

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Rob Fitzpatrick is a serial entrepreneur and author of the classic customer research book, The Mom Test.  Rob talks to us about the importance of customer research as it applies to your business through the various stages of growth.  Here are just a few of the topics we’ll discuss in this episode:

• The incredibly cool story of how The Mom Test came to be
• Conducting customer research through different stages of growth
• Overcoming objections to customer research
• How to make customer research a routine
• Why sales is all about having learning goals
• The importance of forming organizational habits

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Jenko Kent is the founder and creative director at VideGro and has spent almost a decade directing and creating engaging video content that drives serious ROI for DTC brands. In this episode, Jenko shares:

• Why rapid iteration beats perfect planning for creating content.
• The process VideGrow uses go drive outsized returns for brands.
• The types of video content best suited for each stage of your customers journey.
  

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David Greenberg is the SVP of Marketing at Act-On Software.  David shares more about his background and how he wound up helping companies like Act-On grow successfully through marketing.  Here are some of the highlights of what you can expect in this episode:

• What marketing can do to optimize your sales funnel
  
• Why you need qualitative data from your customer to make improvements in sales, marketing and product
  
• How to manage a co-hort of users to get regular feedback about your product
  
• What you need to do to build a marketing machine that works for your company
  
• How customers want to make purchasing decisions today

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In this episode we’re joined by Adrienne Barnes. Adrienne is a B2B SaaS Content Marketer and strategist who’s advised and written for top B2B SaaS companies including Stripe, Drift, and Demio. She is also the founder of Best Buyer Personas. We discussed:

• Why it’s important to know the relationship your customers have with your company?
  
• How to apply what you know about customers to your content?
  
• How to get started with customer research?
  

Resources

In this episode we’re joined by Louis Nicholls. Louis is the founder of Sales for Founders, SparkLoop and several successfully exited companies. He’s also the author of the Social Proof Handbook. We discussed:

- The importance of understanding your customers goals
- Creating shared success plans for customers
- Why sales calls are the fastest way to learn about your early customers

Show Highlights

• Personalization is all about who you are targeting
  
• Everything starts with identifying and solving the customer pain points
  
• “Once you can target, the world changes for you”
  
• Nailing down an effective process to enable you to move into new segments
  
• Learn more about the future of personalization
  

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Hiten is a prolific SaaS founder of companies including Kissmetrics and Crazy Egg and is now working on FYI. He also runs Product Habits to help other founders develop the habits they need for success. In this episode, Hiten shares:

• His framework for identifying product ideas worth pursuing,
  
• How to identify what your customer really want.
  
• What Hiten has learned from David Cancel about different go to market strategies.
  
• Why continuous testing drives increased product value.
  

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Samuel Hulick is best known for running useronboard.com, producing pithy teardowns, and writing “The Elements of User Onboarding.

We talked to user onboarding and UX expert Samuel Hulick about:

• The importance of understanding customers desired outcomes beyond your product.
• What it means to think of products as value delivery systems.
• How to get started improving your customers path to success with your product

Resources

Asia Matos is the Founder of DemandMaven.  In this episode, Asia lays out the truth in marketing for early-stage SaaS companies and startups to put your product on a rocketship.  Learn more about the importance of customer research, extracting valuable insights from your data, finding problem patterns for your niche and more.

Connecting with Asia

Corey Zettler is the Director of Product Management at Chief.  In this episode, Corey shares with us the difference of approach to building internal versus external tools.  Learn more from Corey about measuring the performance of an experiential product, the importance of collecting qualitative data, sharing customer insights regularly with your entire team and more.

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Jonathan Bartlett is the Chief Product Officer at Troops.  Jonathan shares what you need to do now to prepare to sell your SaaS product to the enterprise.  Other topics we discuss in this episode include managing your product like a business, comparing and contrasting a bottom up versus a top down approach to building your product, how product management has evolved and much more.

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Chris Ronzio is Founder and CEO of Trainual. In this episode, Chris shares with us the creative methods the Trainual team uses to continuously improve their product.  Learn from their product ideation process, a host of valuable product tools and more.

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We talked to Churnbuster’s Head of Growth Community about  and host of the Playing for Keeps podcast Kristen LaFrance about:

• What SaaS companies from the world of DTC Ecommerce.
• What retention based acquisition means and the impact making customers successful has on the business bottom line.
• How deeply understanding customers leads enables companies to build more meaningful relationships with them.
  

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We talked to Drift’s Director of Product Management and host of the Build podcast Maggie Crowley about:

1) Why "Shipped is not done" and how that influences goals and measurement at Drift.

2) "Staying close to the customer" and the processes Maggie and the Drift team put in place to ensure that happens as you scale.

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