Another week, another super-useful product marketing questions round-up! In this week’s instalment, you can find out more about how product marketers like you are managing customer feedback and segmentation, as well as what the low-down is when it comes to sales enablement tactics.
And don’t forget we have an incredible Slack channel full of insightful questions and answers from product marketers in every business sector and from all around the globe.
You can join our Slack channel (for free!) here.
Q: How do you manage user feedback? We receive a lot of customer feedback in different channels (NPS Score, app store, surveys, on the phone) and I am searching for a way to collect all the customer feedback in one place.
A: “How you collect/consolidate/report user feedback should be driven by the action you want to take as a result.
For support teams, we’ve found that implementing a simple feedback form allows us to use a rich store of customer feedback to hear about feature suggestions, recurring issues and overall sentiment. I don’t think that having a perfect view of user feedback is as important as a directional view, but you could assemble all of that data in a warehouse and build a model to get a full 360 view of feedback, if that’s important to you.”
Garrett O’Brien, Product Marketing at Stitch/Talend
Q: Does anyone have an existing customer segmentation for small to medium size business? I am looking for something publicly available. Ideally broken down by sales.
A: Segmentation is a really important concept to get your head around when you’re starting to build personas and take a more targeted approach with your marketing. Have a look at our previous article on the importance of geographic segmentation to get your ideas flowing.
“I recommend segmenting in the way that is most relevant to what you are selling, but some good starting places are Infusionsoft and the Small Business Administration (SBA).”
Dekker Fraser, Kellog MBA and marketing teacher
Q: What kind of tool/document do you use to keep up on what the product team is working on? Do they share a spreadsheet? A shared project? A github file?
A: “We have a kanban board in jira which has all our pre-engineering work. Some PMs additionally have their own speadsheets that track status on a particular project, (one uses asana), and then I manually maintain a whiteboard (powerpoint slide now for senior / board / external comms).”
Jenkin Lee, Chief Product Officer at Baze.
Q: I'm quite new to the concept of sales enablement and would appreciate some different perspectives of what this actually means to you and your business? What are some misconceptions that you've found as well?
A: “Here's how I define Sales enablement:
Providing salespeople with the information, content, and tools to successfully engage the buyer throughout the buying process so that sellers can:
- leverage the best practices and knowledge of the top performing, most experienced teammates
- can be as efficient as possible with their time
- can equip their buyer to act as an advocate within their own organization.
Sales enablement is also:
- centered around the buyer
- owned jointly by sales and marketing
- and consists of customer-facing as well as internal content.
Some misconceptions I've seen is when sales enablement managers act more as ‘document managers’ or ‘content police’ who only take a shallow look at content performance, rather than defining and executing on a strategy to achieve real objectives, like improving win rate and shortening the sales cycle.”
Leah Langston, Product Marketing at Zapproved
Q: When you’re doing market research, where do you usually distribute your surveys?
A: “Ideally you can survey prospective buyers in your market, as well as, existing customers. The existing customers part is easy since you already have that list - for the prospective buyers though you can use tools like SurveyMonkey, QuestionPro, or others and pay to reach people outside your audience.
For example, if you sell to marketers in large companies, you could specify that you want responses from folks in Marketing at companies with X number of employees or higher.”
Jeffrey Vocel, Director of Product Marketing at Iterable
