4 minute read
As a product management or product marketing professional you need to know what is happening in the market, but having those conversations is easier said than done. Our experts talk about some common situations that may be hindering your market research efforts along with tips on how to overcome them.
NIHITO (Nothing Important Happens in the Office) is a term that captures the qualitative work involved in market visits and research. While we know the value of market visits, product professionals face many challenges when it comes to actually getting out of the office. For instance, how do you “get out of the office” when you’re working from home? How do you meet your buyers when they’re more distributed and remote?
Today there are more obstacles to conducting market visits than before, from small budgets and lack of support to being understaffed. It can also be hard to access your market. So, how do you conduct NIHITO interviews even when times are tough?
Sometimes, product professionals find themselves buried under an endless amount of tactical activities, and there’s no time for strategic work like market visits. For many reasons, you might find it hard to get face-to-face with customers and prospective customers. Overcoming these challenges is the key to being able to effectively conduct market visits that yield valuable, actionable information.
Market Visit Barriers Product Professionals Face
Today we’re going to outline a more sustainable path that overcomes these common problems. We’ll even discuss some advantages if we think of these circumstances not as constraints but as opportunities. If you are a product manager or product marketer that wants to get out of the office and into the field to uncover market intel, this article is for you.
1: Face-to-face meetings aren’t an option for market visits
Many companies are entirely or partially remote. While remote work has been a trend over the past several years, it has also created a more distributed workforce which makes market visits more challenging. Some of the people you need to talk with can’t get ‘out of the office’ all that easily.
Technology can help bridge the gap between you and market visits in these situations. This is a good opportunity to highlight that there are certain things you can do when you’re using tools like Zoom that you can’t easily do when you’re face-to-face.
For example, during a NIHITO market visit with someone that I’m face-to-face with I get to see their native habitat. That same opportunity isn’t as easy in a virtual setting. You can ask them to scan their desk or office with their camera, but sometimes that’s easier said than done.
However, when I get on a video conference, I gain the ability to record their screen, which is perfect if you’re building software. I can now actually ask them to share and record the process. There are also tools in many conferencing platforms that can assist with the market interview process. Having an AI overview or note taker can free you up to be more engaged with the conversation, knowing you won’t miss a thing. You can use the transcripts along with AI to summarize and find new insights.
2: You have no travel budget for market visits
Even if you’re sold on the idea that getting out of the office is the key to successful market research, one thing remains true: doing market visits costs money.
For some, meeting the market might mean boarding a plane, booking a hotel or buying lunch. If your budget doesn’t support those activities, you might feel like you simply can’t do the work. However, there are some simple approaches that can remove this type of barrier.
The first strategy is you could draw a hundred-mile radius around the office (or your home) and discover who it is you can talk to that is in your market.
If you have global products, there is pressure to make sure you’re capturing a large sample size and you’re talking to people across different geographies. Don’t let that pressure prevent you from starting locally.
The second strategy is to conduct market visits virtually.
When you aren’t conducting face-to-face meetings you lose a significant amount of nonverbal communication, but video conferencing technology can eliminate some of those challenges. It also gives you access to some AI tools, like note taking and transcripts, to help catch details and generate insights.
We have to recognize that some of your customers may not have video capabilities or be willing to go on video for an interview. No matter what technology they do have you should find a way to leverage it to communicate with them. For example, if the only option is to conduct the interview over the phone, then call them. It’s better than no conversation at all and it can serve as a starting point.
3: There’s not enough time to speak with a meaningful sample size
Who says you can’t bundle your sessions together? We always want to be sensitive to people’s time, and maybe now, through technology, we can meet with three of our customers at the same time.
You can create an event like a webinar or office hours with your marketing team to capture attendees. In return, you can provide them with something valuable, even if it is an eBook, template or similar item. At the end of the event, you tack on a short NIHITO session. So if time and scheduling is an issue, your market might be more open in this setting.
4: Discomfort with screen and workspace sharing
Not everyone is comfortable with being on screen or sharing their workspace, even visually through screen sharing, with others. The ability to screen share and get a virtual glimpse into their workspace is, however, a benefit of performing market visits virtually. So, you can reduce their discomfort by being willing to show yourself and your workspace first. This vulnerability can help customers feel comfortable doing the same.
You can also have a conversation about it in advance so that nobody is taken by surprise. You can say something like:
“We really like to observe certain behaviors or see your workspace. We also like to know what different tools you use and how you use them. Is that something you’ll be comfortable doing during our conversation?”
5: Carving time to carry out your market visit strategy
It’s not uncommon for product managers to find themselves saying, “I don’t have time to do market research” or “I can’t do market research because I need to complete these demos or presentations.”
First, take a look at the Pragmatic Framework. The product manager or even the product team doesn’t have to be responsible for all 37 boxes. You can and should divide the labor.
There are collaboration opportunities between the product team and marketing, sales enablement, sales and pricing teams.
There are all sorts of people who can participate in owning the framework. That will give you valuable time to study the market.
Then, the second way is you can be ruthless in the prioritization of your time.
If you aren’t, then what ends up happening, is the most tactical, firefighting noisiest part of your job dominates and takes over. Then, pretty soon all the strategy gets laid to the wayside.
Consider creating a schedule to ensure you have the time you need. For example, block out two hours every Tuesday or Thursday morning to strategy. Use that time to study data, schedule appointments, conduct a win-loss interview or analyze the win-loss interview data.
Your team will start to build discipline and respect that time that you have blocked. You just need to be accountable to yourselves and what you’re trying to accomplish. Eventually, it will become part of the culture.
6: The sales team is preventing market visits
Sometimes, sales can put up a barrier and say, “you’re not talking to my customers.” The problem is that if sales are in the room, it changes the tenor of the meeting. It tends to make it less productive from a research perspective because the interviewee is less likely to feel free to express themselves.
One thing you can initially do right if your sales team is giving you pushback is to pursue your potentials. Our initial course, Foundations, teaches about the three subgroups of your market: customers, evaluators and potentials.
Customers can be both your customers and your competitors. Evaluators are people who are actively shopping for a solution to their problem. Potentials are the people who we assume have the problem, but they have not started looking for a solution.
So if sales is the barrier to you conducting a market visit, we would encourage you to go look at the potential group because you do not need permission to talk to them.
It can also help to bring a salesperson with you to the first couple of meetings. Just make sure that these meetings are with users of your product, not buyers. It’s likely that the salesperson will see that this isn’t the best use of their time. They’ll also see that your visits are non-threatening.
And to be clear, we suggest that you start with users to build trust and gain buy in. We aren’t suggesting that you don’t do market research with buyers as well.
7: Getting sales buy-in for win/loss interviews
I would say the number one thing you can do is to take judgment out of win-loss discussions. This type of work is not about judging sales, right? Salespeople are one part of the overall process of getting someone to buy something. So, a good win-loss process is not about the sales team.
A good win-loss process is about changing the way an organization approaches marketing and content development through lead generation, through the sales process and after the sale by getting a referral. It’s about that entire experience from the buyer’s side.
This means it is about how we as an organization need to change, not just about how sales need to change.
You can change the tone of things by building a partnership with them and get their buy-in. This can help them move from thinking that the product team is trying to do this to them, to seeing that the product team is trying to do this for them.
Explain to the sales team: “Here’s what we’re trying to accomplish and the types of questions we intend to ask. Then ask them, “Do you have suggestions for additional questions?”
This is one way to pull them in so that they can be part of the process.
8: Research doesn’t feel appropriate during a crisis
Product managers have struggled with the question, “Are market visits appropriate in a time of crisis?” especially since the pandemic occurred. In these moments, however, research is even more important. Just because we’re having a difficult time doesn’t mean we should put our products on hold. It doesn’t mean we should freeze our research efforts.
Actually, research might be absolutely critical for many of you depending on the industry you’re in and the type of products you create. The lifeblood of your product team is their ability to drink at the fountain of market knowledge on a continuous basis. And if you stopped drinking from that fountain, eventually you’re going to go dry. We can’t afford to let things go dry.
For example, in 2020, 3M was manufacturing N95 masks and selling them through channels to distribute to hospitals. Overnight, everything changed and they pivoted to engage in a more direct-sales model. They developed strategies to sell directly to the government in ways that they’ve never done before. Their product teams played a big role in identifying and addressing the new market problems.
That being said, you have to be gentle in how you frame these requests for research during times of crisis. But remember, people want to buy products that solve problems that are relevant to them.
If you go to them and say something like:
“Hey, we’re dealing with these challenges. Part of my job is to make sure that we, as an organization, are solving the right problems for you, and that we’re solving them in the right way. Do you have the time to meet with me?”
They are more likely to think, “Okay, this is not a sales engagement; this is something much deeper, and they’re trying to be real with me. They’re trying to be human, to solve problems. They’re actually doing work on my behalf”
This type of approach will make people more receptive to conversations, even during a crisis.
How to Improve Market Visits
The only way you can move past obstacles and improve your market visits is to take action. Here are some specific action items to help move your market visits forward.
1. The first thing is to set up your interview matrix. This is a Pragmatic template. However, you can create this spreadsheet on your own, but essentially it’s going to help you walk through which part of your market segments do you want to hear from? Who are you not hearing from?
2. Set a goal for the number of market visits you want to conduct during the next 30 days.
3. Outline the approach by knowing the technology you might need like Zoom or Teams.
4. Analyze your current data. It could be from past NIHITO visits or web analytics. Start to do a trend analysis for things outside of NIHITO to amplify the market research that we’re going to tackle in the next quarter. You can use AI to help with this part of the process. Our AI workshops can help you learn how to use AI tools to be more efficient and effective.
5. Schedule your market visit. You must strip away the excuses and get it done.
The point is this, whatever metric is right, you have to have some sort of interaction with your market, so prioritize market visits. You must drink at that fountain of market knowledge and do it continuously. So set a goal, execute it, and see how you performed so you know how you can improve.
