The best way to do customer research.

Over the last ten years, I helped launch 8 products across 6 regions.

And each GTM started with customer research.

Some of these companies had 500+ customers, some had 50 and others didn't have any customers except some beta users.

Most marketers and founders though overly spent their time talking to existing customers or reaching out to cold potential customers.

They missed out on a couple of really good sources of data during the process. Few of the sources that I think every marketer should tap when it comes to customer research include,

Existing customers - Preferably your super users or active customers.
Potential customers - Non-acquaintances that fit the ideal customer persona
Website visitors - Anybody directed to your website and visiting specific product/high-intent pages on it.
ICP Communities - ICPs on Reddit, Linkedin, Facebook, Telegram, slack, or other private communities
Product listing and comparison websites - Places like G2, Capterra, and Sourceforge where customers of your competitors give out reviews.

Understanding which type of customers you might want to reach out to usually makes customer research simpler and plans smoother.

Here is what you would need to do,

Talk to 10% of your existing customers

When it comes to companies with 100+ customers, my rule of thumb has been to talk to at least 10% of the existing customers.

With a minimum of 10-15 conversations and a maximum of 50 conversations with your super users who also pay the most.

This is also where most founders and marketers go wrong.

They tend to speak to any customer they can get on a call with and call it a day.

The idea is to scale your marketing towards the customer who will use your product and have the ability to pay for it.

That means you need,

- Super users of your product

- Who also pay more than average

This also applies to potential customers, if you already have customers but not enough to actually do complete customer research.

Then you would have to reach out to potential customers via cold calls or emails, in which case the specific persona to start with would be people who are super users of your product and also pay a premium for it.

Use surveys

Customer research doesn't need to be just interviews.

Strategically placed surveys will do just the same thing but would be easier to implement.

This especially works great when bandwidth and resources to do 1 to 1 interviews are not available and there are,

- Website visitors you can tap

- The customers prefer to answer via email than over calls.

In case of website visitors, for example, you could ask

"What is the ideal amount the customer would be ready to pay for your product?"

on your pricing page.

Communities are a treasure trove

Another really good way to get customer interviews is by being part of closed/curated communities.

In my experience, Slack communities are the best.

For example, if Marketers are your target group, Slack communities like OnlineGeniuses, Growth Marketing pros, and Exit Five are great places to start conversations.

Use the language from G2

Places like G2 and Capterra are great for curating customer feedback on your competitors.

This also means a lot of them explain the problems they are trying to solve and how the competitor's product solves them.

Plus what does the competition lack in their product and which can solve(USP).

In the language they understand.

Rule of thumb if you find something like this, use the exact same language in your copy.

Conclusion

The worst thing you can do as a marketer is to wait for your customers to respond back to you.

In my experience and depending on the size of the company this might take anything between 2 weeks to 2 months to set up and curate.

What you should do is find the lowest-hanging fruits and use that for customer research. Provided these match your ICP.

And if you are a small team then the entire team would have to hit 2-3 of all the audience mentioned above simultaneously for this to work.