Why is it important to inform your GTM with primary research? What benefits does primary research provide to your GTM?

Greater understanding of your customers and markets drives better decisions – your ability to make the best decisions possible increases when you make decisions based on data. Understanding your market, customers, and prospects can unlock significant upside. Most good founders are rigorous about validating their assumptions. However, as companies grow and founders become people managers, a void is created. This connection to the market atrophies and the business’ GTM strategies stop evolving with their market. Primary research can help revive this data-driven approach.

Acting on untested assumptions creates unnecessary financial risk – spending significant amounts of money based on internal assumptions introduces an unacceptable amount of risk.   Properly gathered market insights help you test hypotheses before committing large investment dollars in sales, marketing, and product spend that has limited ROI.

A continuous market feedback loop creates an opportunity to iterate, especially if “fail fast” models aren’t viable – the sales cycle shouldn’t be your testing ground for critical GTM strategy updates. Derisk your GTM decisions by testing and refining new sales approaches before enabling the sales team. 

Win/Loss 

What are the steps in a win/loss research project? 

The steps to a win/loss research project are:

Step 1: Align on project objectives and scope – align with all project stakeholders on the important questions they want answered. Ensure that all project stakeholders will have an open mind to the data. Ask for internal hypotheses that will help you compare internal and customer perspectives.  Step 2: Develop a discussion guide – the guide should cover all topics and be thorough but not descriptive. The interviews should remain conversational so that the interviewer can direct the conversation to the most interesting insights.  Step 3: Identify a qualified sample set – choose a set of strategically relevant customers that provides a healthy mix of perspectives. Ensure potential interviewees participated in enough of a sales cycle to have quality feedback (ideally, “loss” customers reached the proposal stage).  Don’t cherry pick opportunities. Your goal is to “sample” opportunities the way one might conduct QA on the factory floor.  Step 4: Recruit participants – create a process to “prospect” for interviewees. Outreach sequences are necessary, as most won’t reply to your first attempt. Consider offering incentives, especially for lost prospects. Donations on behalf of the interviewee can be helpful in regulated industries and government.  Step 5: Conduct interviews – explore what is important to buyers throughout their journey, and what factors influenced their decisions. If interviewees mention something unexpected, don’t be constrained by your discussion guide. Encourage interviewees to take a storytelling approach to answering your questions so you can identify the objective and emotional factors that played into their decisions.  Step 6: Analyze results and develop actionable recommendations – analyze individual interviews and interviews in aggregate to identify specific insights and overall patterns. Identify potential adjustments across functions. Transform potential adjustments into actionable strategies that better tailor your GTM to your target customers.

Note: Implement an ongoing program of win/loss interviews rather than a one-time initiative – this also allows you to identify GTM problems early and make course corrections to continuously improve your GTM strategy. Companies who pursue an ongoing approach can  often interview 60 – 100 past prospects annually, though the exercise remains useful for companies with smaller customer bases. 

How should you think about selecting an interviewee sample for win/loss interviews? 

Start with a baseline of 20 interviewees (10 wins and 10 losses) – basic qualitative patterns should start to emerge after 10 interviews. If your sample set includes 10 wins and 10 losses, you should already be able to uncover valuable insights through this process. 

Factors to consider when selecting interviewees:

• Won and lost deals (and proposal stage when lost)
• Deal size
• Company size
• Geographic distribution
• Industry vertical
• Product  (Note: interview separate sample sets for each product and keep your data separate)
• Strategic importance

Focus on data density over statistical significance – “data density” is the idea that after a certain number of interviews, patterns appear that allow you to correctly guess what the next interviewee will say. Since win/loss insights are qualitative in nature, prioritize speaking to customers who represent your strategically significant customer segments, not maximizing interview volume.

Commit to representative sampling, not cherry-picking “favorites” – choose your sample set as randomly as possible without compromising on thoroughness. A good win/loss sample set represents the full range of the prospects your organization moved from the lead stage, through the opportunity stage, and to (at least) the proposal stage.

What are the outputs of a win/loss project? How should you communicate those outputs?

Create a data-driven presentation focused on key insights and implications – it should take the form of an executive summary presenting the data, key insights, and suggested next steps to act on the findings. Ideally, these insights recommend future focus areas that will address problems that were identified during the project. These presentations should tie back to the key questions identified at the outset.

Allow the executive team to interrogate the data and discuss possible action items – the project leads should present this information to the executive team. Allow them to ask questions about the data, project methods, and analysis before presenting key findings and facilitating a discussion around how to implement changes based on the research. 

Competitive Intelligence

What are the different research methods for creating competitive intelligence insights? 

Primary research interviews – interviewing individuals with direct experience with your competitors is a great source of intelligence. These interviews can be with competitor customers, prospects, partners active in your market, or prior employees of competitors. This is often the easiest way to get a sense of the competitive landscape. 

Secondary research – sifting through available online information provides context—but there’s so much available that it can be difficult to navigate efficiently. In most industries, the problem is that you have too much information and lack clarity about what is actually important. 

Leveraging Win/loss interviews to inform competitive intelligence research – often, this is where competitive intelligence starts. Many of the questions you ask during win/loss interviews create competitive intelligence and can inform the direction of future research. You can pursue coterminous competitive intelligence and win/loss projects, but conducting win/loss interviews first will help you tailor your competitive intelligence. Consider adding questions like these to win/loss interviews:

• What options did you see in the market when you were looking for an ____ solution? 
• What did you like? 
• How did the products compare? 
• What did the pricing look like? 
• Did you feel like you were compromising on anything you wanted when you chose to use our solution? 
• How has implementation with [competitor] been going? How is the service?

How do you conduct effective competitive intelligence interviews? 

Identify the key intelligence questions and topics you want to pursue before the interviews – understand what information will help you win different types of clients. The information you need also informs who you should talk to; if you need technical information, you might need to interview ex-engineers or leaders from the competitor’s product/dev teams. If you have questions about GTM, you might need to speak with an ex-VP of Sales. 

The most valuable interviewees are often from these demographics:
Demographic		Insights they provide
Previous employees of the competitor		• Strengths and weaknesses in your GTM process • Differences between their previous company and current company • Technical information
Long-term customers of competitors		• What they like and dislike about the product • Quality of service • Sales and renewal processes
Analysts/Partners in your space		• Visibility into the specific pain points and problem areas of competitive products.

Note: Don’t put too much weight on the perspective of a single sales person – they are likely to put their own twist on the official GTM, which can skew your perception of that strategy and its effectiveness. This fact makes secret shopping less effective than people assume it would be. 

What are the outputs of competitive intelligence research? 

Competitive intelligence should create insights that factor into your future sales and product strategy – while these insights from your competitors are important, they shouldn’t be acted on blindly. Instead, they should be considered alongside the priorities, strengths, and roadmaps of your internal team. 

Output		Description
Long-form competitive overviews		Thorough analyses of key competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and strategies – and how they compare to your own perception and success amongst your target demographic.  Note: your audience is often groups like Strategy Sales Engineering, Product, and Product Marketing
Sales battle cards		Specific information, statistics, or positioning angles that can help sales reps win specific types of accounts. This information should focus on the two things Sales cares most about: “What do I do?” and “What do I say?”
Executive profiling		Deep dive into the history and mindset of key executives to understand where their companies will go next. For example, if a CEO is always brought in to support an organic growth play, or if a leader specializes in roll ups or tuck-in acquisitions, that pattern can help you predict your competitors’ future strategies.
Insights around competitive messaging		Deep dives with competitors’ customers and past sales reps can reveal the priorities and needs of valuable customer types. These insights can help inform future branding or positioning exercises.

CI projects commonly produce insights across GTM and Product:

GTM Insights: • Competitive positioning • Messaging • Pricing • Competitor strengths and weaknesses

Product/Engineering insights: • Technical weaknesses in competitors • Trends in product features/feature packaging • Product roadmaps

Competitive Differentiation 

What are the three traits of competitive differentiation? 

Traits	Questions to answer
Uniqueness – what your company does well	• What do you need this product to do for you?  • How does this product help you do your job?  • What would make your job easier?
Target Market Identification – what your customer values	• What makes your specific customer groups unique?  • What does each demographic care most about? • What do your ICPs value the most?
Product or Service Features – what differentiates you from competitors	• Which of these features are most important to you?  • What would make you decide to purchase this product?  • What would be a deal-breaker?

How do you conduct research into your competitive differentiation? 

Bundle competitive differentiation research with work around personas or with win/loss research – companies often believe they know how they’re differentiated, but come to find out that it’s not truly unique, not valuable to customers, or not a durable differentiator. 

First, articulate your internal hypothesis on differentiation – you’re going to have certain areas you think of as strengths but aren’t actually differentiators. You typically start with eight to ten areas. Every competitive differentiator needs to pass a three-part test: 

• Is it unique to you? – is this feature, service or product really something you have that competitors don’t? You don’t have to be the only company that offers this solution, but you must do so in a unique way. 
• Is it a durable advantage? – is there a moat that will allow it to stand over time? Or will it be gone by next quarter? 
• Can you prove it? – how do you show the buyer that the differentiation exists with evidence that your specific market will accept? 

Second, confirm the value of these differentiators with actual buyers by having them rank potential differentiators from most to least valuable – anonymize your brand and ask the same question about each potential differentiator: “If someone in the market has [UNIQUE CHARACTERISTIC], rank how valuable this is when deciding on a [MARKET/CATEGORY] solution.” Ask buyers to stack rank an array of potential traits including current differentiators, potential differentiators, and competitors’ differentiators based on value, then have them explain their reasoning. Don’t be surprised if they reorder the differentiators on their second pass. 

Finally, implement changes to your messaging and positioning based on what you find – when you find an articulation of your solution’s differentiators that buyers confirm hold real value, start to incorporate that language across your sales and marketing materials. 

Why are customer personas important? What incremental research helps you develop personas and further refine your messaging? 

Persona development helps you understand your customers and speak to them in a way that makes them say, “these people get me”  – effective communication depends on understanding the technical and emotional needs of the individuals you are selling to. If your competitors have a better understanding of who your customers are on a deep level, they can develop better products and sell those products in a more compelling way. 

Conduct persona interviews about messaging/differentiation – hold hour-long interviews with buyers in the market to understand their value pillars and how your updated messaging resonates and compares to other messaging in the market. If you are refreshing existing personas, this process occurs through a win/loss project.

Types of questions to ask during persona interviews:

• What do you care about? 
• How do you succeed in your job/ how are you measured? 
• What would convince you to buy this product? 
• What would give you pause when buying this product? 

• How does this make you feel? 
• Does this messaging motivate you? Does it not? 
• How does it compare to other messages in the market?

What are the outputs of persona research? 

B2B personas act as “directories” that let you categorize the best practices and potential hurdles of selling to different types of customers – a directory-style approach to cataloging personas will help you collect content and insights in a usable format for the different types of buyers you interact with. 

Overall 

What are the most important things to get right?

Don’t treat competitive intelligence as a substitute for competitive differentiation research – competitive intelligence can reveal areas of opportunity, but competitive differentiation work is a separate, highly valuable process that uses a robust understanding of both the customer and the market to identify measurable changes to put into place. Companies that take the time to go through that process are able to leverage strategies that are both impactful and durable. 

What are common pitfalls?

Allowing your GTM strategy to revolve around what people internally think you are “best at” – companies often believe they know the 3 things they’re best at—and they often are the best at those things. But being the best only matters if it’s something your customers care about. You can incorporate leadership’s theories about your core strengths into market research projects, but the focus must be on what customers actually value, not what you subjectively feel are your best qualities.