A simple system for PMs to talk to users in B2B SaaS
Show me a product manager who touts the importance of talking to customers and I’ll show you a handful who find it challenging to maintain such habit.
Direct customer engagement is the best way to develop product judgement in order to make the right product decisions.
The argument that “Steve Jobs didn’t ask what customers want because customers don’t always know what they want” is faulty. The purpose of talking to customers is not to find out what they want, but to understand life through their lens. Only through these direct, first hand encounters can one have a chance of understanding their real problems that lead to the right product opportunity.
So let’s assume we’ve moved past the above point and that you truly appreciate the tangible value of talking to customers. This disciplined practice is still often put on the back-burner, especially for enterprise SaaS products, for a number of reasons:
- The customer (buyer) is not the end user. I don’t have direct contact of the user.
- My user segment is not very vocal or engaged. They don’t actively give me feedback.
- I’m too busy. I have more immediate problems to address. I don’t have time to find and talk to users.
These are fair but solvable reasons. If you put in a small upfront investment of setting up a system to collect users, questions, and outreach templates, then it becomes an easy practice that’ll reap great rewards.
To clarify, this guide is specifically for direct engagement with users. You might have in-app feedback systems, surveys, and the likes. They are also useful to help you find candidates to talk to, but nothing replaces directly observing and talking to your customers.
This guide will cover:
- Channels — where to find users/candidates to talk to
- System — how to create a CRM of users and reach out for feedback (with templates)
Channels
In general, there are 3 main channels for enterprise products to acquire customer feedback (assuming you don’t have an existing user advisory board).
- In-app feedback (eg. Delighted, Intercom, Appcues) — scheduled prompts embedded in the product that ask users for feedback, usually in the form of NPS score or satisfaction rating.
- Questions from customer success (eg. Formstack) — CSM forwards unique questions/feedback from customers to the PM where there is no existing solution or answer.
- Internal stakeholders & subject matter experts — colleagues who have frequent direct contacts with customers: sales, customer success, product knowledge experts, implementation specialists, etc.
The first two gives feedback directly from specific users, often including their email. There you go, now you have the direct contact of the end user. Keep a record of these user contacts (more detail in “System” below) and reach out to them directly to book a call — in other words, close that feedback loop!
The internal stakeholders, albeit more indirect, are a good source for general patterns and trends that represent a collective group of users. Ask to join sales demos and listen to what questions potential customers are asking. When designing a new feature, ask this group for feedback. This indirect source of insight can help round out your product decisions but not replace direct experience with users.
Bonus tip: look outside and spend time in communities where your user segment hangs out at.
For example: Twitter, Quora, Reddit. This is a fun and easy way to embed yourself into the culture of your user segment. Follow vocal personas on Twitter and the conversations (and arguments) they’re having. Read the questions and answers on Quora from your user segment. These unfiltered content can give you insights you might not have discovered with your direct customers.
System
Preparation is half of the victory. Having a library of users and questions you can readily draw upon makes it easier to maintain a cadence to talking to users.
Here’s a template you can copy:
This system includes:
1. A User CRM template (or “URM”?). This organizes the user contacts found from the channels described above. It tracks the contact, feedback, and source and groups them by product and problem category.
You could then directly reach out to the user to talk more about the specific comment. Oftentimes, in-app feedback systems are set up as a one way street, where we simply receive but don’t give back. People who gave feedback indicate that they are engaged and care enough to voice something. Closing the feedback loop with these users is one of the highest impact-for-effort activities you can do. Figma is famous for its incredible responsiveness to feedback and ideas from its users. Even if you weren’t ready to close the loop immediately, you’d be building up a list of engaged users to schedule calls with when you need them.
2. A library of user research questions. This set of open ended questions helps to get to the root of users’ problem.
Addressing user’s original feedback is a great hook to get on a call with the user. But asking the right questions can stimulate deeper insights beyond the immediate thing the user is asking for. These questions are grouped in 4 categories depending on the stage of discovery & design you’re on.
3. An email boilerplate.
Ideally, you should try to talk to 3 users a week. Whatever cadence is reasonable to you, it’s important to commit to a cadence. At the same time, convincing users to volunteer their time to talk to you is not always easy, so you must make it dead simple for them to do so. Pick a few users from your CRM and paste your email boilerplate to send off your request. Include your Calendly link so that users can easily book a time convenient for them without the back and forth scheduling. Appeal to their “super-user status”, emphasize that their feedback is valuable to improving the product. Keep it concise.
This might seem like a simple system, but it’s proven effective for me personally in maintaining a consistent habit of talking to customers a few times a week. It hardly takes much time to set up. Most users are quite receptive and responsive. And every call leaves me with some sort of profound revelation.
So there you have it — it turns out that you can directly reach users in B2B SaaS, and it doesn’t take much time to talk to them regularly when you have this simple system in place. Keeping a consistent habit of talking to users is the only way to develop product judgement. The benefit compounds overtime. You’ll develop better intuition and become better at predicting user behavior. It’ll certainly make you a more effective product leader.
What’s your routine of talking to users?
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— Christine
