The Keys to Really Knowing What Makes Your Customers Tick: Ryan Gibson

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Mark Evans: Welcome to Marketing Spark. Knowing your customers inside out matters. The better you know your customers, the more successful your marketing and sales efforts will be. But truth be told, many marketers don't know their customers well enough. It means they're making educated guesses rather than decisions based on insight and knowledge. And one of the keys to truly knowing your customers is simple, talk to them. On the podcast today, I'm excited to have Ryan Gibson, founder at Content Lift, which does investigative customer interviews, also known as customer research. Welcome to Marketing Spark.

Ryan Gibson: Thanks, Mark. Thanks for having me.

Mark Evans: Before we get into it, I wanted to talk about your career path and how you have evolved from being a fractional CMO, a job that I do, to being focused on customer research. What triggered the change in direction, and did you have an epiphany, or was it something that evolved over time?

Ryan Gibson: Yeah. How far back should we go?

Mark Evans: Well, you could go far back enough, but why don't you give me the Reader's Digest version?

Ryan Gibson: Yeah. That's a good version. So I I started in marketing at the beginning of my career, worked in food service b to c, and I'd done a lot of market research. I worked as a director of marketing, and I was doing market research, customer research as part of that role. I and I loved it. And I I was so brazen. I would even go into the lineups of competitors and start pulling people. You know, we have a chain in Canada called Tim Hortons. I work for a competing coffee chain, so I just go and start talking to their customers in real time. I just need to understand why. Right? Like, why them? You know, what was it about them? What was driving their decisions? And I really enjoyed my time in that industry, but I sorta I I burned out a little bit and I made a career change and I ended up taking broadcasting in college, and I became a TV and radio reporter at CBC here in Canada. And that was amazing. It was a fantastic job, and, you know, that really got me into storytelling, communication, but also the interviewing side. Right? How to structure an interview, the psychology of interviewing people, how do you get to an objective, especially if you're doing something that you you're trying to get to a certain point of the objective of the interview, and also, you know, just having a fun time telling stories. Right? So I did that for a few years. I decided I wanna go back in marketing, worked for a few companies, worked for some nonprofits, worked for some tech companies running marketing. But I I I lean more into the content and PR side of things and branding side of things. I sort of had abandoned my research background. And when I left tech, I was like, well, I'm gonna be, I think, a fractional marketer, fractional CMO, and help companies out that way. And I was fine for a while. But what happened I was I just wasn't feeling a lot of the same love that I was for marketing, you know, over the last twenty years. And then out of the blue, got a call from an old colleague who said, I remember you used to do customer research back in the day. Do you do that still? I'm like, yeah. I still do. So I worked with other clients. We went through that whole process. They loved it. I loved it. We did some more, and then it started getting all these calls about wanting to do people asking for this service, and that's I mean, it's funny. Asked for an epiphany. I tell you, I I for the life of me, I never put the two together. Like, wait a second. I used to do this, then I used to interview people for a living. I really like it. Well, I know I just do this. So I niched down, from being a fractional. I'm still doing that work. But now all I do is what I call investigative customer interviews. And my whole goal is I just wanna understand why because that's really if you if I just you hear what I've just described, that's all I've ever wanted to do. Just wanna understand why. Like, why are people making the decisions they are? And that's, to me, just the most fun part. I hope that answers the question.

Mark Evans: It does. And Was that What's

Ryan Gibson: Is that the Reader's Digest version? Or

Mark Evans: Yeah. That's the Reader's Digest version. And I there's a couple of Okay. Good. Things that I draw from your answer. One is that one of the things that consultants need to focus on, and it seems counterintuitive, is the idea of focus. The more you focus, the more successful you are. In my case, the focus on b to b SaaS companies has been a really successful and effective move because it it eliminates any ambivalence about what you do and who you serve. So I can totally empathize with your direction and falling into a place where I guess falling is the wrong word, but getting to a place where you're doing what you love. You're doing the work that excites you and that you're passionate about, and I think that's awesome.

Ryan Gibson: I I think you have a good point. I mean, I thought that the broad aspect of my business before I niched into customer research was gonna be the way to to go. But I found I just there was just too much for me to focus on, and I I couldn't really enjoy a lot of it because it was how do I say this? It's almost like I was restarting every single time with every client. But now I have a really good framework that I like to follow, and it's I get more out of the work because I've narrowed down on something that I really like. Does that make sense?

Mark Evans: Exactly. And I and I have a I have my own methodologies and frameworks that I developed over the last year that have really made my business more efficient. Shifting gears towards knowing your customers on LinkedIn, and I may be getting a skewed view of the world. There's a lot of conversation and many posts about the value of knowing your customers inside out. A lot of marketers are talking the talk, but I wonder how many marketers walk the walk. And the question to you or the questions would be, do you think that marketers fail to talk to their customers enough? Why is there so much focus on the importance of knowing your customers, and what does all the chatter say about the state of marketing and marketers?

Ryan Gibson: Yeah. So that's almost like three questions. Right? The first one is I think you asked is, like, are people failing? I don't know if I'd use the word failing, but they're struggling. That you know what? When I when I decided I was gonna sort of pivot into this, you know, I I had been interviewing customers my entire career. That was always my go to. Even when I was running technology companies, even when worked for nonprofits, my first step was always, wanna go talk to people that are the, you know they're at the end game of this, and and they get our services or product. And I wanna understand what they're saying. When I talked when I would start talking to VPs of marketing and CMOs and other marketing leads, the answers varied. But at the end of the day, we'd like to do more. Right? We're not doing enough or, yeah, we're not doing it at all. And when I worked for tech company I've worked with tech companies for the last five years, and I'm not sure if this is what you're you've seen, Where I find they the conversations happen is either in customer success, which is great, sales, or product, but more around feature sets. You know, how do we build the next thing within the product? And that's great. You should do that. Where I find people really struggle, and maybe it's just since I'm a marketer and this is what I've noticed is they're not really getting a good sense of why why are they choosing us, and how did they actually even come to find us? You know? And what was the logical thought process they went through and the emotional thought process they went through? At the time, they had no idea we existed, and they just know they had something they maybe wanted to throw money at to solve a problem. And what was every step they took along the way to before they actually closed the deal and and and bought our product. That's the part I like to understand because that's where marketing lives. Right? How am I influencing that person?

Mark Evans: Sorry. The question would be I mean, it's a product centric versus customer centric view of the world. And I guess what I'm asking you is what's stopping marketers from talking to customers and prospects and getting that insight into their needs, their wants? And as you say, what are their motivations and triggers to actually consider making a purchase? Because when people buy a product or service, many of them are switching from one solution to the other. And like you, I'm fascinated with that journey and why that happens.

Ryan Gibson: Yeah. So I'll tell you what people have told me. One is they don't have time. Right? Their prior priorities lay elsewhere. It's hard work. What I do is is not an easy lift. It takes time, and you have to distill the qualitative data. It's a lot easier to do surveys and NPS scores and, you know, go to your CRM and look at the data of what what's happened since they've, you know, hit your website. That's ease that's a lot easier just to to get that prioritized and invest time in that. Other things I don't I think people struggle with doing it. You know? I've I'm working with a client now, and I'm doing co interviews. And, you know, just my tactics of how I can extract things are a little further along. I think there's a whole host of reasons that people there's never one silver bullet reason of why. Right? They just all seem to struggle with that part of it.

Mark Evans: When I think about your approach to customer interviews and the way that I look at customer interviews, the common denominator is as we were both journalists. I was a newspaper journalist. Right? I was a newspaper journalist for fifteen years. So asking questions of people that you don't know or you've barely met seems very natural to me. The ability to ask them things that may seem uncomfortable or things that you're curious about, to me, is easy. It's just the way that you talk with people. And maybe a lot of marketers don't have enough experience asking hard questions or trying to get dig into the real answers. I guess maybe that might be one of the biggest reasons and big one of barriers to entry to getting the insight that marketers need.

Ryan Gibson: It's funny. I was watching, I saw Mark Roberge, who was at, HubSpot years ago. He was their chief revenue officer. I saw him at a talk two years ago, and one of his first hires, he said, was a journalist. And for that very reason, he's outlined. You know, you have a certain set of skills as a journalist that you your whole role is, okay. I have an objective and a hypothesis. I have to go and and see whether that's true or false. I have to eliminate as much of my personal bias and and cognitive biases as I can. And that's not easy to do when you're inside a company and you're feeling pressure to fill a pipeline, you're feeling pressure to, decrease churn, or you're feeling pressure to cross sell new products, you're feeling pressure to hit growth metrics of a 100% because, you just raised a series a or a series b and you have two quarters to hit. Right? Like, going out and asking customers, how did you feel about that? It doesn't often get prioritized. It's the other things that do. But what I find is you let me take you through like, I had an interview yesterday with it's one of a client one of my clients are in tech. It's a marketplace product, like so it's an app that's in a SaaS tool. And we talked to we had one conversation with a client that recently bought, which is who I like to talk to. I really like to talk to people that just converted, not so much who are using the product because then the buying journey is very fresh in their mind of all the things they did, as fresh as it can be. And in that one conversation, I was able to get, you know, really deep content, educational content ideas. I was able to get some business development ideas because there were some there were some ways that he talked about how he used the product from where he came from to where he is now that we weren't thinking of before. Interesting. Those are that's a whole new type of company that either I could cold outreach to or I could talk about in, like, a profile in some of my content. I got copy ideas. There was one a few things that that person said I'm I sent right away to the creative team because they can put ads around it in real time. Mhmm. And there was also influencers that they talked about. And one that I had no idea existed, so I went right away to their YouTube channel. I'm like, oh, interesting. And then I sent that to the performative person. Maybe we can there's something to use here. Because this person who bought us said they listened to this other influencer and their words were everyone else is full of nonsense, but I really like this person. So I wanna capitalize on it. I wouldn't have known any of that if I hadn't and gone and had that forty five minute conversation in-depth with that customer, and that's just one. But if you repeat that over ten, you'll see trends and patterns emerge about all sorts of things that you can do.

Mark Evans: Let's get into the nitty gritty of customer interviews. First question, how many customers should you interview and how often, and what type of customers should you be talking to?

Ryan Gibson: The rule of thumb that I've always seen myself and other researchers talk about is eight to 10 because I think, again, this is not a five minute conversation. This is, you know, half an hour to four to five minutes, and you're repeating over time, and you're just doing the the data. So you wanna find a balance. There's a middle of the bell curve there. And the reason for that is, if you don't have too little, it's not enough high enough of a sample size. Too many, you're just sort of going over the same things. Eight to 10 seems to be sort of the sweet spot. If it's hard to get people on the line, and for some products, it is, you know, especially if you're early stage, you don't have a lot of customers, I think you can get away with five to six. I've done that before, but I think eight to 10. And then who you should talk to? I think it depends on your objective. So if I want really good case studies, if I really wanna understand the impact I've had on their business economics or I wanna understand, you know, I want a good good social proof. I wanna talk to super fans because I can engage them for my content, what have you. I probably wanna talk to someone that's been around for quite some time. If I really wanna get a true sense of the current buying journey, I wanna talk to someone that's just closed. Because if I have a client a customer that's been around for three years and I just talk to them now about their buying journey, a lot's changed in that three years. I mean, the landscape moves so fast now that there could be things that are influencing your customers now that did not influence that customer from three years ago. But with the current customer, I'll know that, hey. I just joined a Discord group three months ago, and they mentioned your product. I just came straight to the demo. That's how stuff gets done now. So you need to sort of understand all the different ways people are coming to you. You don't have to be experts and leverage every single one, but I think you should have an understanding. So I would talk to I would I would I think it depends on the objective to your question. What do you wanna get out of the interview? And that's who you need to talk to.

Mark Evans: Here's a tricky question. What about interviewing x customers? People who have left you because they're no longer satisfied for a variety of reasons or they found a different or better solution. That kind of insight strikes me as extremely valuable. But it's also tricky going back to someone who departed for whatever reason. Should you talk to them is the first question. And how should a company approach them in a way that doesn't seem defensive or why did you leave? Like, you wanna you wanna have the right approach or the right attitude when you approach somebody who's no longer a customer.

Ryan Gibson: I mean, I think there's value. There are actually there are entire there are companies that all they do is focus on win back or close loss conversations. It's not where I live, but I can I can understand how to do that? I think it's important because you learn a lot of things. You learn, one, why was the experience not matching what we want to give them? What did they have a perception of what the product could do that didn't map against what we actually delivered? Right? Were they expecting something before they came to us and we didn't be we weren't able to get that. Now some of that's product related, but some of this is experience related. I mean, when I talk to a lot of customers, Mark, and I don't usually hear a lot of issues with the product, it's usually how they treat me, the support I get, and whether it solved my problem or not. But to your point, yeah, you should I think you should talk to them. And then how do you approach it? You know, there's win backs and there's close lost. So I think you can understand if is this a client that I can probably get back, or is this a client that they're gone for whatever reason? So if it's a win back, I think you there are tactics and and tricks that I'm not fully up to speed on about how you can get that back. But from a closed lost, it's almost the same conversation for me. And how I approach it is, I'm not here to, convince you to come back to us. I I respect the decision you made. What we wanna understand is where we drop the ball, how we can do better for other customers, or any things we need to improve on. And I would really love your insights and feedback. It'd be so valuable. I'm just hoping I can take up twenty minutes of your time, and then I wish you the best of luck in your career. And and thank you for, you know, being our customers so long. I like that approach.

Mark Evans: Yeah. It's very it's a very positive approach. It's not defensive at all, and it really is asking people for their insight. And most surprisingly, when you talk to people and you ask them questions, they will tell you things that you may have not known before. Here's another question. Very it sounds like a straightforward question, but the answer probably has some nuance here is who should talk to your customers? When I do consulting engagements, usually, what I insist upon is that I talk to them independently. I don't want the head of marketing or the CEO to be on the call because I feel the person's answers are gonna be biased because they don't wanna offend the company. They don't wanna say things that may seem out of turn or overly critical. But I'm wondering about your approach. Should the marketer be talking to customers directly, or should it be somebody else within this organization or somebody external or a combination of all of the above?

Ryan Gibson: The answer I always have is it depends, which is always a horrible answer, but it it does depend because different parts of a company are gonna wanna have different goals when they talk to customer. So I think everyone everyone should talk to customers. But if I'm in customer success or I'm in sales, the context of how I wanna talk to a person and what I wanna get out of that conversation is different. I mean, I see user research teams talk to everybody. I've seen that before, and it's incredible who they wanna go talk to because they wanna talk about the psychology of design and and sort of how people move through products. So for me, I always think marketers should talk to their customers, especially for what they need to get done. Right? Because of what we talked about is the journey doesn't just start at the website. It starts much farther along. But to your what you just said about bias, yeah, I think if you want an objective opinion, you want to try and eliminate as much bias as possible or have customers feel like there's a safe space, I definitely think you should talk to have someone externally do it. I've I've had my clients' customers say to me when I talk to them because I do things anonymously, and I say, well, you're just customer seven. I'm gonna pull out your insights, it's gonna go into a report. They'll they won't know it's you. I've had them say to me, oh, that's great. I've never said this before, but this. And I think it's a fantastic way to do it because you'll get so much richer insight when someone feels they can be fully honest about their experience or how they came to you, who else they talked to. It's it's very it's it's it's very eye opening when you go through that process. But I think everyone should talk to customers because if you're not, then I think you're really doing yourself a disservice because I guarantee your competitors probably are.

Mark Evans: Here's another tricky question. What happens and I'm dealing with this personally with a client. When a company has few or no customers, so there's nobody using the product. No one has gone through the customer journey and converted over time. No one has interacted with the sales and marketing collateral, and you're dealing with a blank slate. What's your approach to that kind of situation?

Ryan Gibson: That's a tough one, but there's ways around that. If you are creating something and you think it's gonna be competitive in the market against x y z and you've put positioned it so when you've done all your research and you've mapped out sort of, where you think the company's gonna fit, go and talk to your competitors' customers if you can. I've done that. You know? I found people through LinkedIn, Facebook, so and so. I told you I used to do it when I was in in my old days. Used walk into people's lines like, hey.

Mark Evans: Right.

Ryan Gibson: Wonder why you buy them. It sounds really brazen, but it it is actually people love to talk about this stuff in my in my experience, and you just approach it the same way that we talked about, a closed lost. I'm not trying to sell anything. I'm just really trying to understand the industry, understand you and what you care about. There's other ways too. I've sent sent out surveys if you can't get qualitative information through SurveyMonkey for their paid audiences. There's a great site called user interviews, which I'm a member of it. And what they do is they create, boards or they create customer groups, and you can find people in a certain space to go and interview. Right? So if I wanna understand the buying journey of people in b to b x, I can probably find those people through maybe user interviews or other there's other companies as well. I think Winter, which is Pete Blajes' company, they do a lot of, like, testing of messaging. I think he's starting to build user groups in those different spaces and verticals. Try and find those people. That's a, I think, a really interesting way to get at people who could use your product and understand how they buy, how they evaluate what's important to them, and where they go to do all these things and how they research if you don't have anyone that's come through your funnel your pipeline yet or your funnel.

Mark Evans: One final question. After you've interviewed customers, x customers, the competition's customers, how do you extract value and insight from all this information? Like, how do you share that information within the organization so that you can turn conversations into actionable items? Because it's one thing to know what your customers are thinking, understand what their needs are, problems, aspirations, and all the insight that will raise your game from a marketing sales and product perspective. But what are the keys to making sure that Yep. That information is shared and proliferated?

Ryan Gibson: So I'll tell you what my how I do it. I I look at blocks of, okay, What was the journey? So there's always I I follow a lot of the jobs be done methodology, but, and people aren't familiar. That's Clayton Christensen, who created that innovation framework, quite some time ago now. But I look at it through a lens of marketing as opposed to innovation for new products, but they work sort of hand in hand. So I look at, okay. What was the first point of the pain, and what was their thought process around it? How did they move from passive searching for a product, which is, you know, top of funnel type stuff, or even now prior to that, if we're looking at the current landscape, active search. So, you know, I'm, I'm looking at the comparisons between products, and I need information to do that and how would it fit into my business. And now I brought in people, more people into the deal. If there's a buying committee, I brought in more people. And then to the user side of things, and did it did it map against what I was expecting to happen? So I sort of pull out insights, out of the interviews to map there. And then what I'll do is for each segment of a company, so I have customer success at this development, I have marketing, and the subsets within those, I'll take out all the insights that I think and all the trends and patterns I'm seeing emerge and plop them in and say, here's what you can maybe do next. Case in point, I'm working with, actually, a marketing consulting agency. And one of the things that's coming out is they're really good at this, but they are not really good at this. And I'm hearing they're not really good at this consistently, and they're very good at this consistently. So already, I'm like, you might wanna consider about reducing your service offering. We talked already about, you know, niching down, right, and getting more focused. They're killing it here. Here, they're running to that sort of that traditional trap of, well, we need another revenue stream here. Maybe you're maybe you just need to try and increase the amount of people you get in this pipeline for this core service you do really well. Right? And I wouldn't know that. I wouldn't have seen that pattern emerge had I had not talked to eight to 10 people. But I'm also getting really good copy and campaign ideas. The channels are people are finding them. How how people are deciding that over them versus their competitors. That influences sales. So there's I take all these things. I put them to each function of the business, and I say, here's a possible next action for you. Because to your point, yeah, it's easy to go and talk to people, but a lot of what I get in discovery calls with, like, with clients is, well, then what? Well, this is then what? You know? And the customers drive these things. It's so much easier rather than just sitting in a boardroom looking at the whiteboard and trying to figure out your next steps. Like, you're doing that in, you know, in a vacuum. Your customers are really gonna give you a good road map. Now you still need to have the intuition and the business acumen to understand how to apply all that. But it it just it you know, the the the veil gets lifted, so to speak, when you start going out and talking to customers. Hope that answers the question.

Mark Evans: Yeah. It does. If anything, I hope that this conversation motivates or inspires marketers to talk to their customers and talk to them on a regular basis because, like you, I see huge value in getting their insight. And the more you talk to them, the more content ideas that emerge, the more feedback you get about what they like about the product and what they don't. And it really sort of builds stronger relationships and helps turn customers into evangelists and advocates, and I think that's the most important thing. So there's there's all kinds of reasons why you should talk to your customers. I'm just confused or puzzled by why marketers aren't doing it all the time. It it's just a no brainer thing to do.

Ryan Gibson: You know, I don't begrudge them for that. I understand. Sometimes it's even just anxiety. You know? Picking up the phone and talking to people. I think there's all those are reasons. But to what you said, all those great things. And one of the things I've learned that was really surprising to me, customers love to have to get, be asked their opinion. And I've heard them say this in interviews. You want like, this is so great. I'm so impressed that you were doing this. None of none of the other companies that I buy from do this. I this makes me have so much more respect for you. So just the fact that you're talking to them changes their perception of you, just the fact you're doing it. So if you can just get into that exercise that muscle starting to talk to them, imagine what you can do, if it becomes a regular part of your marketing and sales activities.

Mark Evans: Well, this has been great insight, Ryan. Where can people learn more about you and Content Lift?

Ryan Gibson: Yeah. They can go to contentlift.io. I'm really active on LinkedIn just like you. How he's happy to chat people there. I have a free list of questions, broken down to the the areas that I just talked about, which is, you know, first thought, passive search, active search, some customer success, even branding questions. A conversation around brand identity isn't necessarily the same as, you know, why people bought you. Sometimes they're similar. They can go there. They can download that. They can email me, reach me on LinkedIn. I'm always happy to chat. I'm just always up for that and just tell people. I love this. Like, this is so much fun for me, so I just wanna help people get better at it if they wanna do it.

Mark Evans: Well, thanks for listening to another episode of marketing spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review, subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. If you'd like to learn more about how I help b to b SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic adviser, coach, send an email to mark@marketingspark.co. I'll talk to you next time.