During my last posts, my focus was on messaging. This post is on being customer centric.

Product marketers are the voice of the customer. They learn competitive advantages from customers, who share with them why they bought the products in the first place.

Though I had a taste of being the voice of the customer at CoStar as I helped host a customer webinar series and experienced some of this role at ABM as I helped launch our first customer campaign, I didn’t really get to work directly with customers until I joined Reputation.

Being the voice of the customer is exciting! While I enjoyed reading the salesforce notes about why customers chose the product, I didn’t really understand the reason until I heard the excitement in their voices.

I firmly believe that customers hold the key to continuous product innovation. As users of the product, they are the ones who primarily discover new use cases.

For example, read my case study on how Storage Asset Management helped us discover a strategic tagging approach or how Coit Cleaning found a way to launch text campaigns via our product. (Storage Asset Management’s full story can be found here.)

My time at Reputation was just the start of my identity as a customer advocate. This is my favorite part of being a product marketer and a role that I highly recommend that every product marketer tries.

Don’t know what to ask a customer? Below are a list of questions, mapped to the stages of the buyer funnel, from Product Marketing Alliance, which I find useful.

Awareness: this is the stage where the customer realizes they have a problem and begins researching solutions to solve it.

• Why were you looking for a new solution?
• What problem were you looking to solve? 
• Why now?
• What were your top five, must-have requirements?
• While researching options, which resources did you leverage?
• What resources did you wish you had but didn’t?
• Which vendor marketing or sales content did you find to be most valuable? What was missing?
• How useful did you find our marketing and sales content? How could they be better?

Consideration: by this point, the customer has a shortlist of providers, and they begin to compare things like features, price and reviews with your competition.

• How well would you say our solution aligned with your needs?
• Were you given access to our roadmap? If so, is there anything you think we’re missing? And what excited you most about it?

Decision: crunch time. This is the final stage of the customer’s process and where they ultimately decide to choose you, your competitor, or carry on without a solution at all.

• What were the primary reasons you selected us?
• Were there any features or enhancements that our competitors had that we didn’t?
• How would you describe your interactions with our Reputation team?
• How much of a factor was price in your purchase decision?