Product Marketing Adventures

[00:00:41] Elle: [00:00:00] If there's one phrase you hear on repeat in product marketing, it's customer obsession. We all want to be the voice of the customer inside our companies, but where I have seen pmms fall short is their workload. pmms carry so much ownership already that carving out [00:01:00] time for true customer insight, often feels impossible.
Where do you start? How do you make it repeatable? And how do you scale an effort like that? The reality is that customer insights aren't nice to haves. They're a cornerstone of great product marketing. Without them, your ICP is a guess. Your messaging is shaky and your go-to-market strategy rests on hope instead of evidence.
That's why we're gonna unpack this today, how to stop talking about customer obsession and start building a voice of customer system that actually scales. With that, it is my absolute pleasure to introduce Langley Barth. Lang's story is all about service. He started his career as a US naval officer leading cruise on warships, protecting against piracy, and running ballistic missile defense missions.
It's an untraditional path into product marketing for sure, but that foundation and empathy, discipline and service has translated beautifully into product marketing [00:02:00] where he's made a career out of championing customer voices. Today, Lang is a lead PMM at Intuit, where he's helping reimagine how professional tax software serves high value firms beyond work.
He's a mentor to hundreds of military veterans each year, helping them find their next chapter. Oh, and if he's not doing all that, you're probably going to find him in his San Diego backyard. Tending to his mini orchard of 16 fruit trees and thousands of his backyard honeybees Lang, welcome to the show
[00:02:33] Langley: Hey, thanks so much for having me, Al. Thrilled to join you today. Nothing I like more than a deep product marketing dive.
[00:02:41] Elle: Of course. Yeah, Would it be too, uh, cheesy to say that I am buzzing to have you here. It's fun to have a fellow beekeeper on the show. I've never had that before. you don't often meet beekeepers out in the B2B world, so this is gonna be fun. in any case, excited to have you here. [00:03:00] So let's set the stage a little bit today. so you're Intuit, and most of our listeners know the brand through products like TurboTax or QuickBooks. but your work is on the professional tax side, right?
[00:03:13] Langley: Yeah,
[00:03:14] Elle: Yeah, yeah. So
help us understand exactly like what is Intuit and like what products do you specifically care for?
[00:03:21] Langley: yeah, so Intuit, big platform company and we have kind of a lot going on between the different business units. I'm on the professional tax side, but uh, most of our folks watching this, we'll probably know Intuit for QuickBooks, credit Karma, MailChimp, or TurboTax. So the ProTax side in my product specifically is called ProConnect Tax.
It's essentially like TurboTax on steroids. So if you or someone you know uses a CPA. They very likely use an Intuit professional tax software.
[00:03:54] Elle: Ah, got it. Okay. I definitely use Intuit products, both on the professional, and [00:04:00] the personal side. And I've been looking for a CPA, so hopefully, they'll be relying on, uh, Intuit for all of
[00:04:07] Langley: can I add one thing to that Al?
[00:04:09] Elle: please do.
[00:04:11] Langley: So like, so that's Intuit at a high level when you're really trying to learn Intuit though. It's fun man. 'cause like we're a tech company, we play in so many different realms from B2B to B2C and one of our like real staples as a company is customer obsession. And so it's really an Intuit's DNA.
And so I get to live that day to day and use all of these different AI solutions that are coming out to supercharge my workflow.
[00:04:39] Elle: Yeah, and what I love about that, I guess what's actually very evident about that with Intuit specifically is if anyone's ever used their products. Like for me personally, I've used TurboTax. I've been using TurboTax for years, a long time, I think since like the first time I ever filed taxes. And it has always been so user [00:05:00] friendly for a really complex industry.
And so that customer obsession, I think really shines through not only in the marketing efforts, but also in. How the product is actually used. So I'm really excited to see, I now, I've used the product myself or many products from Intuit myself, including MailChimp a long, long time ago. and now, we're gonna unpack the kind of insiders, um, marketing angle of that and see what customer obsession looks like at a company where that's such a big cornerstone.
so let's go ahead and dive in. Today we're talking about the voice of the customer. So take us back to, um, the situation where voice of customer or customer obsession kind of became the forefront of your mission into your team.
[00:05:48] Langley: Yeah, totally. Let me throw in the beekeeper suit and lock in here. Um, so when we think about the situation historically, our go-to market strategy, we were starting to find it was losing some [00:06:00] traction. There's industry shifts. Um, another thing to mention is that accountants are a little bit of a lagging, Cohort when it comes to technological shifts. So we were starting to see with some of our softwares and specifically the one that I work on, that we were having a bit of a product market fit that was higher or further up market than we were expecting. But at the time we were kind of lacking internal alignment and really deeply understanding the customers to try to pivot our existing messaging to capture the high value segment.
So moving on from there, when we look at the task, um, my goal is to kind of redefine our ICP and try to deeply understand their workflows and what are some of the unmet needs for this. Maybe a little bit more complicated segment of accounting firms. Then we decide to use this data to create a, create a cross-functional strategy, not just for product marketing, not just for marketing, but across product [00:07:00] marketing and sales.
So as we moved into action, I kind of spearheaded a lot of this work. it was like a comprehensive research initiative. And so I conducted a little over a hundred interviews with, a mix of existing customers. And I always like to try to over index on prospects, so about 70% prospects. And so I took all of the qualitative learnings, helped to build new customer personas, journey maps, and trying to really data back our value prop moving forward and tailor it to these specific pain points that matter for these new personas we were identifying.
So lastly with the results, so the plan really led to a lot of significant growth for us within this target ICP. it helped to better align and really just create that alignment between our internal teams to have a more cohesive go to market motion moving forward. and then the most important piece to me personally is that I felt like it's kind of broken down some [00:08:00] silos that existed internally within our groups and allow us to just collaborate on a, uh, closer level.
That to me, like when you break down the silos, that's where you can work with speed. And when you can work with speed, that's when you're having fun.
[00:08:15] Elle: I love this. I love everything about this, and I have so many questions. First of all, nearly a hundred customer interviews. I've never, that's so many interviews. It's amazing. I'm super impressed. so I wanna take this basically approach that you've taken with, Intuit and how you identified the opportunity, first of all, to.
pursue this voice of customer initiative initiative and create the system and everything, all the way down to breaking those, breaking down those silos that you mentioned. So let's say that I'm a PMM, I'm a listener to this podcast right now, and I wanna start my own voice of Customer initiative tomorrow.
Where do I begin? What's step one?
[00:08:58] Langley: Yeah, great [00:09:00] question. I don't think it's that hard to scale up, to be honest, but you gotta be diligent on the details. So when we start with the setup, I think I call them sprints, to be honest. And I like grouping these customer sessions as closely together as I can, just to keep it all fresh in my head.
And I'm better gonna be able to notice these patterns. I got ai. AI is my buddy on the backend that's gonna allow me to help find things that I missed, but I like to concentrate it. So you start by defining the sprint's goal and your target firmographics. It's a little bit of like a garbage in, garbage out situation.
So you have to be really ruthlessly specific. So like what firm size? Is there a particular geography, is there a specific piece about their workflow? And that's where you can get some alignment, um, internally and from leadership about what you want to cover. Then with actually running the sessions, I have a pretty easy formula that I go with that works pretty well for me, and I use it to do my best to [00:10:00] mitigate the, say, do gap.
So like when I get on a call, I want to build trust as fast as I can. And so l where are you from? Hey, where are you calling into? Oh, oh my goodness. You're from that area? Like my aunt lives in that area. We went there on vacation last year. Or how's your local sports team doing? Just try to connect with them on something that's not about this
[00:10:19] Elle: Right. Oh, you're a backyard beekeeper too, like,
[00:10:22] Langley: Exactly throw on the hood. And so from there, um, I just call it establishing some sort of uncommon commonality. You feel like more of a human. I start with more quantifiable questions so I can make them recognizable and feel like I know who I'm diagnosing before jumping to any sorts of, uh, deep hypotheses that I want to test.
And then moving to some qualitative questions, just moving back to the like 50 50 psychological principle. Then on the backend I move into, it's really like an AI synthesis. So first I, uh, essentially anonymize the [00:11:00] transcripts, make sure there's no PII coming through. and then I personally use notebook lm, I call it my separate brain.
So I have separate brains in there that nowadays it is so powerful. It used to just be a library for me to look up things, but nowadays it catches so many themes.
[00:11:20] Elle: Yeah. You're the second person to recommend Notebook LM in the last like few days, so
[00:11:25] Langley: I think it's getting better. It's like, you know, it used to just be like, Hey, it's a library without a librarian. You gotta do your own thing. Nowadays, it's like a subject matter expert librarian that is really gonna help you find the right stuff.
so the last piece with the process that I would point to is kind of that cross-functional action piece.
So you want to validate with, data and analytics and your other partners from sales and product, and then try to mobilize campaigns, uh, work on sales enablement, or see what kind of product changes come next.
[00:11:59] Elle: Okay, so [00:12:00] you just laid out such a strong and easy, not necessarily easy to, like, there's effort here, but I think an easy to deploy, we'll say systems. So you've got the setup, you've got um, the actual sessions that you're running with the customers. You have your AI synthesis, which I'm so excited to dig in on.
Um, and then the cross-functional activity or action. so I wanna dig into each one of these just to unpack it a little bit more for our listeners. So for step one, for the setup, what does that look like in practice?
[00:12:31] Langley: Yeah, so each quarter I try to align with leadership and say, Hey, here's like a meaty topic that I wanna learn more about. And so I'll align with cross-functional partners. And honestly, it's the people who I deem as like really helpful thought partners internally. And so I'll talk to them and say, Hey, here's the things I wanna learn about.
So we will tailor a hyper-specific script. Um, maybe it's something like we're using a current [00:13:00] time savings value prop. Is that something that would better resonate with a larger firm versus a smaller firm? As we're trying to move up market, let's test it out. So from there, I'm recruiting customers and prospects who only fit the specific profile of who I'm looking for.
And I think this is one of the big watch outs, you know, that like if you're not being diligent on the front end, you're gonna get sessions with customers that aren't a fit and they're just not gonna go the way you want. And that's the way that people sometimes get started with a initiative like this and then say, ah, it didn't work for me.
It. So I think once you really formalize and ground on topic, you align on, this is kind of the guide that we want to go with and this is the who that we want to work with, then everything is rolling. You're setting it up, you're doing customer sessions, you're working cross-functionally, and you're the point guard as the product marketer.
You're passing the ball to the different teams and [00:14:00] trying to, if you get a particular insight, can you possibly enhance the end, you know, or the sample size by talking to sales, talking to products, see if they've seen similar things, talk to analytics and get some quick data back from your existing users or from prospects to see if there's something beneath the surface there.
And then lastly, I think it's really important to keep everybody on the same page. And so you don't always need to do like a broad share out screaming from the rooftops, but sometimes you do. And so like for one that I did last month, I have three different cross-functional share outs in the next two weeks.
On this specific topic. So I'm excited to, uh, get in the room because that's when people are gonna test you, you know? And that's the fun part for me because like,
[00:14:44] Elle: You get to share all these insights. Yeah. like guess what else I found? Guess what else I found? Yeah.
[00:14:49] Langley: Yeah. It's that, that's the most fun part for me, talking to the customers and then getting in the room where like you want the people to challenge you because like, at least at Intuit, Intuit's pretty [00:15:00] good vibes.
And I think being wrong is like pretty close to being right in the pecking order of any given initiative. If you were wrong, like that's great. You can rule some things out that maybe aren't the solution and it helps you get towards that correct answer, you know.
[00:15:19] Elle: Yeah, absolutely. I know exactly the kind of vibe you're talking about is very, very similar vibes at Twilio actually. And it was fun. You're right. And I, what I noticed is as you're talking about the setup, you mentioned, meeting with your stakeholders ahead of time, right? The thought partners and aligning on the topic and the interview guide, right.
With the customers. And I wanted to call that out because. I would guess, and I have personal experience with the same, where that has such a big impact on that last part of your process that, um, I'm trying to, I'm forgetting now what you were calling it, the, like the cross-functional [00:16:00] bit. when you go and do those readouts, then I would guess it makes those conversations more meaningful, more insightful, and there's more of like a readiness to hear your findings because all those partners, or at least a handful of them, got to be part of identifying the topic and contributing to the interview guide or, um, having a say in that.
So I'm very curious to get, when we get to that part of the conversation,
[00:16:25] Langley: I think providing agency is really key to
these different stakeholders because like am I gonna be the driver on every subsequent initiative?
I hope not, like I don't have the bandwidth for that. But I think if you involve them on the front end and you're very transparent about these are learnings and not Lang's opinion.
And so I try really hard on these share outs to reiterate this. There's no opinion going on here. And maybe when we get to like a implication slide, that's where I align with my key stakeholders and the [00:17:00] people that will be the drivers on what do we see as next steps for.
[00:17:04] Elle: Yes, yes. Uh, okay. I have so many questions. So let's start with, you mentioned that you meet with a number of customers, you lean heavy on prospects, which I think is such a good idea to try to eliminate bias for with existing customers. so how do you find these customers and how do you actually get 'em to spend time with you on the phone?
[00:17:28] Langley: Yeah, I mean, it, it's challenging sometimes. so luckily I have like really good supporting teams, so I think most product marketers are used to having something akin to a customer advisory board. Those can be extremely helpful and allow you to work really quickly, but when you're trying to learn something about a new topic.
I don't think customer advisory board's, the move, you know, 'cause those people are predisposed to already be in your ecosystem and they're gonna want to tell you good things. Like that's not what [00:18:00] you want. And so for me personally, I like setting a super rigid criteria on the front end. And for accountants it might be by how many personnel are in their firm, by what services they offer, by how many total tax returns they do in a year.
but like I am a firm advocate that you really need to talk to both your existing customers and prospects. And I try to over index on prospects when I can.
[00:18:28] Elle: Yep. Yep. And then how do you get 'em on the phone? How do you get 'em to spend the time with you? Do you, do you compensate them? And if you do, like, how do you even get the budget for that? Like, tell me what that looks like. Add into it.
[00:18:41] Langley: Yeah, luckily Intuit is like so customer obsessed that it's pretty easy over here to make the business case of like wanting to talk to more customers. this is like such an interesting topic to me because I don't think I have a perfect solution. I'm always interested in hearing how others go about it.
We [00:19:00] do compensate them, but I agree, or I believe in not leading with the compensation.
I like to let them know, like one in the email, one, I'm not a sales person. I will not be trying to sell them whatsoever. Two, I'm just there to learn from them. And three, I talk to hundreds of firms like them each year, and so a lot of them see that as like, oh, like, let's see what this guy knows, which is really fun for me, you know, because I like to tell them like.
I do not have a tax background, but I talk to a lot of your peers and throughout this conversation, if you're interested, I can call out healthy or unhealthy habits that I see each week in accounting
firms. And you know, I was a little hesitant at first, but good on accountants. They have such a growth mindset that like when I bring something like this up, they, I would say 95% of the time will say, yes, please do let me know where you think there is room to grow.
And at the end of calls, they'll sometimes [00:20:00] say, Hey, can you go off of record? And we can just talk about the industry for a little while, which I'm always happy to do. And sometimes that's where the really deep insights come out.
[00:20:08] Elle: Yeah. So I think it's a really great idea to, when you're reaching out.
to those prospects and customers, you're not just trying to get information, you're also offering to give information to, right. The insights and lessons that you've learned from the hundreds of other conversations. So I think that give take is not an approach that I've seen very often in conducting customer insight interviews.
Like, I personally have never done anything like that. I might steal that idea from you. Um, what I have done is very similar to you just trying to say, I am, I'm here to learn. Um, we want, we we're aiming to improve. We wanna get better, we wanna better serve our customers, you know, taking that approach. and it's hit or miss.
Sometimes they say Yes.
sometimes they say no. Um, but I really love that idea of offering insights and [00:21:00] qualifying it with, Hey, I talk to hundreds of customers like you every year. I'd love to share what I've learned. I think that's a really strong approach. okay, thankfully Intuit has this customer obsessed mindset, so it seems really easy to, get customers on the phone.
And, question here, when you were talking about like a prospect versus a paying customer. Like what does that mix look like when you're building up, you know, trying to figure out that who, that you're, that you're gonna speak with.
[00:21:29] Langley: Yeah, I like 30 70. When in doubt of 30% are gonna be existing customers and 70% are gonna be those prospects. Because sometimes with the existing folks, you can get really deep and sometimes build like a greater level of trust. Sometimes it's not the case. Sometimes they spend like 30 minutes on the call talking about something they're not super happy with or just talking about like future ideas for what they think could come about, which all have their place and are valuable.
[00:21:57] Elle: Yep.
[00:21:57] Langley: But the prospects [00:22:00] always interesting. Like they go super deep and down rabbit holes that you didn't expect to come up. And I find a lot of times that's where the goodness comes out.
[00:22:10] Elle: Yep. I was gonna say the same thing. I have not taken the approach of the 30 70 rule of thumb, I think it's a great idea. I think just finding the prospects and finding the people to, that are willing to talk to you. It's just frankly been easier to get the paying customers on the phone.
But I completely agree with you. Paying customers, I think offer that, more product feedback, right? So if you look at the customer journey. And which, I guess like profile of customer that you'd speak with and like where they'd be able to offer the most value. I think those paying customers are gonna offer 'em the most value around like adoption, continued usage like later in the customer journey versus prospects are gonna give you a wealth of information.
their focus is gonna be more about like the market [00:23:00] and their challenges, their struggles. Not that paying customers can't, but just because of their context, right? Like their frame of reference to who you are. You as someone who represents Intuit, a product that they use in frequently in their job, they're just gonna wanna talk more about that versus the prospect.
Their context of who you are is more so the market. So they're gonna wanna talk more about that.
[00:23:22] Langley: can I add one, uh,
element to that?
it's, it might be a weird thing that I do, but I have a real problem that when I'm in an hour long session, even when it's with a prospect. I get emotionally invested like I'm not emotionally invested in them coming to our software. I'm emotionally invested in their disjointed workflow and them solving different things.
And conversely, when they have an amazing workflow, but there's just a couple things that could help so much. I can't help but be like, oh, like they're doing so many things right? And they're so close on these levels. And so like for me it might be sad, but like I keep in touch with a fair amount of prospects and they'll email [00:24:00] me twice a year or quarterly and a fair amount of the time they'll follow up and say like, Hey, I ended up becoming a customer.
Thanks for talking to me a while
back. And so like, that's always a heartwarming feeling for me.
[00:24:11] Elle: Right. You know, I think that really speaks to, your empathic skill, not skill. I mean, it's part personality and part skill, I think. and so perfect for a product marketer, um, and just general relationship building as well. But I think that's so fantastic. okay. Keeping us on track though a little bit, digging a little bit into step two and the actual sessions that you're running with these customers.
I think a lot of pmms get nervous and they end up sticking to a script and it, it feels, and sounds very q and a. So talk a little bit about like your playbook for running really great sessions, with the customers.
[00:24:48] Langley: Yeah, I think I'm, I'm always learning and always willing to adapt and try new things because like why not test with yourself, you know? But like, what I've narrowed on at this point is [00:25:00] I love you sent up the, set up your sprint's goal. Like you got a primary goal, you have a, uh, very detailed discussion guide, and you have specific firmographics of these customers that you need to enter.
You once that is set, you can be a little looser when you get into the sessions and it's like moving from the quant to the qual, which we so frequently do throughout our day job. So when I get into a session, I'm trying to rapidly build trust and just connect with them on something, just kind of show 'em a human.
Once I've done that, I let them know like, Hey, thanks so much for joining today. First thing at the top of the call, I wanted to let you know I'm not sales. I will not be trying to sell you in any way, shape or form throughout the conversation because I talk to hundreds of firms like yourself each year. I might recommend if you're okay with it, some calling out some different healthy or unhealthy habits throughout your workflow.
And like I said before, these folks are like so awesome with growth mindset stuff that they frequently say, yeah, [00:26:00] please, I'd love to hear that. so from there, you're really just trying to build trust, identify that you are not trying to sell them. Then I jump straight to the quantifiables, like when I'm doing sales enablement.
Personally, our teams use Salesforce and we normally have three key firmographics that are identified there. And what I tell sales again and again is that's not enough. That's like if you showed up to the doctor and he's trying to diagnose you just off of your height, weight, and age, you know, like that's not gonna do it.
You gotta ask
some more questions to better understand who are they. And I think our brains are so good at like identifying patterns and sorting through and saying, this reminds me of X. You know? And so I want to ask three to five additional quantitative questions upfront so that I can almost put them in a box and say, okay, they're on competitive software X, they do this many tax returns, they have this many personnel, these are the services that they offer.
You know, [00:27:00] this kind of reminds me of someone I talked to you about two weeks ago. Now I might pull up the notes for that and try to see like, okay, what are some of the insights I want to test further or, 'cause, uh, like I mentioned earlier, being wrong is just as great as being right. Like I'll try to disprove something that I'm currently holding as a hypothesis in that call.
So I'll jot something like that down. So fun for me. And then I'd like to shift to the psychological principle of if each person is talking 50% of the time, it's just, I don't know, better vibes. And so at that point I will ask them qualitative questions that allow them to really talk about themselves. And I find that accountants really enjoy talking about their firms.
And so I'll ask something like, Hey, so when we look into next year. What would you say is the biggest goal for your firm? And give them some examples. Are you trying to increase your amount of clients? Are you trying to increase your revenue but keep clients the same? Are you trying to automate more of your workflow?
And they'll normally talk [00:28:00] for two to seven minutes about this thing. And so based on how long they take, I'll know when to get back to the topic at hand or when they're kind of feeling comfortable. And it's almost like warming up before an exercise. You know, you're getting them warmed up, you're doing your best to eliminate that, say do gap and bring the best out of them.
And that's gonna be the way that you get the best responses. Last thing to note on that one, the discussion guide is nothing more than a guide. Like sometimes you work with different cross-functional partners and they'll say, they'll be slacking you on the side and say, Hey, we still got like seven questions left, and there's like 10 minutes.
Like, are you sure? Like we should probably move. But I think the key in these sessions is to identify when is someone just rambling, and when are you going super deep on a customer problem that you haven't gone before? Because what I say is that at the end of the day, you're never gonna remember, oh, when I [00:29:00] talk to Rick from accounting firm y we got through all the questions.
But you might remember when we talked to Rick from accounting firm YI uncovered that little inkling of an idea, and that's where everything started for this broader initiative that I'm locked a lot for us.
[00:29:17] Elle: Right. I know exactly what you mean. And it sounds like you ask a lot of open-ended questions too, which helps keep it conversational. It's not just like a yes no, or here's my direct answer, And then you can dig in, you know, based
[00:29:29] Langley: And I think you can relate by having a three-year-old, uh, everything goes back to the five why's. And so nowadays, I'm, I'm in taking a hundred why questions a day. So I'm just trying to model that right back in my customer sessions.
[00:29:44] Elle: Anyone who has little kids or has had little kids in their lives are probably pros at that. You got it. Okay. so. Can you talk a little bit before we move on to the next one, last question on this one. what types of topics do you typically [00:30:00] cover? I think you mentioned a little bit about, um, quantifiables, and you know, what your business priorities are.
Are there any kind of like last, like just few, um, standard questions that you ask or that you would recommend that A PMM would include in their interview guide? Not a script, but a guide, um, for the interview.
[00:30:18] Langley: Yeah. I think it's tough to like generalize across industries, you know? 'cause we have such different. Customers, but the things that I would challenge and always try to keep in your mind, and if possible, like put it at the top of your guide, big red letters, you want to make them remind you of a previous customer or prospect.
And so like ask the Quantifiables until you can say, oh, that reminds me a little bit of this person I talked to last month. Good. Then the point
[00:30:51] Elle: stuff.
[00:30:51] Langley: Yeah, exactly. Like, um, I think I sometimes call it putting them in a box. You know, that like you want them to [00:31:00] fall into a box that you're, you're happy to move them out of it, but you have a starting point and you know, roughly where they are.
And how you should be kind of tailoring your guide moving forward. So once you're at that point, that's when you switch into the qualitative and allow more of their personality to come out. Because I find if you can get a little bit of personality out in the first 10 minutes or so, that's how you're gonna eliminate a lot of say, do guide.
[00:31:25] Elle: I love that. Um, okay. And with all these great questions that you're asking the customer, and there's the sheer number, the volume of interviews that you're having. You have a mountain of notes, right? So I think step three in your process was all about making sense of it all, um, leveraging ai. So tell us more about what AI tools you use and I guess like your process for analyzing this mountain of, of data that you've just gathered.
[00:31:50] Langley: Yeah. So AI tools is so fun right now, um, because I feel like every two to three months. It just shifts, you know? And so like I [00:32:00] was a hardcore quad truther and then like a new version of chat, GPT comes out and you're like, oh, have to get away from it. This is better. And so like rule of thumb with defining what tool is right for you, obviously you have a budget from your company and so you may have to be using something in particular, but if you have the freedom, just try the stuff, you know, make it a biweekly hour long timeframe that you have on a Friday to go try some different tools out.
And I found just connecting with different product marketers on LinkedIn is super helpful because they'll be posting about like what they've seen is helpful and what isn't. And for me, I can go from a list of 30 different tools to three different tools to try out and then determine what's right for my workflow.
With that being said, for customer interviews specifically, right now I'm in a. A committed relationship with the Google AI tools. Um, so I love Notebook lm. It just can unlock so [00:33:00] much. And I think one further thing that's been really helpful is normally I'm running these, normally I would say like 95% of the time, I'm running the sessions and asking the questions.
And when you have to take notes while you're doing a session, it just leads to bad habits where you're typing down and then you say, okay, let me remember what my next question is. And so with like these recordings that we have nowadays, I'll have the template of questions and then after each one I'll download those transcripts and then get AI one, I'll upload it to Notebook at Lamb as my library after I strip out PII information from the person.
The other is I will ask one of my Gemini gems to take the transcript and fill out all of the questions to the best of its ability on what was answered and what wasn't. Because sometimes that can be a helpful pattern too. You might want to say, Hey, like, we're going super deep with these customers, but there's an important topic that's normally comes up in the last third of these discussions.
And this week I've only been able to get to that question twice. Let's [00:34:00] mix around the format and move it up top.
But anyways, with notebook L it is just like so helpful and it has gone in the last year from being this static library to a separate brain that you can really riff with, you
[00:34:18] Elle: Yeah. Scale
[00:34:19] Langley: I you, yeah, a hundred percent.
And so like, I'll go to it with like, Hey, here was my biggest takeaways from these sessions so far. What could I be missing? And it'll come up with things like twice as good of what I was thinking. Now I remember when it first happened, maybe four or five months ago. I was just like, whoa, like this is for real.
Like I need to make sure this is a core part of the process moving forward because this brain over here is outthinking me and I need to be working more closely and trusting what it's given me. And so for me that's super helpful. I like making the custom gpt or um, the Gemini gems. And so like [00:35:00] for my product marketing life, I will make them very specific for like, here is gems for, uh, a white paper or fitting in the right type of testimonial.
Here's gems for our messaging for a specific type of cohort of customers. Maybe our highest value or here maybe is a lower value or a smaller one that we still care about and we want to make sure we're segmenting properly. And so I think there's just so much you can do that. I, I think it makes me probably 10 times more productive with doing this process than I was like a year ago.
And so finding the scale is so fun for me.
[00:35:37] Elle: Yeah, Okay. So for you, your top recommendation is try all the tools, figure out which ones you love and work for you. But it sounds like you gravitate at least lately more toward, um, notebook lm, which I've heard another person recommend recently. and then, um, Gemini Gems,
[00:35:55] Langley: Yeah,
[00:35:56] Elle: top two?
[00:35:57] Langley: I'm going steady with them, but like haven't [00:36:00] committed to anything at this juncture.
[00:36:02] Elle: I love that. Okay. Um, moving on to the last, step in your process, your system was around, cross-functional, um, feedback loops with your stakeholders. So what does that look like in practice?
[00:36:18] Langley: Yeah, I feel like I mentioned it before, but we are, we're point guards, you know, and so like our, and someone might say, oh, you're like a quarterback. I would disagree. I don't think a PM's a quarterback, they're a point guard. You're not gonna get the flashy statistics. You are gonna be passing the ball and setting your other teams up for success and for those wins down the road.
And so like with me, you're passing to you, you get this juicy insight and you're like, wow, that's something I need to learn more about. I like setting up a call with someone on analytics and talking through and saying. You know, this is something I'm very interested in that I'd like to prove out further.
I think a lot of people might [00:37:00] jump to like, uh, put in a Jira ticket or try to like prove out with a dashboard. But I think it's important to note when you're a subject matter expert and when other people might be better suited and to bring them in as a thought partner. so like, I like bringing analytics in and saying more from a qualitative lens.
This is what I'm seeing. How do you think we could best solve this? And those guys are so brilliant, like they're able to vary. Deeply solve these problems in ways that I never would've thought of, you know? And so I call that kind of like juicing up your sample size or your end, you know? And then I'll turn to sales and product because they're having product conversations.
Sorry. They're having customer conversations or prospect conversations, but in a very different lens than we're used to. There's normally some amount of say, do gaps on the product side. People are not wanting them to say like, I don't like this product on the sales side, you got a big guard [00:38:00] up. You know?
And so like you have to take everything they're saying with a grain of salt. But a lot of these topics will touch these different groups, and that's where you can kind of hack that end or sample size and try to get it larger to say, how time sensitive is this thing? You know? And
so once you get to that level, you end up crafting a presentation aligning with stakeholders.
You do the share outs, and I think. We have a pretty fun culture of like people, challenging people on things. And so I really like, like nothing makes me happier than doing one of these share outs with our senior leadership team. And someone says like, I get what you're saying there, but I disagree based on this, this, this, like, that's fun for me because it's like, okay, I can do some legwork to figure this out, or I can pull up some slide from the appendix that just digs deeper on specifically this topic.
And
so
[00:38:51] Elle: that.
[00:38:52] Langley: That's where it gets fun.
[00:38:53] Elle: Okay, so it sounds like you, uh, can maybe test further on various, [00:39:00] maybe bits of insights that you get with your analytics team or, or, you know, maybe other stakeholders. Then you do a formal readout, um, you know, share outs with, with the team. How often are you doing those readouts, would you say?
[00:39:12] Langley: Totally dependent on what type of initiative I'm doing. I would say like at least quarterly.
Um, but like it because for accountants specifically, as you can imagine, their lives are highly seasonal. So if you're trying to talk to accountants from mid-January to the middle of April, you're probably not well set up for success.
But if you're going about it in a little bit different ways and trying to meet them during the timeframes where they are able to speak, I think you're gonna have a lot better success.
[00:39:45] Elle: Yeah, makes a lot of sense. And you mentioned a really big number upfront. Like something like nearly a hundred customers per year factoring in seasonality. So only certain times of the year that you can actually, um, get some like really strong conversations going. [00:40:00] How many customers would you say on average you're talking to up on a monthly basis to keep this muscle strong?
[00:40:07] Langley: Yeah, I think like on average I try to set a bar of like 300 customer or prospect conversations a year. Sometimes you get higher and sometimes you're a touch lower. But like the ways that you can really hack those numbers up is you go to these industry events, you know, and
like I don't have an agenda when I'm going.
I'm not trying to sell to anyone. I'm just showing up to an event. I'm going into sessions, I'm talking to accountants, and like the most beautiful discussions happen over a meal. And I will be able to talk to 10 different accountants that are all contributing and actively asking about these things. And the piece that always cracks me up is I'm not normally advertise advertising like, hi, I am laying from Intuit.
You know, I'm just there trying to learn from people and how they work with their workflows and stuff. And so sometimes 30 [00:41:00] or 40 minutes into a conversation they'll say, Hey, how do you do this for your firm? And I'll say like, oh no, I actually worked for one of the software's just here, try to trying to learn.
And most of the time they're so cool about it. They're like, what? You just had that whole conversation and talking about this like deep thing and you're just trying to learn. I'm like, yeah, it's just like fun for me. Um, and so those are the pieces that are really fun and we can take back those learnings.
And I've had many times coming off of a lunch conversation and before I jump into some other learning session at a conference, just wanting to jot down like two pages of notes of like, Ooh, this was
good.
I need to act on this. I need to talk to this person from product to validate, you know.
[00:41:39] Elle: I love that this is all so much great insight. It's just pure gold. So quick recap for our listeners. Your system has basically four steps. You've got the setup where you are defining the topics, aligning with stakeholders, building the interview guide. Then you have the actual, [00:42:00] um, step two, being running the sessions with the customers, making sure that you're mixing in both quantitative and qualitative bits in the conversation.
Step three is your analysis with ai, which I love that. and then finally to that stakeholder feedback loop internally where you're doing the readouts and potentially doing even more, um, testing. such great insights. So my last question for you on this topic, what last piece of advice would you have for a product marketer who's trying to build out a voice of customer initiative for their product?
[00:42:34] Langley: Yeah, so I think when I started in my role, I had a really great mentor and how she told me to approach things was, Hey, first six months you need to become a subject matter expert on the software. Next six months you need to be a subject matter expert on the customer. From there, you're really trying to like deeply understand how the business makes money, and I think when I got in that second six months, really [00:43:00] learning the voice of the customer, I think I kind of fell in love.
it was just really fun for me and I think the voice of the customer is like the engine for my work in any
given week and anytime where I'm feeling like, ugh, motivation's lacking, or, uh, my daughter had a bad night's sleep last night, you know, that like a customer session is something that can really like snap me out of it and
[00:43:25] Elle: yeah, it gives you the juice you
[00:43:26] Langley: and Exactly. Gets you back on.
[00:43:29] Elle: I love that. Yeah. That voice of customers, the engine. Um, I think that's so true for everything in product marketing. I couldn't agree more. okay, so I wanna, should switch gears a little bit. Um, we talked through that case study and it's super strong case study about customer.
I wanna move on to the second segment of our show, the messaging critique. So this is where we as product marketing experts get to analyze real world messaging. Um, and the fun part is laying, you get to pick the company that [00:44:00] we, um, look at in terms of their messaging. So. quick ground rules before we get started.
you're gonna pick a company that either is a consumer based company or a company where you understand their, um, customer really well. Wouldn't be fair to, to pick on.
a, a company that we didn't know their customers. and then you're gonna tell me what you're loving about the messaging, something you wish the PMM would've done differently.
And then we'll have a quick brainstorm, uh, around how that PMM can take it to the next level. So again, all about learning and refining our craft. No negativity. Just a thoughtful, constructive critique.
[00:44:35] Langley: Yeah, a
hundred percent. Let's, let's get to
[00:44:37] Elle: let's do it. Okay. Tell us the reveal. Who's the
[00:44:40] Langley: all right, today we're talking about eight sleep. So some of like the tech brethren might be tracking, but eight sleep is essentially like a cooling mattress cover ecosystem to help you sleep better.
[00:44:56] Elle: I love it. Okay, so for those of you who wanna follow along, [00:45:00] go to eight sleep.com. It's E-I-G-H-T-S-L-E-E p.com. okay, so I'm already very intrigued. Tell me about their messaging. you know, who do you think their target customer is, just based on what you're seeing on their website. And then just, just kind of walk us through, like, what is the messaging?
Kinda like read aloud for, for the listeners?
[00:45:23] Langley: Yeah, so first off, I think the target customer could be me. and especially given like my Navy background, I just had a lot of experience being sleep deprived for months on end during long deployments. And when I got out of the Navy in 2020, my sleep was very broken. And so I was very much in the market of like, how do I just make sure I have the best sleep hygiene possible?
And so that's something I'm still on the journey on today. So I'm now one of their customers. But when you look at their page for the Target customer, they clearly have premium pricing and their website kind of speaks to like a [00:46:00] tech audience. They try to back things up and have like really cool design going on.
So you can kind of tell off the bat like it's, you would guess it to be like young professionals that are investing in personal health. It's kind of a best guess.
[00:46:14] Elle: Yeah, I completely agree. So when you go to their website, it's a really, I would say, like sleek, not animation, sort of, you know, video background of the product itself. It's a very, sleek, nice coloring with a black and the high contrast. and then like big letters across the main, main screen says exceptional sleep without exception.
And I just, I love that so much. and then the small, in small letters underneath that, it says fall asleep, faster, sleep, deeper, wake up, energized. I really, really like that. It's resonating a lot with me. So maybe I'm also part of the target audience having, two toddlers. Um, [00:47:00] so tell me more. What are you loving about this messaging?
[00:47:03] Langley: Yeah. Um, and as a quick aside before I jump in, is like. Isn't it kind of fun being a product marketer nowadays? Like when I used to just hate, like commercials for like you're watching a football game or something. But nowadays I find that I go from, if I'm not totally locked into like a Steelers game for instance, and something is on the commercials, come on, and my wife will see me like critically watching commercials and then like muttering to myself.
Like that's a pretty good commercial.
[00:47:31] Elle: Right. Or like, oh man, they botched it. Or like, oh, I should, they should have done this, or that was a
[00:47:36] Langley: Yeah. I'll say like, who, who, who's their target customer here?
[00:47:40] Elle: Right. Same. Same.
[00:47:42] Langley: It always cracks me up, but back to eight sleep. Yeah. I think their messaging is really crisp. love the design. I love how they back things up throughout it where they're saying like, members experience up to 25% more deep sleep, where I'm just like, oh, okay, I could go for
[00:47:58] Elle: can.
[00:47:59] Langley: [00:48:00] More
[00:48:00] Elle: I love that. And can I just comment really quickly that they refer to their customers as members. like it sounds so exclusive,
like,
Ooh, yeah.
[00:48:11] Langley: So, uh, they do that and then they say clinical grade accuracy matching ECGs for heart rate monitoring. And you see that and you're just like, okay, this is legit. So they then call out some like big names in this space, which like, it's kind of hard to listen to like a podcast or watch a YouTube video nowadays without seeing something like Andrew Huberman or Brian Johnson thing.
And so they say like 550 million hours of sleep analyzed,
it's pretty pretty big sample size to then be claiming 25% more deep sleep. And so my quantitative brain is saying like, this works. So that, that for me was like, Ooh, I, I gotta check this out.
[00:48:53] Elle: Okay. Loving the proof points. Um, what's something you wish that PMM would've considered to do [00:49:00] differently?
[00:49:01] Langley: Yeah, I feel like sometimes when you're looking at market sizing, you know,
the price range is high. Um, and so like, I think there are ways, and maybe they have separate like types of landing pages, you know, I'd love to see like different landing pages or even different segments within this page where
it maybe spoke to like, uh, a couple, you know, and how like don't fight over the thermostat anymore type of thing.
And I think maybe having different, like entry levels, you know, of, hey, maybe here's like our basic version. And the basic version might be. Pretty great but doesn't have these additional add-ons. And for 25% of the market, they might say, oh, that's worth it for better sleep for me. Where other people might say, [00:50:00] oh, I need this like data backed and all these extra things to make me the best me I can
be.
And so I think it, for me, it really just gets to like try to meet people where they are, especially when it's a premium product on this end. If you want to say, Hey, we're premium, we're sticking to premium, we'll let people find the less expensive piece that's going on, that's great. But like for instance, I showed my wife this page, so in a lot of circumstances there's multiple stakeholders here, especially for like a large purchase.
So I don't know how most people's households work, but like I showed my wife and was shown, look at all these cool things, 25% better deep sleep. That's not bad. Um, so yeah, like I think trying to involve both partners on the journey and trying to make sure that. Anyone that could come to the site could even have like some parallel journey that is going to make them think I'm either, could see myself as a customer, like in the near term [00:51:00] or like, here's an offering that this could be helpful for me.
You know?
[00:51:03] Elle: Yeah, I completely agree with you. So I have an interesting pro cons to consider with the proof points. So while I am a huge fan of proof points, even with, you know, to, this can even apply to any, like a SaaS company even, right? That like 25% more sleep, having context around what that means I think is really important.
And for example, I do not track my sleep and maybe that, maybe that eliminates me as part of the target
audience. Like,
[00:51:31] Langley: yeah, I don't, I don't, like most people
[00:51:33] Elle: so like, yeah. Yeah. So like, I don't really know what that means. Like, is like I'm, I'm, I'm guessing that's a lot. More. Um, so I would love to see some storytelling around what that means for of 25% more sleep.
I could imagine, and maybe we're kind of getting into like the next, like our, like last little, like the creative brainstorm bit here, but I could imagine [00:52:00] doing some storytelling around what that means because then you can double down and like really invest a lot more in that like fantastic proof point, but then build more context around what it means, for your customer.
Curious
[00:52:12] Langley: about we? Yeah. How about we beam in their
[00:52:15] Elle: Yeah,
[00:52:15] Langley: team here? And the thing that I'm, I, I'm already trying to think of like, how can we use these disparate pieces to make it like more tangible? And so maybe take the 550 million hours of analyze sleep, take the 25% more deep sleep and bubble it up to like, how much better rested would you be if you slept?
Uh, I don't know if you just did over a year or something, like next year you could sleep. 120 hours more of deep sleep type of thing. I think if you like, try to quantify it in terms that people can understand, like that might be more helpful.
[00:52:51] Elle: Yeah. Is that, are you kind of going in like, let's hear actually your, your, I, guess, like creative idea for their team. Like, you talked a little bit about that, but [00:53:00] what about
[00:53:00] Langley: I,
[00:53:00] Elle: to the next level?
[00:53:01] Langley: Yeah, I think like you see this with some of their competitors. I only say this 'cause I've looked at all of their competitors and been like, I've, I've like been a member of different ones member. but like. In the ads for, I wanna say like sleep number or something, it'll show like on one side of the bed it's 85 degrees and on the other it's 65
type of thing. And I think a lot of partners find that funny and relatable, you know? Um, and so I think it could be helpful to uplevel something like that, but to give them like fair credit, maybe they're trying to differentiate from others in their space and saying, we are premium. This is what we stand for. And we believe that like our tech is better.
So like that's our competitive
differentiator. We know our ICP, we're gonna keep drilling into them. You know,
[00:53:54] Elle: Awesome. Yeah, totally agree. Yeah, that's funny. I literally sleep with an extra [00:54:00] blanket versus my husband.
[00:54:02] Langley: I, I'm, I'm on the, the weighted blanket game. Have you got into weighted blankets
yet? They're amazing. I should check it
Oh, my couple Christmases ago, my wife got me, she asked How heavy of a weighted blanket would you like? And I asked, how heavy do they come? And so this thing is a beast. It's 50 pounds and so
like it is. yes. yes. So I am putting myself in a hyperbaric chamber and like throwing away the key each night and just like it, I couldn't get up if I wanted to. And so for me, it leads to deeper sleep. So I like it.
[00:54:35] Elle: I love it. Okay. Eight sleep. Um, we are so intrigued. If there's any eight sleep, pmms out there listening. You've got some fans here. Nice messaging. alright, so Lang, um, one things I I like to do, um, on this podcast is to take a moment of gratitude because in product marketing, none of us get here on our own.
We're always learning from each other, building on each other's [00:55:00] work, and I personally believe we're better for it. So before we wrap up, I have a big thank you for you to, you, especially first for being a veteran. Thank you for your service to our country, for me and everyone else who lives here and benefits from you.
and then taking that further and even as a pm m and into your, you know, more B2B Tech, you know, business role all the time that you're sharing with veterans and pmms and then the prep and everything that went into coming on this podcast today and sharing your insights with the PMM community. Thank you so much.
really appreciate you taking the time.
[00:55:35] Langley: Yeah, I mean, first off, thanks for having me here. I think like if I get an invite to come talk about product marketing for an hour, like that's the highlight of my week, you know? Um, but when I look at like some different shout outs, I would say when I first came on it, Intuit, a lady named Angela Doheny just connected me at her hip and just let me follow her around like a little wandering duckling [00:56:00] as I first learned the product and then learn the customer and then learn how the business makes money and like, was so extremely helpful and was really supportive of every step of the way.
So that was fun for me. My current boss, Shannon Scott, she is so wonderful. She just allows me to really do my thing. She knows that like. When I have more autonomy, I'm gonna do better work than if I was being like, heavily supervised on everything. And so she trusts me to just go uncover these unknown unknowns, pushes me to think a little differently, and then really just like empowers me to do transformative product marketing, which is the goal for me.
And then lastly, another person within Intuit, uh, Jessica Chang. She's been super, super helpful and like a real supporter as I've kind of reached outside the boundaries of my group to say what does best in class product marketing look like? Because at the end of the day, I think it's really easy to get hung up on, I [00:57:00] don't know, like generic praise or our dashboards are green, so like things must be going well, but like, that's just not how I'm wired.
Like, I wanna know what's the next thing?
How can we lock in? How can we just be doing like really transformative work? And so for me, I'm always hungry to learn and she's always been there to, uh, support me on whatever I'm trying to learn about next.
[00:57:21] Elle: Yeah, such great shout outs. Angela, Shannon, Jessica, you guys are awesome. Thank you so much. And my last question for you Lang, is where else can we access your expertise? Is it best for our listeners to find you on LinkedIn?
[00:57:37] Langley: Yeah, probably LinkedIn. Um, so you'll see me, I'll post about product marketing stuff. I think I'm a little bit of an outlier that like a lot of the people in the space that are posting are, kind of like consultants. And so I like shining the light on like internal pmms because that is the majority of us and kind of working through some of the struggles and, [00:58:00] um, some of the triumphs that we see.
And then just kind of learning and growing together. That's, um. Someone reached out to me the other day and said like, you're posting as like an in-house PMM. Like why do you do that?
And I thought about it and it was like, I don't know. For the love of the game, like I think I just really enjoy learning deeply from other folks and like it's a really cool place to learn.
The other thing you'll see on there is like I'm big on just trying to democratize learning whether it is from a product marketing lens, I'm trying to share what I've learned and best practices and also ask questions 'cause that's a place to learn. And also try to share those learnings from military veterans because I've been in their shoes.
And boy, it is hard when you get out, you go from like this train track with these. Predetermined stops at every point to like
you're just a boat in the open ocean and you could do anything. But that feels really suffocating when you're not used to it. And so I think when in doubt and when you have like the right mindset and you can actually ask your veteran [00:59:00] network for help, you're in a lot better spot.
But yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn. If any of you guys, uh, want to, I'm always happy to chat.
[00:59:07] Elle: Awesome. Again, thank you so much Lang, and thank you PMM listeners for coming on this adventure with us today. I hope this episode leaves you with inspiration to take the next step in your own journey.