Patrick Campbell: prediction

Transcript context

…All right. Next topic, customer research. I feel like you have a pretty interesting perspective on custom research, so let's go into it. I think I have the 85-year-old curmudgeonly man perspective on customer research. So here's the thing. Everything in your business, it does not matter what type of business you have, everything is used to drive someone to a point of conversion or justify the product or the price that you're offering up. That customer is a human being you're driving to that point of conversion and it's your job to understand how they perceive you, how they perceive their problem, how they perceive the world around them, around your products. We all know this on a philosophical level, but here are some fun facts. So one, only one in five companies have buyer personas or ICPs, only one in five. So we talk about this all the time, we retweet the articles, we give the advice, so many of us give the advice. But then we look at our own companies, only one in five have some sort of segmentation ICPs. And then only one out of 10 companies actually do customer research or development on a quarterly basis. This should be a continuous thing, it should be a monthly, weekly type thing. Not saying you're sending up surveys or having all these conversations on a weekly basis, but only one out of 10 are doing quarterly. So that means the number they're doing monthly is even smaller than that. And I just think that's insane. And when we look at all data, and we have a lot of data on this, and this is something where I've been talking about customer development for a long time. Everything is better. Everything is better. NPS is higher for organizations that have customer development functions or even just ICPs or buyer personas, depending on what framework you're using. Willingness to pay is typically higher. The funnel is more efficient. LTV to CAC is normally much, much higher. All those growth numbers, you're typically growing in a much higher rate, like a 15, 20%, not a small delta, 15-20% higher rate. Retention's better. All these things are better. And the thing that, I think, 20 years ago or 10 years ago you didn't have to do customer development because, and this is where Keith [inaudible 00:42:30] is just like customer research is dumb or whatever his famous quote is, but you didn't have to do it because there just wasn't a lot of stuff out there and we all were riding the wave of the internet. But now the market's harder and harder. So what are you going to do? Are you just going to keep throwing stuff up against the wall or are you going to actually do the stuff that all of us talk about doing and actually do the research? And the research is hard. It's never going to be 100% accurate because you're going to have to use your judgment, but that's your job. And so that's more of a rant, I guess, than a hot take. research? And the research is hard. It's never going to be 100% accurate because you're going to have to use your judgment, but that's your job. And so that's more of a rant, I guess, than a hot take. But I also think this is one of those things that AI starts solving, especially all this generative AI because now you can just throw all that stuff into a workload and then all of a sudden you'll get back a lot of the sentiment or all that kind stuff so you don't even to do the hard part anymore. Yeah, that's my rant.…

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