How to run User Research in B2B SaaS Products

1.5 years ago I started working on Vimeo’s Enterprise offering, and coming from the world of B2C products, I encountered a challenge: it’s harder to access the users in B2B than in the B2C world. I can’t really use usertesting.com, send 500 emails with $50 amazon gift codes for user interviews/surveys, or reply to comments in the app store.

Luckily, throughout my first few months, I learned that it’s not actually harder, it’s just different. What I learned was instead of building your own research pipeline, hook into different touchpoints on enterprise customer’s journey.

Join intro sales calls with customers

When I just started in this role, I got invaluable advice from Vimeo’s President and Chief Product Officer, Mark Kornfilt: when you're looking for inspiration, go join the customer sales calls. In almost any B2B company there are at least dozens of calls happening each week, and it’s usually very easy to join them as a fly on the wall (or listen to recordings, more on that later).?

After listening to ~20 calls I was able to build empathy for our customers, a strong conviction about what our customers need, and a great insight into how our sales team operates. All within 1 week and with zero budget.

There are many types of customer calls. From the product perspective, it makes sense generally to join the intro call, where the customer shares their needs for the first time. That means only joining in after BANT validation (i.e. customer has a budget, authority, need & timeline to buy your product) as they’re less noisy. But if you’re looking for a broader view of the market joining pre-BANT calls can be incredibly helpful, too (SDR calls). There are also the calls where the sales team gives a product demo -- they are an excellent way to learn how customers respond to today’s offering, and they give an opportunity to see if the sales team is pitching the product in a way that makes sense.

The extreme version of this, which I highly recommend, is to not just listen passively, but actually lead the call as a salesperson. You’ll feel the stress of selling the deal, the pressure of ensuring you understand the customer’s problem and pitching the product right, or the discomfort of hearing that your product doesn’t have a specific feature they need.

Partner with Sales

As your company grows, joining calls won’t be enough. You’ll need to scale your research by building a relationship with various sales teams. Different companies name and break down teams differently, but the bottom-line is someone needs to generate a lead, validate it, and then close it. At Vimeo we have Sales Development Reps (SDRs) who are focused on lead generation and validation, and Account Executives (AEs) who focus on closing the deal. In my experience, I’ve mostly worked with post-validation leads, i.e. with AEs.

• To get into the mindset of an AE, you need to know that they have very aggressive quotas, and their compensation depends on it. If they’re losing deals because your product is missing critical functionality, they’ll make sure you’re aware. Vice versa, good products help them close more deals.
• You’ll often get pings like “when is X shipping”, or “is Y on the roadmap?” My advice? Get curious. Determine who’s asking and why. You’ll often be surprised with new insights to pursue. Finish these conversations by asking sales to submit a feature request (more on that below.)
• You’ll often be invited to join calls with potential customers to tell them about a roadmap, or more about a specific feature. These can be very beneficial, but they can also cause get you in trouble if you're not careful (more on that below)
• You can use these calls to show latest mockups of upcoming features, which would both get customers excited (hopefully) and help you validate key points. You can even invite customers to a closed beta (that’s usually difficult at this stage of customer's buying journey)?
• But make sure you manage expectations right: e.g. if you’re asked to share a roadmap - try not committing to it without a strong reason. When an enterprise customer invests a good amount in your product, they have a right to know where you’re going directionally to ensure it matches their own direction, but it’s in your best interest to avoid closing the deal with the assumption that feature X will be available at date Y. There are exceptions to this, but in accepting this you’ll step into a nightmare of dependencies and commitments, losing flexibility to changing priorities, and getting everyone into the stress of hard deadlines. Similarly, you might be asked to help finetune a feature or integrate with the customer’s setup — in this case, I recommend you explicitly tell AE that you won’t be able to help beyond the first call and that they need to involve someone from Sales Engineering or Onboarding teams. PMs are not set up to solve individual customer’s needs, they’re set up to solve the broader market’s needs.
• It’ll serve you well to build relationship with sales, and a good starting point can be a biweekly call that can serve as a platform for you to ask market updates and for them to ask product updates or give specific feedback. Importantly, keep your PMM partner as part of these calls as it’s usually their job to keep sales teams updated and well trained on how to sell the product.

Track Feature Requests

As you’ll be talking to more customers and more salespeople, you’ll notice that you’re getting requests for features from all sorts of places. It’s very easy to make a mistake here: make a promise to ship feature X, submit to recency bias, or only hear the loudest voices of one or two salespeople. Same mistake gets much worse when you’re scaling from a team of 1 to 100.

To prevent that, it’s important to set up a system for tracking feature requests. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Any tracker needs to be very easy to use, and ideally live in the native environment for sales team (usually CRM like Salesforce). Otherwise, it might not get adopted. The sales team is incredibly busy, they have enormous pressure to reach quotas, and all they have is their time, so they won’t be dedicating it to anything that doesn’t get them closer to their goal of closing the deal.
• Each request should be tracked to a specific customer to a) keep sales teams accountable b) tie $ARR to # of requests, or c) be able to go back to an individual customer for more details or invite them to a closed beta. I can’t stress how many times this approach has sped up my research.
• Keep the list of features predefined and short - no more than 15. If there are too many items in the dropdown, the sales team will end up picking “other”. If you remove “other,” they will pick a near-random item with some text comments. Review the “other” category every month or so and update the list of features in the dropdown to the ones you have the most faith in.
• Not every salesperson will submit requests, and not every request will get submitted, and requests will get mixed into wrong categories. Treat this list as directional input only, and before making important calls, go deeper into the requests, read comments and talk to customers. I had a situation where most requested feature had 4x more demand than the rest, but once we started working on it, it turned out customers actually wanted something else. Details got lost in the communication.
• Get the sales team into a habit of making feature request submissions. The best way to do so is to a) start submitting them yourself b) setup a (bi)weekly sync up with them to walk through recently submitted requests (or submit them on a call together) and talk through them in details (it’s important to discuss recent deals/requests while they’re fresh) c) find a few champions who can start doing this first d) as you’re asking for something, make sure you give back, too (e.g. answer their questions, help them close a deal, etc). One good way to grow adoption is to publicly thank top requestors (on biweekly calls or on slack) who take time to submit requests. If you’re lucky this will motivate others to join the habit.
• It’s very important to report back on what decisions you’ve made based on feature requests, to ensure they resonate with a larger group, and reiterate how important FRs are. Good practice is to also show how many requests each feature received, and be very explicit on why you’re pursuing each feature (especially if you’re not pursuing the most requested one.)

Utilize Onboarding

You have a golden learning opportunity by witnessing a customer’s first experience with a product after they sign up. In the B2C world you only get the data, while in B2B this experience is often recorded by a representative from your company. At Vimeo, we have a dedicated Onboarding team who runs these calls, and boy, if your company doesn’t have such team, I highly recommend you start it! Their core mission is to set up customers for success with the product, make sure the product is well set up (e.g. SSO, SCIM), make customers familiar with the key relevant functionality, and minimize any major gaps in meeting a customer’s needs.

But the great side effect for PMs is that the Onboarding team gets to witness all key insights from customers as they’re starting to use your product. Which makes them a strategic partner in identifying gaps or delighters. At Vimeo we work with the Onboarding team as closely as we work with support: we sync up weekly on product gaps, we give them an early preview of upcoming features and incorporate their feedback, they share great customer quotes with us, we help them onboard the largest customers, and plenty more.

Worth noting, there’s sometimes a similar team that helps close customer’s gaps before they sign a contract. At Vimeo, they’re called Sales Engineers, and we have a very similar dynamic with this team as with Onboarding.

Partner with Account Managers

Once customers go through onboarding they land in account management. Account Managers’ (AMs) main success metrics are retention and upsell in existing accounts — very similar to product success metrics, so there’s a natural synergy between the two groups. Here are a few key ways you can partner with AMs:

• Run weekly churn calls. At Vimeo, we’re doing a weekly churn summary call with PMs and AMs. AMs summarize who churned this week and why, why customers didn’t adopt a feature or product they were expected to, and together with PMs we brainstorm how we might’ve saved them, either by improving the product, or improving the relationship. We’re also extending this to “sign on” calls, where we do the same for accounts who just signed, so we can run the same projections before any customer churned.
• Join customer calls. AMs are often interested in showing customers that the company is listening to their feedback, and introducing clients to a PM is an extremely useful tool for everyone involved - AM, PM, and the customer. Make sure to take those calls when they’re offered: this is a foundation to build a strong relationship with AM (you really might help AM to close the renewal/upsell deal), and it’s also always useful for PM as well, to both listen to a customer’s thoughts and ask them your own questions. But you can also be proactive and ask for those calls yourself (just explain value if an AM is new to this). e.g. when you stumbled on a feature request, a call recording, or data usage pattern that has potential great insights but lacks depth, you have a great opportunity to talk directly to the customer to understand where it’s coming from. It’s a luxury you don’t always have in B2C.
• Spread user research to the AM team. On top of getting high-level feature requests from the AM team (via form mentioned above), you can partner up with AMs to help detect most impactful ones (i.e. detect trends among many customers), and even dig a bit deeper. Once you explain how you prioritize initiatives, and which follow-up questions you usually ask after learning about feature requests, some AMs might show initiative to dig deeper into customer’s needs and consolidate requests from multiple AMs. As a result this will decrease learning time, and will help you get impactful initiatives to market fast.
• Share the data. Product group looks at product health, usage and adoption metrics, and early churn/upsell prediction across all customers. AMs care about the same data for individual customers. You as a PM can help AMs use this data to build their own dashboards so every AM can look at their specific accounts, and if any of them might churn or have an opportunity for an upsell. They’re extremely interested in acting early on those signals.

Learn your tools

All user research methods above (and more) can be dramatically improved if you use the right tool. For example, instead of attending a sales call, you simply watch a recording, which both simplifies scheduling and reduces the burden on a salesperson to introduce you on the call. But it’s much more than that.?

Salesforce / CRMs. You’ll want to get comfortable with your CRM. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve filtered through leads and opportunities to find specific industry, company size, or use case that are affecting the trends. Or went through sales notes of individual deals to manually categorize the data I needed.

Gong / Chorus / etc. These tools are pure magic. They record every sales call, transcribe them (surprisingly well), and allow you to search through the transcripts by keywords, customer type, person speaking, and much more. In my team it’s a must have phase of research now to walk through customer calls mentioning “new feature name”. It’s just unbelievable productive.

Build customer advisory group

Usually, it takes few weeks to set up a customer call in Enterprise, between asking AM and waiting for customer to clear their schedule. You don’t always have that. And you’re not always sure how involved the customer is and how deep of feedback they would give. For that reason it’s very handy to build a group of trusted customers who are more involved with your product, are happy to provide timely feedback, and go into greater length when providing it.?

We often do it as a beta when launching big new products, and after aligning with AMs we create a direct line of communication between product managers and customers (and vice versa). We send surveys, invite them to interviews or to user tests. You want this group to be up to 10 customers, from a diverse group that represents your target userbase.?

As a bonus, if you do this right, same group of customers can serve you in sales by serving as reference customers, i.e. telling you prospective clients why they chose you.

Conclusions

Enterprise world is ripe with rich data for PMs to build great products. And in order to use it, you gotta build a two-way partnership with key players in sales org across different stages of the pipeline. It takes a while to kick-off but then pays off long term.

p.s. I didn’t mention Support here as from a research perspective it’s a very similar relationship to b2c products

p.p.s. We're hiring PMs & PMMs for exciting B2B and B2C products! DM for details