So, when you decide to use the Customer-Led Growth framework to address various business opportunities you’ve got, what are you actually doing?

Broadly, there are four steps:

• The customer research phase 📝
• The Jobs to Be Done definitions phase 🚧
• Drawing of the Customer Experience Map(s) 🗺️
• The “So now what?” phase—decisions, action plans, implementation 💡

Let’s go through each of these one by one.

Customer Research

Everything customer-led must start with customer research. You cannot operate on your assumptions, educated guesses and even previous experience alone. You simply must talk to your customers.

While running customer interviews and surveys is the primary tool I recommend, there are many other sources of customer insight you may already have access to. Think sales call recordings, customer reviews, feedback, even publicly posted comments or questions.

Not all customer research is created equal. You need to know what questions to ask and what kind of information to extract for the research to be helpful and usable. Since Customer-Led Growth relies on the principles of Jobs to Be Done when building customer journey maps, you should let the JTBD theory guide you when conducting interviews and/or surveys as well.

Gather as much insight as you can and hear what your customers have to say, in their own words.

Jobs to Be Done

The Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) innovation theory has changed the way I look at marketing and I know it’s been the case for many amazing marketers out there too!

JTBD helps you understand why people buy—what “job” they are hiring your product to do. In any Job to Be Done, there is always a struggle, a motivation and a desired outcome present.

Motivation is what most companies focus on in their marketing, often forgetting the struggle and not emphasizing the desired outcome enough. But in JTBD, all three parts are equally important.

Customer-led growth cannot exist without you knowing your customer’s JTBD. Whether you are going through the process yourself or have a Customer-Led Growth consultant guiding you, you will need to do this work. Define the top Jobs your customers are hiring your product to do and then choose the top-priority one for your product.

Customer Experience Map

I like to call Customer-Led Growth brainy work 🧠 It often feels almost ephemeral and even theoretical until you start seeing the pieces of the puzzle come together for your unique business.

The Customer Experience (CX) Map drawing is where all this gets even brainier! This is also the point where the insight gathered and the Jobs to Be Done identified will converge with the practical everyday realities of your customers coming into contact with your product or service.

You will use everything you’ve got (and then some) to map out an actual customer journey for each JTBD you identified. One at a time please! Mapping is complicated and demanding work that has to be laser-focused on one Job.

What goes into a CX map?

The short answer: everything.

As the customer works through the process of realizing their problem to finding a solution that solves it, everything they do, think and feel will be reflected in your CX map.

It’s usually a combination of what already happens (if you have customers) and how you want it all to happen ideally, or “what good looks like” for you.

Here, you will also define the KPIs you will use to measure the successful transitions of your customer from one phase of the CX map to another. This is key—you’ll need to know whether what you’re doing is working!

Decisions, Decisions…

Once you have the CX map ready, it’s decision time. You have the full customer journey of your ideal customers right in front of you. What are you going to do with this information?

• What gaps have you identified, and what opportunities?
• Are there any low-hanging fruit?
• What can you improve for your customers with the least effort?
• Which changes would take more time but have a bigger payoff for serving them?

If you are working with a Customer-Led Growth consultant like myself, at this stage I would be drafting strategic recommendations for you based on everything learned in the previous phases of the project.

Depending on your needs as a client, the recommendations may include a messaging guide leaning on the customer research we’ve done, onboarding sequence recommendations, homepage revamps, additional marketing opportunities and more. All of them will centre your ideal customers and rely on their journeys to help your business grow in a sustainable way, long-term.

The Power of Customer-Led Growth

You can repeat this process for any specific problem or business opportunity. Most commonly, you would tackle other Jobs to Be Done you’ve identified and develop product and service improvements for customers with those Jobs.

The more you do it, the better and faster it gets!

For instance, depending on various deadlines and the responsiveness of a client’s customers, I can deliver the initial Customer-Led Growth project in under seven weeks. If this sounds like a long time, believe me, it’s not… because if you’re taking care of it in-house, it’s likely to take longer since you’re juggling other responsibilities. But it’s still worthwhile!

If you can, have a CLG consultant on your side so that you can be supported in the implementation. Operationalizing the philosophy of Customer-Led Growth will have lasting positive effects on how you serve your customers and grow your business.

The post Customer-Led Growth Explained Step by Step appeared first on SMM Headquarters.

Put simply: unusable research is trash.

Harsh? But it’s true.

No matter how thoughtful, well-targeted or brilliantly executed your research efforts are, they’re ultimately useless if they don’t move the needle for your product and your company.

So should you not do it at all?

I strongly believe that it’s better to do research and fail than not do it at all.

If you’ve got time and budget to learn from your mistakes, please allow me to help you make the best of the first round. My Research Power Hour was created specifically for this.

If you’re determined to do it right (and who wouldn’t be?), start with an understanding of how you will move forward with the insight gained from research.

Every research effort, no matter how small, should begin with clarity on “What will this do for us?” and “How are we going to act on this information?”

Until you can answer both of these questions, resist the temptation to get busy.

Try nothing without a plan.

The post Customer research has to be usable appeared first on SMM Headquarters.

There’s something to be said about moving faster, especially when you’re seeking clarity on who your best customers really are. It’s tempting to think you can handle everything in-house as a product leader. Truth be told, you and your team are already doing quite a bit.

So why should you consider bringing in a dedicated customer researcher to refine the knowledge you’ve got, instead of tackling it yourself? A few compelling reasons:

Speed

First and foremost, speed matters. When you’re on a mission to understand your customers better, time can be of the essence. Someone solely dedicated to the research can significantly expedite the process. They know the ropes, the shortcuts, and the most efficient ways to gather insights.

Focus

Another critical factor is focus. You have a packed calendar with a dozen other pressing priorities. If you decide to squeeze in customer research there, it’s going to compete for your attention. Hiring a dedicated researcher means you’re bringing in someone who’s laser-focused on solving that one specific problem. No distractions, no juggling multiple tasks—just unwavering attention to the task at hand.

The Exact Insight You Need

Have you ever found yourself drowning in data and not finding that one nugget of information you needed? It happens. When you hire a dedicated researcher, they will steer the research towards the precise information you need, before research even begins. They know exactly what to look for and how to find it, giving you the insights you need to move forward.

Bringing in someone dedicated to one problem allows them to dive deep, find answers efficiently, and do it with minimal hiccups. Could you do it yourself? Absolutely, and you’d probably do a great job too. It’s just that it might take you significantly longer, with a lot more effort, and potentially with a bit less precision.

Some might see research as a time-intensive endeavour. It is; it’s also one that’s perfectly suited for delegation. Let someone experienced handle the heavy lifting—trust me, it’s worth it.

The post When you need customer insight, fast appeared first on SMM Headquarters.

In 2022, I helped my clients serve their ideal customers better and give them value in the shortest possible amount of time.

Here are some numbers.

In 2022:

• I worked with 8 clients for an average project duration of 1.5 months. Here’s what a typical engagement looks like.
• I ran 40 customer interviews. That’s just over 24 hours total spent talking to my clients’ customers. A full day!
• I parsed 69 interview transcripts, including those of the interviews I didn’t conduct myself. I need between an hour and an hour and a half for each transcript to fully process it, so that’s, um, just over 100 hours on parsing alone!
• I analyzed 375 customer survey replies. It takes me on average two to three minutes to parse the themes from each response, so that’s between 750 and 1125 minutes total, or up to 19 hours of non-stop analysis.
• And to analyze, crystallize and prepare recommendations based on all that data… Can’t even begin to count the hours. Won’t even try!

In 2023, I have plans to do so much more!

2022 has been my best year yet, both in terms of fulfilling work and the income I earned from doing it.

It’s a nice trend that I hope continues next year. I’ll make dang sure of it.

Onwards!

-Katya Ryabova

SMM Headqurters owner

The post 2022: A Year in Review appeared first on SMM Headquarters.

Interviews or surveys?

I use these two in strategy work. These are the only two I’ve used. There may be other, hybrid, ways of getting your customers’ answers to research questions, but interviews and surveys are the tried and tested ones.

I think of interviews as a way to gather very rich, detailed stories from a select few customers. Less poetically, I have to rely on interviews when my client doesn’t have enough customers to warrant a survey.

Surveys are great at reaching customers en masse. Who has the budget or the leisure to run two hundred interviews? Sending a well-worded customer survey, on the other hand, is straightforward and useful. Surveys tend to get less detailed answers but have the potential to serve up patterns more readily than interviews.

So what do I mean when I say that the decision to go with one or the other is usually made for us?

How many customers we have is the defining point. # of customers = # of potential respondents, however, not every customer is an ideal one, so the actual number of people you want to reach is always smaller. It can get so small that you can’t hope to send them a survey and be done with it. You will get all the brevity of a Typeform response and none of the patterns you were hoping to see.

On the other hand, you can have such a faithful, eager customer base (great news) that your interview list grows unmanageable and you risk sinking all of your time into a massive interviewing project that ultimately yields the same insights as a good survey would.

These are general points, certainly, and each research project differs. Of course, we have the power to choose. Regardless of how many customers we are hoping to talk to, we can say: “Interviews only” or “Survey or bust”. But the tool you use must serve you, not the other way around.

I’m working on a project right now where I’m seeing very clearly the shortcomings and the strengths of both approaches.

Generally, my advice about choosing is this:

For a company with few customers or a very small pool of ideal customers, go with interviews right away. Go for nuance, context, really dig into your customers’ struggles and motivations. For a company with a large customer base, start with a survey that includes a question about a follow-up interview. If the survey doesn’t provide the depth of the insights needed, you can draw from the respondents for a round of interviews.

Ultimately, as long as you got the answers you need, you have chosen correctly.

This essay first appeared in my monthly newsletter sent to an audience of marketers and founders. Subscribe to be the first to read what I write next.

The post Surveys or interviews? appeared first on SMM Headquarters.

What can I say?

When I was writing a similar post just a year ago, I hoped 2021 would be different from 2020. There was a sense of hope and of turning the corner despite the COVID-19 pandemic still raging. It was supposed to be a new year in which vaccines were arriving and businesses were coming back to life.

So 2021 *was* different from 2020 but it was a different shade of dark—it felt like an incredibly hard, endless and at times a hopeless year that seemed to pass in a blink of an eye.

Putting my business aside for a moment, I want to acknowledge the collective and individual suffering we have all been going through this year. The COVID death toll around the world; the discovery of unmarked residential school graves in Canada; the ongoing threat to abortion rights in the United States; and more, and more, and more. The barrage of tragedy seems at times endless and with the new omicron variant swooping in just before the holidays, the outlook on the beginning of 2022 is looking grim.

But.

I believe things will get better. Not as quickly as I may want, but they will. And after all, I’m not here only to complain about 2021 but also to summarize the good that happened in it—and there was plenty.

How it started

SMM Headquarters entered 2021 as an agency focused on SEM and PPC as its core service. I, as its owner and lead consultant, grew my portfolio of Google Ads clients, maintained and expanded my certifications, and looked to the future as a PPC expert.

Little did I know that in spring my professional world would once again flip upside down with the certification I earned in Customer-Led Growth. It opened my eyes to the many possibilities in overall strategy and direction of growth that so many companies miss by forgetting to focus on their customers.

The possibilities exist not just beyond paid ads but alongside them too. The Customer-Led Growth framework reminded me why I couldn’t help certain clients reach the best results when we simply didn’t know who we were talking to and how we were trying to reach them.

So I think it counts as another pivot when I decided to go all in on CLG.

How it’s going

So far, in the second half of 2021, SMM Headquarters and I:

• Focused on understanding my clients’ customers and the strategy to reach them as a whole;
• Worked on intensive, Customer-Led Growth informed projects for several SaaS and non-profit clients in partnership with Elevate;
• Stopped accepting clients for “straightforward” Google Ads management projects that didn’t include at least a component of Customer-Led Growth to do research and identify customer “jobs to be done”;
• Conversely, I moved away from discussing Google Ads in my newsletter, LindkedIn and Twitter, talking more about growth, research and strategy instead.

Right now, I am working on marrying the knowledge and experience I have with Google Ads to Customer-Led Growth. CLG for PPC, anyone?

Exciting? You bet!

What’s in store for 2022

Reading my end-of-year posts is a great reminder that I’m notoriously bad at predicting what’s going to happen.

(This is also a great lesson to learn when doing customer interviews—never ask your interviewee to predict the future as people will usually be wrong!)

I can only plan for a year filled with determination and working smart, not hard. My eyes are on the prize of bringing the customer to the fore of my clients’ attention. Building a product or service with your best customer in mind can be a life-changing decision that transforms an entire business. I would like to see more companies adopt customer-led thinking while recognizing the challenges it brings and the changes it requires.

Not predicting anything more than that or else I’d read this post in a year and think, “Oh my sweet summer child Katya, little did you know…”

Although I’m sure that’s going to happen regardless.

Season’s greetings to you and yours 🎄

I wish you all a wonderful new year filled with hope, new opportunities, prosperity and, most importantly, health. Please take some time off, rest and disconnect. You deserve it.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and I will see you in 2022!

With love,

Katya Ryabova

SMM Headqurters owner

The post 2021: A Year in Review appeared first on SMM Headquarters.

That’s right, any business.

There are no exceptions. Whether a solopreneur or a mature corporation, a business that regularly talks to its customers gains an advantage over those that don’t.

It could be as little as a couple of interviews or one short survey that gives you a breakthrough.

It could also be a hundred interviews and many surveys. Still, each one you do will get you closer to understanding why your customers buy from you.

As long as you’re asking the right questions, of course.

This is where leaning onto the Jobs-to-Be-Done framework can help. At its most basic, it relies on the idea that your customers are hiring your product or service to complete a specific “job” to make progress in their lives. They are always switching to you from something else, even if this something is inaction/doing nothing.

In your customer interviews/surveys, focus on questions like:

❓ What happened in your customers’ lives that they realized they had a problem that needed solving?

❓ What pushed them towards starting to look for a solution?

❓ Which solutions did they consider?

❓ What made them choose you as the solution to evaluate?

❓ What made them sure you were the solution for them?

❓ How are their lives different now that they are your customer?

Focusing on this journey of circumstances and decisions, you will be able to glimpse a more complete picture of how your customers became your customers.

Asking what was going on in their lives before they found you gives you an understanding of:

• Their problem
• What solutions they used to solve it (again, no solution counts as well)
• The trigger that pushed them past their breaking point

Once you know that, you can dig into the context of how they evaluated potential solutions, including yours.

• What made them choose you in the end?
• How did it literally change their life?

Because it did, even in a small way.

The combination of Problem + Solution + Desired Outcome is the Jobs to Be Done approach.

P.S. Want a little help with knowing exactly what questions to ask? Book a call with me.

The post Jobs to Be Done for Customer Research appeared first on SMM Headquarters.

Note: I wrote this post with small business owners in mind who are just starting out on Twitter. The advice below follows the same focus throughout.

POST LAST UPDATED: August 10, 2021
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: February 28, 2017

So here you are, finally on Twitter and ready to start sharing all about your great business. You are probably asking yourself a lot of questions right now.

How do I tweet? What do I say? Most importantly, what to tweet first?

Just like any other social network, Twitter requires a bit of getting used to. Its format is unique since tweets are limited to 240 characters, there are hashtags to worry about, and everything you post will be public*.

*Unless you mark your profile as private, which we do not recommend for business accounts.

First impressions matter on Twitter. Your first tweets will not only teach you how to use the platform but also set the stage for your account and pave the way for your first followers and likes.

So today, we are going to be talking about the first tweets! No matter what kind of business you run, there are things for you to tweet about, and some of these things should definitely be included in your first few tweets.

How Twitter Tries to Help New Users

Twitter offers a little tour for new users. The tour directs you where to click to access the most important parts of the platform like your profile, the settings, and your home feed.

It also invites you to send your first tweet at the end of the tour. Twitter is very understanding about you being new, so it kindly provides ideas for you to try with your first tweet.

As you can see, both tweet suggestions include a hashtag (#MyFirstTweet). If you decide to include it in a tweet, you can then click on the hashtag and see who else just got started on the platform.

Unfortunately, this template is what every new user sees. There is nothing wrong with tweeting this message, but in all honesty, it is pretty boring and tells the world nothing about you or, most importantly, about your business.

Sherpatax is an amazing free tax tool for Canadians, but you wouldn't know it from their first tweet! (Thankfully, they have tweeted plenty great things since.)

Don't let your first tweet go to waste!

What to Tweet First as a Small Business Owner

So what should your first tweet say? Here are the five things that you could talk about. Some of them are perfect for the first tweet, and some can be used to craft your second, third and even fourth tweet.

1. Introduce yourself

This should be your very first tweet. Introduce your business and express excitement about it. Feel free to say that you are excited to be on Twitter too!

2. Be informative

Offer vital information about your business as soon as possible. This could include where you are located or where you operate, your value proposition, what you will be tweeting about, why your clients love you, and more.

 3. Immediately show how to get in touch with you

You need to outline concrete steps towards getting to know you beyond your Twitter feed. List business hours to encourage customers to come in. Share the link to your website for people to learn more. Provide a portfolio link so that visitors may see your design work right away.

4. Find peers and say hi

Twitter has made connecting with business owners in the same industry so much easier. There is no reason why you shouldn't do this from the get-go! Your peers are more likely to engage with you and follow you back at the very start of your Twitter journey.

 5. Post a photo

Tweets with images get the most engagement, and for a good reason. A photo catches immediate attention and helps provide an immediate link between a Twitter account and a business behind it. So let it!

Post a photo of your store, restaurant, studio or office. Snap a photo of your product. Share a smile on camera. The key here is not to be sales-y, but informative and entertaining.

First Tweet Ideas

The pointers above should give you plenty of ideas about what to tweet! But if you are still stuck, not to worry, the team at SMM Headquarters is here for you 🤓

We came up with 5 first tweet examples for some (fictitious) small businesses. Simply click the link to tweet! If what you do doesn't quite fit any of the categories below, let us know and we can brainstorm together.

First tweet for restaurant/café owners (112 characters):

Tweet: We are open for business Mon-Sun 9 am-6 pm. Come in for the best espresso this side of Don Valley! #coffeelovers

First tweet for freelance writers (98 characters):

Tweet: Seems like it's finally time to spend my lunch break setting up Twitter. Now back to writing I go.

First tweet for designers (124 characters):

Tweet: Hiya Twitter! Violet has finally joined. Graphic design is my life, so I will be sharing lots about that here. #myfirstTweet

First tweet for a consulting/service business (114 characters):

Tweet: We are Consulting Inc and we help other businesses be their most productive day in, day out. Feel free to connect!

First tweet for an e-commerce business (112 characters):

Tweet: Welcome to Awesome - our store is now open! Browse www.AwesomeShop.ca 24/7 and let us know how we can help!

Happy Tweeting!

P.S. Want to know exactly what your customers want to hear on Twitter? With our new "Start Talking to Your Customers" worksheets, you can! Check it out 👇

The post You Must Be New Here: What to Tweet as Your First Tweet appeared first on SMM Headquarters.

At the core of CLG, there are just three components:

• Targeted customer research;
• The top-priority customer’s Job-to-Be-Done definition;
• The top-priority customer’s experience/journey map.

Yes, just three. But pretty big ones, right?

Once you have them, you can use them to solve any number of business problems. Working through the CLG framework opens your eyes in a way—it highlights both the gaps and the opportunities that exist in and for your business.

A common one is customer acquisition. Addressing churn. Closing sales. Turning one-time purchasers into lifelong customers. Creating a referral program. And so many more!

“Customer-led growth” is a SaaS-inspired term coined by Georgiana Laudi and Claire Suellentrop from Forget the Funnel. Think “product-led growth”, “sales-led growth”, “marketing-led growth”—these are all popular models in the technology sector. Even though CLG is also “something”-led growth, it is not meant to replace these models, but complement them. I believe it can work in perfect tandem with a sales-led company and a marketing-led startup alike!

Customer-led growth can work in perfect tandem with a sales-led company and a marketing-led startup alike.

I’ll go even further and say that being customer-led lays the solid foundation for your company to make a conscious decision to become anything-first. And then rock it, own it and win at it.

CLG is not synonymous with marketing strategy but it is a great framework for developing a superb one. This is what got me interested and what ultimately sold me on CLG. This is also how I’m planning to apply it—by helping companies write and execute marketing strategies that are perfectly unique to their customers and their product or service. See my newly updated Services for more details.

CLG sounds straightforward—gather and analyze research, apply the Jobs-to-Be-Done theory to the findings, create a Customer Experience Map, then make decisions—and it is. But this doesn’t mean it’s easy. It’s time- and resources-intensive, taxing and plain hard, which explains why many companies aren’t doing it. But it’s also incredibly important and rewarding to do!

And I strongly believe more businesses should.

Book a call with me to talk customer-led growth.

The post Customer-Led Growth (and why I believe it’s the way forward) appeared first on SMM Headquarters.

Is it a business plan? A 5-year roadmap? A portrait of a target customer? A combination of the above?

The way I understand it, a strategy is one big & audacious business goal and a step-by-step plan to achieve it.

And no, “making money” is not an audacious enough goal.

Besides the goal, there is also a plan. Having a strategy means having a plan. So, for simplicity’s sake, let’s call it a plan from now on.

Your business needs to have a plan. The Plan.

You may have started your business with an idea and a desire to make money. Good! Probably, that sort of worked. (Otherwise, you wouldn’t be in business right now.)

You are making money, growing in spurts, you have employees or contractors. Things are moseying along. But you have this vague feeling that it all isn’t very planned or proactive. Sounds right?

Well, you’re not alone. I see this all the time. It’s common among micro- and small businesses that I work with, but isn’t limited to them. I actually believe it’s the norm across the board.

So, many businesses don’t have The Plan. They don’t have a clear direction they’re moving in. Because “We want to make money” isn’t a clear direction. It’s the reality of staying in business. You can make money without a plan, as you know—because you’re already doing it.

That’s kind of the hardest thing about all this—lotsa companies succeed without. Succeed somewhat. Succeed despite of.

But imagine succeeding with purpose. Proactively. Growing bolder, being better, achieving a purpose beyond staying solvent. Imagine having a clear direction and a plan. The Plan.

That’s what I want for your business. You would be one of the very few.

The post What’s a strategy anyway? appeared first on SMM Headquarters.