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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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