Use Customer Evidence Drives GTM Success with Evan Huck
Evan Huck from User Evidence joins us to share the value of building scalable and relevant customer stories, and the challenges of making customer endorsements both authentic and impactful in a crowded market.
Thanks for tuning into this exclusive edition of GTM News Desk presented by the
TAC Network. This show is hosted by me, Nick Bennett, and my co-host, Mark Kill
ins.
Now let's get to the goods on with the show.
Our hi, we are back.
If you didn't listen to the first part of this conversation, Evan
absolute drops some serious knowledge as someone that was in customer marketing
as someone that values customers and has always talked to customers.
You have to listen to that.
But for those that are listening right now, we're going to be diving into Evan
's proven framework
when it comes to go to market with user evidence.
So Evan, what are your top three best practices when it comes to go to market
folks using customer
evidence in their marketing and sales strategies?
I'll share a recent example.
We did this report where we surveyed buyer sellers and marketers actually on
where there's this gap
in customer evidence. And the one thing I want to talk about is actually the
distribution of that.
So the report was great. We surveyed these three different audiences,
which was kind of cool to highlight the difference in opinions between buyers
and sellers and marketers.
For example, the sellers and marketers thought their website was the number one
source of information.
And buyers were like, "Nope, it's analysts review sites, customer stories."
So there's a bunch of examples like that. Another good one was marketers
thought that
fancy logos were the most important thing. And that was the very last thing
that mattered to buyers.
So this is going to be tactical guidance for folks that are thinking about
doing these kind of like
thought leadership, like survey based reports. Because I know we're going for
like media actual
advice here. So the two audience thing was cool. The comparing contrast,
obviously there's plenty
of interest, even just individually, there's lots of good stuff to talk about.
But having
additional opportunity to compare and contrast the two audiences, I thought
yield, it's a really
interesting insights. But the biggest thing I learned to this that I thought
was really clever
that our VP of marketing, Mark Huber did. So we had all the underlying survey
data that
informed the report. And then we pulled in basically influencers are like well
known
go-to-market experts to contribute their kind of thoughts and reactions. And
then we put those quotes
into their report, which made the report just a lot cooler and more interesting
. But the seeker
weapon and unlocked was we then had all these influencers as the distribution
channel to help
share the report when it went live. So you had like Devin Reed and people like
that that are
sharing it about way bigger audiences than that we do. And I think that like
when I'd done this before,
you know, last year, I'm just doing it through our own distribution network, we
generated like
45 leads or downloads on a similar report. And we were over 800 this time.
Obviously,
I got brands hopefully growing a little bit, but I think that influencer play
made a big
difference in enhancing amplifying the distribution of this report. And also
just adding
credibility because you have some knowledgeable known names kind of commenting
on the reports.
I love that. And funny enough, I have a book coming out in December that is all
about B2B brands,
how to leverage creators and influencers. And I talk about this specific play
because I've
done it on both sides. I've worked for B2B brands where I partner with creators
and influencers to
do something specific. And I saw similar results, which are fantastic. And then
as a creator myself,
I've also worked with brands to do similar and it's super interesting. So I'm
just more grateful
that you're even open. And I think obviously, I know Mark well, and I think
Mark does a fantastic
job with leveraging creators. He has a lot of amazing relationships, but it's a
fantastic play.
And I'm hopeful that more B2B brands start to go down that path too.
Yeah, it's super high leverage. I mean, I have like, and I remember my
marketing plan from the
game of the year, we had this abstract concept of like, we want to use influ
encers more. We didn't
know what that mean. And this was a good like tactical actual like usage of
that that I thought
made a big impact. Classic people for us go to market go to market tactic. It's
a great one.
It's a great one. We did similar things at drift, even hub spot. But I want to
go deep into how do
you build one of these thought leadership reports? How do you actually collect
the evidence to support
what you're saying in the report? This is interesting. And so my background
before
founding this company, User Evidence, I spent a long time at SurveyMonkey as
part of their
audience business, which was a market research based, you know, panel based
business. So for
this type of report, that's where it starts is like, you need to find an
audience, right? And
there's a couple ways to do that. And this is actually, ironically, our new
offering called
User Evidence Research Content is basically selling this, you know, methodology
. And there's
some technology behind it too on behalf of our clients to do reports like these
. But yeah,
this was the first one I've actually been involved in. So I learned a lot from
it. But from the
panel perspective, either you can build your own. So either, you know, you can
use your own
audience, which would be sending a survey out to your own LinkedIn or blasting
it out to your
email subscriber base or whatever. And that is one source. And then your other
source is third
party panel providers, which is kind of this ugly world of somewhat commod
itized, you know,
panel providers that all specialized in kind of different niches, right? Like
every monkey
audience was great for like B2C, if you wanted to get 18 to 21 year olds, you
know, opinion on which,
you know, Pamper's ads gonna be the most effective or something like that. But
you know, finding
comparatively scarce specialized P2B audience, like DevOps engineers or
something like that,
is a totally different scenario. So there's panel providers that specialized in
these kind of
different industry niches. And that's one thing that we're getting out is kind
of putting together
this network and make it easy to access. So you can find the right panel. But I
do like, on the panel,
that the lazy way to do it, which works is just go to panel provider, get your
responses and off
you go. I think there's a cool play to use both an external panel and owned
audience, because then
the survey collection piece can actually be a step in this campaign, like, Hey,
we want to hear
from you, Nick. And if you give us, you know, if you respond, you'll get early
access to the research.
And then the people that contribute to this report feel a little bit more
ownership of it, because
they've actually contributed to the data set versus just like seeing some
random data, and they never
were part of the study in the first place. So especially if you're, you know,
selling the same
audience that the study is going to come from. So ideally, you kind of synthes
ize both of these
data sources, own network and third party for random providers. The next step
is the questions.
And this was a learning experience for me. And I've been around surveys for
freaking 14 years.
So I have this hypothesis that like marketers think they're the shit on, you
know, generating
great content. But then if you go out of sales, people will be like, no, it
sucks. Like we have gaps
all over the place. And the way I friended the questions the first time, it
wasn't really the
case at all. I didn't support my hypothesis. I was like, Oh, shit, like, I got
to go back to
the well on this one. So I had to rejigger the questions, which is, you know,
it's a little
science on kind of, you know, leading the horse to water on what you want the
people to say.
And then the second time we did a much better validation of our overhead
offices. So that was one of the nice things about our offerings. We had an
opportunity to kind of
do a test sample to just like 30 responses to direction, see where it was going
. And then that
gave us time to change course before we had invested, you know, all this time
and money in the four
for it. So yeah, the questions, you know, obviously super critical hours of
extra conflases, because
we had to do it across three audiences so that we could normalize or compare on
some dimensions,
which was interesting. And then yeah, then a third report creation, you know,
analyzing and pulling
out the key themes, you know, hopefully molding it to your hypothesis and what
they want the
direction to say. And then you know, design, of course, and then the
distribution piece,
which we've already talked about is where I think a lot of the upside is to be
gained,
if you can, you know, nail the distribution.
I love this. It seems to me like we need to be doing a people first go to
market report,
Nick with Evan considering how aligned the go to market of both companies are
and how much we
believe in this, but we'll talk about that once you get back on surgery.
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, trust me, I'm a huge believer of that. But you
dropped so much knowledge.
We have one more question for you because this is something, you know, Mark and
I,
we deal with a lot of different companies all over. And what's the one piece of
advice you'd
give to leadership who's looking to up their game around using customer
insights in their go to
market strategy at the end of the day? I think we get so caught up as leaders,
like I spend,
you know, all day, every day around user evidence and like, I just assume
people speak
language and like they know the value of it. And I'm always shocked on two
fronts. You know, one,
on the more constructive front, like when you hear feedback from actual
customers,
particularly at scale and you start to really synthesize the kind of the key
learnings of what
you could do better. I think that challenges a lot of your assumptions. Like we
've made
radically different product decisions this year. And I've been around the space
for a while that
we're not my initial instinct that like I wouldn't have made unless I had like
a good amount of
direct evidence from customers that supported the fact that they wanted this
different direction.
So it was humbling. And yeah, I think listening to customers is obviously cl
iche, but you know,
if you're presented with a lot of customers saying the same thing, you know, it
starts to feel a
little work and pilling. I think the second thing is more on the positive side
and kind of harnessing
these the voice of these customers for marketing purposes. Customers are way
better at selling
your product and way better at telling the story than you are. And that's not
to say that all
customers like a lot of customers are like, yeah, we love the product, which is
, you know, fine. But
when you do it at scale, like you will uncover these gems of people that just
write these like
novellas around them. But like the most interesting use cases and cool
applications and
fantastic results, but casting a wide net is what helps you get there, right?
Like some of the
gems we found just by just asking, you know, people on scale what they think,
yeah, produce some of
the coolest stories and content and evidence and proof points. And you can tell
like the marketing,
you know, written quote, like, yeah, this increased our efficiency and stuff
like that versus the
actual like real ones that have some depth and substance. And I think like in
this day and age,
there is such demand and hunger for like interesting, depthful, authentic, real
stories versus just
this kind of, you know, sanitized, polished, you know, presentation of one. And
so yeah, I think
that's a huge opportunity and piece of advice to find a way to unlock it doesn
't even have to be
completely positive. And in fact, I think that helps credibility. If there's
some more honesty
and what the tool didn't do well, because it just, yeah, get it, it builds,
yeah, much more
credibility in that particular, you know, reviewer 100%. I was gonna say that
was always
something that I did like people were like, why would anyone write a negative
anything about you?
And I was like, listen, I don't care what you write those negative comments. If
you want to see
it as negative, will help inform future roadmap to make the product better.
Like, think about it.
Like if you go around, say everything is the best, it's like, it's the best
product ever.
How are you going to innovate and make the product even better than it already
is? Like,
you need that as fuel. And I feel like companies sometimes like to like shy
away from that. But
that was something I don't know. I always loved hearing what is the other side
to use on how we
can get better. And people didn't hold back. Like, there was things that I didn
't even think of. And
I used the product, I was a previous user of the product before going like
working there. And I
was like, didn't even think of that. Like, that makes complete sense now that I
hear someone else
saying it. So yeah, I'm bored for sure. Well, one funny story is like, we
obviously like do
surveys with our product on our own product. And there's this one dude, he's
like a VP of product
marketing and one of the biggest like lead contact providers out there. And he
always writes,
like he writes, he's like epic. Like the coolest customer story ever. And he
always gives us a
six on the MPS. He's like, what? It's like, this is transformative. It's driven
so much value. And
like, MPS is six. I don't get it. But anyway, it's got a button. Yeah, I mean,
you need like the real
deal. We're actually helping a customer build a page that's all about why you
should not. Yeah,
either. I'm, I love that. I think that's, that's awesome. That transparency
first not being afraid
to disqualify. I think that's, you know, a great example about a built and
trust and credibility
really. Thank you so much, Evan. I'm going to hold you and Nick to it. We're
going to do a people
first go to market research report. It's been long overdue. Love the stuff you
're doing
a user evidence. Thank you so much for the time. Awesome place guys. Appreciate
it.
Thank you for joining us for this exclusive edition of GTM News Desk. If people
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