So here’s the thing…
This case study is long.
I don’t even know if I should call it a case study to be honest. But the top two questions I get are, “How does this work?” and “What is the end result?”.
So I decided to answer those two questions with a real-life example. Here is a customer research project I ran with Rewind and how it moved the needle for them.
TL;DR
The Company
Founded in 2015, Rewind builds backup & restoration software for SaaS platforms. The company’s first product was an integration for Shopify. By 2021, the company had grown to over 100,000 customers across 100 countries, protecting multiple SaaS tools. They had recently raised a Series B for $65 Million USD.
The company generates a significant amount of revenue from inbound traffic but also leverages partnerships and some outbound activities. The marketing team was a mix of positions at the time of the research. Content marketers, demand gen, growth and product marketing roles.
I conducted the research with Ahmet Ozcelik, Product Marketing Manager for Rewind. He oversaw the go-to-market strategies for products that target developers and developer operations. He’s worked as a senior marketer for over a decade.
Fun Fact: I helped Rewind produce this vid, cause I’m still a marketer after all
What Triggered Customer Research
After their first round of VC funding, Rewind acquired another company called BackHub. BackHub had built an app that backed up and restored data for GitHub code repositories.
GitHub is one of the largest code repositories in the world, used by over 73 million developers. The executive team at Rewind was expecting big things after buying this new software. A big increase in sales.
It didn’t happen though.
Anxiety started to take hold among the sales team (and others). The prospects hitting the pipeline, didn’t match Rewind’s hypothesis of the ideal customer. Concerns began to surface that the messaging & marketing approach were off.
Ahmet Ozcelik, PMM, Rewind
“Even our digital marketing manager felt they didn’t have a good handle on who the customer was. We needed more research to hear what buyers were saying. As a team, we had some ideas but need verification from the customers.”
The “Listen to Sales Calls” Status Quo
Like many SaaS companies, Rewind does talk to its customers. Yet these conversations usually focus on product feedback or improving the customer experience.
Today’s SaaS companies are usually missing key insights about what’s happening in a buying journey, before a purchase. This can be what triggered the search for a solution, how they evaluated different options and any underlying concerns about using something new.
A veteran product marketing manager, Ahmet says a lack of qualitative insights to help marketing teams make better decisions, is nothing new.
“Before Rewind, I worked with a larger telecom company and also a smaller startup. I had not conducted many interviews before. I had always attended or listened to sales calls.”
Trying to understand customers from listening to sales calls, obsessing over CRM data, and turning to Google are common ways to solve knowledge gaps in B2B.
But this doesn’t translate to marketing success or an increase in revenue, for many reasons:
❌ These sources of information are contextual. They don’t focus on understanding a buyer’s purchasing behaviours & habits.
❌ All the data in your CRM & dashboards only tell you what happened, they will not tell you why things happened.
❌ Buyers spend 83% of a journey NOT interacting with a seller (Gartner).
The most effective marketing happens before a buyer starts looking for a solution. Yet, that’s not what happens in B2B today. Most marketing teams spend their budget on the tail end of the buying journey.
“Listening to sales, to be honest, is less effective because the point of that conversation is to sell something. You're a fly on the wall, just trying to get some insights, but the customer obviously is being sold to.”
Ahmet was very interested in conducting investigative interviews. He says his experience of sitting through endless sales calls, rarely produced insights that made a dent in marketing programs.
“In a sales conversation, you can maybe ask two questions related to marketing. And that's okay. However, speaking with a customer for 30 mins, with the structure Ryan built, brings significantly more value.”
Preparing for Interviews
I worked with the Rewind team (Marketing, Sales & Product) to define the ideal customer we should speak with and set research objectives. We listed out everything the marketing team wanted to understand:
All the reasons & rationales for buying the product
Details about their role & the company
Pains, priorities and anxieties in their role.
All the events which triggered the search
The customer’s buying timeline
After setting research objectives, I created a list of topics, aligned with each stage of the hypothesized buying journey. I do list out some questions but having a pre-determined list can be a crutch. Outlining desired topics creates room for an organic discussion. An endless list of questions can stifle the discovery of new insights.
Ahmet Ozcelik, PMM, Rewind
“Before our first conversation, I was leaning more towards listing the questions out and following a specific order. Your guidance was that it should be a conversation. There should be objectives but also room for flexibility.“
Booking & Conducting Interviews
After creating a list of customers, both Ahmet and I reached to people via email and LinkedIn. We invited customers to book a meeting for a 30-minute video call, recorded with their permission.
During each investigative interview, we try to capture the exact order of events in a buying journey, in as much detail as possible. I try not to gather personal opinions but behaviours. I want to understand the actions buyers took from identifying a problem, right to the actual purchase.
It’s normal for most people to give surface-level answers at the start of an interview. They struggle to remember details at first. Extracting the answers that marketing teams will need later on, is a process and can take practice.
“You were experienced in directing the customers, digging deeper into people’s answers.” says Ahmet. “Most people’s answers are quick; wanting to move on to the next question.
I noticed you went back to refine and focus the customers on what's important. We were trying to understand the reasons behind an answer, rather than immediately moving on to the next question”
Organizing Interviews Afterwards
I always take some short-hand notes throughout an interview, but it’s just to guide the conversation and ensure we cover the research objectives. To capture everything, I record and transcribe every interview.
Recording an interview is vital because the brain can only process so much new data and insights within a 30-minute conversation. Without a physical recording and transcription, you will not be able to successfully compare and distill the answers into actionable data.
Here’s a transcript of Ahmet & I chatting about this case study (it’s super meta)
Too often - I see product managers or product marketing managers scribble down a few sentences from a 30-minute conversation. That’s a missed opportunity and won’t provide any insights needed to help move the marketing needle.
I review all the recordings and transcription a second time and start to codify the answers. Once I find patterns, insights are bucketed into four categories:
Interviewees priorities, pains and anxieties
What happened in the business (or role) which triggered a search
How they researched for various solutions
How they evaluated the solutions
Turning Answers ➡ Actions
The final report had in-depth details about the average buying story for Rewind’s GitHub app. These reports are a significant amount of information, but every section has insights that a marketing team can use to upgrade their strategy.
It ain’t fancy but it gets the job done (Blacked out to hide proprietary insights)
“I actually thought the level of detail was too much at first. Then I noticed I would go back and re-read everything. It honestly surprised me”, says Ahmet.
“I wanted to refer back to the quotes, remember what customers said in their own words and the examples they gave in detail. I don’t think any of that would’ve been possible without the detail you provided.”
Along with a map of the buying journey, research reports also have:
Ideas for marketing campaigns
Topic clusters for content marketing
A list of keywords for both paid and SEO channels
Like most SaaS teams, Rewind already had campaign, content and keyword ideas. But what comes out of this process is different. These content ideas are aligned to how people actually purchased Rewind’s backup software.
And there was also a major discovery. Much of Rewind’s marketing for its GitHub app had been targeting an incorrect persona. Prior to this research, the various teams (sales, product, etc) had been describing the target buyer much differently than the one that emerged from this research.
Now we had the right persona and in-depth guide of how they purchase products like Rewind’s:
“The training or at least the methodology I’ve used throughout my career, is that personas are short & digestible. The thought process has always been that you give just enough information so that people (teams) are aligned”, says Ahmet.
“I’ve realized now you need both; personas and the larger story of how people are buying.”
A Marketing Overhaul
Most B2B marketing teams create buyer personas from very superficial data. If we’re being honest, they're often guessing what their ideal customer looks like.
After the research we did with Rewind buyers, a fully-informed persona emerged, replacing what the team had been using before.
But that was just the start. The other marketing assets created were:
The average buying story in the customer’s voice
New sales enablement materials for Account Executives & Partner Managers
New ad copy for paid search & display
Revised product & landing pages
Updated the listing in GitHub Marketplace
A before & after example of one copywriting change
The new research also allowed Ahmet to get product, sales, and marketing on the same page:
“We had deeper insights into the buyers purchasing our GitHub product. We also identified who we were NOT selling to. This was vital for speaking internally to other teams, so we weren’t facing a scenario where it’s “your idea, versus my idea”. The research gives us everything we needed to create alignment.”
The End Result: More Revenue
“We almost doubled the number of installs. It was consistent over a two-month period. So, not just a one-time hike.”
Ahmet Ozcelik, PMM, Rewind
After refreshing all the marketing materials, Rewind saw an immediate uptick in product installs. Direct attribution is always hard but Ahmet is pretty certain the new messaging across the most active channels, led to the increase.
A new content marketing strategy was also hashed out. The research we conducted identified twelve different themes and campaign ideas, which Rewind can now use to influence different stages of the buying journey.
Having worked in a variety of B2B settings, where marketers lacked their own customer research, Ahmet says customers interviews will be essential going forward.
“Now I’m a big believer in customer interviews as a process for insight creation. And the insights are direct and gathered quickly, which creates a competitive advantage”, says Ahmet.
“It puts you are ahead of the competition.”