While many traditional industry companies are on full-blown pause, Firetrace, a manufacturing company, is on fire, running their digital strategy better than ever.
Their digital push wasn’t from scratch. They had a digital strategy in place before, but the crisis has helped them accelerate that process and become leaders in the manufacturing space.
Their practices don’t only apply to manufacturing – what MJ Peters, VP of Marketing at Firetrace, does at Firetrace can be replicated and adjusted to any kind of company: SaaS, tech, e-commerce and more.
Their superpower? Customer listening.
Today we chat with MJ, and she tells us exactly how she got her team’s buy-in and the process they use for customer listening across departments.
In this conversation, we cover:
✅ What customer listening looks like
✅ How to get everyone in your team to participate
✅ What questions to ask customers to get a thorough persona
✅ What to do after customer listening
Let’s dive in!
Customer listening for developing a customer persona
MJ spends 10-15 minutes a day doing social listening and checking the pulse of the industry.
She looks at support tickets and quote requests in their CRM every day.
Pre-covid, she used to meet face-to-face with customers every few months. Marketers and business owners need to keep this connection with customers fresh. Needs change and personas change, and you won’t be able to know unless you speak to them regularly.
Every so often, they do customer listening sprints.
Their goal? Get 10 customer phone calls done in two weeks. They ask their customers about their perception of our brand or their opinion on the new product development roadmap.
We created a guide on how to do customer listening for your businesses’ content
What a customer listening conversation looks like
MJ’s customer listening process revolves around asking open-ended questions.
“I like to start with kind of easy questions, right to get people in the flow of the conversation,” MJ tells me “and then kind of progress from there. It’s all about taking cues from the customer. You don’t want to put your ideas in their head.”
She and her team use a report template, which they fill out before the call.
It answers questions like:
Who is this person?
What are you trying to learn from them?
What you going to do with that information?
Her team always knows the answers to these questions before starting a customer listening conversation.
Then, they prepare the questions they’ll ask the customer ahead of time.
They don’t always use all of them. But it’s good to have it well thought out because you’ll get the most out that person’s time.
After the call, they fill in a general summary of what they learned.
In the summary, they always include:
- What surprised them
- Pain points (ranked by importance)
- Quantification of the life impact
Quantifying the pain point is vital to good marketing.
For example, MJ works in manufacturing.
Let’s say she learned customers production process is causing them downtime.
And the person she’s talking to thinks that’s a real headache.
She asks them: “Can you quantify that downtime in losses?”
If they have a really high production plan, or a data center that has a service level agreement that they need to be up 99% of the time, 15 minutes of downtime a day could cost you millions of dollars.
Fifteen minutes of downtime might not be as big of a deal for other businesses
So it’s important to understand how those pains rank relative to one another and how they impact the customer’s life relative to all the other things they have to think about.
Then, they have board meetings or strategic marketing meetings or workshops, where they take all of that information and trying to make sense of it as a grou.
Things can be abstract in strategic marketing. So it’s good to get multiple perspectives on what it all means put that story together as a team.
How to train your team on customer listening
One of the first things MJ and her team did was host a two day in-depth training that covered both having the conversation and documenting it for marketing use.
Why is this important?
Because not everybody in a company has been trained in marketing.
It’s important to bring people along on that journey and show them what an effective customer listening conversation looks like. Also, they need practice.
“We actually had a couple of customers that were nice enough to join us for that training. And they kind of acted as our test subjects,” MJ says.
Their marketing team is in charge of product as well. A marketing and product team, if you will.
They’re a small business and they wear a lot of hats. However, they do try to get engineering involved in customer listening calls.
When I asked her how she gets all the teams involved, she told me:
“We definitely take a lot of input from our sales team. And then when we try to interpret the information, we’ll have all of the departments represented, including operations, including finance, or we’re talking about what this means for the strategy. Especially when it comes to the sales team, you can go out and get a lot of information from your customers and start to build up a story. They spend time with customers every single day. So there will sometimes be aspects of that story that don’t quite click with them. And they can usually give you great feedback on that with really tangible anecdotes.”
Case study: How MJ and her team took this research and created a webinar for her 2 audiences
Despite being a traditional manufacturing company, Firetrace has a strong digital presence.
They create a series of webinars to build their list and engage their audiences.
They were already digital before the crisis, but the sudden shift to working from home has helped them focus and accelerate their digital efforts.
Firetrace products are for end-users and distributors.
They run two separate webinar series, one for each.
They leverage theirHubSpot email lists to promote the webinars for the distributors. Attendance is high and the Q&As at the end of each webinar is very active.
On the end-user side, they reach outside of their company and bring in industry experts.
MJ uses Sales Navigator, which supposed to be for prospecting, to find industry experts to interview.
They get them on a webinar, chat about various industry topics for 45 minutes, and do a 15-minute Q&A.
They then use the recording to create blog posts and short organic social clips.
It’s a great way to accelerate your content engine.
According to MJ: “the only other key difference between those two groups is that we promote our distributor webinars exclusively through our own email list. Whereas with the end-user webinars, we will promote it using paid social media to amplify our reach.”
Why you should get your whole team involved in customer listening
It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in.
All content does better when you listen to the customer. Product does better when you listen to the customer.
Every person and every department has a different touchpoint with the customer. Unifying them helps create a customer persona that makes sense. Unifying your brains in this process helps create a strategy that will reach the right people and truly help them.
We created a guide on how to do customer listening for your businesses’ content
