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Recently, we completed a comprehensive market research project for a SaaS company with more than 9,000 paying customers. The goal was to better understand their customers’ needs, behaviors, and pain points and deliver insights that would drive product improvements and growth.
This article outlines the six strategic steps we took to deliver a data-driven, actionable report that gave the company's founders the clarity needed to make key decisions.
Step 1: Strategic Email Campaign Setup ✉️
The first challenge in any research project is obtaining valuable data. For this SaaS company, the key was to create a system for gathering actionable feedback directly from their customers. Given the large customer base—more than **9,000 paying users**—the strategy required a systematic approach to segment and engage users effectively.
Segmentation: Understanding Your Audience
To begin, we segmented the customer base into two key groups:
1. Enterprise users: Organizations using the product at scale, likely with multiple team members interacting with the tool.
2. Individual consumers: Smaller businesses or professionals using the product independently or in smaller teams.
Segmentation is critical to ensure that the outreach effort is both personalized and effective. Enterprise users typically have more complex needs and are likely to have different use cases compared to individual consumers. Therefore, the feedback from these two groups would differ significantly, and targeting them with the same messaging would dilute the quality of the insights gathered.
Crafting a Multi-Touch Email Flow
We developed two distinct 3-part email flows aimed at soliciting different types of engagement from these user segments:
1. A flow that encouraged users to book a call for a more detailed discussion of their needs and experiences. This approach was designed to foster deeper conversations.
2. A flow designed to drive responses to a Google form survey. The goal was to gather more quantitative feedback, leveraging the larger volume of customers to capture broader trends.
Each email was strategically timed and framed in a way that communicated the value of participation for the customer. For example, we positioned the calls as an opportunity for customers to shape the product roadmap, while the survey emphasized the convenience of quick feedback for users.
Why Two Approaches?
The dual email flow strategy enabled us to test response rates and compare the quality of insights derived from the two channels.
Here’s what we found:
- Surveys generated more responses, providing a higher volume of data.
- Calls offered deeper insights, with more qualitative information that helped us understand the 'why' behind certain customer behaviors.
Despite the higher volume of data from surveys, we found that calls were more valuable for delivering actionable insights, which led us to prioritize them in the final stages of the project.
Results:
- We successfully scheduled dozens of calls with users, which allowed us to delve deeply into their pain points, product needs, and feature requests.
- Surveys provided useful supplementary data, but the calls were pivotal in identifying more detailed opportunities for product and pricing optimization.
Step 2: The Calls – Extracting Deep Insights 📞
The most critical part of any customer research initiative is direct user engagement. While surveys provide breadth, calls provide depth—allowing you to explore the underlying reasons behind customer preferences and behaviors.
We structured each call to ensure it was efficient yet comprehensive, maximizing the value we could derive in 20-30 minutes.
Structuring the Call
A structured approach was essential for consistency across all calls. Our framework involved three key components:
1. Introduction: We started each call with a brief introduction, asking for the customer’s name and use case. This helped set the context for the conversation and allowed us to tailor subsequent questions based on their specific use of the product.
2. Focusing on Pain Points: We quickly shifted to identifying areas where the product wasn’t meeting expectations. This included asking questions like:
- What’s one thing you wish our product could do better?
- Are there any features you find particularly challenging to use?
These questions were followed by genuine curiosity as the best insights often come from follow-up questions.
3. Exploring New Feature Requests: We also probed into potential feature requests and areas where customers thought the product could improve:
- What feature would make your life easier?
- Have you found any workarounds to compensate for missing functionality?
The goal was to focus not only on what customers disliked but to also understand the underlying reasons behind their concerns.
Digging Deeper: Uncovering Hidden Insights
Whenever customers mentioned a pain point, we asked follow-up questions to drill down and uncover deeper insights. For example:
- Pricing too high? We asked, "Why do you feel the price is too high?" and "How often do you use the product?"
- One customer explained they needed to use the product more frequently because of the nature of their role.
- We further explored how their usage compared to other roles in their organization, leading us to realize that different job functions had varying use cases for the product.
Result: This led to the identification of a new buyer persona—frequent users whose job roles required more intense usage. Based on these insights, we recommended the company introduce a special pricing tier for these high-frequency users, a strategy that could help retain customers who otherwise might churn due to pricing concerns.
Step 3: Partnerships – Discovering New Growth Channels 🤝
Beyond understanding product pain points and feature requests, another key element we explored during the calls was the potential for **partnerships**. While the main objective of the market research was to improve the product, conversations with enterprise customers often revealed opportunities for business development that went beyond the immediate scope of the project.
Identifying Partnership Opportunities
As we spoke to customers, some indicated that they were using the SaaS product in conjunction with other software tools or platforms. In these cases, we explored whether there were opportunities for integration or strategic partnerships that could benefit both our client and the customer’s company.
Whenever a potential partnership was identified, we flagged it and set up a follow-up call between the client and the customer to explore the opportunity further.
Results:
- These discussions led to one high-potential partnership, with the potential to generate over $40,000 in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR).
- Beyond immediate revenue, these partnerships could provide an opportunity for the client to expand their ecosystem, offering complementary services and integrations that enhance the product’s value proposition.
Strategic Recommendation:
Our research uncovered that partnerships are a critical yet often overlooked growth lever for SaaS businesses, especially those targeting enterprise clients. By proactively identifying and pursuing partnerships during the market research process, SaaS companies can unlock new revenue streams and create additional value for customers.
Step 4: Capturing and Summarizing Key Insights – Building a Data-Driven Narrative 📝
Once we completed the calls, the next step was to turn the raw data into something usable. While the transcripts from calls provide the most granular detail, it’s essential to organize and summarize these insights in a way that makes them actionable for stakeholders.
Transcriptions: A Starting Point
Each call was transcribed to ensure that no insights were lost. However, a raw transcript alone doesn’t tell the whole story—it’s the analysis and structuring of that data that adds value.
What We Looked For:
- Feature Requests: Specific features or improvements customers wanted.
- Pain Points: Areas of frustration or difficulty users experienced with the product.
- Use Cases: How different customer segments were using the product.
- Trigger Events: What event or problem prompted the customer to search for a solution like ours?
Summarizing Key Themes
In addition to highlighting key quotes and findings from each call, we also wrote concise memos summarizing the most important takeaways. Each memo included:
1. The customer’s use case.
2. Specific recommendations derived from the conversation.
3. Any contextual factors that might influence how the feedback should be interpreted (e.g., whether they were a power user, a new user, or switching from a competitor).
Step 5: Airtable – Building a Knowledge Management System 📑
Once all the qualitative data was captured, we needed a system that allowed for easy analysis, filtering, and cross-referencing. For this, we utilized Airtable, a flexible database tool that allowed us to organize the data efficiently.
Organizing Data with Tags and Color-Coding
We tagged each call and survey response with relevant attributes, including:
- Buyer Persona: Whether the feedback came from an enterprise user, an individual consumer, or a specific job role like project manager or customer support.
- Feature Requests: Any new features the customer requested or suggested.
- Pain Points: Issues or challenges that customers reported.
- Use Case: How the customer was using the product (e.g., project management, customer support, etc.).
Benefits of the Airtable System:
1. Easy Filtering: The company could quickly filter by tags to see, for example, all feedback related to pricing concerns, or all suggestions related to customer support features.
2. Visual Representation: We used a color-coding system to highlight frequently occurring tags, making it easy to spot trends and patterns at a glance.
3. Comprehensive Overview: The Airtable allowed the client to see all feedback in one place while maintaining the flexibility to dive deeper into specific segments or issues as needed.
Outcome: The Airtable system became a living document for the company, enabling ongoing analysis and making it easy to track changes in customer needs over time.
Step 6: Delivering the Final Report – Actionable Insights for Decision-Makers 📖
The final step in any market research project is delivering the insights in a way that empowers decision-makers to act. Our goal was to create a report that was not only comprehensive but also actionable, allowing the company’s founders to prioritize and execute the most impactful recommendations.
Report Structure:
We structured the report into several key sections, each addressing different aspects of the research:
1. Buyer Personas: Detailed descriptions of the most important customer segments, including their use cases, pain points, and decision-making criteria.
2. Feature Requests: A ranked list of the most commonly requested features, each backed by direct quotes from customers. This allowed the company to prioritize product development based on actual customer demand.
3. Customer Insights: We included insights on why customers were asking for certain features.
For instance, we found that export functionality was a major pain point for many users:
- Upon further investigation, we learned that users were manually copying hundreds of email addresses from the tool into Excel sheets. This led to the recommendation of a one-click export button.
Making the Marketing Insights Actionable
To make it easier for the company to act on the insights, we broke down each marketing recommendation into four key dimensions:
- Time commitment: How long it would take to implement a recommendation.
- Cost estimate: The potential budget required for execution.
- Potential ROI: The expected return on investment for implementing the feature or change.
- Roadblocks: Any potential challenges or risks that could delay implementation.
Each recommendation was scored using a custom metric system, allowing us to stack rank them based on their potential impact and feasibility.
Creating Interactive Elements
To further enhance usability, we added interactive elements to the report. For example, the report included clickable links to call transcripts where relevant parts were highlighted:
- If the founders wanted to dive deeper into why a certain feature was requested, they could click on the corresponding quote and be taken to the relevant part of the call transcript.
Strategic Outcomes: Driving Clarity and Reducing Uncertainty 💡
By the time the founders reviewed the final report, they had:
1. Clarity on who their users are: Detailed buyer personas helped them understand their customer base more deeply.
2. A roadmap for feature development: The ranked list of feature requests, backed by customer quotes, allowed them to prioritize high-impact features.
3. Improved messaging and positioning: Insights from the calls helped them refine their product messaging, using the exact language customers used to describe the product.
4. Clear next steps for growth: The strategic recommendations on partnerships, pricing, and product improvements were accompanied by detailed plans for execution, including time commitments, cost estimates, and potential ROI.
Conclusion: Great Research = Better Decision Making = Growth 🚀
The insights gained from this market research project provided the SaaS company with the clarity needed to make informed decisions that would drive growth. By focusing on actionable data, the company was able to:
- Tailor its pricing model to meet the needs of different buyer personas.
- Prioritize high-impact features that customers were actively requesting.
- Discover new partnership opportunities that could generate additional revenue.
Great market research doesn’t just collect data—it drives action
When companies have a clear understanding of their customers’ needs, they can make better decisions, avoid costly mistakes, and ultimately, grow faster.
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