📂 Use surveys to find patterns in value propositions and buying triggers

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📖 The following is an excerpt from my work-in-progress book, Founding Marketing. It's a (very) rough draft of thoughts, notes, and research... so feel free to reply with your feedback on what I should expand more on and what needs to be clarified. Enjoy!

Surveys tend to be pretty polarizing. Love em or hate em. Work or don’t work. I think they’re especially useful for mass collection of both qualitative and quantitative data.

Surveys make for a great research tool if you:

• Can gather enough responses to deem it statistically significant or insightful
• Want to discover ideal customers or prospective customers to talk to directly
• Don’t have time or energy to talk directly with all the customers or prospective customers that you could
• Have a large audience you can tap into, such as a community, email list, or social media following

Many of the same questions covered in the video calls and face to face lesson can also be used in a survey format. In some cases, the person you’re talking to directly may not be able to recall the specifics of something to answer your question, but they’d be able to take the time to go back and jog their memory to give a really insightful answer via a survey.

For example, if you ask someone directly what their favorite blogs, newsletters, and podcasts are, they may list a few off the top of their head and then you’d have to pry some more to get them to list some more. Whereas if you ask someone this same question through a survey, they may be inspired to pull out their phone to list all their favorite podcasts, dig through email to find newsletters, and look in their browser bookmarks to find favorite blogs and websites.

Some widely-accepted survey best practices include:

• Make the survey about them, not you: Put yourself in the perspective of someone taking your survey and think about why they would want to take the time and energy to take it. Orient the survey around how their responses will benefit them. A great survey makes someone feel understood, appreciated, and achieved for helping you.
• Minimize the length and time required as much as you can:Data shows that the longer a survey is, the less time respondents spend answering each question. There’s a careful balance between length and brevity. Too few questions won’t give you the insight you need. Too many questions won’t give you the quality of insights you need.
• Order questions from easiest to most demanding: To support respondents to complete the survey and give the best answers they can, consider starting your survey with easier questions and then gradually increasing the difficulty of the questions. Starting with easier questions gets respondents engaged and encouraged so that when they get to the more demanding questions, they are more likely to give a sufficient answer.
• Design questions and potential answersto be as easy to understand as possible: Both super-specific and immensely vague questions are difficult to understand. Surveys can get over complicated very quickly. The goal is not to create the most intricate survey; the goal is to create the most insightful survey.

For more on survey design, Stripe Atlas’s Principles of effective survey design and Zapier’s survey design guide are both great resources.

Here’s the full survey I recommend running:

1. How would you feel if you could no longer use ?
   • A) Very disappointed
   • B) Somewhat disappointed
   • C) Not disappointed
   • D) n/a no longer use
2. What type of people do you think would most benefit from ?
3. What is the main benefit you receive from ?
4. How can we improve for you?

Now, don’t view this survey as having binary outcome. It shouldn’t be has or doesn’t have product/market fit. Think of it more on a spectrum where you’re just trying to get an indication of customers perception of you. It sums up both the perceived value and positioning of your product — because if they’re not disappointed, that means they must have something else they see as equally valuable or useful.

So, it’s not life or death. But I love it for a few reasons:

• The first question really gets to the heart of “how my customers feel about my product?” and “is it indispensable or a luxury?”
• The second question tells you what type of roles, functions, and companies they think would get the most value — which may validate or uncover new market opportunities.
• The third question gets to the heart of why they gave their answer for the first question and what they hold as valuable above everything else.
• And the fourth question provides them an opportunity to tell you how you can improve their response in the future to become more valuable.

And then you also want to ask demographic and firmographic questions as well like role and type of company, but this can be at the end of the survey.

After you’ve run the survey…

First: Segment.

• Find supporters and those who would be very disappointed.
• Identify those on the fence who would be somewhat disappointed.
• Store away and disregard (for now) those who wouldn’t be disappointed.

To increase your product/market fit score — and overall what to make of this new data — spend half your time doubling down on what users already love and the other half on addressing what’s holding others back.

So for supporters and those who would be very disappointed, find the patterns across:

• What kind of roles and companies find the most value
• Who they think would also get value (and if they’re people like them or not)
• What the main benefit they receive
• Areas for improvement

For those on the fence and who would only be somewhat disappointed, find the patterns across:

• What kind of roles and companies aren’t finding enough value
• Who they think would maybe get more value (and if they’re people like them or not)
• What the main benefit they receive
• Areas for improvement

Another interesting use case: Competitor surveys

Now, this is really only useful or appropriate when you’re pre-launch and especially when you’re trying to find SaaS product ideas worth pursuing.

You can run product-market fit surveys just like this on current solutions out there and potential future competitors.

I’ve seen Hiten Shah do this, and they did it a lot with FYI, their latest product, but it’s a genius move to gather data on competitors and really get into where the gaps are and how your product can differentiate.

And then if you’re really savvy, ask a question at the end if someone would be willing to talking to you personally over the phone so you can learn more.

I recommend running a survey like this at least once a year, if not more depending on how quickly you release new features or acquire customers.

—Corey

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