questions you probably haven't asked customers

4 questions that you almost definitely haven't asked your customers (+ a fun project update)

794 people will get this email. My last edition got the highest number of unsubscribes I've ever had and it made me feel weird. But then a lot of people joined in their place.

Swings and roundabouts.

I treat this newsletter like it's a zine (the punkier version of the sensible sibling the magazine) and if you love that approach, forward it to someone and send them to this page?

Don't remember me or why you get this email? Scroll to the bottom to get a reminder.

A lot of the questions that you see on the internet for doing customer research are going to get you to skin-level answers

I used to be a journalist and specialised in writing magazine profiles

So customer research was an obvious opportunity for me when I started working in marketing

And here's 4 questions that you almost certainly haven't seen on those boring lists:

Question 1 – Party Joke

Imagine you're at a party with people who do the same job as you at different companies. What's a joke you tell about your work that has everyone laughing or crying?

Why it works:

Hidden in our humour, there’s often deep truths about our day to day

Question 2 – I could do your job

A total stranger thinks they know it all and could do your job easily. How do you describe the hardest bits of your job to them to prove them wrong?

Why it works:

The hardest parts of any job tend to contain pain points you may not have considered otherwise

Question 3 – Expectations vs Reality

When we booked this time to speak, you probably had some expectations about how it would go. What did you think I might ask you about that I haven’t so far?

Why it works:

There’s no way you can know how well you’ve covered the topic until you ask the customer where they’ve been left wanting to say something

Question 4 – Unknown Knowns

But it has its critics, right?

Why it works:

An old, dogged desk head at the Economist taught me this one when I interviewed her once. You can use this after any statement where a customer has expressed an opinion about their way of doing something. You don’t need to know what the critics say. Just sit back and wait for your customer to give you a valuable industry insight

She said only one person in her whole career had ever asked her what the critics were saying

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A quick observation: the best interview questions tend to set a premise before the question is asked. 1,2,3 here all do that. It's important to try to get an interviewee out of their normal patterns because patterns are the brain's way of protecting the ego

And letting the ego talk is how we end up with 1cm deep marketing output

Stay+

Marc

How is the Marc as a Service going?

Last week, I lost a bunch of subscribers after announcing that I had productised my own charisma into a service where every day I text you with a challenge, an entertaining message, a question, a song

Well, it turns out people also really liked that service and all 5 spaces went within 12 hours

And so far I've had a lot of fun and it seems like the people who bought have too. Some of the messages I've sent:

A custom mixtape
An agenda for a weekend of notworking
A helpful framework for strategy setting
A pixel art reproduction of someone's face in the style of their favourite game
A napkin math (we actually say fag packet in the UK – fags = cigarettes here) plan for someone's retreat

I don't know if I'll do another one after the end of this (I might) but this and the fact that I've started getting a lot of inbound requests for coaching and consultancy have made me wonder whether I'd like to do a similar (albeit higher ticket price) service where I coach people through navigating the post-playbook marketing career

I'm not sure yet. But I might do it. If it's interesting to you, reply because I really want to hear from you

Oh, P.S. I also was genuinely weirdly set off by the thing with people unsubscribing because it messes with me so hard and I turned it into a BIG BOY LITTLE BOY episode

Why are you even here? What is this newsletter? Who is Marc Thomas?

Some people may not remember why they signed up to this. It's probably one of these:

You saw me on LinkedIn
You saw one of my SaaS post-punk music videos somewhere
You're feeling like most of the SaaS marketing advice on the internet isn't actually going to work for you
You're frustrated the feeling that nothing you do to grow your SaaS gets the response that you want

If you nodded your head to one or more of those then trust me: you're in the right place.

Recently I've had kind of a Road to Damascus moment and stopped believing in 90% of the stuff I used to write about.

Now, I share about how you by understanding customers deeply you can give yourself permission to stray from the herd and produce stand out marketing that actually makes a difference to your growth.

I'm kind of on a journey myself working out what life is like 'post-playbook' and I'm using this newsletter as a way to work through that in public.

It's totally cool if you're not into it. There's an unsubscribe link below.

If you want to stick around and go on this journey with me: thanks so much.