Good Day PROs!
In our work with over 50 middle market companies over the last several years, there is one role that we rarely see, yet it provides the highest compound returns to the business.
The "Investigative Journalist"
The specificity with which we need to message to our Ideal Customer has never been more intense.
Just a few short years ago, we could deliver mediocre content and messaging and still attract interest.
But with 10 petabytes of information created on the Internet every day, the noise has just gotten too extreme for our buyers to bear.
They just want answers. Relevant, very specific answers, to the problems they are trying to resolve.
The challenge is that the depth of knowledge our company has about the market has diluted significantly over time. With 20% annual employee attrition and modest growth, more than half our company is brand new in just a few years time.
So how do we create a common, consistent, deep understanding of the Buyer that permeates every level of the organization?
The "Investigative Journalist"
Pieces of this role already exist today in our Company.
Listening to sales calls (but for training, not insights)
Win/Loss analysis (let's be honest, only when the Board asks for it)
Customer interviews (when Product wants to build something)
Marketing interviews (for testimonials)
Customer Success QBRs (too often a monologue by us)
The issue, however, is that this function is a part of many jobs, which means it is the first to fall off when the daily tyranny of operations overwhelms our small teams.
Buyer Advocate
Just like a real investigative journalist, this person does not necessarily have to be an expert in the industry (but that will happen, at first slowly and then suddenly).
They do, however, need to persistently pursue a broad and deep understanding of the Ideal Customer to be able to synthesize answers to questions like:
What are the typical organizational structures and how does those structures amplify the problems solved by our product/service?
Who are the common stakeholders involved and what other priorities do they typically have to balance?
What are the non-product related obstacles that often take implementation off the rails?
Where do various members of the Buyer Group go to learn and seek guidance?
The market is changing rapidly, so competition is changing rapidly so our Buyer's needs are changing rapidly. We can't afford to run our entire revenue engine on a perspective of the Buyer that goes stale in as little as 6-12 months.
The Allocation of Capital
The CEO's number one job is allocating capital (for which they are stewards) to deliver compounding returns on that capital.
In the software and services space, that capital is people and where they spend their time.
Can you think of a higher-returning investment than an intimate, firm-wide understanding of the Buyer?
An understanding that is shared uniformly by junior-level marketers, brand new sales reps, product managers, support leaders … literally everyone in the Company?
And this understanding is always-on and always up to date?
Powerful.
Where Does This Role Live Within the Org?
Marketing? Product? RevOps? Directly to the CEO?
Ideally, the person holding this role can operate autonomously, being able to "float above" the revenue engine with an access badge to every corner of the revenue engine.
Having said that, this role most likely lives in Marketing, sometimes as a replacement for a Content Marketer.
However … if you decide to pivot the Content Marketer role, be very careful that you have a solution for the production side of content, or you will lose the impact of this role to the tyranny of daily operations.
We have seen, in rare cases, where Product has a "voice of customer" role. But in our experience this role is in service to helping Product build stuff vs democratizing information about the buyer … Advocating for the Buyer … across ALL departments.
Does your firm have a version of the "investigative journalist?" We would love to hear about it! Email us and fill us in.
We would also love to see you follow gtmPRO on LinkedIn!
Thanks and have a great weekend!
