By Jeff Shelton, Revenue.io’s Chief Product Officer
The Revenue.io product team always keeps a pulse on the market and customer needs. Data driven product teams use information from multiple sources and listening posts to create a cohesive strategy. At Revenue.io we achieve this feedback at scale by using Revenue.io’s mobile coaching app, ConversationAI.
It’s no secret that one of the key mandates of any product team is to source customer feedback…but what does prove to be a more elusive concept is how to actually get this feedback in a meaningful and scalable way.
To me, the essence of product management is about creating listening points and using those as key inputs for roadmap prioritization. But how do you create and hone in on these key moments at just the right time? And how do you carve out the time to do so?
I’ve found that being closely aligned with our sales, support, and marketing teams by using our own calls as a data point I am able to do this efficiently with ease — I am able to do this with efficiency and ease.
By analyzing calls using ConversationAI, I’m able to correlate trends in the market by understanding and aggregating swaths of customer use cases, feedback points, feature requests, and more. We have made material investments in our platform based on this feedback, such as our new Sequence platform. Our investment in sequence was validated by tracking trends in customers needing a voice and email solution in a single platform across various stages in the buying lifecycle.
And it’s not just customer conversations. Since we leverage our own technology in-house across all departments, we often dig into how our Sales team is using the platform and what they are hearing on conversations, because this is one of the best ways to get direct customer feedback. Additionally, it can also be used as a training tool to see where we need to focus product training with the team based on behaviors and ability to field questions. And a nice byproduct is that it fuels collaboration by isolating how reps are highlighting features and prompting new areas of value in our platform.
Further, we can use support conversations to understand where we can improve product usability and correlate trends in issues. We can use customer success calls and Voice of Customer software to extract areas to focus on and continue to provide value to existing customers. We can use calls aligned with marketing campaigns to understand how messaging is resonating in the market. We can track late stage revenue generation calls to ensure we are helping to get deals over the finish line. And the list goes on… For example, we can even use ConversationAI in hiring cycles to hone in on and breakdown interview calls to understand the sentiment of prospects.
No matter the context, your internal calls are the lifeblood to understanding the pulse of your business to execute tactical strategies based on understanding the market and your business at an intimate level.