Episode Transcript
Asia Orangio (00:01.73)
Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of the In Demand podcast. My name is Asia Rungio and I'm joined by my lovely co-host Kim Talarzyk and we are both at Demand Maven. We work with SaaS PLG companies to troubleshoot slow growth when you've thrown everything against the wall and nothing seems to work. On today's episode of the In Demand podcast, we are going to talk all about why research projects fail and why they're actually a means to an end.
more than anything and we're gonna kind of take the approach of both consultants but then also of client because projects like this happen all the time internally but also you may hire consultants or hire people to help you with the research process but not all of those projects are successful and we're gonna talk about all the ins and outs of why. So yeah, I'll start there. Yeah, yeah, it's an interesting one. has been...
Kim Talarczyk (00:53.858)
Yeah, I'm excited about this one.
Asia Orangio (01:00.416)
inspired by many of the conversations that I've had when I went to Spark Together, which was a conference that happened a few weeks ago now. But it's also just based on anytime I talk to consultants about the work that we do or other like research consultants or people who provide insights, this question or these questions come up a lot around how do you make sure that you get buy-in on the research? How do you avoid scenarios where
clients hire you but then kind of reject the research that you do. There's all kinds of nuances and things that come up. And a lot of it is unavoidable, but some of it I think can be avoided in some scenarios. But then there's also the client side. So from the perspective of the client, when does hiring a research provider make sense? And also similarly,
Kim Talarczyk (01:42.605)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (01:53.346)
how do you ensure that projects like this don't fail and that you actually get what you need out of them? Because that's also like the double-edged sword as well.
Kim Talarczyk (02:01.836)
And then when you say fail, what does that mean?
Asia Orangio (02:04.694)
Yeah. to me, failure is, think there are different levels of failure. think that there's like delivery failure, which is you, for whatever reason, the provider can't provide the research or the insights. Maybe they literally can't get people on the phone or they can't, like they're not, they're unable to do their analysis and that can have, that could be due to a number of reasons. But there's also, beyond delivery failure, there's also like,
Kim Talarczyk (02:17.058)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (02:34.922)
impact failure where you conduct the research, then nothing happens after, or it's never really fully absorbed or translated to the rest of the team. It never unlocks something. It just kind of sits there as like in no man's land of, great, like you did it, but nothing happens after. So I think failure can kind of mean different things to different people, but that's how I think about it. It could be delivery failure or it could be like impact failure.
Kim Talarczyk (02:40.686)
you
Kim Talarczyk (03:01.005)
Yeah.
Asia Orangio (03:04.706)
which to me is, it's not the worst. think delivery failure probably sucks more, because like you've probably paid money and maybe not getting what you thought you were getting or what you paid for. But the other side is, I think where most tension gets created. ideally you want to avoid impact failure as much as you can, because it basically means like you spent resources for nothing or you spent resources, got value out of it, but that value didn't.
move to other departments or other functions or what have you.
Kim Talarczyk (03:37.282)
Right. Yeah. Cool. So then where do want to start?
Asia Orangio (03:42.061)
Yeah, yeah, I was just thinking the same thing. So I think we can start with the consultant side. And we can start here because I think that's the perspective that I know a lot of my peers are very curious about. So I get a lot of questions, for example, around how do you ensure that you are, like you're working with clients who are going to...
value what you do, but then also make sure that the project doesn't fail. Like they're actually gonna do something with it. And I think, just take a step back even further, I think the first thing is that it's important for consultants to understand that clients aren't hiring, like if we think about like jobs to be done world, clients aren't hiring research for the sake of research. They're hiring research for the sake of progress in whatever other program or function that they're trying to.
improve or impact. Clients are ultimately focused on outcomes. So whenever we pitch and sell research projects or we pitch insights gathering, we're not pitching that for nothing. Like it's not just like, like you should know your customers. Usually it's knowing your customers in service of improving customer acquisition or improving awareness building or improving retention or improving something maybe even more
specific like MQL to SQL conversion rate. Like there are very specific outcomes that the client is after and our jobs as consultants and service providers is to enable that through some scope. And I think with research, there's a tendency to treat it like the client is hiring the research because it's cool, because you're gonna learn a lot and because it's fun.
And that is true. I love the research work that we do. It's one of my favorite parts of the work. But it's not the only part of the work. That's like a third of the work. The other third is translating that into something that people can execute. And the third part of the work is, if you do this, actually enabling the work. Like, how do you create the change or facilitate change that way people can execute this? And you might actually do the execution work too. Like you might actually do some of like the
Asia Orangio (06:03.65)
maybe marketing execution work or growth execution work such as like activation or pricing or whatever. But I think a lot of people think that research is a means to an end. And I think that is certainly true, but they almost treat it like that's what clients are hiring, that they're hiring the research but not the means to the end, like not the end. But actually they're buying the end, but you're selling the research. And I think that that's the disconnect sometimes. I think that there are certainly businesses and scenarios and functions where like,
Kim Talarczyk (06:22.157)
Yeah.
Asia Orangio (06:33.154)
they are hiring research certainly for, like that's all they want is just the research, but usually it's in service of something. Like most teams, departments, executive leaders aren't conducting research for no reason. There's usually always a reason. And your job as the consultant and service provider is to understand what that reason is, make sure that you're aligned with what their goals are. And then no one ever feels like it's a waste necessarily because
they know what the ultimate goals were and the derivative of that was gonna be the research or at least part of it. So I think that's the first step is understanding that clients aren't buying research, they're buying outcomes and research is a way to get to the outcome or to understand how to achieve an outcome. So that's step one, I think.
Kim Talarczyk (07:07.373)
Yep.
Kim Talarczyk (07:19.275)
Right. And the consultant has to do the digging ahead of time to understand what those outcomes should be.
Asia Orangio (07:27.128)
Totally. I have heard from other peers, consultant friends, colleagues, et cetera, that sometimes they interact with clients who, for whatever reason, they say that they want research, but they don't actually, and they'll reject anything that you provide anyway. And I've heard about this phenomenon. I've certainly observed it. I think we've experienced it a handful of times where
Sometimes we get hired because it's a box to check or it's like, everyone's hiring this consulting firm or everyone's hiring this consultancy or consultant or whatever. So we should too, because that's just like the thing to do. But what I find is you can actually screen for this upfront, like in your discovery process. I'm not interested in people who just wanna give us money just to say that they did or.
or even people who are like, well, like we know we're supposed to do this step, so we're just going to hire you just to make sure that we do it. And then, and then taking a step further, ensuring that there's actually buy-in on the research or the insights that we're providing. That's a separate, slightly separate topic, but we'll bookmark it, we'll get to it. But we can actually screen at least a little bit of for this. So what I encourage other consultants and agencies to really think about is how do you screen for people who are more likely to
accept what you produce, but then also are more likely to actually do something with it, like when you actually do provide it. Because the worst thing in the world is obviously doing all this work and then nothing happens. Like no real change gets facilitated. Some of that has to do with who is actually on deck. Like do you actually have a project sponsor or a champion who has enough influence, power, leeway, what have you to be able to
Kim Talarczyk (09:00.705)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (09:20.904)
move things around and make enough of an impact with whatever it is that you provide. So think that's the first step. When I think about our clients, we're typically working with executive leaders or the CEO and the founders, could be plural themselves. And when I think about who has the most internal impact, it's probably gonna be those executive leaders. And so that's who we tend to sell to.
Where there might be struggle or tension, I should say, is when someone maybe more junior with less impact or less influence hires you. And then all you can really do is provide the insights and then hope and pray that they're able to deliver, like, you know, implement it in some kind of way. There's certainly scenarios where that is not the case. like, you're almost like staff augmentation. Like you're kind of working pretty hand in hand with someone else, possibly more junior.
and you're both able to like, you know, create the impact together that you need to for that investment to pay off and be worth it. But there could also be scenarios where maybe you're tackling something much larger and like, you're going to need buy-in from other executives and other leaders. and sometimes even like the CEO or co-founders themselves. And this is where I would say like level, like, like where you enter in the project sphere, like what level are you entering at?
I think has a pretty big impact on will they actually do anything with it after. I think the second thing of course is buy in, that's, we'll bookmark that. I'll get to that in a second, but I'll pause here because I feel like there's a number of directions we could go in.
Kim Talarczyk (11:00.909)
Thanks.
Kim Talarczyk (11:05.791)
Yeah, and I mean, of course, you're saying this as a good consultant because, you know, people could say, yeah, we'll do research. We don't care if you use it or not. Like you paid us. We did the work. So but, you know, you're speaking from the level of like you want things to move forward in a business. The research has to apply to something. And, you know, people that.
Asia Orangio (11:28.749)
right.
Kim Talarczyk (11:32.885)
anyone does business for, they should be coming at it too as of like, yes, what do I actually need to solve? Like what are our biggest issues in the business? Our biggest growth blockers or whatever.
Asia Orangio (11:45.591)
The other thing that I look for, this just reminded me, the other thing I'm looking for too is, you can always tell a project is gonna go nowhere if they have no history of conducting a project, if they have no history of ever either conducting research, which is very possible, there are many teams who've never, who've maybe they've done very, very, very little of it, or they've done it, but it's been very haphazard or ad hoc or whatever.
maybe less structured or intentional. But if they have a history of maybe never doing this before, or maybe they've done it before, but they've done nothing. So sometimes if we talk to a larger organization, for example, and they're interested in either research or troubleshooting growth in some kind of way, I'll ask them, have you ever done a project like this before?
whether it was with us or like a consultant or whatever. Like have you ever even like, have you ever interviewed customers before? And if so, what did that project look like and what did you do after? The other way to think about this too is not just like research, like research again, it's a means to an end. it's a, it is in service of something else usually. Good research at least is. But there's also how do they handle troubleshooting problems internally anyway? So for example,
I like to ask, it's okay if you've never done research before. There are many teams who are like that. Or again, maybe it's haphazard or maybe they hire really the big five agencies where the research is not based on their data, but it's based on generalized market data or whatever. How do they handle troubleshooting problems in general? And how have they handled that historically? Because I think teams that know how to troubleshoot their own issues,
and have had a history of actually like iterating and testing things and trying new things and then learning from them. I look for a history of that if they don't have a history of deploying research insights. Deploying research insights is really tough for any business. And it's not surprising if someone doesn't have that experience, but if you have had experience though in your organization of troubleshooting growth or like trouble, like problem solving in any kind of way and doing it successfully,
Asia Orangio (13:59.459)
That gives me faith that what comes out of this, you'll at least apply in your problem solving process for whatever it is that you're trying to do. And now I come from the context of like when people hire demand mavenants because there are problems. Sometimes that's not always the case. Like you might be solving something very different and maybe it's not like a problem or a pain that they're experiencing. It may be something that's like a gap that you're observing and you're filling, but they might not feel the pain in the same way. it could be maybe more in that.
category, but from my context of I'm helping people's problem solve, and usually it's like really sticky problems, like problems that are expansive and are across many different departments or functions of the business. So when folks come to us, like usually the pain is pretty high and they're kind of like, we'll do whatever it takes to overcome this. If you're not in that context, I do think it's a little different for you.
Like the way that you've got to think about how this applies in the broader context of the business might require a little bit more observation, question asking. Like you might need to dig a little bit deeper and understanding like where does this fit in the priority list of all the different other priorities. And that kind of gives you a gauge for how far is this going to go? Like how much impact will this actually create for them if we were to go this route?
Kim Talarczyk (15:21.878)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (15:22.018)
But again, I do think that you can pre-screen for this. There's no perfect science here. I do think it's a lot of intuition. But I do think that there needs to be, you almost kind of have to level set with yourself a little bit and gain enough information first before you can decide and set your own expectations really of like, okay, we can do this, but here's what has to be true in order for this to be truly successful. And based on how the client
has engaged with others in the past can help with you understanding that and making the decision of like, should you do that project or not? Because there are certainly companies who, research and insights and all that type of stuff, again, it's usually in the service of something. And if it's not in the service of something, then I question like, why are we doing it? But usually projects that don't move forward or don't really
go anywhere after is because that problem wasn't that big of a problem for that company. There is a flip side to this that's like, you might see it as a huge problem or a pain or whatever, but they don't see it that way, which means that they don't prioritize it. And I think, again, depending on your level of consulting and like depending on how deep into consulting you wanna be, you might have to learn how to influence people and how to get them to see what you see.
you know, my business coach, Charlie has always said like, Asia, if you're, if your client is a to B, but you're all the way in Z, your job is to get them from a to B first and then take them from B to C and then take them from C to D and then they can catch up with you. But if you're all the way over here in outer space and they've never been to outer space before, they don't know what that looks like.
your first mission is just to get them to zero gravity out of the Earth's atmosphere. Like, we're not even going to the moon yet. We're just trying to like, okay, well, here's what zero G feels like. You know what I mean? Because you're all the way like in Mars and they can't go with you there if you can't first take them to zero G and then to the moon and then to blah, blah, blah. know what I mean? So when he described it like that, I was like, oh, that is such a good point. And you can decide as a consultant or consulting practice if...
Kim Talarczyk (17:20.397)
.
Kim Talarczyk (17:25.645)
Yep.
Asia Orangio (17:43.853)
you want to take on that responsibility or not. I think we've worked with a lot of founders who, some of them I think we did a lot better job, but I think in the early days, I didn't think it was my job necessarily to educate in that way. I think I used to think about it very much like, well, they should just get it. But I think like, and some of them won't, and that's not on you. You know what I mean? Like some of them will never. And don't actually,
Kim Talarczyk (18:11.585)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (18:14.006)
and won't ever care and that's okay. But the ones that do, yeah, like I take a lot more responsibility now for educating the client. And I think like, ultimately we are here to solve problems and be in service and help others. And I think that's part of it. And you can't expect them to follow if you're not willing to lead. And I think that that's the caveat to all of this is you might need to close gaps.
But you can decide how much of that you want to close and how much of it you don't. That's part of the beauty, I think, of consulting as well.
Kim Talarczyk (18:49.319)
Right. Yeah. So I think what you're saying too is maybe earlier on in demand maven, you might have jumped into research gathering, for example, but are you saying that some clients may need to just be walked before that? Other things might need to happen, education, before you're diving into a bigger project.
Asia Orangio (19:12.43)
Totally, absolutely. I'm experiencing this now actually in one of our client projects where a lot of the emphasis growth wise for this client, their eyes were completely 100 % on marketing and sales. And it's not that they didn't know that other growth opportunities existed. It was just much more how much emphasis do they really need to put on that to grow how they want. But we all know, at least on the SaaS PLG side, that
If you only focus on marketing and sales, your growth will only ever be linear, which is why you have to also focus on product, pricing, monetization. You have to focus on not just client acquisition or customer acquisition. You have to also consider activation, retention, expansion, pricing, operations, culture. Like there are so many other things that you have to think about if you want to grow exponentially. And it's all of your growth.
can't and won't be 100 % through marketing and sales. Or at least maybe you do experience good growth, but it's linear growth at best, not without considering the other options. So what I've had to do is I've had to educate that client quite a bit on, like you know all these things already, like you already know pricing is a lever for you, you already know activation is a lever for you, but here's where you are going to see the greatest
most, like you're not going to see a growth curve until you invest in those things in addition to marketing and sales. And that has been the leadership that I have had to provide and the education I've had to provide. And I've sent resources and I think that they see it now. They see growth more like loops versus like just pure funnels. And I think that that's the beauty of, again, being a good consultant is kind of taking them through that process. Now, again, they can decide to not care and that's okay.
that's totally within their right. But for the clients that do and are willing and are open and want to really work with you, I think that those people deserve, in some way at least, your time and energy educating them to some degree. But I think, know, expecting them to just get it, I don't think is fair. And I see that now. I see that now a lot more. But also I think this comes a little bit too with
Kim Talarczyk (21:25.869)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (21:37.325)
being in the game for eight years and kind of realizing like, okay, well this way doesn't work. Like expecting them to just like, you know, read the article or, you know, see the talk and they're just gonna understand it now. Like, no, like we still have to kind of hold their hand a little bit and walk them through this and be patient and give them examples because it's scary. And like, I think the other thing too is when you're an expert, you don't...
you don't always think about all the things that you've used to create that expertise and the amount of iterations you've gone through and the amount of muscle that you've built. Nobody ever thinks about like building muscle over time. They only think about the photos that they take at the end of the day. And I think that that's the, that's the missing piece sometimes. So if research is something that you're selling,
Kim Talarczyk (22:25.461)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (22:29.57)
Again, you might need to take a step back and think about, what are the things that we're actually in service of? What are the outcomes that we're actually helping drive with this research? And for anyone, any of my clients who maybe doesn't think that this is a problem, what is it that they need to see or understand before they agree that this is a problem, this is actually a pain? Because you might see it as a pain. Like you might say, man, like their positioning and messaging sucks and they don't understand or see it.
Well, how can you make them see it? What are the things that you learned that helped you see that you can now translate to your client and see if they can see it after you walk them through that? Because at the end of the day, it's almost like getting mad at them for not doing something that you're unwilling to open the door for. And certainly there are going to be clients who are ham-fisted and don't want to go through that process and aren't interested in that.
Kim Talarczyk (23:17.846)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (23:27.296)
it's type of expansion of the mind. But those are probably not gonna be good clients anyway. So it's like, you you take what you can get, I think, for some of those. You play by ear, your mileage may vary, all those things. But for the ones that are like actually open to it and could be a great like growth partner for you, I think they are worth it in that way.
Kim Talarczyk (23:48.397)
Yeah.
Asia Orangio (23:50.295)
So, sorry, go ahead. I was going to say, so that brings me into growth partners or sorry, not growth partners. Let me restate. That brings me into getting buy-in. So I think when it comes to getting buy-in for research work, the way that I think about this is,
Kim Talarczyk (23:52.077)
No, go ahead.
Kim Talarczyk (24:01.463)
Mm.
Asia Orangio (24:12.214)
At the end of the day, you're in service of an outcome. And we've talked about that already. But what's critical for buy-in is making sure that they see that the work that you are doing is in service of that outcome. And also that they might not achieve that outcome very well, effectively or efficiently, if they don't do that work. Like that's the part about buy-in.
That's one part of the buy-in. The second part of the buy-in is it's usually not just one person who needs to be bought in. It's usually that person's team and their peers and possibly their leadership, like their boss. So you have all these different levels of influence. What I find is if you were to ask your client, if you were to ask your primary project sponsor, whoever that is, your project lead,
If you were to ask your primary project lead, who else do I need to talk to to get buy in? Most of them aren't going to think of that in the same way. Like most of them aren't going to be like, yeah, you know what? You should talk to my VP and maybe you should talk to like a few members of my team. And maybe you should talk to like, you know, the chief product officer, the VP of product or whatever. and then maybe like the head of sales, like they might not think of it that way because they might not think of their work as.
needing to have buy-in from those other parties. But what I find is if you're the consultant, you might need to be the one who pitches that to them and be like, I'd like to talk to these people who this work will eventually touch. When you position it that way, then that, like your project lead might be like, actually, no, that's a good point. Okay, so this work is gonna touch like these people in this way.
and that may be who they need to get buy-in from, even if they don't think of it that way. I will say, I think it's little bit of a death knoll if you have your project lead and that's the only person you work with or talk to and you never are presenting your insights to anybody else or distributing it to anybody else. Or you're depending on them to do the distribution, but the reality is that
Kim Talarczyk (26:07.799)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (26:31.616)
unless they are hand-in-hand working with you the entire time, they are never going to position your work the same way as you would if you were to do it. And also similarly, when it comes to research at least, insights I find are not truly absorbed unless you are part of the process. And so if your project lead is not actually part of the research process, they may have a hard time describing what it is that they're learning and how that translates to other folks. So part of getting by, and I think
Those are the two parts. The other way I think about buy-in is actually in the research process itself. And I've actually talked about this on stage before. I've talked about this in a number of ways. But there's a lot of debate on should you have the client in the interviews that you do? And we have actually talked about this before, where we used to be very anti-client on the call. I think that there are several things can be true at the same time.
Kim Talarczyk (27:19.646)
Thank
Asia Orangio (27:30.614)
I think when it comes to buy-in, you have an infinitely easier time when the client is actually on the actual customer interview, unless the client is a highly influential person, like in the space or in life or whatever. What I mean by that, so for example, I'm gonna use Spark Together or Spark Toro as an example because Ranch Fishkin is a very well-known person, like in the marketing.
and SEO and even though he would hate, I don't know if he would hate it, but he'd be like, I'm not an SEO, but like, yes, we get it Rand, but you're also the one who created the very first SEO platform ever. like, you're not off the hook. Like your name is still in the SEO world. Even though like, I'm sure he's like over at .com. But like marketing, SEO and to some degree like, startup SaaS.
Asia Orangio (28:25.378)
Like he's a well-known name in these spaces. He is someone who, if we have on the customer interview, like if we have it on any interview, honestly, he's gonna bias the heck out of that interview for no other reason than he's Rand Fishkin and people see his name and they're like, my God, Rand. And you're just not gonna get super critical feedback from whoever it is that you're talking to. You might, like you might get lucky, but most people are not that way. Most people...
Asia Orangio (28:53.266)
Most humans in general are gonna be nice to you on the call. They just are. You get a different reaction when you get someone who's outside of the company leading the call, but what we find is that's leading the call, not necessarily like being on the call. Most people kind of, and I was telling this to someone actually recently, even though we're demand maven and we do research on behalf of our clients, people still think that we're part of the client.
Kim Talarczyk (28:58.411)
Mm-hmm.
Kim Talarczyk (29:09.1)
Mm-hmm.
Kim Talarczyk (29:19.275)
Yep. Yeah. You can say it. from Demand Maven. don't. Yeah. And they'll still be like, well, your product.
Asia Orangio (29:26.446)
Yeah, your product, when you guys did this, and it's like, I have no idea what you're talking about, but that sounds great. Yeah, like people still kind of assume that we're like part of the client anyway. There was one time where, I don't know if you remember this, there was one time where we did a project and someone that we interviewed was like, oh, I thought Demand Maven was like a small product within the client. we were like, no, we're like a whole other company. So all that to say,
Kim Talarczyk (29:30.303)
Yeah.
Asia Orangio (29:54.709)
Even if we do research on behalf, lot of us, like people sometimes usually are like, okay, like you're like something else. But then in the middle of the call, it's almost like we're part of the company now. And to them, it's almost like there's not really a difference in the end. So I'll have to say, when it comes to buy-in though, and also bias in the interview itself, I have found that two things are actually more true maybe than I thought. But the first is that I don't think that presence of certain people
impacts the biases at that much. Unless again, you are a highly influential or recognizable person, and then it's a different story. But if you're not though, I don't I don't think it's that big of a deal in the end.
Kim Talarczyk (30:28.087)
Yeah.
Kim Talarczyk (30:40.917)
Yeah, I think too, I've almost noticed like nice people are gonna be nice and rude people are gonna be rude and like cranky people are gonna be cranky like no matter what. It doesn't.
Asia Orangio (30:48.364)
No matter what, yeah.
Like, yeah, like it kind of doesn't matter. And again, unless that person is like highly influential, but even then it might bias maybe what they say, but not necessarily how they say it. So that there's that, but then there's also, so again, when it comes to buy-in, there is also, however, the truth that remains that when people are not part of the research process, they just simply don't absorb it in the same way.
Kim Talarczyk (31:05.866)
Right. Yeah, that makes sense.
Asia Orangio (31:21.152)
and it also doesn't hit the same way. You can record Zoom calls all you want. But we have found that nobody listens to them fuckers anyway. Like nobody listens to those recordings.
Kim Talarczyk (31:33.077)
Yes, or if they do, it somehow hits different.
Asia Orangio (31:37.199)
It's the same thing I think that happens when you're standing in line for something. You just disassociate. Like, I don't know what it is, but it is really hard for people to be present on a recording of something than if they were just on the meeting itself. And sometimes even then. But what I find is like, and I actually had someone bring this up. They were like, okay, but like, you can attend a call and ignore it.
Kim Talarczyk (31:45.655)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Kim Talarczyk (31:59.606)
Right.
Asia Orangio (32:07.534)
And was like, yes, but that is why you have to have a debrief after you have the interview where they are going to be quizzed and they are gonna need to know, they're gonna need to have things to say.
Kim Talarczyk (32:19.457)
That's a, that's a great point. That's where it is.
Asia Orangio (32:23.042)
So it's a combination of these things. And all of this, by the way, none of this is like, I didn't invent this. This isn't unique to us. I learned a lot of this from Bob Mouesta, co-architect of Jobs to Be Done with Clayton Christensen, of course. But a lot of this I actually learned from Bob. And Bob does this, I mean, he's done this a bajillion times. So obviously his specialty is Jobs to Be Done.
We do all kinds of research. Jobs Beyond is a big part of what we do, but there are different types of interviews that we do based on what the context is. Everything from UX to win-loss to certainly there's also jobs. There are many different types of research we provide in service, of course, of a particular outcome. But Bob has done so much of this for so long, and he's done it many different ways. And I believe him when he says,
It kind of doesn't matter if like you need, you need the client on the call and you need to talk about it after. Cause like it just doesn't, it doesn't hit the same way at all. Like when you do it by yourself. So what most consultants and teams do is they'll go off into a little hidey hole and they'll be like, okay, we're to go do a research. They go off into outer space for three, four months. And then they come back and then they're like, okay, this is what we found guys. And then the executives, the team, they're like, okay, great. Sounds awesome. What do we do now?
Kim Talarczyk (33:42.199)
Great, we'll read that sometime.
Asia Orangio (33:45.231)
we're gonna read that document and they never do. then you're like, okay, great. So what's the update? What have you guys done? And they're like, nothing, we're still blah, blah, blah, blah. Because that's what they already were doing. And what you provided did not create a change for them. But it's because they weren't, I mean there could be many reasons, but usually it's because they weren't part of the process. It probably wasn't delivered quick enough for them to execute against it. And then.
again, unless it's in service of a particular outcome that's painful for them or that they're very passionate about, nothing might not happen anyway. So that's what we typically see. So that's why we say, unless the person is a very highly influential person who's like a really well-known persona in the space, like it would be very distracting if Jeff Goldblum joined your call, for example. Like, wouldn't that be distracting? Like, don't invite Jeff Goldblum to your call if everyone knows he's Jeff Goldblum. Don't do that. But like,
Kim Talarczyk (34:19.82)
Mm-hmm.
Kim Talarczyk (34:32.973)
Yeah. Right.
Asia Orangio (34:41.792)
If that is not you, then you probably can join the call, like the interview itself. The key, however, is to have people join and then you debrief after. The magic happens in the debrief. That's how you start getting buy-in. And with jobs to be done, know, we've talked about jobs before, but you don't need a ton of interviews here. Even for the largest organizations in the world, Bob only does 10 to 12 per segment, if that. And sometimes he hasn't even due per segment.
He literally just says 10 to 12 total interviews ever. the company might have hundreds of thousands of customers. So you don't need that many interviews when it comes to jobs work. With that said, it's not like we're asking them to attend hundreds of interviews. It's 10 max, minimum three. And by the fifth interview that you do,
you've already started to map out like next steps usually like that's that's true for us in our process. But when they're actually a part of it, you don't have to debate what the next steps are. And you also don't have to get buy in on the interview itself because they heard it firsthand. And if they were paying attention, they're not going to argue with you about what you heard usually.
Kim Talarczyk (35:40.876)
Mm-hmm.
Kim Talarczyk (35:56.14)
Right. And we do give a chance for the people on the call, the client, to ask follow-up questions, which almost might seem bad, like, now the company is actually talking. But somehow it works. The person has just been in this nice casual conversation with Demand Maven. And then at the end, someone from the company pops in. And it's just a continuation.
Asia Orangio (36:11.553)
Yeah.
Kim Talarczyk (36:26.219)
And I think that helps too, because then there's buy-in. It's almost like, if you watch someone else's kid versus your own kid, it's like, that's what it is to have the client on the call versus a recording. It hits different if you're live and you're watching your baby and you're like, my gosh, my baby's so cute, because it's yours. It's like that.
Asia Orangio (36:37.004)
Yeah.
Asia Orangio (36:51.31)
Totally. Yeah. The recording, now there are some people who will very adamantly listen and pay, like actively listen and be really invested, but most people aren't, if we're being honest. So that is why, that is part of why we approach it that way. Now, there are some listeners out there who are like, okay, but that, not everyone is SaaS, not everyone is software, so how do you,
How do you handle those scenarios where you're working with a company like outside of the context of software or where like being on a Zoom call is weird or like the executives are so far removed from the process or what have you. And yeah, so I don't know if I've experienced this nearly as often, but from my understanding, something else that Bob Moleste recommends is really approaching this from like a sprint perspective.
where you try to crunch in the research in as short of a timeframe as possible, which we also do as well. But the way that you can sometimes get buy-in from an executive is to say, you know, block out these three days of this week. You're gonna attend these meetings. It's gonna be a sprint style. And if you run it virtually, like on a Zoom, which is what we do, that's how we conduct research all over the world. Like Zoom is like, you know, like everyone's pretty used to it post pandemic. But if you can't for some reason,
do that or like maybe you're an on-site consultant. You might actually be able to get everyone in the conference room and for three straight days you're in the conference room, order lunch, order breakfast, whatever, order snacks, what have you. And you're just, they're part of the call, but they're not like on the call if that makes any sense. So they're still listening. That's actually another way that maybe if you're not in the SaaS or software world, but you're in like healthcare or you're in
Kim Talarczyk (38:38.583)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (38:49.602)
finance or whatever, that is another way to think about how to execute something like this. And you can still have executive leadership or at least like leadership in general. You can have leadership and project sponsors and other people that you need to get buy-in from. You can have them as part of that process. And then obviously like the recording is kind of how you distribute to others who can't be part of the process. But that's how I think about...
buy-in, so two different levels of buy-in. There's buy-in on like what is it that we're doing in the first place, why, and who is this work going to touch that is going to need to believe that this is done well. And then there's the other part of it which is like how do get buy-in in terms of like the research itself. There are people who are just gonna reject it no matter what and I think maybe not even reject it but not care. I think that's part of it but again I think that's kind of where it goes into like if they don't care it's probably because
They don't care about the outcome at the end of the day, or they're not involved in the outcome, or they don't believe that this is a necessary step to take to improve the outcome or to achieve the outcome or whatever it is. So I think that those are, I think the consultant's job is to kind of figure out what's going on there. just understanding that there are some people you'll never be able to change their minds, but at least you can kind of maybe diagnose a little bit, like what's actually happening, because it could be that.
Kim Talarczyk (40:11.234)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (40:12.886)
and they just don't believe, it's not clicking into place for them that this is what needs to happen, even though that might be your perspective and possibly your project sponsor's perspective or whoever hired you.
Kim Talarczyk (40:23.477)
Yep. Yeah.
Asia Orangio (40:26.702)
So that's the consulting slash service provider side. I think the client side is also interesting. And this is as someone who, I do fractional CMO work now. So in a way, I'm acting also from an internal perspective as well. I'm never obviously like, I am the kind of leader
Kim Talarczyk (40:32.801)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (40:54.414)
who believes in insights gathering. Like I believe in doing research. I'm not someone who needs to be convinced. It's much more like when do we do it and when do we have the right resources to do it? It's much more like that's usually what my like, what my tension is because obviously like you can't do everything all at once. But what's interesting is we're at a place in our, in my fractional CMO work where we are doing a lot more research.
And it's across, it's not just for marketing, it's across the business. And it's really exciting because it's just, it's just cool to see like when you show a team, hey, when you do insights gathering, it dramatically improves your decision-making like a lot. and seeing that transfer over into other departments is really cool because I don't think that they really had a big practice around this before I joined. could be wrong, but I think
Kim Talarczyk (41:35.616)
Hmm.
Asia Orangio (41:47.075)
they're starting to actually build an internal practice of insights gathering as they start not just troubleshooting growth, but also like making decisions in general. And I think from a client perspective, from an in-house perspective, again, the reason why you do research is in service of an outcome. What's interesting though is if you don't know how to arrive at an outcome, there is always a way to...
gather qualitative insight to understand what would it take. So for example, one of my favorite things that we did recently was competitive intelligence gathering. Now, competitive intelligence gathering, a lot of different, there's like a million different ways to do this. The way that we did that I really like is we've been trying to decide if we should invest in a particular department. And so what we did was we conducted interviews of ex-department leaders.
from competitors. And we specifically looked at people who hadn't worked for their competitor for a while, because obviously we don't want them to feel like they need to share trade secrets or whatever, which to be frank, this isn't trade secret stuff. It's much more like, how did you guys structure your team? What were your goals? Did you hit them? What did that look like? It's more like, this is less unique data and more just like,
Kim Talarczyk (42:46.764)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (43:11.498)
industry or in our customer segment or software category, what does performance look like? What does good look like? But we specifically targeted people who we felt weren't going to feel like, not like bad, but like it would be like a conflict of interest or something or like too soon. And we learned so much about what good looked like for this department. Like it really completely shifted how we thought about the department itself. I'm not going to say which department because it does, I think,
Kim Talarczyk (43:27.501)
Right.
Asia Orangio (43:41.099)
matter a little bit and I just want to protect their privacy a little bit. But it was absolutely, it was fascinating. And we learned a lot, like when we looked at our department, we were like, we need to shift these things around or like this could be improved in this way. And, but it also made us say, do we invest in this more than we already are? Like it really put it a lot into perspective. And again, this research was done in service of an outcome or in service of a
of a question of how to improve something. So for us, we were like, we can't tell if we're not doing this right or if it's just not for us and we need to pivot. And that was really what we were trying to understand and figure out. And like, we could make that decision in a vacuum, but it's a vacuum. Or we could figure out a way to gather insights to improve this thing. And that I think is where...
Kim Talarczyk (44:19.862)
and I'm
Asia Orangio (44:36.652)
Research, now I say research, but really we're gathering insights. It's intelligence. We're using insights to inform our decision making and to give us perspective. Because when you don't have perspective or insights or knowledge or wisdom about the thing, it's just really, really, really easy to make a bad decision, to make an ill-informed decision and not actually achieve the goal you're trying to achieve. I think the way a lot of teams get stuck
Kim Talarczyk (45:02.453)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (45:06.146)
is, well, you can't do research for everything. And I agree. But I think when you're making big decisions or at least decisions that dramatically impact an outcome of something that shapes the rest of your growth trajectory, I think that's when you do a research. So for example, if like, can you imagine if we didn't do any research around pricing? if but like if we were pricing consultants, which we do pricing projects, but we didn't do a single interview or run a single survey.
Kim Talarczyk (45:21.036)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (45:35.395)
we just looked at like amplitude and called it a day. We probably would come up with some interesting pricing ideas, but it might not actually align at all with the customer at the end of the day. But that is one of those things where if you're tweaking pricing, but you're not interviewing a single person, that to me is like, you might as well, like you're wasting your time in my opinion. Like you need to actually do pricing interviews.
Kim Talarczyk (45:39.874)
Right.
Kim Talarczyk (46:02.411)
Yeah, and I think the key is some people might think, I'm not going to listen to a couple of people. And you're not, right? That is a data point that you're using to help you make an informed decision.
Asia Orangio (46:13.41)
Or to also understand, to give you context behind numbers that you're seeing. I think most teams over rely on quantitative analysis or even more specifically, because quantitative includes surveys technically. Quantitative research includes surveys, but quantitative analysis is more like BI work, like data work, like you're crunching numbers and analyzing data.
Kim Talarczyk (46:18.7)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (46:37.206)
I think a lot of teams over rely on that without ever getting context behind, but like, what does this number actually mean in context? Like I see that for example, usage of this feature is low, but why? And numbers can't tell you why. You have to make the number talk and you make the number talk by talking to people. And there is no amount of chat GPTing or AIing that can get you around talking to an actual human.
Kim Talarczyk (46:45.484)
Hmm.
Kim Talarczyk (46:58.124)
right.
Asia Orangio (47:07.026)
Is there synthetic research? actually did talk about synthetic research recently too. Yeah, you can use synthetic research, but I don't think it's the thing that you use when you're trying to troubleshoot and critical growth problems. I think it's what you use when you're lacking ideas and you're trying to like expand your mind a little bit around possibilities. But even then a human is still gonna be better at this than an AI or whatever. So from a client perspective,
Insights gathering is critical. I think teams who have really good insights gathering arms, that's a muscle that they have built and they can flex at any time. They, find, usually are better at decision making. They're also much faster, I find, at making decisions, committing to them, and seeing results. I do think that they also tend to be a bit more curious. They're not always making assumptions and then just kind of assuming that those assumptions are blanket.
they're constantly challenging norms. So for example, something that I discovered when I first started at Offering Tree was we target studios, internally we kind of talk about studios like they're a monolith. And when we did the research, it's not just studios as a category or a customer segment, there are actually many different types of studios. Like we actually have a few different personas, if you will, or like little micro segments within studios.
And so part of my language building for my team was studios are not a monolith. Studios is where we want to go, but there are different types of studios and each of those have different needs and they need to see different marketing from us based on that. So I'll have to say though, insights gathering is crucial. And when you're really, really, really good at it, I think you move a lot faster. I think
Kim Talarczyk (48:45.121)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (48:58.004)
If you know when to do that type of research or when to do that type of insights gathering, you know, it's not as wasteful in my opinion. There are certainly teams I think who can spin their wheels too much, but I think that's rare actually. I don't think that that's common in the SaaS world. I think it's far more that we don't gather enough information and it's because we're afraid to slow down, to speed up. And we'd rather just keep going fast, as fast as we possibly can.
But there are moments where you do need to do that insights gathering. You can't just look at dashboards and just know what to do all the time. Sometimes you need that data.
Kim Talarczyk (49:34.357)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yeah, I would imagine too, it might be hard for people to think of, okay, if I, well, one, it's going to take me forever to find people to talk to, but it really doesn't. But then two, when I talk to them, like then how do I know what to do with the information? What do I do with it? How do I, how do I now take that and look at it with my quantitative data?
Asia Orangio (50:00.783)
Yeah. Yeah. And again, this kind of goes back to like, it's really research design. I do think it ultimately goes back to what are the types of questions that you need to answer to do whatever it is you need to do well. This can be tough with low experience. Like if you don't have a ton of experience in the area or whatever it is that you're looking at, then it's kind of hard to know like, well, what questions do you need be asking? So I do think that there's like a little bit of like a, there's a double-edged sword there because
part of good research design infers that you know enough about this to know where you need to dig into next and how it's gonna impact all the different variables that you're looking at, understanding how all those variables work together. So I think that is part of it. But generally speaking though, to me, insights gathering, qualitative research, I say it's in service of an outcome, but usually it's in service of what's the insight that you need to unlock
whatever the thing is that you're trying to improve. And you might not know what that is until you hear it. sometimes it's one of those things where it's like, you just might not know what that looks like until like you've done enough digging and scratching at it. And again, that's tough with low experience. If you're more on the experienced end, different story, but that's the way that I look at it. And some of that too is maybe when you bring on a consultant or like maybe you need a consultant to kind of help you.
Kim Talarczyk (51:10.689)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (51:31.85)
see what you can't see yet. When I talk about research or when I talk about like decision making, at the end of the day, like there's, it's a four quadrant system. There are your known knowns, your known unknowns, your unknown knowns and your unknown unknowns. And there's nothing you can do about unknown unknowns. Like maybe you can hire a consultant and maybe they can open your eyes to things that you just wouldn't have known anyway. But that's kind of what unknown unknowns are is it's the stuff you just can't predict and no one else can either.
but your known knowns and your known unknowns, that's where you spend most of your time. Now, unknown knowns are weird, because that implies that you're not aware of what you know, which can happen. They're a little bit harder to identify. But that's where a consultant can help with acknowledging your known knowns, acknowledging your known unknowns, and then possibly unknown unknowns. But again, those are the ones that are really hard to predict. You're just not going to know. Literally. That's why it's an unknown unknown.
So that's kind of where I think insights gathering does have to have like an initial purpose, even if you don't always know all the things that you need to unpack. Sometimes that comes later anyway, and that happens to us too. Sometimes we start a project and we go about it in a particular way and then we uncover something that asks a
a better question and then we're like, we should pivot the research a little bit and focus on these people and ask these questions. And sometimes you just don't, you can't know that until you're in it. And it's unpredictable for the most part, but at least you know that you can adjust. We've talked before about how research, how fast research can be. For people who have influence, budgets, et cetera,
Kim Talarczyk (53:06.337)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (53:27.222)
Research can be extremely fast. We're about to kick off a project. We just kicked off a project. We're about to put it into a marketplace to source research participants. And we're going to have people in 24 or 48 hours. Research can happen so fast. And I talked about this on a podcast before. That was the... gosh, it was the... No, it wasn't user list. was... What podcast was this?
Kim Talarczyk (53:42.85)
Yep.
Kim Talarczyk (53:52.82)
user list.
Asia Orangio (53:58.361)
Their name is on the tip of my tongue. I'm not gonna remember, it was a user testing podcast, that's what it was. It was user testing. The user testing podcast, Leah and I were talking about how slow research is a choice. Slowness is a choice, it just is. You're choosing to be slow. Even though I know it's like, wait, but no, I have to get by and I have to do all the stuff. And I'm like, or you could just be scrappy and do it.
Kim Talarczyk (54:06.241)
Right, yep.
Kim Talarczyk (54:15.053)
Mm-hmm
Asia Orangio (54:27.714)
Like it's so fast to get participants. When you don't have budget, like when you don't have a credit card, can swipe. When you're on your own, so to speak, which I think that there are people who have this and it sucks. you know, like they don't necessarily have that type of power. That is where I think there are ways that you can be scrappy and kind of get what you need. And if you don't have budget to pay people,
you might be able to pay them in other ways. Like you might be able to, know, typically the transaction is like someone participates in your interview and you give them a gift card, but you might also be able to do like other things. Anything from like, maybe you donate a small amount to their charity. Maybe it could also be like, maybe you give them like a freebie, schwag, like there's all kinds of stuff that you might be able to do instead.
You could also just ask for free. We used to do that actually. So we used to do all of our research We wouldn't incentivize at all and we would still get people saying yes, we did that for years So I think it is possible to see if people will participate anyway I think you'll get faster research done if you do have a little bit of a budget But I think this is where you can again getting buy-in is critical you can create an internal proposal and
say like, here's my budget for this. Here's what this unlocks for us. And here's why we need this. And usually with like a good proposal slash executive brief, I think a lot of people would say yes, like they'd approve it. Especially if you can show that this is necessary step. Like this is a necessary step in order for us to achieve this outcome. This is a requirement. And if we don't do this, we are sacrificing progress and impact.
Kim Talarczyk (56:01.952)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (56:18.482)
and you can show that in a particular way. Otherwise, we're going to be back at the drawing board all over again. And there are certainly industries where this is not possible. Like I know that there are industries, like for example, in some healthcare companies, if you were to ask to do customer research, like it would have to come from executives. And there's just no way like you as an RN or I don't know, a floor operations manager, like you might really struggle to get research done in that way. But again, I think you can almost think about it like...
Kim Talarczyk (56:23.191)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (56:48.526)
It's almost like journalism. Sometimes people are just willing to talk to you, even if there's no thing dangling at the end for them, if they feel heard. And I think sometimes research can be good journalism. Like sometimes you can think of it like how would a journalist or a reporter get this done? Cause those people aren't paying. You know what I mean? Like, yeah. So I, I, yeah, I encourage like if you're internal and you're in house, you don't have, and you don't have a credit card to swipe, that's a business credit card.
Kim Talarczyk (56:58.157)
Thank
Kim Talarczyk (57:08.417)
Yeah. That's a great point.
Asia Orangio (57:18.542)
But you need insights and you need research. I encourage you to think about this like a journalist, like how do journalists do this? Can you go knock on a door? Can you call a phone number? Can you like send a DM on LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever, wherever people hang out these days, TikTok? There are ways to still get people to talk to you and it doesn't have to be purely transactional. Sometimes people just want to talk about them and that's enough.
Kim Talarczyk (57:41.355)
Right, and just don't be afraid to ask.
Asia Orangio (57:44.003)
Yeah. And for all the people that you can't talk to, maybe you just really don't have the time. There are tools like SparkToro. There are ways to kind of get in the heads of your customers. Answer the public is another good resource. Like there are tons of more like solutions like that that kind of give you insight in that way, but it still doesn't beat talking to a human, I think. Or I don't want to say it doesn't beat it. I don't see it as mutually exclusive. I think it's both. You need both.
Kim Talarczyk (58:11.629)
Yeah, that makes sense.
Asia Orangio (58:31.862)
I think it's, yeah, it's when you need to make big decisions or achieve big outcomes. And even if you already know what to do, it still might help to validate. And I think that's also part of it as well. But that's when I think about it. Now, again, this is experience dependent, because I do also think that
Kim Talarczyk (58:50.721)
Yeah.
Asia Orangio (58:59.98)
You might not know if it's a big impact thing if you don't have the experience of that.
And I'm not sure how you solve for that except for learning the hard way possibly. But I do tend to think about it like these are big levers that you pull where imagine if you botch it and it doesn't change the conversion rate or it doesn't change the goal or it doesn't change it any positive way. And if you miss this target, like it's gonna dramatically impact everything else. That's kind of how I think about, like this is higher risk. If it's lower risk, then you know,
Kim Talarczyk (59:30.391)
Mm-hmm.
Asia Orangio (59:34.926)
It could be whatever but if it's higher risk, like I think that's when you do that's when you pull the research Lever for sure like gather insights Don't just look at dashboards all day and kind of wonder about numbers like you need to make the numbers talk for any challenge that you're facing I think that thing too is like you're facing a problem You're facing a challenge and you've tried a million things and nothing seems to work Chances are you can make the number talk to in that way. Like you can literally Whatever problem you're facing. There's probably a human on the other side of it that you can talk to about it
Kim Talarczyk (01:00:03.693)
Yeah. Cool. We did it.
Asia Orangio (01:00:07.15)
Cool. All right, we did it. Thanks for listening as per usual. And also thank you, Kim, for being my co-host also as per usual.
Kim Talarczyk (01:00:15.361)
Yes, thank you, Asia, for sharing your knowledge.
Asia Orangio (01:00:18.223)
Doing what I can. It's not much, but it's honest work. Yes, it's that meme. I need to put that meme in the post. All right, cool. I'm gonna stop and then we can.
Kim Talarczyk (01:00:23.423)
Yes, right, in service.
