How SearchPilot unlocked growth by leveraging customer insights

A story about analyzing the customer experience, learning from customers, and scaling beyond founder-led sales.
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“I would’ve said going into it, I knew who my customers were in terms of personas. I’d already done a bit of work around that in terms of, more like properties of the businesses, but I think what DemandMaven did was go a level deeper, and look at it as a point of contact, or a people problem rather than a business problem.”

Will Critchlow

CEO, SearchPilot

Highlights

  • Conducted JTBD customer interviews
  • Thematic analysis of all interviews
  • Clustering of top JTBD themes
  • Identified messaging & acquisition opportunities per product

Services Provided

  • Customer research & interviews
  • Thematic analysis and coding of interviews
  • Jobs-To-Be-Done mapping based on outcomes of customers
  • Messaging & positioning guides
  • Customer journey mapping
  • Growth strategy brief containing recommendations for growth

The Company

SearchPilot was spun out of UK-based marketing and SEO consultancy, Distilled, in January of 2020. One month later, business as usual was immobilized by COVID a global pandemic of unprecedented proportions. But SearchPilot didn’t just make it through to the other side – there was a bright spot during that difficult time period for Will Critchlow (Founder, CEO) and Craig Bradford (Chief Operating Officer). They learned they had an SEO split-testing technology that people were genuinely excited about using.

In 2021, SearchPilot’s leadership team decided they were ready to step on the gas and accelerate their growth. Will and Craig had a lot of ideas about their customers and marketing experiments they wanted to run – what they were lacking was time and the full view of their customers’ needs, wants, and decision-making process during the buyer’s journey. They quickly realized the best way to make meaningful progress and ensure they were moving in the right direction was to bring on a provider who could help them think through their growth challenges.

By working with DemandMaven to get clear on their customers, priorities, and growth opportunities, Will and Craig experienced the added level of commitment that comes from having an external partner. With the guidance of Asia and her team, they were able to move faster than they could alone and walked away with the artifacts, actionable recommendations, and customer insights that changed the way they think about their business.

“Sometimes you do projects and you make a presentation and then it gets archived and gathers digital dust, but already, I can see us using the words that were in those documents, talking about Jobs-to-Be-Done, and the problems that we have, and making new [artifacts] and new pieces of content for our customers based on the things that we’ve learned,” Craig explained.

The Challenge

Incomplete understanding of the customer

Although Will and Craig felt confident about the success of SearchPilot, they wanted to keep the early-mover advantage they were known for and win more and bigger customers.

“We wanted more leads, more sales on the path to trying to increase our growth rate, especially coming out of COVID. In 2020 we managed to grow through the year but only a little bit. On the flip side, we felt like we got to the point where we had a product that certain people were paying for and enthusiastic about. We felt like if we could go to market, the opportunity was now,” Will said.

The SearchPilot leadership team also had a clear understanding of the target market segments they were going after — large enterprise companies with extremely high-traffic websites and dedicated SEO departments — but they struggled with an understanding of the customer beyond that.

“We’ve got a reasonably good grasp of the target market, but the most valuable bit is that layer above it. What do they want? What is the job to be done, and what is it that they’re missing that would be the trigger that would cause them to speak to us?” Will said.

“I would’ve said going into it, I knew who my customers were in terms of personas. I’d already done a bit of work around that in terms of, more like properties of the businesses, but I think what DemandMaven did was go a level deeper, and look at it as a point of contact, or a people problem rather than a business problem. I have a spreadsheet, it was like, “Our target customer is this amount of revenue. They’ve got this type of website, they’ve got this many employees, they’ve got this many pages.” But I hadn’t done as much thinking of it from, “This SEO manager is Lauren, and she has these problems, and she’s trying to achieve these things, but she’s blocked by these other things’ “ said Craig.

Another initial area the SearchPilot team was hoping to optimize was the onboarding process. Will and Craig had a hunch it needed refinement, or a different experience altogether, but weren’t sure where the disconnect was happening on the customer’s end.

Ultimately, Will and Craig recognized that attempting to solve their problems on their own would be the riskiest move of all. Like many business owners, they were used to coming up with ideas that sounded good in theory but ended up falling by the wayside when new priorities and projects popped up. By summer of 2021 they had reached a turning point, and didn’t want to waste any more time.

“We didn’t want to turn around in five years and say, ‘We just went too slowly. We didn’t capitalize on that opportunity,’” Will said.

The Solution

Customer research and a deep analysis of their buyer journey

In the marketing and tech intersection where Craig and Will live, there is no shortage of growth consultants, but eventually they came to DemandMaven.

“I hadn’t met Asia, but I knew of Asia through two different routes: One was her involvement with Moz on the board there, and the other was through the Founders Summit. Then we discovered a third avenue! So, I was quite excited to give DemandMaven a shot and see how it would go,” Will explained.

Together with the SearchPilot team, DemandMaven scoped out a plan based on the company’s unique situation, background, and goals and then recommendations for next best steps.

The clear place to start was with customer research. We started with the fundamentals: interviewing both long-time raving-fan customers, relatively newer customers, and customers that SearchPilot knew were vocally critical about the product but wanted to hear from anyways. In total, we did just 10 interviews to surface the insights needed to identify key opportunities for growth and improvements.

After working with SearchPilot to target and recruit the right group of users for the interview series, DemandMaven’s team took it from there.

“[One of our favorite things about working together was] just someone running that whole customer interview process. It’s one of those things that has been on our to-do list forever – we’ve done little bits and pieces of it – but I think there’s value to an external person doing it as well, as opposed to it being someone from SearchPilot asking questions. I think we would get different answers. The fact that it’s an external person asking the questions was really, really good,” Craig said.

The interviews could then be used to inform SearchPilot’s growth strategy, positioning, messaging, and overall customer experience. DemandMaven also went on to deliver a few artifacts to help guide the SearchPilot team and support their work:

  • An overview of the top “jobs” that customers were hiring SearchPilot for
    • Also contained an overview of the top struggles customers had when considering a solution like SearchPilot and successes
  • A visual map of the customer journey (along with where customers got stuck)
  • Recommendations for how to adjust messaging to better align with customers desired outcomes

The Result

Unlocking new growth opportunities to execute

DemandMaven’s process of interviewing customers, analyzing metrics, and compiling findings and recommendations into several documents, including a Growth Strategy Brief, met all of SearchPilot’s expectations for their marketing partner.

“The strategic project I think has definitely achieved what we set out to achieve in that we have plenty to work on: We have a roadmap, we have a strategy. We know what’s coming next. We have a whole set of actions,” Craig said.

The lightbulb moment for Craig and Will came during the customer research interviews, where Asia and her team led 45-minute calls that dug deep into users’ existing SEO testing processes and the “why” behind every decision that led them to choose SearchPilot.

“The most tangible immediate win is the insight into our core market wanting to self-serve, and [them] wanting to describe it as self-serve and wanting to go faster. [Before the interviews] we got sucked up into thinking that what we do is unique, that our customers can’t do it without us, which is somewhat true, but of course they’ve all got workarounds. Everybody who comes to us is doing something that approximates what we do, and seeing it on that continuum our job is to take what they’re doing and make it better, faster, more effective, more rigorous. Rather than say, ‘You’re doing nothing right now, you should be doing this.’ That came from data. It came from the research and the conversations and had to be discovered,” Will explained.

And right away, the insights proved useful as they’ve sent the SearchPilot in a whole new direction with their customer experience, leading to critical optimizations and improvements in everything from the buying journey to the website to the product itself.

“Straight away we’ve started using that language in the sales journey and in some of our marketing materials and just framing the way we think about it a little bit.
On the next level down there’s a whole load of things that we [are still digesting]: recommendations for the website, recommendations for sales materials, the customer experience map. We’re working through some of those interviews, reading the transcripts and so forth and getting some of those gems out. There’s a ton of value baked into those bits,” Will went on to say.

Beyond the tangible to-dos that came out of the work, Craig and Will have a new understanding and appreciation for the SearchPilot ideal customer that has transformed their perspective.

“I would’ve said going into it that I knew who my customers were, but I think what DemandMaven did was go a level deeper. [For example] I have a spreadsheet that was like, ‘Our target customer is this amount of revenue. They’ve got this type of website. They’ve got this many employees. They’ve got this many [web] pages.’ But [now I’m] thinking of it like, ‘This SEO manager is Lauren, and she has these problems, and she’s trying to achieve these things, but she’s blocked by these other things,’” Craig said.

“[Now we feel we have] a really solid understanding of what the pain points are of our customers, and I don’t think I can overemphasize that.”

This mindset shift, plus the artifacts DemandMaven built for SearchPilot at the end of their engagement, will go a long way towards driving the growth Will and Craig have envisioned for their company. Overall, they’re happy with their DemandMaven experience, from the speed at which Asia and her team worked to the thoughtful presentation of final deliverables.

“Honestly, the quality of the work has been amazing. Everything, when it was delivered, was top class,” Craig said.

Will adds, “I think the organization has been impeccable. The async delivery of things has been really valuable, especially given the time zone gaps. The fact that we have been able to consume a Loom video and a slide deck, and then we get on the call just to talk about the meat of it, rather than having to schedule an hour to go through the update. I love the design of the customer experience map, [the fact that it was in our] brand colors. There’s quite a lot of those little touches that [made our DemandMaven engagement a] nice experience. It just feels like there’s care being taken.”

“Honestly, the quality of the work has been amazing. Everything, when it was delivered, was top class.”

Craig Bradford

COO, SearchPilot

Ready to get started?

This sh*t ain’t easy, but that’s exactly why we built DemandMaven. We’ll help you find your absolute best growth opportunities based on the “jobs” your customers are hiring the product for. Then, we’ll show you exactly what needs to happen to achieve your goals.