Introduction

Are you the go-to person for customer-facing product content? Most Founding PMMs are.

When the sales team or VP marketing decides it’s time for a new sales deck, one-pager, or product demo, they often rush into demanding the latest deliverables from product marketing. Right?

But there is a crucial first step you should take before diving into your next asset (or staring at the blank page or slide deck). It’s all starts with leveraging customer insights.

Good collateral is based on a solid understanding of how product capabilities meet market needs – and your customers are the ones who are best placed to provide those insights.

This playbook is designed to help you get the most out of conversations with your customers and build a repeatable customer insights program that drives meaningful business impact.

Meet Shoshana Kordova

Shoshana Kordova is a 3x founding product marketer who specializes in customer-infused messaging for B2B tech startups. She runs the product marketing consultancy Peel Product Marketing.

Shoshana has been interviewing people – and writing about the stories they tell her – for a long time, first as a journalist for publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post and Smithsonian, and then as a content and product marketer in the fintech, mobility, and health tech industries.

She’s led workshops on customer insights and storytelling, has taught product marketing at Reichman University, and prefers holding her Pick My Brain micro-mentoring sessions while walking outside in the evening. Shoshana was selected by the GTM Alliance as a Top 20 Go-to-Market Influencer to Watch in 2025.

Where to find Shoshana:

• LinkedIn
• Peel Product Marketing
• Book a customer insights consult

What are customer insights?

To sell a product effectively, you need to know:

• What problem it solves?
• Who struggles with that problem?
• How it solves the problem better or differently than alternatives?

Chances are, there are people in your company (founders, sales reps, etc.) who can answer these questions because they interact with customers regularly. But here’s the thing: relying on their secondhand accounts is like taking rumor for fact. When it comes to insights, you want first-hand knowledge, not biased interpretations.

Customer insights are simply all the things you learn from having conversations with your customers. If you’re not sure where to start, check out our customer interview guide template:

Customer Interview Guide Customer Interview Guide

Why customer insights matter

As a product marketer, nothing beats hearing directly from your customers. They’re the ones who know best what drove them to find a solution to their problem, and why your product was the answer.

Your CEO or sales leader might have great ideas, but we should be taking them with a grain of salt. It’s the customer who understands the challenges, the solutions, and what makes your product stand out, and they speak from genuine experience.

So don’t take internal feedback at face value. Talk to customers, capture their insights, and share those golden nuggets across your team.

In this playbook, we’ll guide you on how to do both.

What you can do with customer insights

Customer insights are the foundation of many product marketing activities. They fuel your customer stories flywheel (shown below) and can take many forms, from case studies to internal reports, to shaping your product roadmap.

These insights can transform everything from marketing to sales, product development, and customer success. Here are 8 specific ways you can use customer insights:

1. ROI metrics

Whether or not the primary goal of your customer interview is to get ROI metrics, it’s always a good idea to ask questions that can uncover this incredibly useful information. But they may not know how to calculate it on their own. That’s where your conversational skills come in.

How to get ROI metrics from customer interviews

ROI for B2B products typically comes down to a) saving time and/or b) saving money. One common formula to access this information is:

Money/time spent using the product to reach a specific goal minus money/time spent to reach the goal prior to using the product

Customers often have an easier time walking you through the “before” and “after” scenarios that give rise to an ROI metric than answering a direct question like “What’s the ROI on our product?”

HOW TO USE THIS

• Marketing: Website, landing pages, one-pagers, email campaigns, organic and paid social media
• Sales: Prospecting calls, prospecting or nurture emails, case study slides in the sales deck
• Product: A better understanding of the value for customers can influence how the product team plans the roadmap and builds the product

2. Competitive intelligence

Your customers were likely considering other options before landing on your product. Get inside their heads, understand why they chose you over the competition, and turn that info into powerful messaging.

HOW TO USE THIS

• Share with the sales and product teams.
• Add to battle cards and comparison pages.
• Use in your messaging to highlight your product's unique value.

Pro Tip: Start with a broad question about why they sought a solution, then gradually dive into which alternatives they considered. This eases into the topic.

3. Case studies and testimonials

Getting quotes and success stories directly from customers is a classic reason to interview. And it’s perfect for aligning the incentives — you get to know your customers better, and your sales team gets real-world stories to close deals.

HOW TO USE THIS

• Pull quotes for website or marketing materials.
• Use video snippets for social media, email campaigns, or landing pages.

4. Sales enablement

Use insights to create sales enablement materials like customer cards (typically a single slide). These summarize the problems and solutions in a way that your sales team can use to pitch your product better.

HOW TO USE THIS

• Segment customer cards by use case, industry, or region.
• Share landing pages, email snippets, or anecdotes with your sales team to customize their outreach.

5. Positioning, messaging, & copy

Customer insights are key to refining your positioning, and messaging. They help you understand how your product addresses pain points, why that matters, and why your customers chose you over competitors

Plus often times the best copy comes straight from the mouths of our customers.

HOW TO USE THIS

• Use your customers’ language — from pain points to specific phrases they use — to craft copy that speaks directly to prospects who share those same challenges.

6. Product-market fit & ICP refinement

Not sure who your ideal customer is? Customer interviews, segmented by factors like industry or company size, can help you find your focus and improve your product-market fit.

HOW TO USE THIS

• Look for patterns in customer profiles, then align your ICP with those segments for more targeted outreach.

7. Software reviews

Getting customers to leave reviews on sites like G2 or Trustpilot can be much easier if you ask them after an interview, especially after they’ve just shared why they love your product.

HOW TO USE THIS

• Follow up with an email, sharing a direct link to your review site.
• Even better, a quick reminder with a quote from their interview, can help encourage them to leave feedback.

8. Product usage, product roadmap, product education

Interviews aren’t just about emotions and pain points. They’re also an opportunity to ask customers how they use your product, what features they wish existed, and how well they understand your offering.

HOW TO USE THIS

• Pass product feedback to your product team and suggest any potential educational improvements.

The biggest challenges when gathering customer insights

We know that understanding how customers really think is a superpower that can make almost every aspect of your product marketing better. But while there’s a huge upside, it’s not always easy to get access to those customer insights. Here are some of the main challenges you might face, and how to overcome them.

Challenge #1: No one’s asking you to do this

PMMs are constantly juggling requests from all directions, and gathering customer insights might not even make it onto your to-do list. It’s easy to feel like you’re just trying to stay afloat.

But you know deep down that customer insights are a goldmine. They’ll make your marketing more relevant, your content more targeted, and your sales team’s job easier. So yes, it’s worth making a case for carving out some time for it.

DO THIS:

To make the case, link customer insights to goals that matter to your stakeholders:

• If the sales team needs more customer success stories to win deals, use your customer interviews for case studies, testimonials, or quotes.
• If your VP of Marketing is pushing for more G2 reviews, get in touch with your happiest customers and turn those interviews into review requests.

Don’t forget you can use the Customer Insight Tracker to stay organized.

Customer Interview Questions & Insights Tracker Customer Interview Questions & Insights Tracker

Challenge #2: You don’t own the customer relationship

There’s bound to be someone else at the company who owns the relationship with the customer you want to speak with and will want to be in the loop. That’s most likely to be customer success, but could be sales team or some other dept.

DO THIS:

Partner up with the person who owns the relationship. If they see you as a collaborator rather than a competitor for customer attention, they’ll be far more likely to help you gather the insights you need.

And the best part? Their knowledge of customer history and product use cases will help you ask the right questions and avoid any potential awkward moments (like reaching out at the wrong time).

We recommend working with the customer relationship owner to implement an interview request process and maintain an interview pipeline to make sure you’re working together to access interviews from the right customers at the right time.

Customer Interview Pipeline Customer Interview Pipeline

Challenge #3: You’re not sure how to interview customers

It’s one thing to know you need customer insights, but it’s another to know how to conduct a productive interview. Whether you're new to this or feel a little lost, we’ve got you covered.

We break it down into a 6 step process:

How to launch a customer insights program: A step-by-step process

Launching a customer insights program is about more than just grabbing a few customer quotes here and there. You’re building a repeatable, efficient process for gathering insights that will fuel smarter product, marketing, and sales decisions.

Step 1: Set goals that align with your stakeholders’ needs

Think back to the examples above. What could customer insights help your business achieve?

Whether it's refining messaging, creating more social proof, or improving sales enablement, getting buy-in is much easier when you tie your efforts to something that resonates with the stakeholders who matter most. Ideally with actual dollars and cents attached.

Setting clear goals also helps you figure out what to do with the insights once you’ve got them.

Pro Tip: If your sales team is always hungry for case studies or ROI metrics, customer interviews are a perfect solution. Tie your goals to these needs to get the green light.

Step 2: Build a Customer Interview Pipeline

Rather than starting from scratch with each new interview request, we recommend that you build a Customer Interview Pipeline – a kind of “CRM for customer interviews” that you can use to build a repeatable process.

Customer Interview Pipeline Template

This pipeline can live on a spreadsheet or on shared productivity software – just make sure that both you and the team you’re collaborating with have access to it.

Customer Interview Pipeline Customer Interview Pipeline

By collaborating with the customer relationship owner, you can track the status of your interviews and make sure you’re interviewing the right customers at the right time.

Here’s a sample outreach template for a customer relationship owner (like a CSM) to request an interview on your behalf:

FROM: [Customer relationship owner]
TO: [Main customer contact]
CC: [Product marketer]

SUBJECT: Introducing you to our product marketer

TEXT:
Hi, hope you’re doing well!

I wanted to introduce you to our product marketer, [Firstname Lastname] (cc’d). 
[Firstname] is looking to learn more about how customers are using 
[Company/Product Name], and she’d love to hear about [Customer’s] experience.

Would you be open to a 20-30 minute call to discuss that?

If so, [Firstname] will reach out to set a time.

Thanks so much!

[Customer relationship owner]

Step 3: Interview the customers

Once your pipeline is set, it's time to do what you’ve been waiting for: actual customer interviews!

Follow these important guidelines for interviewing customers:

1. Give more weight to the problem than the solution

Sometimes we’re so focused on getting feedback about why the customer likes the product that we forget that we’ve started in the middle of the story.

Dig into why they needed your product in the first place—what issues were they struggling with? How urgent was it? This helps you understand the real pain points and how your product fits into the bigger picture.

2. Seek out comparisons to create context

Always look for ways to understand the “before and after” of using your product. If a customer is telling you how much time they saved, ask how long it used to take them before they found your product. This gives you real context on the impact your product has had.

3. Listen closely

4. Always, always, always ask follow-up questions

Follow-up questions are the key getting the in-depth insights you need from your customer conversations. It’s similar to the “5 whys” of product management: Some good follow ups:

• Can you tell me more about that?
• Are you able to give me an example?
• Can you explain why that’s so important?
• Is there a time when that made a significant impact on the business?
• Can you walk me through what that looked like?

Customer Interview Questions & Insights Tracker Customer Interview Questions & Insights Tracker

Step 4: Keep your internal stakeholders in the loop

Once you kick off the customer interviews, it’s tempting to hold off on sharing any insights until you’ve reached your goals or completed a certain number of customer calls.

But it can be much more effective to share what you’re learning in real time:

• Did a customer share a great quote about how they love the product? Post it in the company-wide channel for everyone to see.
• Did a customer mention ROI metrics or competitive insights? That info is valuable to sales, marketing, and product teams, so make sure they have access to it.
• Did a customer highlight a feature they don’t like? Share that directly with the product team so they can act on the feedback.

Step 5: Document, document, document

Interviews are only as valuable as the documentation behind them. Record your interviews, transcribe them, and make sure your insights are easily accessible for future reference.

Your near-term goal may be the objectives you’ve outlined at the start, but ultimately you want your interviews to become the basis of an increasingly rich collection of customer insights data, foundational to the strategy of the entire business.

This is where your Customer Insights Tracker comes into play. Use it to capture and analyze the data, so it’s ready for use in shaping future strategies.

Customer Interview Questions & Insights Tracker Customer Interview Questions & Insights Tracker

Step 6: Leverage your customer insights to carry out (and socialize!) the goals you’ve set

You’ve launched a customer insights program, conducted a few interviews, documented your findings, and shared some key takeaways with other teams. Take a breath and congratulate yourself for reaching this point!

You’ve built the foundation for a massively important program that will serve as the bedrock of market-informed strategy.

Next steps:

• If one of your goals is case studies or something else that can be accomplished on the basis of a single interview, you can either keep interviewing customers or create the output for each customer interview before moving on to the next.
• If your goal is messaging, ICP refinement or something else that requires identification of common themes or analysis, we recommend you first speak to at least five customers who fit the same customer profile.
• Be sure to share your findings internally, because the greatest insights on the planet won’t effect change if no one knows about them.

Conclusion

Creating collateral that truly resonates with your audience starts with listening to your customers. By conducting insightful interviews, asking the right follow-up questions, and collaborating with internal teams, you can uncover the real challenges and needs that drive customer decisions.

Build a repeatable, strategic process for gathering and documenting these insights, and make sure to share them across the company to inform everything from messaging to product strategy. With the right insights, you’ll be empowered to craft PMM materials that speak directly to your audience’s pain points and drive real results.

Now go do some listening! 👂🏻

Resources

Customer Interview Pipeline Customer Interview Pipeline

Customer Interview Guide Customer Interview Guide

Customer Interview Questions & Insights Tracker Customer Interview Questions & Insights Tracker

Where to find Shoshana

• LinkedIn
• Peel Product Marketing
• Book a customer insights consult

• Introduction
• Meet Shoshana Kordova
• What are customer insights?
• Why customer insights matter
• What you can do with customer insights
• 1. ROI metrics
• 2. Competitive intelligence
• 3. Case studies and testimonials
• 4. Sales enablement
• 5. Positioning, messaging, & copy
• 6. Product-market fit & ICP refinement
• 7. Software reviews
• 8. Product usage, product roadmap, product education
• The biggest challenges when gathering customer insights
• Challenge #1: No one’s asking you to do this
• Challenge #2: You don’t own the customer relationship
• Challenge #3: You’re not sure how to interview customers
• How to launch a customer insights program: A step-by-step process
• Step 1: Set goals that align with your stakeholders’ needs
• Step 2: Build a Customer Interview Pipeline
• Step 3: Interview the customers
• Step 4: Keep your internal stakeholders in the loop
• Step 5: Document, document, document
• Step 6: Leverage your customer insights to carry out (and socialize!) the goals you’ve set
• Conclusion
• Resources
• Where to find Shoshana