The Customer Research Playbook: How 100 Finance Leader Interviews Shaped This Company’s Mid-Market Strategy

Before writing a single line of code in April 2020, Julio Martinez conducted over 100 interviews with finance leaders. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, he revealed how this methodical research process shaped their entire go-to-market strategy and led to rapid growth in the mid-market FP&A space.

Going Beyond Basic Customer Discovery

Most founders know they should talk to customers. But Julio’s approach went deeper: “I’m very rigorous about going by the book and trying to doing customer research as it’s supposed to be done, or as people that know more than I do have done it successfully in the past.”

This wasn’t just about having casual conversations. Having spent years in finance himself, Julio knew the risk of letting his own experiences bias the research. Instead, he implemented a structured methodology focused on uncovering actual priorities rather than just validating assumptions.

The Coin Exercise: Forcing Prioritization

One technique proved particularly revealing: “I personally like a lot the exercise with the coins,” Julio explains. Here’s how it worked: “If you have to say hey, what do you want to solve? First, imagine this data problem, this modeling problem, this reporting problem, or this collaboration problem… any customer will want it all. But if you say hey, but now your constraint is that you only have ten points, how do you allocate that? And you can only pick two.”

This constraint-based questioning revealed something crucial: as companies scaled, their pain points evolved in a predictable pattern. “As companies mature, they will have more volumes of data, they will have more dimensions,” Julio notes. “That means more complexity in their models, more countries, more products, more stuff to manage.”

The Mid-Market Revelation

The interviews revealed a clear pattern about market segmentation. “Down market we don’t believe there is enough intensity in the pain,” Julio explains. “With Excel and Google sheets, hey, you can get a lot done really.”

But mid-market companies were different. They had outgrown basic tools but weren’t ready for enterprise solutions. As Julio describes it, “We see finance teams and revenue operations teams spending a lot of time, actually 60, 70, 80% in some cases of their time, in manual tasks, cleaning data and scrambling through data and fighting with spreadsheets.”

Shaping the Go-to-Market Strategy

These insights fundamentally shaped their GTM approach in three ways:

1. Technical Sales Focus The research revealed that finance leaders think differently than other buyers. “Selling to finance teams is very technical and is sophisticated, and you are facing somebody that doesn’t get easily excited as opposed to selling to sales or marketing or some other functions,” Julio notes.
2. ROI-Driven Messaging Instead of focusing on excitement about new technology, they emphasized concrete value: “Finding that velocity is going to be always true value, an ROI, clear ROI, instead of, hey, excitement, or it’s the new shiny object in our space.”
3. Product Development Priorities Understanding the technical sophistication of mid-market companies shaped their product roadmap: “These companies in the mid market are sophisticated. Usually they have a good tech stack in terms of ERP, CRM, data warehouse, bi solution, has, the hiring solution as well, ATS.”

From Research to Growth

The depth of their customer research gave them confidence to launch even as COVID was shutting down the economy. While VCs were “running headless” and “nobody was fundraising,” Julio’s team knew they had identified a real problem with a clear solution.

This conviction proved correct. The company achieved “more than ten times year growth” initially, later settling into “more the three times year growth” as they scaled. But perhaps more importantly, their deep understanding of customer needs has allowed them to expand their vision beyond FP&A to become “the operational planning system for companies in the mid market.”

For B2B founders, the lesson is clear: thorough, structured customer research isn’t just about validating assumptions – it’s about uncovering the insights that will shape every aspect of your go-to-market strategy. The key is having the discipline to do it systematically and the wisdom to let the insights guide your decisions, even when they challenge your initial assumptions.