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Most sales teams say they sell value, but in practice, they sell features wrapped in vague ROI claims, backed by hand-wavy maths and optimistic assumptions.

Buyers nod along… until they stall, ask for discounts, or say they need to “think about it”.

One of the biggest challenges I see PMMs, sales teams, and founders struggling with is how to create urgency with prospects; how to create an undeniable ‘pull’ motion, rather than trying to ‘push’ sales conversations like a heavy rock up a hill.

Early in my career I joined a company called Emailvision (later rebranded as SmartFocus), through the acqusition of PredictiveIntent – my first startup where I was employee number 4, the first marketer.

SmartFocus was sizable: thousands of customers, 650+ employees, and more than a dozen offices globally. My job was to roll this new product out to an existing sales organisation and help them sell it into the existing customer base.

It was a great success: we signed 40 customers to the new product within the first 6 months of rollout, getting to $1m ARR in record time.

Looking back, one sales tool + narrative helped lower barriers to entry, increase value perception, and make it a no-brainer to say yes. We built a tight process for generating customer-specific, evidence-led value cases.

This post breaks down the exact approach we used, why it worked, and how you can apply the same mechanics to your own product.

As a product marketer, your job is not to write broad ROI claims as part of your positioning and messaging. Your job is to help build the sales narrative that move a prospect along the buyer journey.

Designing a value case that reps can safely co-create with buyers, using the buyer’s numbers, assumptions, and constraints is a great way to deliver impact.

The real job: make value tangible

Smart Focus Advisor (the rebranded PredictiveIntent product) was a revenue-generating product. That should have made it easy.

Alas, it did not.

The PredictiveIntent technology was early AI and ‘big data’ number crunching designed to recommend ‘you might also like’ products on ecommerce stores by looking at thousands of similar customers like you.

With just a few lines of javascript, retailers could add recommendation blocks that would ‘be relevant and drive incremental revenue’.

But it sounds abstract… until you translate it into numbers that matter to a buyer: revenue, waste, targets, and trade-offs.

The turning point came from working closely with a sales rep who was unusually good at building business cases. We iterated together, systemized what worked, and taught it across the sales team.

The entire process had a few non-negotiable principles baked in:

• Build trust before you build maths

• Start with low stakes, then go deeper

• Use the customer’s numbers, not yours

• Anchor everything to monthly and annual impact

• Show the experience, not just the outcome

Step 1: Build trust before asking for numbers

I have never given deep company insights to a sales rep I don’t trust.

So the first move in any sales conversation was always to lower the stakes.

We framed the exercise as diagnostic, not transactional.

The language mattered:

“We want to understand where you are today so we can suggest a few ideas on how you can grow revenue with personalization. This is not a proposal, and your data won’t be shared or aggregated.”

That framing did three things:

• Signalled genuine intent to help

• Removed pressure to commit

• Made sharing data feel safe

Step 2: Start with a few pivotal inputs

We never asked for everything upfront.

We started with a small set of numbers that had an outsized impact on the model. Ballparks were fine.

For SmartFocus Advisor, that meant questions like:

• Average daily visitors

• Average daily page views

• Purchases per day

• Current average order value

If a prospect shared only these, we could already sketch a rough revenue baseline.

Once momentum built, we invited them to go deeper:

• Monthly SEO, PPC, and affiliate spend

• Bounce rate

• Cart abandonment rate

• Number of abandoned carts per day

• Number of products and categories

Step 3: Establish the revenue baseline

With a handful of inputs, we anchored the conversation in reality: to revenue.

Example logic:

• Purchases per day × average order value = average daily revenue

• Daily revenue × 28 = monthly revenue estimate

• Monthly revenue × 12 = annual revenue estimate

This was not presented as exact. It was presented as accurate enough to reason with, with an obvious margin for error and excluding seasonality.

Step 4: Expose waste without judgement

Next, we looked at traffic and spend.

• Average daily page views × 28 = monthly page views

• PPC/SEO/Affiliate spend × bounce rate = wasted spend

If a customer spent £20,000 per month on PPC with a 35 percent bounce rate, roughly £7,000 went to visitors who never engaged with the site.

We framed it as structural inefficiency that every large site has – an opportunity to present an upside in ‘lost’, but committed, spending.

Waste reframed the product from “new investment” to “better use of what you already spend” – even if the argument is hybrid.

Step 5: Make the solution visible

Buying a solution that has any impact on end-user UX can be risky enough – doubly so if you’re trying to combine it with an abstract, hard to trust uplift. So we made the experience real.

Because we had data across many customers, we could estimate page view distribution by page type:

• Homepage

• Category pages

• Product pages

• Checkout

We took screenshots of the prospect’s site and overlaid design examples showing how SmartFocus Advisor would appear in each context.

This did two things:

• Reduced fear of disruption

• Anchored uplift to specific surfaces

The buyer could see where value would be created.

Step 6: Apply credible uplift assumptions

Uplift is where most business cases collapsee, so we avoided aggressive promises. We used conservative ranges based on live customers.

Each uplift was calculated separately, then rolled up into monthly and annual potential revenue figures – because no only do bigger numbers sell better, but because buyers have monthly and annual targets in mind.

Step 7: Offer a low-effort wedge

While we pushed for a full rollout, the model made it easy to propose a pilot:

• One page type

• One clear success metric

This reframed the decision from a bet to a test – especially useful in selling to existing install bases who trust you for one product already, and to low-margin retailers with high-risk spend.

Step 8: Map value against cost

Only at the end did we introduce pricing.

• Setup fees

• Recurring fees

• Year one total cost

• Any discounts against ratecard

All against the estimated incremental revenue uplift.

Who wouldn’t spend £15k to make between £75k and £1m of incremental revenue?

How product marketers can build business case tools and ROI calculators

Value cases, ROI calculators etc are often treated as sales tools – but they’re actually product and narrative infrastructure.

In practice, PMMs should own:

• The input model: Which numbers matter, which are optional, and which unlock deeper insight

• The assumptions: What counts as a credible uplift, the proof, and defensible ranges that don’t spark lack of trust

• The artifacts: Worksheets, online tools, and the slides that guide the conversation without scripting it

Sales then take these tools to apply their unique sales skills to every prospect:

• The pacing of the conversation

• The judgement of when to go deeper

• The relationship and trust-building

When done well, ROI calculators reduce pressure, rather than adding it. It becomes easier to showcase potential, realistic value wihle reps don’t need to defend price: it becomes all about the upside.

Why I think this worked

In my opinion, we respected the buyer throughout, by:

1. Identifying the smallest set of inputs they would feel comfortable sharing

2. Approaching the conversation in a low-pressure, diagnostic frame

3. Translating numbers into the metrics they cared most about

4. Show where waste exists, not just where upside lives

5. Grounding the uplift in realistic mockups

6. Anchoring ROI in conservative, explainable assumptions

7. Offering a pilot as an initial wedge, as well as a full commitment to the complete solution

Value cases are powerful in nearly all sales-led conversations – from showing how teams can save time, to generate revenue, to reducing risk. How can you turn intangible potential into an honest business case?

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

The post Teardown: Building business cases that actually sell appeared first on Building Momentum.

I think something has shifted in the last 12 months.

Positioning, messaging, and sales decks that used to work have started to stall.

The products haven’t changed. The markets haven’t evaporated (even if it feels like they have).

The challenge: most B2B narratives are now too abstract.

Buyers are drowning in logistics and operational reality, while vendors are still trying to sell philosophies and belief systems.

Buyers still want vision… They just can’t afford to buy into a lofty future anymore.

The acceptable altitude of B2B storytelling has cratered. If your positioning, messaging, or sales deck is still flying at 30,000 feet, you’re going to lose them.

The big shift

AI means buyers are done with buying belief systems.

There are tons of reasons for this, from budget pressures and tariffs to the political environment, but AI has the most to answer for.

The explosion and adoption of AI agents — plus the complete wall of sound from every angle — in almost every facet of software is promising outputs and outcomes, not platforms and workflows.

The mental model has shifted almost overnight from “buy a system of record” to “get the result faster,”… at every level, from execs making strategic decisions to bottoms-up shadow IT and PLG plays.

This change now influences all software buying, even outside AI-native tools. Buyers now assume the system should do the thinking, not create more work.

They just want inputs, workflows, and outcomes, and fewer moving parts.

What this means for positioning

Buyers are tired of learning new categories, defining new roles to hire for, or wrapping their heads around new disciplines.

• Selling ambitious, futuristic narratives is an overhead.
• When you sell a “framework,” buyers know they’ll need training.
• When you sell a “new way of thinking,” they hear change management.
• When you try to create a “category,” the buyer knows it’s going to be a tough budget justification battle

In the current climate, lofty, aspirational messaging is a tax that nobody wants to pay.

The acceptable altitude for positioning and messaging – from sales narratives and website copy, to outbound email and your booth messaging – has plummeted.

Buyers want stories closer to the ground, that are closer to execution, closer to their inbox, to their calendar… closer to the mess they’re living day-to-day.

Buying software used to be partly buying an identity:

• Drift sold a chatbot – but buyers could say they were operating conversational marketing
• Hubspot sold emails and content marketing tools – but buyers were at the forefront of inbound marketing.
• At Kayako and Headstart, we created manifestos that defined how we think about the world and resonated strongly with buyers.
• At Remote, we leaned on the ‘talent is everywhere, and opportunities are not’ message: a tall, identity-level belief that created advocates.

That kind of storytelling works when buyers have time, slack, and political cover.

Today, default messaging has shifted toward survival.

Whether your buyer is a CEO, VP, Director, Manager, or just a plain ol’ individual contributor, they don’t want your manifesto. They’re in the weeds, day-in, day-out. They don’t have the time or patience to translate abstract value into concrete outcomes.

They simply want to buy the machinery that’s going to work immediately on Monday.

Where narratives are going wrong

1. They sell philosophy when buyers want machinery

Vision, worldviews, future-facing thought leadership, frameworks are dead – for now!

What buyers want is process, automation, enforcement, decisions, judgement.

At Headstart (a YC company focused on improving diversity in graduate recruiting), I built a beautiful sales narrative about “diversity recruiting”. It had a villain (bias). It had a promised land (equality).

Selling it was tough. It wasn’t wrong – but in every conversation, we had to align with the buyer’s philosophic stance on diversity… and debates don’t close deals.

When we rewrote it to focus on “improve speed and accuracy, and remove bias to hire the next generation of leaders,” close rates doubled.

Same product… different altitude.

2. They try to create fancy new categories

Category creation used to signal market leadership, and now it signals more work and a tough sell internally.

New category = new owner, new budget, new justifications.

Effective positioning is less about creating brand new conceptual landscapes for how to read the market – and more about fitting into the frames buyers already use to make decisions.

3. They promise “systems” instead of outcomes

Systems imply management, effort, risk, adoption challenges.

But buyers increasingly want automation, autopilot, guardrails, defaults… things that operate without supervision.

They don’t want to hire. In fact, they want to reduce team size: so you better be saving at least 2 full-time equivalents in workload.

When your deck says “our system empowers your team to make better decisions,” what they hear is: “You’ll need to train people, manage adoption, and hope they use it right.”

When your deck says “our platform enforces global hiring guardrails automatically,” what they hear is: “I can stop worrying about this, we can reduce the size of our legal team, and we won’t be at risk of non-compliance”.

Relief beats righteousness.

Reframing the Raskin model for this moment

Andy Raskin’s strategic narrative approach – from undeniable truth → monsters → promised land → magic – is still one of the best ways to communicate and sell vision in your customer’s world.

The psychology is sound. Buyers still respond to a shift they recognize, the problem they feel, the destination they want to achieve, and credible ways to get there.

But the way people apply strategic narrative has drifted too far abstract.

They use the ‘change in the world’ story without tying it to a tangible buyer and concrete outcomes.

The result is often narrative that sounds right but floats above reality. Narratives must operate at a lower altitude now.

Positioning should not be at the keynote level. It must be tactical, tangible, and meet buyers where they are.

The undeniable truth

• Ineffective: “The world of work is changing”
• Effective: “The moment a process requires human judgment, it stops being predictable”

The undeniable truth needs to be operationally obvious.

Every buyer knows this. They’ve seen clean workflows collapse when judgment is required, and they know standards slip when enforcement is manual.

If the truth needs explaining, it’s too high-level.

The monster (now)

• Ineffective: Inefficiency. Bias. Performance gaps.
• Effective: Unreviewed changes, ignored inputs, and one-off decisions nobody remembers making.

And monsters need to be expensive. Not in a “10% efficiency loss” way, but in a “we lost a $2M deal because someone sent the wrong deck” way.

Make it visceral. Make it something they dealt with last Tuesday, and need to avoid before it costs them credibility or their job.

The promised land (now)

• Ineffective: A better world. A fairer system. A transformed industry.
• Effective: Nothing slips through. Nothing needs chasing. Nothing surprises you on Monday morning.

Promised land is no longer transformation, it’s relief.

A calm Sunday evening matters more than you think. Buyers want to sleep. They want to stop worrying about what their team might screw up while they’re offline.

The magic (now)

• Ineffective: A framework. A methodology. A system to adopt.
• Effective: Software that catches mistakes before people do.

This is the part where you describe your product and how it works – but not the operating theory behind it. Specificity is magic now.

This also solves sales team insecurity

Something I’ve always noticed is that when positioning is too high-altitude, reps feel a ton of dissonance.

They’re told to pitch vision, but the prospect asks “but how does it actually work?”… and the rep doesn’t have an answer because the narrative didn’t give them the tactical answers they need.

So they panic and end up feature dumping: opening the product to click through every screen. This encourages them to feature dump earlier in the sales process… and this is how your sales team stop selling value and sell features instead.

Narratives that work well at ‘low altitude’ restore confidence because they match the buyer’s reality, they’re defensible, and they feel honest.

“We enforce pricing guardrails automatically,” can be shown and proven.

But when your narrative is “we empower teams to transform decision-making,”… what the hell are they supposed to demo?

The new role of narrative and storytelling?

Your website homepage and sales deck is no longer about connecting to a manifesto, a belief system, or a declaring you’re at the forefront of a clever category name you created.

I don’t think positioning is about inspiring buyers anymore.

Instead, narrative and storytelling is risk reduction. It’s control: a way for the buyer to say “yes” safely.

Storytelling has to connect with the buyers reality, more than ever. We are influencing the narrative that already exists for them – colouring in between the lines, not drawing from scratch.

There’s still plenty of room to be creative. The Bain Elements of B2B Value Pyramid is still useful – connecting your buyer’s reality and motivations to personal and aspirational value still works – but it can’t be fluid and wishy-washy.

Buyers want less to manage, not more to believe in.

They are less patient than ever before. They’re in the trenches of chaos, every day.

Stop flying motivational overhead banners, and instead get down there with them.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

The post The altitude problem in B2B positioning and sales narratives appeared first on Building Momentum.

Have you ever sat in a presentation where someone puts up a slide titled “Our ICP” and it reads:

“B2B SaaS companies, $10M-$50M ARR, 50-200 employees, North America.”

And someone in the room asks: “So… that’s like 8,000 companies. Which ones should we actually call?”

Silence.

I see this pattern constantly. Companies with reasonable-sounding ICPs built entirely on firmographics: company size, industry, revenue range, location… nothing else.

That’s not an ICP.

Six months later, they’re still stuck in the same place.

• Marketing can’t deliver the right leads
• Sales teams spray and pray without focus
• Win rates stay flat
• Churn goes up
• The team burns out

The problem isn’t work ethic or the budget: it’s your ICP definition.

Most ICPs tell you what a company is, but they don’t tell you when that company is ready to buy.

Situation influences purchase more than firmographics

The thing about firmographics is, they’re static and tell you literally nothing. They describe a company’s characteristics, but not their context.

A “Series B SaaS company” could be crushing it or bleeding cash. They could have a world-class GTM engine… or a pipeline held together with hope and spreadsheets.

One is browsing, and the other is buying.

But a “Series B SaaS company that just missed their board forecast by 40% and realized their pipeline has no repeatable process” is in a completely different state. That’s a company in a situation… and situations create urgency.

Let me give you a real example.

At Headstart, before I joined, the ICP was purely firmographic. Consulting and professional services companies, specific revenue range, offices in certain locations. Standard stuff.

It wasn’t working. The messaging was generic. Sales cycles were long. There was no pattern to wins.

So we shifted the definition. We started targeting companies that had published in their annual reports that diversity, equity, and inclusion was a strategic priority.

That was the trigger.

Once a company published that commitment, we knew they were serious.

We could reference their own language back to them. We could connect with people inside those organizations who personally cared about this work. The motivation was already there.

Everything changed. The sales team knew exactly who to target and when. The messaging got sharper because it could speak to a specific moment: the moment leadership made a public commitment. Close rates improved noticeably.

Why?

We stopped fishing in the ocean, and started fishing where the fish were already biting.

This is what I mean by situational ICP. The question isn’t “who is our ideal customer?” The real question is “What happened the week before they started looking for us?”

Was it a failed product launch?

A new executive who exposed gaps in the GTM? A competitor win that blindsided them?

A board meeting that went sideways?

A public commitment they now need to deliver on?

That specific moment, that trigger, is your real ICP.

When you shift to situational thinking, three things happen

Your messaging gets sharper.

You’re not writing for “B2B SaaS companies.”

You’re writing for “B2B SaaS companies whose last product launch flopped and the CEO is demanding answers.”

That specificity cuts through the noise and validates the pain before you even pitch the solution. It makes your prospect feel seen.

Your targeting gets easier.

You can build content around the trigger event, not just the company size.

Target companies with new hires in key roles. Companies that just announced funding. Companies that published commitments in annual reports. Companies that failed a compliance audit.

This powers ABM, outbound, and your entire content strategy.

Your close rates improve.

Because you’re reaching companies when they’re actually ready to change.

Most of your market is stuck in inertia.

They know they have a problem, but the emotional cost of change feels too high.

But companies in a situation? They’ve already overcome that inertia.

Something broke. Someone’s mad. The status quo isn’t acceptable anymore.

You’re not convincing them they have a problem… you’re showing up exactly when they’re ready to solve it.

Quick diagnostic: is your ICP sharp enough?

Before we go further, let’s diagnose your current ICP. Score yourself honestly on these 5 questions:

1. Can you describe their “horrible day” in specific detail?

If you can’t describe the exact moment their day falls apart, you don’t understand their pain well enough to sell to it.

2. Can your sales team spot the difference between a good-fit and bad-fit lead in 5 minutes?

A sharp ICP gives your team conviction. They should confidently disqualify a bad fit early in the conversation.

3. Does your ICP exclude at least 70% of your total market?

Narrow focus isn’t limiting… the opposite! It’s liberating! It lets you build messaging that actually resonates.

4. Is there less than 2 steps between your feature and their revenue or cost outcome?

Every step is a chance for them to lose interest. “Close 30% more deals” is stronger than “better project management leading to faster shipping leading to more revenue.”

5. Are you seeing momentum with this segment?

If you’re not seeing faster cycles, higher win rates, and better retention, your ICP might be theoretically correct but practically wrong.

If you can’t confidently say yes to at least 4 of these, your ICP is probably costing you deals.

Fix 1: Listen to sales calls

Don’t skim – actually listen!

Your job is to find the moment of maximum frustration, the point where the prospect’s voice changes where they sound tired, or angry, or desperate.

That emotion is your trigger. Write down the exact situation they describe.

For example, you might hear: “The CFO presents a messy pipeline report to board. CEO asks pointed questions the VP Sales can’t answer. VP Sales gets told to ‘fix it in 30 days or we’ll find someone who can.’ They start Googling solutions that night.”

That’s a trigger. That’s the moment they became a strong, high-potential, motivated buyer.

Fix 2: Build your “Negative ICP”

Pull a list of your highest-churn customers. What do they have in common? Industry patterns? Size? Mindset? Buying motion?

Write down the 5 attributes that scream churn, and turn that into a one-pager for your sales and marketing team. Make it easy for them to disqualify bad fits early, avoid targeting them in paid marketing, etc.

This is critical: disqualification is more important than qualification.

Every hour your team spends on a bad-fit prospect is an hour they’re not spending on someone who’s actually ready to buy.

You’re not trying to build the perfect persona; you’re trying to get sharp enough that your messaging actually resonates.

And remember: your ICP isn’t static. It’s going to evolve every 6 months as you learn what’s working and what’s not. You might refine it to be even more niche, or broaden slightly as you find success in adjacent markets.

This is what I call the positioning loop:

• Clarity (define your ICP)

• Conviction (commit to it)

• Consistency (execute for 6 months)

… so you can actually learn fast and narrow, without spraying and praying.

The fear of narrowing down is real

Every time I’ve recommended narrowing an ICP, I’ve gotten pushback from founders and CEOs.

“If we go that narrow, we’ll leave 90% of the revenue on the table.”

“We need to keep it broad so we can see what sticks.”

“Our product works for everyone in this category.”

The fear is real. Nobody wants to miss being the next Salesforce because they niched too early.

But trying to be everything to everyone is the fastest way to become nothing to anyone.

You can’t build authority with a broad ICP.

Authority requires a point of view.

And a point of view requires choosing who you’re for… and who you’re not.

I worked with a seller who focused on an uncomfortably narrow ICP. They only sold to one specific customer type, in a specific region. Their pitch was three sentences. Their close rate was ridiculously high. Customers barely asked questions before signing.

When I asked if they worried about leaving money on the table, they said: “No. I worry about trying to serve everyone poorly instead of serving someone exceptionally well.”

That stuck with me.

Because narrowing your ICP doesn’t shrink your business. It expands your impact.

When you’re crystal clear on who you serve, three things happen:

1. Your messaging gets sharp enough to cut through the noise

2. Your sales team can spot good fits instantly

3. Your product roadmap has a clear direction

The hardest part of strategy is saying no. But it’s also the most important part.

Stop fishing in the ocean

In B2B, you don’t sell to company profiles. You sell to people in companies in specific situations that they desperately want to escape.

So here’s what I’d challenge you to do:

• Stop building ICPs on demographic filters

• Stop defining your market by company size and job titles alone

• Instead, ask: “What happened the week before they started looking for us?”

• Find that moment

• Build your messaging around it

• Target companies when they’re in that situation

Because that’s when they’re ready to buy, when you can actually help them move forward.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

The post Stop selling to job titles, and start selling to situations instead appeared first on Building Momentum.

Before we get into it, this post is half tongue-in-cheek… and half real. This is a joke, except for the parts that aren’t.

The tides are turning. Product launches are not really about driving commercial outcomes anymore.

Nope. Product launches are performative performances.

Founders, CEOs, and tech tastemakers in the SF/YC bubble now have higher expectations for what ‘good’ looks like when introducing a new product to the world.

Launches are less about what the product does on day one, and more what it says about the people behind it.

9 rules of the cool product launch playbook

If it’s not AI, it’s not worth it

It’s fine if the product isn’t meaningfully powered by AI, you just gotta find a way to tie it in.

AI-native works. ‘Agentic’ even better. Throw in some LLM, RAG, vector-database and you’re golden.

Ambiguity on exactly how it works is fine, because you’ll figure it out later.

AI is less of a capability, and more a costume to signal relevance, ambition, and tech chops. The goal is to be associated with AI, not actually AI – it’s easier this way!

Manufacture intimacy

You know what every prospect in your industry wants? To really vibe with the people behind the product.

And luckily, since both you and them just have click-mouse-send-email jobs, you’re halfway there!

You need to:

• Record a podcast and get the video too – I mean, record a video that looks like a podcast. Nothing says ‘I’m cool, trust me’ like a guy behind a mic!
• Capture the ‘behind the scenes’ B-roll footage. You’re at a desk scrolling through a dashboard, or pacing in the city on a walking 121… or if you’re ever in doubt, the classic ‘pondering at a whiteboard covered in post-it notes’
• Tweet secret, random thoughts that are fleetingly intellectual, but disintegrate under scrutiny. Luckily, X only shows your posts to 2% of your followers, so the veil never lifts.
• Get a LinkedIn ghostwriter. You’re too important to write your own posts. Also, you don’t have anything real to say, so outsourcing is efficient.

Intimacy creates an impression of access. You’re not being marketed to! You’re being let in to the secret club of the rich, famous, and ambitious.

You, an ‘insert job title here’ making $100k a year, can really connect with the life of a $2bn startup founder who took more out in secondaries than you’ll make in a lifetime.

Cinema over comprehension

Clear demos answer questions – but who wants that?

You need to create desire, and nothing does that better than a cinematic product launch video film.

Moody b-roll, slow pans, music that suggests importance. Glimpses of the product, but the focus is on people using the product.

Bonus: you don’t need to commit to anything technical that invites scrutiny! Cinema invites projection – viewers fill the gaps with their own assumptions.

Every Series A small feature launch comes with an Apple-style production, complete with viewing party.

Brand it like it’s 1992

Nothing says ‘cool’ like subversion. We’re at the cutting edge of AI! So obviously, branding must look like Windows 3.1 when computer software came on floppy disks.

There’s no particular reason for this – it just looks cool. SaaS branding, like fashion, is cyclical.

Speak fluent internet

Language evolves and signals belonging, so you’ve gotta get onboard with the dominant paradigm.

• Are you cooking?
• Is your team cracked?
• Do you have enough alpha?
• Is this feature signal?
• Are you locked in or NGMI?

Welcome to the post-clarity era. Use the right language to signal something – sounding right to the right audience matters more than being understood by everything.

Lock in, in public

You’re not committed unless you’re telling people about it!

996, but that’s just about being at an office – you still have food, gym, sauna and massage services, dry cleaning, etc that you can use whenever. But so long as your butt is in the office, you’re good.

And you gotta tell people about it too.

Take photos of engineers at their desks at 10pm. Share your pride on the whole team working on a Saturday – shoutout to Bob who missed his child’s birth to watch Cursor generate a ‘remember me’ checkbox for the login screen!

We hope that old adage is true: an object in motion [or at least, appears to be] stays in motion – enough to get to the next round anyway.

Only personal social is cool

Emails are the most effective form of marketing? Who cares!

Personal social is the coolest. Everyone can be an influencer – or at least look like it.

Make clips of every fake-podcast video. Thot-leadership threads on X that connect something Elon said to your finance platform feature.

Don’t forget to include ‘must engage with every exec-team LinkedIn post’ part of your employee contracts too.

If a product launches and it isn’t ‘big’ on social, was it successful? Probably not.

Optimize for tastemakers, not customers

Customers are generally a bit slow to recognize greatness. Mid-market and enterprise sales cycles take months – far too long to show traction.

Instead, let’s show traction by getting nods from the right people – VCs, friendly founders who happen to be in the same YC group, a comment from that thought leader you gave 2% equity to for association…

Their participation gives you distribution, a sense that something cool is happening, and cultural weight.

Actual customers can come later, validation from peers with vested interests can be instant!

Success = approval

Anyone can make a dollar on the internet, but only a lucky few can get a ‘looks dope’ retweet from a guy with a black-and-white profile picture and ambiguous bio.

Adoption, revenue, retention… they all still matter, but they’re allowed to lag.

The launch is successful if it looked right, sounds right, and land with the right crowd.

Jokes aside… this playbook works

While I’ve taken a lot of creative license with the above, this playbook isn’t stupid… it’s just a reaction to the current environment.

Attention compounds fast. Social proof travels quickly. Public approval is a targeted shortcut to positioning: you’ve just gotta be seen as being good.

The playbook works because many AI startups are looking to:

• Raise their next round
• Attract talent
• Stay culturally relevant in a crowded, hyped space

… and the tactics above work because you’re not selling hard software, you’re selling belief in a team, in an idea, in the future.

… until it doesn’t

The problems will show up later.

• Prospects aren’t quite convinced on the product value
• Customers churn because they struggle to adopt in their day-to-day
• The product, with all the locked-in, cracked engineers you can hire, doesn’t neatly solve a real problem
• The fleeting launch moment dissolves and you need a repeatable MQLs > SQLs > Opps > CW pipeline

At some point, belief runs out and reality hits hard.

The least cool launches are often the most effective. They:

• Explain the problem plainly
• Show the product clearly
• Target and reach a narrow audience
• Make explicit tradeoffs
• Accept that some people won’t care, but the ones who will are going to give you $
• Might not pop on X, but will lead to CW sales conversations

None of this is a moral argument.

You can do the cool launch… and you may ‘win’ doing it. Just be honest about what you’re optimizing for.

If your launch is designed to impress the industry, don’t be surprised when you struggle to convert customers. If your business is loud about prioritizing sales, don’t be surprised when a behind-the-scenes X thread isn’t the main launch tactic.

Cool is a choice: so are the consequences. Make the decision!

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

The post The ‘Cool Product Launch’ Playbook appeared first on Building Momentum.

We ran a live AMA last week for 230+ product marketers on how to get ahead in 2026 – you can watch it back here.

Before the first question came in, Alicia and I spent time unpacking the reality of the role today: why it feels stretched, why priorities blur, and why product marketers often find themselves doing everything… except the work that matters.

PMM today feels like being asked to be everywhere at once.

Commercial thinking. Customer understanding. Product depth. Data fluency. AI. Segmentation. Launches. Pricing. Positioning…. all while fielding daily reactive asks (or demands!).

Expectations keep expanding… but your authority hasn’t.

You don’t own the roadmap. You don’t own a commercial target. You influence without levers. You experience a ton of pressure, without direct control.

And because of this, most PMMs get pulled toward the visible, fast-moving part of the job: the top of the pyramid.

Work that looks productive… but rarely increases influence.

Top PMMs spend most of their time in the bottom layer, where clarity, direction, and influence are shaped.

If you can spend more time there, then everything above it becomes easier, clearer, and more impactful.

We then broke down the three things top-performing PMMs do differently – keep reading to find out more, plus get the exclusive Q&A rundown.

But first, did you know that I run The GTM Playbook course together with Alicia?

The GTM Playbook

Much of the work we shared in the session comes from building and scaling PMM functions inside high-growth SaaS companies.

We’ve taken teams from zero to hundreds of millions in ARR… and seen what breaks when customer understanding, positioning, and GTM foundations aren’t in place.

We like to say The GTM Playbook is grounded in our trauma ?

It exists because we lived the failed launches, the restructures, the narrative gaps, and the cost of misalignment across product, sales, and marketing.

That’s why we rebuilt a clearer operating system for PMMs: The GTM Playbook.

We cover six key modules so you can be strategic, execute effectively, and adapt with agility:

1. Understand GTM fundamentals

2. Know your customer deeply to win

3. Define your value proposition

4. Communicate so people get it

5. Get your product to market with ease

6. Iterate to success without losing pace

With 35+ hours of learning, 10+ templates, and peer-led community, it’s the most human way to get the tools, skills, and confidence you need to excel in product marketing.

Plus, it works: it’s 100% five-star rated, and nearly half of past students were promoted within six months.

And, if you need to get your manager’s approval to expense it, there’s a simple template at gtmplaybook.co/boss.

Now, back to the main content:

1. They focus on business impact

We all know that output isn’t the same as impact, but it’s hard to prove.

The PMMs who move up fastest begin by asking a different question: what is the business trying to achieve, and which work helps move that lever?

When you anchor to a commercial outcome like activation, conversion, retention, sales velocity, ACV (or, whatever trendy metric your CEO cares about…) your priorities change accordingly.

You stop reacting, and start shaping. The job becomes clearer the moment you:

• Start from impact, not deliverables

• Evaluate requests by the lever they support

• Use business outcomes to frame your recommendations

• Make it visible how PMM work changes a number

2. They lead and weave with evidence

Most PMMs spend their time primarily working on channels and tactics, maybe on enablement and motions, with maybe some targeted customer research later on.

Top PMMs flip the pyramid.

They spend a disproportionate amount of time speaking to buyers, joining sales calls, listening to lost deals, and observing how prospects think about risk, value, and switching.

• This enables them to influence and guide GTM strategy

• To create more resonant positioning and messaging

• To enable sales and commercial teams on the right motions

• To execute campaigns and marketing tactics that are going to win.

Alicia described it this way in the session: You cannot represent the customer in the room if you haven’t heard them in the real world.

Evidence becomes the raw material for influence.

And high-performing PMMs don’t just gather insights, they weave it across their work into:

• Positioning decisions

• Product conversations

• Sales narratives

• Pricing rationales

• Executive direction

This is also why “insight” in isolation isn’t enough. You need insight → interpretation → implications → recommended action.

3. They build systems that create natural influence

The third behaviour we walked through before the AMA is bringing order to confusion.

Influence doesn’t come from owning decisions… it comes from making decisions easier for others.

Most PMMs create far more documentation than they need, and much of it goes unread. The mental tax of interpreting it is too high for busy teams.

High-performing PMMs build embedded systems that become second-nature across the business:

• A repeatable structure for value (Value → Benefits → Features → Proof)

• A simple path through positioning decisions

• A predictable launch rhythm

• Updated sales narratives that reflect market reality

• Consistent language that reduces internal friction

This is not about being process-driven; it’s removing friction so other teams can execute more clearly.

Product marketers should not hand people concepts they have to work hard to interpret. Your job is to lower the cognitive load, not increase it.

Balancing foundations with tactics

Then the question every PMM wrestles with: How do you balance foundation with execution?

The honest answer is that PMMs always have to spend time in channels and tactics. Slides will always be needed. Requests will still come your way. Campaigns will still need support.

But top PMMs flip the pyramid:

• They earn the right to be in foundational discussions.

• They invest early in customer understanding.

• They build positioning with evidence, not assumptions.

• And because their foundations are clear, their execution becomes faster and more consistent.

When you spend 70% of your thinking in the core foundations, the 30% you spend in execution becomes more effective.

You’re not tweaking slides anymore! You’re reinforcing a story grounded in market truths.

Cementing your reputation as a strategic doer

Top PMMs earn influence through a loop:

1. Focus on business impact

   1. Understand the situation

   2. Communicate challenges and opportunities

   3. Measure the impact of your work

2. Gather evidence and inputs:

   1. Customers, competitors, market signals, etc.

3. Influence across the business:

   1. Inform the right people

   2. Deliver the right projects

   3. Make updates to business-as-usual material and systems

4. Repeat…

Run this loop consistently and you build a reputation for clarity, direction, judgement, and operational follow-through.

Earning trust by bringing order

PMMs earn trust when they make complexity simpler for others… not when they produce more work.

Teams shouldn’t have to “do the hard work” just to understand PMM output. The role adds the most value when PMMs take scattered inputs and turn them into a clearer direction with

• Less documentation

• More clarity

• Fewer bespoke assets

• More reusable models

• Less noise

• More signal

Those systems might be repeatable positioning concepts, launch programs, regular updates and insights, etc… anything that stops teams guessing what PMM means, and instead relying on the structure PMM provides.

AMA Highlights

Q: Apart from strengths in storytelling, analysis, and sales enablement… what will genuinely differentiate PMMs and help them deliver value in 2026?

A: The biggest shift comes from moving beyond functional execution and stepping into the decisions that shape the direction of the business. The PMMs who will stand out in 2026 are the ones who use their vantage point to influence choices earlier in the process.

When PMMs bring this perspective consistently, the role stops being defined by deliverables and becomes a source of direction. For example:

• Connecting product and commercial plans to real demand patterns

• Shaping the narrative that links the product vision to what buyers want

• Grounding pricing and packaging in customer expectations

• Surfacing market risks and opportunities before they become urgent

Strategic influence is no longer optional. It’s becoming the differentiator.

Q: “What recommendations do you have for someone who works remotely, not in the same market as their customers, where in-depth calls are harder?”

A: Working in a different region from customers adds friction, but it doesn’t remove the need to build customer instinct. There are tons of approaches that can work well:

• Partner with sales or CS to identify “safe” accounts for interviews, such as closed-lost deals or churned customers

• Use automated sequences to regularly invite these contacts to short calls, so research time is booked automatically

• Make customer conversations a weekly fixture rather than an ad-hoc task

The goal is a pipeline of predictable, low-friction sources of insight – not just waiting for the right conversations to magic themselves into existence.

Q: “What’s the most effective way to present customer feedback to product? What loops or channels work best?”

A: Customer feedback needs to be structured, quantified, and linked to business outcomes. You’re going to convince people best with an evidence-based narrative – not just the volume of research itself.

One effective method is a structured “voice of the stakeholder” report that:

• Teaches teams how to contribute useful feedback

• Aggregates data across markets, deals, or segments

• Highlights patterns rather than anecdotes

• Links requests to expected commercial impact

When feedback is organised in this way, product teams can distinguish noise from signal… it’s easier to prioritise work because the underlying need is clearer, and the consequences of inaction are more explicit.

Q: “How do you ensure internal docs and one-pagers are actually used by sales?”

A: Enablement only works when it is connected to how sales teams operate. Documents that live in isolation don’t change behaviour. Adoption improves when PMMs approach enablement as a system, not an output.

I’ve taken quite a hardline approach to this before – sales adoption is an accountability issue.

• Align with sales leadership so materials are part of onboarding, training, and inspection

• Map every collateral request to a stage in the buyer journey

• Deprioritise assets that don’t help advance a deal

• Check how existing materials are being used before assuming the team needs more

When enablement reflects how deals actually move (and when sales leaders reinforce usage) PMM materials become part of the rhythm of selling rather than static assets in a folder.

Q: “Is the IC career path limiting?”

A: No! In many companies it is expanding, especially as fractional roles become more common. Both IC and manager roles mean PMMs can have meaningful impact. The difference is in how that impact is expressed.

A strong IC can influence strategy, shape positioning, guide product direction, and become the person teams rely on for clarity and judgement. A strong manager enables others to do this at scale. Neither is inherently superior.

The best path is the one that reflects how you like to work:

• If you enjoy depth, ownership, and autonomy, the IC route fits

• If you enjoy coaching, structure, and team dynamics, management fits

Both create value, and both are viable long-term careers… and neither should be treated like a consolation prize.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

The post Why top PMMs flip the pyramid appeared first on Building Momentum.

Every go-to-market team has to figure out how to sell the future without lying about it.

That’s easy to say and hard to do.

The pace of building has exploded. AI-assisted engineering means teams can spin up new capabilities in days. But shipping isn’t the same as releasing. QA, pricing, enablement, and rollout still move on human time.

The result: a messy middle full of “almost ready” features and internal betas that the market doesn’t see yet, while buyers are actually judging you on where you’ll be next year.

They don’t just buy your product. Investors, partners, and customers are all buying your momentum.

I’ve learned the companies that win aren’t always the ones that build fastest, or the ones that build the best product. Instead, they’re the ones that make progress visible before anyone else believes it.

• If you only sell what’s live, you undersell your potential.
• If you only sell what’s next, you break trust.

The job is to sell the slope: to show what’s real today, and what’s becoming real.

Why buyers buy momentum, not just product

Sales needs something to sell. Product wants to wait until it’s stable. Marketing worries about over-promising. Success teams brace for support load when things launch, whether they’re stable or not.

… Ultimately, everyone is stuck in a different version of the truth.

Buyers, meanwhile, don’t care about those internal trade-offs.

They care about what they can see: progress, energy, direction.

You can build faster than ever, but if the market can’t feel that motion it might as well not exist.

Selling the slope isn’t a storytelling trick.. it’s a positioning strategy. You’re not educating the market on what you do today. You need to educate them on where you’re going.

The key to introducing something new is gradual motion, not sudden reinvention. Timing matters – too early, and it won’t land.

Selling the slope follows the same rhythm: invite people into your trajectory, one believable step at a time.

Examples: how to walk the line

Brainfish have got this down! Their homepage starts with a grounded, current value proposition: AI support that feels built-in, not bolted on. That’s the product as it exists today.

But, click the spaceship icon in the menu bar and boom: you get a great sense of their direction. No release dates. No buzzwords. Just a clear sense of motion.

That duality – today’s product and tomorrow’s intent – builds trust. The company feels alive.

Zendesk followed the same playbook over years. Their message shifted gradually: from support software to customer experience platform to AI-powered service suite. I wrote about this when I reviewed their positioning evolution: each repositioning wasn’t a reinvention, but a visible continuation of what came before.

Make the future visible, but believable

Selling the present feels safe. You can demo what’s live, point to proof, and stay factual, but it flattens your story.

Buyers don’t just want confidence in what exists, they want evidence of what’s evolving. Momentum should be part of your positioning. If you don’t project it, someone else will (and they’ll leapfrog you quickly).

The opposite is more dangerous. I’ve seen teams promise future features to close deals, demoing prototypes as if they were live, or showing slides full of intentions dressed up as products.

It works for a while… until it breaks.

• Customers get frustrated when promises don’t materialize
• Support teams drown in tickets
• CSMs spend months resetting expectations
• Reps lose confidence (and commission) when deals churn

I’ve written before about how to prepare sales to talk about what’s coming without slipping into speculation. The same discipline applies here: teach people how to sell intent, not illusion.

Align behind a shared statement of direction

Selling the slope only works when everyone tells the same story. That means alignment – and as a product marketer, it’s your job to connect the dots.

In multiple companies, I’ve built a shared Statement of Direction – a single slide deck that replaced the guessing game between product and sales. This becomes the living narrative: a way to align intent without over-committing to dates.

A good Statement of Direction isn’t a marketing deck. It’s a leadership artefact: the bridge between your vision narrative and your next two quarters of execution.

It’s what lets every investor update, sales call, and roadmap review tell the same believable story. It should describe your themes, goals, and intended outcomes. Not dates or specs, just direction. It should answer:

• What’s live now
• What’s in motion
• What’s being explored

Then teach sellers and CSMs how to navigate the grey area. Give them phrases and connective tissue that express confidence without over-promising – things like:

• “In pilot with early customers”
• “Scheduled for validation later this quarter”
• “Under active research for next year”

Build those distinctions into decks, product pages, and demos so everyone stays consistent.

Finally, make it tangible. Give sellers something they can show: Figma prototypes and visual mockups. Invite product managers into key customer conversations to help shape that story live.

When all of this aligns, the future stops feeling abstract.

Don’t forget pricing, rollout, and the reality of your business

Selling the slope doesn’t stop at messaging… it ripples through pricing, rollout, and support.

If new products or modules are coming, customers should have a sense of how pricing might evolve. Springing a new tier or upsell later creates sticker shock. See if you can agree pricing guidelines like:

• Significant new products will be charged separately
• New features may be chargeable as an add-on
• Beta testers will receive 6 months free and a 50% 1 year discount from market rate if they decide to continue

Customer success needs the same preparation. They should know what’s on the horizon so they can manage adoption, renewals, and education.

Ultimately, the roadmap and the story and the future is business strategy challenge, not just a product marketing/product management thing.

Keep your slope alive: turn momentum into a rhythm

Selling the slope is a rhythm, not a one-off campaign.

• If you talk too far ahead, it becomes fiction
• If you’re too vague, it loses meaning
• If teams tell different stories, you fracture trust

Keep it current. Revisit your statement of direction every quarter. Update decks, demos, and sales materials. Let the slope evolve as the product catches up.

Start small, then build

If this feels big, start small. Write a one-pager that outlines where your product is going and why. Include:

• A few quarters of committed work
• Two or three long-term themes
• A short note on customer impact

Share it with sales and success first, then listen to how they use it.

Turn it into one simple “future direction” slide for your sales deck to show what’s live, what’s coming, and what’s being explored.

Every feature you launch updates the present; every iteration shifts the slope. Show motion without hype, give direction without overreach, and show progress that people can believe in.

That’s how you sell the slope.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

The post Sell the slope: How to make progress believable before it’s real. appeared first on Building Momentum.

Every week there’s a new screenshot on LinkedIn: someone pastes a half-baked prompt into ChatGPT, gets a polished paragraph back, and declares the end of marketing as we know it.

It makes for good engagement bait, but it misses the point.

AI is incredible at processing content. It can rewrite, reframe, and remix faster than any of us. But it doesn’t understand the same way you do.

It doesn’t know the pressure your buyer is under from their CFO. It doesn’t know the difference between a “feature” that looks good in a deck and a “capability” that can define someone’s career. It doesn’t know the subtle gap between what your product does and what your buyer cares about.

That’s the part only a product marketer can do. And that’s exactly why AI will expose lazy product marketing, and the lazy PMMs behind it.

The 90% vs the 10%

A tweet I saw nailed it:

The 90%? Drafting headlines, generating alternatives, summarizing content. The stuff that feels like “work” but is really just mechanics. AI eats that for breakfast.

The 10% that matters?

Knowing which headline actually lands with a VP of HR vs a hiring manager.

Knowing when to push on aspiration (“build the future of your company”) and when to hammer on utility (“approve time off requests in seconds”).

Knowing how to turn a product feature into value that speaks across personas.

That’s the work AI can’t do… and where your leverage comes alive.

Why your taste matters more than ever

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: some product marketers don’t have great taste to begin with.

They hid behind laundry lists of features. They recycled the same “save time, save money, do more strategic work” tropes. They defaulted to “seamless” and “easy to use” without ever asking why it matters.

AI will happily crank out more of the same. If you don’t have a strong point of view, you’ll drown in blandness.

Lazy product marketing was already ineffective. With AI, it gets exposed for what it is.

What makes the difference is taste. Knowing the difference between copy that looks fine on the page and messaging that changes how someone thinks.

Taste comes from three places:

• Pattern recognition: shipping enough launches to know what works and what flops.
• Buyer psychology: understanding your buyers and what they value (better than anyone else)
• Curiosity: going deeper in discovery calls, asking the questions that unlock the tension, the politics, the career stakes: the human drivers behind a deal.

That taste is the multiplier. AI makes it easier to generate raw material… which means you can spend more of your time choosing, shaping, and sharpening.

The future is curation, not creation

The biggest shift AI brings is not “replace the PMM.” It’s “change what part of the job creates leverage.”

Creation used to be the bottleneck. Getting to a decent draft was slow. Now? That’s the easy bit.

The bottleneck is curation. Picking the right angle, cutting what’s weak, elevating what’s strong, aligning it with strategy. That’s where momentum comes from.

So if you’re in product marketing, stop worrying about whether AI makes you obsolete. Start asking yourself:

• Am I spending 80% of my time in the 90% bucket, tweaking outputs anyone could make?
• Or am I building leverage in the 10%, sharpening taste, judgment, and insight into what really drives buyer behavior?

AI is not the end of product marketing. It is the end of lazy product marketing.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

The post AI exposes lazy product marketers appeared first on Building Momentum.

A good story isn’t enough. You can write the sharpest narrative in your category, build a killer deck, and train your team to the script.

But if that story never makes it into how your team speaks, builds, and sells… it doesn’t matter.

Most teams treat positioning like a one-and-done project. They ship a deck, update the copy, and move on.

Great teams do more. They treat positioning like a loop. A system. A habit. Something they revisit, reinforce, and refine over time.

And when they do, positioning becomes a growth driver, not a forgotten artefact.

That’s where the Positioning Loop comes in.

It’s not a framework. It’s a cycle. One that helps you move beyond theory and actually embed positioning into your go-to-market motion – day in, day out.

The Positioning Loop has three phases:

• Get clarity
• Build conviction
• Be consistent

Here’s how to actually do it.

Get clarity

This is where most get stuck.

You craft a compelling story that earns nods and comments until you realise it doesn’t answer the right questions.

Clarity isn’t word polish. It’s decision making.
You must define:

• Exactly which customer you serve
• The problems you relentlessly solve
• What you’re replacing, and why you’re better

At Paddle, we went beyond just looking for product market fit. We started asking: is this company likely to act now? Are they feeling the urgency?

That’s what led us to focus on buyer moment fit – not just who could benefit from our product, but who was actually primed to engage now.

We built a short list of signals to help us identify these moments: had they just raised a round? Recently hired in finance or ops? Expanded into the US? Each one gave us clues that the buyer was not only a good fit, but ready for a conversation.

That changed how we told our story. We weren’t speaking to some abstract ICP. We were targeting companies in motion, and it showed up everywhere from outbound copy to demo calls.

That shift didn’t just make our messaging clearer… it made it usable. Because when you know exactly who you’re speaking to and why they care right now, every part of go-to-market gets sharper.

If your positioning doesn’t make you uncomfortable, it’s probably too safe.

Build conviction

Having clarity is one thing. Getting the team to believe is another.

Sure, you roll out the story. Slides get saved. But a few weeks in, everyone has defaulted back to old language.

Belief doesn’t live in slides. It lives in lived experience.

At Paddle, we leaned into this. To help the team believe, we invited real customers into all-hands so people could hear unfiltered quotes. We plastered those quotes on posters everywhere. We celebrated great calls and shared snippets of the language that prospects used, so reps would know what to look out for.

This was strategic reinforcement: when sales walked into the market, they’d hear exactly the pains we were teaching them to talk to. The story would feel real. They’d believe it more, pitch more robustly, and bring more energy into every conversation.

How to help conviction stick:

• Turn personas into real humans. Use call clips, quotes, live stories so the pain becomes tangible
• Flag every win where the new messaging was part of the success. Share that fast
• Make positioning a visible part of the environment, like Slack, meetings, and even the office

You earn conviction; it can’t be enforced. 

Be consistent

If your message morphs every quarter, it stops being positioning. It becomes noise.

In my article on Zendesk’s positioning evolution, I charted how their narrative evolved over time, but never flipped. From scrappy startup to enterprise-friendly leader, they stuck to a single tension point: simplicity at scale in customer service. That consistency gave it strength.

Your team needs time to absorb. Your buyers need time to remember.

In When Should You Reposition Your Brand? I outlined five real reasons to change positioning. Rarely is it because you lost one deal or a competitor launched new features. Most teams only need to revisit their story every 6 to 12 months. It gives you enough signal to make deliberate decisions about how to evolve.

Consistency isn’t rigidity. It’s giving your message a fighting chance to embed.

Psst… it’s a loop, remember?

• Clarity builds belief.
• Belief drives execution.
• Execution sharpens the message.
• Rinse, repeat.

The more consistently you run this loop, the more clearly you see what’s working… and what’s not.

When you stick with a story, patterns emerge. Your team stops saying “we’re not sure if it’s landing” and starts saying “this line always gets a nod” or “people get stuck here.”

You move past guesswork. You gather real-world evidence. You start making sharper decisions about what to double down on, what to drop, and how to improve.

This is why the loop matters. Not just to maintain alignment, but to drive smarter iteration over time.

Positioning is a muscle. The more you run the loop, the more you understand how to grow – and how to get better.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

The post The repeatable system to level up your positioning appeared first on Building Momentum.

At a previous company, we rolled out a big repositioning with a new target customer, new narrative, a new proposition.

The story was stronger, sharper, more emotional. It passed all the internal checks, well aligned across the CEO, COO, Sales, and Marketing, and felt like a very real, positive step forward.

We felt good going into it. The rollout was smooth, building out new decks, updating the website, training the team. All the right moves. But what we didn’t expect was what came next.

I started listening back to sales calls and… the story wasn’t landing.

Some reps were skipping it. Others were falling back on old language. A few tried the new pitch, but it just came out wrong. The sharp, confident message we’d worked so hard on was already unraveling.

We’d underestimated how easily a strong message can unravel the moment it hits the real world.

That’s messaging distortion.

Messaging distortion is real

Even the strongest positioning and clearest messaging can fall apart in execution. Not because the strategy is wrong or the copy is weak, but because of what happens in the handoffs.

Messaging distortion is when the carefully crafted messaging you designed doesn’t make it out the way you intended. It gets reshaped at every step between teams until what reaches the customer is a version you barely recognise.

• PMMs tweak the message for sales collateral
• Sales enablement adjusts it for training sessions
• Marketing reworks it for content and paid channels
• Sales reps reframe it based on what they hear in discovery

By the time it reaches the end user, the original message has been reshaped so many times it’s vague, generic, and missing the point. 

You thought you were handing over a sharp, useful story… but the end result could be a completely different pitch.

It’s the sales rep’s fault for not parroting the language correctly. It’s yours for not building a system that made the message stick.

If your messaging only works when you personally deliver it, it’s not built to scale. If every person in the chain has to guess or fill in the gaps, you haven’t created alignment: you’ve set the stage for distortion.

This isn’t a knowledge problem, it’s a distortion problem

It’s tempting to think you can just explain it better.

Run a team training call. Drop some messaging in Slack. Update the deck. Ask Sales to pitch it this way.

But the gap will stay open. Because what you actually need isn’t more explanation… you need a downstream system that reinforces the message at every level through training, repetition, and shared understanding.

How to fix messaging distortion

Spoiler alert: it doesn’t fix itself.

1. Codify messaging like a system, not a sentence

Messaging should work like Lego, not glass. It needs to be built with a flexible structure from the start.

That means breaking your story down into reusable building blocks, each one small, sharp, and versatile enough to be picked up and used in context.

This is where the concept of value nuggets come in. They’re compact, structured chunks of messaging that link a product capability to a customer outcome. They’re sharp, portable, and designed to be navigated in real-time by helping sellers scale from value to benefits to features and vice versa by asking ‘why’ and ‘how’. 

You also want to provide your cross-functional team with messaging that fits into different channels and moments like outbound hooks, discovery talk tracks, demo intros, objection busters, plus ad headlines, social proof, customer stories, and analogies that are all aligned.

Every single piece should give someone a way to move the conversation forward. Don’t assume people will “just get it.” Give them language they can reach for, without having to translate.

2. Cascade the ‘why’ with intensity

It’s not enough to hand teams a finished message. You have to show your work. People need to understand why it’s framed this way, why it works for this audience, and why it’s different from what came before.

The real job of good internal positioning and messaging enablement isn’t just to hand people the lines, but to give them the logic. You only unlock real leverage when your team has the confidence to think like the customer. 

Sales and marketing can’t just recite talking points. They need to understand the role the buyer is in, the pressures they face, the objections they’re quietly holding back.

Wherever you can, make the story real. Bring real customers into all-hands. Walk through example discovery calls together. Build fluency, not just familiarity. 

Developing a value story for every value point can help build empathy with the customer’s situation, their problems, the implications of those, and how they can unlock value. 

You want a team that knows what to say, when to say it, and why it matters to the person across the table. Your precious positioning message doesn’t land because it’s memorised: it lands because it makes sense. 

3. Build coaching and feedback loops

You can’t assume messaging will stick after one rollout. It needs reinforcement, feedback loops, and accountability.

Start by making feedback part of the process. Sales needs a way to signal when a message doesn’t land or, hopefully more often, when it really works. 

Coaching should be ongoing, not one-off. Set expectations that frontline managers are responsible for messaging consistency on their teams, and be clear that that doesn’t just mean delivery. It means real understanding.

There’s also a ton of value in public coaching through positive reinforcement. Celebrate great calls. Replay them in all-hands. Highlight the moments where a rep used a story, a value nugget, or phrasing that clearly clicked with the buyer.

This isn’t just about reps learning the message, but about your whole company learning what actually resonates. And if positioning is strategy, then that feedback is more valuable than most teams realise. 

The goal isn’t better messaging, but alignment

If every new team member needs a live walkthrough to understand what you do, you’re not set up to scale.

If every pitch needs your involvement to land, you don’t have a messaging system. You have a dependency.

High-functioning go-to-market teams don’t just write great messaging, they ensure the message is going to work in the real world. They create the conditions for the story to travel across the business… without falling apart.

It doesn’t matter what’s in your positioning deck. It’s what actually gets said on a call, in a deck, in a room with a buyer, that matters. 

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

The post You wrote the message, but they heard something else appeared first on Building Momentum.

Most SaaS websites treat product imagery like a checkbox: drop in a dashboard, a mockup, maybe a stock photo of someone pretending to use a laptop. Done.

But none of that really helps people understand what your product actually does, or why they should care. And if they can’t get that quickly, they’re probably not going to dig deeper.

Product imagery isn’t decoration.

It’s proof. It’s storytelling. More than that, it should reinforce the message you’re trying to land. Every visual you include should add clarity or conviction, rather than just filling a gap.

The product images that work best help people feel the value of your product before they even read the headline.

Here are some of my tips and examples to help you brief product images that just work better.

What product imagery is actually for

Most visuals are wasted. They’re either too vague to be useful, or too dense to be legible. The goal of product imagery is to make your story click faster, deeper, and more believably than words alone.

Product imagery should back up the story you’re telling. It’s there to support your positioning and make your product feel real, not just sit alongside the copy.

Every image is a chance to signal something specific. If there’s a mismatch and your copy is pointing in one direction and your visuals say something else, it won’t work.

The best visuals don’t just support the narrative. They give people a way to visualise outcomes, not just features. They make the product easier to grasp, easier to remember and easier to trust.

Design for first impressions, not power users

Your product is built for people who use it every day. But your website and your deck are for people seeing it for the first time.

So while your existing customers might love the complexity and power, your marketing visuals need to massively simplify. Design for first impressions, not power users

Your product is built for people who use it every day. But your website and your deck are for people seeing it for the first time.

So while your existing customers might love the complexity and power, your marketing visuals need to simplify to deliver a more efficient mental model for viewers.

Stop showing the full UI

Screenshots of the full product interface feel like the obvious thing to show, but trust me: they’re rarely the right choice.

A full UI can look dense, busy, and difficult to decode, especially for someone who’s never seen your product before. They don’t know what matters. They don’t know where to look.

Here’s a real example from Intercom that shows where this can go wrong:

The intention is to show the power of the inbox. But the execution is overwhelming. The screenshot takes up a huge amount of space, there’s no visual hierarchy, and it’s unclear what you’re supposed to notice or care about.

It’s the UI version of word vomit. Everything is shown, but nothing lands.

Instead, I strongly suggest creating a consistent lo-fi language for your UI:

• Strip out the noise
• Crop the screen
• Blur the background or grey out irrelevant sections.
• Use redacted bars to simulate text.
• Replace real data with visual placeholders.

Lo-fi UI images give you control. It helps focus attention on what matters without overwhelming your user.

Here’s an example from Kayako (RIP):

Notice how only the relevant pieces are shown. The logic blocks on the left clearly map to the action happening on the right, without needing a full, high-fidelity product walkthrough. Everything else is greyed out, abstracted, or simplified. There’s just enough context to make the idea land.

This is what good lo-fi looks like. It’s clean. It’s focused. It tells a story.

If your product has lots of capability, great. Don’t try to show it all at once. Sequence it. Let the visuals build understanding step by step.

Show moments, not manuals

Product snippets are more useful than full-screen views because they help you isolate and elevate specific features, without forcing someone to make sense of the entire UI all at once.

A snippet is a self-contained piece of your product. It might be a single card, a chart, a dropdown menu, a modal. It’s something that stands on its own and represents a meaningful moment or capability.

Snippets give you flexibility. You can feature them alone, group several together, or build out a visual story using them as ingredients. They’re perfect for ads, landing pages, and decks where space and attention are limited.

Here’s an example from Remote that shows it in action:

You’re seeing multiple small UI elements brought together to tell a cohesive story. Each piece is simple enough to understand on its own, but together they hint at the broader capability without feeling overwhelming.

When used well, snippets help your product feel more dynamic, more real, and more relevant to the user’s world.

Don’t default to screenshots

Screenshots are useful in the right formats, like sales decks where you want to leave a particular impression. But they’re not always the right choice, especially when they’re trying to carry the full weight of your story on their own.

Clean, abstracted visuals of your product or features can be just as effective, and more so when they’re overlaid with illustrations to demonstrate movement or actions.

Here’s a great example from Front:

It’s simple, clean, and highly intentional. You immediately understand the concept being communicated without needing to parse a full UI. The illustration does just enough to land the idea, and nothing more.

And here’s another from Kayako that mixes illustration with lo-fi UI to land a slightly different feeling:

The use of blueprint lines is to reinforce the positioning: that this is something new, useful, and thoughtfully designed. It doesn’t try to over-explain. It creates mood and clarity at the same time.

That’s the power of a well-designed visual. It helps tell the story faster and better than a screenshot ever could.

They also let you dial in the emotion. A good illustration can soften the tone, bring in personality, and still be incredibly clear. The key is knowing what the image is there to communicate.

Make people feel like it’s for them

Even if your product isn’t fully localised, your visuals can still be.

Swap out currencies. Use familiar formats. Show names and languages that feel native to the audience. These small tweaks build relevance fast.

While you probably won’t need to go to this length, Remote localises images into 20+ locales… even dealing with long German words.

Even a few small changes like showing the right language, currency, or field labels can make it feel like the product was designed with them in mind.

Build a world, not a one-off

Instead of using lorem ipsum or fake placeholder data, create a consistent narrative that appears across your product visuals.

At Kayako, we introduced Brewfictus, a fictional coffee shop. The same customer tickets and internal team showed up everywhere from the website, and demos, to onboarding flows and ads.

Here’s one of the visuals we used. A fictional support thread, shown both as a live chat and a logged help desk ticket was just one of the 5 scenarios, 5 team members, and 5 customers that we designed for continuity, making the whole experience feel more real.

It grounded the product in a relatable use case—and helped people imagine themselves using it.

If you’re curious how far we took it, go check out the old Kayako site on the Wayback Machine. We built out Brewfictus across the entire site, it’s all still there: https://web.archive.org/web/20250328101152/https://kayako.com/

Show movement, not noise

Some ideas are better shown with motion.

A quick animation. A looped gif. A scroll or toggle to show how something works.

It doesn’t need to be complex. In fact, it shouldn’t be. Motion should serve the point, whether that’s showing a change, revealing an interaction, or contrasting two states.

Here’s an example from Kayako:

It’s clean, subtle, and purposeful. You immediately understand what’s happening. That’s all you need. It gets the point across without needing narration or additional visuals.

Use just enough to make it easier to understand, and no more.

Avoid stock images, duh

If you sell software, show the software.

Stock photos don’t hurt because they’re cheesy. They hurt because they introduce ambiguity. What am I looking at? What does this have to do with your product?

Visuals should make your product feel real, useful, and relevant. That could mean a literal UI shot. It could mean a stylised mockup. But it should always feel grounded in what you actually offer.

The real job of product imagery

Whether you like it or not, the truth is your visuals are doing one of two things: either helping someone believe, or making them work harder to understand.

Good product images should reduce friction, build trust, make benefits feel obvious… and outcomes feel within reach.

That’s what you’re aiming for. Images aren’t just decoration, or to fill th space, or just ‘showing the UI’.

Be intentional. Tell the story clearly, and let your visuals do the heavy lifting.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

The post Weak screenshots undercut your story appeared first on Building Momentum.

As product marketers, we often don’t hold budget and companies know that. So we don’t get cold emailed, cold-called, actively chased by anyone (except the spammy list sellers using Gmail accounts). 

But it’s a different story for the rest of your colleagues. Message your demand-gen friends, your rev ops team, or your HR reps and find out.

They’re swimming in sales outreaches, ads, and marketing slop every week.

… now ask them how many they actually engaged with.

The reality of modern marketing

The answer will be the same: They’ll archive emails, reject calls, ignore LinkedIn messages.

Now ask them how they react to paid marketing: Google ads for high intent keywords will be the only ads they’ll actually remember engaging with.

Social ads? Mostly wasted unless it’s super relevant, timely, and actually interesting. (Trust me, this is rare).  

Sponsored content? They’ll feel cheated when they realise it’s an advertorial.

They’ll even visit website pages with preconceptions on what they’re looking for, and if they don’t see it, they’ll bounce. 

The average B2B buyer (without speaking down about the general population) is smarter than the average consumer. They’re sharp. They’re critical. They clock the format, skim the tone, and make a snap call on whether it’s worth their time. If it feels low-effort or generic, they’re out.

This is the reality: your work has to earn its way. If you’re not meeting buyers on their terms with sharp positioning, relevant messaging, and an actual point, they won’t give you a second glance.

How this shapes your positioning and messaging

If you’ve read this newsletter before, you’ll have read this before: The definition of positioning is to ‘occupy a space in the mind of your customer’.

So your job as a product marketer is to know exactly what’s in your customer’s head to identify the gap that exists.

You can’t build positioning based solely on how your customer uses your product and the first-order outcomes: you have to consider your product is a tiny part of their overall lives.

One of the most common things I try to help PMMs understand when reviewing their messaging is that unless you’ve found something that catches the prospect’s attention, your positioning, even if the core message is great, is going to be ignored.

It’s like one of those ‘hook a duck’ games at a funfair. If you don’t make your positioning (the duck, in this stupid metaphor) eye-catching, attractive, persuasive, and unique with a huge hook, it’s just going to float on by and get lost amongst all the other ducks (in this case, the millions of other messages your prospect is subjected to each year).

So when you’re assessing your messaging, think: why would the buyer pay attention to your duck?

• What exactly does your buyer believe about this category? Not just what they say on sales calls — what do they really think? What baggage are they carrying from past tools, broken promises, or overhyped solutions?
• What assumptions are they carrying? What do they think they already know about your product type or approach? What are they wrong about — and how will you change that?
• What have they tried before? And why didn’t it work? If you’re not speaking to that pain, your value won’t feel urgent.
• What makes them ignore things? What words, phrases, formats, or ideas are they numb to? What do they associate with BS?
• What would make them stop scrolling? What hits hard enough that it disrupts the mental autopilot and makes them say: “Wait, that’s me.”

If your messaging doesn’t tap into that, it’s not differentiated… it’s invisible.

How this changes your sales narrative

Another oft-used concept on this newsletter: Focus + Confidence = Momentum.

A common error is thinking that ‘prioritisation’ is the sole definition of focus. Focus also means clarity. You need to know a niche, specific type of customer with extreme empathy and context.

Only then will you not just understand the customer, but be able to pre-empt their reaction. You need to embody their spirit, perception, and thought process.

Maybe it’s just how my brain works, but when I’m writing positioning or building anything, I’m running simulations in my head to imagine the conversations, figure out what happens next, and how my work influences the customer when you’re not in the room.

Being able to think in the customer’s shoes means your sales narratives aren’t reactive — they’re already anticipating what happens next.

• Can your narrative confidently explain why now? What’s the compelling moment or shift that makes this the right time to act — and how clearly does that come through in your deck, your one-pager, your demo flow?
• Does it paint the risk of doing nothing? Not just what your product enables, but what the buyer stands to lose by staying stuck in the status quo?
• Does it show you understand what already lives in the buyer’s head? Their internal blockers, priorities, pressure from leadership — and how your solution meets them where they are, without needing it spelled out?

If not, your narrative’s going to miss the mark.

How this should change your marketing

Your marketing isn’t fighting for attention in a vacuum. It’s scrapping for attention in a market that’s oversaturated with teams firing off campaigns, chasing MQLs, and clinging to whatever worked last quarter: SEO hacks, influencer collabs, and 12 variations of the same whitepaper.

So what wins?

Clarity. Relevance. Proof. Urgency. Distinctiveness. 

It’s not just about running ads or publishing content. Your marketing has to answer the right unspoken question in the buyer’s mind. Not just “Why should I care?”, but “Is this actually for me, right now?”

And not in 400 words or a 12-slide carousel either; in the first glance, the first line, the first moment. Because that’s where most marketing dies.

Most marketing teams are under pressure to churn out deliverables. But connection is what earns attention. And attention is what earns action.

Too many teams start with the format, then work backwards. It’s not about how polished the carousel is. It’s about whether it says something the buyer already half-knows but hasn’t quite heard phrased like that before.

When you get that right, when you reflect their reality back at them in a way that feels fresh, specific, and grounded, the format almost doesn’t matter.

Great marketing starts with the buyer. Their context. Their problem. Their frustration. Their moment.

Start there. Because the buyer doesn’t care — not until your message stands out like the only duck with a hook worth grabbing. 

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

The post Your buyer doesn’t care (but it’s your job is to change that) appeared first on Building Momentum.

If you know me, you might know that I’m a Virgo, my Myers-Briggs type is INTJ (with a 100% ‘judging’ score), and I have strong opinions. 

So, here’s a tongue-in-cheek take on messaging. Disclaimer: This is purely for fun. If it feels like I’m calling out your company, that’s a coincidence… probably. 

When I visit your website, I’m judging it. And so is everyone else. 

Nothing exposes a lack of customer focus, internal power struggles, and general marketing fails faster than the words on your homepage.

So, who wrote your website copy? 

1. The SEO-Obsessed Content Marketer

If your homepage reads like an AI-generated word cloud, a content marketer who prays to the Googlebot got there first. Expect keyword-stuffed nonsense like:

“A leading AI-powered, cloud-based, enterprise-ready, blockchain-enabled solution for seamless digital transformation.”

No normal person talks like this. But Google likes it, so your homepage does too.

2. The Wannabe Novelist

Some content marketers look at their day job as a backup, when really they want to write a book.

Instead, they got assigned to SaaS copy, and it shows. Their version of a homepage starts with:

“It all began in a dimly lit coffee shop. Our founder, lost in thought, stared into their oat milk flat white. That’s when it hit them. What if customer support… was better?”

Three paragraphs in, and I have no idea what the company does.

3. The CTO

If your website reads like a technical spec sheet, an engineer steamrolled the copy review. The telltale sign? It’s packed with acronyms and features over literally anything useful:

“Now with enhanced multi-cloud Kubernetes orchestration and AI-driven predictive analytics.”

Great. But why should I use it? Who knows. 

4. The Product Manager

Product Managers are great at discovery, PRDs, and engineering planning. But when they write website copy, it reads like a Jira ticket:

“Users log in, navigate to the dashboard, select the desired configuration, and click ‘Generate Report’ to receive output.”

This is an instruction manual, not a sales pitch.

5. The Direct Response Marketer

A direct response marketer got their hands on the homepage if everything feels like you’re watching late night TV adverts.

“Act Now! Unlock Exclusive Savings Today. Don’t Miss Out!”

Urgency? Check. Overuse of action words? Check. Feels like you’re about to sign up for a free webinar that leads to a dodgy supplement subscription you can never cancel? Also check.

6. The AI-Addict

Someone got way too into ChatGPT. Now your website is full of predictable phrasing, em-dash abuse, and every overused AI-generated buzzword:

“In today’s ever-evolving landscape—where innovation is paramount—we harness the power of AI to drive unparalleled efficiency.”

Every sentence sounds like it was pulled from a LinkedIn post.

PS: Bonus points when they forget to delete “I’ve generated your website copy–let me know if you want any more changes.” 

7. The Corporate Marketer

This person spent way too much time in PowerPoint, and it shows. The website now follows the rule of 6: no more than six words per sentence, six sentences per section, and six bullet points per list. The result?

• Optimize: Streamline workflows.
• Accelerate: Drive business outcomes.
• Deliver: Achieve unparalleled impact.

Your homepage is basically a TED Talk with none of the charisma and all the fake practiced pauses. 

8. The Committee

Your homepage was written by 12 people in a Google Doc. Every word was argued for, none were removed, and now nobody knows what it actually says.

The result?

“At Flotsam, we believe in the power of innovation, integrity, and industry-leading solutions that empower businesses of all sizes to maximize efficiency, optimize workflows, and leverage cutting-edge technology to drive meaningful impact in an ever-evolving global landscape.”

Huh? 

9. The Legal Department

You know they got involved when every bold claim is followed by an asterisk and the copy is stripped of anything that sounds remotely confident.

“Our platform may help* businesses optimize* operations and could potentially* improve efficiency.”

No promises, just plausible deniability.

10. The HiPPO

The most senior (and usually the furthest removed from what customers actually want) person in the room decides the website should be exactly like something they did ten years ago.

“We are at the forefront of the SoLoMo revolution, seamlessly integrating Social, Local, and Mobile trends to drive next-gen engagement strategies.”

The result? A homepage that looks like it was ripped straight from a 2012 tech conference keynote.

How to fix it

If you’re reading this and realizing your website has been taken hijacked by one (or more) of the culprits above, don’t worry, it’s fixable. Here’s how to bring it back to life:

• Start with the customer, not your org chart. Nobody cares about your internal debates. Lead with the problem your customer is trying to solve.
• Cut the fluff. If it wouldn’t make sense in a sales conversation, it doesn’t belong on your homepage.
• Write like a human. If you wouldn’t say it out loud, don’t put it on your site.
• Test it with actual buyers. Not your boss, not the committee, but real customers. If they don’t get it in five seconds, rewrite it.

If your homepage makes people work too hard to understand what you do, they’ll move on to one that doesn’t.

And if your copy got frankensteined together by SEO, corporate, and someone’s outdated best practice… trust me, I can tell. 

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

The post I can tell who wrote your website appeared first on Building Momentum.

Just like your value proposition, you’re going to find most success when you tailor the differentiators you use to two things: the primary stakeholder, and the buyer journey stage.

I learnt the value proposition lesson the hard way, when we launched a new product but had messaged towards executive-level concerns on the homepage – without realising that the folks coming to our website were mostly managers. They didn’t care about the aspirational messaging, and instead needed more tangible content.

It’s exactly the same with the differentiators that you’ll want to call out.

Showcase the wrong differentiators to the wrong person at the wrong time, and you’ll be missing out on impact, momentum, and revenue.

But first, what’s a differentiator?

Your competitive differentiators are just that… what makes you different from your competitors. It’s not your pricing, your product features, or your branding.

I like using the Bain Elements of B2B Value Pyramid to illustrate value and differentiators.

The pyramid starts at the base with “table stakes,” which are the basic requirements and functional elements of value that customers expect from any product. As we move up the pyramid, the elements of value become less tangible and more about the implications of using the product – first within the organization, then what matters to the individual buyer.

The next level is “functional value,” which includes things like product performance and reliability. Above that is “ease of doing business value,” which includes things like responsive customer service and streamlined ordering processes.

Moving further up the pyramid, we come to “individual value,” which includes things like reputation assurance and reduced anxiety. At the top of the pyramid is “inspirational value,” which includes hope, vision, and social responsibility. Here, differentiators aim to align the vendor with the buyer’s cultural and ethical worldview.

The pyramid is a useful tool for understanding your competitive differentiators because it shows that not all differentiators are created equal. The most tangible and functional elements of value may be important, but they may not be what ultimately sets you apart from the competition. By understanding the different levels of value in the pyramid, you can more effectively communicate the unique benefits of your product to each stakeholder at each stage of the buyer journey.

You can read more about the pyramid here.

Take a minute to read through and understand the different groupings: tablestakes, functional value, ease of doing business value, individual value, and inspirational value.

You can’t really create differentiators, only discover them. What is it about your product that draws buyers to you, and not to others?

Aligning value differentiators

My experience suggests that there are two main ways to segment and combine differentiators: by the stakeholder, and the funnel stage. It looks something a bit like this:

Let’s take a look at the two axes.

Differentiators by stakeholder

Just like my failed product launch example above, the type of stakeholder you’re communicating to changes the starting point.

Generally:

• Users are concerned with the day-to-day. They want information features, they want to build a functional understanding of your product.
• Managers want functional information, but they’re looking for benefits too. They want to understand what the product is going to help them achieve over a medium timeframe.
• Execs are more interested in the aspirational direction that your product can support them to achieve in the long-term.

This will definitely vary, but generally I’ve seen these patterns repeated many times over the last ~12 years.

Differentiators by buyer journey

Your buyer journey is not the sales funnel. Hopefully you’ve got a good understanding of the expedition they go on to solve problems and buy solutions.

• At the awareness stage, your differentiators should focus on grabbing attention and building interest. You want to differentiate your product from the competition and highlight its unique value with what matters most to the stakeholder. You’re answering the ‘why’ at this stage.
• At the consideration stage, your differentiators should focus on providing more detailed information about how it addresses the buyer’s specific needs. You want to demonstrate how your product solves their problems better than the competition, and provide evidence of its effectiveness. You’re answering ‘how’ at this stage.
• At the purchase stage, you should focus on reinforcing the buyer’s decision to choose your product by highlighting differentiators that answer and reinforce the specific ‘what’ that each stakeholder is looking for.

Putting these both together

So if we combine both the primary stakeholder and the funnel stage, we get something like this:

At the awareness stage, you want to stand out and resonate with the differentiators that your stakeholder is going to engage with the most.

• For users, that’s things that will make their life easier – time savings, how much more organized they can be, the configurability.
• For managers, it’s about individual value – what do they stand to gain from working with you? Things like reputational assurance or the reduced anxiety they’ll feel using your product.
• For execs, you’ll engage best on inspirational value. Aspirational differentiators that get them pumped up about what they could achieve in the long-term.

During the consideration stage, you’re showcasing ‘how’ your product helps the stakeholder to achieve all the stuff you just said in the awareness stage.

• For users, show functional differentiators, the performance and economic impact of your product.
• For managers, make it real and show how your product differentiators make it easier to do business.
• For execs, it’s individual value differentiators that appeal most at this stage. You’ve said what the long-term vision is, but now the differentiators that matter will give them confidence.

Finally, at the purchase stage your differentiators are not high-level aspirational things – but rather, the extremely tangible components – because you’ve already sold the story and highlighted your unique values that separates you from the pack on the intangible.

• For users, tablestake differentiators will get them motivated. Price, specifications, and compliance.
• For managers, it’s that functional value that will help them – the performance and economic impact
• For execs, differentiators that matter here are about the ease of doing business with your product – configurability, responsiveness, fit, quality, and so on.

An example

Here’s how the matrix might look for a project management tool. See how the potential differentiators at each stage map back to the elements discussed in the B2B Elements of Value pyramid?

So what does this all mean?

Understanding your competitive differentiators is critical to your success – even more so, knowing where and when to use them.

Using the Bain Elements of B2B Value Pyramid and the framework above, you can align them to the needs and priorities of each stakeholder at each stage of the buyer journey. You can stand out from the competition, and provide the right mix of value to the right stakeholders at the right time.

Remember though: differentiators cannot be created; they can only be discovered. By focusing on what makes your product or service unique in the mind of your customer, you can provide value that truly resonates with your customers, build momentum, and find success.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

The post Align your differentiators with the buyer journey appeared first on Building Momentum.

Quickly after starting at Headstart – an early-stage enterprise HR AI SaaS company – I noticed two major things.

Firstly, our brand identity was corporate and stale.

Just because we were selling to the largest businesses on the planet didn’t mean we were destined to be blue and bland.

Secondly, our mission was to prove that people are more than a piece of paper, and deliver the next generation of diverse, future leaders into business. It was more than a product – it was our responsibility.

How could we inspire action around such an important social movement with a brand look-and-feel that was stuck in the early 00’s?

Here’s how.

But first… Branding vs Positioning

Positioning, if you’re a regular reader, is about occupying a space in the mind of your customer. It’s about being The Thing For Someone (rather than something for everyone), delivering clear and differentiated value, and discriminating against bad-fit prospects.

Branding, on the other hand, is how your positioning is brought to life with the visual look and feel, your messaging and tone of voice, and the vibe you portray to the world. To be successful, branding has to be consistent and recognizable – once you’ve got it, use it – everywhere.

And positioning should always come first. Decide who you are, and then explore how you best show it.

Headstart case study

We started with refreshing our mission, revisiting positioning, and bringing life into our tone of voice.

We said au revoir to ‘Prioritise diverse candidates’ and hello to ‘Making recruiting fair’ – levelling up from benefit to value.

We leaned into contention, opinion, and focused on the dichotomy at stake between discrimination and fairness – we needed to find and activate the radicals in our target market, those who were motivated and engaged to change their approach.

So when it came to the visual identity, we knew what we had to do.

No more ‘typical business branding’. We leaned into a look-and-feel inspired by movements like Extinction Rebellion – bold, brash, chaotic, in your face. Unmissable.

Icons and design elements, sticker visuals, vibrant and bold block colors, big capital letters, thick bold sans-serif fonts.

We thought there’s no better way to visualise our mission than by including humans in our identity. Diverse humans: people of all races, disabilities, backgrounds, styles. Confident humans.

We knew we were onto a winner when we saw the mockup below.

Then… we put it into practice.

Our sales deck no longer looked like a sales deck… It was a manifesto. Big, bold slides. Eye-catching, almost distracting templates designed to surprise.

Our event collateral looked like handouts at a rally, not just a brochure.

Our social accounts were more like that of a cause, than a SaaS company.

We also asked the designer to deliver assets, templates, and elements that we could easily recreate in Canva, to scale brand design without needing continual design support.

So, how much did this cost? How long did it take?

Traditionally, brand redesigns cost tens of thousands, take months, and have to be signed off by a committee of people.

Well, no – that’s simply an unconscious decision that you make.

This took us about five weeks, from start-to-end. By focusing on reusable assets and templates, we could speed up the process, creating assets that we needed and asking the designer to perfect. And approvals were simple: just me and the CEO.

Did it work?

• Qualitatively yes – we received tons of great feedback on it from prospects, partners, and folks in the market.
• Quantitatively? Honestly, who knows. Covid hit just as we rolled it out, so we’ll never know.

But without a question, I’m really proud of how well this came together.

Branding tips for product marketers

Most product marketers will have a tangential relationship with brand: it’s something you might get involved in, but probably just as an aside.

But, product marketing really should be more involved in the whole process.

From identifying and bringing clarity to the target customer, to developing positioning that’s designed to resonate with them, and then representing the customer voice in the creative review room.

But there are a few things you can do to support the process:

• Collate together customer research with business strategy – who your target customer is, why they’re the target customer, and what the opportunity is.
• Provide positioning that links the value your target customers desire back to your product features and benefits. Without clear connections between them and proof points, you can make outrageous claims that aren’t supported by reality – which then creates a bigger gap between the brand and what you can deliver.
• If you have some input over the branding process, push for a small review group – avoid branding by committee.
• Don’t let the branding project run away. Use a tight, well-defined brief that delivers in multiple milestones.
• Think about how you’ll use the branding in conjunction with positioning. Plan with deliverables in mind, but create a simple system of templates and guidelines that you can work with.

Good luck!

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to build positioning, messaging, and narrative that is memeable.

And I don’t mean putting your positioning statement over an image…

Or coming up with a quirky tagline to fit in a meme like this one…

But I bet that, regardless of whether you’re extremely online or not, you instantly understand these memes.

You know when these are used, how they’re used.

The emotions they’re conveying.

You’ll know the format of the text that should go over the images, even without seeing them before.

And what’s more, you’ll share them and maybe create them yourself. You can share ideas, emotion, logic, and pretty much guarantee a reaction – with just an image of a cat.

You need to do the same for your positioning.

The essence of your positioning needs to transmit all the same things: the idea, the vision, emotion, targeting, and a reaction.

The goal is for those who hear your positioning to understand it, to embody it, and to transmit it onwards.

To grasp the idea, for it to stick.

And, as the definition of positioning says, to ‘occupy a space in the mind of your customer’.

But, JDP, how?

I honestly think it’s pretty simple, but it needs dedicated effort – and an understanding that positioning is an evolving journey.

1. Define a niche group of target customers
2. Talk to them – understand what their lives are like
3. Find the patterns that exist in their jobs, pains, gains, and triggers
4. Connect the dots between the value they want, and how your product helps them
5. Define a heart-and-brain narrative based on unconventional wisdom
6. Test it, and see what feedback is like

In my free Customer Value Positioning framework, you’ll see that I focus on defining the heading and paragraph that exists in your website homepage hero section.

This is, without a doubt, where your memeable positioning needs to work the hardest. As soon as someone lands on your site, they’ve gotta ‘get it’. Fully, deeply, instantly without delay.

So experiment with the language you use. It’s so easy to fall back to boring professionalspeak that ultimately says nothing.

You want your customers to understand innately, to feel something, to be motivated, to feel urgency… so your language has to reflect that.

What to avoid

I don’t think you can build memeable positioning that:

• Has been crafted internally, without basing on hard evidence from your target customers
• Focuses on features and benefits, instead of value
• Is broad and untargeted – remember, it’s better to be the thing for someone rather than something for everyone
• Doesn’t use the same language your customers use
• Isn’t focused on your customers – you need separate messaging for your PR pitching, for investors, for employees
• Isn’t connected to a part of their lives that they recognise – it must be connected to an aspiration, a fear, a thought they all have

Meme once, repeat ad infinitum

Really, memeable positioning is just good positioning.

And so long as it starts – and ends – with how your customers are living their lives, you’ll be on the right track.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Every so often, I’ll see a Twitter or LinkedIn post go viral in the SaaS community and the topic is nearly always the same:

I decided not to request a demo from a SaaS company because they didn’t publish pricing on their website! Imagine how many leads they’re missing out on!!!

And honestly, it grinds my gears a little. And usually, these complainers have something in common: they’re all individual ‘makers’ or from early-stage, pre-PMF startups trying to buy from established SaaS companies that are usually targeted to more mature businesses.

Quite simply, if you (as a buyer) need to know pricing before requesting a demo or getting more information and the company doesn’t publish pricing, they are sending you a message: you are not their target customer.

Why SaaS companies don’t publish pricing

Good go-to-market strategy should discriminate.

Being something for everyone is a waste of time, effort, and focus. Most companies are focused on attracting up to 10% or maybe 20% share of the total market.

As startups mature they are often naturally pulled upmarket, away from serving very small businesses and SMBs who traditionally have lower average contract values (ACV) and higher churn. SMBs can also be expensive to acquire through paid performance marketing, and then still require an inside sales journey.

As companies are pulled upmarket, they win bigger, more mature companies as customers. These traditionally come with larger ACVs and more concrete growth prospects.

The effort to win a $10k customer is about the same as a $30k customer. From there, it’s only a period of experimentation and hiring the right people to get to $100k ACVs. These customers also cost less on the paid performance side, but can still be tended to and won by inside sales teams.

This whole process does leave a gap at the bottom of the market – which is usually quickly filled by other early-stage startups, and the same thing happens.

So as those companies mature, should they craft propositions and a buying experience that works for the 100%? No. They will focus on bigger ICPs, and adapt their marketing, sales, and product strategy accordingly.

It then makes less sense for these companies to publish pricing on their website for a number of reasons.

1. The buyer may not require pricing before getting more information. Larger businesses have more flexible budgets, and if the challenge to solve is important enough, budget can be created.
2. It leaves revenue on the table. Understanding a buyer’s problems before discussing pricing means you can size the proposal as required. A customer with a $1m problem will gladly pay $100k a year to solve, but if you’re setting public pricing at $50k, you’re missing out.
3. For perception. I don’t know about you, but I often feel companies without public pricing are going to take a more custom, solution-oriented approach to my problem. Not publishing pricing can help build perception as a higher-quality service.

What you can do instead

As a product marketer, you might be instructed to hide pricing on the pricing page – regardless of whether it’s the right thing or not – and you want to hedge against it.

And in some cases, you may want to offer hints on your pricing page, especially if you’re working through that transition period.

Here are two different ways you can bridge the gap.

Create an anchor with ‘good, best’ packaging

Defining a reference point on your pricing page can help your customers to understand how your product and value – and therefore, pricing – is likely to compare.

This might be a very low-touch plan that you offer with zero customization capabilities, or very cut down features. You can attach a per-user price, a platform fee, or whatever other value metric makes sense.

Usually, you won’t actually sell this to users – but it’s priced high enough that it’s an easy upsell to the minimum pricing for a basic offer for your ‘best’ plan, the one you actually want to sell.

This creates a anchor in your customer’s mind. If the first plan with not many features is priced at $x, then the recommended package must be higher.

Create an anchor with a competitor comparison

When you’re competing against low-value competitors but have clear, high-value differentiators, you can use this to your advantage.

You can group your competitors together as ‘Alternatives’ and present them in a comparison table, along with the primary features – and include your differentiators. For pricing, enter a range for the alternatives – and for your product, just use ‘Contact sales’ or ‘Request pricing’ or whatever works for your customers.

This format helps separate you from the crowd, set yourselves apart in terms of features and value, and offer a pricing anchor too. Your potential customers visit the page and instantly expect you to be higher priced, but have some point of reference.

Be very clear who your product is for

This one is contentious because for some reason, it’s considered a little gauche to say exactly who your target customer is.

But if you can push through, there’s no harm in stating something like

• Our product is best suited to customers with 500 to 5000 employees and spend an average of $1m per month on performance marketing
• We serve Enterprise customers who handle 50k transactions per day
• Customers typically invest $1m per year across their cybersecurity stack

And you have all of these guidelines already – your sales reps are using these in qualification calls. Could you experiment being upfront and transparent on your website? Would this help your SDRs be more productive?

Understand your customer, iterate

When it comes down to it, the companies that win will be the ones that best understand their customers – and support their buyer’s experience with the right information, at the right time.

Ultimately, the impact of transparent pricing on the website or not is unlikely to be the needle-mover you (or your execs) think it will be.

Give it a try, or don’t. But definitely get out there and understand what your customers want, then do that.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Do we all know what tech debt means?

“Technical debt… is the consequence of software development decisions that result in prioritizing speed or release over the [most] well-designed code… It is often the result of using quick fixes and patches rather than full-scale solutions.”

When something is created without thinking through the second-order implications – something that product marketers are good at – debt is created. You’ve solved today’s problem, but you just have a different problem in the future.

Just like real financial debt, you can borrow money – but in this case, it’s time. You can pay it off slowly – fixing things adhoc. Or you take the plunge to save and repay it all at once with a rewrite. But be careful – you’re borrowing future time. Spend too much without the ability to repay and you might go bankrupt.

And just like financial debt and tech debt, you can also incur positioning debt.

Different types of positioning debt

In a number of different ways, quick fixes and patches to ‘fix’ positioning without proper consideration can definitely solve today’s problem, but present you more issues in the future.

Credit cards: Positioning to win a deal

Ah, the trusty credit card. I bet you’ve got many in your pocket.

Small, easy to use, always accepted – adapting your positioning to win a deal can really help turn a prospect into a customer.

Sure, maybe it’s only a small white lie (“We serve many enterprise customers!”) or just over-exaggerating features (“Yep, all automated, you don’t even have to click a button!”).

But it will only be a short while until the balance needs paying. Customer complaints. Churn. Bad G2 reviews. Product teams trying to build retention features, less focus on new biz priorities, and the house of cards starts to crumble.

Loans: Positioning for every campaign

Consistency in your positioning matters – probably more than you think it does.

If you’re creating new messaging for every campaign, you’re losing impact. Rather than having one message across all of your campaigns, you’re now attracting and winning customers on multiple different angles.

And at some point, you’ve got to pay the piper.

Say there’s a reactive campaign you created to scramble against a competitor’s news. At the same time, you’ve got thought leadership messages on a nascent angle you’re starting to explore. And your SDRs are using last quarters collateral with your ‘grow revenue’ messaging – but now the industry is in cost-saving mode.

Now you have to support at least three different strands across the go-to-market horizon. You can probably pay these back, a bit a time just like a loan, spread out over a few months or even longer.

But loans mean you don’t have the money/time to spend today, because of your prior commitments. And you don’t have any spare cash/hours, so it’s difficult to save for the next big spend.

Mortgages: Hasty repositioning projects

Repositioning your product and business is a lot like buying a house (stick with me here…!).

Every mortgage needs a downpayment. You can save for ages – in the case of positioning, by carrying out market research and getting ahead of the game. Or, you can move forward with the meagre minimum deposit, but not get the best results

Mortgages have valuations. If you’ve committed to positioning and then take it to market, you’re going to quickly find out whether it works or not. Do your research poorly and you’ll pay above market-value.

And are you sure you’re choosing the right house/positioning to begin with? What if you do it quickly, invest a lot of effort and time, but quickly outgrow it? Will you be stuck there, unable to move? Will you tack on extensions to your positioning, weird outhouses and follies that don’t match the style?

Just like mortgages, big positioning projects are affected by the economy too. Last year’s ‘invest in growth’ message can get wiped out in a matter of weeks as inflation and interest rates bite, with companies now favoring vendors with cost-efficiency messages. Can you quickly ‘re-mortgage’ without losing too much impact and finding worse terms?

Avoiding positioning debt

There are three things you can do to repay positioning debt and prevent getting there in the first place. Spoiler: it’s just positioning best practices.

Have a niche ideal customer profile that your entire business is aligned on building, marketing to, selling to, and supporting. This drives efficiencies and impact – but it does require hard conversations and discipline. You need to drive consistency.

In the early days while you’re still finding product/market-fit you have luxury to play around with positioning without much impact on your market perception. When you’re starting to scale and double-down, you have less wiggle room. This means you need more confidence in your positioning: that reality is going to meet expectations. You need to know how it’s going to perform, having tested and adapted it as necessary.

Lastly, building a constant pipeline of customer interviews, market research, and review will help you keep a pulse check on the market so you can react faster, adapt constantly, and look out for warning signs that you’re not keeping up with your debts.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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I’ll admit it. I’ve worked on numerous positioning projects that completely drowned.

On some, the messaging was obviously not right. On another, the messaging never really took hold and was left rotting in a slide deck somewhere.

Here are five reasons that positioning projects can fail.

Internal assumptions, over external evidence

Positioning by assumption doesn’t work. But still, teams lead with internal “knowledge” first, and simply don’t know what they don’t know.

Sure, it’s easier. “Insights” reverb around the room as ideas riff off each other. Excitement builds, the group gets rowdy as confirmation bias sets in.

This is capital-D Dangerous. While the team might have customer-facing exposure or have been a customer before, they’re biased and blind to the day-to-day challenges and opportunities that real prospects are facing.

Most commonly, this means your team overestimate the maturity of the average customer. Hoping to sell their ‘bleeding edge tech’ to early innovators doesn’t work when customers are actually still extremely early in working out what their problems are (let alone how to solve them).

This is why I make clear that we will willingly gather assumptions – but we’ll validate with new market/customer research to make sure we’re seeing the full picture.

No hard decisions

Positioning (and product marketing) is strategy. And strategy is just as much what you say no to, as what you say yes to.

Trying to be everything for everyone, wanting to throw in every feature, and suggesting every message is a must-have … it’s distracting for everyone involved.

Often this isn’t accidental… it’s a sign of cautiousness, a lack of conviction. Unfortunately, this means your positioning becomes meaningless – it’s much better to be the thing for someone instead.

Rather than allow positioning to end up messy, I’ll constantly bring up examples where having a niche, refined ICP has a positive impact on momentum. I’ll also gather challenges they’re experiencing that are often implications of poor positioning, so we bring hard choices back into the real world.

Crafted by marketing, but never activated with sales

Positioning that’s created in a vacuum might be aesthetically perfect and pleasing to the marketer, but will likely be ineffective in the field.

If sales don’t have confidence in the messaging, they won’t embrace it. Trying to encourage adoption is like pushing a rock up a hill.

Most failures come from creating positioning in an ‘about us’ deck that doesn’t translate well into the actual pitch. Messages designed to create an impressive sense of superiority are perceived as fluffy nonsense in a sales conversation – and are summarily skipped.

New positioning requires a considered rollout with sales reps being brought along the journey. The evidence behind the updated direction has to be shared – reps need to build empathy and your messaging needs to feel ‘real’. Not activating evidence is a surefire way to positioning failure.

I always involve sales reps from the frontline in my positioning processes. Not only do they have accurate knowledge of the challenges today’s customers are facing, they’re a good benchmark for confidence in the new direction – and can help act as a champion in the sales team.

The CEO wasn’t involved

Every great project I’ve been involved in had significant involvement from the CEO. Every less-than-great project had CEOs with tangential involvement – enough to have a say and promote/demote ideas, but not enough to take responsibility for the project.

If the project is a success, everything is good! If not, then the CEO has plausible deniability.

Ideally, CEOs are involved all the way – including the customer/market research calls that you should undertake in your project. This way, it’s real for the CEO and they can operate with up-to-date evidence of what customers want, rather than the idealised persona that exists in their head.

This hasn’t been something I’ve required – but will be moving forward. Especially when the business is growing, CEOs are often undertaking investor discussions at the same time as trying to grow sales – and ensuring we’re communicating the right thing, to the right audiences in the right way, is important.

“We’ve always done it this way” (and other bad advice)

One of the most annoying things about working on projects is that if a team has done positioning before – regardless of its actual success – the past process they used is their benchmark.

Any bad advice they took away from those projects gets regurgitated, leaving those with more effective processes and frameworks to spend a ton of time countering, rather than moving forward productively. This also affects the confidence of the positioning team, wondering if there is another/better way (which can lead to infighting).

Many marketers claim to be experts at positioning, but not all have the right experience for your business. B2C vs B2B, industry expertise, SaaS vs on-premise, SMB vs Enterprise, and many other variables can vastly impact the process, experience, and results that you’ll gain from your project.

I don’t think this will ever get easier. All we can do is help teams understand how modern frameworks, with the best practices we’ve learnt, make it easier to attack the challenges the business is facing.

Positioning doesn’t have to be hard

I actually think positioning is quite simple. Find your best-fit customers, understand what’s going on, and tell them exactly how you help them overcome challenges and achieve better outcomes.

Check out my Customer Value Positioning framework for a how-to, and everything you need to make it happen – and give your project the best chance of success by avoiding the issues above.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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There’s nothing like having something to back up your perspective – especially if it’s something controversial.

But too often, positioning narratives and content campaigns rely on blasé adlibbed theoretical statements, rather than anything concrete. We hope that we have a narrative someone can believe in – but it’s unlikely that we have evidence that someone will accept.

Creating your own statistics and gathering your own insights is a great, simple way to build persuasive evidence. Not only does it back up your positioning and narrative, but it can support coordinated activity across the business to get the biggest bang for your buck.

Gathering primary research and insight to form the basis of marketing campaigns was taught hard at advertising school and has stuck with me ever since. In fact, it’s something that I’ve done at nearly every job in the last few years.

Examples

Here’s three examples of stat-based campaigns I’ve run that have helped drive sales, start conversations, and support go-to-market campaigns.

Kayako: Live Chat Statistics

One of our first post-launch campaigns for a new product that merged a live chat tool with a ‘home screen’ of information, this Live Chat Statistics report surveyed both businesses and consumers with their thoughts on live chat support experiences.

We aimed to show that customers wanted live chat experiences that worked, and that businesses were massively behind customer expectations.

How we used it

• We created a snazzy animated experience (see here on the Internet Archive) that delightfully illustrated the story
• We built all of the stats into our content marketing, repurposing the stats with a whole series of blog posts that looked into every angle
• We summarised into three different lead magnet PDFs that we promoted through social, email, and PPC
• We hosted webinars, guestposted, guest presented and really banged the drum of these stats over and over again

Headstart: Diversity & The Dream

At Headstart (enterprise recruiting software for graduate hiring teams), we were looking to enter the US market with a bang. We needed to have a different take and stand out from alternative solutions by hitting prospects hard with proof.

Again, we spoke to both consumers and businesses on their experiences with discrimination, hiring, and diversity – and found some huge gaps that created a really enticing story, and proved what we already knew. You can read some of the highlights here.

How we used it

• For this traditional report targeted to enterprise champions, we leaned heavily on sales engagement to distribute. Sales reps had snippets, summary images to entice in initial emails, and personal links to see who was reading what (and when)
• We also promoted via paid LinkedIn ads to people in HR and recruiting at target organizations
• This formed the basis of a live-streamed panel conversation to extend the conversation

SmartFocus: Christmas 2014

Wow – this is 8 years ago!

At SmartFocus (previously Emailvision, which was of the original email marketing SaaS companies) we decided to double-down on the ecommerce industry.

We surveyed 800+ consumers in the UK and US to understand how they’d be approaching the holiday season, creating infographics that covered market spend, the various Christmas shopper personas, and the differences between how men and women shopped for gifts.

How we used it

• This started out as just a content marketing project but quickly became a project targeted on PR outcomes – it drove mentions in many online ecommerce publications, as well as making some UK and US media mentions
• We involved our customer success team to help guide our customers with targeted recommendations
• Content, email, and social marketing campaigns as standard

Bonus: Lune

Alicia (who I run WTF is Go-To-Market? with) carried out primary research at Lune to understand consumer demand for green, climate-friendly payment methods and services. This now takes centre stage in their pitch to payment platforms.

How to create consumer research surveys

I’ll be honest: this will not be a completely scientific way to get accurate, reliable data to form the basis of strategy or make huge life-changing decisions on.

But this can help you pop above the parapet with a point of view, and provide some proof that helps push prospects along your sales and marketing process.

Define your audience

Usually, you’ll want to get weighted data that represents the census of a particular country. Platforms like Pollfish – my preferred platform of choice – does this automatically.

You’ll just need to decide the demographics of your target audience (things like location, age, gender, income, and some other markers), plus set some screening questions

Screening questions allow you to accept only respondents who meet your criteria, rejecting those from a population you’re not interested in. Tip: form your screening questions with multiple options, rather than asking for pure yes/no examples to avoid people just picking the answer they think you want.

Set your questions

If using Pollfish, you have about 18 questions to extract the juiciest information possible from your target audience before the cost goes up.

I’d recommend separating your questions into themes. For example, you might structure your survey like this:

• Problem awareness
• Problem impact
• Problem solution consideration
• Solution outcomes

Think about the angles you’re trying to extract. What’s going to surprise your audience the most? If you’re using the survey for content and sales, it needs to be have an interesting angle that suggests something your prospects don’t know. If you’re using it mostly for mainstream PR, you’ll need to have something really juicy to provide comment on pop culture.

You may want to work with a special survey writer or researcher (you can find them on Fiverr and Upwork) to make sure your questions aren’t leading, and are actually designed with best intentions in mind.

Run a pilot

Don’t pay for a huge survey to 1000 consumers without doing a smaller test first. You can pilot it either with colleagues and friends, or to a small group of 50-100 consumers.

Pilot surveys help you test whether the questions are easy to understand, if answer options make sense in the real world, and ultimately whether the survey is generating the results you want.

Ensure reliability and trustworthiness

I’m not going to trust a survey of just 200 consumers. The closer you can get to 1000 consumer responses, the more reliable (i.e. repeatable) your survey will be, and the more trustworthy your target audience will find it.

Of course, balance this with cost. If you’re investing a lot of money into the distribution of the content, it’s worth spending on the extra surveys to avoid any reliability issues.

Tip: some platforms like SurveyMonkey Audience will charge you based on the distribution of the survey to a number of potential respondents, not completed surveys. Pollfish charges only on the number of fully-completed surveys you get back.

Crunch that data

Now it’s time to slice and dice that data until you carve perfect nuggets of statistical goodness.

If you’re using Pollfish, the platform already provides a tool to help you segment the data by demographic insights and answers to other questions. This is where you can analyse to find the deltas and gaps and correlations to provide great stats for your report.

Consider all the angles

Often surveys become a bit repetitive… 50% do this… 34% think that… A third of people read this... Try to avoid this.

Group 1 are more likely to X than Group 2. Group 3 do this X times, but this increases to Y times when they are Z.

You can also change how you present the stats. 50%…, Half of…, The majority of… all help you keep readers engaged – and help you tell a story.

You can also think about collecting qualitative data, which is great for human interest angles. These can make strong emotional connections and really embed your survey results in real life.

Design your report

Creating a PDF report or standalone web page is a great way to showcase your survey report in an engaging way. Don’t limit yourself to A4 pages – think about a long, flowing report that readers will peruse on their phone or at their computer.

You can get creative with graph design, showing stats as bar charts or pie charts or line graphs or whatever makes sense.

Unethically, this is your opportunity to convince readers that your stats tell the whole story. You can write the report like you would a story: presenting challenges, introducing the hero, selling the dream outcome, the roadblocks to get there, etc.

Repurpose, repurpose, repurpose

If you’ve invested so much time and effort and money in your survey, don’t let it flop. These stats can become a core part of your positioning and sales narrative, and provide months and months of juice for your content team.

• Tie in your report with events: hold online webinars or IRL conference talks to introduce your stats and hold space for discussion
• Introduce to your customers just as much as your prospects: they can be a big vehicle for distribution
• Think social by default: shareable images and videos
• Train your teams: build the survey results into your sales process at both the top and bottom of the funnel, generating interest and reiterating its importance throughout
• Arm your teams: make sure your sales, marketing, and customer success teams have the material, content, and collateral they need to use the outcomes you’ve discovered in their everyday work
• If the focus is PR, bring a PR team in early: they’ll be able to help guide and shape the survey with journalists to maximise hit rates
• Distribute: guest-post on partner sites, join partner webinars, add your stats to ‘top stats’ for inclusion and backlinks, syndicate content with publishers
• Repeat and repeat and repeat: repeat the outcomes you’ve discovered until everyone inside and outside your business knows them by heart

Your outcomes are only as good as your preparation

If you write a question that’s a bit too confusing, or set up a screening question incorrectly, your data is going to be skewed – and that’s not good.

Putting extra emphasis on preparing your survey pays dividends. If you can, work with a researcher who can craft the survey, manage responses, and analyse the data to give you the best outcomes.

You also need to understand how you will use the survey before you carry it out. Exploratory quantitative research helps nobody. Validate themes and understand likely directions through qualitative research first before going out to build your survey. Know exactly how you’ll repurpose the content to support different marketing and sales activities to avoid wasting time.

Lastly: don’t overdo these kind of campaigns – and when you do, do it well.. It’s become standard for ‘digital PR’ agencies to create crappy, linkbait surveys that are only tangentially connected to the business, that are weak and implausible – damaging brand perception.

Good luck! I’d love to see the surveys you’ve run – drop me a note or leave a comment!

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

The post Using surveys in narratives and marketing campaigns appeared first on Building Momentum.

We’re all guilty of indulging in a little bit of fluffy marketing copy. “Enable teams to excel”, “be your customer’s hero”, and “personalize all your touchpoints” are all things I’ve written before.

But looking back, what did they mean? They were empty attempts to say something smart. Contrite. A waste of bits and bytes, crowding the internet, taking up much-needed space for more cat gifs.

And we see this all around the internet.

Nearly every B2B website – including yours, sorry – has some version of the same old tired cliches:

• Work faster, not smarter
• Save time and effort
• Grow revenue
• Scale with ease
• Connect with your customers
• Build stronger relationships
• Deliver a better customer experience
• Enable teams to collaborate
• Turn X into a strategic advantage
• … and many more.

And what surprises me is that these garbled monstrosities don’t come from a thousand monkeys banging on keyboards, or from fresh interns souped up on Red Bull.

They come from experienced people who care so much about what they’re trying to say. People with so much passion, insight, experience, and genuine love for the product and technology.

The thought process in people like this – speaking from personal experience – goes like this. We feel the overwhelming to say everything. We know that we’re too close to the metal, so we try to ‘dumb down’ language for the normies out there. We rely on cliches because everyone knows what they mean – they’re cliches for a reason!

But these attempts to say something, actually say nothing at all. Confusing, unreadable, and create more questions than they answer.

Your copy should never lead to this outcome.

The goal of product marketing copy, whether on your website or sales collateral or a video script, should never make prospects think. Cognition is a barrier, not an accelerant. Your prospects should nod along, embracing your proposition and adjusting their view of the world.

Start with the customer

Go back to that thought process: we try to dumb down language because we want to make it easier for people to understand what we really do.

This is the wrong approach. Rather than mangle the product to fit the customer’s world, can we understand our customers and create something that fits perfectly?

This means understanding the value that customers desire. The jobs they undertake, the pains to avoid, gains they want to achieve, and triggers that motivate them to search/switch/buy.

It can be tricky to convince product-/technology-first stakeholders that this is the way, but it’s not an either/or situation. You need to do both: customer discovery with technology innovation.

The ‘so what?’ antidote

When you find yourself reaching for a comfortable cliche, stop. Take a breath, and ask yourself “so what?”. Then write that!

What exactly does ‘saving time’ enable? What do customers gain when they can collaborate better? What outcomes are improved when the business grows and is successful?

These are often the hardest questions for CEOs, founders, and technologists to answer.

But levelling up your copy and answering ‘so what’ doesn’t just help customers understand what you do better. It helps you justify higher prices. Build stronger brand positioning. Build word of mouth. Build loyalty. Reduce sales objections and improve sales efficiency. These all lead to one thing: easier revenue generation.

Sometimes these will be obvious: reducing specific metrics or achieving a new status. Sometimes they’ll be more opaque: being seen as a leader, achieving a higher valuation, or helping the company embrace a new direction.

And you might wonder… can you say those out loud? Is it not a bit gauche or transactional to say exactly what we enable?

Absolutely not. B2B is rational. See a problem, solve a problem.

Don’t make them think ‘so what?’. Tell them.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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The post It’s obvious, but… say what you mean appeared first on Building Momentum.

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Presenting our company position and narrative to the world is fraught with second-guessing how it resonates. 

One day, the CEO hears something from a customer that doesn’t sit right and demands a rewrite. Or a new marketer starts, and they think the website copy needs updating.

And when we role out new positioning/messaging, we often rely on just our internal assumptions and gut feel. Maybe we get feedback from one or two friendly customers.

But that’s not enough. We need look for external indicators that it will be successful, rather than just rely on our assumptions. 

You can’t A/B your way to high performing positioning. Positioning, by default, should mean something to someone; it won’t appeal to everyone. Your go-to-market must discriminate.

Validate your positioning like a software developer

I think about validating positioning similar to how software teams roll out new products: an internal alpha stage, and then an external beta stage.

We want to build confidence in our positioning and messaging at multiple levels, and ultimately ensure that it performs the way we expect it to perform.

I think that’s an important point to make. We can feel confident about something… for no reason at all. Rather than expect reality to match our expectations, we should build our expectations based on reality.

Alpha stage

The goal of your alpha test stage is to use internal teams. We want to see how well they think it will perform, based on their experience. The goal is to pass a 60% threshold of satisfaction, explore edge cases and limits, and find conflicts.

Sales reps and customer success managers who are on the frontline of customer interactions will help understand whether the problems and values you’ve extracted are commonplace within your existing customer base – or if you’ve gone on an irrelevant tangent.

They’ll be able to give you examples of customers that it will resonate with – and customers that will reject it.

Their insight will help you understand the general direction, but might not be best-placed to feedback on the exact destination. So take their feedback with a pinch of salt.

Beta stage

Once we’ve passed alpha, we can look to external sources to understand whether positioning is going to perform the job it’s intended to do. Here are some ways you can put messaging to the test in a controlled manner.

Presenting to existing customers

I don’t usually recommend sharing new positioning with existing customers.  They’ve bought into your product for a reason, and you might upset them if presenting them with a different story.

However, you can continue to interview your customers and ask them about their role, company, and their experience with your product. Take their feedback with caution: you’ll want to continue building patterns and identifying anomalies. 

Success is when they repeat the messaging back at you, without being prompted. This will show that customers identify and resonate with your pitch. This comes naturally when you have a deep, foundations-first understanding of who they are and what they care about.

Market research

Use a platform like UserTesting to get real feedback from real people in your target market. 

We used this with great results at Kayako to get instant feedback on our website, looking to understand:

• How they interpreted our website and messaging
• What was unclear
• What other companies they think are similar, and why

What’s great about platforms like this is that users are encouraged to navigate your website whilst talking out loud and vocalizing their thoughts. This way, you get more real and raw feedback – rather than polished, curated feedback that might happen from surveys or interviews. 

Google and social ads

We can validate positioning through paid ads on Google searches for relevant keywords, and social ads. But both have a different purpose.

Google ads can help test whether positioning performs at the middle-of-the-funnel to capture consideration-led interest and intent. 

Users have found a category or a type of product they’re interested in. Will your ad copy encourage them to click? Then, on the landing page you have another opportunity to expand upon your ad copy and play with messaging to encourage them to fill out an interest form or take a trial. 

Social ads are an opportunity to capture TOFU interest. Because targeting can be so precise (to job titles, industries, and even interests) and because ads can easily disappear into the feed, our ads can focus instead on validating whether positioning and messaging captures attention.

“Tiger team”

It’s all well and fine testing the individual components of your positioning… but the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. 

If you can, and if it’s worth it, consider proposing a ‘tiger team’: a cross-functional group of representatives across marketing, sales, and success to bring new positioning to life throughout the buyer journey. You’ll be able to identify follow-on, second-order impacts of positioning on things like sales velocity, the onboarding experience, and customer satisfaction as a whole. 

They’ll need the flexibility and support of the business to iterate and make recommendations, but ultimately can be a crucial part of ensuring new positioning and messaging is brought to life in a de-risked, prepared way. 

Additional reading: how to test your positioning

Avoid A/B testing

A/B testing can be a great get-out clause when everyone has an opinion – but is rarely beneficial.

I recommend setting out an iterative approach instead. Communicate the approach to build/measure/learn how positioning performs:

• Build positioning based on the evidence and high-confidence assumptions you have 
• Measure performance based on the intended impact (like conversion rates, sales wins)
• Learn what those results mean: right customer, wrong message – or the other way round? 
• Start the process again until satisfied

Alpha and beta test to success

Don’t go to market without validating your positioning. You’ll look like a lemon, and it’s a huge waste of time and energy.

Instead, check with your internal team. Improve. Then, check it works (and performs better) than your previous baseline). Improve. Launch. Simple.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

The post Test positioning like you test software appeared first on Building Momentum.

As product marketers, we’re forever asking ‘why’.

• Why do customers struggle with this problem?
• Why did we build this feature?
• Why are we seeing more closed-won deals from a particular country?
• Why are we not getting traction with performance marketing on a particular channel?

We’re always trying to get to the core nugget of insight that has driven, or can drive, a specific action. (And remember: marketing is meant to drive behavior change).

But when we’re actually doing work ourselves, it’s easy to lose sight of that initial insight. Strategic work quickly becomes part of the everyday mundanity.

A one-pager is never just a one-pager

Whether it’s creating sales enablement one-pagers, updating the pitch deck, or crafting a new product launch rollout plan, it might seem super straightforward.

“Sales asked for this one-pager. We launched some new features, so we should update the pitch deck. This is our standard product rollout plan.”

But we’re never just updating a deck: we’re figuring out how to tell our story in a persuasive way that drives the conversation.

We’re not just creating a rollout plan: we’re looking to drive incremental revenue, better meet customer needs, and showcase our innovation.

And a one-pager is never just a one-pager. It might be intended to actually educate prospects on the problem, or persuade prospects of our differentiation, or support our prospect in championing our solution over others.

The two-bullet brief

Something I learnt (but, I raise my hand, haven’t practiced lately), is to add two bullet points to every document.

These two bulletpoints help me keep in mind what it is we’re actually trying to achieve. They help align work-in-progress reviewers and those giving feedback – and help us have higher value discussions.

At the top of every document or initiative you’re working on, make a quick note on the following:

• Audience and buying stage
• What success will look like

The first is obvious. How successful our work is depends on having a good, consistent understanding of the audience, so keeping in mind the specific type of customer – whether that’s a persona, an industry, or even an internal stakeholder – helps.

But we also need to consider where they are in their buyer journey. Are they early in their evaluation journey? Their needs – and your response – will change significantly.

The second bullet, you might call an outcome or the goal – but that can be too restrictive. We’re talking about success! In the best case scenario, what does this activity enable or achieve?

• Success of a product one-pager might look like an improvement in opportunity progression, with customers excited to learn more.
• Success of a website update might be prospects having an elevated understanding of our product differentiation with a positive impact on lead generation.

You might want to treat this as a hypothesis and approach it from an experimental perspective, but that can be overkill and confusing for people or organizations that don’t operate that way.

Think bigger

As product marketers, we’re experts in second-order thinking. Our actions have consequences and implications.

Let’s make sure that the work we do always has the right implications and work towards the best outcomes.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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The post Okay… but why? appeared first on Building Momentum.

I’m writing this whilst a little bit sick, so the below is a short and sweet post. Drop me a note and let me know what topics you’d like to see covered in upcoming posts.

SPIN is a sales methodology developed by Neil Rackham after studying more than 35,000 sales calls over 12 years.

The SPIN framework covers the different questions that are asked, posted, and answered throughout a sales engagement:

• Situation – what customers are doing today
• Problem – the challenge they are (or will be) facing
• Implication – the consequences they will experience as a result of the problem
• Need-payoff – the value, the outcome, that the customer can achieve by solving the problem

I think it’s more than just a sales methodology. I think it’s a great acronym to use in everyday product marketing work, ensuring that we’re constantly thinking about our customers.

If we’re not rooting our collateral, copy, deliverables, enablement, and strategy overall in the world our customers are living, then we’re not doing our job right.

We need to think about the specifics of what customers are doing today and the resulting mess, chaos, and pain they are (or will be) experiencing.

And we need to think not just about the immediate outcomes (the tangible benefits), but that our messaging is focused on the value they desire.

Our messaging needs to honestly pass the ‘so what?’ test. Say your feature helps you save time. So what? What does that mean – what’s the pay-off that you’re actually able to gain?

SPIN is probably the most useful framework for every product marketer to know and use. Give it a try today!

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

The post Every product marketer needs to know about SPIN appeared first on Building Momentum.

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“One area in my current role that I’m struggling with are the very short value props and elevator pitches for our new product releases. I’m strong at writing longer descriptions but when I really need to scale it down to one or two sentences I find it challenging. Do you have any good frameworks to help with this?”

I got this message from a Building Momentum subscriber on LinkedIn and thought it’d be worth sharing and expanding upon my answer.

As product marketers, we’re really comfortable writing long tomes of product copy. Give us a blank Google Doc and we can wax lyrical about the product, the value it delivers, how customers use it, and the future direction of the industry.

… But ask us to come up with headlines and short elevator pitches? It’s difficult!

There are so many things we want to say, so many angles to cover, and we need to get our key phrases and differentiators and category description in there too…

(And, even worse, we’re usually crafting copy for use by other teams, leading to copy by committee. Nothing good happens here).

There are a few short copy tricks and tips that I’ve picked up that can help you craft concise, captivating, creative statements. Keep these in mind when you’re drafting website copy, 25-word ‘about us’ descriptions, sales decks, digital ads, and more.

Remember, ABC

Something that’s stuck with me from journalism class: you should always write with accuracy, brevity, and clarity in mind.

• Accuracy: As well as accurate information, you need to accurately express what you’re writing through tone of voice, precision, and spelling/grammar.
• Brevity: You should get to the point in as few words as possible. Additional words often don’t make anything clearer, but add more cognitive effort for the reader to comprehend.
• Clarity: Avoid misunderstanding and ambiguity in your writing. Use simple language, avoid jargon, and be direct.

This blogpost has a ton of tips on how to make your writing accurate, brief, and clear: bookmark for future use.

Use rhetorical devices

As humans, we’re tuned to listen and engage more when we hear certain persuasive tactics. Rhetorical devices are techniques that you can steal to elevate your copy from drab to fab.

This post on ‘16 Rhetorical Devices That Will Make You Sound Like Steve Jobs‘ is one I’ve bookmarked and come back to time and time again. Here are my favorites:

• Aporia: A feigned statement of doubt by the speaker and a question to the audience.
  • “Now, how are we gonna communicate this? We don’t wanna carry around a mouse, right? What are we gonna do?”
• Antitheton: Two opposing facts of contrasting content.
  • “The kind of things you would find on a typical phone, but in a very untypical way now.”
• Climax: The increase from a weaker to a stronger expression. A word sequence is arranged in ascending order.
  • “First was the mouse. The second was the click wheel. And now, we’re gonna bring multi-touch to the market.”

Build an inspiration swipefile

Take notes of inspiring value propositions, engaging use of language, and creative copy execution.

Take a look at my post on good examples of messaging for some inspiration, and add your own.

Look outside your own industry and vertical too, from consumer products to heavy machinery manufacturers. You’re not so much interested in the words, but more how the statements are formed and crafted.

If you can, work with a copywriter

Product marketers are trained to become excellent at understanding customer needs. Copywriters are trained to become excellent at communicating in copy.

Working with a copywriter, whether in-house or freelance, will 100% help to level up your results.

Steal from your customers

If you’re talking to your customers regularly, carrying out market research, or even checking their profiles out on LinkedIn, then you’ve got a creative copy goldmine at your fingertips.

Sometimes, our customers can sum our product value up better than we ever could. You might be surprised at the gems you’ll discover.

Imagine customer conversations

Hopefully, you’ve been able to build significant empathy with your customers and feel in sync with who they are, their mindset, what their jobs/gains/pains/triggers are, and the value they desire.

If you can’t talk to customers, try imagining what they would say if you did ask them.

Some prompts that might be useful are things like:

• “So, what is [product] and why do you use it?”
• “What was life like before, and what’s life like now?”
• “Why do you recommend our product?”
• “Explain where our product compares to others in the market.”

Creative writing is an art

Hopefully some of these tips will help you find new inspiration or employ frameworks to improve the copy you’ve already created.

Creative writing is an art so again, think about working with an experienced copywriter to help you create copy that works for your business and customers.

Lastly, don’t be afraid to push the boundaries. Understand your brand voice, try different angles, and stick your neck out on the line: fortune favors the brave.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

The post 6 tips to craft concise, captivating, creative value propositions appeared first on Building Momentum.

Over the last 5 years, I’ve cultivated a positioning process that I call Customer Value Positioning.

I’ve written about all of the component pieces on this newsletter so regular readers will recognise the themes, but it’s taken me the last 12 months to revise, simplify, and improve based on the feedback of over 20+ marketers.

With Customer Value Positioning (CVP), you’ll:

• Define the perfect website heading and slogan that resonates
• Detail exactly how your product helps your customer achieve their goals
• Describe the top three outcomes your customers desire
• Discover your ideal customer profile and build a fluff-free persona that aligns your sales, marketing, and product teams

And, just like the name might suggest, we’re basing the whole process on the only thing that matters: your customer.

Background: Why positioning needs more support

Last year I was named Positioning & Messaging Maestro of the Year 2021 by the Product Marketing Alliance.

Positioning is my jam: the intersection of customer-centricity, internal assumptions, and strategy in practice.

The literal definition of positioning is “to occupy a space in the customer’s mind,”… but how are we going to position effectively if we don’t understand what’s going on in their head?

Traditionally, marketers have relied on the ol’ trusty positioning statement, something that’s been around for ~30+ years. Unfortunately, it’s become a limp safety blanket for uninventive marketers and founders, crushing their innovations and aspirations into a maddening game of adlibs.

More recent positioning frameworks like Obviously Awesome have provided a much-needed boost and spotlight on positioning as a whole… but after talking to 100+ product marketers and founders over the last few years, it still leaves a gap:

• Positioning has so many subtle inputs, and is too intangible for many “casual” users to internalise no matter how good the book is
• Trying to connect the dots between the product you’ve built and the customers you think are good fit is difficult, because we’re so close to it that we can’t see the wood for the trees
• Usually these processes don’t have a tangible output – a mark of success that helps build momentum. A positioning document is great: but then what? How is that doc then translated to the website, or a tradeshow banner, or a sales deck?

Download The Customer Value Positioning framework

Introducing my battle-tested positioning process

Firstly, I want to mention that this framework builds on top of the work of many great marketers, and as such you’ll see echoes and similarities with the work of April Dunford, Myk Pono, Al Ries and Jack Trout, Andy Raskin, and more. If this framework can be a quarter as good as their work, I’ll be happy.

Secondly, customer value positioning is not strictly just a framework, it’s a battle-tested process.

It’s built to ensure that with the right inputs and the right questions asked, the outcome is the same: quality positioning that resonates with your customer, and showcases how your product supports them in obtaining the value they desire.

Let’s walk through the process.

Discover your buyer persona

Buyer personas are discovered, not created.

The most valuable input to this process is customer insight. You can use your internal assumptions, but please: go and ask 10-15 customers these questions.

Transcribe your interviews, extract each point into an online Mural board, then group and summarise the themes.

Then organize those themes into:

• Jobs: common responsibilities and activities your customer does as part of their day-to-day
• Gains: their personal, professional, or business goals they want to achieve
• Pains: marks of failure and frustrations the customer must avoid
• Triggers: motivations that encourage them to solve their problem and switch away from their current solution

Make sure you’re also capturing some information on your customer’s psychographic profile. Are they early adopters and innovators, or laggards? Are they rational or emotional beings? Introverts or extroverts?

Describe the value your customers desire

I define value as an element that your customer wants to attain that:

• Is useful
• Is worth the effort (cost, time, energy)
• Is a priority for them

These might be the outcomes of solving problems and overcoming challenges, or new states that they can achieve by unlocking new capabilities.

You’ll see value themes jump out at you from the previous step. Describe why the value is important to the customer, with a value story following this script:

• Situation:
  • Today, our customer is… (what are they doing, what’s the situation that sets context for the value?)
• Problem:
  • However, …(the limitations or challenges that they’re experiencing)
• Implication:
  • This means…(what’s the downside of continuing in the current way?)
• Resolution:
  • By… (what does fixing the problem look like, not necessarily your product)
• Value:
  • … our customer will…(detail the value they can gain)

Detail how your product helps

We can’t promise that we’ll help customers achieve their outcomes without connecting it back to our product.

Think about the features within your product that support each desired value. These might be an obvious product capability like an integration, a less obvious consideration like a modern and clean UX, or even service elements like a dedicated account manager

Then list out the benefits that those features enable. Benefits are tangible advantages a buyer experiences when using your product; something they can report on, and usually starts with a verb. 

Define your positioning

Start at the bottom.

Frame of reference

April Dunford’s book explains how a frame of reference works with a great example. A wholegrain cake can be a diet muffin, or a paleo snack – depending on the target customer.

The frame of reference, or category, you define your product as will help target customers understand in a few words what you are, what you do, and whether they’re interested or not.

Think about the value your customer desires, the trends they’re experiencing in the market, and how they interpret your product.

Alternative solutions

Your biggest competitors are probably spreadsheets and people power, rather than technology vendors. Defining the alternative solutions that your customers actually use will help your frontline sales and marketing teams to consider how they frame your product in conversations and in marketing material, and provides a foundation to build shared understanding.

Are customers relatively green and new to the market, using niche cloud solutions? That requires different go-to-market tactics, compared to customers who use legacy enterprise hosted solutions.

Value statements

For each value story you created in the Describe stage, get creative.

Think about how you message and wordsmith the outcomes they seek. Start these with a verb: get, make, change, smash, unlock, break, bring, grow – the opportunities are endless.

Website homepage hero

I think the most obvious use of positioning is to decide what you say on the top of your website homepage, so it makes sense to just lock this down in the positioning process.

You’re going to write two things:

1. A creative heading that catches attention and appeals to the outcomes your customer desires
2. A matter-of-fact sentence that describes what your product is (frame of reference), and key values or benefits

You can find some examples of good homepage messaging here.

Remember the psychographic details you captured in the first stage? Use these to find your tone of voice. If your customer is an innovative extrovert, you have license to be more creative and wacky; if they’re more risk-averse and logical, you’ll need to focus on the facts more than feelings.

Four steps to focused customer value positioning

In four stages, you’ve:

• Discovered your ICP and built a fluff-free persona that aligns your sales, marketing, and product teams
• Described the top three outcomes your customers desire
• Detailed exactly how your product helps your customer achieve their goals
• Defined the perfect website heading and slogan that resonates

And this process works, regardless of your industry, target customer, or product.

This process always results in successful positioning.

Think back to the definition of positioning: “to occupy a space in the customer’s mind,”.

Following the Customer Value Positioning framework helps you position more effectively by understanding exactly what your customers care about, finding the gaps that exist, and occupying them with positioning that resonates.

Frequently asked questions

Who should be involved in this process?

I recommend the CEO, a marketing lead, a sales lead, and a product lead: people who have experience with customers, and are charged with directing teams to make change. Positioning often leads to new ideas: don’t waste that opportunity.

What customers should we talk to?

Your ‘best-fit’ customers (and non-customers like them): those that represent the best product/market fit, the best growth opportunity, the highest satisfaction with your product. Niche down for tighter results.

How long does this take?

Most teams will budget for a minimum of 4 weeks with ~4 hours of workshops a week, but often 6-8 weeks gives you the opportunity to set customer interviews, interpret findings, and validate your messaging with internal teams and external methods.

Do we have to do research interviews?

Yes. I feel extremely strongly that interviewing best-fit customers, prospects, and friendly people in the market is the best way to understand your customers. You can do this process by building on top of internal assumptions, but it will never be as strong. Focus on evidence over assumptions.

Can you help facilitate this process, or recommend others who can help?

Yes – book an intro call here.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

The post Introducing the Customer Value Positioning framework appeared first on Building Momentum.

I care a lot about defining the value that our customers gain from our products.

Not the immediate, tangible benefits they achieve – but the true, ultimate value they derive.

I define value as an element that your customer wants to attain that:

• Is useful
• Is worth the effort (cost, time, energy)
• Is a priority for them

And ideally, all three things will be true. When we understand the true value our product enables customers to achieve, we are able to sell faster, charge more, fight commoditisation, and market more easily.

Value is deduced from the work we do to discover our personas. The patterns emerge in broad-to-narrow customer interviews as we understand more about their jobs (common activities), gains (personal/professional/organizational desires), pains (marks of failure and frustrations), and triggers (motivations to search/switch/buy).

This process can be messy. And sometimes it’s easy to miss the woods for the trees as value becomes less tangible, less related to how they use the product, and more about the tangentially-connected outcomes they’ll be able to achieve.

In my positioning process, I used to just extract value themes and then go straight into messaging, creating value nuggets that tie back to product features.

But as I rolled out more messaging to larger teams or in more complex arenas, I noticed that we had to go further, and give frontline sales and marketing teams the context of where our customers are today, the challenges they’re facing, and then showcase how fixing the problem enables value.

Introducing the value story

I use the SPIN selling framework as a foundation for telling a story about what our customers are doing, why that’s not great, and how much better life could be.

Here’s the framework:

• Situation:
  • Today, our customer is… (what are they doing, what’s the situation that sets context for the value?)
• Problem:
  • However, …(the limitations or challenges that they’re experiencing)
• Implication:
  • This means…(what’s the downside of continuing in the current way?)
• Resolution:
  • By… (what does fixing the problem look like, not necessarily your product)
• Value:
  • … our customer will…(detail the value they can gain)

Using the prompts for each section, it’s possible to craft a simple narrative that helps build empathy with customers.

It starts by detailing the situation our customers finds themselves in. Today, our customer is doing something – a painful process, achieving mediocre results, or struggling to make sense of something.

Then we learn the real problem they’re facing. The problem is not the situation; the problem is a blocker that prevents them from advancing.

Next we learn the implications of that – a core part that many gloss over. This is where we uncover the pain, the lost opportunity cost of what they could achieve.

Then we address the resolution. What steps would they take to fix the problem? This probably shouldn’t be anything to do with your product.

Lastly, we drill down on the value. By solving the problem, the customer will achieve a value.

Example

I’ll use the same example as I offer for value nuggets; that of Xerox, and how they moved from selling printers based on features, to instead sell the value of increased student education performance (read more on that here).

• Situation:
  • Today, our customer is… a school administrator, responsible for delivering quality student education experiences whilst managing slim budgets.
• Problem:
  • However, … students find it hard to retain information from their black-and-white workbooks, and there’s limited budget for alternative study methods
• Implication:
  • This means… students may not achieve good grades, reducing the school’s performance.
• Resolution:
  • By… printing workbooks in color, students will be more likely to focus and retain information, and
• Value:
  • … our customer will… provide the best possible educational experiences while managing year-over-year budget pressures

Using value stories

I find value stories an invaluable way at every stage of the positioning and messaging journey.

It helps sanity-check whether the ‘value’ is really important, or whether it’s missing an important point. It helps recenter messaging around the challenges and intended outcomes, providing structure. And it’s so useful for training sales reps on specific use cases, building a simple narrative to frame pitches, and for building website/marketing copy.

Ultimately, this is a simple way to help frame customer context for almost anyone who needs to get up-to-speed. We’re not using jargon or business-speak. We’re simply trying to detail what our customers are facing today, and how solving their problem will help.

Extract value, don’t make it up

It’s important to restate here that value stories shouldn’t be built on anything that sounds good. We can’t position based on assumptions, and we can’t just assume our customers think about.

We need to learn from our ideal customers through interviews and research.

Buyer personas must be discovered, not created.

Value stories must detail the challenges that our customers are facing.

This allows us to connect the dots and create messaging showing how our product supports customers in achieving those outcomes.

And only then can we position ourselves effectively in the minds of our customers.

Good luck!

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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The post Telling ‘value stories’ to guide your positioning appeared first on Building Momentum.

In the UK, traditionally ‘Media Studies’ further education is considered to be a ‘Mickey Mouse’ subject – a pejorative way to tarnish ‘soft’ topics against harder subjects like maths and science.

But you know what? Unlike algebra in maths, I actually learnt a ton of stuff that I still use in my day-to-day work.

In this post I want to explain two big theories that you can use to build stronger and more resilient narratives in your marketing, positioning, and sales narrative.

Todorov’s Equilibrium Theory

This theory is applicable to nearly every story I can think of: a core component of the narratives that govern, influence, and form our world.

What’s the theory?

There are five stages:

1. There is an equal balance and initial equilibrium.
2. The equilibrium is disrupted by an event. (Disequilibrium)
3. There is recognition of the disruption occurring.
4. There is an attempt to repair the damage done by the disruption.
5. A return or restoration of a new equilibrium at the end of the narrative.

What does this look like, in practice?

Think back to your favorite movie: it starts with an equilibrium, where context is introduced. Quickly, an event happens that causes damage, whether physical, mental, or emotional. The disruption is recognized, before our protagonist goes on a journey to fix the issue, right the world, and win the affection of the love interest.

In business we can think about the stories we tell our prospects:

1. The world used to be fine: things worked as they were meant to.
2. Suddenly, something happens: a world change, a technological innovation, a new challenge
3. You feel the pain of it through these metrics, these are the symptoms you face as part of that problem
4. But, you can fix it with our product – this is what the process could be like
5. When you’re live, you’ll be back to normal – and seeing even better results

How can we use this?

It’s no longer as simple as thinking about the beginning, middle, and end of a story.

When understanding, building, and training narratives we need to think about the full picture, and this theory helps:

1. What was life like before?
2. What happened to disrupt the equilibrium?
3. How was it recognised?
4. How can it be fixed? What does that journey look like?
5. What is life like after?

Using Equilibrium Theory can help you build more empathy for customers, grounding your work in their lives.

Propp’s Character Theory

Once you understand this, you’ll see this theory in use in every movie you watch – sometimes it’s a trope, sometimes it’s done with more consideration.

What’s the theory?

Every story has characters that fit into these seven archetypes

1. The protagonist/hero (the character around whom the action revolves)
2. The antagonist/villain (opposes the hero)
3. The dispatcher/boss (sends the hero on the quest)
4. The helper/sidekick (aids the hero)
5. The donor/fairy godmother (gives the hero advice or a useful object)
6. The princess/the girl (motivation & reward for the hero)
7. The false hero/the betrayer (often a helper who turns on the hero and is punished)

They may be a ‘sole’ archetype, or fulfil several roles during the story.

What does this look like in practice?

Let’s take a fairytale example: Little Red Riding Hood

1. Protagonist: Little Red Riding Hood
2. Villain: Big Bad Wolf
3. Dispatcher: The mother, sending LRRH to her grandmother’s
4. Helper: The woodcutter
5. Donor: The woodcutter, with an axe
6. Princess: LRRH
7. False hero: The Big Bad Wolf, for pretending to be the grandmother

How do we apply this to SaaS marketing, you ask? Let’s take Drift as an example.

1. Protagonist: The prospect’s marketing team
2. Villain: Forms!
3. Dispatcher: The end-customer, who hates forms
4. Helper: Drift
5. Donor: Drift, and their platform
6. Princess: The end-customer, and their money!
7. False hero: Forms, pretending to be good ways to ask for details from prospects

How can we use this?

Whether you’re aligned to Andy Raskin’s World Change framework, narrative design, or any other narrative framework, are you missing elements that could help you tell a stronger story? Do you understand the full scope of the characters, roles, and actors that are performing in your market, and within your marketing/sales narrative?

By better understand the roles that your internal and external stakeholders play, you can reframe conversations, think bigger, and develop new ways to guide the narrative in your favour.

Layering theory will simplify, not complicate

Whenever I mention these to people, the most common response is something like “That sounds too complex.” And my response would be “Yes, because simplification is complex by design.”

When we start with well-researched and validated frameworks or theories as a basis for our narratives, we’re able to save time and cognitive energy. Not only is it easier to shortcut initial thoughts, but these systems and tropes and stereotypes are embedded in the minds of our customers, thanks to the modern media machine. The frames already exist for you to build from.

Just don’t forget to use these frameworks as inspiration, not instruction.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Why, you ask?

The first time was legitimate; an acquisition meant the product offering had fundamentally changed.

The second and third times? Each time a new CEO started, fresh with ideas and forceful on expectations.

These were, obviously, bad ideas. Repositioning is fundamental change, and change is disruptive – it’s no small decision.

Many marketers will be part of repositioning projects, whether for a small product line or for the entire business. Sometimes, they’re justified with good, honest signals indicating a repositioning would be a strategic good decision. In other situations like my example above, repositioning projects can be frivolous – a waste of time, effort, money, and momentum.

Let’s take a look.

Warning signs to watch out for

The HIPPO’s ego

Your CEO struts in, pitches you the new position they’ve been thinking about, then drops the mic and leaves the room. In their wake, a trail of carnage follows. One rogue shower idea turns into a highly disruptive and expensive experiment, destined to fail.

Aside: one CMO wanted to reposition us as marketing software for the ‘everyWEAR consumer’, as a cringe-inducing portmanteau of both ‘everywhere’ (i.e. mobile-first, location-based) and ‘wearables’ (i.e. smartwatches). We had to fight surprisingly hard to prevent this monstrosity from seeing the light of day.

Competitor moves

Certain industries are just more attune to sheep syndrome. The Metaverse is a good example – suddenly, every big tech brand has a metaverse play.

Competitor repositioning is FOMO in action.

Do they know something you don’t? Whatever they’re doing, they’re doing it in a big way – that means they’re confident in it – so let’s get in on the action too! We need to hedge our bets, right?

Except… you are not your competitor. You don’t have their business, their product, customers, financials, strategy – or lack of.

Broad sales execution challenges

When the pipeline is looking empty and the win rate isn’t looking good, it’s tempting to change course — often in a big way.

If only we talked about X, instead of Y… We’d be closing more opportunities, I just know it.

And then, you embark upon a treacherous journey: sailing into the unknown with no safe passage.

Especially in earlier-stage businesses, it’s SO TEMPTING to change the pitch for every prospect: spraying and praying that something sticks. While it might feel productive, it’s counter-intuitive – you won’t have a consistent foundation to evaluate your findings.

Repositioning — and the need to reposition — can sometimes be a smokescreen to cover for an (ineffective) tactic-led sales approach.

Reliable signals to keep in mind

Product offering has legitimately changed

If you’ve made an acquisition, added a new product line, or developed new capabilities that vastly change the outcomes your customers can achieve, maybe it’s time to review your positioning.

But not always – P3 or P4 nice-to-have features can sometimes get blown out of proportion in your internal echo chamber, when actually the customer impact is negligible. Sanity check whether new features can really have an impact before spending the time and effort to reposition.

New unique, unconventional wisdom unlocked

Unconventional wisdom is a great way to stand out from your competitors, re-educate your customers, and develop a strong sales and marketing narrative that drives urgency and demand.

When you discover or develop this unconventional wisdom new doors open. It’s broader than just product features – new approaches for sales, marketing, product, and the rest of the business start to click into place.

Obviously, test and validate your unique wisdom first – but it’s a great way to make noise, especially in crowded marketplaces, with an entirely new way of looking at the market.

Customer patterns and feedback

The literal definition of positioning is “to occupy a space in your customer’s mind”.

So as you win new accounts, your ‘best-fit customer’ will change.

As you continue to sell and market and support to them, you’ll learn much more about what’s going on in their minds – new hopes, dreams, and fears that can enable stronger positioning.

Customer feedback is often under-used as a source of market insight. David Cancel, CEO of Drift, once wrote about how customer questions that begin “how do I…” actually aren’t about product features, but highlight a product marketing issue. Their expectations are such, because of your positioning, messaging, and experience.

Specific sales funnel challenges

Above, I talked about how broad sales challenges are a poor signal: do not reposition ‘just because’.

However, specific sales funnel challenges can be really great indicators that you need to revisit the way you present your brand to the market.

When you’ve identified specific challenges – like poor discovery-to-opp conversion rates or low win-rates – you’ll be able to first evaluate the sales skills. Are the team well equipped, skilled, and knowledgeable enough that skill is not a barrier?

If you’ve reviewed the team and found no skill problems, you’ll find positioning issues as an aside. Start there!

Tip: always be proactive

Positioning is like an evolving fabric that connects your customers and the market to your product and sales/marketing experience.

There will always be holes and gaps. You won’t win every opportunity, or beat every competitor.

So long as you make proactive decisions, you can’t lose. Take the time to think about your positioning strategy and how you can grasp it by the horns to build momentum and avoid inertia.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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One of the most common questions I get is “what are examples of good positioning?”.

Unfortunately, it’s really hard to just ‘teardown’ positioning without knowing the strategy and decisions behind it.

While it’s easy to assess from the outside, there are many, many variables that affect the outcome of positioning from business strategy and customer feedback, to the experience and ability of those involved in the process.

If positioning is strategic, it would be foolish to think we can understand how objectively ‘good’ it may or may not be without knowing the context.

So that’s why – generally – I don’t do teardowns or criticize positioning.

But, I do offer examples of how I think positioning has been crafted well. It’s always possible to appreciate the craftsmanship that’s gone into how a company is presenting themselves to the world.

I want to offer a few examples of both good positioning and good messaging, in the hope you can find inspiration and confidence to level up your positioning.

Examples of good positioning

First up is Shipamax – although, spoiler alert, I helped them.

Throughout the process, we discovered that their key buyers were looking for specific pieces of value that weren’t being addressed by competing solutions. By building these insights into the positioning, we were able to speak directly to customer value – and that translates into differentiation that galvanizes buyers.

For example, we understood that technical buyers wanted to be more directly involved in business growth, and not just seen as a supporting function. They also had grand plans to innovate processes across the business, but couldn’t get this done with a standard vanilla OCR solution.

We built this directly into the positioning, and then had some fun with messaging: ‘at last’ to speak to unblocking frustrations, ‘in a way that vanilla OCR just can’t’ as a not-so-subtle hat tip to alternative solutions.

Next, Truelayer. No affiliation this time!

I think this is a great example of clarity in positioning.

Firstly, the headline speaks to the value for the buyer: instant access to open banking.

Then, the description tells you how, and what the impact of that is.

It’s so simple that almost anyone can look at this and instantly grok who, how, what, and why.

To improve, I’d only recommend throwing some proof points into it. How quickly, exactly, can someone get up and running? Let’s quantify just how ‘instant’ ‘instant access’ is.

Lastly, Soldo.

One thing companies often want to do is outposition their competitors. If they go one way, we follow.

We assume this is because they have some unique experience or insights – but often, it’s the blind leading the blind.

I like this example from Soldo because it positions clearly in the gaps, the unmet area between the old and new worlds of expense management:

• New world: things like Pleo – easy spending with company cards, built for the spender
• Old world: things like Concur – expense management built for the company

We can see in the hero section how Soldo have communicated the value for both audiences – and then used proof points below to provide evidence.

Good examples of messaging

I wanted to highlight a few examples of where messaging could easily have been staid, boring, and bland – but has been given a new lease of life.

Coda is a great example of creativity in messaging. This could have easily been ‘no more spreadsheets’ or ‘say goodbye to spreadsheets’ – but somehow they summoned the courage to land on a pun with a swear word.

Front is a quality example of using tone-of-voice in messaging, just within a few words at the top of the homepage.

‘Make millions of customers feel like one in a million’ is aspirational, yet down-to-earth – and I expect they’ve landed on a value that their customers want to achieve. In fact, I bet they pulled this from a customer interview.

‘Front is your hub for all things customer communication’ just sounds like a friend telling you what it is. Simple, honest, direct, no fluff.

Lastly, Stripe. If you know about Stripe, you’ll know how many products they offer: the breadth, depth, and complexity.

I love how simple the homepage hero section is, for just a complex business.

Many other companies would’ve wanted to showcase their expertise and complexity as a badge of honor, but not Stripe.

Their mission and a really simple sentence communicates a number of different things to those arriving on the site:

• What Stripe does: payments infrastructure for the internet
• Who it’s for: startups to large enterprises
• What Stripe build (software and APIs)
• Social proof: millions of businesses
• The value customers achieve: accept payments, send payouts, and manage businesses online

But, it doesn’t feel overbearing or complicated. It’s accurate, brief, and clear.

What do you think?

What do you think is an example of good positioning? Maybe you think your messaging is great? Let me know!

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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I recently sat down with Ishara Naotunna, behind the Spill The Marketing Beans podcast.

In 28 minutes, we got through so much, including: my battle-tested positioning process, the types of customers you should talk to and who should be involved, how to test new messaging, how to activate messaging internally, how to know you need new positioning… and much more!

Watch the video below, or read the slightly-edited notes below!

Transcript

On the traditional positioning statement…

I think that the standard positioning format statement that everyone uses is probably the worst thing that could happen in, especially in SaaS, because it reduces our value of our product and what customers, one down to just a statement that gets repeated and parroted.

Nobody really believes in it. It just becomes meaningless words.

On my positioning process…

So my positioning process, I call it customer-led value positioning. Because it does what it says on the tin. It is focused on who our customers are. And we’re trying to understand the value that our product delivers them.

Get assumptions on paper first

So that process generally starts by trying to get all of the assumptions out that our core internal team have about who our customers are, what they want to achieve, and what the value is that our product delivers.

The reason we do this is because otherwise later in the process, you’re going to have all of these biased assumptions come up and you’re going to be finding reasons to include or exclude them later on, rather than having a really honest conversation upfront, and asking, “how confident are we about this specific thing?”. If a CMO or a product manager has this one belief, it’s a good opportunity in the research that we’re going to go do to test whether that is true, or whether it’s just a one-off that we’ve seen in one customer.

We really want to try and find patterns. Positioning is about patterns. And so that’s really cool, getting those assumptions out first of all, super important. The output of that is something called a customer empathy map. And we use that as a really rough basis to guide our customer research that we’re going to do.

Do customer research

I have a list of like 19 questions that I rely on and try and get a good enough spread across all of them from maybe 10, 15 interviews if we can.

Those interviews are with customers. They are with prospects, with people that we know in the market, analysts, other people that have some knowledge around the problem space that we’re solving. Those questions fall into four categories.

The first part is about segmentation. Who was the person that we were interested in? What do they do? What’s their job? Who do they report to? All of the kind of standard stuff that you might as.

The next piece we want to ask about are the general problems that they have, so problem discovery. We’re trying to get a really broad view of who our customers are, what they care about, what’s going on in their day to day, stuff like that.

The reason we do that, and start really broad, is because the literal definition of positioning is to find a space in our customers’ minds that we can occupy. How are we going to do that if we don’t know what is already in their head?

So we have to start super, super broad, and that might be specific software challenges, like they’re trying to do this specific thing with this category of software, or it might be professional goals. They want to get a promotion that’s on their mind at the minute, or they might have really personal goal, to make them more money, or save time so they can go home and do other stuff.

After we’ve done that, we have the opportunity to dig in a bit more on the problem that we think those customers have. And so we’re validating that problem to some extent. And so we’re trying to ask questions about how, does this affect you? What other impact does it have?

And then lastly. in this questioning process, we’re trying to understand, after giving a brief explanation of what our product does, how it would work for them. Would it save them time, how do they think it would change their life? What would the ultimate value and benefits be, from their perspective?

So those four sections give a ton of data. The next step is to just go through and find all of the patterns amongst those and try to understand where are the big things that we might want to rely on later? What are the top important themes that are coming out?

Create personas

So we’ve got all of our assumptions out, we’ve talked to customers. The next step for me in my process is creating personas. These aren’t personas in the kind of usual fluffy marketing sense.

We’re relying on evidence, not assumptions, and we’re focusing on four key elements: their jobs, so the responsibilities and their day-to-day activities, tasks. Their pains: things that frustrate them, annoy them, they want to get rid of. Elements that they want to gain, things that they would love to have, things that they’re trying to achieve.There’s not always necessarily an opposite pain to gain, but sometimes there is. And lastly, their triggers, or the motivations, what’s galvanizing someone to take action, to search, to switch or to buy something.

So we have a really nice tight understanding of what our persona is. And you might have two of them or three of them, depending on how many people are in your kind of core stakeholder group.

Extract customer value themes

From there we then get to the really important part, which is trying to extract the value the customer wants to achieve, wants to gain. That might be solving a pain. It might be reacting to a trigger. It might be achieving something, or doing a job better.

I have a quite tight definition for what the value should be. I think a value is something that is useful to the customer, it’s a priority for them – so there’s some urgency behind it – and it’s something that’s going to be worth the cost, the time, or the effort to make it happen.

Ultimately the value should meet all three of those. Otherwise it’s, fine, but it’s not going to be as strong as it could be. And so we run all of these values, all of these themes that we’re pulling out in personas and try to identify “does it meet all three” and get some level of prioritization in there as well.

So that’s a really simple way in this process of going from super raw, unstructured data to now, for this customer, we know these are the things that person really wants. These are the things that this person is really going to get use out of. They are really invested in solving it because there’s some urgency behind it. And it’s something that they are going to see a positive ROI from.

Get creative

Super simple. Then we can get a bit creative, which tries to tease out those values and we put them into sentences statements to try and understand how all of the benefits that our features deliver are all linked together.

I have something called a value nugget, which is the hierarchy between benefits features and proof points. So we try and package all of these up together and you’ll have multiple value nuggets.

But the interesting thing about them is that you can move up or move down really easily. So you can move up by asking “why” and moving down by asking “how”. Say you are starting with the value that we help you save time.

Why is that important? Because of this particular benefit, you’re going to be able to do something else that’s more valuable instead. Why is that? Because we’re going to help you do it through these particular features in our product.

And then you can move up in a similar way, by asking how, and it’s a really easy way to train out as well with sales teams, and really easy to give to marketers, to create website copy as well.

So all of that gets wrapped up in a tagline, a slogan, the typical things you might see on the top hero section of a website page. Just a really brief description of all these things for our customer. How do we summarize the ultimate value and benefits that our product delivers?

And we see how that goes.

Launch, test, iterate

We put the positioning out to test it. We message it according to the different channels, we try to prove out confidence in it. Is it successful in the ways that we want it to be? Whether that’s through the sales reps, through pitch decks, through outbound emails, through Google ads. Ultimately we just learn more, iterate and it just becomes a really nice self fulfilling prophecy. As we get smarter, we get more focused and we get more confident about what we’re doing.

Should you frame customer interviews with assumptions?

Often you’ll start the conversation with something in mind.

The last part of the interview is going to be validating your product. So you’re going to give them a really quick detailed description, and then ask them “what do you think of that? How do you think you would benefit?”

Often you’ll start these conversations and as you learn more about who they are, what’s going on in their life, you will often see a light bulb switch on in your mind, where you slightly twist the description that you’re going to give of your product in a way that opens it up, that is different from what you had originally. And that’s really interesting. We’re start to see how people doing the interview react slightly to what we’re hearing from customers.

And when that happens, it’s actually better than having a really strict and discrete description. Because again, we’re trying to learn, we’re trying to find the edges of what our positioning should be. And that’s really interesting to see happen.

What type of customers should you speak to in the positioning process?

I usually rely on best-fit customers. Again, this is an assumption and there are different ways to look at it.

Best fit for your business might be the ones that deliver the most revenue. Or it might be the customers that are the most evangelistic about what you’re doing, or the customers that have the best product/market fit with today.It really depends on the stage of your business, and what you think you need next — that can be difficult to determine.

But you don’t just want to speak with happy customers, because they’re only going to tell you what you wants hear. So you want to try and understand from customers from across the spectrum really.

But the most important thing I would recommend is to look outside of your customer base. To speak to people in the market. Purely because if you think about the average website conversion, you’re probably only getting 2% or 3% of visitors to your website that convert to leads. That means you’re missing out on 97% of people that came to your website who weren’t interested enough.

And so by really learning from those top of funnel, potential prospects and customers, that’s where you can start to understand where are the edges of my customer base or my ideal customers? Is there more we can do to expand that pool, or maybe we need to be more focused on excluding some potential customers as well?

Who should be involved in the positioning process?

I found that it works best with five or six people maximum. The reason we want more than just two or three is because some of the work we’re going to do is about looking for patterns. And so we want to split up groups so that they can do effectively half the work each, and then review what the other has done to check for mistakes.So there’s a logistics piece in there.

But also by involving people from the marketing team from sales, from customer success, usually someone from product… I also think is important for CEOs to be involved in this process as well, because ultimately positioning is a representation or even a driver of your business strategy. It’s really cool to get that in that kind of opinion into the room, but also make sure that executive level people are exposed to the insights that are coming from customers.

How do you test positioning?

So it really depends on what the company wants to achieve. Some companies will just be like, okay, we need new positioning: we need to get something out there because we know what we have today doesn’t work.

And that will be really quite simple because it’s just going to be shared among internal people. Do we feel confident that this positioning is better than what we have today? Yes or no? We build up from there, we start to iterate and then launch externally.

The other part is when we are maybe taking in a different angle, we’re trying to test it a bit more slowly. There’s a bit more risk involved. That’s when we need to try and break it down into “what are the things that we expect positioning to do for us?”. So it can’t just be a blanket catch-all, “let’s put it out there, see how it performs”. It can’t just be something that is done super discreetly.

It needs to be something where you’re going to get confidence that it’s doing the job it’s meant to do. You think about software development testing. They will have an alpha process where it’s done internally. They’ll have a beta process where they are testing it with a small number of customers.

So that could be I want a couple of people to pick this up entirely, use it in pitches and see how it works. We’ll give them a couple of weeks to see that process run through. Or with our marketing team, can we set up some campaigns, some Google ads or some social campaigns, for example, that rely on this new messaging to see how it performs.

One of the things I think is really interesting is when you can do all this cross functionally, So in my experience, what we’ve done is pulled together a tiger team: a really cross-functional group of five or six people from different teams, give them this messaging, this new positioning and say “hey, go and put this into action with this group of customers, and over five or six weeks, you will have much more information as to how it needs to improve, what works and what doesn’t work, and what you need to do to build more confidence in that.

Positioning isn’t going to be something that you set and forget, it’s something that needs to be visited over and over again. We’re never going to have a hundred percent confidence that positioning is good, or better, or works: it’s just something we’re putting out into the world, building our confidence in over time.

How do you activate positioning in your business?

So let’s imagine that you have done with the testing and you’re really happy with it. Now we’re going to present it to the rest of the business and say, “hey, get on with it”. The worst thing you can do is do an all-hands presentation and expect people to use it.It’s not going to happen, not going to work well at all.

The activation of positioning has a couple of different levels. The core piece should be about making your customer’s lives real in the minds of your sales reps and the rest of your team. So you really have to bring the customer to life.

Literally, if you can, do interviews, do all-hands interviews with customers, interview them, do podcasts, internal podcasts, anything you can do to help the rest of the team, understand who the customer is, what’s going on in their lives, what they care about. That’s really key because otherwise they’re not going to have anything to ground the value that you’re delivering on later, it’s just all a little bit too abstract for them.

So if we have actually done that piece, and that takes time, if we’re starting to make our customer’s experiences real for our team, then we can train out the positioning and messaging. We can do the decks and the templates and all of this kind of stuff. And it’s much stronger, because it’s connected to really core piece of empathy for our customers.

And that way people won’t just repeat it, it won’t just be parroted like the standard positioning statement is. But it’s something that people can connect to and it’s something that they will embody and have more confidence in themselves, and that’s going to help them tell the story better.

How should you position against a sea of alternatives?

Firstly, I think it’s more important to use the phrase alternative solutions than competitors, because if you ask your customers or potential customers how they are achieving a piece of value, they will tell you… If you asked 10 people, half of them will tell you they don’t do that at all. Or they’ve got somebody they pay to do that. They’ve got an agency or a freelancer. Maybe one or two people will tell you they using software to do that. There’s a whole world of other ways people are trying to achieve the same value.

So if we’re looking at that purely on a software-to-software comparative level, we’re not really going to understand, the real ultimate thing a customer is trying to achieve. Often there will be one or two, maybe three or four competitors that have really similar things. Yeah. The only thing I’ve seen successfully done is by focusing the customer segment deeper nicher become more narrow, because that way you’re not just going to have one small differentiator, you’re going to have the differentiator for this customer, and that is going to set you apart. April Dunford calls it being a big fish in a small pond.

That works really, well. And it also, again, gives you a bit more of a strategy. If you are struggling to compete against one competitor, try and niche away, angle away from the same market. And you will see that not only you’re going to win more deals, you’re going to see more momentum in this whole process as well, because they are seeing much more of their own jobs, pains, gains, and triggers represented in the way you’re going to market.

What are the telltale signs that show a repositioning is required?

The biggest signs I’ve seen are the ones that are qualitative, like feedback from sales reps. And it’s tricky, because sales reps act at very one-to-one level: everything is about this next deal or this deal.

So the role of product marketers in this is to actually try and understand from qualitative interviews, with sales reps, what’s not working and then try and look for the patterns that exist within those.

That, I think is probably the best way to find out there’s actually an issue with core positioning. And sometimes it’s going to be a small thing, it’s maybe not the right frame of reference for example.

Other times, you’ll just have a lot of things that you need to redo completely. You don’t know who you are, what you’re doing, why for some customers should choose you.

I do positioning consulting with other companies as well, and I think the number one reason people come to me is because they have 10 sales reps, and every sales rep tells a different story when they get on the phone to somebody. There’s no consistency in that messaging and that narrative and that’s going to make your product weaker. It’s not going to instill the same values in your customers. And that’s really important: the consistent narrative, consistent go-to market story is really really key.

What should product marketers know about positioning?

I think to get a really solid foundation of positioning, product marketers should really double down on the way they connect data and insights from customers to business challenges they are seeing.

We’re trying to get… almost like intuition when you’re talking to customers, like, oh, okay, yeah, I think this might be a thing. And sometimes we would just let it go.

But otherwise, a lot of times you say, actually, this might be impacting this metric over there.

Because positioning is part of the whole go-to-market system. Sometimes it’s a bit too fluffy and intangible, but again, to understand how positioning impacts business metrics I think is really, really core.

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If you’re in SaaS, you definitely know about Hubspot’s inbound marketing funnel…

… and you’ll also know it’s replaced by their flywheel:

If you’re in a billing or bizops role, you probably know about the Zuora 9 Keys to Subscription Success.

And if you’re in Customer Success, you probably know of Gainsight’s Periodic Table.

These are all examples of a custom methodology that these companies have developed to help guide not just their product strategy, but their product narrative.

Any company can develop a methodology. Those that do it well are able to stand out, sell higher value, and sell faster by educating their prospects, customers, and the market of a new way to operate.

Why create your own methodology?

There are a few different ways to differentiate from your competitors, but the most resilient option is to have an opinion.

This doesn’t necessarily mean have an opinionated product (but it could do).

It means to have a certain view of how the vertical, industry, and jobs you’re supporting can be done better – usually based on your own unique wisdom.

By presenting a new mental model (if it works!), you’re able to convince prospects that you have the upper-hand, experience, nous, and specialism. It gives you an opportunity to build a stronger product strategy that’s built around the process, cementing your ability to better meet those customer needs.

And, when converted to your sales narrative, you’re able to do one of my favorite types of sales experiences: the whiteboard map. This is where your sales rep can pull out your customer’s challenges and aspirations through discovery conversation, jotting them on the board in seemingly random positions – before going in for the kill and wrapping it all in your methodology. Suddenly, random points become part of an interconnected map on the path from chaos to success. I’ve only ever seen this work well.

Building a methodology: examples

Example 1

At Kayako, we looked to build a methodology for delivering something we called ‘unified customer service’. UCS was part of our manifesto, a new way of approaching customer service strategy.

We began with some principles.

Firstly, the model needed to be built on verbs, active elements that described the core tasks someone needed to master to unlock UCS.

The model also needed to work in a number of different contexts, with prompts like these to guide our thinking:

• The market – The customer service shift means it’s critical that I:
• Our customer’s business – To deliver an effortless customer experience, I must:
• Our customer themselves – To get better at customer service, I must improve my ability to:
• Our product – With Kayako, I can:
• Our marketing – Take a look at this blog post on how to:
• Our roadmap – These features help our customers to:

Lastly, we paraphrased context from Zuora’s 9 Keys guide to set the scene of how the blueprint should work:

• These seven steps serve as a foundational blueprint for building and scaling an effortless customer service experience.
• Some of these may seem more immediately relevant to your business, but eventually all of them have to be addressed.
• While individual keys may be prioritized at different times, a business must focus on the collective set as a whole.
• This introductory guide is intended to outline these concepts in very broad terms.
• This section sets out how these steps help businesses achieve UCS.

For each part of the framework, we added notes on:

• Why the step is necessary
• How it can be achieved
• What the specific requirements were
• Why it’s important
• What’s blocking people from doing it now
• The problem and implication that not doing so presents
• The approach that businesses should take to overcome

After a lot of research, back-and-forth, and experimenting, we developed this:

8 Steps to Unified Customer Service:

1. Capture – Gather the right data and learn about your customer and what they’re doing in real-time
2. Interact – Communicate with your customer on the right channel, at the right time
3. Understand – Apply what you know about your customer and their context to make every interaction as personal as possible
4. Resolve – Provide the perfect response that answers all of your customer’s questions, and head off the next issue too.
5. Measure – Measure the impact of your effortless customer service experience on your business goals
6. Improve – Test and experiment to discover processes that work for you and your customers
7. Scale – Ensure your team, tools and processes are ready for success

We used it in some conversations and validated with customers, but unfortunately never got a chance to use it!

Example 2

At another company, we really needed a framework to help distill our narrative into something that could be repeated over-and-over, turning our product feature set into a toolbox for achieving distinct outcomes.

We distilled what we knew about both the achievements our customers were making and internal thinking about what else the product could support to create a ‘five star framework’. This had real legs, although was relatively short-lived due to changing priorities!

How to build your own methodology

In both of my experiences, we used mostly our internal understanding of our customers and the industry to determine the stages and steps in our methodology. This was fine… but in hindsight, we over-thought it. Without external insight, we were left second-guessing the maturity of our customers and the market.

If I were to do it again, I’d focus solely on our customers jobs-to-be-done map, and use that research to form the basis of our framework.

It’s really important to extract, simplify, and reduce the knowledge you gain into core steps that can be followed and put into practice by your ideal customers. This means if your customer is an advanced thinker, go to the same level. Otherwise, always err on the side of caution and message for the lowest common denominator. Being unnecessarily smart won’t do you any favors.

Think about your visualization from the beginning and involve a designer if you can. Are you a building a cyclical process, a puzzle to be completed, or a maturity framework? This can have a big impact on the way you build and frame your methodology.

Lastly, validate with internal experts, customers, and other friendly folks in the market. Your framework — and the resulting product strategy and narrative you build from it — won’t be successful if it doesn’t resonate with the intended audience.

Show ‘how’ with your methodology

Getting your methodology right can set a solid foundation to break through the market, differentiate in the mind of your customers, and speed up sales by offering not just the product, but the methodology for success. Good luck!

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I read Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate by George Lakoff, a renowned linguist – and I think it’s a must-read for anyone who works on positioning and messaging for their business.

With decades of experience, Lakoff writes about the US GOP party and their messaging machine — or rather, the foundational cognitive functions they understand to help them build awareness, influence political discourse, and own the narrative.

In SaaS, we can apply many of the same concepts to how we think about our positioning and messaging to drive awareness and influence, define categories, and build narratives.

Without plagiarizing too much, here’s a summary that may help you take your positioning and messaging to the next level.

It’s all about the framing

Frames are “mental structures that shape the way we see the world”. These are built-in, default concepts that guide our psyche and our understanding of life and the universe.

Frames already exist in your customers mind — influenced by their peers, the media, education, and more.

A frame might be a customer’s view of their problem, and the solution they think they need. It might be their opinion of a particular piece of software or brand. It might even be their interpretation of their problem.

Frames are hard to build from scratch, although they can be broken down and rebuilt piece-by-piece.

Frames need to exist to be activated

One of the core concepts is that frames must pre-exist in order to be understood.

Many, many SaaS companies are currently contemplating whether to name a category, or align with another. Popularised by Play Bigger, to differentiate you need to distinguish your proposition away from the competitors by creating a new category.

However some folks have taken this to new, weird, and almost unrecognisable heights. Odd naming that doesn’t quite stick, tangential application of concepts from other industries, and too much verbatim HiPPO (the highest paid person’s opinion) language.

One of my favorite quotes on category creation is from Andy Raskin:

Unless the core concept of the category can resonate that well, it’s unlikely to hit the mark. (See the difference between Drift’s former ‘Conversational Marketing’ category and their new ‘Revenue Acceleration’ category, in my opinion at least!).

Similarly in sales, we want to pitch and have prospects nod their head and agree with everything we say – not scratch their head in confusion, overloaded with cognitive effort.

Repetition works

Lakoff says that repetition is key, broadcasting a message until it becomes an unconsciously held belief.

When done well, category creation builds upon existing concepts and then activates them, bringing them into everyday public discourse. Of course, this is easier to do in our niche stakeholder audiences rather at national-scale political messaging.

Everything you put out into the world should cite the same core concept over and over again. It should build the frame in the mind of your audience piece-by-piece, strengthening the neural networks and priming their subconscious for your approach.

Frame your features

Lakoff uses the ‘tax relief’ framing as an example of understanding a core belief (taxes should be lower) and building the surrounding frame (‘relief’ meaning to release burden).

And we can use the same concepts in the way we name product features. For example, ‘invoice generation’ is plain and straightforward; ‘invoice automation’ feels smart and helpful.

Build the messaging machine

One of the most interesting parts of the book that isn’t covered in detail is the huge messaging operation that sits behind the Republican party. It’s not just the politicians and the policywonks, but a coordinated army of researchers, theorists, intellectuals, training programs, media relations, pollsters, and more.

I think there’s a ton of opportunity to think about building a messaging machine in your business. It shouldn’t just be the product marketing or marketing team who own, test, and iterate on messaging; every team should be brought into the process with a common goal in mind.

• Every team should be trained on the messaging, from the theory to the execution
• There should be clear learning and validation goals to help iterate successfully
• Feedback loops should be obvious and well-managed, to quickly pass learnings from the frontline back to the intelligence center

The book is highly recommended for anyone in the messaging and positioning realm. Buy it, and let me know what you think!

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I bet that you’ve seen bold claims on B2B websites or sales decks and though… nah I don’t believe it. Me too.

Everyone uses statistics and proof points in their marketing but too often, I see claims that just don’t make sense:

• Weird, convoluted language – caveated with a paragraph of super small text

• Odd phrasing to convey a distant impact, when really it’s held together by a thread

• Orwellian language and spin that says something but means nothing

But proof points are really important in B2B marketing. They work to persuade your audience that your product/service works and achieves the outcomes that are important to stakeholders.

B2B must ultimately contribute to revenue generation or cost reduction – proof points are how we show that impact.

How do you determine the proof points you should actually use?

Choosing proof points

Using the wrong stat could be the difference between getting in the evaluation set or not. There’s no point using proof points that your customers don’t care about. Not only do irrelevant stats take up valuable marketing space, they take up cognitive space.

1. Understand value

That’s why it’s important to understand the ultimate value that your product delivers to customers.

Regular readers will know that understanding your value your customers are seeking (and how you help them achieve that!) is the most single important thing you can do to build momentum in your business.

This helps you build the mental model that your potential customers operate in, and help you understand how you position around that.

That might mean focusing less, or more, on the functional features (and their immediate proof points) – and instead, more on aspirational benefits or second-order impacts.

2. Connect proof points to value

Throwing in random stats here-and-there again will confuse your buyer. It’s important to deliver a focused message: you help customers achieve X as a result of Y, using Z – and proving it.

I call this a value nugget.

A value nugget is a way to package up your product features and benefits, while providing a clear hierarchy to navigate effortlessly in sales conversations and marketing.

A value nugget is comprised of:

You can move through the value nugget by asking ‘why’ and ‘how’. This makes it easier to train a narrative and talk track that can be navigated in real-time.

Crafting strong messaging with value nuggets

When using this, keep in mind that your value is probably not an immediate outcome of your product, but rather a second-order impact.

An example I’ve shared before is Xerox. When marketing their printers, they used stats that showed that the impact their products had on school learning and education outcomes – not just how fast their printers were.

How to create proof points

Sometimes, you’ll have stats ready to hand that you can already slot into your marketing. Other times, you’ll have to create them.

A tip: elements of value

Use the Elements of Value pyramid (detailed in this post on competitive differentiation) to see if there are elements you could mention that you haven’t thought of yet.

Ask customers before they sign

A good practice – if it works for your sales process – is to ask prospects for stats during the sales process. Not only can these be used to build a business case and provide fodder for Customer Success engagements and renewal conversations, but you can use them to determine the impact your product has after 3, 6, 9, 12 months of use.

You can ask customers for hard stats like conversion rates, revenue, or volumes. But you can also ask for softer stats that are less scientific, but potentially more meaningful: how many hours they think they spent on tasks, how happier their team are, etc.

Collect these in the sales process, ask successful customers how those numbers have changed – and build from there.

The survey approach

This is something that I noticed a company do before and I love it. It’s not the most scientific, but it does help you create a pool of stats that you can use that tie directly to the impacts your customers are hoping for.

Survey your customers with questions like these:

1. Do you agree or disagree with this statement? [Product] has helped our business to [increase revenue].

2. By what percentage do you think [revenue would have increased] WITHOUT [product]?

3. By what percentage do you think [revenue has increased] WITH [product]?

This approach gets you three great stats:

• The percentage of customers that say your product has helped grow revenue

• The average percentage revenue increase that customers say your product has contributed

• A stat to help you say “Customers say using our product adds x% more revenue than without”

I like these stats because they’re a mixture of social proof and actual impact. Yes, they aren’t scientifically quantified – but if you’re in a pinch, they’re great substitutes.

And in most cases, what your customers ‘think’ your impact has been is potentially more valuable than what it actually was.

“What if our numbers aren’t great?”

If the statistics that matter aren’t great, I have four options.

1. Consider if they are really the best metrics to use

2. Start a cross-functional project determined to improve that number

3. Find other stats that may contribute to the intended outcome but are not directly linked

4. Be honest: “Right now we have X% impact, and we’re dedicated to improving this all the time”

Never lie about stats – always have a doc ready to go that shows the source and calculations if anyone asks, particularly in countries like the UK where the Advertising Standards Authority can ask for proof of claims.

Use proof points to build momentum

Proof points are crucial to show you have real impact on metrics that your customers care about.

Don’t just throw anything down on the website – take the time to consider what stats your customers want to improve, and then find the statistics that will help you get in the consideration set and move the deal forward.

Avoid caveated messaging – be clear, simple, and direct. Honest, upfront messaging is alway the best policy.

How are you using proof points in your marketing? Leave a comment and share your thoughts:

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Positioning can be neglected for a whole number of reasons. Usually, speed of execution throws out any plans for a structured approach to positioning. Shortcuts become common.

New messages, new themes, new features and benefits, new narratives are lackadaisically attached to your messaging without coherent care and attention. “It does the job,” you think. “It won’t be there forever. We’ll revisit it soon.”

But that never happens. The chances of revisiting fades. The messaging just becomes baked in, part of the furniture. Everyone accepts it. Where did it come from? Nobody knows for certain – but everyone uses it, so it must be great.

The slippery slope

Just like a neglected property, everything might look fine on the outside… but inside it’s rotten.

And just like rot, neglected positioning starts to infect everything else too.

New upcoming features are treated the same: a bit of wordsmithing, run it past the boss – and click, it’s on the website.

“Wordsmithing” loses any creativity. It now means “look at a thesaurus and use a synonym”.

“Value” is forgotten. Faster, easier, simpler, time-saving, more efficient, more flexible, the first, the only, best-in-class, modern, all-in-one.

First-order thinking wins. Do this, get that: use our new feature to save time on process.

When was the last time anyone spoke to a customer or prospect that wasn’t on a sales call? Nobody knows.

When this kind of thing happens, it won’t be obvious. It will show up in many different ways. Death by a thousand cuts.

Slower sales cycles. Unmotivated prospects. Falling conversion rates. Tyre-kickers. Team attrition. A big push on sales comp plans and spiffs to grow the pipeline: “the top rep gets a Ferrari”.

Inertia sets in.

Test your confidence

Positioning is a really crucial step to consider thoughtfully in everything you do – whether that’s release a new product, change pricing, make platform updates, or even communicate failures.

Sometimes, you’ll want to run a full positioning project: segmentation, research, value messaging.

Sometimes, you don’t have the time or the need to run a full project. You can get by with a few casual conversations, or a quick email to a friendly customer. Maybe you have solid internal customer-representation from sales, customer success, and product marketing colleagues.

In these situations, measure your confidence.

Are you feeling comfortable and confident that the positioning you’re about to use will hit the mark? Is it resilient and based on evidence?

Or perhaps you’re not feeling sure: the positioning has been developed within your team without any other internal validation. Or it’s really important to get it right, so you need more eyes on it.

Whatever you do, don’t neglect positioning

Be mindful of the positioning messages that you’re creating and putting out into the world.

• Do they fit well, or does it feel discombobulated?

• Are they based on evidence, or are they assumptions?

• Were they developed with care and attention, or were they an afterthought?

Neglected positioning will pull you down and prevent you from making real progress. And as regular readers will know, momentum is the output of focus and confidence.

Can you improve focus (by reducing breadth and increasing clarity) and build confidence (through measurement, testing, and iteration) in your positioning?

Here’s hoping.

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Inbound marketing. Robotic process automation. Customer success. Conversational marketing. Revenue intelligence.

We’ve all heard these categories bounce around, coined by their relevant organizations. Building a category is sexy: take the Play Bigger book, Drift’s meteoric rise in the B2B SaaS discourse, and Andy Raskin’s narrative work as proof.

But most startups worry too much about defining the category they’ll create and eventually win in time, and not enough time thinking about the frame of reference that will give them the upper-hand right now.

What’s the difference?

• A category is about coining the ‘new game’ that the ‘winners’ are able to play, that ‘losers’ aren’t.

• A frame of reference is the perspective through which a product is positioned

A product can be in a category and have a frame of reference. Hubspot is a marketing automation platform (frame) in the inbound marketing category.

I think early-stage startups can deliver better, quicker results by nailing their frame of reference, instead of contemplating their category design journey.

Focus on your frame of reference

April Dunford’s book explains how a frame of reference works with a great example.

Imagine a muffin made from the healthiest ingredients you can find: nuts, wholemeal grains, and all the quinoa/acai/superfoods you can imagine. Let’s call it a diet muffin.

Now imagine two customers:

1. A young bodybuilder really into their fitness who meticulously plans every meal

2. A busy middle-aged mum on the go

Both are equally as likely to buy the product – it’s tasty, nutritious, and can help them with their goals and meets their jobs to be done.

But do you think the bodybuilder is likely to buy ‘a diet muffin’? Or are they more likely to purchase a ‘paleo energy snack’?

Conversely – is a busy mum going to feel like a ‘paleo energy snack’ is what she needs? Or does a ‘diet muffin’ resonate much more with her?

How to determine your frame of reference

There are many elements that can determine or influence the frame of reference you use:

• Who your customer is

• What they search for

• What they think they want

• Market trends

• Competitors, their capabilities and their frames of reference

• Analyst research

Here are some tips on how to deduce the most accurate and potentially successful frame of reference for your product.

1. Don’t be obsessed with creating a category

For the majority of startups, it’s highly unlikely you need to create a category in the first place. At least right now.

April Dunford suggests there are three ways to ‘win’ a frame of reference:

1. Head to head: position to win an existing market

2. Big fish, small pond: position to win a subsegment of existing market

3. Create a new game: position to win a category you create

Remember, a market is a group of similar customers with similar characteristics that are looking to solve a similar problem. Markets are not defined by vendors – they are defined by the customer.

If you are competing directly for a customer, go head to head or look to win a niche part of the market. These strategies don’t require the effort involved to design and launch and market a category – you can ride the coattails of a defined market frame of reference already.

If you definitely want and need to own a category, check out my short post on category design.

2. Know your customer

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times.

The literal definition of positioning is “to occupy a space in the mind of the customer”. It is absolutely crucial to understand what else is going on for them, so we can identify the space we can own.

Look beyond the immediate problem area you are solving. Look to the key jobs, pains, gains, and triggers that your personas and stakeholders have. What are their aspirations? What do they really struggle with? What are they accountable for?

Remember, buyer personas are discovered – not created. Talk to your customers and learn not just who they are, but what makes them tick.

3. Focus on value

Value are elements that your customer wants to attain that is useful, worth the effort (cost, time, energy), and urgent.

Let’s use the diet muffin example above.

• A bodybuilder does not value diet foods that will help them lose weight. But a bodybuilder does value food that provides increased energy with minimal health impact.

• The mum does not value the nutritional benefits of paleo food… but does appreciate a healthy, nutritious snack she can eat whilst out-and-about.

Same product, different value for different customers.

Tune out the tactical and biased internal voices clouding your value messaging judgement, and instead rely on what comes out of your customer’s mouth. Adapt your messaging to their interpretation and beliefs – don’t force your internal product narrative on them.

Even successful category creation relies on the same principles. Category creation must recognize, name, and define an emerging belief and practice that already exists. Gainsight recognized the customer success approach, and coined it. Drift did the same with conversational marketing… but may not be so successful with its new ‘revenue acceleration’ approach.

Nothing lasts forever

We’re not writing the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy; the answer to life, the universe, and everything cannot be summed up in two digits.

As you learn more about your customer and the market, and as your product and competitors adapt, your frame of reference is going to evolve. Today you might be an ecommerce customer service helpdesk; tomorrow, a DTC customer happiness solution.

Revisit your positioning regularly – every six months. Test and iterate with your ear to the ground – don’t just make big internal assumptions. Be led by your customers.

The goal of defining the frame of reference for your product – whether entering an existing category or designing a new one – is to build momentum. A successful frame of reference allows you to focus your message for an audience, and build confidence in your execution.

And, if you’re a regular reader you’ll know that focus + confidence = momentum.

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Nearly every first-time founder I’ve worked with believes their new product is a total gamechanger, a completely new, never-been-done-before innovation that’s going to create a category and spark a new market.

But when I work with second-time founders or career CEOs, their new products are nearly always positioned as a step-change to an existing category.

When we look at new products, new categories, or new methodologies that pop up every day, they could all have exponential potential to change your customers life.

But introducing them as truly revolutionary isn’t always the best approach.

The California Roll

In this article, Nir Eyal talks about how Japanese restaurants introduced sushi to the American public in the 1970’s. In a market where fish was cooked, not raw, and seaweed was strictly something found on a beach and not eaten, how could they convince consumers to try something completely foreign to them?

The answer? The California Roll. Rice, avocado, cucumber, sesame seeds, and crab meat – with a small sliver of nori seaweed holding it together.

In a perfect example of new product innovation, sushi restaurateurs combined an existing product concept with the taste preferences of a new market – reducing barriers to entry and serving as an entry point into the world of sushi.

But early-stage first-time founders usually don’t want to create and sell a California roll – it’s not as exciting.

Instead, they create their own version of fugu: confusing, weird, off-putting, even dangerous.

In these scenarios, at a minimum you risk confusing potential customers and failing. At worst, you alienate them and get a bad reputation.

In B2B SaaS however, most likely prospects probably just won’t believe what you’re selling can help them.

Surely, if they have a discrete problem, then they need a tool that solves that – not something completely new that helps them achieve something they’ve never experienced?

So how do you create a narrative that blends ingenuity and innovation with familiarity and comfort? By designing your product pitch around the concept of evolution, not revolution.

Andy Raskin has posted before about how category creation must be based on a new game that your customers see others playing – not just assumptions or wishful thinking.

Instead of a complete revolution to an existing market, can you create and test a narrative around your product as an evolution of an existing process, category, or belief system?

Anchoring

Hubspot did this with inbound marketing: the old way doesn’t work, the new way does. Zuora did this with the subscription economy: people don’t want to buy anymore, they want to rent. Drift did this with conversational marketing: people don’t want to fill out forms, they want to talk to companies.

By anchoring to existing formats, you’re reducing the cognitive load on the customer. You’re connecting the dots for them, rather than hoping they’ll make the connection themselves.

Educate on life with and life without

Can you help prospects understand where they are today – what they’re missing out on, what their real expenses are, and where their problems will be if they don’t fix something?

And can you present an example of where they could be – their gains achieved, pains solved, costs reduced, money made, free of problems and worries?

Andy Raskin calls this the promised land – the state your customer will exist in after they have made their journey. This is never just as simple as a problem solved – it’s a new way of being.

Monsters

When presenting an evolution message, how do you make sure that people can only get there with you? By promoting the monsters and enemies that prevent prospects from achieving their promised land.

This might be anything from the existing processes they work with, their organization’s change environment, and the systems they use, to the beliefs they have. Limitations, boundaries, blockers – find the most effective narrative that helps prospects who want to improve realize they are incapable of doing so without you.

NIHITO

Nothing important happens in the office.

You might have your finger on the pulse, have all the relevant domain experience, and be super tuned into the market – but still miss out on potential interesting angles because of your bias.

It’s crucial get out of your head and into the mind of your customer. Positioning by assumption doesn’t work. Learning from your customers does.

Evolution is the natural selection of what works

We know enough about evolution from biology to know that natural selection rewards those who test, who adapt, who build on top of existing concepts.

An evolutionary narrative doesn’t restrict you from innovation or experimenting – but it does require you always think back to your customer’s view of the world, and how to bring them along the journey.

Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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What makes you different compared to competitors?

You’ve probably been asked this question before, and answered with something similar to the below:

• Our product is our differentiator.

• No, actually, our people are our competitive differentiation.

• Our pricing: economies of scale make us cheaper whilst providing the same service.

• Customers love our design-led ethos, that makes us stand out.

But, is it really?

If you workshopped your competitive differentiator internally, relied on biased interpretations of competitor strengths and weaknesses from your team, then… honestly? I’d say you don’t know the real answer.

What is a differentiator?

Definition: something that enables a difference or distinction to be made.

In the context of B2B SaaS, a differentiator is an element of your product, service, worldview, or other method that positions you away from competitors in some aspect.

Often, marketers and founders early in the journey will rely on objective differentiation: the product, the service, the performance, the economic value – or my pet peeve, configurability.

Standout SaaS companies, especially those that grow faster, understand earlier on that what makes them distinct is not something that can be shown or demonstrated or modelled – but it’s something the customer can believe in… something they can buy into.

Think about category creation – it’s not about naming a new type of product, but about naming a new game people are playing.

The B2B Elements of Value Pyramid

This diagram, created by Bain, extends Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to order the motivations of B2B buyers. Read more about the pyramid here.

The base begins with table stake, basic requirements, and functional value like the product or the price.

As we go up the pyramid, elements of value become less tangible and more about the implication of using the product – first within the organization, then what matters to the individual buyer.

The pyramid tops out with purpose – hope, vision, and social responsibility. Here, differentiators aim to align the vendor with the buyer’s cultural and ethical worldview.

Think about some SaaS products you know. Take Drift:

• Yes, there is functional product value.

• The product delivers high impact implications to the organizations.

• It allows individual buyers to signal their innovation and become more marketable themselves in the job market.

• They build community and a category through their vision of transforming the way companies connect with their customers.

• They offer a bright spark of hope in an otherwise grey sea of same-same, from their tone of voice to their visual brand to their events to their product launches.

Discovering your differentiators

Notice I said discover your differentiators, not define them.

Many marketers I know don’t know about the different elements of value above and therefore struggle to determine what their competitive differentiators might be.

But they’re also usually looking inward to find the answers.

NIHITO: Nothing Important Happens In The Office – Pragmatic Marketing

The best way to understand why you are different in the market is to look to your customers and others in the market.

Follow the questions in my customer development framework, and ask them to your customers, friendly experts, and non-affiliated other buyers in the market. Ask your competitor’s customers too.

From here, you’ll be able to define your personas: their jobs, pains, gains, and triggers. This forms the basis of the value your customers desire. From there, discovering your differentiators is simple. What value are your customers wanting that they can’t get elsewhere?

Maybe they are super price sensitive, so price is a distinction – or your product is a 100% fit for their needs.

But it’s more likely that you’ll best differentiate when you can meet higher-level needs as well. Help an organization deliver on qualitative goals. Allow the buyer to become more marketable. Set a vision that buyers can literally buy into.

And there will be more than one differentiator, more than one element of value that you’re meeting. See the Drift example above. So make sure to prioritize them in a way that aligns with your persona’s triggers, their motivations for searching, switching, or buying.

As an example, at Headstart our personas were radically progressive, so we prioritized our ethos and vision. We still promoted the economic benefits and savings, but led with the heart, and followed with the brain.

What’s your competitive differentiator?

Next time, don’t just wing it. Look to your customers and prospects to understand why you matter to them.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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If there’s one thing I tell everyone, it’s that it’s much more valuable to be ‘the thing for someone’. Niches for riches.

But look around many SaaS websites, and it’s obvious they haven’t learnt the lesson yet. They’re trying to be something for everyone.

This is often a goal for early-stage founders and sales leaders.

“We can sell to everyone!”

“Our market is everyone who’s ever had this problem!”

And yet… it never quite works out.

Spreading focus too thin, and trying to be something for everyone, has a slim chance of success. It also has a high probability of negative impact.

Your value proposition becomes muddied, as your external positioning confuses both ends of the market.

Marketing can’t quite deliver. Either there aren’t enough leads, they’re not the right type, or CAC is too high, or LTV is too low.

Sales resources become stretched and inertia sets in. In my experience, most sales reps want to sell bigger and bigger deals, so they neglect smaller prospects. But reps become dissatisfied with the lack of momentum from bigger prospects. And then they flip-flop back and forth, aimlessly without a sales plan.

Product teams fight: priorities compete, sales asks win, and customer advocacy takes a hit.

Pricing becomes a mess. You’re either priced too cheap and therefore leaving tons of cash on the table. Or, you’re too expensive, losing out on a big chunk of low-effort high-reward revenue.

Internal discussions go on for ages about whether to remove pricing on the website. When sales win the argument to remove prices, you see an increase in tweets and complaints that you’re losing out on business.

Culture flails between the inevitable struggle as hires from both scrappy self-service startups and the enterprise SaaS world butt heads with each other.

Good go-to-market should discriminate

If to discriminate is to “make a distinction in the treatment of different categories”, that’s what your go-to-market should do.

Disqualification is much more important than qualification.

The way you go-to-market should disquality bad-fit prospects out. They should – politely – be discouraged from moving forward from the moment they land on your website or engage with your sales reps.

Of course, you don’t want to scar them for life; they might be the next big market you move into. But today, say ‘thanks, but no thanks’.

Meanwhile, your ideal customers should be welcomed with an experience tailor made for them. Roll out the red carpet and make the whole experience effortless for them from the first click.

Make sure these components are aligned

Pay attention to these components, to sanity-check how focused your GTM is for today’s ideal customers:

Positioning and messaging

Know your customer. Extract their jobs, pains, gains, and triggers. Understand the value your product can deliver for them – and build your messaging around it.

Everything from the phrasing in your ads and headline on the homepage, to the illustrations on your website and the customer logos you choose to promote, matter.

Buyer journey

It’s not as simple as self-service vs inside sales. Buyers will have many different needs and questions based on their company stage, maturity, and change environment.

What should your meeting decks look like? Do they expect to receive send-over decks too? What about PDF one-pagers?

And onboarding: should it be a white-glove service, or should it be self-activation with lots of educational content?

Pricing

Do potential customers need to know the prices before they sign up or request a demo, or is price not the most important factor?

What’s the right value metric: number of seats, utilization, or a flat platform fee?

What’s the number that’s borderline expensive, but at which they would still consider?

Customer support expectations

In my experience, this is the biggest indicator of whether your GTM is working as expected (although, customer support is often neglected in GTM planning).

Is your customer success program set up and aligned with the types of customers you’re bringing onboard?

Are you focusing on self-service content and in-product chat, or are you providing 1 customer success manager for every 10 customers? Do you deliver personalized QBRs on how to maximize adoption and results, or do you just send new feature emails to your product admins?

GTM evolves, but be considerate about it

As you grow and learn more, it’s natural that your go-to-market will evolve along with your customers and the market opportunity. Some businesses will find themselves being pulled upmarket by bigger customers – others will try to force a change.

Especially if you have aggressive funding, you rightly have the space and opportunity to explore multiple GTM motions – just make sure that your choices are considered, and decisions made with aligned tactics and execution.

But at the early stage, trying to be something for everyone risks spreading your focus too thin.

And in this community, we know that a tight focus + increasing confidence = building momentum.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Let’s say your business is really good at tracking who you compete against.

Each deal tracks an ‘incumbent solution’ field, a ‘competing against’ field, and when you lose to one of them, that’s captured in your win/loss accordingly. From this data, you have a pretty good idea of who your biggest competitors are.

Your battlecards are updated with the necessary information that help sales reps to guide competitive conversations (and win):

• Strengths

• Weaknesses

• Opportunities

• Threats

• Offensive attack

• Defensive attack

• Anecdotes

• Win stories

Altogether, you have a pretty good idea of how to beat your top three competitors.

Except… are they actually your biggest competition?

Look to the top of the funnel

The top of the funnel stage – attraction, awareness, or whatever funnel design you subscribe to – is often ignored as a source of competitive insight and focus.

It’s much easier to prevent losses later in the funnel than it is to widen the pool of potential wins, isn’t it? Not always.

There’s a pool of prospects and potential customers that engage with you at the top of the funnel. That pool is n big.

There’s also an ocean of prospects and potential customers that don’t engage with you. That ocean is potentially n¹⁰ big.

Your actual competitors…

That ocean of potential customers are all solving their problems with an existing alternative solution, or sourcing new ones.

Here are some examples of different alternative solutions that you may want to consider as key competitors.

Niche solutions

You might be a horizontal email marketing platform. But I bet there’s also a vertical email platform for DTC commerce brands between $5-10m revenue for teams focused on building community that integrates directly into their little-known ecommerce platform technology.

How are you going to get in front of them and convince them you’re the better partner?

Existing vendors

Not the same as any of the above – these might be existing software providers that currently solve problems for another department, team, or business unit. But with the land-and-expand tactic as one of the most prevalent ways to grow SaaS revenue, you can bet that existing vendors are trying to get in front of your buyer stakeholders.

And what’s more, they’re already approved, trusted, and have internal champions already in your business. How are you going to discover those opportunities exist, let alone beat procurement?

Agencies/outsourcing

Potential prospects might just be outsourcing everything to an agency. Agencies exist for everything, from total ownership of email marketing and project management, to recruiting, product engineering, and sales.

How are you going to convince a prospect to ditch and agency and bring the process something in-house?

Freelancers and contractors

Some businesses will bring in niche freelancers and contractors for executional expertise they don’t have in-house; for example, diversity recruiting, deployment processes, or ecommerce merchandising. It’s easier, less risk, and a faster time-to-ramp.

Can you compete against a playbook – or help those with the playbook work smarter instead?

Consultants

The 2020s will see huge growth in the ‘fractional CxO’ model.

When organizations have the executional resources but lack the strategic expertise, they look to consultants. These might be traditional large full-service organizations, or experts that have gone it alone to offer ‘fractional’ executive time.

How will you compete against consultants already in-situ, as well as those where consultants may be offering to run the show? And even further: can you convince consultants to bring you in to their clients?

People power

‘Hiring more people’ is always an option, and sometimes just expected for companies facing specific challenges around volume and throughput. When expertise is not required, only raw manhours and energy, some organizations won’t be used to solving solutions in any other way.

How do you a) get in front of those people, b) convince them there’s a different way, c) build trust and change their mindset?

In-house tech solutions

I bet every SaaS business has at least one example where a developer in a prospect’s business has said “We could build that in a week”. Obviously, they fail – but there are so many businesses out there with their own home-grown solutions that manage everything from small repetitive tasks to huge, critical parts of their business operations.

Can you overcome those objections and provide a solution that works for them and their needs?

Set yourself up to beat TOFU competitors

In terms of process, it’s exactly the same. Understand your customer, understand your competitive landscape, define your positioning, and execute with focus.

Positioning becomes even more important against TOFU competitors. How do you stand for something? How do you bring unconventional wisdom to the narrative? How do you promote your unique value?

When you can do this effectively, you’ll build a bigger top-of-funnel pool, win more clients, and build momentum.

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If I see the “buyers are x% through their journey before they talk with you” stat one more time…. *shakes fist*.

But yes, the concept stands. The power is in the buyer’s hands. Caveat emptor stands no more.

Buyers request meetings knowing more about your product, your competitors, and the market landscape than ever before.

So how do you stand out, challenge preconceptions, and persuade them that you have the best solution for them?

Your unconventional wisdom

Presenting unconventional wisdom is a core part of many story-driven sales narrative frameworks:

• Andy Raskin’s ‘world change’ and ‘enemy’

• Gartner’s ‘sense-making’ framework

• The Challenger Sale ‘reframe’

Introducing a unique insight that goes against commonly-accepted knowledge has a number of goals:

1. To position your company and product as an innovator

2. To differentiate from competitors by reframing the problem and value to be achieved

3. To create excitement and motivation or fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) with the prospect

But often, these insights don’t perform as expected.

Instead of unique wisdom that shifts the narrative… we get a generic, dull, and obvious rehashing of the world we already know.

‘Competitive’ product capabilities are retold with macro-level sprinkles of ‘customers expect more’ or ‘technology has changed’ thrown in for good measure.

So what makes unconventional wisdom… unconventional?

Unconventional wisdom that wins

I posit there are three elements that make your unconventional wisdom / world change / sense-making strategy / reframe really pop, and get you the results you want.

1. It’s staring them in the face

Sometimes, your customer can’t see the forest for the trees. They’re so close to their immediate, tangible problems to be solved that they are blind to… or choosing to ignore.

Right now, they’re standing at a forked path in the woods; one way leads to heaven, the other to hell. Can you help them zoom out and see the the bigger picture?

Take Drift’s earlier unconventional wisdom: forms suck. Of course! How could we not see that before?!

2. It’s a rational statement that drives an emotional response

Just like the Drift example above, you can feel the exasperation.

Good nuggets of unconventional wisdom will be a purely rational statement, based on fact and truth and natural laws.

But they’ll tug at the heartstrings, make you feel dumb, or galvanize your ambition.

Here’s an example:

This is the story of Nina – a young woman who grew up in a working-class family from a dodgy part of London. She went to school that was in measures for low performance. She received free school meals as a result of a low family income. She worked at a supermarket part-time to put herself through a good university, even after receiving education grants. She received a good grade, and applied for a graduate role in your company.

But so did Thomas, an Eton student from Surrey who interned at Goldman Sachs and received the same grade from the same university.

If you were the recruiter with both resumes on your desk… who would you put forward: Thomas or Nina? Be honest.

On paper, Thomas is the best candidate. In reality, Nina has shown more grit, determination, and ability. But the recruiting screening process isn’t designed to spotlight people’s potential.

Telling a story like this with an emotional edge takes a conventional situation, causes people to look inwards and ask themselves the hard questions.

3. It’s a blocker to their aspirations and ambitions

Telling someone they’re not going to achieve their goal is a surefire way to either get an attentive audience, or get ignored.

When you can back this up with proof, you’ll be able to point out the mistakes and missteps before they’re made. These need to be grounded in reality, and you need to have a solid path to help them overcome these new hidden barriers, and get them to success.

Hubspot’s inbound marketing narrative did this well. Outbound marketing was making lead generation more expensive and less effective – you’re not going to meet your revenue and growth without change.

Strong unconventional wisdom blames the game, not the tools

When you’re bringing in an unconventional wisdom narrative element, make sure it’s not telling them they’re stupid. Instead, help them make sense of the world – it’s not their fault.

There is something happening – to their buyers, to their market, to their organization – that is causing them stress and pain. Not only will you let them in on the secret that nobody else knows… you have the key to fix their challenges too.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Do you know the story of how Xerox went from selling printers to selling improved student performance?

It’s a masterclass in the switch from selling features to selling value.

A summary:

• Xerox were struggling to sell their premium products in the K12 education sector

• Sales reps and marketers focused on technical features and benefits; more vibrant colors, the latest tech, and less waste

• But their customers still bought on price, often in a competitive bid situation

• They knew they needed to change the story using customer insights

• After surveying customers, they found that their buyers were focused on outcomes that increase student performance

• After further research and creative thinking, they arrived at a compelling value proposition: color printouts help students perform better in school

• They surveyed customers and students to back this claim up with data: 77% said color helped them focus and remember things better

• Rather than selling technical features, their reps could sell a solution to a critical challenge

• Rather than competing on price, their reps are able to have high-urgency, non-competitive conversations with buyers who are motivated to pay a premium

Want to learn more? Read The Challenger Customer or check out this recap.

The Xerox example presents two interesting takeaways for B2B SaaS companies.

Firstly, Xerox found success when they changed their narrative away from technical features and solutions to helping customers achieve value.

Remember what value is?

A value is an element that your customer wants to attain that:

Read more: What is value?

And secondly, they didn’t just lead with a marketing message – they linked the value they delivered, through to product benefits, through to features, and backed it up with proof points.

I call this hierarchy a value nugget.

A value nugget is a way to package up your product features and benefits, while providing a clear hierarchy to navigate effortlessly in sales conversations and marketing.

A value nugget is comprised of:

You can move through the value nugget by asking ‘why’ and ‘how’. This makes it easier to train a narrative and talk track that can be navigated in real-time.

Read more: Crafting strong messaging with value nuggets

Value nugget teardown

I wanted to give a quick example of how a value nugget can be used to provide the basis for strong messaging.

I’ve extracted different elements from Xerox’s latest K12 Education datasheet and transposed them into the value nugget framework. I’ve tried to distill elements using closely-located copy from the datasheet to show the relationships between the value that’s being communicated through to the proof-points being used.

Here, we’re looking at two distinct values:

1. Broadening the spectrum of learning in the classroom

2. Provide the best possible educational experiences while managing year-over-year budget pressures

Let’s take the second example and use the ‘how’ method to travel down the elements.

Moving down by asking ‘how’:

• We help K12 educators to provide the best possible educational experiences while managing year-over-year budget pressures (value)

• How? Educational institutions can:

  • Incorporate more color without adding more costs (benefit)

    • How? Through on-demand printing (feature)

    • How? 50% cost savings by printing what they needed, when they needed it in-house (proof point)

  • Encourage higher student performance (benefit)

    • How? By printing full-color workbooks (feature)

    • How? Because reading comprehension is 14% better with color (proof point)

    Get up to speed in no time (benefit)

    • How? Our printer has a small footprint, is high-output, scalable, and complementary with existing devices (feature)

    • How? Our customers see a 25% increase in productivity (proof point)

How could you use value nuggets in your messaging?

Although not a perfect example due to limited information (just one datasheet!), hopefully you can see how the value nugget framework works to connect product features to tangible benefits to aspirational value – and back your claims up with proof.

Instead of training teams with details they won’t use – or will forget! – value nuggets provide an opportunity to distill your product into a format that’s memorable with a hierarchy that can be traversed in real-time.

With this teardown, I hope you can see how value nuggets provide one way to package your product features, benefits and value into easily-consumable bites of insight.

Improving your messaging – and empowering others to tell it successfully – means your sales reps and marketers will be more focused, more confident, and build momentum.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Take a look around the B2B SaaS Space, and you’ll see these messages proclaimed by almost everyone.

“Our product is the fastest.”

“Ours is the only…”.

“We’re an all-in-one solution.”

So what?

Startups generally suck at describing the value of their product. They rely on generic ad libs that provide zero competitive differentiation, full of weasel words.

This happens when deciding the messaging – usually founders, sales leaders, and growth marketers – think about how to make the product sound sexy.

People want to hear that things are fast, that it’s comprehensive, that it’s feature-rich – right?

No. They want to know what your product will do for them.

So we need to convey our product value in a way that resonates.

What is value?

A value is an element that your customer wants to attain that:

1. Is useful

2. Is worth the effort (cost, time, energy)

3. Is a priority for them

Every value you communicate should meet these three tests.

• Is a faster product useful? It could be, for time-sensitive processes.

• Is an all-in-one product worth the cost to a customer that only has part of the problem you’re solving? Probably not.

• Trying to sell a videoconferencing platform to Zoom? Probably not a priority for them.

Understanding the exact value you deliver helps you:

• differentiate and stand out from your competition

• sell faster, as a result of increased buyer motivation

• build a moat around your product and brand

• become more efficient, by building a tight and repeatable sales/marketing process

• make much better decisions across the business, from product and engineering to finance

But… how do you discover what value you deliver to begin with?

Deducing value

It all starts by being focused on your customer.

You need to know who you are targeting – be uncomfortably narrow with your Ideal Customer Profile.

Then, do your research. Speak to customers, prospects, friendly people in the market, analysts and experts in the field.

Ask your customers and prospects these 19 customer development questions, and make notes for all the things they said. Pull them up on a whiteboard or Mural board and you’ll get something like this:

Finding patterns – the diamonds in the haystack – can be tricky. Use a small group to review each section, group cards that have similar themes and create a summary – and then use another small group to review and validate.

You’ll also want to keep an eye out for unusual statements that you didn’t expect to hear. The more unguarded your interviewees are, the more honest they’ll be about their challenges – providing you with the perfect insight to resonate hard.

Once you’ve got your summaries for each question, look to extract four elements to build your persona:

• Key jobs – common activities that your customer does as part of their day-to-day

• Top 3 gains – their personal, professional, or business goals they want to achieve

• Top 3 pains – marks of failure and frustrations the customer must avoid,

• Likely triggers – their motivations to search for a way to solve their problem and switch away from their current solution

Once you’ve defined these, you’ll see clear distinctions in what your customer is hoping to achieve, avoid, or take action on. These will provide the basis for providing your value messaging.

Communicating value through value nuggets

It’s crucial to connect the dots from your product features, through to the tangible benefits they deliver, through to the value your product is delivering. And back them up with proof points.

I call this a value nugget: a way to package your product features and benefits around a clear hierarchy to navigate effortlessly in sales conversations and marketing.

A value nugget is comprised of:

• A value: an attribute or state that the buyer hopes to attain.

• One or more benefits: the advantage a buyer gets when using your product.

• Benefits are gained via features: a specific piece of functionality that’s used by your customer.

• Benefits are justified through proof: stats or testimonials that can be highlighted to provide social proof, additional context, and evidence that it works.

You can move through the value nugget by asking ‘why’ and ‘how’. This makes it easier to train a narrative and talk track that can be navigated in real-time.

Good value messaging is specific

There’s no excuse for describing your product in broad terms anymore. Good value messaging needs to cut straight through the noise to the heart of someone who cares. It makes you stand out, and gives you a platform to stand for.

It’s not enough to be something for anyone. Don’t miss the opportunity to be the thing for someone.

Thanks for reading! Let’s connect on Twitter and LinkedIn, and let me know what you thought.

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Your biggest competitor is not another SaaS business. It’s not a spreadsheet. Not a person. Not an agency.

Your biggest competitor is what they are using today. Inertia.

They’re using a process that’s working. They’re spending a comfortable amount of money doing so. They’ve got buy-in, alignment on how it works, and they’re in a regular motion.

But your sales process, positioning, product strategy is all built around them embracing a new world. The promised land. The opportunity.

But… change hurts. Change costs. Change is disruptive.

You’re expecting them to implement a new product, pay more for it, pick up new processes, train their teams, get to grips with a new system… For what?

The promise of value in the future may shine bright… but is it enough?

How do you light a fire under their derrière, and get them to take action?

Four ways to drive status-quo dissatisfaction

Here are four approaches I’ve found useful to find new angles for positioning and messaging that touches a nerve.

Promote the pain

In your customer development, make sure you understand the broad problems your prospect is facing.

• What’s the hardest part of their day?

• What’s the hardest part about being a [job title]?

• What are your biggest obstacles to winning?

• What does losing at this look like?

Can you shadow them doing their day-to-day work? In a recent call with a prospect, we discovered every hire they made required 20+ hours of total work to process (excluding interviews). Times that by multiple hires… and it’s a lot.

Your prospects are likely spending unnecessary cash, time, and energy solving problems that you can dial up to 11.

Can you build a personalized business case that focuses not just on the expected gains, but on the explicit (money, time) and implicit (effort, impact) savings that customers achieve with you?

Can you highlight the painpoints in your topline messaging? Generally, people prefer to save over gain.

Intensify the risk

Inaction is not a positive experience for anyone. They still experience the pain and the problems they tried to solve, but the appetite for change is low – even though champions and users will be chomping at the bit to access new tech that can take them to the next level.

Organizations that need to play it safe will be less receptive to innovation and less likely to embrace new technology for the sake of it.

But they do care about the intrinsic risks to their business: reduced customer satisfaction, falling revenue, decreasing margins, negative press, and any challenges that arise from a PESTEL analysis.

Can you position some of your product value as a preventative risk reduction strategy? Can you show that your product reduces the frequency of severe events, reduces the severity of them, or reduces the occurrence overall?

Highlight the missed opportunities

What are your prospects missing out on when they don’t use your product?

• What would winning at this look like?

• How would this product solve your problem?

• How has our product changed your life?

• What has changed in the last 5 years that has made this much more valuable?

Uncover the opportunity costs, the benefits that could have been realized. This is not the same as the benefits they could gain.

These will often be linked to a company’s growth plans: revenue, customers, efficiency. But can you find the discrete, distinct occasions – the individual cuts that make up death by a thousand cuts?

Make it personal

Stagnation sucks for employees. Can you dial up the personal pains of the individuals involved and drive enough momentum in them to make change happen?

Users want to work less. Managers want to get a promotion. Directors want to build their internal company profile. VPs want industry recognition.

Can you take advantage of these desires, highlight the personal costs of inaction, and offer a solution that appeals to these fundamental motivations?

Tear their world apart to build it up

It’s not enough to just share a perfect, idealized vision of the world a customer enters when they buy your product. Unless you can convince them there is a burning need to embrace it, you’ll end up dragging them kicking and screaming over the line.

To drive urgency in your prospect’s world, you’ll need to give them something to worry about: highlight their current pains, intensify risks, highlight the opportunity cost, and make it personal.

Thanks for reading! Let’s connect on Twitter and LinkedIn, and let me know what you thought.

The post Four ways to highlight the “pain of same” appeared first on Building Momentum.

Everyone knows the saying: “people don’t buy a drill, they buy a hole in the wall.”

And yeah, that’s true, but is it the full story? While making a decision to buy a drill, they also had to evaluate whether:

• They wanted a drill could be used anywhere, or only near a power outlet

• They wanted to save time and money by buying an all-in-one set, or if they wanted to buy drill bits separately

• Whether they wanted the confidence that the Black & Decker brand name stands for, or not

And we also need to consider why they want the hole in the wall. Is it to showcase family photographs in their living room, or to hang their bike up in the garage?

Every purchase decision that a consumer or business makes is based on their perception of the value it will deliver them. That perception is made up of the benefits they will achieve, and the features that they are delivered through.

In B2B SaaS, it’s not quite as simple. More often than not we sell to buying groups, made up of different stakeholders who all have their own perception of the value to be gained. They disagree on which features are a must-have, and whether a benefit is relevant for them or not.

This makes it really hard across sales and marketing to craft product positioning and messaging that works.

Marketing teams often want to focus on the aspirational value as a way to differentiate from competitors. But doing this without building on a solid feature/benefit foundation means messaging can feel fragile, soft, and fluffy.

On the other hand, sales reps think it will be easier to sell just on features alone. But without tying features to the tangible benefits and overall aspirational value, the product is perceived to be a commodity whilst deals don’t gain urgency, traction, or importance.

So what really is a value? What’s a benefit? Where do features fit in? How do we enable sales/marketing to use these in their messaging to drive momentum?

Introducing the value nugget

A value nugget is a way to package up your product features and benefits, while providing a clear hierarchy to navigate effortlessly in sales conversations and marketing.

A value nugget is comprised of:

• A value: an attribute or state that the buyer hopes to attain. Examples might be “hire future leaders, faster”, “deliver repeatable results”, “workforce flexibility”, or “visibility into their processes”.

• One or more benefits: the advantage a buyer gets when using your product. It’s tangible – something they can report on, and starts with a verb. Examples might be ‘save time’, ‘increase customer satisfaction’, or ‘maximize time-to-value’.

• Benefits are gained via features: a specific piece of functionality that’s used by your customer. These might be an obvious product capability like an integration, a less obvious consideration like a modern and clean UX, or even service elements like a dedicated account manager.

• Benefits are justified through proof: stats or testimonials that can be highlighted to provide social proof, additional context, and evidence that it works.

You can move through the value nugget by asking ‘why’ and ‘how’. This makes it easier to train a narrative and talk track that can be navigated in real-time.

For example, moving down by asking ‘how’:

• We help our clients hire the right candidates, faster (value)

• How? Clients can ensure candidates are a good cultural fit and have the right skills and attitude required for the role (benefit)

• How? Through our psychometric interview and report process (feature)

• How? Our customers see a 50% increase in employee performance (proof point)

And moving up, asking ‘why’:

• Our customers see a 50% increase in employee performance with our product (proof point)

• Why? By using our psychometric interview and report process (feature)

• Why? To ensure candidates are a good cultural fit and have the right skills and attitude required for the role (benefit)

• Why? So our clients can hire the right candidates, faster (value)

Using value nuggets in messaging and positioning

Based on your customer research, you’ll have discovered the top value that each persona aspires to achieve. These might also cross over multiple personas, which makes life a lot easier!

For each value, build out the nugget:

• The value theme: as condensed as possible into a word or short phrase

• A value statement: the phrasing you want to use every time

• Value bullets: combine benefits and features into single sentences (like ‘[benefit] with [feature]’) – you’ll have multiple value bullets

• A list of associated features and proof points

At the end of the process, you’ll have a persona with the top three values they want to achieve. You can describe how your product helps them achieve that, how it links to features, and how you’ve proven it.

Using value nuggets in marketing

One of the things I learnt from a failed product launch was messaging your product at the right level in the hierarchy. We launched with aspirational, value-heavy messages that bombed with the champions in our sales process, who wanted to see more tangible benefits instead.

From your customer development and buyer journey research, you’ll hopefully understand what each persona wants to know and needs to understand at various points in the buying process. This should help decide the right way to execute your messaging.

Generally:

• Execs will want to focus on the value

• Champions will focus on the benefits

• Evaluators will focus on the features

Using value nuggets in sales

Again, depending on your buyer journey you’ll have a better understanding of the information that different stakeholders want to see along their experience.

Train reps on using SPIN (situation, problem, implication, value/need-payoff) to navigate the conversation. The goal is to:

• get enough information from the prospect, and agree on the value they want to achieve

• enable the rep to tailor the response using the value nugget, make it clear how it is achieved, and persuade with proof

How are you messaging your product value?

Communicating your product value, benefits, and features in a structured way allows marketing to drive better results and sales to drive more revenue, faster.

It is really important to ensure these values are built on customer research, and adapted to your buyer journey. And you’ll need to iterate and tweak as you learn. But messaging is sometimes an under-estimated lever to drive momentum – so make sure you take control and use it well.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

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Does any of this sound familiar?

• “We need to send a one-pager!”

• “The customer requested an overview deck before we meet.”

• “They asked us to send some information over to see if they’re interested… what do we have?”

A PDF is thrown together with a few days delay whilst it’s designed in the brand colors. Or a custom Frankenstein deck is created from the other relics that clog up the Google Drive shared folder.

Maybe somebody clicks, and it piques interest enough to get that meeting booked. But who really knows?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This whole rigamarole is inefficient and ineffective, yet it’s still expected by prospects and sales reps, and so duly delivered by whoever is responsible.

Unfortunately, it’s extremely likely that the sales collateral has been created just because somebody asked for something. The end result is disconnected from the buyer journey, confusing the prospect or muddying the waters even further.

Sales collateral is material specifically developed to engage a prospect with the information they need, in order to close the deal faster.

Most sales collateral ignores the buyer and what they need from their process and instead chooses to shout about the company or product. Whitebooks on proprietary technology and algorithms, case studies about the implementation process, or ROI calculators that are not at all one-sided.

Often, sales reps can use collateral as a crutch to hang their outreach and engagement on. I’ve seen too many reps send the overview deck in the first cold outreach email, or use a one-pager with a wasted call-to-action of “let me know if you’re interested in finding out more”.

What makes good sales collateral?

In an alternative world, sales collateral comes from a solid understanding of your buyer’s journey – which comes from a solid understanding of who your ICP is and what’s going on for all your personas.

A solid buyer journey

The buyer journey is well-documented, highlighting and prioritizing what they need the questions they ask at each stage in the process. This aligns with your internal sales process, mapped to stages in the funnel.

Each stage of the buyer’s journey has been analyzed to understand what the buyer wants to know and should know by the time they move onto the next stage. This is then aligned into key sales activities at each stage – your discovery call, meeting one, demo, and so on.

Purposefully crafted collateral

The sales collateral available at each stage has been created proactively, in preparation to both answer questions should they arise, and also carefully crafted content to push the deal forward. This might be through case studies to build trust, interactive demos for workflow exploration, or a short video that walks through key topics. Each sales rep has a playbook of collateral they can deploy to answer specific questions and achieve specific outcomes.

Collateral generates insight and actions

The usage of sales collateral is linked to each prospect, and provides further information to help the rep navigate through the opportunity. Did they open it, share it, engage with it?

This alternate universe sounds great… but is probably unattainable, right?

Not quite. Here are three steps to help you understand your buyer journey, identify opportunities for effective collateral, and create content that helps deals close, faster.

Step 1: Understand your buyer journey

This is really key to many parts of your Go-To-Market strategy, but is complex to develop.

Every single person you speak to – from buyers, champions, to sales reps, and subject matter experts – will describe their buying process both wildly differently and completely unhelpfully. They were (and are) so enveloped in the process, they’ll find it hard to step back and look at the big picture.

Map your internal understanding

1. Start with your sales process map, and interview your top sales reps to understand what buyer needs, questions, and sales needs exist at each stage.

2. Create a simple spreadsheet and sanity check with other reps. Ask them to highlight the insights they have experienced themselves, the insights they’ve experienced that are in the wrong stage, and to remove anything that they have not experienced. This filtering helps you identify patterns that exist, those which need to be better understood, and pieces which may not be common.

3. Use call recordings and email comms to try to provide some evidence behind the buyer questions and needs you’ve identified, and ask questions to adapt as required.

This will get you to something that looks roughly correct. But now we need to find a way to discover our unknown unknowns.

Use and validate with outside insight

1. Ask ~3 customers to describe a) how they purchased a similar product like yours, and b) how they purchased your product – and record all the notes.

2. Look for patterns and compare the key questions and needs they identified to those discovered in your internal research.

3. Select some friendly customers and prospects to take part in a card-sorting exercise. Here, you’ll randomize the buyer needs and questions into ‘cards’, and ask buyers to group them along a process, before naming each step of the process. You’ll get a few different versions, so you’ll need to use your own insights to finalise them, but you’ll end up with something that is much stronger than having a guess yourself.

Document your buyer journey

Make sure you document your buyer journey in an easy-to-understand format.

Step 2: identify sales collateral opportunities

Now that your buyer journey is documented, you’ll have a good idea of the buyer needs and questions that arise at each stage of the journey. So how do you use this to understand where your sales team need collateral support?

Map your current deals

The easiest way to start is by mapping your current pipeline to the buyer journey. Where is each prospect, what questions have not been answered yet, which needs have not been met at each stage?

This will help you understand where the most immediate gaps are. Work with sales to see how those can be best met, whether through meeting / email outreach, or if those questions/needs are best met through collateral.

Prioritize for the highest revenue impact

Quickly, every piece of collateral becomes a must-have, so start building a wishlist.

You can prioritize how you like, but I prefer to rate each wishlist item using an adjusted RICE method:

• Reach (or, revenue impact in $)

• Impact (or, the increase in probability expected in %)

• Confidence (score 1 for low, 3 for medium, 5 for high)

• Effort (score 1 for low, 3 for medium, 5 for high)

Then, use the formula (R x I x C) / E and you’ll end up with an adjusted dollar amount to suggest the revenue impact that could be gained by closing that gap.

This may not be best for your needs, so make sure to evaluate priority according to your situation.

Step 3: create content that closes deals faster

So you’ve identified your buyer journey, and you’ve prioritized the first few gaps that need filling in with collateral. How do you make sure it gets used by sales, lands with the customer, and actually contributes to the deal?

Co-create the first version

Sales collateral can’t be built in isolation. It has to be built in conjunction with sales, with an opportunity in mind. This might mean working on an urgent MVP to test the water, or predicting a gap that will need closing in advance. The sales rep will hopefully know enough about the angle that’s required, and have enough context to support in developing the right medium and message.

Ensure it educates the buyer above all else

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty good at spotting sales propaganda when I see it. Big claims, testimonials that seem too good to be true, and the promise that everything will work out.

We know that buyers are generally further along in their education and knowledge than we might expect – so don’t try to pull the wool over their eyes with dumbed-down takes. We want to prevent churn and post-sales dissatisfaction too, right?

The content must be relatable, truly insightful, and easy to repeat. In most buying circumstances, your champion has to cheerlead for your product internally, so make sure that helps them.

Remember – we already know what they need at each stage, and what questions they will have. It shouldn’t be difficult to answer them with creative, educational messages.

Optimize for sales insight

Please don’t just create a PDF unless it is the absolute best medium for your needs! It might be… but probably isn’t.

Sales collateral should help close the deal faster, and that means ensuring sales benefit from it too.

• Can you create an interactive calculator for the prospect to complete, that shares results with the rep?

• If a video case study, can you provide on a trackable link that monitors which areas piqued their interest, and where they switched off?

• If it has to be text + images, can you create a webpage that is tracked through your CRM, allowing the rep to see who has viewed the page?

• If it has to be a PDF, can you add a unique call-to-action that shows the intended reader has understood the message?

• Must it be a technical whitepaper? Can you offer a whitepaper PDF, and a 5 minute overview video from your CTO?

Plan to iterate

Just as your positioning evolves, so will the buyer journey, and so will the needs that collateral has to answer.

At a minimum, review the performance of collateral every 6 months. Ideally, every two months.

• Is it being used by sales? Why/why not?

• Is it judged to be successful? Why/why not?

• What segments is it successful with? Why/why not?

Use sales collateral strategically, not tactically

The opportunity to drive sales velocity – closing more deals, for more revenue, faster – through smart, strategic sales collateral is huge.

Don’t waste your prospect’s attention with a half-handed, cobbled-together deck that mocks their intelligence and tries to do the sales reps job for them.

Understand your buyer journey, prioritize intervention opportunities, and create content that works for everyone.

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Imagine you’re building a plane. Would you test that it flies? Yes. Why don’t you test your positioning too?

• You’ve done customer research: you know what they want from their experience

• You’ve done some product thinking: you’ve got the basics down, and married with a vision for supersonic travel

• You’ve designed the plane: it looks great and people like it

Are you going to bet money that it flies?

Now imagine that you just shipped it. You start rolling it out, training teams how to use it, and promote the innovative new design and experience to the world.

The plane manages to take off – just about, it’s unstable. Once it’s in the air, there’s soft drinks, but no water to drink. Customers and crew scream as the smallest turbulence turns the in-air experience into a rollercoaster.

Maybe you missed a core step that ensures not only your plane flies, but it flies according to expectations and that the end-to-end experience works.

Awkward analogy aside, this is what happens in most positioning projects.

You’ve worked through a process, did research, added in your company vision, did the wordsmithing, and happy with the results.

Now you’re building the decks, updating the website. You’re betting it’s going to work… but is it going to have the desired effect? Is it going to drive more leads, create more urgency, and help you win new revenue?

Now it’s launched. What happens to sales morale when it doesn’t hit the mark? What about executive growth expectations when the pipeline gets harder to fill?

What to test

Hopefully, you’re designing positioning and value messaging that’s built on customer insight, not assumption. But even so, how do you ensure that it’s going to be effective? Are you flying blind?

The goal is to not so much to measure individual results, but more to build confidence in the direction, the concept, and give yourself the ability to iterate from the get-go. A lack of confidence can cause inertia to set in.

I suggest testing positioning to check performance through five different lenses.

• Attraction: is the messaging going to cut through and be noticed, and increase marketing engagement?

• Interest: is it going to convey enough to create a position in their mind, make it easier to start sales conversations?

• Desire: does it spark a fire or persuade through FOMO1 or FUD2, create evangelists, increase galvanization in sales conversations?

• Action: does the messaging drive the right activity, in the right way, through the marketing/sales process – and ultimately increase win rates?

How to test your positioning

Here are some ways you can test positioning, ensure it performs, and iterate quickly if not.

PPC landing pages

Set up Google Ads for top keywords (e.g. brand, competitors, use-case or JTBD phrases), and create a landing page with the new messaging, plus a lead form. Monitor ad clickthrough rates, time on page, and form conversion rates. Tag each lead with a campaign, so you can check for qualitative measures – are they more galvanized?

Outbound email campaigns

This tells you a whole load of things that can help suss out whether you’re on the money, or if you need to rethink a concept. I suggest using Apollo.io to draw up a list of relevant contacts that meet your persona qualification. Then, create 2-4 sequences that highlight different values.

Check you’re not bodging the execution of this – keep the emails short, use 3-5 emails in the sequence over a period of 6 weeks, and ask a simple question to encourage a reply. You’ll be able to measure open rates (did the subject line positioning interest them?) and reply rates (did it encourage them to reply? are they persuaded to find out more?).

User testing

Can you mockup a web page, put it in front of your intended audience, and ask them to tell you what they think? Wynter is the easiest way to do this for B2B SaaS audiences, although you can also use other survey panels or research agencies to make this happen.

Target your audience based on job titles, industry, and company size, then show a page. Wynter will ask multiple questions to give you qualitative insights into how your positioning is perceived, what respondents didn’t think was clear, and how it could be improved.

Friendly customers

Probably the easiest way to test positioning, but also the most dangerous! Your customers chose your product to meet their problems, and will be biased towards that – they might have difficulty understanding what the new positioning means if they aren’t the intended customer.

Position the call as ‘taking part in a research project’, and aim to set 3-10 conversations with people ideally performing different stakeholder roles (e.g. decision maker, budget holder, technical evaluator).

Kick off the interview by explaining you’re testing a new way to explain your product, and either walk them through a sales deck, or show them a web page mockup. Give the pitch, then let them take control and ask them to drive – go through the deck/page and just speak their thoughts.

You’ll get a ton of information – just make sure to transcribe and make notes on inflection, areas of interest, dejected tones, and so on.

‘Tiger team’ the marketing/sales process

Probably the trickiest to do, but also the highest return. Can you bring an SDR, a sales rep, and a marketer together and task them with using the new positioning in targeted campaigns through targeted paid marketing, retargeting, outbound sales, and the sales process?

This is useful not only for measuring the impact on the full experience, but how well your team can internalize the new positioning. Is it something they believe in? Do they need continual support? What questions are they asking, what elements are they not confident about?

The benefit is that the positioning team can be super synchronized with the reaction from prospects. Every email reply, every ad click, every call and demo can be recorded and reviewed for insight. Again, ensure best practices are met and understand whether negative results are an execution issue or a strategy challenge. Try to use the sales reps who are most comfortable with discovery, ambiguity, and objection handling. You’ll need to think about incentives too, and ensure those assigned to the project don’t miss out on commissions for new exploratory work.

Cheatcode: build evidence throughout the positioning process

In my positioning practice, we use four stages to test elements from the beginning.

Firstly, we start with assumptions – who do we think are our best-fit customers today? Using an empathy map to draw out thoughts, align the cross-functional positioning workgroup, and see how confident we are.

Secondly, we carry out customer interviews that build evidence. We transcribe, pull out themes, and use this insight to build personas.

Thirdly – the bit that’s hardest to do without facilitation – is keep asking the question for every suggestion that comes up when building value messaging: “do we have evidence?” Bringing the conversation back down to reality – away from the bias and assumptions that we all have – makes much stronger and defensible positioning.

Lastly, we follow the tactics outlined above to test the areas we have low-confidence in. Akin to unit-testing software, we can unit-test positioning to build confidence in the end result.

Test with momentum in mind

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

If your positioning is seen or heard by your ideal customer and it doesn’t occupy a space in their mind and encourage them to take action, does it work?

Probably not. You’ve focused your messaging on a customer and their problems – now test it in the market and build your confidence in it. Because focus + confidence = momentum.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter @jdomanpipe.

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Although following ‘category design’ principles, most categories that SaaS companies are ‘creating’ are not actually categories.

They might be good ways to describe their product, and offer a marketing shortcut to own a phrase.

But a category isn’t really ‘created’ – it’s defined.

Name the process, not the product

Category Design is a discipline of creating and monetizing new markets in a noisy world. The journey starts first with understanding the problem that you desire to solve. The problem is the proxy for the category and is the strategic element you see missing in the world. That unsolved problem is what keeps you up at night, and drives you to build a product, company and category to solve it.

Play Bigger

A category is a new market that’s defined by a problem experienced by a group of buyers.

Most category projects start by looking internally: what’s a classy, unique way to describe what does our product does? What’s a nice, brandable phrase that we can use in marketing?

That misses a huge opportunity to find a term that is grounded in evidence, not assumption.

Strong category design describes the new game that your customers can play when their problem is solved.

That comes from deeply understanding your customer, and knowing not just their jobs-to-be-done, but their mindset. What’s going on for them in their role and in their business? Ask your customers:

• How has our product changed your life?

• What does our product free you up to focus on instead?

• If you didn’t have our product, what would life be like instead?

When you can define the promised land your customers can achieve, you’re better equipped to name the process through which it is achieved.

Sense-check your category naming

When trying to name your category, ask yourself: will your customers organically admit to it?

Test with this phrase:

Yes, we do [category name].

The category has to be grounded in your buyers and users’ reality. Will they accept it as part of their role (and therefore, their identity)? Will they start bond with others through it, create and join communities, and use the terminology in their CV or mention in interviews, unironically?

Do you need to design a category in the first place?

Nope. Markets do already exist, and creating a category is a long-term commitment. It’s not for everyone.

April Dunford suggests there are three ways to determine your frame of reference:

1. Head to head: position to win an existing market

2. Big fish, small pond: position to win a subsegment of existing market

3. Create a new game: position to win a category you create

If your business goals need immediate clarity and return on investment, defining a category is probably not for you. If you have the space and can invest long-term, get started.

Thinking of your category as a frame of reference for your product in the mind of your customer is a better way to look at it. What do you need to create that space? What shortcuts – existing markets, trends, competitors and alternatives – can you use in that pursuit?

How to define your category

• Niche down on your Ideal Customer Profile

• Deeply understand your customer’s jobs, gains, pains, and motivations

• Use that insight to develop customer-led value messaging

• Develop your strategic narrative – undeniable world change, enemies, promised land, and your magic capabilities

• Combine your messaging and narrative to investigate the best frame of reference for your product in the mind of your customer, that aligns with your business goals

• Put a tiger team on it to test and iterate through friendly customer/prospect conversations, internal presentations, outbound emails, sales decks, paid marketing, organic marketing, external presentations, etc.

• Launch – with a marketable lightning strike

Alternatively, give this ‘Minimum Viable Category Design’ workshop plan from VC Pietro Bezza a go – a nice, structured way to think about your product in a new market.

Who’s done a good job of category design?

There are two great examples in tech that always come to mind.

Drift’s Conversational Marketing

A few weeks ago, I met a CMO named Yvette in the office kitchen at OpenView Venture Partners. She was chewing on a bagel during a lunch break from the VC firm’s all-day speaker event, and she was clearly upset.

“How in the world,” Yvette said, reaching for the cream cheese, “am I going to inform my team that our entire approach to marketing is wrong?”

Andy Raskin

Undeniably, Drift did a great job of building their Conversational Marketing category.

• World change: messaging is the primary way people communicate

• Enemy: forms – why gate something with a static form?

• Promised land: connect to your customers in minutes

• Magic: chatbot and live chat for sales conversations

They then executed perfectly with content, training, partner channels, events, a book – literally every trick in the book. There are over 5000+ people on LinkedIn with ‘conversational marketing” in their job descriptions or titles.

Aside: Drift’s new ‘Revenue Acceleration’ category doesn’t have quite the same impact, and is probably more of a good way to describe their product, rather than naming the new game that winners play.

Gainsight’s Customer Success

It doesn’t even sound like a category anymore – it’s just the way that you do account management now.

From the mental model to educate buyers on a new game to huge events, content, and community, Gainsight took a nascent phrase and turned it into a movement that’s now used by over 428,000 people to describe their job on LinkedIn.

What market will assist you in building momentum?

Defining your market – whether through a category, or by using another existing category that already exists – helps focus your strategy and execution. And focus + confidence = momentum.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter @jdomanpipe.

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Positioning: “the place that a brand occupies in the minds of the customers,”

At least, that’s what Wikipedia says. And yet… I’ve always thought it’s weird when other positioning methodologies start with competitive alternatives and world changes, before agreeing who the customer actually is.

Most positioning conversations are inwardly-focused on the product, the company, the mission. What we know, what we think, our assumptions about customers and their world. Everything is viewed through the rose-tinted, biased view of our company.

I think this is a fundamental mistake that most B2B startups make.

How is our brand supposed to occupy a space in our customers minds if we don’t know what else is in their heads?

What is positioning-by-assumption?

It starts small and innocuously. The sales rep who’s seen a pattern in their wins. The CEO, influenced by the latest hot-shot unicorn. The marketer, spotting a gap in the market. A technical co-founder thinking their tech stack is a differentiator.

These honest assumptions can quickly snowball into huge decisions that set a new path for the company – only for it to melt away as soon as it meets the market.

But strong positioning needs to be based evidence and insight direct from customers.

The strongest positioning is when:

• You’ve identified a space in your customer’s mind that actually exists

• You can build a defensible moat of opinion to own that space

• That opinion becomes an integral shortcut in your customer’s understanding of the world

Drift is a great example of strong positioning in action:

• Marketers and sales reps are concerned about the majority people who come to their website but don’t convert

• Drift says that forms are to blame, and that conversational marketing tools are better

• Suddenly, it clicks; of course chat is better than forms

• And the category is created

I believe the strongest positioning happens when you start with your customer. Early-stage startups have the best opportunity to do this, and start right.

Assumptions have a wide impact

I’ve made the same mistake of positioning-by-assumption many times before – including this example, where we created messaging that resonated with visionary budget holders rather than the champions we actually sold to (because we assumed they would think the same).

Positioning that is based on untested assumptions will likely impact the business in the following ways:

• The positioning team like it, but sales/marketing struggle to understand – so they hook onto one message (probably ease of use or time saved) that they can parrot

• The majority of the first sales conversation is spent walking the prospect through the message, rather than the proposition

• Outreach emails become solely focused on features, rather than value

• Product teams get caught in a prioritization loop, as they can’t decide what to build to support the positioning

Ultimately it sets you further back than before you rolled out the new message – leaving you scratching your head, wondering what to do… but blind as to the cause.

But at this stage, most teams will try to fix the symptoms, rather than the cause.

You’ll re-educate sales on messaging, forcing them to push the on-brand message. Product teams will be tasked with just getting back to building, with a direction to ‘build something small and iterate from there’. Marketing will ask if customer segmentation is correct, because nobody seems to be responding in the expected way.

The alternative isn’t difficult

Imagine the alternative. Your team want to improve positioning, based on what you’ve learnt over the last six months.

• We start with customer segmentation, and niche down on the market problem groups1 we are going to support

• Once we have an idea, we ideate on an empathy map for each group. What do they think, feel, see, hear, say, and do? What do we think they want to gain, and what do they want to avoid?

• Armed with the empathy map, we form a proto-persona – literally a prototype of a persona – that covers their demographics, firmographics, psychographics, gains and pains.

• Armed with this, we test our assumptions internally – what feels right, what’s not correct?

• We set up 10-20 research calls with customers, prospects, and people in the market. The conversations cover five areas: segmentation, problem discovery, problem validation, product discovery, product validation.

• These areas give us a whole range of insights to help us to slightly adjust our understanding, or highlight that our assumptions are completely false.

This process helps us refine our focus and align on a customer. It means the positioning team start from a shared understanding of ‘what we think about our customers’. It means we have created a hypothesis (the proto-persona) of what we expect to find in the market to evaluate our discovery against.

If we skipped straight to research calls, internal teams won’t feel heard. They feel they have some unique insight that’s been ignored – and will be more likely to reject the new positioning.

If we skipped the hypothesis building and didn’t create a proto-persona, people in the positioning team will use their own interpretation (of the customer, market, and problems). Rather than starting from a single, agreed interpretation, you’ll start from many differing opinions.

If we didn’t do research calls, then we wouldn’t be positioning for a customer, we’d be positioning for an imaginary creature that just doesn’t exist. It is always possible to do these – enterprise B2B startups often insist that research calls are impossible, but find a ton of value above-and-beyond the positioning purpose when they actually make it happen.

The best positioning is defensible. When someone asks ‘why message X?’, you must be able to tie that back to a customer insight.

Assume, then test

Assumptions are useful. I’m strongly of the belief that assumptions, gut-feeling, and intuition are internalized pattern-recognition. The challenge, however, is extracting assumptions affected by our many biases from those which are grounded in true insight.

In my work with early-stage B2B startups, we rely a lot on untested assumptions about the world. But it’s important that we learn from real people. It’s important that we learn about their lives, their goals, and what’s going on for them. It’s important that we can find a real space that exists in our customer’s head. Because that’s positioning.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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At Kayako, we wanted to burn down the existing concept of customer service software that was focused on ‘tickets’ and ‘departments’ using the all-too-often emotional experience of being treated like a ticket number, and getting passed around from pillar to post between teams.

We all know what that feels like, and we used this emotional enemy – a concept that our audience had experienced, could believe, and can rally against – to our advantage. 

At the same time, we talked about how better customer service is not just a nice concept, but it’s good for business: improving your service builds loyalty, leading to repeat orders, and more word of mouth referrals that grow your business. This is the economic incentive that aligned with our audience: raising customer service from a cost-center to a profit-center.

See this framework in action

Hubspot: inbound marketing

Hubspot popularized inbound marketing. Display advertising, PPC, and tradeshows weren’t working as well as they did, but deep down, in our hearts, it’s not the way we want to win customers. We want customers to find our company organically and to like us so much they buy our product or service – we don’t want to spam them with hard sale messages or trick them into a purchase. The “old way” was an emotional enemy that passionate marketers and CEOs wanted to kill.

The inevitable upside – growing your business with more traffic and more leads that drive more sales with this new inbound marketing concept – is the economic incentive. Who’s going to say no to more sales?

Drift: forms suck

Drift has a similar story. Why on earth are we gating content, when we want people to actually read it? The emotional enemy is the form: we’ve all closed a page that asks us to complete a ten-field form before getting a one-page PDF. Is that the way we really want to treat our potential customers? Is that how we would want to be treated?

The economic incentive? “Connect your sales teams to future customers, now.” It aligns with their audience of marketers, sales leads, and CEO on the economic level against their incentives: more conversations equals more opportunities, which leads to higher (and faster!) revenue growth.

Further reading

This isn’t a new concept; the use of an enemy in company narrative has been popularized by Andy Raskin, like this great nugget of advice:

One of the most powerful ways to turn prospects into aspiring heroes is to pit them against an antagonist. … Naming your customer’s enemy differentiates you — not directly in relation to competitors (which comes off as “salesy”), but in relation to the old world that your competitors represent.

Andy Raskin

Sales conversations no longer stall on ‘what and how’, but move faster because the ‘why’ is more personal at both economic and emotional levels. Assigning an emotional enemy creates positive affinity and removes objections, while the economic pull creates urgency and helps build a rational business case.

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