Whether you’ve noticed it or not, the combined wisdom of the B2B SaaS community has started to regress.

And it’s bad for product marketers, for marketing/sales teams, and for CMOs and CEOs and Founders… but nobody is pushing back.

The change has been driven not by what works – but by what people think they want.

They are two very different things.

Let’s get into it.

Your next launch needs to move pipeline, not just make noise.

I run 4-week positioning sprints for B2B SaaS teams who are about to launch company-defining products and can’t afford to waste the opportunity.

Book an intro call now

Product launches have become marketing theatre

Teams are optimizing for the splash on launch day:

• A million video views on Twitter
• Techcrunch mentions
• LinkedIn influencer engagement
• Crazy buzz amongst the VC and tech-celeb community

We’ve started to optimize for breadth, not resonance; 15 seconds of fame, rather than long-lasting impact: temporary distribution, rather than real traction.

The change is driven by vanity and shortcuts

Drift, back in the day, was a big advocate of ‘marketing moments’ – monthly bursts of activity designed to continually deliver attention and eyeballs.

It was a great strategy, because it was built on a strong foundation: true differentiation, strong narrative, a product that delivered.

Today’s product launch beliefs began with good intentions, but marketing moments got bastardized – they became ‘make noise moments’, just for the sake of it.

1. It feels easier to orchestrate a big bang launch than it is to build reliable, resilient ongoing distribution

A ‘big bang’ launch feels like a worthwhile, valuable, and efficient use of time for the expected ROI.

“Let’s make some noise… focus on the lightning strike… We need to pop on social…”

Indeed, the Silicon Valley in-crowd are actively advocating for the ‘take over the internet for the day’ approach… so much so that it’s the name of a service offered by A16Z’s ‘New Media’ agency.

And there’s always the chance that the big bang launch does catapult a business into lasting success. Because if you’ve gone big and EVERYONE knows about you, then surely you’ll be top-of-mind! Right?

… No.

2. Product launches gloss over snake oil products

Some product launches try to hide the fact the product is really mutton dressed as lamb. Smart marketing, not a unique, useful, valuable product.

Cluely is a great example of this – huge buzz on socials because of their ‘cheat at everything’ message. Then traction dropped off a cliff, and now they’re just an AI meeting recorder, with no differentiation other than a CEO who’s literally built an influencer-facing app just to drive ‘clipping’ – an insidious social media tactic that drives views with bait.

Product launches also rely on goodwill of the wider circle.

Everyone congratulates everyone – and now ‘distribution’ focused founders are leaning into this, asking (or, forcing) employees and their families, friends, and connections to all lean in on launch day for a ‘thunderclap’ (RIP 2010s Twitter) – with pre-written messages tailored for each poster’s audience. They’ve never used the product, never seen a demo, but happy to – maybe for a fee – post about it.

3. AI is pouring fuel on the fire

AI makes it really easy to pretend that your product is much bigger, better, integrated, and useful than it actually is – from copywriting that jazzes up (read: lies about) features, to capabilities that are actually human-powered or purely non-existent.

Sometimes that’s just marketing spin… sometimes it’s a hallucination that nobody checked.

And because AI means product development moves so fast, teams prioritize creating seductive, sleek, glossy product launch videos that show the future state – because you’ll be there in 6 months! – but then wonder why that launch video generates interest that fails to convert today.

4. Breadth over focus

We all know that founders have a hard time saying no to things. “We want to launch to the broadest audience possible so we can learn what works and then double-down.”

(Tip: that’s not an effective way to launch)

Big, bold product launches generally don’t focus on “we solve one problem for one ICP very well, with these specifics”.

Instead they’re angled as “cutting-edge innovation in new category that changes the game for every person in the world”.

Yep… we’re back to startups talking about how they’re making the world a better place. Very 2011.

5. Ego

At the end of the day, product launches are conflated by the founder as the celebration milestone of many years of hard work. It’s validation of their thesis – the way they see the problem, the solution they’ve designed… and it’s also thought of as the north-star for what could be their life’s work.

But this taints direction and limits potential.

Executing a launch around the emotional arc of a founder optimizes for the wrong audience: it optimizes for social standing and status rather than the signals that are ACTUALLY going to drive impact.

This is a dangerous problem: how do we escape?

We’re at a point where launch marketing is fast becoming disingenuous, inauthentic, and ineffective.

So it’s worth reminding ourselves what a product launch is really intended to achieve.

A product launch is a momentum machine – not a marketing moment.

Its primary job is to make the next 100 sales conversations easier, faster, and more likely to close.

They should be judged on three things, in this order:

1. Their impact on pipeline velocity
2. Their impact on sales confidence
3. Their impact on buyer behavior change

If it doesn’t drive pipeline, it doesn’t give sellers more confidence in their pitch, or doesn’t spark behavior change in the intended buyer, it’s failed.

You can get a million video impressions on X. You can get mentions in Techcrunch. You can glow in the warm bubble of Silicon Valley thotfluencers crowing about your vision.

But if it doesn’t ? turn ? into ? cold ? hard ? cash ? it’s ? honestly ? been ? a ? waste ? of ? time ? and ? money.

Plan your next launch like this

Before you write a single brief or book a single journalist, start here.

Decide: what are you optimizing for?

• Launches that create excitement:
  • Look impressive internally
  • Hit every channel
  • Generate buzz and coverage
  • Make everyone feel like we “did a launch”
  • Leave sales wondering what to do with it
• Launches that create urgency for buyers:
  • Give sales a sharper story
  • Make the competitive alternative look riskier
  • Surface evidence that builds confidence
  • Shorten the path from interest to decision
  • Make deals close faster

You can have both. But if you have to choose, choose the second one.

Know your baseline:

• Our current win rate is X
• Time to close is Y.
• Sales team are X/10 confident in pitching.
• We are focusing on Z specific ICP, and we’re positioning our product as a way they can achieve ABC value.
• Our product launch goal is $x million in pipeline within X months.

Now build backwards.

• Strategy
  • Own the specific problem your ICP keeps getting wrong without you. Don’t describe what you do – describe the decision they keep making badly, and position your product as the thing that makes that decision feel inevitable.
• Tactics:
  • Start with sales enablement:
    • Build your sales enablement deck from real objections, not the product roadmap
    • Give sales the launch assets 2 weeks before go-live. If they can’t start conversations with them before launch day, rebuild them.
  • Prepare the groundwork:
    • Identify 50 accounts in active evaluation and reach them directly – not 50,000 via broadcast
  • Predict and fix pipeline challenges:
    • If top-of-funnel is the actual obstacle, invest in TOFU broad awareness activity.
    • If MOFU is the blocker, focus on problem/solution concepts.
    • If you have plenty of potential pipeline but poor conversions, fix BOFU.
• Milestones
  • Beta with friendly customers.
  • Soft launch to existing customers and targeted sellers.
  • Main launch activity timed around a specific event or moment.
  • 90-day follow-on plan to build BAU activity and repetition amongst target ICP.
• Kill conditions:
  • If win rate hasn’t moved after 60 days, the story isn’t landing – stop and diagnose before investing more.
• Adjust conditions:
  • If pipeline is building but velocity is slow, the story is working but sales enablement needs sharpening.
• Invest conditions:
  • Win rate up, time to close down, sales team asking for more. Scale distribution.

The launches worth studying aren’t the ones that made the most noise.

They’re the ones that made the right noise – to the right people, at the moment a decision was forming.

Their launches probably weren’t big bangs. They might have been really quiet; precision instruments designed to achieve a goal with the least effort possible.

The Cluely launch got everyone talking, but got almost nobody buying.

Every market has a long memory and a short attention span – and it will punish product launch theatre eventually.

Some people will read this post and nod… then build the same launch they always have. The same checklist, chasing internal validation rather than doing what’s right for the business.

Build for momentum, not theatre.

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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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.

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.

The relationship between product marketing and sales is weird. On paper, we’re on the same side. In reality? We speak different languages, operate on different timelines, and have entirely different incentives.

That’s why so many PMMs struggle to get sales to use their messaging. They create positioning that sounds great in a slide deck but doesn’t hold up in a real sales conversation. Sales reps ignore it, not because they don’t care, but because it doesn’t help them win.

If your messaging doesn’t align with how they actually sell; how they engage with prospects, handle objections, and close deals… then it’s useless. A tagline alone won’t move pipeline. A clever framework won’t make quota. Messaging only matters if it helps sales reps do their job better, faster, and with more confidence.

The core issue? Most product marketers don’t think like sales reps. They don’t fully understand how reps make decisions, how they prioritize deals, or what actually happens on a sales call. And if you don’t get that, you’re not going to build messaging and GTM strategies that actually work in the real world.

Sales is a game of incentives and priorities

Here’s what I’ve learned about sales after years of working closely with reps. It’s not a one-size-fits-all playbook, but these patterns have held true for me more often than not.

Sales isn’t just about pitching a product. It’s about constantly weighing tradeoffs.

Incentives shape prioritization

Reps are coin-operated. As Charlie Munger famously said, “Show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome.” Sales compensation is usually tied to quotas, commissions, and short-term sales performance incentives. A rep’s income often depends on hitting or exceeding their target, so every deal they pursue is a calculated risk.

If a prospect looks like a long shot or has a complex buying process, the rep might deprioritize them in favor of lower-effort, higher-certainty deals. If your messaging and GTM strategy doesn’t clearly help them close more deals faster, they won’t use it. Reps don’t just chase leads; they calculate the potential commission impact of every deal, constantly evaluating pipeline conversion rates, and adjusting their focus accordingly to maximize earnings.

Not every prospect is equal. A good rep is always calculating: Is this deal worth my time? Some buyers will close fast with little effort. Others will drag on for months. Reps prioritize accordingly because time is their most valuable resource. 

Time-to-close often outweighs deal size. Depending on your ICP, a quick-win $50K deal is often more attractive than a $200K deal that takes six months to land. Every minute spent on a dead-end deal is time taken away from a more promising opportunity.

Reps don’t have the luxury of chasing bad fits. If your messaging doesn’t help them quickly qualify and disqualify leads, they won’t use it. This is why I recommend being contentious and niche: messaging should make it obvious who is and isn’t a fit.

A sales rep is going to evaluate whether a prospect is a good fit, what their budget looks like, and how long the sales cycle is expected to take. They think about how each deal will impact their commission, factoring in quota attainment and whether the effort required to close a deal is worth the potential payout. If the numbers don’t add up, they’ll deprioritize and move on.

Confidence and credibility win deals

Quota pressure shapes behavior. If end-of-quarter is near and a deal isn’t progressing fast enough, reps will pivot to lower-hanging fruit. This often means shifting focus to existing customers, leaning on discounting, or prioritizing prospects who have shown the most urgency.

Confidence is everything. If a rep doesn’t believe in a pitch, they won’t use it. They need to walk into every call knowing they can win. This belief doesn’t come from blind optimism, but from real, tangible proof that the product delivers results. If they don’t feel equipped, they’ll revert to what feels safe: sticking to familiar talking points or avoiding the pitch altogether.

Confidence is also tied to knowing how to handle objections in real-time. Sales is 30% delivering a perfect pitch and 70% about adapting under pressure to convince and persuade. A rep who feels equipped to answer tough questions, counter competitor claims, and steer the conversation toward the right outcome will sell more effectively. PMMs need to arm them with these insights. It’s not just about the product’s strengths; it’s about how to communicate them persuasively when challenged.

They care about relationships. The best reps see themselves as trusted advisors, not just deal-closers. That means they need messaging that enables valuable conversations. If they feel like their pitch is too transactional or doesn’t align with how they build trust with prospects, they won’t use it. Great messaging helps reps guide buyers, solve their problems, and position themselves as credible experts—not just people trying to hit quota.

Most PMMs don’t account for this. They focus on what to say, but not how a sales rep will actually use it—under pressure, in a live conversation where credibility, confidence, and adaptability matter just as much as the message itself.

How to build for the sales mindset

If you want your messaging to actually drive revenue, you need to build it through the lens of a sales conversation.

One of the most effective ways to do this is to mentally run sales conversations in your head. I do this constantly—predicting how a rep will position the product, anticipating objections, and thinking through how a buyer will react. If you can’t visualize how your messaging plays out in a real conversation, it’s not ready.

Sit in on sales calls. If you’re not regularly listening to how prospects respond to your messaging, you’re working off theory, not reality.

Ask reps what’s working. Forget formal surveys… have real conversations. What messaging do they naturally lean on? Where do they get stuck? Their behavior will tell you what’s useful and what’s fluff.

Build messaging that solves real sales problems. Sales doesn’t need another tagline; they need messaging that tackles real objections, positions your product against competitors, and gives them confidence in every call.

Make it frictionless to use. If your messaging requires reps to memorize a new framework or shift their entire pitch structure, they won’t adopt it. Instead, integrate it into what they already use through battlecards, talk tracks, pitch decks, and discovery call scripts.

Test and iterate. Your messaging is never “done.” Just like sales reps refine their pitch over time, your positioning should evolve based on real-world feedback.

Build like a seller

If you don’t know how a sales call plays out; if you’ve never watched a deal unfold in real time; if you don’t understand how reps think about prioritizing deals, you’re not building messaging that moves pipeline.

So before you finalize your next positioning doc, ask yourself – Would this actually help close a deal? Would a rep want to use this? If the answer isn’t a clear yes, go back and make it stronger.

Great PMMs don’t just create messaging. They engineer it to be so practical, so relevant, and so deeply tied to how sales works that reps can’t afford to ignore it.

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 product marketers struggle with sales (and how to fix it) appeared first on Building Momentum.

Outbound sales can seem like a dark art.

How does it work? You throw a few different ingredients – data, emails, phone calls, demos, collateral, pricing – into a pot, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Is it some obscure alchemy, or is there a science behind the sales process?

As a product marketer, you’ll likely be called into provide support for an outbound sales motion like:

• Air cover: Broader marketing activities to raise awareness and create high-level demand like blog posts and whitepapers, PR activity for brand recognition and credibility, social media for conversations, or webinars for soft call-to-action
• Ground cover: Tools the sales team can use instantly, like cheat sheets, battlecards, call scripts, and every PMMs nemesis, the one-pager.

But to actually help impact results from outbound sales at large, there are a few key areas that product marketers don’t get trained on and learn over time. Or, by reading the rest of this blog post.

Build the outbound muscle when you’re in a lead surplus

Most commonly, I’ve seen companies build outbound motions when their inbound starts to dry up. But that’s too late!

Outbound is a muscle that should be built alongside inbound at the same time. There will inevitably be peaks and troughs in your inbound lead flow. In good inbound times, you’ll be accelerating pipeline. In poor inbound times, you’ll have a pipeline and (relatively) proven funnel performance to support forecasting.

To drive this, a VP Sales I worked with implemented a requirement for AEs to hit quotas made of:

• 40% from marketing
• 30% from SDR qualified prospects
• 30% from self-generated pipeline

… as well as creating an outbound SDR team, rather than sharing inbound + outbound responsibility across existing SDRs.

Do outbound with purpose and focus

Outbound cannot be effective with a spray-and-pray model. Outbound must always be strategic.

It’s a relatively simple way to build traction and focus. Maybe you want to systematically approach entering a new market, build references in a particular industry, or learn what it means to move upmarket. A strong, strategic outbound operating motion gives you the ability to turn on a dime and react to market or business changes.

Having a clearly defined ideal customer profile is table stakes, but the hard part is driving sales adherence. You need to be super clear and unwavering with sellers on exactly what types of companies your product is a legitimate fit for – from both the firmographic criteria and actual use cases.

If you don’t hold that line, one of two things will happen. You’ll either get pulled into too many complex, hairy deals that take ages, or you’ll get inundated with SMB logos that will churn fast. Neither is ideal when you’re trying to build sustainable revenue streams.

Understand the outbound process

If you’ve received this newsletter for a while, you’ll remember my blog post on the importance of understanding your buyer journey.

The same matters for the outbound motion. You need to know the typical buying experience for your customers when they buy software in your category: how many calls, how many demos, what stakeholders, when do they bring in procurement and technical evaluators, do they do RFPs, and so on.

Then, link the buyer’s journey TO your sales process. So often companies will move prospects throughout their internal sales process, rather than adapting to the buyer’s journey.

This gives you more context for helping design the sales enablement and collateral that’s actually going to hit the mark.

All outbound relies on excellent, excellent discovery

Asking probing questions, truly listening, and peeling back layers to fully comprehend a prospect’s unique situation separates fruitful outbound from vapid spam calls.

Effective discovery unlocks the contextual nuances that allow you to reframe how prospects see their own world. To turn discovery into revenue, you need to vividly illustrate the pains, inefficiencies and risks they’ve missed or under-appreciated.

The best sellers I’ve seen go into discovery conversations with company-specific knowledge that allow them to get straight into the nitty-gritty. Things like industry trends are meaningless… knowing the pressures affecting a company (or buyer) as they grow, scale, and evolve is where you’ll be most effective.

Scalable outbound sells the problem, not the product

You’ve probably had situations like these. A sales rep has a great call with a prospect, excitedly runs to the product team… but says “They’re interested if we can help with [a loosely related feature that’s not the core product focus]!”.

Here’s why that happens. The seller had poor control of the call, and did a bad job of selling the problem you’re actually solving.

In every outbound conversation, the prospect’s actual problems are immutable, fixed realities. They either exist, or they don’t. During discovery, they’ll outline their challenges. The seller’s job is to find a problem that your product can fix.

A good seller will find a problem, dial up the importance, and reshape it until it fits your product like a glove. A poor seller will hear problems, but forget (or, not be skilled enough) to do the moulding. Inexplicably, that results in your product being almost good enough to buy, but not quite.

So a critical skill is being able to illustrate the unrecognized pains, inefficiencies, and risks they’re living with today – before you can ever pitch your product as the solution. You have to make them say “Wow, I never thought about it that way, but you’re absolutely right!”.

The rep becomes more than a seller. They become a trusted advisor and subject matter expert for that particular prospect’s situation. It’s about adding value first and foremost by thoroughly understanding their world before you ever configure a business case for your product.

Incentives matter

This one is crucial. At the end of the day, sales reps are – and this is said with the utmost respect – coin operated.

From a product marketer’s perspective, we’re likely just on a plain annual salary with maybe a small bonus. Sellers, on the other hand, need to hit hard numbers to make their OTE (on target earnings).

And so every seller will find the quickest, fastest route to meeting targets. But this can easily be at-odds with the intended behaviors the company want to encourage.

Here’s a common situation. SDRs are often incentivized on the number of meetings they book. So without strong guidelines, they might try to hit targets by prospecting to undeniably poor-fit prospect. This hits their target, but overwhelms AEs with bad conversations, so they won’t hit quota.

If SDRs are focused on handing over prospects that are then qualified by AEs, but the AE is targeted on hitting deals with a minimum contract value, they might reject more prospects in order to focus on larger deals from a smaller number of customers.

And if sales overall are focused on driving larger deals, you will see fewer new logos. If they’re focused on only revenue targets, they’ll sell your most expensive products instead of new products that are attractively priced.

You need to get creative with structuring comp plans, SPIFFs, accelerators and other monetary motivators to ensure sales work on the goals you desire – not just how much money, but where it comes from.

What goes in, comes out

Outbound is a science.

Don’t overlook the importance of optimizing all the tiny process pieces to build your outbound engine.

Your prospecting cadences and nurture flows should be reviewed, analyzed, and iterated. Use different channels, push calls more, try soft outreach and direct response touches, hire specialized cold email outreach copywriters – do anything to get improvements.

And that’s why you need to ensure quality inputs too. Good data. Refine your sellers book of business. Build the universe of potential good fits, acquire as many contact details as you can. Understand what’s working, double-down, and go easy on activities and segments that aren’t performing.

Of course, if you’re maturing fast you’ll be able to centralize and optimize faster. But if you’re just getting started, empower sellers with the context and skills, and help them run experiments on smaller scales before introducing to the wider team.

It’s difficult, but not impossible

Outbound can be incredibly effective, with many huge companies built on the success of a good email, strong call scripts, and solid sales processes.

As a product marketer, understanding the nuts, bolts, and unwritten rules of outbound sales can help you be more strategic, better support your sales team, and show strong impact. Hopefully, the tips above help you bring more alignment, cohesion, and effectiveness whether you’re scaling or starting your outbound motion.

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

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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.

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

Yes, we’re product marketers. MQLs can sometimes be a dirty word to us.

But you know what’s going to score you brownie points with your fellow marketing and sales teams? Delivering projects that drive marketing qualified leads!

Here are two, pretty simple projects that you could get done – in less than two weeks – that will help you become the belle of the marketing all-hands.

These are great opportunities to show off your product marketing skills and support your marketing and sales teams with new call-to-actions as part of your buyer journey.

Create a pre-recorded demo video

It sounds pretty simple, and yeah, it actually is.

Offering a pre-recorded demo video on your website, gated behind a form asking for just an email, is one of the simplest data-for-information exchanges you can set up. It’s a perfect soft call-to-action for website visitors that don’t want to sign up for a trial, don’t want to speak to sales, but want to see more than just the information on your website.

Your demo video should be like the actual demos your sales teams give – or at least, should give. It definitely shouldn’t be feature-heavy, and it definitely shouldn’t bore viewers.

Your demo video should focus on the outcomes and value your product delivers, not the features. Instead of the standard “you click here, do this, and then see that happen,” voiceover, you want to tell a story that combines your product features, benefits, and ultimate outcomes into a packaged nugget of value (funnily enough, I call these value nuggets).

Here’s a simple outline for your first pre-recorded demo video.

1. The situation, problem, and implication of what the customer’s life is like today – be clear on who the target customer is, the impact through their organization, professional, and personal lenses. Use 1 or 2 slides.
2. Value they desire – the three ideal outcomes that your product solves (that they want to achieve). Use 1 slide.
3. Switch to a product screen recording. For each value, create a narrative that walks through;
   • Importance of the outcome
   • The progress to achieve the outcome with your product, connecting features to benefits
4. Recap each value, and finish with overall messaging in one slide.

Making these happen can be complex, if you’re after a super high production quality video. You can start with something you can make in Apple iMovie or Descript. Maybe work with a pre-sales or customer success manager to perfect the flow and capture a screen recording that you can chop up. Make a scrappy first version, and then see if you can get the budget to work with someone from Fiverr, Upwork, or a local student to perfect it.

Then, distribution: get it up on a separate ‘[product name] demo video’ page, gated behind an email form, then start linking to it – here are a few quick ideas:

• Review past and upcoming content plans to find opportunities to post a soft call-to-action
• Use in marketing email campaigns – send a one-off email to your entire prospect database, then build it into regular newsletters and lead nurture campaigns
• Let sales reps use an ungated version of the video as an alternative call-to-action in their nurture campaigns and cold emails: ‘Can I send you a quick demo video?’
• Promote in retargeting paid acquisition campaigns to visitors who viewed the website but didn’t sign up
• Include it in follow-up emails to all leads collected at online and IRL events

The placement of your demo video in the buyer journey should be determined by what you know about your buyer journey – make sure that it’s a logical progression between your buyer’s previous step, viewing the video, and the next step (likely, talking to sales).

P.S. Don’t forget to add a ‘book a demo’ section on the webpage, and make it really simple for those who view the video to put their hand up for sales interaction.

A one-two punch: regular demo webinars

You’ve gone to the effort of designing a demo script that speaks to your product value, benefits, and features. You’ve made it into a recorded demo video.

But not everyone likes demo videos – they need a bit more interaction. And not everyone wants to speak to sales.

So, get the most juice out of your efforts and set up regular – weekly, bi-weekly, monthly – demo webinars.

These will be approx 30 minute sessions that you can host as a product marketer – trust me, you’ve got this! – or with a customer success or pre-sales rep. And they’ll follow pretty much the same flow as the demo video:

1. Introduce the problem you’re solving and the challenge that customers are experiencing
2. Present how you help
3. Walk through the similar narrative: value > benefits > features
4. Maybe bulk up with a case study
5. 10 minutes at the end for an AMA, so folks can get their questions answered live

My recommendation is to use Demio for effortless webinars. Use a few slides from your sales deck, practice a few times to build confidence in your pitch and delivery, and make it human. Tell stories. Your viewers will love it. Maybe brand it ‘The [Product] Rundown’ or ‘[Product] 101’.

You’ll promote your regular webinars in pretty much the same way. Throw up a webpage where you can update the date of the next webinar and the registration link, then drive traffic to it through very similar methods as above:

• Call-to-action in content
• Add a call-out in every prospect-facing newsletter
• Share with sales reps to include in cold emails as an alternative to replying
• Try some paid retargeting campaigns, maybe paid social on LinkedIn to target a specific market
• Include a link to the webinar page on every ‘thank you’ page from your other gated content – give those leads a place to go next
• Share it via organic social and create some snazzy banners to share

These will feel much easier to carry out than creating a demo video, because they’re more human and natural. But, creating a demo video first will really help set the scene and perfect what you’ve got to say, and how you’re going to say it.

Make SaaS tangible with demos

I think this is a principle that we can all lean into more. SaaS is pretty intangible sometimes – a bunch of buttons and fields on a webpage.

When we link that to the bigger problems we’re helping customers to achieve, we’ll do better. When we show the outcomes that our features solve, we’ll do better. When we talk about our product in a human way, we’ll do better.

Good luck, and hit me up if you’d like some examples of good demo videos and demo webinars!

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

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The post Two things every product marketer can do right now to grow MQLs appeared first on Building Momentum.

I’ll start by saying I’m no pricing expert. But I have, as a product marketer at various companies of different stages, both been involved in and led pricing conversations… usually because nobody else has the experience. And you probably will (or have been) in the same situation.

I think it’s important that PMMs can work on pricing projects because of the obvious impact that it has on revenue.

But for those who haven’t had sight of pricing before, it’s a minefield. What, when, how, where, why?

In this post I’m going to walk through what a typical pricing project might look like for a standard B2B SaaS product. I don’t have a proper, academic approach – but I do focus on what I think is right, and what I’ve found works. As always, your mileage may vary – and if you’re following this process, remember that I write to give you inspiration, not instructions.

Principles

Here are some principles I’ve tried to internalise that guide my approach and thinking around pricing.

Price before product

If you’ve built your product and THEN decide what to charge for it, you’re wasting time and energy.

• Most startups will focus on the product first – the features it’s going to have, what it’s going to do
• Then, they’ll think about the cost – it’s taken us $X amount to build, or costs $Y to service
• They then use a cost-plus approach to set a price by adding an extra 50% – 80% margin
• They then look at the value that the product delivers, before working out what customers would be most interested

See how much riskier that is?!

Instead, smart startups will:

• Examine the market and select a group of customers to service
• Define the value those customers want to achieve
• Determine how much customers will pay to access a product that delivers that value
• Depending on the price customers will pay, plan how much they can spend to build/service, and set their own costs
• Finally, use the cost guidelines to develop the product

See how much more straightforward and rational that is? You’re more likely to hit gold earlier, rather than struggling to find traction.

Price problems are probably a positioning problem

“It’s not the price that people don’t like, but what they understand they are – or are not – getting for that price.”

That was the motto of a pricing consultant we worked with in a previous business and it’s stuck with me ever since.

All commerce is an exchange – value, for money.

• If your customers don’t understand the value your product delivers them, they’re unlikely to pay more money for it.
• If your customers believe your product delivers the value they need at a reasonable price, they’ll buy.
• If your customers think your product delivers more than the value they need at a bargain price, they’ll probably rip your hand off for it.

Pricing goes hand-in-hand with positioning.

Margin matters

In recent years gone by, how much profit you make when providing a product or service is usually here nor there – it was all about growth!

Not any more. Showing sustainable growth is crucial for sanity, let alone fundraising.

Analysing the COGS – cost of goods sold – means you can consider where pricing should be set so that it at least covers costs, if not deliver a 40% – 80% margin.

Process

Here’s what a typical pricing project might look like.

Set pricing objectives

Getting alignment on pricing objectives was actually one of the first posts I wrote about product marketing.

Your pricing is not going to exist in a vacuum. It does not exist for its own sake. It exists to support your business goals – so you should move forward with a clear understanding of what job the pricing is intended to do.

Pricing can be used to achieve many different objectives, from maximizing profit and growing market share, to reducing churn or discouraging new entrants.

You can download my pricing objectives process and template here.

Define your pricing strategy

Once you’ve agreed and discussed what pricing is expected to support, you can define your pricing strategy to support your objectives.

Your strategy should contain a review of the situation so far, the objectives set out, and then offer principles that will guide how you move forward.

There are a number of potential price strategies that you can choose from:

• Value-based pricing – determined by what customers will pay
• Competitive pricing – based on what competitors charge
• Price skimming – setting high pricing to capture demand from big spenders, then reducing pricing to capture lower layers of the market
• Cost-plus pricing – adding a margin on top of your costs
• Penetration pricing – offering attractive low prices to gain a foothold in the market
• Economy pricing – pricing low to build volume, so you can drive down costs through economies of scale
• Dynamic pricing – changing prices depending on demand

For example, you may build a strategy that is 70% penetration pricing and 30% cost-plus, with the intention of striking a balance between setting pricing low enough to be competitive – but enough to cover costs and contribute margin.

Note: we’re not talking about specific numbers yet.

Keep on customer research

Hopefully, you’re already working in lockstep with research underway to understand the market, segment them, identify the buying journey, buying group, personas, understand the value they desire, and more! This will help you to hit the ground running with strong inputs. Here’s my post on 19 customer development questions you should be asking.

The personas that you discover (don’t create them!) are going to be super useful to analyse the results from other research in this project. Understanding the value that they desire – and where they’re coming from, in the form of a value story – matters much more than the features they like.

Carry out specific pricing research

Once you’ve understood the personas that you want to sell to, now you can find people who fit those guidelines to three things:

• The ‘value metric’ they prefer to be charged by – seats, numbers of landing pages, number of customers, etc.
• Understand what features they value the most – to help you design the packages and pricing tiers you’ll offer
• Uncover how much they’ll be willing to pay for your product.

For context, I recommend reading the PriceIntelligently SaaS Pricing Strategy ebook and their blog post on value metrics here.

You’ll want to run a survey with four sections:

• Questions: Qualification info about them and their company – so you can match them against personas
• Questions: Value metrics – asking what is most important when it comes to pricing
• Questions: Feature preference analysis – asking which features are most and least important, so you can match up against personas to design packaging
• Description: Showcase your product with a landing page, product screenshots, or a demo video so your respondents can understand how your product is positioned and the value it delievrs
• Questions: Willingness to pay – asking for price points the respondent feels is too expensive, high but would consider, a bargain, too cheap

Here’s an example survey I captured in my Swipe File from Hiten Shah that walks through qualification, feature preference analysis, and WTP questions.

When it comes to the WTP analysis, you’ll need to carry out a Van Westerndorp analysis. Sounds complicated, right? It’s really not. Here’s a template – complete with walkthrough video! – that you can copy and follow.

The output is a graph like this that tells you the highest and lowest acceptable prices, and the optimal price point – where the most people think pricing is neither too cheap or too expensive.

Competitor research

At the same time, you’ll want to be understanding how your competitors… compare on pricing. You’ll want to look at a broad range of alternative solutions that customers can use to accomplish the same outcome and achieve the same value – because your biggest competitors are not who you think they are.

You’ll want to carry out general competitor research on their pricing tiers, positioning, product features – but don’t over-rotate on what competitors are doing. Rather than compete against competitors, we want to compete for customers – to be the ones who understand and service them best.

Draft and first review

If you’ve got this far, you’ve now acquired a ton of insight and understand what pricing needs to achieve for your business and the principles that will guide your pricing implementation, what your competitors are charging, plus:

• Your personas, the value they desire, etc.
• What customers think they should be charged against
• What features they think are most and least important
• The price points they think are too expensive, too cheap, and just right.
• All of the above, by specific segments and personas

Unfortunately there’s no quick and easy tips at this stage, except to say that it all has to go in the melting pot that is your consciousness to be considered, evaluated, analyzed, until you’ve come up with an initial perspective.

Your first draft is not going to be perfect, so don’t try too hard. Instead it should be a first checkpoint – a sanity check that you’re on the right path. If you’re in a typical SaaS business, you’ll probably create good/better/best pricing tiers.

Review it with the core stakeholders invested in pricing and ask for feedback and input. What works, what doesn’t work? What might be challenging?

Margin review and iterations

Once you have specific feedback on the direction, it’s time to check your margins and make sure you’re working towards something that will be long-term profitable for the business. You can find my post on creating a revenue model here to start working out your COGS.

With your finance team, understand what good margins look like for your business. A typical SaaS business will push for 70% margin, but this may be lower if you’re in an aggressive growth phase or higher if you’re moving into profit mode.

With these margins in mind, you’ll be able to iterate on your pricing draft and work in conjunction with the stakeholder group to improve. This might take one or two rounds… or might take more. What’s important is to continually revisit the pricing objectives that you have agreed at the start of the project. There’s nothing worse than the goalposts changing the game, or stress caused by misalignment.

Testing

I don’t mean A/B testing pricing on the website – you probably don’t have enough traffic to be statistically-significant, it’s difficult to track and follow through to purchase, and it may upset customers who bought at a higher price if you’re also testing a lower one.

Instead, test pricing in a similar way to how you might test positioning – alpha-test it with internal teams, beta-test it with friendly customers or in a cross-functional ‘tiger team’ to present pricing to real customers.

Generally, your pricing is going to exist in its form for around 6 months – long enough to get valid signals on effectiveness, and short-enough that it’s not going to create huge compounding problems. You’ll also want to think about the second-order effects of pricing: it may reduce the number of closed-won deals to begin with, but the customers that do buy may expand at faster rates to cover the gap and more.

Get approval

With all of this insight and feedback in mind, work with your stakeholders to get approval and final sign-off. Make it clear that pricing is an iterative process – it’s never one-and-done. You’ll want to build a plan to revisit and re-evaluate every three or six months to make sure you’re reacting to the market and setting yourselves up for success.

Implement

Depending on how your business is organized, this can be super easy… or super difficult. There’s no way to tell until you’re in the process either. Sorry!

Bringing it all together

Pricing is a beast. I highly recommend breaking it down into stages that work for your business, whether that means using the process outlined above, or adapting into whatever makes sense.

The principles, objectives, and strategy that you define will have a huge impact on the effectiveness of your pricing in action – so don’t skip the crucial conversations that need to happen to build alignment and level up your thinking.

Good luck!

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

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The post How to define pricing for brand new products appeared first on Building Momentum.

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.

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

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Revenue models can be really freaking confusing, especially for someone who’s never been exposed to that side of the business before.

But luckily, they’re not too complicated – once you understand what you’re looking at.

In this post I’m going to walk through how you can approach building a revenue model for your product.

Why should product marketers know the financial model?

As PMMs, we’re super close to how the product is marketed and sold. We should understand the total, addressable, and obtainable market opportunity over the short-to-long-term.

We want to work with sales, to accurately set expectations around product performance in the market. We want to work with growth and marketing teams to understand the funnel, set goals, and plan the campaigns required to meet targets.

But we also need a good understanding of P&L fundamentals like margins, COGS, etc. The decisions we make – around target customer, positioning, pricing, and product details – are all interconnected – and directly relate to the success and return on investment of our products.

Financial model template

For this post, we’ll use the early-stage SaaS financial model created by marker.io – you can copy the Google Sheet template here.

The template has four tabs:

1. Recap – this is your overview of the total revenue, costs, and profit by year
2. Growth Hypotheses – here you’ll adjust assumptions around growth rates, pricing, and churn
3. Costs Hypotheses – assumptions around spending, including any staff, marketing, and other expenses
4. Financial model – your month-by-month breakdown of how everything adds up, breaks down, and turns out

The template is built for startup founders, so isn’t exactly what you need, but has enough bones for you to customize for your own needs. You may want to remove references to staff costs, make marketing costs dollar amounts rather than a percentage of revenue, and reword or delete miscellaneous costs as necessary.

Using the revenue model template

Growth assumptions

On the growth tab, it’s time to input the following:

Average monthly price of subscriptions. How much monthly recurring revenue will your customers pay each? You may want to consider blending or adjusting the fields and formulas to account for discounts, average size of customers, pricing package uptake, etc

Monthly growth in number of new customers. How are you growing month-over-month? This is measured as a percentage of the existing customer base. Consider product/market-fit, the maturity of the market, sales cycle length, and seasonality.

Monthly revenue churn rate. Each month, what percentage of the customer base stop paying for your product? You’ll always have some level of churn whether it’s customers actively dissatisfied with your product, new customers that never get up-and-running, or customers going bust and no longer able to pay their bills.

If you’re launching a brand new product into the market, you’ll also need to think about:

• Number of new customers added last month (i.e. the number of customers you start with) – your beta customers, early adopters, etc.
• Starting MRR – the monthly recurring revenue you start with (from those initial customers!)

Cost assumptions

Click on to tab two to start playing around with your spend. You can either use this template as-is to capture operating expenses for a fuller picture, or remove items not involved with the creating/selling/providing the product.

Personnel. You can use this to track personnel costs to support the product, e.g. any operational team members required, or go broader to consider all of those who work on building, shipping, marketing, selling, and supporting your product.

Marketing spend. The template uses a percentage of MRR to estimate how much money you’ll put on marketing activity. Update these fields (or create new ones) to accurately estimate where you’ll be spending money on promotion.

Cost of goods sold. Every SaaS will have a cost to serve product to a customer. The template contains fields for payment processing and hosting/bandwidth costs – you may want to update or create new fields to capture additional costs involved in delivering product, like any third-party software license fees.

Miscellaneous. Pretty straightforward – use to capture any additional costs.

Check the numbers!

You’ve thought about your product’s growth potential and been rational about the costs you’ll experience.

Now you can review the financial model tab to see how things pan out.

Revenue. The top section looks at all the incoming customer growth, how many will churn, and the resulting revenue from their customership.

Costs. All those costs you entered now appear, month-by-month, so you can see total costs add up.

Profit and loss. Now we’re summarising the incomes, outgoings, and impact on the bottom line.

• Gross MRR – Monthly revenue before any deductions
• COGS – Any cost line items that are deducted from the gross MRR, involved with making, selling, and providing the product
• Gross Profit – Profit after deducting COGS
  • % – your gross profit margin shows how much more revenue you generate than spend.
• Operating expenses – If you’re going deeper than just the costs involved in delivering the product, you’ll track other costs here
• Operating margin – If you take the gross profit, minus all the operating expenses, how much profit is left at the end? The spreadsheet uses the phrase ‘Earnings before interest and tax’ (EBIT), also known as operating income.
  • % – your operating margin, expressed as a percentage of revenue

Analyze the revenue model

You’ve gone through the process and you’ve got all the numbers in place. The assumptions are pretty realistic – now it’s time to interrogate the output.

Switch back to the first tab and you’ll see your ARR, costs, EBIT outcomes by year – plus if there’s a shortfall, how much cash you’ll need to cover outgoings.

Updating any of the numbers for growth and costs will impact the outcomes – and don’t forget that everything compounds with SaaS.

You’ll want to think hard about the financial model and whether it really works for your business.

As a starting point, questions you’ll need to consider are:

• What happens if you increase the price and reduce growth… or vice versa?
• Where are there areas to reduce costs to improve margins?
• Does the gross profit margin work for your finance team?
• Is there seasonality in your sales or costs that you can adjust or avoid?

You can then work back with sales and marketing to identify the number of sales reps you need to hit revenue goals, and predict the number of opportunities and leads that marketing and sales need to generate.

Now, the hard part

Creating and analyzing your revenue model is actually surprisingly easy.

The hard part is to share, align, socialize, refine, monitor, track, learn, and iterate with your wider go-to-market team.

Good luck!

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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Your pricing page is the second most important page of your entire website (after the homepage). It’s probably your second most highly-trafficked page, it can make or break someone’s decision to sign up for your trial or request a demo.

And unless you work at a large company with pricing analysts or deep pockets for expensive pricing consultancy projects, the design of your pricing page is probably going to fall down to two groups: product marketing, and brand design.

If there are no product marketers involved in your pricing page design, then what are you still doing here? Go and start collaborating on it now!

In an absence of direction, it can be difficult to know how you should think about the pricing page, let alone what should go on it.

Here are some of the core considerations that I’d think about when crafting a compelling pricing page.

What’s your pricing page hero heading?

Don’t just put ‘Pricing’ at the top of your pricing page. It’s a wasted opportunity to frame the rest of the page and set the scene for how you want potential prospects to interpret the dollar amounts that follow.

Take a look at these random samples from a selection of SaaS companies.

What do you notice?

Some are focused on their pricing being straightforward, simple, transparent. Start for free. No credit card required.

Others reiterate the value of the product. Build stronger relationships, organize your work, make teamwork more productive.

Others choose to highlight a combination of pricing and product value: everything you need, always know what you’ll pay.

Takeaway: Reiterate value

Hopefully, at this stage of your buyers journey, you know that buyers have questions they need to answer before they can move forward.

For some types of product, this might be something straightforward like “Is there a free trial?”, or “What’s included in the price?”, or “Is the product worth this price?”. It might be more complex, requiring your hero heading to elaborate on the specifics of your product, pricing, and value prop.

What should you call your product packages?

Most SaaS products will use a three-plan Good/Better/Best packaging structure, all increasing in price. Sometimes you’ll have a freemium entry tier too.

When developing these packages, we’ll stress for days on the dollar amounts but give little thought about the descriptive names that we’ll use internally and externally that almost everyone who engages with your brand will encounter at some point.

Generally, there a few options.

A ‘Good/Better/Best analogy’ approach will see you name plans in increasing levels of specialness, like:

• Silver, Gold, Platinum
• You can even get creative, like Freshdesk did with a nature-themed Sprout / Blossom / Garden / Estate / Forest

You may want to help users self-select a plan that’s right for them, like:

• Starter / Professional / Expert
• Team / Growth / Enterprise

Or maybe it’s about product capabilities:

• Support / Engage / Convert
• Inbox / Chat / Integrate

Takeaway: It depends (start with the customer-centric approach first)

Ultimately the names of your product packages will depend on the way your product is architected, whether compartmentalised by capabilities or if features can be accessed by different tiers of customers.

I recommend starting with the customer approach first – what will resonate with customers as they scan your site? What phrasing will they self-select as?

What plan should we highlight?

This isn’t even a question – the real question is, which plan to highlight?

Adding a border, additional coloring, or badges can help a plan stand out. Usually, you’d use this to highlight the plan that most customers will select – the one that should catch their eye.

But it doesn’t have to be. You can experiment with placement, and depending on the intention of your design, highlight other plans that impact the perception of others.

Take Zendesk’s pricing page for example. They’ve highlighted their Suite Professional plan as an anchor, their highest page. Your eye is drawn there first. £79! Does that mean the £39 plan or the £65 plan is actually a great deal? I think so.

And now Asana: their £9.49 plan feels like an absolute steal compared to the £20.99 plan.

Takeaway: It’s all about perception

Unless your TAM is extremely small, we’re thinking about visitors in groups of thousands. What is going to have the biggest impact on the majority of visitors? Not edge-cases; the broad strokes of normal folk that visit your site.

All you can do is create multiple variations, and test in-house to see how they feel. Pricing is just as much as art as it is science.

The big one: to price, or not to price?

It really annoys me when I see Twitter and LinkedIn influencers trashing companies for not publishing pricing on their pricing page.

In my opinion, it’s 100% acceptable to have ‘by application only’ pricing on your website. If your customers are comfortable with that.

In an oft-quoted trope, customers that have small budgets will sweat the small stuff, bargaining over $5 discounts. Smaller customers are more likely to want – NEED – pricing on your website to decide whether they continue to evaluate or not.

More mature businesses usually move slower. They don’t make rash decisions. Budgets are larger (but not unlimited) … but everything can be negotiated. There’s a process for that. If the product says it does the right thing, we’re potentially interested. And so exact pricing is not necessarily required at the point in their journey in which they visit your pricing page (but they may want a ballpark figure in the discovery call).

Takeaway: It depends (on your pricepoint)

If your product is primarily self-service, then show pricing. If it’s mostly inbound-sales under $20k a year, show pricing. If it’s over $50k you’ll probably need to sell the value as well as the pricing structure, so don’t show pricing.

Of course you can always experiment. If you do show pricing, try ‘Pricing on request’ in place of a $ amount for your highest plan and see if you can eek out higher ACVs. Or if you’re already hiding pricing, try showing a ‘Starts at’ $ figure as a benchmark to set expectations.

Build, measure, learn

The last tip I can leave you with, is pricing is never done in a vacuum. Your product progress, sales skills, market landscape, the macro-economic environment, and whether Mercury is in retrograde can have a huge impact on how your pricing page is perceived by potential prospects.

Make sure you have a strong cadence to iterating. Put something out there, build a hypothesis for it. Measure the numbers, review the metrics. Make inferences, get feedback. Try again. Good luck!

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 Four pricing page considerations appeared first on Building Momentum.

One of the best sales reps I ever worked with had a secret weapon. He kept it pretty quiet – certainly from the overzealous brand-led marketing director I worked for. But it worked. He closed more customers, bigger deals, and build stronger relationships with every prospect.

At the start of every sales process, he took the time to really understand the metrics that the prospect was be looking to impact: the quantifiable measures of value that would be used to judge success.

This would be used to create a personalized business case spreadsheet that was shared with the prospect, but didn’t have any of the with/without numbers completed. It was just a template – branded with their own logo – that they could use to play around with scenarios and look at the potential outcomes they could achieve.

Then throughout the sales engagement, the sales rep would keep referencing the metrics, the business case, and introducing proof points on our success impacting those numbers for other customers. These proof points would come from the case studies we’d created, our primary data, and his experience working with other customers.

Towards the end of the process, he would then re-introduce the business case and lead a workshop with the prospect to guide them through completing it with the metrics and proof points he’d already introduced. And of course, they ended up with a spreadsheet showing they couldn’t go wrong when choosing our product.

This worked with an astonishingly high close rate.

Why did this work?

I think the business case is extremely clever, for three reasons.

Firstly, it really supports the prospect on their journey and helps them buy – not just selling to them.

Secondly, it introduces unique wisdom and a challenger angle into the process. If buyers are 67% through the process before they speak to someone, now they’re re-evaluating what they already know in a new, but slightly different light.

Lastly, prospects felt more engaged and have more ownership in the business case process. They feel more confident about the potential outcomes after completing the spreadsheets themselves – rather than having something provided pre-filled.

Can you build a business case tool?

Business case tools don’t have to be complex, and are made up of just three components:

• The input metrics that impact success
• The expectations of how those input metrics will be improved
• The output metrics for modelling outcomes

If you like, you can get more complex and map out projections across time, show low/medium/high options, and compare against competitor metrics – and the dreaded status quo too.

Regardless of your ideal customer profile and personas, a business case can help you turn intangible outcomes into concrete projections and expectations, win more business, and build stronger customer relationships too.

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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“Sales have asked for a competitor comparison battlecard that they can send to prospects.”

Dangerous for many reasons.

We never want to sling mud around or disrespect competitors. That’s not a good way to sell.

We want customers to focus on why they should use us – not why they shouldn’t use others.

Feature comparisons are even more dangerous. We will never 100% know whether a competitor has specific features or not. Not only does that open us up to legal claims, if our understanding is incorrect it can make us look slimy by not telling the truth.

Every competitor is, ultimately, a good choice in it’s own way for a specific type of customer. Their benefits and shortcomings will make perfect sense for a type of customer in a certain situation.

Your goal, as a product marketer or sales rep, is to focus on why your solution is the best solution for the prospect you’re engaging with. The best way to do this is to influence the prospect’s requirements and buying journey by getting ahead of the sale.

Create the ultimate buyer’s guide

If you don’t have this already, put it on your to-do list immediately.

Creating a clear, concise buyer’s guide is a must-have piece of content that you promote to pretty much every prospect, whether they came from inbound or outbound.

Our goal with the buyers guide is to remove the cognition that a buyer must do to decide what their requirements should be, and why.

It’s our opportunity to introduce and highlight a particular frame – a concept that already exists in the buyer’s mind. We get to influence their decision criteria, let them know what they should and shouldn’t be looking for, and help them understand exactly why your product is the one they should choose.

Your buyer guide outline might be something like this:

Category overview

This sets the scene for your readers on how they should interpret the market – positioning your business at the leading edge. You may want to call out specific sub-categories, which can be used to position competitors and alternative solutions as good… but for other contexts.

“When to buy or switch”

This section builds on what you know from the common triggers and motivations that encourage your ideal buyers to search, switch, or buy an alternative solution. This is your opportunity to pinpoint and dial up the pain that customers are likely experiencing.

Explore key features

This section might refer to features, but actually we’re exploring key areas of value that your customers desires. A prime opportunity to call out the must-have features your product has – and why they’re so important to delivering good outcomes.

How to evaluate and compare solutions

We’re now educating buyers on the process they should follow, what they should consider, and other things to watch out for in the purchase process. It’s an opportunity to suggest the standard things (like value and ROI, not just cost) as well as things that are unique to you.

Implementation considerations

Ease of implementation and quick time-to-value is a great differentiator. Educating buyers on what they should consider when evaluating other products is where you can go to town on your approach versus others, especially when you have fundamentally different implementation concepts.

Case study

Why would you not take the chance to shout about a successful customer experience? Use this an opportunity to talk about why the customer chose your solution, as well as how they use the product and the results they’ve seen. This helps build social proof and makes your product feel tangible.

Why choose us

Finish up your buyer’s guide with a persuasive message that really resonates with your ideal customers. Reinforce the framing you’ve set out at the start, why it’s the right product for them, and remind them of the valuable unique differentiators that set your product apart from the rest.

Inform, educate, and support buyers on their journey

Not only can you create a buyer’s guide as a full-funnel piece of content, but you can take it to the next level by creating an evaluation template that prospects can use throughout their consideration process. Handily, the template will include several features and capabilities that highlights your product’s benefits… whilst competitors don’t meet the standard.

With these two pieces of collateral in your toolkit, you’ll be driving faster sales cycles, justifying higher pricing, and create happier customers – without the inconvenience and potential downsides of creating shareable competitor comparisons.

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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Businesses are tightening their belts, spending less money on anything that isn’t a core requirement. We’ve seen some big layoffs over the last few months, with more probably to come. What does this mean for product marketers?

Whilst marketing teams are generally the first to go when businesses think about ‘rightsizing’ and cutting budgets, product marketing usually slips through relatively unscathed. Our strategic, cross-functional, multi-skilled approach means that we can shape-shift into the gaps filled by other cuts – unlike single-skilled, specialist roles.

But what should product marketing teams focus on when the business world is going through a downturn?

Customer retention and expansion

Churn kills SaaS business economics, especially in environments where new business wins are falling.

I’ll bet that most product marketings teams are rarely involved in supporting account management and customer success teams, but that’s a big miss.

If you know the initial buyer journey that your customers go through, you can also expand to cover the context and triggers that encourage expansion post-sale too. Identifying the needs, questions, and motivations that drive expansion means you can then develop the collateral, enablement, and campaigns that will have maximum impact.

And perhaps, working with product teams, there are quick wins that help you to take additional revenue off the table through expansion. For example, if your pricing is per-seat, then perhaps there’s an opportunity for chargeable “light user” roles for folks that don’t need a full seat but want access.

Positioning to evolving value

We’ve all heard that it’s better to be a painkiller than a vitamin. While it’s not always as clearcut as that, it rings true.

Yesterday, your customers were looking to power growth. Today, those same customers are looking to sustain revenue, or cut costs. Your message should adapt as required.

At a previous HR tech employer prior to the pandemic, we had positioned on solving the biggest problem our customers had: making diverse hires. When coronavirus hit, our customers couldn’t run in-person recruiting events, so our message shifted to solve the new problem: prioritising thousands of applications, and still trying to make diverse hires.

Our mission and reason for being didn’t change. Our product didn’t change. But we evolved our top-of-funnel positioning to capture the immediate pain our prospects were experiencing.

If you’re not sure what your customers are struggling with now, ask your sales team or listen to Gong recordings. Even better, set up a continual customer and market insights interview process.

Supporting pipeline generation

Revenue is going to be harder to come by, regardless of how skilled your sales team is and how big your brand is.

So do what you can to support marketing and sales.

Start backwards from closing. Perhaps there are opportunities where new collateral or targeted enablement can help close more. Maybe competitive messaging needs a boost to cut through or elevate conversations away from price.

Maybe you can help SDRs to explore new outbound hooks, or work with email marketers to improve nurture sequences to drive more urgency. Maybe there’s an unexplored audience or an unworked angle to help increase MQLs.

There are always new customer insights that can be understood, shared, and implemented.

Making efficiencies

As it happens, product marketers aren’t really a frivolous bunch. We don’t have big software budgets, agency retainers to pay, and usually our teams are pretty lean. So there’s not a lot for us to ‘make efficiencies’ from.

Instead, we can cut back on adjacent activities that cost us attention without delivering impact.

You’ll probably know where these are already, you just don’t want to admit them. Projects that were a good idea once, but no longer make sense. Processes that you’ve continued for so long… but can’t remember why.

One tip: step back and look holistically at the top business priority. Does all the work you’re doing still support that goal? If not, it’s time to rethink.

Diamonds are forever, but downturns are temporary

Don’t give up on your core messaging, core GTM motions just because it’s not working as well as expected today. Don’t throw away all the evidence of product/market fit you have.

Instead, evolve with your customers. Do they still plan to get back to business as usual – or is this going to be a permanent new normal?

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 Product marketing in downturns 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?

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Sorry, but it’s true. Most demo videos suck.

They drone on about microscopic features. They’re too long. They’re a condescending mess of tacky cliches, awkward video cuts, and rhetorical questions in an attempt to feign engagement.

Just as every stage in the buyer journey needs a different sales deck, every demo video should be tailored to the stage of the buyer journey.

This means that yes, sometimes a 10 minute video that deep-dives into features and technical information can be really useful – for prospects who are far down the sales process and need to review the product async.

That same video isn’t going to work as the call-to-action in a cold outreach email.

Here are three types of demo video that you might need in your buyer journey, and how to frame each video in the right way to drive momentum in the buyer journey.

The explainer video

The explainer video is the one you might be using ungated on your website, linking to in cold outreach, and sharing on social media.

Too many explainer videos actually explain the wrong thing. It shouldn’t explain what the product is and how it works. It should explain who the product is for, and why they should care.

These should be around 2 minutes at most, and answer these key questions:

• Is this for me?
• Does it solve a problem I have?
• Why would we use it?

Explainer videos should be accurate, brief, and clear: and this is what makes them hard. The narrative the video tells is more important than what is shown on screen.

Avoid using screen-capture product videos, because they’ll quickly overwhelm attention and distract from your narrative. And definitely don’t use scammy, ‘whiteboard drawing’ style animation with stock images.

I really recommend investing in an explainer video using a video agency or freelancer who can walk you through the process, give you pointers, and make your explainer video work harder for you.

Below is a great example: ‘What is Slack?’.

The ‘tell me more’ video

The ‘tell me more’ video is one you’ll send to prospects when they’re interested in finding out more. Maybe they’ve filled out a lead form and you want to give them some more information, or maybe they need to share something internally with colleagues who can’t make an initial discovery call.

A ‘tell me more’ needs to convey the same information you’d share in a 5 minute elevator pitch, but hopefully in around 2-3 minutes.

Here, we can expand upon the same narrative we used in the explainer video above to add more color. The video needs to identify:

• Who the product is for
• What problem it solves
• Why the customer would use it
• What the product is
• How it works
• Any results or proofpoints

These can be more in-depth but still light enough to cover the key points in an engaging way.

Below is an example of a ‘tell me more’ that I created. I’m not saying it’s great – it’s definitely too cringe – but I’d definitely give it a B+. If I were to redo it now, I’d get rid of the American voiceover, and show more product screenshots in here too.

The walkthrough video

Walkthrough videos are your opportunity to get deep and showcase the best of your product: but don’t forget to always tell a consistent story, grounded squarely from your customer’s perspective.

Depending on the circumstances, these videos might be used as a gated demo, or as a post-meeting resource.

These videos can walk through your product workflows, get nitty-gritty in the specifics of why your product is built the way it is, and show an end-to-end walkthrough of the customer or end-users experience.

They can be longer, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be engaging.

And importantly, these can’t just be product-centric. You still need to explain the importance of each feature and frame how it supports the customer to achieve their intended goals and gain value from your product.

Here’s an example from ~6 years ago, where Alicia and I created a walkthrough video that was originally gated behind a lead form.

Apart from the embarrassing quality (we did it entirely ourselves!), I still like how we framed the narrative from a customer’s perspective, showed how the customer and end-user experiences intertwined, and made it feel engaging with a personal intro and outro from Alicia herself!

Make every video you make work harder

Think about each context you need demo videos for, and what they need to achieve.

Think about what your prospect needs to know from their perspective on their buying journey.

Then unite both with a consistent, customer-centric narrative that focuses on the value they ultimately desire.

Then get creative.

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

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Announcing new features can be the bane of a product marketer’s work life.

Product can build something autonomously, let the PMM know when it’s going to be shipped, and expect it to be announced through the usual channels.

And, well, that’s probably fine. But it’s not great.

It’s an example of PMM as a conveyor belt team.

Teams can take many different approaches to feature launches. The most common in SaaS is based on Intercom’s feature prioritization matrix

And this is fine, but it lacks any real strategy. Deliverables are turned into tasks, checked off in a to-do manager for a feeling of satisfaction – but a lack of impact.

What if we reimagined how to ensure feature releases make a real impact on our business, our customers, and their outcomes?

The five A’s of successful feature releases

We all want our feature releases to have impact – ideally with the minimum work required. But to get there, we need to build new concepts to think about the intended outcomes, not just the planned work.

See what you think below – could you use these four concepts to get more efficient and effective feature launch results?

Audience

The audience you promote new features to probably has a bigger end-result on performance than whatever it is you’re actually shipping.

Just as with defining the ideal customer for your product, we need to niche down. Don’t just blast the email and show the in-app notification to all customers.

Instead, be selective: who needs to know about the feature?

For example:

• Customers that have shown interest or meet a particularly niche segment
• Show to all existing customers, only those who joined between specific dates, or only those with a specific registration date
• Send emails with different copy and action depending on the user persona

A good tip is to think about the anti-audience: what types of customers will NOT be interested in what you’re announcing?

Awareness

Every feature release checklist in the world has:

• Email
• In-app notification
• Social

… as standard for every top priority feature. But does it actually make sense to do these for every release? Probably not. We keep these in because we think it’s a good idea to make customers informed of new features, even if they’re not tied to their particular usecase or challenges. More product features is always a good thing, right?

I think it can do the opposite: too much noise trains your customers to ignore feature releases. In-app notifications get swiped away instantly without a second thought. And if they’re luckily enough to be opened in the first place, emails are skimmed and archived immediately.

Instead, think about how we can help customers become aware of new features at the right time.

For example:

• Show in-app notifications to customers when they take a particular in-app action (e.g. visit a new page, or click a specific button)
• Send behavioral emails when it makes sense, not just at a specific point in time because the functionality is now available

Always ask whether announcing the feature now will have the best impact, or if there’s a more timely approach.

Action

What’s the specific action we want customers to take with our feature release?

Tip: ‘Read the announcement blog post’ is never the best use of your customer’s attention.

Sometimes we’ll want to guide customers to enable a setting, setup a new feature from scratch, or convince their boss to purchase an add-on. Sometimes, it’s just an FYI – “there’s a new thing, thought ya might be interested.”

This largely depends on everything above – the audience, the channels you’re using to build awareness, and the affinity you’re chasing.

For top-tier customers, we wouldn’t send an email that asks an admin to just ‘switch on’ a feature that uses machine learning to do stuff. We’d use an explainer and ask for a meeting to be booked to showcase how the new functionality can lead to X% better outcomes.

Considering the most effective next step, and enabling teams across customer success, support, sales, and product is a surefire way to build an efficient customer/user journey.

Affinity

This is getting deep: what do we want customers to feel when we announce features?

A good exercise is to work with your customer success team and start with first principles. For each customer tier, what should their experience entail? What role do feature launches play in their evaluation, usage, and renewal/expansion decisions of your product?

For example:

• Top-tier customers are focused on processes and avoiding hiccups, so we shouldn’t announce new features to them autonomously. New releases should be batched up, and presented by a customer success manager who can tailor them to the client’s specific use case.
• Self-service, low-touch customers are mostly interested in ease of use for core capabilities, and improvements to these should be proactively promoted.
• Customers with the potential to expand need to feel confident in our product innovation velocity – let’s send them everything, as soon as it’s available.

This then allows you to execute more impactful launch strategies that contribute to a customer’s perception of your company.

Accountability

The holy grail of PMs and PMMs is to measure feature releases against business or customer outcomes, and iterate until those goals are achieved.

In reality, it’s very rare. It can take a lot to reorient a business around a different approach to building product, and it’s difficult to showcase incrementality (whether PMM work has had an improvement against the baseline, or not).

In the meantime, we can all start somewhere.

For certain features where it makes sense, we should guesstimate some goals that show whether our feature release met the specifics we’ve outlined above – plus any measurable business or customer outcomes.

For example, we might report on:

• Audience: How many targeted customers were successfully reached in the first four weeks of a feature release
• Awareness: How many customers engaged with feature release comms
• Action: How many customers took the intended action (e.g. activated a feature)
• Affinity: Positive/negative feedback via support and success teams
• Accountability: Whether business/customer outcomes have been met

Don’t wait for a full strategy: get started today

When I talk to product marketers, often the biggest barrier to more effective feature releases is waiting for a bigger strategy (either from their leadership, or their own to-do list).

But you don’t need to think through the whole strategy first. You don’t need to build the perfect matrix, think about the never-ending list of distribution and marketing channels at your potential disposal, or drag out sign-off from ten different stakeholders.

Just start with your next feature:

• What’s the best audience for this – and what’s the anti-audience?
• What channels make the most sense for this, and when would be best for customers to become aware?
• What’s the overall intended action, but what makes sense as the next step in the journey?
• What should our audience/customer segments think and feel about our product with this announcement?
• What makes sense to measure, both as a yardstick for the announcement performance and as a proxy for feature incrementality?

Spend a few minutes thinking about these, write the answers down, then build from there. Have fun!

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

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My first real job in marketing began with a data entry gig as part of an internship: sorting out Excel lists of leads, importing and de-duplicating into a CRM. What was expected to take two weeks took two days instead. So I broadened out: writing some blog posts, tweeting, and playing around with the website. I was employee number four

Fast forward 10 months, and I’d been working with them throughout my last year of university, and fell nicely into a full-time position in the now-10 people startup. We were PredictiveIntent: a flexible recommendation platform, first developed for mobile network operator media portals (remember those?).

Our audience then? Anything, and anyone. The sales team (the CEO and one sales rep) were trying to nail down any opportunity, any pilot, any conversation they could. Funded with an initial $2m seed – in traction-based tranches – meant incentives were mismatched with the expected progress, and so the behavior was rewarded.

The most consistent interest we’d seen was from the eCommerce world. Retailers wanted to increase average order values, increase conversion rates, and deliver a more relevant experience (on the expectation it would grow loyalty and revenue).

In this post, I’m going to cover the three elements we used to focus our efforts to build traction, turn an API platform into something tangible, and join a mutually-rewarding ecosystem… and how these three steps took us to an acquisition within 13 months.

Niching down in action

We were trying to sell our technology: an ultra-configurable recommendation and personalization platform that used a number of different algorithms to determine the best content to put in front of a user, based on what they were doing, what they had done, and what was known about them.

The co-founders had come from the mobile world, developing and selling mobile internet technology to network operators. But timing – namely the rapid growth of internet-enabled 3G phones – meant their problems dissipated over night. Without a coordinated strategy, they’d succumbed to a common mistake – trying to sell something to anyone. This meant our messages were broad, and confusing. Marketing activity was disjointed. The engineering team had no focus.

A few months into my internship, whilst I was working part-time, I’d began a more coordinated marketing and sales approach for the eCommerce industry, and we’d scored our first customer – an online Christian bookstore from the Midwest.

This was enough validation for us to narrow and niche. We restructured our website to speak the customer’s language and began to focus solely on solving an online retailer’s central problems: growing revenue, and saving on costs.

With a narrower value proposition, we tried multiple ways to sell the product. At its core, it was an API that required developer integration and quite a lot of setup. At the time – early 10’s – most retailers would have a Head of eCommerce, a business buyer that wasn’t technical. Any technical slides were an instant put-off.

So we changed the way we described the product to a core and components, delivered in combination in plans. We offered PersonalMerchant (simple, structured, with as little integration as possible) and PersonalMerchant Pro (requiring heavy custom integration and setup). The top plan acted as an anchor, pushing most prospects towards the main plan.

By naming and defining the plans, we made an intangible API platform into a real thing, a package that a non-technical buyer could understand and purchase.

Making it tangible

Even with a slimmed down proposition, we were struggling to get real traction: a plethora of closed-wall eCommerce platforms available meant every customer was using something different – or worse, their own.

At the same time, we started talking to our first customer on the Magento platform. Back then it was an independent company, one of the first platforms to follow the commercial open-source model. They offered the core for free which anyone could use, and they charged extra for a Pro platform with extra features and support.

Magento had built the first app store for eCommerce platforms, Magento Connect. Anyone could create a plugin and market it via the marketplace with direct installation to a self-hosted Magento instance.

I remember checking Google Trends for the Magento search term, a steady upward trajectory. Within a few weeks, I’d suggested and fought for us to prioritise an integration, targeting a quicker time-to-close and improving our deal velocity with a more focused ideal customer profile.

And it worked. Being able to claim (and prove) installation in under 60 minutes was a godsend for proof-of-concept trials, whilst we worked on building a strong business case for our $50,000 annual contract value target.

Focusing on one platform and creating an integration that we could literally give away for free was driving deals, and traction was building.

At the same time, Magento were building out their partner network, with one person on the ground in Europe. So we jumped straight in. We signed up for their top-tier paid partner program, which gave us the opportunity to train their account managers, get better visibility on the marketplace, and take part in co-marketing activities.

Growing in an ecosystem

A rising tide lifts all boats: Magento was booming. Conferences in Las Vegas has grown from a few hundred people to 10,000. A community of developers, agencies, software providers, and retailers all connected, eager to learn and advance together. So we went all in.

We dug deeper into the Magento world, looking for tech agencies that had top-tier classes and building joint propositions together. We took control of usual partner relationship mechanics, and flipped it to work in our advantage.

During the sales process, a client would introduce us to their eCommerce agency to scope out the technical integration. At this point, we would also start partner conversations and invite them to become ‘certified’, allowing them to re-sell the integration they were going to build anyway, and profit from a partner margin.

We did this for every third-party we came into contact with, and created a certified partner program complete with sales training, collateral, co-marketing events, and of course, generous margins for them. We transformed traditionally intangible partner relationships into a tangible program.

We specialized in the pincer-sale – approaching the customer direct, and orchestrating partner activity to drive engagement and ultimately contracts.

We started saying no to non-Magento deals – one-off integrations weren’t worth our time anymore. We removed the other integration platforms from our website. We had truly found product-market fit with a targeted, growing market.

Marketing agencies would recommend us, and they would manage the process. The same with conversion rate optimization consultants, email providers, and more. We were relatively well-known in the industry, despite having less than 20 employees based in two rooms in a co-working space on the south-coast of England.

Bringing it all together

We were not alone – many other software providers were trying to do the same. One of those companies was Emailvision, a French email marketing platform that was growing fast.

Within 6 months of an introduction, Emailvision had acquired PredictiveIntent, using the technology to create a unified eCommerce marketing platform with personalization and recommendation technology at the core, using the partner network we had created as a core sales channel, and using the Magento integration as a core driver of sales and marketing.

In this post, I hope you can see how three important principles – niche focus, making the intangible tangible, and utilising ecosystems – lead us from unfocused with no traction, to high-growth and eventual acquisition.

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Here’s the truth: In B2B, nobody is going to buy your product randomly.

Unlike B2C, there’s no impulse purchase. There’s no buying on the off-chance it might be useful, something to keep in the back pocket.

Your product is only ever going to be bought when it provides value: that is, it delivers elements the buyer wants which are useful, a priority, and worth the effort (cost/time/energy).

But don’t be disappointed. This is an opportunity to focus – and as regular readers will know, focus + confidence = momentum.

We need to understand the contexts that decide when your buyers recognise their need exists and what propels them through the evaluation process.

We need understand the motivations and triggers that lead your best-fit customers to search for a solution, switch from their status quo, and buy your product.

What are motivations and triggers?

Triggers are stimuli that impact the motivations someone has. Often, these are events that take place that disrupt an equilibrium. In this context, triggers might be things like company funding announcements, career growth, or industry news.

Motivations are the guiding principles which affect the way someone behaves in response to the trigger. There are four types of motivations:

• Positive – positive accolades

• Negative – negative fear

• Intrinsic – internal self-driven

• Extrinsic – external forces

These combine in a really nice matrix that looks like this…

… which shows the four ultimate principles that affect how someone behaves:

• Desire

• Reward

• Threat

• Fear

These principles subconsciously guide your buyers and stakeholders through the purchase journey. And knowing how to use them will help you sell more, sell faster, and better convey the value you’re delivering.

Extracting motivations and triggers

To understand the motivations and triggers that affect your customers, we need to talk with them.

My 19 customer development questions are designed to pull these out through customer research by asking questions like their biggest personal/professional goals, what winning/losing looks like, and how your product would change their life.

We also need to supplement this insight with win/loss interview research, to dig into the exact scenarios that your prospects were walking through when they began the evaluation process.

I then use a simple framework like this, designed to think through the triggers and motivations that drive people to action.

First we consider the lenses that someone can operate through.

• Personal: me, myself and I

• Professional: me at work

• Organizational: work

And then we look at the different timeframes under consideration.

• Immediate pains: self-explanatory; ongoing frustrations

• Short-term: tangible problems that can be solved

• Mid-term: aspirational achievements

• Long-term: visionary undertakings

With each combination, we can think through both the triggers (events and other stimuli) and subsequent motivation (desires, threats, fears, rewards) that drive someone to action.

Using motivations and triggers in marketing/sales

Now, the fun part. We’ve got real evidenced insight from customers, we’ve mapped it to the different lenses/timeframes that our buyers operate in. How do we use this valuable information to help us win more?

Here are a few examples of how you can use triggers and motivations in marketing and sales.

1. Use content marketing to showcase the potential rewards available

2. Drive up the fear and threats at risk through content, using social proof for added evidence

3. Highlight triggers through paid ads and create more trigger opportunities

4. Use influencers and highlight their status to speak to the rewards that can be gained

5. Create an award process to promote intrinsic desires

6. Integrate desires into your positioning, using self-actualization as a value for competitive differentiation

7. Ensure threats and fears are highlighted in your sales pitch: make sure everyone knows what losing looks like

8. Through paid ads, content, and sales outreach, drive up the pain of same

Sell more faster with triggers and motivations

Whether through highlighting the potential rewards, promoting the achievements, or dialling up the fear of failure, it’s important to understand the contexts that your best-fit customers experience and the psychological factors that affect their thought process – and then use them in your marketing/sales.

By focusing on the specific triggers and motivations that cause your customer to take action and influence their behavior, you can take charge of those to sell more, faster.

How are you using triggers and motivations in your marketing and sales? Leave a comment and share your thoughts:

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In SaaS, we compete against alternative solutions every day. They might be your mainstream competitors, niche providers, bums-in-seats, agencies, outsourcers, in-house technology, or any other number of categories.

One of the questions I get asked a lot is, where do competitors fit into the positioning process? Shouldn’t we evaluate our competitors and their messaging early on, to make sure we differentiate? But also so we can steal things from them? What are they doing that we should be doing? How do we stand out against them?

However, my belief is that we should reframe the narrative away from competing against providers, to competing for customers. The onus should be on understanding our customer and building the process to win them.

Competitors in the positioning process

The positioning process I’ve developed – that I call Customer-Led Value Positioning – starts with who your customer is.

The reason for this? As we know, the definition of positioning is “to occupy a space in your customer’s mind”. How are you going to do that if you don’t know what else is going on in their head? Key to this is understanding their broader mindspace – their personal, professional, and business responsibilities.

Competitors in positioning become more interesting when you think about the alternative solutions customers use to meet their needs.

In my persona research template, we ask how interviewees have attempted to solve their challenges before. Often, answers to these do include competing products – but sometimes a whole host of other ways people have tried to overcome their pain-points.

By using the alternative solutions your customer is thinking about as a starting point, we’re already focusing on a much more niche and actionable set of insights than just ‘other products in a broad vendor-defined category’.

And then as we go through the positioning process and understand the value our customers are seeking, we look to competitive differentiators. Often, these are features that only we can provide – but as you’ll see in the linked post, the higher up the B2B elements of value pyramid, the more valuable attributes are intangible and experiential.

So if we are:

1. Starting with our customers and the solutions they have in mind

2. Understanding exactly what our customers want

3. Determining how we differentiate with a mixture of tangible and intangible attributes

… then why do we need to think about competitive positioning?

Play offense and defense

At multiple points through the buying journey, our customers make multiple choices that depend if our product will be part of their final evaluation set, where they actively consider our solution against others with a purchase in mind.

But our competitive positioning needs to start way before the evaluation phase. We need to stand out and influence our customer’s thought process, to position our product as a must-have, and others as second-rate solutions.

We can do this through content and through awareness-level tactics, but it needs to be baked into your positioning.

Tip: if you haven’t already, create an eBook on “What to consider when evaluating [category] solutions” right now.

And when we get to the evaluation stage, we need to proactively and reactively message within the competitive context, as well as focusing on the broader customer value and how we meet their tangible needs.

Especially in sales conversations, we need to be playing two games against our competitors all the time:

1. Offense: Proactively detailing where competitors fall down, how we’re better suited to the customer’s needs, and why our value is more important to the customer than that offered by others

2. Defense: Predicting the attacks that competitors might make, explaining the reasoning behind those attacks (whether rooted in reality or in wishful thinking), and reshaping the customer’s idea of what’s important

Competitive messaging

These games need to be played in the language of our customers, in the context of what’s valuable to them – all based on our understanding of their jobs, pains, gains, and triggers, and the resulting value they hope to achieve.

Your top-of-funnel positioning needs to speak directly to the needs of your customer, subconsciously setting the scene to help your potential customers understand the landscape.

This doesn’t mean using phrasing like “the only all-in-one solution”. Can you message that differentiation with more context instead?

This is where unconventional wisdom really comes into play. What is the revelation that only you have foreseen and understood? What elements of value are you uniquely positioned to play and own, and why? What does the customer want to achieve that can only be achieved effectively and successfully when working with you?

Example

I worked with Shipamax, a SaaS machine learning tech startup to update their positioning. We discovered that buyers valued flexibility to run multiple processes with different types of documents through one provider. And that competing solutions were inflexible, requiring a lot of manual setup to process new types of documents. And so we landed on our tagline:

This spoke not only to what the customer valued, but how they differentiated in the market.

Competitive positioning

I think we should move away from a narrow approach to competitors, and embrace a more open approach that focuses on who our customers are, and what they’re trying to achieve.

From there, it’s easier to understand the alternative solutions they might consider so we can proactively position our value and competitive differentiators to influence the customer.

Then, we can play offense and defense against competitors in marketing and sales conversations, and even in how we set and execute product and business strategy.

Let’s stop competing against providers, and compete for customers instead.

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I’ve written before about how sales decks are more than just a presentation to be talked over.

Instead, your sales deck is a prop.

When sales reps use it as a conversation starter, they’ll be able to engage, learn from, and persuade the prospect.

But to do that, you need to encourage your team to ask questions, listen, and use that to frame or reframe your product in the best light.

In this post, I’m going to walk through a sales deck I created in a previous role, along with the the framing used by sales reps and the questions asked throughout to keep the conversation on track.

Recap: SPIN questioning

We trained sales reps to use the SPIN framework to navigate the conversation.

• Situation: how they are doing something today

• Problem: the challenge that arises

• Implication: the impact of their incumbent solution

• Need-Payoff/Value: the impact that a new solution that solves the challenge would deliver

In the case of a demo, we would ideally be armed with enough information from the discovery call to know the prospects top three challenges. This would provide enough framing for the call from the get-go.

Example: Kayako sales deck

This deck was used as the Kayako sales demo deck from our relaunch in 2016, where I led go-to-market strategy and execution, including positioning, messaging, customer development, inbound marketing, and sales strategy/enablement. Check out this post for more context on our relaunch.

Kayako is customer service software that helps businesses to deliver effortless customer service across live chat, email, support portals, and social media. It was acquired by ESW Capital in March 2018.

For context, this deck was used in the sales demo meeting stage. It followed a discovery call by an SDR, who would check for BANT qualification and discover the motivations behind searching/switching for a new solution. All leads were inbound trials; they had signed up for a free trial.

Slide 1: Framing

The title of this slide would be changed to one of three of our core value drivers (see slide 5 below), depending on which was deduced as the most relevant from the discovery call.

Goal: Make a memorable impression and hold space in the customers mind for the call

Talk track: Introduce Kayako and detail our goal – in this case, to help organizations grow personal customer relationships.

Questions:

• Clear up anything not gained from the discovery call

• Ask about their day, any big projects they were working on, etc.

Slide 2: Agenda

Taking a moment to set the scene allowed us to align on the outcome of the call and make sure it met everyone’s needs.

The rep would introduce themselves and their experience helping similar companies, before asking for brief intros from everyone else on the call. This would help the sales rep adjust their talk track accordingly.

Goal: Set the scene for the call

Talk track: Introduce today’s agenda, ask if there’s anything else the prospect would like to get out of this call, introduce the rep, and learn more about who’s on the call.

Questions:

• Who do we have on the call today?

• I’m going to walk through … Is there anything else you’d like to cover today?

Slide 3: Challenges

We understood our market – mostly eCommerce retailers and SaaS businesses – pretty well. Presenting our interpretation of the challenges they were facing were our stake in the ground. Customers would engage with these and agree – in which case, we were going to be a good fit. If they didn’t engage or find some connection with these, they were going to be a bad fit. We would be transparent about this upfront – disqualification is even more important than qualification in SMB sales.

Goal: Present our insight, gain alignment

Talk track: Top challenges we understand organizations like yours to be facing, learn about their specific challenges

Questions:

• From our [discovery] call the other day, you mentioned that [problem] is a challenge, can you tell me more

• How do these fit with the challenges you’re facing, is there any similarity?

• Focus on specific challenge, e.g. How have your customer’s expectations around support changed over the last few years? / Are you finding more customers contact you multiple times across channels to get support? / Have you found it difficult to make decisions based on data because of [situation]?

Slide 4: Go on the offensive

We competed strongly on our belief that the way customer service has been done – the old game – is a point of failure. The only way to be successful is to understand your customer as as whole, not just their support tickets. By presenting a ‘life without/life with’ illustration, we were able to make our philosophy more tangible and make a clear case.

Goal: Attack competitor viewpoint, detail our philosophy and how we are uniquely placed to deliver this

Talk track: The illustration on the left is typical of almost every other customer service tool out there. Every customer query becomes nothing more than a ticket number, it’s impersonal, there’s tons of unhelpful information that agents have to tackle before they even get to the request. We think this is wrong. Kayako makes customer service personal, creating a single timeline for your customer’s requests and their customer journey across all interactions with you.

Questions:

• How are you finding [current platform]?

• Where are you in trials with other competitors? What are your thoughts on them?

• What are you doing today to understand your customer and provide personal support experiences?

• What challenges arise from not being able to understand the customer journey?

• If you could, what do you think would change?

Slide 5: Present our value

As a result of the challenges we understood from the market, plus additional framing from the demo call so far, this slide was our opportunity to present our solution’s core value drivers.

Reps would link these back to stories they’ve heard from the prospect in the call, or from case studies. For example when talking about supporting customers as a team, they would share a quick anecdote on how Company X has been able to cut resolution time in half by allowing non-support staff to collaborate on conversations.

Goal: Reiterate our three core value drivers, double-down on the most relevant points based on understanding so far, link to demo

Talk track: With our personal customer experience philosophy and the challenges we discussed, we built Kayako to ensure you can stay personal as you grow and scale, work together as a team to provide the highest level of quality support, and have all the data you need to truly understand your customer.

Questions:

• So far, what do these mean to you? How do these resonate with what you’re hoping to achieve with your customer support platform?

• Based on our conversation so far, I’d say that Y is the most pressing for you right now, is that fair?

• In the demo coming up, I’m going to run through the core ways we help you achieve these goals. Is there anything else that I should focus on?

Slide 6: It’s demo time

Our standard product demo would be split into three sections, showing how our product helps overcome the top three challenges and any others the prospect has raised. Sales reps were given a crib sheet to follow with key steps and key points to follow, using the value nugget format to show how intangible value was formed of tangible benefits, delivered by product features.

Product demos would not involve clicking through each button or page, or showing an complicated workflow. These would be covered in a follow up pre-sales meeting, if required at all. The aim of this demo is to provide enough tangible insight into what working in the product is like.

Goal: Showcase exactly how the Kayako product helps deliver those three values, plus other areas of interest to the prospect

Questions:

• SPIN questioning would be used throughout, asking prospects to explain the situation, problem, implication, and needs-payoff/value for core, relevant challenges

For example:

• Situation:
  • “How are you doing this today?” / “So today, you’re doing…”
• Problem: 
  • “What’s difficult about this?” / “When you’re doing [x], you struggle to…”
• Implication:
  • “What’s the impact of this?” / “And this means you can/can’t…”
• Need-Payoff/Value:
  • “If you could fix [problem], what would that achieve?” / “When you can [overcome problem], that would allow you to [find value].”

Slide 7: Social proof

Based on signals picked up during the conversation, as well as anything from the discovery call, sales reps could reactively or proactively tackle any objections at this point with framing that imbued trust, scalability, and social proof.

Reps would use the Feel/Felt/Found, Priorities, Justification, or Proactive approaches to objection handling, making sure to move the conversation forward.

Goal: Combat objections

Talk track: Kayako is trusted by organizations of all sizes to deliver personal customer support, used by over 130,000 support pros. [Combat objections].

Slide 8: Finish on a success story

After tackling any objections, we wanted to leave a positive impression and have one last push at persuading further engagement. By presenting a quick case study – often navigating to the prospect’s support portal to show the product in action – we were able to create some FOMO, ground the product in a physical form, and offer relevant anecdotes on how similar customers have achieved the same kind of outcomes the prospect is looking for.

Goal: Showcase a relevant success story, leave a positive lasting impression

Talk track: I hope today’s session has given you a taste of how Kayako can help you provide effortless customer service. Before we finish up, I just wanted to offer a quick example of how a similar company is using Kayako and seeing great results. [expand]

Slide 9: Push it forward

This slide showed the basic steps involved, and we explained how customers could get up-and-running with the product, and what after-sales support would be like. We used this as a way to learn what the prospect’s buying process would be so we could prioritize or deprioritize accordingly. We aimed to galvanize the conversation, using what we knew about their challenges or sometimes offering deadlines to create urgency and momentum.

Goal: Understand the prospect buying process and build momentum

Talk track: So this is the process that customers follow with us to get up-and-running really quickly, often from start to finish within four weeks. After today’s call, your trial now has 14 days left. Once you’ve made your selection and agreed terms, we’ll help you out with onboarding before going live. You’ll also get expert ongoing support from our success team to help you make the most and help you [overcome biggest challenge].

Questions:

• “How quickly are you trying to get up-and-running?”

• “What’s your selection criteria? What additional information can we provide?”

• “Are there any steps not on here, that you would need to go through on your side?”

Tips: how to use your sales deck as a conversation starter

• Use and train reps with the SPIN question format to dig from situation to value in real-time

• Go light on text

• Challenge – offer some type of contentious, unconventional wisdom

Lastly, remember; there is no single sales deck. Make sure you’ve understood the buyer journey to determine exactly what the buyer – and your business – need from each meeting in the sales process.

Thanks for reading! Let’s connect on Twitter and LinkedIn, and let me know what you thought.

The post Using sales decks as a conversation tool appeared first on Building Momentum.

Try as much as you like, some customers just aren’t going to buy.

You could have the best product, a high-ROI marketing strategy, a spectacular sales process… and they’ll either reject you straight up or you’ll get a ‘no’ at the end.

Why? Not for the reasons you might expect.

There’s one element that will decide whether your product is bought and adopted, or not.

Your customer’s internal change environment will determine your sales outcome

Whether your customer can or will buy your product will depend on their internal change environment.

This is not their attitude to change – more so the entire atmosphere within their business. Is change locked down and admonished, is it expected and encouraged, or does no change happen because everything is burning down?

“The internal environment of an organization refers to events, factors, people, systems, structure, and conditions that… influence organization activities, decisions, and employee behavior and attitudes.”

Source

Generally the more mature the business, the more difficult change is.

It’s not the same as when companies are highly risk-averse. They might be super galvanized and eager, but just can’t summon the energy to make it happen.

It’s extremely annoying to lose an opp because of this. You couldn’t have done anything more; it’s just the way the cookie crumbled. In hindsight, there may have been slight missteps – but it just wasn’t meant to be

What causes a poor change environment?

Organizations with poor change environments won’t often have issues just in one area – when they do, it’s much easier to overcome! It’s more likely that they’ll have a whole catalogue of issues that slow them down, cause them pain, and increases the likelihood of inertia – the enemy of momentum.

These issues are likely to include:

• Strict IT and security concerns that need to be appeased before any software can be piloted, let alone onboarded

• Internal team bandwidth and priorities that limit their scope for investigating new solutions to their problems, let alone the implementation and energy required to state their case

• Entrenched software systems that are owned by centralized teams with their own priorities and restrictions

• Incumbent contracts that are poorly negotiated for long-term ROI with no exit clauses

• Business diktats that ban unnecessary spending, hiring freezes, or limit projects/areas for investment

Some of these will be visible from the start. Some will only become blockers later in the process.

So how do you expect, account, and move forward with prospects with cumulative issues like these?

Build your process around the change environment

Some sales reps will battle through all of the issues as they arise one-by-one, to no result. It just leads to knockback after knockback, diminished motivation and a drop in confidence.

You can try to mitigate these challenges in the sales process with various tactics, but it’s more valuable to recognize the bigger issue and bake it into your GTM, sales, and marketing strategy. For example:

• Understand it within your ICP and personas

  • Especially at ICP level, is there another segment that is more willing and able to work with you than prospects with hard-change environments?

• Extract as much information as possible in discovery and create different sales paths for easy-vs-hard change environments

  • Ask questions to understand the procurement process, ask for examples on the last time they purchased software, make sure you’re extracting potential blockers in the discovery call

  • In early-stage sales, disqualification is much more important and valuable than qualification – be strict on the types of prospects you want

• Track progress made in hard change environments to look for patterns, see what approaches work well, and consciously iterate on your win path

  • Make sure you’re building a NoWL (no, win, loss) program

  • Use a sales framework to record information and plan your deal strategy

• Be realistic with your go-to-market strategy and: is it worth trying to win those customers at all?

  • Could the time you spend on one hard customer be better spent acquiring two easier customers?

The sooner you can recognize and understand the change environment that your buyer operates within, the better systems and processes you can build around it – but make sure you make a conscious decision to acknowledge the challenge and are prepared to overcome, work around, or avoid.

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

If you enjoyed this post, will you share it with your network?

The post Understanding your prospect’s change environment appeared first on Building Momentum.

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.

A great lead comes in: a real household name, with money to spend. They get through your SDR team qualification with ease. The AE’s discovery call goes swimmingly. The demo is great. And then they ask one single question that threatens to derail the entire conversation.

Prospect: “Do you have [feature]?”

AE: “No, but it’s on our roadmap.”

Prospect: “Do you know when it will be available?”

AE: “No. I can check with our team and get back to you.”

And the opportunity disappears, never to be seen again.

Why does this happen?

It’s not because you don’t have the feature available right now.

It’s not because your sales rep doesn’t know what the feature will be available. Usually, it’s an “nice-to-have” compared to the main product anyway.

This phenomenon happens when the sales rep doesn’t understand what the prospect expects the feature to resolve, and what benefit they are attempting to realize from it.

Without this knowledge it’s difficult to overcome objections, like re-prioritizing the importance the overall solution. This trough of momentum makes it difficult to build the urgency needed to move the deal forward.

To overcome, reps need confidence in their understanding of the customer and their problems. This confidence enables them to set expectations, dig deeper with questioning, and move the issue forward.

Usually, this skill comes from reps with domain knowledge: those who’ve done the work before or have intimate knowledge of the workflows involved. SaaS businesses with small teams, or those that are scaling rapidly, will find it harder to educate their team well enough to handle feature objections.

And then (even more annoyingly) you’re missing out on the rich and valuable information to feed back from the sales process to the product team. It makes it harder to gain mid-funnel feedback that could impact product prioritization, and unlock a lot more sales.

So how can you empower sales reps with the information and tactics they need to overcome these objections and push the opportunity forward?

Overcoming feature objections

Luckily, reps can maneuver around these conversations with a little help from the basic roadmap information you may already have.

Splitting your roadmap into ‘landing shortly’, ‘near term’, and ‘planned’ timelines helps your team set those relative expectations with prospects and have more productive conversations.

Educate your team on the problems to be solved

One prerequisite to overcoming objections is to give sales and success teams enough information, without overloading them on the technical details.

There are many different ways to align product, marketing, and sales, but I’d recommend the Jobs To Be Done methodology.

You can read more about the JTBD methodology here, but watch Clayton Christensen in this primer:

JTBD can quickly become imperious for customer-facing teams, but you can use the core concepts to help them understand what customers and users are trying to achieve.

There are five key components of a ‘job’ to be achieved:

1. Who: Who is the executor of the job, who will be overcoming the problem?

2. What: What’s the objective that the job executor wants to achieve?

3. How: What is the process the job executor will follow to achieve the objective?

4. Why: What are the intended outcomes that indicate success from completing the job?

5. When/where: What contextual factors matter in this scenario?

Using this framework when communicating the problems under investigation and features to be launched helps sales teams ground product development in a story they can internalize and retell.

Set expectations, question, move forward

Armed with that knowledge, give your team the tactics to overcome those objections.

Here are some template approaches to ensure your roadmap helps, and doesn’t hinder, your team’s sales conversations.

Landing shortly

These are features that are currently under planning and development that your product team have 95% confidence will be implemented within the next few months. The designs are set, the technical build is estimated, and we know what problem it’s intended to solve.

Set expectations:

• This is something our product team is working on right now, it’s slated to be available this quarter.

• We’re expecting this to [solve problem] by [method].

Question them:

• How would you use that?

• Is it a feature you’ve used before? How do you achieve it today?

• How is that met by the other solutions you’re evaluating?

Move them forward:

• Ask if they would be interested in seeing the mockups, or getting early-access when it’s available

Near-term

These are features that you expect to deliver next quarter: they may be loosely scoped, but the opportunity exists to get information that will validate your problem/product assumptions.

Set expectations:

• We’re planning to start on this in the next few months for it to be available next quarter.

• So far, we understand the problem to be solved is [explain problem].

Question them:

• How would you use this feature?

• How will that impact your business and workflow?

• What problem would it solve for you?

• What benefit do you expect to realize from this, and why?

• Is it a deal-breaker to moving forward with our solution shortly?

Move forward:

• Take notes to understand their problem and share with the product team, to both provide additional validation and see whether the planned features will meet their needs

• Dial up the urgency and the pain their other problems are causing, that can be solved instantly with your solution today

Planned

Planned items are in the proposal and ideation stage. Set those customer expectations as such, and deep-dive for details on how customers would use these features. These situations are helpful for impacting development prioritization when there’s a dollar amount available to be indicative of future opportunities.

Set the expectation:

• I know it’s something our product team are evaluating this right now, but need more information on how to best solve this.

• So far, we’re expecting to help customers [solve broad problem area] and achieve [result].

Question them:

• How would you use this feature?

• How will that impact your business and workflow?

• How do you do this today?

• What problem will it solve for you?

• How do you achieve the same outcome today?

• Is the capability a deal-breaker for this type of solution?

• What’s the driving force behind this requirement?

Move forward:

• If their requirements are complex, confirm by email to make sure there’s no misunderstanding

• Explain that the feedback will really help the product direction, and ask if they’ll be open to contact by the product team

• If the deal isn’t a requirement to moving forward, explain how getting onboard now is an opportunity to be involved in the product design and beta process and ensure their needs are taken into account

Avoid saying no and ensure the feedback loop is closed

It’s too easy to say no, shutting down the conversation.

If you can, attempt to turn it back round to the features you do have  by re-prioritizing the problems you can solve.

But taking the time to understand requirements and feed that insight back helps product teams to build solutions that accurately meet the needs of your prospects and customers.

Taking note of the problems and features that prospects are interested in, even if the feature delivery is some time away, can also help with re-engaging in the future.

Thanks for reading! Let’s connect on Twitter and LinkedIn, and let me know what you thought.

If you found this post helpful, will you share it with your network?

The post Overcoming product roadmap sales objections appeared first on Building Momentum.

Your sales team has been working hard on two particular opportunities. The first one comes back with a signed contract. There’s a sigh of relief, and after the celebratory gong it’s on to the next. 

For the second, instead of a signed contract, you get a rejection email . You lost to a competitor. There’s a sigh of annoyance, and after sending a hail mary to see if the deal can be saved, you move on.

Sound familiar? Of course it does. 53% of opportunities are lost.

But if you’re just moving onto the next opportunity without having a framework to review and learn, you’re always going to be a step behind.

In this post, I’m going to walk through three steps to learn and improve with a simple win/loss analysis program. With this process, you’ll:

• win more deals

• drive higher average contract values

• shorten your sales cycle 

• improve your positioning and marketing

• improve your forecasting ability

• better understand and react to the market

What is a win/loss analysis program? 

The goal of win/loss analysis is to understand why an opportunity was closed and passing those insights back into the business. These insights can feed into product development, improve the sales and marketing process, and reshape business strategy.

From both won and lost opportunities, you’ll want to understand:

• Why they chose you, or chose an alternative solution

• What they liked / didn’t like about the sales process

• How they think about the market, your competitors, and your product

• What their buying process was like

• How they think about the value your product is delivering

• What’s going on in their business

It’s key that someone other than sales – preferably a product marketer – manages the win/loss program. A product marketer should be skilled at spotting patterns at different levels and thinking through to first- and second-order impacts.

How do I set up a win/loss process?

I’ve detailed three stages to think through when building a useful win/loss process, focusing on high-volume data, objective research, and utilizing insights.

1: Capture information in your CRM

You’ll want to ensure every opportunity has completed, mandatory fields at time of close that ask the rep to enter their understanding of why the deal did or didn’t progress.

These don’t have to be difficult, clunky, or overbearing – but they do need to be communicated with the common goal in mind: to increase the number of deals that we win as a business. You might feel some pushback from sales reps who think you’re evaluating them, or from CSMs who want to protect their relationship with the customer – so make sure to build understanding and trust in the process.

Hopefully over time, your throughput of opportunities will begin to provide some insight at a statistically-significant scale, helping you be more confident in the actions you’ll take with that data.

Win/Loss reason code fields

• Close reason – dropdown.
  • Win reasons. Try to distill the key point of influence that motivated a buyer to make the purchase decision. Your reasons should represent the above-and-beyond reasons, and should be worded as such. Avoid using single word reasons like ‘feature’ or ‘price’, and try to capture the specific sentiments that led to the win.
    • High feature fit
    • Bargain price
    • Beat competitor propositions
    • Highly motivated buyer
    • Excellent sales skill
    • Confident social proof
    • Positive brand affinity
    • No single reason
    • Other
  • Loss reasons. Depersonalize loss reasons from the rep and place emphasis on the points of failure in the sales process and the prospect’s evaluation. These will encourage reps to be more specific and less defensive.
    • Sales process miss
    • Lack of urgency
    • Lack of authority
    • Lack of expertise – prospect lacks knowledge
    • Deprioritised – lack of internal bandwidth
    • Predetermined decision – not a real opportunity
    • Poor product understanding
    • Poor brand perception
    • High switching costs
    • Poor qualification
    • Wrong target
    • No budget
    • Insufficient budget
    • Other
  • Close reason note – free text field. Encourage reps to leave full sentences that explain their thoughts on why the win/loss reason was selected.
  • Closed next steps – checkboxes. Ask the rep to select what should happen to the rep next. Evaluate this to see whether you’re able to reignite opps later on, burning opps completely, or ending conversations in good standing.
    • Handover to CSM – set a task for CSM
    • AE to revisit – set a task for an AE to reconnect, as there may be another sales opportunity soon
    • BDR to recycle – set a task for a BDR to reconnect, as the contact should be nurtured
    • Within this section, ask reps to check whether prospects are:
      • Friendly, good to engage – okay for CSMs / product marketers / etc to follow up with
      • Hostile, do not engage – remove from sales queues and do not contact
  • Lost opp, prospect next step – dropdown. Try to capture what the next step for the prospect in their journey is. Use this to rethink objection handling, the discovery process, and positioning against alternative solutions.
    • No change
    • Renew/re-engage current provider
    • Switch to competitor
    • Search still underway
    • Other

These four fields will help you understand why an opportunity closed, what should happen next, and what the prospect is doing next.

Evaluating these regularly, and asking follow-up questions to reps, can give you some really powerful insights to adjust your processes and get ahead to ensure other deals don’t slip too.

Having an ‘other’ field for the win/loss reasons allows you to regularly review other reasons and see if they need to be included in your main list, or if they are just anomalies.

2: Create a win/loss research interview program

Whatever objections sales or success have, it’s really imperative that prospects are engaged for objective research by an impartial, non-sales team member.

This is where you can get really juicy details, hear how customers think about the world, and better understand their mindset.

You’ll capture key snippets to help improve marketing conversion rates, elements to dial down in the sales process, and small product wins that could have a huge impact on conversion.

Automate and streamline it as much as possible to remove resource, but don’t let this valuable source of insight get deprioritized. Your hit rate of calls booked is likely to be around 30%.

Choose your audience

If you’re capturing CRM data as above, exclude hostile prospects – and you may want to skip prospects where the AE will re-engage within a certain timeframe.

Hopefully you’re tagging stakeholders in your CRM against a persona, so you can focus automated outreach on champions to provide a continual stream of general insights. You can also do manual outreach to learn from other stakeholders as and when needed.

Set up your outreach

Using your CRM or email marketing platform, set up a low-touch sequence of personal, friendly outreach emails set over roughly six weeks from the close date.

Positioning win/loss calls as strict research activities can work well. In those emails, explain that you’re:

• Working with the product research team

• Not looking to sell

• Looking to learn from their expertise

• Able to speak at a time that suits them

You may want to incentivize the conversation to catch those that need some motivation – I’ve found offering the choice between a personal gift-card or a donation to charity works well.

Schedule meetings using Calendly or just good ol’ calendar back-and-forth. Ask for both a phone number (in case they don’t show up), as well as confirm the meeting will be via Zoom/Google Hangouts/etc.

Don’t forget to plug in some reminder emails 24hrs and 1hr before the call, providing any links again.

Have the call

Ask if they’re comfortable for you to record the call so you can take notes later – most will agree.

Have a set list of interview questions arranged by topic, but don’t stick to them rigidly. Ensure the call is fluid, and that it feels like a conversation. Offer pauses and allow the interviewee to fill in the gaps. Use open-ended questions. Ask them to walkthrough from end-to-end, to provide rough timings, to add color and personal details to help bring their full experience to life.

You’ll want to understand key areas like:

• Their perception of the product and company

• Their experience in the sales/marketing process

• Their interpretation of your products value and pricing

• Their thoughts on the competitor landscape

• Their general experiences in their role and what matters to them

During the call, make quick notes on key things that stood out, so you have a list of areas to dig into using the recording after.

Create a summary for each call

These summaries will be useful for either CSMs or for AEs/BDRs in the future when they re-engage. Make key notes on:

• Their profile – their persona, segmentation, jobs to be done

• Their behavior – process details, actions they took

• Their fit – their thoughts on the product and experience, competitors, etc.

• Their pain – their business challenges they were looking to solve, other problems they experience, etc

You’ll want to tag the summaries with key points from the journey, so you can pull them up later when reviewing personas, buyer journey, product plans, etc.

Interpret each research call as objectively as you can. You’re not looking to prove or disprove things at this stage, for fear of biasing your interpretation.

3: Collate, share, discuss, utilise

The value of both win/loss tactics is not achieved by docs just sitting somewhere in a CRM or in a folder, never to be read again.

Make sure these insights are fuelling action and satisfying curiosity across the business.

Democratize access

• Have a CRM dashboard that summarises key win/loss CRM fields

• Create a single source-of-knowledge in your intranet for all win/loss interview notes

• Post every win/loss CRM update and published summary to a Slack channel, and promote it every month.

Proactively share

• Share interesting tidbits and new learnings in your team updates

• Run a regular lunch-and-learn session that highlights interesting stories – especially if you can involve the sales rep to give their side of the story

Package up your insights

• Create monthly/quarterly reports using CRM data and analyze to help support sales, product, and marketing tactics and strategy

• Include win/loss updates in your Voice of Customer reports, sharing them widely to help teams feel closer to the customer

• When you have significant enough insight into a particular themes, create a focused pack of evidence and start to build buy-in to overcome challenges or innovate further

Utilize

• Work with product teams to use win/loss insights in product strategy

• Use your insights in quarterly planning for sales and marketing to improve processes, tweak messaging, or try something different

• Gain exec buy-in as a sponsor for your win/loss efforts and encourage them to bring win/loss summaries into leadership meetings

• Create win/loss review segments in your regular sales meetings and work with a rep to explain how the deal went, what the outcome was, and invite feedback and suggestions on how to replicate or avoid certain aspects

• Pull up summaries and reports when working on regular updates to personas, buyer journey docs, positioning and messaging, product roadmaps – they are artifacts and evidence that fuel your iteration in those processes

Every opportunity is a learning opportunity

You’re going to lose ~50% of your deals anyway, so make sure you take something positive away from them.

The win/loss streams of work detailed in this post give you the best of both worlds: CRM data at scale to support sales enablement and further investigation, objective research interviews to step back and look at the bigger picture, and ensuring insights are used across the business.

The sales and marketing process is – at its heart – an assumption-testing exercise. Where better to learn what’s needed to iterate, than from your wins and losses?

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

The post How to always win, even from deals you lost appeared first on Building Momentum.

But I think those reasons are manifestations of misconceptions.

A concept has been presented, and it’s either been misconstrued by the rep or misunderstood by the prospect. Those misconceptions are about really the value of your product.

What’s value?

Value can be determined with three different questions:

1. Is it an important enough priority?

2. Is it worth the effort?

3. Will it be useful?

Your proposition has to satisfy these tests as the prospect makes almost every decision in the process. Whether to take the next meeting. Whether they’ll convince their boss. Whether they’ll sign off the budget request.

So it’s not really the monetary price the prospect is objecting to; it’s the perceived return of value.

It’s not that you lack features; it’s a perception that the product as is won’t deliver enough value.

The prospect isn’t asking how you’re different from a competitor; they’re asking why they would get more value from your product instead of theirs.

So when handling objections, don’t just answer the question or give a basic response. Take the opportunity to learn as much as you can to position your value with stronger foundations. Use value nuggets to tie every feature to a tangible benefit and the overall value the prospect will attain.

Overcoming objections in the buyer journey

This post shares five approaches to overcoming objections throughout the buyer journey. These can be tackled in sales conversations, through collateral, or in marketing.

Preparation is key

The best reps I’ve worked with will spend almost as much time on customer conversations as they do on research and preparation. They use STRONGMAN or other sales methodologies to track progress and plan their sales strategy.

Some of the questions you’ll want to cover and understand include:

• What are their priorities?

• What are their options?

• How will we perform against our competitors?

• What is their competition doing?

• What are the risks to their business/to their team?

• What is the cost of inaction?

• What is the cost of change?

• What are the upsides and benefits to be realized?

These questions can be semi-answered through product marketing support – like your knowledge of the buyer journey, persona research, and ideal customer profile.

But the real meat is going to come from your discovery and sales meetings. Methods like SPIN questioning can help you extract what’s going on today, what problems that presents, the implications of those, and what the need-payoff (value) would be.

1. Feel, felt, found

Goal: show you understand them, and contrast their view with an alternative fact or interpretation

Feel, felt, found is a way to show empathy with the prospect but contest and challenge their opinion with new information or a different perspective. It’s best used in real-time conversations or emails, and does need some training to ensure it feels natural and organic.

Usage:

• I understand how you feel.

• I / others have also felt this way.

• However, I / others found that…

2. Priorities

Goal: dial up the pain of other, more important problems that you can solve

Restating a prospect’s priorities – sometimes, bringing them back to reality – is useful when handling minor objections that can slow down a deal, especially in enterprise prospects where everyone in the stakeholder group has an opinion.

It’s really useful for showing vulnerability whilst dialling up the implications of the problems you’ve discovered.

Usage:

• You said X. In terms of priorities, would overcoming that challenge in the short-term be more important than the benefit that Y would provide?

• Is that a high immediate requirement, or could you benefit from [value] straight away instead?

3. Clarify and question

Goal: get more information, understand what they want, dig to deeper objections, see if it is an absolute blocker

Some objections need to be challenged more directly. You’ll need to ask questions, actively listen, and try to tease out the real reasons behind an objection. I’ve found this is most prominent in feature objections, where you’re disrupting the status quo and trying to overcome the predicted cost of change.

Usage:

• Can you explain the features you feel are missing?

• How would you use this feature?

• How do you achieve this today?

• What’s the benefit of that?

• How do you achieve the same outcome today?

• What’s the driving force behind this requirement?

• Is this feature a deal breaker?

4. Justification

Goal: state our point of view and try to turn it around

Sometimes, you can’t win every conversation. You just need to state your perspective, offer an honest justification, and level with the prospect. Sometimes you’ll show vulnerability, sometimes you’ll keep it clinical.

Usage:

• We’ve arranged our pricing plans in a way that suits different types of customers and their needs. Larger businesses are most likely to X, which is why that capability is in our Enterprise plan. We do offer a discount for yearly payment and multiyear contracts, which can help with planning budgets.

5. Proactive

Goal: pre-empt objections and face them head on

The best objection is one that never arises. Proactively tackling objections is a measure of confidence in both your understanding of the prospect, and your position of value. You’ll have a good understanding of the most common objection points, so make sure you’ve carefully considered and tested your key talking points.

Usage:

• Have you seen our pricing plans yet? You may find you’re looking at our Enterprise plan for the ability to do Y. I think it will be much better suited to your needs, let me show you why.

Moving beyond objections

To move beyond objections in sales conversations, you’ll need to state your case and ask for feedback:

1. What do you think of that?

2. How does that sound?

3. Is there anything else I can do or share to help you move forward?

4. Is this a blocker?

Don’t get held up by objections. You can try to keep pushing forward by proposing next steps or ask what you can do to help. Or cut your losses and de-prioritize the opportunity.

Either way, objections are a learning opportunity, so make sure everything is being captured and reviewed as part of your ongoing buyer journey and customer development process.

You’re battle-testing your product/market fit assumptions.

Focus tightly, test your confidence, and build momentum.

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

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The post Overcoming sales objections appeared first on Building Momentum.

My first product marketing role could be politely described as a ‘PowerPoint monkey’.

In the office – wearing a suit and tie, until a new American CEO took us business casual – I sat down at my desk. My task? To churn out decks for sales reps and account managers to present to prospects and customers.

These decks often ran to 30 slides or more. We used the rule of six (no more than six bullets per slide, no more than six words per bullet). Sales reps would use the decks in good faith… only to go off piste, skip around, and cut most of it out. But sales leadership felt it was important for reps to have the material to hand, even if they didn’t use it.

Fast forward to today.

Has much really changed? Do we still build big bulky decks? Do sales reps still customize the deck? Do we dutifully update the deck every product launch, even though it doesn’t get used? Probably ?.

The sales deck is a tool for momentum

When built, trained, and used effectively, the sales deck is a powerful tool to:

• Introduce your prospect to your company and product

• Grab their interest and convert it to desire

• Persuade the prospect that your product solves their problem

• Stand out from (and drive away) alternative solutions

• Galvanize the prospect into taking next steps

Sales decks generally fall somewhere on a scale.

• Too much focus on features makes it hard to create differentiation and justify higher price-points

• Too much fluffy visionary value messaging makes it less tangible, less actionable, and you’ll fight harder to close the deal

The mid-point is best: enough explanation of tangible features that combine to deliver value the customer desires (find out more in my post on value nuggets).

Four tips to rethink your sales deck

Here are four tips I’ve discovered to help you create a sales deck that is strong, insightful, powerful, and effective.

There is not ‘one’ sales deck

We normally use ‘sales deck’ to refer to multiple documents across the buyer journey:

• Overview deck that we send before a call

• Slides we run through in a first call

• The deck that’s sent after an initial meeting to share internally

• A presentation we run through in a second call for context

• Slides used every quarter in customer success calls

• …etc

Using one deck or one set of slides for all of these is a mistake.

The deck has to meet the needs identified as part of the buyer journey. Early in the process, it may be about generating interest and showing value. Later, the deck may require technical architecture and security credentials.

The story and narrative should have the same consistent building blocks. But the messaging will differ based on the context, the stakeholders involved, and the needs to be satisfied at each stage.

Less text, more conversation

We’ve all sat through a 30 minute sales presentation, before being asked “Any questions?” at the end. Dull. Unengaging. A poor experience.

Especially in meeting 1, your sales deck is a conversation tool. It is a prop.

For the rep, the meeting should be 50% active listening, 20% talking, and 30% reframing what’s being said.

Every slide is a discussion point: present some information, pose a question, and have a conversation.

Train reps on using SPIN questioning and framing in conversations.

• Situation: “How are you doing this today?” / “So today, you’re doing…”

• Problem: “What’s difficult about this?” / “When you’re doing [x], you struggle to…”

• Implication: “What’s the impact of this?” / “And this means you can/can’t…”

• Need-Payoff/Value: “If you could fix [problem], what would that achieve?” / “When you can [overcome problem], that would allow you to [value].”

You can capture really powerful insights to tailor the following conversations.

More than that, it offers the rep the chance to reframe the prospects thought process. For example, by challenging conventional wisdom, broadening their mindset, or reprogramming default cause-and-effect reasoning.

Write a consistent story with your customer

I recommend framing strategic narratives using Andy Raskin’s methodology. There are others, and it doesn’t always fit – but is a good place to aim for.

Namely, four elements that help unlock everything a good sales deck needs:

• An undeniable world change that your prospect agrees is happening

• The enemies that prevent them from keeping up with the change

• A promised land, an end-state they want to achieve

• Your product value, framed as magic capabilities

Some sales decks will follow these four elements in precise order, which feels forced and unnatural.

It has to feel authentic – your prospect has to be thinking “Wow… What we are doing isn’t working anymore, and won’t… How are we going to make change happen?”. They need to nod yes, and they need to jump to the right conclusion before you’ve mentioned it.

For the story to work, it has to resonate. It must be based on your Ideal Customer Profile, your customer development research, and you need to test your positioning in the market.

It can’t be built on your internal product vision alone, or what the founders see in the market. There is simply too much bias at play for positioning-by-assumption to work in the real world.

Galvanize the opportunity

When the conversation is flowing and you’re actively listening to the prospect, you’ll pick up on super valuable things to shape the opportunity.

One of the most effective ways to drive momentum in a sales deck meeting is with the last slide. Don’t finish with questions or a credential slide. Instead, can you end with a question to discover information to galvanize the deal?

Here’s an example of a slide we used at Kayako as a conversation starter. This slide showed the basic steps involved, and we explained how customers could get up-and-running with the product, and what after-sales support would be like.

More importantly, it offered the chance to ask prospects about their process, with questions like:

• “Where are you in trials with other competitors? What are your thoughts on them?”

• “How quickly are you trying to get up-and-running?”

• “What’s your selection criteria? What additional information can we provide?”

• “Are there any steps not on here, that you would need to go through on your side?”

You can imagine how powerful this was to supercharge opportunities – or to de-prioritize them if needed.

Rethinking your sales deck: where to start?

It’s difficult to build a sales deck within your current limitations and worldview. Trying to manipulate your existing story into a new framework is hard.

It’s much easier to let go of the past.

Do the research, have the internal and external discussions. Focus.

Craft a unique narrative, understand the buyer journey. Build confidence.

And then form the decks and tools that you’ll use to build momentum.

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

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The post The sales deck: a tool for momentum appeared first on Building Momentum.

When was the last time you saw a sales product demo that not only informed you, but actually got you excited? Where you couldn’t wait to get your hands on it, explore it, and put it to good use?

Usually we join a 30 minute Zoom call with an AE. They talk passionately over some positioning slides before opening up the product demo. Cue: an explanation of every every button, every form field, and every screen.

But that’s pretty unhelpful. If we’re early in the process, the prospect is going to be overwhelmed. If we’re later in the process then a demo is too little, too late.

A good sales demonstration, early in the sales process, is not a walkthrough. It’s to demonstrate how your product solves the prospect’s problem, to substantiate your product’s value, and build momentum.

Four signs your product demo could be better… and how to counter them.

1. Most sentences start with ‘This button…’

You showcase your product by explaining every feature, button-by-button and click-by-click.

Is it necessary to explain “this button opens this form up in a new window”? Or that the user can “click here to see more details”?

You’re probably attempting to show configuration and optionality… but this is hedging your bets. You need to show the definitive solution your customers will use to solve their problem. Otherwise, you’ll overload prospects with minor details that have no bearing in their purchase decision.

You might be attempting to justify a high price point by demonstrating comprehensiveness. “We’re worth the price because you’re getting all this!” Instead, it devalues and commodifies your product down to a number of buttons

The more you explain your product, the less people will want to hear about it.

Instead…

Structure your demo around value nuggets to ladder each feature up to the value you provide. Make sure every feature you mentioned deserves precious airtime.

2. You show the administration area

Generally, I don’t believe that any sales demo should show the admin area. They’re often ugly, complex, and full of settings. Settings raise questions… and questions lead to objections.

This depends on a number of factors:

• Where the demo is in the process

• Whether your product is positioned with configuration as a core value

• Whether you’re demoing to an admin user rather than a buyer or champion.

Showing the admin area will prompt questions like “Can it do X? How do we do Y?”, which will slow your process down.

Instead…

Understand who the demo is for and where it fits into their buying journey. You’ll then be able to pre-empt questions that will arise and tackle them head on.

Try to avoid broadening the goalposts in the early stages of the sales process. Your product solves a discrete problem and it provides many benefits around that. Later on, you can tackle the broader applications and how to make it happen.

3. You’re talking in hypotheticals

The demo has to ground the product in your customer’s world. They have to understand what working in the product will be like.

But so many demos will talk through the product in hypotheticals.

• “So if you wanted to do X, you’ll click here and do that.”

• “You could do Y, if you wanted to.”

These are prime opportunities to build confidence and show you believe in how your product solves problems. Instead, you’re introducing optionality and choice into the prospect’s consideration.

Instead…

Throw away that broad catch-all sales pitch and focus on solving specific pain points. Use what you know from the discovery process, and use relevant examples from other customers.

Think less fairytale, more documentary.

4. You talk too much about the how, not the outcome

The sales demo is to get your prospect excited about using your product. The product experience is part of the puzzle, but don’t forget: they have an acute problem to solve. And most problems have many solutions, so you need to hit the mark and make sure yours wins.

Using a sales demo to only explain how your product works is a missed opportunity to understand how to galvanize the deal:

• How do they prioritize the solutions you’re showing?

• What’s the most powerful thing you’ve showed them?

• How do they think your product would change their life or results?

A poor sales demo will also have an unhealthy listening-to-talking ratio. The sales demo is not just a stage in your process: it’s a tool to help both sides make progress.

Instead…

Link as much as you can back to the ultimate value your product is delivering and the problems you’re solving.

Construct the conversation around SPIN. Through questioning, build a story with the prospect that identifies the clear positive outcomes they want to achieve.

The sales demo is a key tool

It’s likely that your sales process will need a more in-depth opportunity for a user or technical evaluator to see the product. They’ll want to play around, ask questions, and see exactly how it feels to use. But that can come later in many formats, like:

• Interactive product walkthrough tools

• Demo account access

• Guided walkthrough sessions with pre-sales

• A sandbox

• Detailed how-to videos

But the sales demo has a special role in your buyer journey. It can motivate the prospect, generate insight for your rep, and help you build momentum.

Don’t use complex walkthroughs, insignificant details, hypothetical situations, or product-centric presentations. Make the most of it by positioning your product around your unique value, their problem, and how you’ll solve it.

I’m trying something new: What questions do you have about sales demos? Leave a comment with your questions and I’ll answer.

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

If you enjoyed this post, will you share it with your network?

The post Four signs your sales demo is boring buyers appeared first on Building Momentum.

After all, there’s so much more to be doing: you need more opportunities, you need more conversations, more networking, so you’re too busy to make notes. Right?

Not quite…

If anything, it’s even more crucial to make sure you’re recording the right information to help you gain control of your pipeline, assess performance, and extract useful insights to improve your sales results. But how?

Plan the sale and adapt as you learn

The best sales reps I’ve worked with use deal plans to formulate their strategy to each sale.

They know the product they’re selling, and it’s value, the market, and competitors.

They know more than you might expect about their customer, from the problem to be solved to their exact purchase procurement process.

They’ve also got a plan for their sales process.

• What levers will be most effective?

• How are they going to proactively manage objections?

• When to push with contention, when to open negotiation, when to make it personal.

And as they go through the process, they adapt their approach. They acknowledge what’s changed, think through the potential impacts, and adjust until they achieve the ideal outcome.

They weigh up a deal rationally to protect their time and effort, without being muddied by biases and the human condition.

But… where do you start?

Plan deals with STRONGMAN

STRONGMAN is a framework designed to help with solution selling – a problem-led (rather than product-led) approach to examine whether the customer could achieve desired improvements through a new product or process.

As a mnemonic device, STRONGMAN represents eight different areas to review an opportunity, plan your approach, and record changes.

• S – solution

• T – timeline

• R – review

• O – options

• N – need

• G – galvanization

• M – money

• A – authority

• N – negotiation

How to use STRONGMAN in sales

For discipline, I’d recommend adding each area as a separate field in your CRM and ensuring the fields are updated weekly. Every week, add new comments at the top and date the previous notes, so you have a running record of changes. Alternatively, start a Google Doc for each deal and review weekly.

These notes should be completed and shared a day before a weekly sales meeting where the team can ask questions, offer support, and ask for help.

“But sales reps need to be out selling, not filling in admin.”

The average win rate is 47% – in other words, more than half your sales effort goes to unsuccessful deals. Encouraging thoughtful introspective thinking will not only help you improve in the future, but unlock new ideas to correct course earlier.

Creating in-depth notes and plans like this also means sales reps have more leverage to argue for changes they’d like to see in product/marketing/sales, by creating referenceable ‘evidence’. Make sure you’re sharing these updates with your marketing, product marketing, sales enablement teams to help adjust customer understanding, market insight, and identify new enablement opportunities.

Examine STRONGMAN in more detail

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of interrogative questions for each area. Use these prompts to assess, control, and ultimately learn from your opportunities.

S – Solution

Assess:

• How would our solution be used by the customer, to solve their problem?

• What would the ideal solution look like?

Control:

• How do we position our solution in the best light?

• Who understands the solution, and who do we need to convince?

T – Timeline

Assess:

• What do we know about the prospect’s timeline?

• What’s our ideal timeline?

Control:

• How do we build momentum in the deal?

• When do we need key actions to happen?

R – Review

Assess:

• Is the prospect just researching, or is are they seriously considering our solution?

• Is the prospect going to gain value from our solution?

• What do you know about their assessment of our product?

Control:

• What does the prospect need to move into review stage?

• Is this a deal we should prioritize or de-prioritize?

O – Options

Assess:

• What’s the status quo, and what’s the business case against it?

• What other solutions are there, and how are they ranked by the prospect?

Control:

• How do we reframe the options available to them, and position ours in the best light?

• Can we introduce alternative options to help anchor our solution?

N – Need

Assess:

• How convinced is the prospect by the need for a new solution?

• Is everyone in the buying group convinced the need exists and needs to be solved?

Control:

• How do we increase the need by dialling up pain, fear, uncertainty, doubt, FOMO, etc?

• How do we access and convince stakeholders who are more detached from the pain?

G – Galvanization

Note: this is my favourite piece of the puzzle. There’s so much opportunity to build momentum by turning prospects into champions and building urgency to close.

Assess:

• Is the prospect serious? Are they motivated to solve the problem?

• Who is galvanized, and why?

Control:

• How can you utilize other buying stakeholders to improve motivation and drive urgency?

• What risks are there that would de-motivate or damage urgency?

M – Money

Assess:

• Where’s the budget coming from?

• What’s the purchase process?

Control:

• Can you pre-engage the procurement process?

• What risks exist in accessing their budget?

• How will we we proactively counter budget objections?

A – Authority

Assess:

• Does the champion have signing authority, or do they have social capital with the person who does?

• Do we understand the buyer stakeholder group well enough to understand how decisions are made?

Control:

• Who do we need to understand better in the buyer group, and how do we do that?

• How will we counter authority-based objections?

N – Negotiation

Assess:

• What signals have we seen that may impact negotiation?

• How does our solution compare to alternative options?

Control:

• What levers and insight do we have, and what negotiation tactics can we expect to use?

• Is this a deal to win at any cost, or are we sticking to our proposal? What concessions can we offer for procurement, if any?

Build a stronger go-to-market approach

STRONGMAN is not the only framework to use – so give it a try, find another one, or create your own deal strategy template.

Taking a product to market through sales is an exercise in building confidence in your ability to do so repeatedly. So train the team, capture the insight, and use it to get better.

How did you find this post?

Let me know what you thought: leave a comment or find me on Twitter @jdomanpipe.

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The post Optimize sales execution with STRONGMAN appeared first on Building Momentum.

A company grew from 40 to 140 people in a year’s time. They had grown considerably on their existing product that a repeatable product/marketing/sales process. As such, they hired people to execute that effectively – the scalers.

To meet growth expectations, they began to hire people with different skills to develop a new product and build a marketing and sales engine from scratch to take over as the existing product plateaued – the explorers.

This cultural dissonance created ambiguity. Was the old product worth it anymore? Was the new one better? If the new one isn’t growing fast enough, is the old one better? What type of customer was more important? How should we be spending our time?

Warring debates between the two factions held up any decision. Indecision and competing priorities resulted in multiple consecutive quarters of disappointingly low growth. Inertia had infiltrated.

If momentum is the goal, then inertia is the enemy.

What causes inertia?

Inertia happens in two ways.

Increased resistance

The first is through increased resistance, where it feels like getting blood out of a stone whilst walking through mud. Try as hard as you might, obstacles eventually block every path.

It’s most likely from the more esoteric thinkers in your team, where ripple-down effects are most dangerous. It’s manifested through politics and infighting, misguided debates, and bike-shedding. Decisions, large and small, are bogged down with unreasonably metaphorical what-ifs and gotchas.

Increased resistance happens when people lose trust in the direction of travel because it doesn’t generate the results they are experiencing or expecting.

Lack of velocity

The second is a lack of velocity. Velocity, if anyone remembers high school physics, is speed in a specific direction. Often, this infiltrates businesses under the radar, when the guards are down, disguised as busywork. A thousand monkeys bashing on typewriters will look like they’re hard at work. But are they close to writing the entire works of Shakespeare?

When faced with a lack of velocity, the immediate response from managers is to monitor the work, the deliverables, the outputs. This is akin to measuring the speed, in the velocity equation – how fast are we going? But that won’t tell you if your team are moving in the desired direction.

Velocity is lost when people are confused about the direction they should be moving in.

Ultimately, these causes of inertia occur when there is uncertainty, ambiguity, and misalignment.

Ambiguity and inertia

Startups are a lesson in managing ambiguity and the chaos that it can cause. It feels like current advice is to only hire smart people who can deal with uncertainty – but you also need people that can work on discrete, executable tasks too. Can you define the skillsets required, and set both sides up to deliver business value?

Releasing ambiguity on a team is not likely to work, regardless of how smart your people may be. Personal interpretations, assumptions, and misaligned incentives can cause havoc – and prevent teams from rowing in the same direction together. Can you list the logical questions to be answered, create a framework for reviewing new information, and set rational expectations on milestones and success?

Hiding uncertainty from people also doesn’t work; it builds resistance and friction, and creates a false sense of security on both sides. Can you be super transparent on the challenges, educate teams on the impact and ramifications of discoveries, and create low-friction feedback loops?

Your big hairy audacious goal, mission and vision might suit some people in your teams – but others will likely need the peace of mind that comes with short-term clarity. Can you create a definitive but living, breathing understanding of today’s business-as-usual activity, upcoming priorities, and how they ladder up into your longer-term goals?

Most projects that involve an entire organization dealing with ambiguity are run with an aura of importance, ambitious goals, and high expectations. Can you reframe each ambiguous challenge as a hypothesis, with a rational prediction and clear understanding of what success looks like?

Taming inertia

When you take control of the causes of inertia – a lack of direction, uncertainty, and misalignment – you have an opportunity to use every lesson learnt as a battle you’ve won in the war for momentum.

It’s really important to ensure not only is everyone is rowing in the same direction, but everyone is learning the same lessons. That communal knowledge drives increased focus, whilst framing every outcome as a win builds confidence. And focus + confidence = momentum.

The post Inertia: the enemy of momentum appeared first on Building Momentum.

Probably the most overused, yet most misunderstood word in SaaS?

Go-to-market is often used to refer to everything that happens in a business outside of engineering and core functions like finance and HR.

Often this isn’t defined as a single strategy, but as an amalgamation of everything you’re already doing. Even to those in the know, GTM can feel really intangible – and extremely difficult to communicate internally.

And if it’s difficult to communicate amongst different teams, are you sure you’re all rowing in the same direction?

Ultimately, it needs to be a summary of:

• how you are literally taking (through marketing and sales)…

• …the product you have (and are) building…

• …to the market (who, and in which landscape)

Your go-to-market plan needs to convey target customer, your product and positioning, pricing, and distribution channels.

You probably have strategies for all of these pieces, but aligning these together under one GTM strategy can really help focus the message, refine rough edges, and bring everyone on the journey together.

One slide to rule them all

Get the template here

This is not a replacement for more in-depth documentation, but a way to reduce your core strategies and actions into one simple slide that can be shared internally.

The first column covers your customers:

• Summarise your target market – beginning with your ICP segment, the teams you sell to, and the job title personas in your core audience

• Pull out the unique value that your product delivers, which aligns with your customers expectations and needs. Reminder: these need to be based in reality, not fiction.

The second column covers your product and landscape:

• Category – what’s the frame of reference for your product?

• Key differentiators – what are they key features that your product delivers that others don’t?

• Competitors – who are your top immediate competitors, and how do you differ from them? Also describe any alternative solutions that customers use to achieve similar outcomes.

Lastly, communicate distribution channels (sales and marketing):

• Sales strategy – how do you sell and engage prospects, what are the key actions in the sales process?

• Pricing – what’s the pricing goal, how much does the product cost, and what is the target average revenue per account?

• Marketing strategy – how are you finding prospects in the market, what are the key channels you’re using, what’s your customer acquisition cost?

• Elevator pitch – how should everyone who reads the slide explain what your product delivers?

Communicate better, finetune strategy, and increase alignment

I’ve used slides like this before as a summary in presentations to give teams context and grounding on how their work connects to the go-to-market process.

Whether you already have a defined GTM strategy or not, it’s always an interesting process to review within these boundaries with some questions in mind:

• Can you spot misalignment in your GTM, rough edges across the components that create some friction?

• Are there still questions around who your customers are and their problems, your product differentiators, or how you compete?

• Does everyone understand why your price is what it is?

• Are people actually using the customer value / product differentiator points in conversations?

One of the most powerful pieces of this template is sharing drafts with people across your business. After reviewing the slide, would they fundamentally disagree with the points you’ve detailed?

If so, you may need to revisit your underlying strategies to unlock higher levels of alignment. Focusing your you go-to-market strategy creates confidence, which in turn builds momentum.

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

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The post Communicating GTM strategy in one slide appeared first on Building Momentum.

A misguided founder is asked who the ideal customer is. “Everyone!” That’s the genius of it! Everyone in the world will need this product!”

The same applies to eager early-stage B2B startup marketers, founders, and sales leads. “We will sell to every company in the industry.” Revisit a few months later… and you’ll find are still in the same place. Trying to sell to everyone – SMBs, midmarket, enterprise – without much success.

But those who narrowed their focus on a particular, specific type of customer will usually be further along. They’ll have evidence of traction, be starting to build their ‘mini-brand’, and a pipeline to match.

Why? Niching down brings a multitude of value to early startups: improving alignment, reducing ambiguity across all teams, and bringing people from product to success together to build for the right person. The priority is velocity.

Many startups are reticent to get niche and narrow. “We’ll lose too much time,” or “we need to sell to anyone who’ll take it,” overpowers target-focused teams. And in six months, they wonder why they aren’t seeing any patterns in their data, let alone closed won deals.

Enter the Ideal Customer Profile.

What’s an Ideal Customer Profile?

An ICP is a hypothetical representation of a best-fit customer for your business today. Let’s break it down:

• Hypothetical – a method for testing and iteration, not a hard rule

• Representation – a depiction, caricature that’s easily recognisable

• Best-fit – objective assessment of the type of customers that you can market to, sell to, and support effectively

• Today – that you can market/sell/support today (or in the very short-term)

ICPs aren’t personas – they don’t describe a person. They describe the company, the firmographics, and any identifying information that makes it easier to recognize them in the marketplace.

An Ideal Customer Profile probably contains information like:

• Industry

• Number of employees

• Revenue

• Growth rate

• Geographies

• Target market (e.g. sells to B2B or B2C)

• Attributes (e.g. tech stack)

• Behavior (e.g. company goals and daily activities)

• Business challenges

ICP fails

I see two common issues with startups using ICPs in their go-to-market strategy.

Balancing breadth

Firstly, the profile has to be broad enough to support marketing and sales activity, yet specific enough to provide a yes/no qualification with a high likelihood of converting to a customer. Unfortunately, the symptom for ICPs that are both too broad or too specific is the same: lack of traction.

ICP as fantasy

Secondly, I’ve seen some teams use ICP as a theoretical device; a dream of the perfect customer… if only they actually existed. An ICP must be based in evidence, or at least be a structured, hypothesis-based attempt to discover a customer segment that will react strongly to your current proposition.

In these scenarios, ICPs become meaningless busywork rather than a strong guiding light for teams across the business.

Bringing structure to your ICP journey

Most ICP advice on the internet just tells you to research your current customers, look for common patterns, and then document it. Easy.

Not so simple… especially if you’re just starting out.

Notion (the VC, not app) has a great resource guide on ICPs, and I’ve used their ICP template multiple times to bring structure to this part of GTM.

Without repeating their post, I’ll summarise the key steps with my tips below:

1. List the possibilities: get “uncomfortably narrow” and list out all of the segments that you could serve. Use your existing customers, current prospects, market research, and more for inspiration. Segment via industry, revenue, number of employees, geographies, and anything else that can used to create a representation of an ideal customer.

2. Size the opportunities: add a bottoms-up TAM calculation or a proxy for the size of the market in the Addressable Value column. Tip: use lead-gen tools to search for lists of companies that match the descriptions you’ve created.

3. Assess Product Market Fit: agree the criteria that match the capabilities of your product with the needs of the customer. Try to keep them simple with Yes or No answers, like “accepts card payments” or “receives 1000s of customer emails each day”. Use an obvious ratings system for scores. Average out the criteria score for each segment.

   • On obvious rating systems; I use 5 for yes or high, 3 for maybe or medium, 1 for low, 0 for no. This create clearer delineations between scores, for easier prioritization.

4. Assess their propensity to buy: using the same approach, list criteria that defines how easy it is to do business with those segments. These criteria might range from simple (are their employees easy to find on LinkedIn?), to complex (does this segment require custom setup? are they willing to do business with a startup?). Use the same scoring system and average it up.

Then, the fun bit: combine the PMF criteria and propensity to buy score for each segment, and explore in conjunction with the addressable value you detailed.

• Are certain segments bigger markets, but harder to sell to?

• Are there high PMF segments you could reach today, but don’t have big markets?

• Do any segments stand out particularly high or low in either category that challenges current thinking?

You’re then left with a prioritized list of Ideal Customer Profiles that you can discuss, make decisions on, and – most importantly – use as a hypothesis to experiment with your go-to-market.

Validating the ICP

Ultimately, your ICP is a bet that you’re making. Are we able to build/market/sell/support these companies effectively? Hopefully, your ICP is based on current activity, and becomes a refinement rather than a redo. Then, validation is less of an issue: continue to do the work, see the results.

For those where an ICP is new and untested, think about the odds of success along the bet. Based on what you know and have done, is the biggest unknown whether you can market to them, or sell to them? This helps understand where to focus your validation efforts. It might be useful to assign a small cross-functional ‘tiger team’ to focus just on ICP customers before rolling out to the rest of the business.

ICP is strategy

An ideal customer profile is a tool to speed up your go-to-market by aligning product, marketing, sales, and success on the type of organization you are building for.

Don’t let it become a stale artefact. ICPs should adapt every six months as you learn more, better understand your performance with segments, and narrow down the ideal customers for your business.

If an ICP doesn’t work out… that’s fine, it’s expected. The ICP is a device to test our hypothesis, whether we can build for/market/sell/support this customer effectively. Look for qualitative signals (lack of excitement and urgency) just as much as quantitative ones (responses to marketing/sales activity, revenue).

Use the ICP as an alignment tool. Embed the profile across the business in conjunction with personas to reiterate the customers that you’re building and solving for (and importantly, who you are not solving for). Velocity – how much is achieved in a certain time period – will increase as a result of reduced ambiguity.

Eventually your ICP will broaden, as a halo effect of success organically introduces you into adjacent segments. But that’s another challenge.

In the meantime, remember: niches for riches*.

• For non-Americans: ‘niches’ rhymes with ‘riches’ in American English (yep, like “nitches”…)

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

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Everybody has a reasoned and valid opinion on how pricing should be set, from experience with past companies, watching competitors, ‘best practices’ articles, or even individuals influenced by the ‘IKEA effect’ bias. Rarely is there any alignment on the pricing objectives: the goal that pricing should help you achieve.

Here are some fictional examples that you might recognize from real life:

• The CEO, who wants low prices to win more customers

• Your head of product, who wants to charge more to reflect the product quality

• A CMO who wants to use pricing to position for the mid-market

• The CFO whose team put much effort into calculating COGs and wants to ensure a healthy profit margin

As a product marketer or person in charge of coordinating pricing, you might be tempted to lock stakeholders in a room and wait with baited breath for them to walk out, smiles and handshakes all around as they celebrate their new-found alignment.

Except… that doesn’t happen! You may appear to have a grasp of loose objectives, only to discover everyone else still has a different understanding. You can still be dealing with fallout from decisions that didn’t have full buy-in months after implementing.

So what should you do to keep your pricing process on track, and gain the confidence you need to move forward?

Gain clarity and alignment

At Kayako – for our failed product launch – we were introduced to the concept of pricing objectives by Chris Hopf, a pricing consultant, and iterated to find a regular, repeatable process of setting and revisiting pricing objectives that works for us.

We find this process helpful to:

• get everyone on the same page

• set direction

• make decisions

• define success

• (occasionally) defend our approach against new, off-piste initiatives

Before any discussion, the leadership team receive individual spreadsheets, where each row is a pricing objective — you can find the list we use at the bottom of this article.

Each person is given 100 points and must divide this amongst the objectives they think are most important: the bigger the share, the higher priority. There’s just one other rule — no single objective can be allocated less than 20 points. With this approach, you’re forced to consider which objectives are truly the most important and make tradeoffs.

When evaluating the objectives, your leadership team need to consider how they will affect:

• strategic company objectives

• tactical objectives

• your customer’s perception of your brand and product

• your organization’s resources

When all the responses are in, we bring them together in one spreadsheet. If necessary to rid the sheet of “noise”, discard all 20-point awards: if the objective was given the minimum score, then it’s a minimum priority.

We share the results with the leadership team in a structured discussion. The goal? Leave the room with confidence on what pricing should achieve for your business.

Your agenda might look like something this:

• What is the top objective, and does that align with business goals?

• Are there any outliers or anomalies?

• Which objectives are most surprising?

• Can we agree that the two priorities with the highest scores are the most important moving forward?

• What impact will focusing on these two priorities have on the wider business?

Often, within 90 minutes we’ve got the alignment and direction necessary to continue along the pricing process with confidence and clarity at all levels.

Example pricing objectives

This is an incomplete list of pricing objectives you could use for your business. These are from a variety of sources, so make sure they are relevant before using them in your process.

• Target return on investment

• Target market share

• Increase or accelerate market share (e.g. number of customers)

• Maximize long-run profit (over a year or longer)

• Maximize short-run profit (over the next quarter)

• Grow sales revenue

• Maximize customer lifetime value (encourage upgrades and expansion)

• Maximize customer retention and reduce churn

• Reduce new business pricing objections or reduce sales cycle length

• Simplify for internal/operational reasons

• Stabilize the market / compete on non-price considerations

• Convey a particular image

• Desensitize customers to price

• Be the price leader

• Discourage entry by new competitors

• Match competitor pricing

• Avoid regulation

• Maintain distribution channel support and loyalty (e.g. partners)

• Be regarded as “fair” by customers

• Create interest and excitement

• Use price of one product to upsell other products

• Discourage others from lowering prices

• Quickly recover investment specifically in product development

• Generate volume in order to drive down costs

• Prepare for sale of the business (harvesting)

• Business survival

• Encourage the exit of marginal firms from the industry

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