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?

The post The product launch has become a vanity exercise appeared first on Building Momentum.

Hello – it’s been a while, but I’m getting back into regular writing on Building Momentum. It’s been a crazy few years in my day job! At some point I’ll write about what I’ve learnt about scaling product marketing through obscene revenue growth, moving from single-product to multi-product, and the business change management required to support that.

But for now, I hope to get back into weekly posts. If you have any topics you’d like me to cover, drop me a message.

Get my new free positioning course

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In just 7 days, you’ll learn how to:

Clarify your unique value
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Attract the right customers (and close more deals)

It’s packed with actionable insights, templates, and tips from my 15+ years of product marketing and positioning experience.

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The Fat Duck. Dinner. Sublimotion. Oaxen Krog. Geranium. The Jane. Momofuko Ko.

Believe it or not, they’re not made up words. They’re the names of some of the world’s hottest, most acclaimed restaurants in the world.

If you’ve ever been to a Michelin-starred restaurant, you’ll be familiar with one particular feeling. You’ll get there, look at the menu, and you consciously plan to get a McDonald’s on the way home.

The portion sizes are tiny. The menu is limited. Adaptations are rare; off-menu requests are often not allowed.

And yet… these restaurants are consistently booked out. You have more luck getting into Harvard than getting a booking at French Laundry. Diners willingly pay premium prices for what might feel, at first glance, like a constrained and rigid experience.

Why? Because those constraints are what make them extraordinary. The way the chef has designed the menu, the dishes, the entire experience transmits and embodies the positioning of the restaurant.

If the definition of positioning is to “occupy a space in the mind of your customer”, these restaurants are renowned for crafting an identify that’s impossible to overlook.

Unlike your casual fast-food takeouts, chain eateries, or gastropubs, these restaurants don’t deign to cater to everyone. They don’t serve spaghetti alongside sushi, or offer endless variations.

Instead, they focus on a few curated dishes. They refine each one until it’s unforgettable (and therefore, occupies a space in the mind of the customer). The scarcity of a limited menu, refined portion sizes, and the year-long waiting list, create value.

How is this relevant to B2B SaaS product marketing? Well, the same principles apply in competitive positioning.

Be more Fat Duck, less Cheesecake Factory

The Cheesecake Factory is a marvel of indecision. It’s 20 pages of options, with everything from Tex-Mex to Italian, burgers to brunch. It caters to everyone because their target customer is, well, everyone.

Let’s compare this to The Fat Duck: a three-Michelin-starred restaurant known for its experimental, multi-sensory approach to dining that’s designed to evoke nostalgia, surprise, and delight.

From the playful “Sound of the Sea,” where seafood is served alongside an iPod playing ocean sounds, to the whimsical meat fruit designed to look like a mandarin, every dish is a masterclass in storytelling, precision, and refinement.

Every detail from the ingredients to the presentation is deliberate, reinforces a distinct identity (a position) that lingers in the customer’s mind long before they arrive, and long after they leave.

In SaaS, trying to cater to everyone with every feature or use case often leads to diluted messaging and unclear value propositions. Just like The Cheesecake Factory’s sprawling menu, this approach makes it hard for customers to see what makes you special and why they should choose you.

What this can teach us about B2B product marketing

The magic of Michelin-starred restaurants lies in their clarity. What they do not do is as important, if not more important, than what they do.

To stand out, you can’t be everything to everyone

It’s so tempting to spray-and-pray multiple use-cases in the early days to get traction and try to see what lands. I’ve known CROs who pitch ten different versions of the same product each day – just don’t tell the product team.

This is a disservice not just to your product, but to your entire business strategy. You don’t learn anything.

Instead (and let’s be honest, this is so basic but everyone needs a reminder), you need to:

1. Understand the market (and by market, we mean a group of customers with similar needs)
2. Identify their underserved needs
3. Craft a solution that meets their needs better than anyone else

Simple, right?

The more clear you can be on what you do, for whom, and what they get from it, the faster you’ll learn and the more effective you’ll become.

Refine like your business depends on it (well, it does)

It’s important to test your strategy, not just whether you can build, market, or sell something.

My friend, PMM life partner, and fellow GTM Playbook course instructor Alicia is one of the most holistic, iterative product marketers I know when it comes to GTM strategy. At multiple companies, she’s helped them learn the right go-to-market mix of customers, product, pricing and positioning they need to grow successfully.

Check out the interview below to find Alicia’s tips on defining and validating your ideal customer profile.

This is probably my favorite point from the interview: In customer development interviews, you need to ask open-ended questions about the customer’s challenges, priorities, and decision-making processes, not just what they think of your product.

Why? You need to solve a customer need, but you need to make sure someone has the capabilities and motivations to solve them in the first place. For example, in the climate tech space, Alicia validated that fintech companies were interested in sustainability, but couldn’t move fast enough – so tested a different industry and saw just as much engagement with a faster sales cycle.

Positioning is strategy, and everything is your product

Whether it’s the iPod experience at Fat Duck, the luxury at Geranium, or the choreographed movement of the waiters at Eleven Madison Park, your positioning shows up in every detail.

It’s not just your website or your sales deck you need to think about. Your positioning influences how your sales reps talk to customers, the attitude they use on the phones. It changes the way your partners represent you to their customers, how your website agency design your site, and how recruiters hire new colleagues into your business.

So you’d better work hard on it and make sure it’s optimized around your best-fit customer.

And from your customer’s perspective, they don’t just buy your product. Especially if it’s SaaS, they’re not buying access to some code. They’re buying the entire experience around it. They’re buying into your sales process, constantly evaluating whether it’s worth their time in a thousand microdecisions every conversation. They’re buying your customer service, with trust as their currency of choice. They’re buying status, and whether deploying your software is going to earn them a promotion.

So when it comes to refinement, make like an obsessed executive chef.

Be proud of what you do (and spin your tiny menu)

In tough competitive evaluations and RFIs, not having certain products or features can cost you marks. But that’s not a reason to give in.

Say, for example, there’s a prospect looking for 10 different features. You only have 7 of their key needs, while a competitor can deliver on all 10. Does that mean you should give up, decry your product a failure, and reduce your ambitions?

Absolutely not.

Your business chose to focus on those 7 features for a reason. As a product marketer, sales rep, or product manager it’s your job to make sure that reason is clear, known, and can be communicated with confidence.

Remember: Michelin-starred restaurants have tiny menus for a reason. When you focus on what you do best and communicate it with confidence, you’ll leave a lasting impression… just like a perfectly curated dining experience.

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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Let’s face it, no two product marketing jobs are the same. Consider this random selection from current product marketing job descriptions:

• “In this role, you will work with others in marketing to establish compelling product positioning & messaging.”
• “Responsible for the cross-functional success of large projects and product launches—with a strong bias toward operational and organizational excellence.”
• “You’ll own the marketing strategy and product marketing campaigns for all business lines.”
• “…will be responsible for growing our customer base and understanding their needs.”

As you can see, the job descriptions are all over the place. The ideal candidate for one role might not thrive in another, given the distinct priorities each role demands.

The many faces of product marketing

Honestly, product marketing varies significantly across different organizations. This variability makes many product marketers akin to a Swiss Army knife, adaptable to any and every need—and believe me, the needs are plentiful. One day, you might be crafting customer communications for a crisis; the next day, you could be issuing a press release for a major new product launch, or even tweaking sales collateral over a single word difference.

I view product marketing as a gap-filler. In early-stage companies, these gaps are numerous. In more mature companies, the gaps narrow, filled by PMMs with specialized roles such as competitive intelligence or customer marketing, or by other teams like dedicated sales enablement, go-to-market strategy, or product operations.

Perhaps you’ll choose to specialize in areas like competitive intelligence, sales enablement, product-led growth, solution marketing, or another emerging niche within product marketing.

However, for the majority of PMMs, you’ll develop as a generalist. But to develop as a T-shaped marketer, you must identify where to dive deep—to advance your career and deliver the greatest value to your employer.

So, just like the job description examples above, should your focus be on positioning, crafting marketing campaigns, delving into customer insights, or leadership skills required to drive the product forward?

I’m going to give you my top three priorities that I think are most important to develop skills, experience, and confidence in as a product marketer.

Understand the customer…

First up, you need to develop the strongest skills and undeniable prowess at reading the room (i.e., your customers and the market).

I don’t just mean being able to fake up a persona doc (because, don’t forget, you should be discovering personas), or because you can run a customer interview. In order to understand the customer, you need to truly become the customer.

Building empathy will help you walk in their shoes. Watching sales calls will help you learn how to react to your positioning and sales pitch. Evaluating their buying journey means you’ll see the market from their perspective. Experiencing the product through their eyes (and support tickets) will give you unique context on their aspirations and frustrations.

But that’s the art side—don’t forget the science part too. Knowing your win/loss numbers, testing positioning accurately, and how to orchestrate your CRM data will give you unique insights and help you keep your finger on the pulse of your market.

… then build collaborative loops internally…

Here’s an unfortunate hard truth.

Unless you can establish effective, two-way relationships within your organization, the deepest customer insights won’t translate into successful outcomes. You could be a customer savant, but still struggle unless you can turn that knowledge into influence and execution.

Building these loops means creating continuous, robust channels for communication among marketing, sales, product, and customer service teams. It means sharing two-way honest, raw insights in the pursuit of growth.

Sharing insights, challenges, and successes regularly ensures everyone is on the same page and has the opportunity to share their unique perspectives – whilst also learning (from you, amongst other inputs) how the market is reacting. It’s about making sure that every team member understands their role in the go-to-market strategy and feels integral to both the process and the outcomes.

This isn’t just about coordinating projects. It’s about crafting a symphony of skills and knowledge that raises the entire organization’s ability to deliver on the promise of your product. That means tight relationships with every level; slightly playing politics, but mostly being true to the only person that matters (your customer, if you had to ask).

…before bringing the product to market.

Your GTM hinges on your ability to combine the first two priorities with a strong external marketing strategy. That is, how quickly and how well you work from insights, through influence, to execution.

I’ve made this mistake. I see many PMMs across businesses making this mistakes too. Too much work happens in the dark, and as we all know, plants grow best when exposed to sunlight.

Good product marketing means marketing the product. You need to go from a realization, to socialization, and finally implementation in as short a timeframe as possible (ideally in two weeks, not two months).

Some external product marketing launches will need the whole shebang from press releases to teaser marketing and the kitchen sink. Some will need minor tweaks to the website and some sales enablement. Either way, every thing you ‘launch’ into the world should be something you’re proud of.

A big part of this is positioning, messaging, and your website as the shop window. These should be closely integrated as part of your priorities above, as they provide metrics that directly correlate (through lead-gen, conversion, and sales win rates) to the impact and influence of your product marketing role.

PMM is the chameleon of marketing

As a lifelong product marketer, I’m biased… but product marketers are the most capable people I’ve ever worked with.

Product marketing is crucial, but nobody really understand why. It’s multifaceted, but often underestimated. It’s strategic, but can be seen as tactical. It’s about leading change, but also about ensuring consistency. It’s visionary, yet grounded in the day-to-day realities.

By keeping these three priorities—understanding the customer, fostering internal collaboration, and mastering market strategy—at the top of your agenda, you can’t go wrong. Commit to these priorities, and you’ll navigate the complexities of product marketing with confidence and effectiveness. No matter the challenges that come your way, developing intuition and expertise will ensure you remain agile and impactful in your role, continually driving your product—and your career—forward.

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

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

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Imagine this: you’re a year or two post-launch and things are going well. You’ve got a steady stream of leads, marketing is building traction, you’re seeing high-quality sales conversations. It’s all you’ve wanted for so long. 

So what do you do? You capitalize on it!

You decide to double down on your current strategy.

You hire more sales reps who are eager to take the simple, repeatable playbook you’ve developed and roll it out. 

You expand your product team – surely you’ve found the winning formula, and it’s just a matter of building all the things you’ve heard customers ask for. 

You bring on the whole marketing team and give them the budgets they’re asking for.

The brief is simple. Scale what’s working.

The teams build processes, build alignment, set up the sales and marketing platforms. The calendars are created, the annual planning, the big strategic goals set.

Sounds great.

Except… 

A year later, you’re running out of cash, your team are burnt out, and nothing’s working as you expected, anywhere. Everything is just not running to plan.

You’re a victim of premature go-to-market optimization.

I’ve seen this happen a few times at various size companies.

The plan is decidedly to ‘scale’ – but the go-to-market strategy – the product, ICP, pricing, proposition – is still in flux.

Putting your foot on the gas before the GTM has settled means you’re unnecessarily (and unconsciously) prioritizing ‘repeatability’ over innovation and flexibility.

That becomes hard to unwind because you’ve got targets… which are otherwise known as ‘numbers picked out of thin air that you’ve now committed to, or face personal performance issues’.

Your teams have quotas and they want the easiest route to reach their on-target earnings. Do you think they’re going to jump at the chance to try something experimental and unproven: shifting to a new target customer, to a new product, or to new messaging? Probably not.

So instead, wait. Scale reactively based on demand, rather than scale the supply. Scale when your glass is overflowing – don’t buy a bucket in the hope you’ll catch the rain.

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 risk of scaling too soon appeared first on Building Momentum.

Hello!

You might be thinking, “How come I’ve not seen any emails from JDP and Building Momentum lately?”

Well I went on a long holiday, came home, and struggled to get back into the groove with things again. But, I’ve recommitted to the core priorities that are important to me right now – this newsletter being one of them.

And, with that, let’s get back into a regular stream of product marketing concepts, advice, and stories!

Thanks for sticking with me – glad to have you on the journey.

JDP

P.S. From now, I’ll just be sending one post a week. You’ll find the same insights, tips, and frameworks – plus a few related articles or tweets that I found interesting – skip down to the end of the email for The Overview.

Product marketers: Don’t forget to create.

It’s so easy to get lost in a world of research, strategizing, relationship building, engaging others, collecting feedback, analysing everything, reporting, testing, validating, planning, documenting, training…

I get it.

We’re good at these. We’re generally happy to spend time digging in, doing a better job than before, seeing what we can learn, looking for a silver bullet that will fix everything forever.

And it definitely is valuable work. Sometimes we do learn something that has an outsized impact on our go-to-market approach, changing the business forever.

But be honest; when was the last time that happened? Early-stage startups are most likely to pivot – but that insight isn’t going to come from siloed analysis. If you’re at a maturing business, new discoveries are rare. And sure, you can eek out optimizations from micro-work – but likely going to move your northstar needle.

Sometimes, the amount of energy we expend in our areas of expertise and the work we often enjoy the most doesn’t serve us – and our businesses – best.

Make your work tangible, by making something

Yes, we need to understand our customers and the market through research.

Yes, we need to build good, strong relationships that help us influence.

Yes, we need to engage our cross-functional teams to get buy-in and motivate.

Yes, we need to analyze data and insights to identify patterns and segments.

Yes, we need to create coordinated strategy that sets a long-term vision and our plan to get there.

But that shouldn’t come at the expense of creating.

Only when we create something do we put our strategy, our insight, our perspective into action. We form something out of nothing. Ideas become concrete, tangible, discussable.

We need to create great marketing material that speaks to how well we understand our customers, and reflects how we want to be strategically perceived in the world. Sometimes that’s a webpage, sometimes it’s a brochure, or an email campaign.

We need to create great buyer journey collateral that motivates and moves the needle. We understand the questions our customers have at each stage – we should answer them in the most engaging, convincing, differentiated way we can.

We need to create great customer experiences that engage, persuade, motivate, surprise, and delight.

Whether it’s a feature launch, a multi-channel marketing campaign, a new onboarding nurture sequence, sales tools, a PDF one-pager, or a sales talk track… we’re representing the business. We’re setting the standard for how we go out into the world, how we talk about our product and it’s value, how we differentiate.

And if we can’t do that to an extremely high standard, then how will everyone – from sales, marketing, and product teams, to customers – do the same?

Product marketing is strategy – but don’t forget to market your product

There’s also another ‘curse’ that affects ambitious product marketers. The more we spend on strategy and planning, we get a taste for not doing the work. “We’ll sort out execution once we’ve got all the information,” we think.

Well, that’s wrong. You’ll never have perfect information.

Product marketing is not a game of chess. You don’t get special moves.

Product marketers is checkers. The only way you will make progress is by moving forward, step-by-step.

As product marketers, we’ve got to market the product. And that means doing the work. Creating the collateral. Producing the webpage. Shipping the deck. Building the campaign. Every day.

So there you go. One tip, learnt the hard way, and shared so you don’t make the same mistake.

The Overview

More feedback is not better feedback

Click through to read the full tweet. Your biggest impact will not come from the research you do – it will be how you translate that research into action. Here’s my favorite snippet:

The alpha really comes from *translating that feedback to unique insights* and from *making creative choices* on

a) what problems to actually solve
b) what customers to prioritize
c) what features to build & not build
d) how the user experience works
e) how to market the product in a way that really resonates

Product-market fit is a journey, not a destination

Here’s an interesting article on First Round about how a company found product-market fit twice – first in B2C, then in B2B. Even though they had great demand from their B2C value proposition, the economics and level of investment required meant it wasn’t a smart move.

The era of subtle differentiation

Was Cash App unique? No. It was subtly different – being 2x better at 10 things, instead of 10x better at one thing.

In the early days of the Cash Card, people sometimes asked why anyone would choose the Cash Card over a BofA card (in a lot of cases they’d also ask why anyone would choose Cash App over Venmo). I thought a lot about how to answer this, and within the 10x model for differentiation [1] (which was dominant in 2015, and I think remains dominant in software industry narratives to this day). I didn’t have a good answer. My answer at the time was that we weren’t going to be 10x better at one thing, because it just wasn’t possible. But we could be 2x better at 10 things.

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 marketers: don’t forget to create. appeared first on Building Momentum.

Before I get into it, I don’t mean this to be a negative. I think it’s just stating the facts, and we have to deal with it regardless.

But product marketing is often a thankless role.

I’ve seen firsthand how crucial product marketing – both fundamental strategy and execution – is to the success of a product. From initial discovery and validation, to searching for product/market fit, scaling revenue, and eventual sunsetting – product marketers bring something special.

That special something can’t be replaced. It’s a mixture of customer empathy, commercial nous, pragmatic execution, frameworks and gut intuition, second-order thinking, and a hundred other attributes.

And yes, other teams might have some of the same ingredients: our friends in product, marketing, sales, strategy. But it’s not quite the same. Their worldviews are generally fixed on one level only. Product managers think about the broad customer. Sales are all about the one-to-one. Marketers think in segments. Only product marketers can zoom in and zoom out, organically, effortlessly.

What a product marketer brings is more valuable than the sum of its parts.

Our role is complex, interdisciplinary. We’ve got to know enough about everything – or be good at learning it. What other role needs to know about market research methods, how to educate others, sales process, product development fundamentals, copywriting and positioning, and marketing channel strategy?

We’ve got to work with literally everyone to make anything happen. So our professional skills need to grow too. How to build trust, balance expectations, influence teams without authority. And, for what it’s worth, most of this is invisible work, in Slack conversations or Zoom calls or IRL 1:1s – hidden from plain sight. We face the brunt of internal politics, conflicts, disputes. We try to represent the voice of the customer, maintain a delicate balance between stakeholders, and cross the line just enough to advocate for what we think is right.

Because our influence work is hidden, we have to show we’re doing work. But customer research – is barely valued. We spend countless hours building mental models of customers, and competitors, and the landscape. We transform that, on the fly, from thin air, into positioning, messaging, that become how our product is perceived in the market. But this, generally, is also unrecognized. It’s only writing, right? It’s not creating real value, right?

So, we then have to put all of that into stuff. PDFs, website copy, go-to-market documents, marketing and sales collateral. But no revenue is ever won because of one PDF, or one webpage, or GTM motion initiative. Our efforts might contribute significantly to product adoption, growth, revenue… but we can’t quantify our influence. And if you can’t quantify it, you need to build trust. You have to build an internal narrative that product marketing is a long-term investment and whilst it might not be apparent in the numbers right now, the full extent of its value will come.

With all of these multiple conscious and unconscious worksteams, we’re always in a state of flux and generally under-resourced. The market changes. Sales need more. We need more leads. Product need more support. Who’s going to deal with all that? You! Can we hire more folks? Probably not. There’s no ‘off’ day; you’re always on. Even on days off, you can’t help but think about your todo list, the big rocks you’ve got to tackle, or how you need to approach a certain conversation.

But, at the same time, product marketing is probably the most rewarding role in the marketing space.

It’s a thrilling and fulfilling career path for people who thrive in dynamic environments. We work with tons of different people and gain exposure we never would have otherwise. We build diverse relationships that quickly become less ‘work’ and more ‘support’. We get to know our colleagues deeply and intimately. We become half-PMM, half-therapist.

We’re adaptable and versatile. We can do – and do do – anything and everything. We can learn faster, harder, deeper. We build a holistic understanding of the business, its mechanics, and all of its facets. Of the customer, the market, the variables at play. We develop core skills and mental models for thinking, not just processes for doing.

We recognise that success is a team sport. Our success is the businesses success, and vice versa. We enable others to meet their goals, exceed the targets, to feel confident. We thrive on building momentum – things getting faster, easier, growing, building. We feel pride and accomplishment in unique ways – when a customer repeats our positioning, when we win a great logo, when users love the product, when we learn new things that can help us build better.

Product marketing may be a thankless role, but the inherent challenges – and opposite opportunities for growth – make it an exciting, fulfilling career choice. While recognition may not always be immediate… and while the day-to-day may be stressful… we can enjoy the unique experiences that product marketing offers, and take pride in contributing to growth more than many people will understand.

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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In my first post of 2023, I wrote that ‘try’ is my word of the year.

My word for 2023 is ‘Try’. The last few years of Covid disruption have really left me feeling a bit… unsatisfied with what I can achieve. Even though we’ve done a lot, I know there’s more I can do.

For the last three months, I can honestly say that I’ve been trying in all areas I wanted to improve: career, work, side hustles, relationships, socialising, hobbies, and self-care.

And it’s been super fun – overcoming challenges at work, pushing myself to be more outspoken, leaning in more strongly to relationships, seeing good results from my workout routine, and – perhaps most importantly? – partying all night on a number of occasions.

It’s been so rewarding – and we’re only a quarter of the way into the year. 75% left.

I don’t want this to be a hustleporn post, but wanted to share some of the things that have resonated with me, and that I’m keeping in mind moving forward.

The goal is momentum

If the game is trying, each goal is momentum.

That feeling where things get faster, easier, bigger. The connections are becoming more obvious. There’s output, results, evidence. It’s like climbing a mountain, but you’ve got stairs instead of a hard rockface.

For me, this means getting feedback – positive or constructive. It means feeling personal growth – even if it’s sore. Celebrating the wins, rolling with the punches.

Mindset matters

Trying is a mindset.

Sometimes it’s harder to ‘try’ than you want it to be. Even if you’re feeling tired or cranky… and especially if you’re feeling awkward. Feeling uncomfortable is a sign that you’re pushing yourself and trying something new.

But sometimes, trying comes really easy.

A feeling of comfort when you understand that failure isn’t a setback, but just a temporary diversion. Beaming with pride in new-found confidence. Getting that warm fuzzy feeling when you realise that actually, you don’t need permission… “I can”.

Focus on the big rocks

We’ve all got tough stuff to do. Big projects to run, hard conversations to have, ambitious targets to hit. Focus on those.

You know what’s not a big rock? Overthinking the implications of small and inconsequential decisions. Over-rotating on things that aren’t on your customers or stakeholders radar. Self-importance, pompousness. Bikeshedding.

Everything, everywhere, all at once

Worrying about priorities and bandwidth is also pointless.

The energy I’ve wasted with trying to get things into Asana, trying to keep up with a todo list, or stressing out about all of the things I’ve had to do is magnitudes more than just doing the things. Keeping the plates spinning just enough, while picking and choosing the ones to do fancy tricks with.

At least, that works for me; I work best in a state of flow. You may find more optimal ways of working that suit you better.

But the point remains: worrying about the system you use to prioritise is minor, compared to just prioritising things.

It’s your choice

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

I’ve always appreciated this Shakespeare quote. At first, I thought it was a great quote for nihilism. We’re just acting according to a script, so why both?

But then I began to view it from a more existentialist perspective. Life isn’t a big, predetermined play… it’s all improvisation. It’s up to you to write your own script.

Are you really doing your best?

Doing your best isn’t about the result. You know you did your best before you know the result. Doing your best is about the position you find yourself in when you show up. Over the long term, the average person who constantly puts themselves in a good position beats the genius who finds themselves in a poor position.

FS

I also think that trying means accountability – both ways.

If you’ve watched The Good Place, you’ll know the core theme – what do we owe to each other? And if you’ve read Five Dysfunctions of a Team, you’ll know the fourth dysfunction is the avoidance of accountability. To try is to feel good that you’ve tried, and pretty much everything we do is a team sport, so encouraging others to try is a requirement too.

Over to you

As I come to write the conclusion to this post, I’ve gotta admit – I’m not too sure what I set out to write, or what I expect you to take away from it. All I know is that this topic has been bubbling away in my consciousness for the last three months, and I had to get my thoughts out on digital paper.

So, here’s to the next nine months of trying. And I sincerely hope that you’ll experience what it means to try soon.

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

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Positioning is what your company says about itself to the world, and can be the difference between being the hottest, must-have software, or the dullest product on earth.

Your positioning will adapt and evolve to remain relevant and effective – or at least, attempt to do so.

But it’s hard to see this in action. Positioning evolves pretty slowly at any company – in years, rather than months. So, in this example, I’ve taken a look at Zendesk – the customer support platform you all know (and if you’re a user, probably hate).

I’ve stepped back in time over 16 years of Internet Archive snapshots to look at how Zendesk positioned themselves, and see what insights we can glean about changes to their target customer, value proposition, frame of reference, and market trends.

But first, when should positioning evolve?

From my previous post on when you should consider repositioning, I called out the following:

• Product offering has legitimately changed – If you’ve made an acquisition, added a new product line, or developed new capabilities that vastly change the outcomes your customers can achieve, it’s time to refresh.
• New unique, unconventional wisdom unlocked – Unconventional wisdom is a great way to stand out from your competitors, re-educate your customers, and develop a strong sales and marketing narrative that drives urgency and demand.
• Customer patterns and feedback – As you win new customers, your ‘best-fit customer’ will change. As you continue to sell and market and support to them, you’ll learn much more about what’s going on in their minds – new hopes, dreams, and fears that can enable stronger positioning.
• Specific sales funnel challenges – Drops in MQLs or closed won rates can be really great indicators that you need to revisit the way you present your brand to the market.

And they still hold true. Building new product features, introducing new concepts or categories to the market, learning about your next ideal customers, and reacting to challenging sales environments cover nearly every reason you might need to change and adapt your positioning.

Zendesk’s positioning evolution

Zendesk is one of the longest-running ‘real’ SaaS businesses that we can look back almost two decades and see how their positioning, messaging, and value proposition has changed.

So… I’ve gone back over the last 16 years, and taken a screenshot of their website homepage hero section. This is the digital version of cutting a tree trunk and learning how old it is and how the conditions have changed each year.

Only in this case, we’re able to understand how Zendesk thought about:

• Their target customers
• Their value proposition
• The frame of reference they use
• Trends affecting the market

You can scroll down to the bottom of this post to see screenshots each year with a brief commentary. But first, let’s take a look at how it’s changed:

What we can learn from Zendesk

Zendesk have been unapologetic to evolve and experiment with positioning over the years, and while we’ll never know the full reasoning or context surrounding their decisions, we’re able to pass some judgement over what has changed – and potentially why.

Target customer: From IT to any company

Zendesk started by targeting agile IT organizations in 2007 but expanded to serve any company, large or small. Very quickly, Zendesk found product/market-fit quickly with a much broader audience, but still kept messaging to appeal to IT user needs throughout.

Value proposition: Reinventing the helpdesk, to the better choice

Straight out of the gate, Zendesk focused on how they were reimagining a boring software category for the new Web 2.0 age. Throughout the years, they’ve played around with several value props including those on speed, customer satisfaction, and – their most famous – “Beautiful customer support software”.

Today, Zendesk have landed on how they help businesses to meet customer needs, set teams up for success, and keep their business in sync.

Frame of reference: From helpdesk to multichannel and more

Unlike many tech darlings, Zendesk didn’t really try to own a frame of reference or create a category. Beginning as a helpdesk (common in the IT world) to ending with customer service software (a much broader framing), Zendesk has always been relatively consistent. Over the years, they’ve adjusted their frame of reference with clarifiers like multi-channel software, beautiful software, powerful platforms, etc.

Market trends: Web 2.0 to speed and scalability

Zendesk has ridden the general waves of B2B tech over the last 16 years. Firstly calling out the Web 2.0 trend of interconnectivity and fun user experiences, to then reiterating the benefits of on-demand (rather than on-premise) software, to gradually evolving as the market moved towards customer support as growth lever through better customer relationships. These can help build urgency and new consideration opportunities, as well as link your positioning to important trends.

Key takeaways

Over 16 years, Zendesk has remained the leader in the industry (not for our lack of trying!) by evolving to reflect changes in the market and customer needs.

Emphasising its core strengths, and staying true to its goal of reinventing the support software industry around the wholesome message of ‘tender loving customer care’ since 2008 is still visible in their tone of voice today. However, the 2013 repositioning as beautifully simple customer service software is probably their most resonant and successful, and still comes up when talking about Zendesk today.

So what can we learn?

• Evolving and broadening your target customer works – once you’re seeing positive shoots of product/market-fit
• Leaning into market trends can help influence your value proposition with the latest cool stuff – and drive new consideration opportunities too
• More than anything, your frame of reference must be from the perspective of your customers – adding clarifiers helps create differentiation here
• As you learn more, you can evolve the value proposition from focusing on features and benefits, to defining the valuable outcomes your customers seek – just don’t take it took far

Zendesk over the years

Below are screenshots from the Zendesk homepage each year according to the Internet Archive.

2007

It’s the summer of 2007, and Zendesk is still in pre-launch mode. Their homepage makes it clear their market: IT teams, looking for modern web 2.0 style software, and they’re bold enough to say they’re reinventing the help desk.

I also copied in their about page, adding more color to Zendesk’s IT team origins – but how they see an opportunity by connecting the features that IT teams care about, with the design and user experience they desire.

2008

Out of beta and using Flash – but see the language that Zendesk is using? Tender loving customer care – probably at stark odds with messaging from other IT help desk providers at the time.

Their hero section dials up the core benefits – elegant and simple, works for everyone, and no downloads or installs.

2009

Still using Flash Player, but we’ve now seen Zendesk jump from being for IT teams to being for any company, large and small. For context, 2009 was when Zendesk raised an undisclosed Series A in March, followed by a $6m Series B in August – undoubtedly this is the year that Zendesk knew they had product/market-fit.

Note their messaging still highlights ‘on-demand’ software, as companies were still getting used to SaaS delivery, but the value their customers are looking for is better customer care.

2010

In 2010 we see Zendesk dial back up the ‘reinvention’ angle, not seen since the first pre-launch homepage. Their header also calls out how it can help companies to engage their customers too, while their rotating callouts focus on core benefits like delivering ‘customer love’, being available ‘any time, any place’, and being ‘beyond SaaS’.

2011

In the December of 2010, Zendesk raise a $19m series C – and get to business. In 2011 they’re claiming 10k+ customers and also do a great job keyword-stuffing their homepage: help desk software, support ticket system, customer support platform.

And we see Zendesk’s messaging become more tangible. Gone is the lofty ‘reinventing’ message – and now it’s just the fastest way to great customer support. Supporting text highlights that Zendesk is agile, smart, and convenient.

2012

The fastest message continues into 2012 but we now see two new messages on their homepage:

• Powerful, yet simple: Positioning to appeal to their core IT team base, but wanting to reach a wider audience with a focus on simplicity.
• Multi-channel customer service software: Positioning to appeal to businesses pushing the boundaries – multi-channel across email, social, phone, chat, and more.

2013

We finally get to the phrase that everyone knows and remembers Zendesk for: beautifully simple customer service software.

We also see a ‘levelling up’ in terms of the overall value and outcome that customers are searching for. Fast customer support isn’t the endgame now – customer satisfaction is the holy grail.

2014

In 2014, Zendesk went public. And I think this homepage is probably an outcome of that, rather than an example of what actually worked well for them at the time.

It’s a good reminder that positioning doesn’t always have to serve your customers – sometimes, it can serve other purposes. In this case, we can speculate that it may have been to tell a story for the retail investor market.

Regardless, Zendesk have levelled up their messaging even higher still, probably to ineffective heights. There’s a lack of tangibility in this core message of ‘being better at customer service’.

2015

I think 2015 is another year where the brand marketers won the argument. Yes, bringing customers and their customers closer together is a good outcome, but it’s probably not the one that businesses are most motivated to achieve.

We do see an introduction of a frame of reference that makes senes: software for better customer service.

2016

The argument between the PMMs and the brand marketers is tipping ever more in the PMMs favour – but not quite. We see more information in the sub-hero section than we do above the fold.

Zendesk helps companies to provide a great overall customer experience. Aspirational enough? No. But clear.

Building customer relationships that are meaningful, personal, and productive. Tangible enough? No – feels like they’re skirting around the concept that “better customer support means customers spend more money”.

2017

The year of the big Zendesk rebrand, using geometric shapes to denote a whole suite of products. Building software for better relationships, great. Lending a hand? Not so sure.

2018

Deliver the best customer experience. Powerful, flexible, scalable customer service and engagement platform. Meeting the needs of any business. Clear, concise, and valuable.

2019

And it seems they found a winner – no changes over a whole year.

2020

We all know what happened in 2020, and this is a great example of reactive positioning. Scaling up faster than everything else is changing. Speaking to the core needs of getting to get up and running quickly, and flexibility to adapt to any need.

2021

Zendesk makes customer service better. Again, a return of ‘better’ – an ambiguous shapeshifter that can mean anything, to anyone – and probably why they use it. Better could mean more flexible to a support manager, more integrated to an IT person, or easier to use for a support agent.

We see Zendesk highlight the value their product delivers to businesses: meeting customer needs, setting team up for success, and keeping business in sync.

2022

Again, onto another winner? No changes for a whole other year.

2023

Even today, you’ll see the same hero header on the homepage.

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

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Something that every product marketer faces: how to deliver on our often long and involved projects.

The problems are many:

• Needing to be transparent and visible on what we’re working on
• Needing to show progress against outcomes as soon as possible, even while planning is in progress
• Needing to build some confidence by testing a direction

But… how?

• Foundational product marketing work takes time to research, refine, and implement
• Campaign work usually needs planning and then content creation before distribution
• Product marketing initiatives need a few sales cycles to see results

Not only does this mean we’re more divorced from the effects of our work, but that it’s harder for us to demonstrate our work in progress… lots of stuff is always ‘in progress’ or ‘planned’, and less is ‘done’.

Here are a few questions I ask product marketers who are facing similar issues.

What’s the least you can do to move forward?

I definitely know some folks who dream up big, massive, deeply-integrated campaigns and then spend ages trying to plumb it all together… although it’s mostly built on some assumptions and good (but untested) ideas.

So, rather than build all the things first – what are the questions you’re trying to answer… and what’s the least you can do to move forward?

• Don’t build a whole new product – create a landing page.
• Don’t roll out a whole new sales deck – test a new slide first
• Don’t plan the whole automated sequence first – test it out on a manual group

By trying to unlock the next question you can gain more confidence and determine whether the direction is correct – while also showing immediate progress, deliverables, and outcomes to your team.

What can you do in two weeks, rather than two months?

It’s so easy to plan the big thing and wait ages for it all to happen, only for the project to lose momentum and be relegated to the backburner.

Breaking down projects into quicker sprints might help to overcome project paralysis, keep things moving, and get closer towards the bigger goal while staying motivated.

Similar to the tip above, thinking about the next two weeks might mean:

• An MVP or prototype to test
• A blog post on a topic, rather than an ebook, to test the waters
• A time-bound project to see how far you can get, rather than a project that fills the time available

Can you ‘slice the elephant’?

Sometimes known as elephant carpaccio, sometimes known as slicing, is a way to break big projects down into more compact segments – that still deliver across the footprint of your project. You might have seen this illustration before, which represents the same idea:

Rather than building a fully-functional deliverable first, you might build something with a little bit of functionality, something that’s just about reliable, is just about usable, and looks alright. And over time, you’ll expand and build more functionality, more reliability, better design, etc.

While sacrificing some depth in each layer, you might be surprised with the results you get from something below your usual execution effort. This helps you be pragmatic, and prioritise energy on the parts of the puzzle that help you get the most bang for your buck.

So… how far can you lower your bar, while retaining a level of quality and results? That’s the balance you’ve got to explore for yourself.

Break it down, show your work in progress, test and learn

When you can ‘move fast and prove fast’, you’ll be more transparent internally (and therefore, build visibility).

You’ll be able to spot winners early – and prevent losers from taking up too much time.

And you’ll feel more motivated with better accuracy, feedback, direction, and validation at each step.

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

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Multiple times, I’ve been the sole product marketer in small but ambitious startups.

And as any product marketer can attest to, our broad marketing skillset means we end up doing everything from defining the messaging, building the deck, and launching products… to managing the website, making marketing lead-gen content, running webinars, and training the sales team.

Honestly, it’s tough. You’re being pulled in every direction, you don’t know where to prioritize, and you need to deliver – even though you don’t have the budget or support you need to get stuff done!

And hopefully you’re able to fight the good fight and make the business case to hire extra help. But sometimes you’ve just gotta push through.

In those situations – and really, if you’re a product marketer in a team of any size that needs to be scrappy for one reason or another! – here are a few tips on managing the workload with impact in mind, and getting the maximum bang for your buck.

Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize

Set this up early, and stand your ground.

I really like using ICE prioritization as a starting point.

ICE stands for :

• Impact – how much the initiative may help move the needle
• Effort – how difficult it will be to execute
• Confidence – how sure you are that the impact and confidence are correct?

You then use the formula above to create a score to sort your list of potential things accordingly. You can also plot them on a graph like the below to help visualise where your backlog sits.

You can plot a the overall value score, against the effort score to get an idea of where the chips fall.

Maybe there are quick wins that provide high impact that you’re pretty confident about, without much effort: a prime opportunity to get stuck in.

And perhaps there’s a sneaky task that could be medium or impact, but actually is going to take a load of effort to get off the ground… so maybe it’s something to deprioritise for now.

However you decide to prioritise potential initiatives, make sure you set a process to evaluate the things you need to work on, and share it with the broader business.

You’ll want a process for exceptions too – like when a high-value opportunity comes in and you need to support the deck, or a new piece of content is needed to prevent customer churn. These should be routed through your line manager, who can either defend the prioritisation or make the decision to deprioritise something else.

Be transparent on what you can (and can’t) do

When you’re trying to do more with less, the worst thing you can do is overpromise the world, and underdeliver.

Managing expectations is so crucial – not only will it affect your ability to deliver, but it affects the perception of you as an individual contributor, and of the product marketing function at large.

Perhaps every few weeks, you can share a brief update on Slack with the projects recently completed, those in play, and what’s prioritised next.

Reduce, reuse, recycle

Often our product marketing work can seem quite siloed. Positioning sits over there; content creation sits over there; webinar campaigns are in the corner.

And if you’re being stretched thin, you need to find opportunities to align everything around as little work as possible.

We can lean into the concept of content repurposing: create the base material once, reuse and reformat everywhere. Here’s some examples:

• Your customer and market research interviews should allow you to see the themes and challenges that are popping up
• You can run an easy to create panel-format webinar on that topic with a customer or other industry expert
• The panel webinar can be turned into multiple videos and snippets for Youtube and social media
• Turn the webinar discussion into a lead-gen PDF, peppered with qualitative quotes
• Design the quotes into shareable social media images
• Offer a ‘personalized evaluation’ to encourage demo requests
• Send email campaigns to your marketing database, encouraging them to go from ‘problem aware’ (with the webinar and PDF download) to ‘solution aware’ (with the demo request offer)

And suddenly, with little effort, you can go from a single insight into a full campaign – and you can get started with just an email campaign and a landing page.

Tip: Don’t write content marketing blog posts (unless you don’t have $600 a month)

Product marketers can do content marketing, but should not do content marketing. Yes, we can write content. Yes, we can distribute content. But we can’t do that well in addition to everything else we should be doing.

If you’re a PMM writing content, you need to find flexible freelance writers or use a content marketing service like Scribly to bolster your content, set the foundations for good SEO footprint, and provide content that your sales teams and customers can use in the buyer journey.

Outsourcing content creation doesn’t mean outsourcing the strategy – you should still set the scene in terms of topics, questions your customer wants answering at the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel.

But your energy is best used in driving results from product marketing foundations as a multiplier, not wordsmithing an 800-word blog post.

At every opportunity, restate strategy

Not in a grandiose ‘we’re sticking to the strategy!’ way.

But keeping your go-to-market strategy close to hand can help you with all of the above.

You’ll probably find everyone has great ideas and wants to share them with you. A cool new target customer that could be good to validate, a marketing campaign idea, or positioning changes they want to try.

Subconciously, we already understand the biases and motivations that our stakeholders have. If we can start doing this consciously, we can find better ways to work with them.

Take recency bias – most seen in sales reps, who operate at a 1:1 scale with each prospect. If they’ve heard pushback on a pitch, but tried something new randomly that kinda worked, they might think success actually lies with their spitball direction.

Here, restating the strategy that’s been selected, the evidence for the current approach, and asking whether they think the strategy is wrong, or if the execution could be better, can help them reconsider the broader context.

Don’t forget to develop yourself

Scrappy product marketing doesn’t mean letting yourself operate at the whims of others. Instead, you can take charge and chart your own course, collaborate better with others, and put your own plans into action.

So don’t forget to find opportunities to learn and push yourself. Subscribe to product marketing newsletters. Engage in communities. Take courses. Find casual mentors. Read industry news. Have an open mind!

(P.S. We’re opening up registrations soon for the fourth cohort of WTF is Go-To-Market. Register your interest, and we’ll let you know as soon as applications are open!)

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 Scrappy product marketing: how to do more with less appeared first on Building Momentum.

Think back to 2021 and AI wasn’t really artificial intelligence, and more just a tree of confusing ‘if this, then that’ statements.

Jump forward to today, and AI has evolved leaps and bounds (funded by over $38bn of capital in the first half of 2021 alone).

GPT-3 is the most popular natural language algorithm, taking your text prompts and using its knowledge of almost all internet content to spit out scarily-good content – while DALL-E creates realistic images and art, also from text prompts.

But despite all the funding and hype, does it have any real function for product marketers – and how can product marketers get started?

AI tools in product marketing today

Let’s take a look at some of the ways you might already be using artificial intelligence.

To analyse voice of customer at scale

We’re bombarded by (hopefully) useful customer feedback from every angle: customer surveys, NPS and satisfaction scores, support tickets, targeted research, and more. But trying to understand the patterns and themes at scale is difficult without several spreadsheets and a lot of time.

Tools like Chattermill allow you to collect ongoing feedback, uncover themes and sentiment at every stage of the customer lifecycle, and direct the right insights to the right teams – automatically, at scale.

To analyse sales call trends and performance

If your company uses Gong (or the many other alternatives), you’re using two types of AI: one to convert speech to text, and another to identify the common themes that arise in your sales calls.

Gong uses its own, custom training model to identify the keywords, phrases, and sections of your sales calls that relate to topics you want to learn about – whether to highlight sections of calls that talk about pricing, or when a prospect is talking about a competitor.

To write blog posts and content

I don’t know about you, but I have to be in the mood to write… but with AI, you might not need to.

Jasper is an AI content platform that helps marketers and writers to create content faster. Trained on copywriting frameworks, it’s an easy way to create outlines for blog post briefs, generate social media copy, or get inspired with auto-generated ad headlines.

Opportunities for AI in product marketing

In many ways, we’re still at the beginning of the adoption curve for artificial intelligence in product marketing. Here are just a few thoughts on where it might be going:

Helping to generate product names, messaging, and positioning

As AI gets better at understanding the nuances of language, it will be able to generate ever-more realistic product names, marketing copy, and positioning statements – helping product marketers to validate (or invalidate) their ideas, faster.

What if you could feed customer interview transcripts into an AI tool, and automatically generate personas that summarise your target audience’s jobs, pains, gains, and triggers?

What if you could prompt an AI messaging engine with personas and your product features, and create a messaging map that’s ready for use in your sales deck?

Tracking the impact of product marketing effectiveness

Be honest… how often do PMMs use data to make decisions? The tools are there, but is there the will? AI could help save product marketers many hours of analysis to ultimately prove their worth.

Without being responsible for revenue or MQL numbers, could product marketers use AI to understand how many prospects repeated the latest messaging as their own?

Could we generate automatic reports that cite revenue and NPS impacts to customers that engaged with our activation and expansion campaigns?

Can AI spot changes in customer behavior, from bounce rates on webpages with recently updated messaging, to a drop in win-rates in a particular segment, way before a human does – allowing PMMs to prevent decline and make the most of opportunities faster?

Helping to target the right customers

And finally, one of the most difficult challenges for product marketing: how do you reach the right target customers, with the right message, at the right time in their lifecycle?

We often think about our ideal customer profiles as big, broad-brush groups. But could AI identify micro-segments that allow us to create targeted messaging for smaller groups of similar customers that can be easily targeted by ABM or outbound sales based on their demographics, firmographics, techstacks, and more?

And think about the website – one website homepage for every visitor that comes to your site means it’s unlikely going to resonate with everyone. Could AI-based personalization platforms (trained against your on-brand positioning) identify your visitor and have a good stab at crafting a custom message variation?

Your sales cycle could also do with a touch of artificial intelligence. Would you see win rates increase if your sales reps had a personalized AI deal coach that encourages them to share collateral, crafts nurture campaigns, and suggests the right time for a phone outreach?

Fad or future?

As fast as they’re advancing, AI is unlikely going to be a full replacement for product marketers.

AI will definitely help PMMs to be more strategic by automating tasks, increasing creativity, and understanding the real impact of their work on the wider business.

But just how quickly PMMs will be able to outsource tasks to AI algorithms remains to be seen.

For example, this post has been written on Lex: an AI-based writing assistant that helps you to write quickly, better, and with more confidence. (The header image was created on DALL-E too!). It’s provided some inspiration, but the suggested copy has been rather bland and without character, mimicking the millions of other content marketing blog posts out there. Any AI is only as good as what it’s been trained on.

My opinion? There’s still a long way to go before AI is writing the next great sales deck or crafting targeted positioning that’s on brand and resonates with your audience.

But every product marketer should make it a goal to start learning the AI tools that I’m pretty sure will guide more and more of our work over the next few years.

Your turn: what do you think about the role of AI in product marketing?

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

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The ‘secret’ to killer brand positioning? Get to know your customers

​In my latest Vouch video, I explain why brand positioning must always begin with getting to know your customer. Who they are, what they want and who they struggle with.

Vouch is the easiest way to collect customer research. Simply add your questions, share the link, and start capturing feedback and insights at scale.

​Try Vouch for free today

I speak to a lot of product marketers at all different levels, and one common strand is that everyone is being asked to cut corners. To provide critical input quickly. Without proper due diligence. Without thoughtful consideration. Without understanding the context, the requirements, the situation.

And unfortunately, that’s only over going to lead to poor results. Even the most capable, on-the-pulse product marketer is not going to craft a GTM strategy, messaging doc, or sales overview doc without full context.

Here are some common shortcuts I see product marketers trying to take – often at the behest of others – and how to counter them.

Working with assumptions (without validating or iterating)

Firstly, working based on assumptions at the start of a project is absolutely fine. We all need to start somewhere. Your team probably has enough domain experience to have a comfortable level of intuition (that is, internalised pattern-matching).

The shortcut PMMs try to take (usually on the direction of their seniors) is treating those assumptions as fact… and integrating those assumptions into the business-as-usual shared understanding. This is pretty dangerous – your entire strategy and execution can be based on unproven, biased assumptions.

How to get back on track

Just do the validation anyway. Frame it as an opportunity to measure the impact, prove you’re on the right path.

Check in with internal and external sources – sales reps, CSMs, friendly customers, or random folks in the market. Ask them broad, top-level related questions and keep asking ‘why’ to prove or disprove the assumptions you have, without asking leading questions.

When you present the learnings back, offer a plan on what needs to happen next. Show what you’ve learnt with a summary of the impact and suggestions on the way forward, to save time and build your reputation.

They say jump, you say ‘how high?’

Particularly when it comes to sales collateral, custom slide or deck requests, or even a new idea for content, it’s sooo eassyyyy to just be a yes-person.

While it may be easy, it’s also a surefire way to be unsatisfied with your job. You have less input and control, and instead react to the whims of various stakeholders (who probably don’t know what they want anyway!).

How to get back on track

You have two options.

Firstly, graciously accept new requests for collateral as ideas and opportunities, not as hard-and-fast requirements. Use this as an opportunity to redirect the conversation to focus on the reason for the request, not the actual request itself. Maybe they have some unique insight, a hot opportunity to test something, or feel underserved by what you have today. Rather than jumping to create new collateral, it could just be reframing something you have already, or solving by other means.

Secondly, you can make the time to build the foundational artefacts that help you hold your ground and frame requests against your current, documented understanding. This means your:

• ICP – your aligned target segment for cross-functional focus
• Personas – a representation of core buying group stakeholders
• Buyer journey – the process a buying group follows from initial awareness to purchase decision and expansion
• Messaging guide – the framework for communicating our unique value proposition
• JTBD map – understanding what ‘jobs’ customers achieve with the product and the steps they take to get there

This means that for new requests, you can refer back to the documentation, ask for information, and counter with alternatives as required to make sure everyone leaves happy.

“Let’s set it live and we’ll measure performance later”

You can’t manage what you don’t measure. If you’ve spent enough time and effort doing something – a big product launch, a huge content campaign – and don’t set your goals upfront, you’re always going to be a step behind. You’ll also be left unsatisfied with whatever results you do get, feeling anxious that you could’ve achieved more – and no idea what’s working best, what to double-down on, and where to improve.

How to get back on track

During the planning phase of a project, define the leading and lagging metrics that you’ll track, and set a primary goal, even just for your own satisfaction.

Set your goal and create a burn-up chart to predict your progress over time. You’ll be able to measure progress against this every week, allowing you to react to changes in performance and iterate on your way to results.

Being this diligent will set you apart from other product marketers, and act as a forcing function for delivering on your goals.

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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Understand your customers better with these three questions – and Vouch

Capturing your customers’ feedback helps you build a product they can’t live without. In this Vouch video, James shares the three questions every business should be asking its customers. Watch it here.

Vouch is a video collection platform, perfect for capturing authentic feedback. Simply add your questions, share the link, and start learning from your customers.

Try Vouch for free today

Maybe we don’t feel confident about it. Or maybe we’re perfectionists. Or scared of the reaction.

But regardless, often as product marketers we’re much more comfortable sharing updates after something has happened.

The feature launched! The campaign is now live! The battlecard is now ready! The whitepaper is finished!

Which is a shame, really.

All of our good, hard work that goes into everything that our wider teams don’t see – the planning, strategizing, creating, editing, reviewing, testing, iterating, reporting – becomes invisible. And we’re judged only by the outputs (and hopefully results) that we’ve released.

Momentum is that feeling where things are happening. You’re winning deals, closing faster, results come easier. Momentum is not a lagging indicator; it’s a leading indicator. Momentum is excitement.

Share early

Nothing is as exciting as new. New projects, new experiments, new ideas. New fires people up, lights a fire in their belly, and sparks the brain into action.

When you’ve got the go-ahead on a new project, let people know. Announce it. It doesn’t have to be a big proclamation, but it does need to give people enough insight into:

• What you’re doing
• Who’s involved
• What happens next
• Where they can go for more information

It’s important to set expectations. Too high and everyone will be disappointed when it might not happen. Set expectations too low, and you miss an opportunity to get people bought in.

Share the wins (and the fails)

Momentum breeds momentum. If you’ve had a win, whatever the size, shout about it!

We usually reserve announcements for the big wins – the huge customer deal, the massive product feature.

But every small win should be celebrated. Had feedback that helped adjust direction for a campaign? Celebrate it! Completed a small task that gets your competitor intelligence hub up to scratch? Sing it loud!

Even if things aren’t going well, talk about it publicly.

Sharing failures doesn’t induce a lack of confidence – it creates trust. You never know what you might learn from the wider team, or who might be able to provide that crucial nugget to unblock everything else.

Share the learnings

Want to supercharge the momentum you’re building with your internal stakeholders? Actually monitor your results, and communicate how well your project performed against the goals set against it.

Hopefully they’re great, and you win accolades for setting and achieving results. Even if they’re not great, you’ll build confidence. People will know that you’re monitoring results, measuring success, and are actually honest about what’s happening.

New insights are wins. Getting to an outcome, one way or another, is a win.

Final tip: be consistent

Maybe it’s a weekly, or bi-weekly, or monthly update. But make it, every time. No update is an update that people will love to hear.

Building trust and momentum starts with transparency and consistency – good luck!

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

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As product marketers, we’re often highly visible with feature launches, positioning and messaging, and go-to-market strategy.

And this is actually scarier than it seems. We go from working in the business-as-usual back office for most of the time, to suddenly being thrust in the spotlight.

Add to that, we often need to encourage people in other teams to do work on our behalf too. This might mean shifting priorities, adding new resources, updating their processes, and sometimes completely reinventing the way they work.

Plus, not all launches go smoothly! There’s usually an element of iteration and testing in our work: we need to put things out in the world and then learn. Without proper management, this can cause a drop in motivation and confidence issues across the business.

To really drive maximum results, we need to shift our mindset away from just “sharing internal updates” and team enablement. Instead we need to consider how we proactively manage internal communication.

An internal comms framework to save

I’ve had this article saved in my product marketing swipe file forever for this image.

It’s a helpful framework to have available and ready to consider whenever you need, until it becomes part of your muscle memory.

• When a project requires a considered approach to internal communication – and as with all good strategy – it’s recommended to start with an analysis of the current context and understand the background. For example, this might be a product that has a long history of stops-and-starts and low success.
• Doing this with input from all those impacted – like a cross-section of sales, marketing, success and even supporting teams like billing and finance – will help identify any potential issues and alternatives.
• In your project you’ll set a vision and make choices about the direction that teams will need to work with. in conjunction with teams, you need to understand what gaps exist and the changes required to get from A (today) to B (destination).
• The action plan you’ll create needs to consider four core components: people, structure and process, culture, and measures and rewards.
• From here, the only thing left to do is implement and experiment, with a feedback loop to help you quickly adapt and evolve.

Action plan components

100% of the success of your work relies on 1) whether you have the right people in the right places, 2) how they work together in the organization, 3) the culture that guides their execution, and 4) how they are incentivized.

Let’s look at people.

Twice, I’ve had to have tricky conversations with leadership teams and convince them that they don’t have the right people. Usually, companies that scale fast hire lots of people who can ‘repeat’ – but when time comes to pivot and adapt, they’re not able to keep up. Their preferences for safe comfort zones leads to a lack of engagement with the ‘new world’. All we, as PMMs, can do is to highlight issues and push for resolution, and have candid conversations with leadership.

How teams work together in an organization is a crucial part of strategy success. Most ‘teams’ are actually working groups: a set of individuals with their own goals, managed top-down with performance rated individually. That’s not a team!

A team should be a collaborative approach by a team with a common vision and built-in ownership. Results are achieved and shared.

Your go-to-market team, of cross-functional experts from across the business, should hopefully be a team – not just a working group.

These people should be jointly responsible for setting the structure and process that defines how their peers operate. They’ll be best placed to understand the objective, set process, and support implementation. Structure and process should not just be the way the work is done, but how feedback is heard, changes are managed, and anomalies are processed.

And then incentives. As product marketers, how do you encourage and motivate teams to jump in to the new world? We can influence management and reporting lines to offer spiffs, but tangible incentives are never enough.

Instead, we can treat frontline teams as internal customers, consider the ‘value’ they desire, and position the new world accordingly. How will this new approach help sales to improve quota attainment by selling faster, moving upmarket easier, and justifying higher average contract values? How will this new thing help CX to be less stressed with unhappy customers, and instead focus on delivering proactive support and account expansion?

Tips for maximum internal comms results

There are a few things I’ve taken away from product launches and other changes that have driven hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, and engaged thousands of team members at various companies.

1. Consider support teams. These teams may have more procedural changes to update, which can make or break the ease of change for other teams.
2. People want to emulate success. So when working on iterative projects, create internal case studies: working in this new way made X more successful, or Y found it easier to sell faster.
3. Ultimately, incentives and motivations matter the most. Sales reps can’t (and won’t) dedicate time to something they can’t count as part of their quota. Get creative with spiffs, bonuses, and competitions to gamify engagement.
4. People want clarity. Ambiguity is difficult to manage. Nuance is difficult to communicate. It’s harder to simplify than to add complexity.
5. Avoid communicating solely by decks. You’ll need to write long-form documents and put opinions to paper. Decks are better produced when they are summarising something else.
6. Communicate up, early. You’ll need sign-off and approval, and that’s easiest when your stakeholders have been brought along the journey already.
7. Consider how people will ‘get on board’ with change. Usually, they might have a few hours of ‘getting to grips’ before they’re expected to get results with it – is that fair? Depending on the size of the change you should give advance warning, lots of support, lots of practice and Q&A sessions – and allow enough time for a decent ramp-up to full power.
8. Open the door. Everyone will feel more confident and comfortable when they feel heard. Be transparent, communicate early, ask for feedback publicly and privately.

Hopefully these can help you achieve better results by working as a team, transparently, and considering the needs of your stakeholders. Think more about internal comms as a core lever to the success of your go-to-market strategy, not just part of the execution, and you’ll see a stepchange in behavior… and feel momentum build with ease.

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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A few weeks ago, Alicia and I joined Steve Klein from the Launch Awesome community (powered by LaunchNotes) for a live AMA on how we turned around a failed product launch.

Over 45 minutes – at least 15 more than scheduled! – we covered everything from how our horror story unfolded, to how we share ‘#GongGold’ to build customer empathy.

Here are some of the top snippets. You can find the full video and transcript on the LaunchNotes blog here.

Having the courage to acknowledge problems

Nobody wants to be the first person to say ‘uhh… this isn’t working’. But sometimes that needs to be said, acknowledging the tension that might exist, and getting ahead of what could be a car crash in slow motion.

Maintaining trust when things aren’t going so well

When we set about fixing multiple problems with our product launch – from poor pricing decisions to plain dumb onboarding flows – we couldn’t do it alone. We used transparency as a tool, sharing what we had found and bringing our marketing, sales, product, engineering, and CS teams on the journey too.

Includes my new favourite quote from Steve: “Trust dies in darkness.”

Discovering buyer personas

We can’t say it enough: don’t move ahead with your own biased assumptions of the people you sell to and what they care about.

Instead, look to your market and discover the buyer personas that actually exist.

The sales deck as the ideal home for your narrative

Your sales deck is the best place to build your narrative – but don’t miss the opportunity to use it as a conversation tool.

Share snippets from sales to enable and encourage

I love this idea from Alicia – using a #GongGold channel to share insights and celebrate when customers repeat their value messaging without prompt.

About Launch Awesome

Launch Awesome is a premium Slack community where the world’s best Product Managers and Marketers discuss the strategy, tactics, and pro tips they use to successfully launch new features and products. Find out more and request your invite here.

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

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It can be difficult to understand how all the product marketing puzzle pieces fit together.

It’s a question that comes up often throughout our course, WTF is Go-To-Market?. What’s the difference between an ICP and a persona? Is an ICP the same as the target market? How about positioning, narrative, and messaging – do you need one for each persona?

I personally found it hard to grasp all of these intangible elements. They often appear disjointed, especially when used by those without deep experience.

Here’s my attempt to show how I think all the core pieces of the puzzle fit together:

Breaking it down

The target market is the overall serviceable group of potential customers. Think “APAC fintech companies”.

Your go-to-market strategy encapsulates all the elements required to launch, sell, and market your product to the target market. This includes the. components listed below, as well as how your customers will buy (e.g. inside sales, product-led growth, etc) plus pricing and so on.

Your GTM strategy is based on your ideal customer profile, a niched definition of what a perfect customer looks like. We’re usually looking at a company or segment level.

Next we bring in your positioning and narrative. Positioning is about defining the space your business occupies in the mind of the customer. Narrative is the story you tell to your customers: why you exist, how you help, how their lives will be different. If you have multiple products and ICPs, these still need to make sense together as they explain your focus and priorities.

The ICP is the defined group of customers that you’re solving problems for. These are the customers that your sales and marketing team will focus on attacking to build traction. Think “Fintech startups based in India or Singapore, under $10m in revenue, over $10m in funding, using Stripe.”

Within each ICP, you’ll identify key personas. These are the people and roles that you’ll cater to in marketing and sales.

You’ll want to understand the buyer journey to craft a marketing and sales experience that has the best hit rate for turning those personas within your ICP into customers.

Finally, you can create stage-specific messaging along the buyer journey to drive prospects from problem awareness to purchase, activation, and expansion.

Over time, you’ll either expand your ICP to include adjacent customers, add additional ICPs to cover new segments, or pivot completely to a new ICP as you learn about your product/market-fit. This might require new/additional buyer personas (and therefore buyer journeys and messaging), or different go-to-market motions (for example, adding a self-service GTM).

Where’s best to start?

If you’re attacking a brand new business from scratch, I think it’s best to start by defining your ideal customer profile. From here, you can move down to deep-dive into the specifics of who’s involved and how you can reach them, and move up to build positioning and align the business around a go-to-market strategy.

What would you change?

I think every product marketer probably has a slightly different approach to connecting the dots and I’m excited to hear how you think about how the product marketing puzzle fits together. Drop me a note or comment below!

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

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Alicia and I run a course WTF is Go-To-Market? – and one of the first things we do is answer that question. What is go-to-market?

We spent a long time discussing, researching, validating, and wordsmithing the concept and definition, and this is what we ended with:

Go-To-Market is a collection of processes, programmes, and human mindset that delivers customer-focused products out into the world, and drives the continual creation of their unique value for real people – and businesses – over time.

WTF is Go-To-Market?

If you compare this to every other definition of go-to-market, you’ll get some generic definition that just talks about creating a plan. Utilizing resources. Achieve competitive advantage. Enhance customer experience.

But we purposefully included how mindset is a huge piece of the go-to-market puzzle. The mindset that we approach our go-to-market process with (both personally and as an organization) can have a huge impact on the outcomes we can deliver.

And having the right mindset across product marketing is important too. I’ve written before about tips to hire product marketers and three product marketing interview questions to ask, but in this post I want to touch on some of the mindset traits that I think make successful product marketers.

(And of course, this is my take. Your mileage may vary, and you’ll have different opinions and experiences.)

Empathetic

Being able to understand the feelings of another, whether a colleague or customer, is the bedrock of product marketing. Only when we can sit in our customer’s shoes can we effectively understand who they are, their context, and how we can help them. And we need to activate this external-in, customer-centric mindset in nearly every thing we do.

Growth mindset

We’re 100% human, not superheroes. We’re not going to get everything right on the first go (and if we do, we weren’t aspirational enough). Ask ‘how can we do better?’, roll with the punches when things go wrong, and actually learn from mistakes.

Adventurous

Nothing is impossible. Of course, some things are, so let’s be realistic about them. But nearly everything else is doable.

Want to do something really huge and outrageous? Let’s do it. In a short space of time? Might be tricky, but let’s try. Will it have the right impact? We think so – but let’s see how it goes.

Playing it safe is comfortable, but not exciting. Not everything can be planned, de-risked, calculated, verified. We can’t protect against every eventuality, even the most likely ones. Let’s be prepared, but sometimes we’ve just gotta see what happens.

At the end of the day, we can cope with almost anything.

Strategic

I’m convinced that most people haven’t really considered what a strategic mindset is, so here’s my take.

Having a strategic mindset is like playing chess. You have the tactics you can play. You’re competing against the market (competitors, customers, and other forces). But if you play one move, then what? How will the other side respond? What will your next move be? What do you think is your overall path to victory right now – and what other paths are there?

This should be visible at every level. Planning an entire GTM strategy? Think strategically. Writing an overview sales collateral? Think strategically.

Mindset needs confidence

Having the right mindset needs you to also have the confidence to put them into action. You might come up against obstacles, like bosses who disagree or a business culture that just isn’t a match – but at least try.

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

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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post called Okay… but why? with a simple tip.

In it, I wrote that at the top of every document or initiative you’re working on, it’s worthwhile making a quick note on the following:

• Audience and buying stage
• What success will look like

This can help you to forge alignment on your product marketing work, and ensure that it’s built to meet the customer wherever they are in the buying journey.

But ‘how’ we do the work is just as important as the why. How do we gain alignment and clarity on ‘how’ work should be done?

Define principles for hot project

If you’ve read Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters (and if you haven’t, buy it now!) then you’ll know that good strategy is built on defining your principles, the values that will guide how you will move forward.

And it’s no different for the product marketing work we do, whether you’re working on strategic direction reports, market research, or customer comms for a product launch.

Principles can help you both:

• Guide the work you do, by keeping what really matters at the top of your mind
• Gain alignment by stating your perspective and generating productive, strategic discussions

From there, you can tactically create content and plan initiatives that’s in line with a strategic direction.

Examples of principles that you apply to projects might be related to:

• Any relevant company values, and an explanation of how they might be applied
• What the customer experience should feel like
• Your unique factors of market differentiation
• Anything else that defines the approach you’ll want to take

Explore Vision to Values

It took about five years of Alicia badgering me to give Vision to Values a try – and I can’t believe I didn’t get to grips with it earlier.

A framework from LinkedIn Exec Chairman Jeff Weiner, it’s a simple structure to help set out strategy and detail the connections between your mission, vision, values, objectives, and priorities.

I’ve used it to help guide GTM strategy, showcasing how decisions have been made in alignment with the company vision.

Principles matter

“If you stand for nothing, Burr, what’ll you fall for?” (said Alexander Hamilton in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton).

But they do matter. We build company cultures, define our brand, and become known for the way our businesses operate.

Bringing in principles in your project-planning work can level up your approach, keep you closer to strategic thinking, and help you achieve better outcomes.

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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I’ve recently moved to a new house, and had to buy a ton of new furniture and home stuff.

New bed, new sofa, a vacuum cleaner, and so much more.

I’m also looking to buy a new clothes airer.

You might think it’s a pretty simple thing to buy. They’re all pretty much the same style, they do the same job, and besides, it’s only a small thing to use a few times a week.

But in my mind, when I was browsing around looking to buy, my criteria expanded.

Not only was I looking for a clothes airer that:

1. Had enough space for a load of washing
2. Was easy to fold down and pack away

but also

3. Is well-designed, and would look good when in use

This surprised me. I didn’t recognise this in advance: I thought I just wanted a basic dryer, like the other millions in use around the world.

But when I was in buying mode, my evaluation criteria changed.

And did you notice what was missing from that list? Price. Whilst an outrageously expensive item would have been an instant ‘no’, it wasn’t an important aspect of the search.

So what does an extremely middle-class search for a random house object mean?

I think there are a few takeaways.

Firstly, desk research and interviews need to be supplemented with observational research. We’re human: our brains lie to us without us knowing. What we say might not be what we mean, and what we say might not be what we do.

Secondly, there are potential customers for everything, everywhere. From low-cost cheap and cheerful, to high-end boutique offerings of every item, every service. The only question is timing the market right.

And then pricing. A pricing consultant I once worked with told me:

“It’s not the price that people have an issue with; it’s what they understand they are – or are not – getting for that price.”

Chris Hopf

If someone put me to the test and asked me how much I’d spend on a well-designed clothes airer, I’d probably say £70 would be a bargain, and that £130 would be expensive but I’d still consider.

But luckily for me (and unluckily for retailers), the kind of items I’m looking at are priced anywhere from £30-60.

If I had to bet, retailers looked at their costs and their margin and calculated a price that way. If they’d have done willingness-to-pay research instead, they’d be making up to 100% more on every sale.

So there you go. Some random takeaways from a rather mundane shopping search that might inspire you to reconsider how you carry out research, how you think about your customers and the market, and how you price.

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

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The last fifteen years have seen a bust and boom cycle, we’ve struggled through a global pandemic, and now we’re trying to finish spreadsheets and write messaging whilst Russia invades Ukraine.

And as product marketers, we lead and support so many crucial parts of our businesses. It can feel like we’re carrying the weight of the world on our shoulders.

It’s a constant juggling act: balancing customer needs with internal constraints, all whilst trying to keep our heads above water with the day-to-day.

It’s no wonder that product marketers are burnt out: exhausted, swamped, overwhelmed, and drained.

I’ve had so many friends and colleagues deal with debilitating stress, anxiety, and self-doubt – to the point where they’ve had to take extended mental health leave or quit completely to save their sanity.

Burnout stories

I wanted to highlight a couple of real stories.

First, here’s what an anonymous product marketer in the health-tech industry had to say:

Ranee Soundara also shared an insightful, personal thread on the effects of burnout on her mental and physical health:

“At the peak of my burnout, my emotional work exhaustion manifested these ways:
+ PTSD nightmares about work, due deadlines, being angry about the unmanageable workload on myself and my team, rage quitting
+ wake up with nausea, and throw up some mornings before going on Zoom

“The raw feelings of anger and resentment would carry from my nightmares and into my woken state—and the insurmountable mental exhaustion and depletion virtually internalized in such a way I began to feel like a complete personal failure: ineffective and worthless.

“I didn’t know how much burnout affected me until my best friend pointed out I was withdrawn from my normal social routine, and literally told me: “I’m worried about you. You’ve had stressful jobs before, but right now you are a completely different person.” I was gutted.

“At first, I thought it was just the pandemic. Everyone was under lockdown, and I was isolated—living alone, and distantly socialized with only a handful of friends that chose to remain in New York. Then more friends began to say the same things: “we can tell how sad you are…”

“My mom suggested I increase my monthly therapy sessions to bi-weekly. That way, I could unpack some of the emotional burden I carried and also be in a safe space to carefully think things through. With a therapist’s help, I could identify the changes to improve mental wellness.

“Additionally, during my annual medical exam, my doctor explained the long-term negative effects of burnout on my body and fertility health. That if I continued on this path, I would become at-risk for hereditary diseases, and it’d be increasingly challenging to freeze my eggs.

“It was in my doctor’s exam notes that finally motivated me to leave my job:
+ My mental wellness has been completely depleted
+ My burnout has caused me to have early stage PTSD
+ As long as I was working, I couldn’t make the best decisions to improve mental and physical health

“I understand the reluctance to leave a job. We are pressured to constantly be “onto the next” without taking time off to deal with stressors and refreshing our mental health—most having to prioritize family and financial obligations. The reality is, we can’t afford time off.

“Of course we all want a good job, to do good work and feel validated in the value we bring an organization, however, when conditions don’t enable us to do our best work and becomes wholly demoralizing, we cannot continue living with it. No job is worth jeopardizing your health.”

You can also read more about Ranee’s story on CNBC. 

I also asked Alicia Carney, my friend and fellow co-founder of WTF is Go-To-Market, and product marketer, for her thoughts.

“It’s difficult to isolate product marketing’s contribution to success, often we have an amplifier effect that can make or break the success of a product, marketing team, or even the business overall. But the downside of this is that product marketing can often be hidden, undervalued, and can feel thankless. It’s exhausting having to create space to showcase your work, make sure the right people are paying attention, and it can be really exhausting – especially if you crave external validation.” 

Personally, I’ve also cycled through peaks of burnout every few months for the last few years, overwhelmed by the amount of ‘small rock’ tasks that I need to complete – in addition to making progress on the ‘big rocks’. 

Tips for dealing with burnout

If you’re in urgent need of support, I encourage you to find the help you need from your manager, HR team, doctors, and other professionals you have access to.

Here are a few tips for dealing with burnout.

• Understand what burnout feels like for you. It might be feeling increased stress and pressure to the point of exhaustion, or it might be withdrawing from your normal lifestyle.
• Get support. Most companies have woken up to the importance of mental health, and offer coaching, therapy, sick days, and other support for burnout. Make use of any Employee Assistance Programs.
• Work with your manager. Be transparent about your needs with your manager. Ask for help, let them know you need to step back, and deprioritise projects so you can focus on fewer things.
• Build working habits. Take your full allocation of PTO. Set work/life boundaries, like no work after 6pm. Take walks during the day to reset. Adapt your working style to maximize your day-to-day health.
• Give-and-take. Maybe controversial, but sometimes you’ll need to work under deadline – requiring weekend work or late nights. And that can be fine, so long as it doesn’t become an expectation. Make sure to take back time you’ve worked in lieu whether an official policy or not.
• Communicate. Talking about burnout, being transparent, and showing vulnerability is not a weakness. Things will only get better as a culture and society if we can speak up with confidence and be proud that you’re prioritising your mental wellbeing.

I’d love to hear your tips on protecting your mental health – drop me a reply or comment on the post below with your thoughts.

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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Pivots usually come at the worst time: running out of money, struggling to find customers, and general confusion and dismay.

I’ve led, or been part of, five major pivots:

1. From software for mobile operators to e-commerce retailers
2. From email marketing software for anyone, to personalized marketing specific for retailers
3. From helpdesk software for IT teams, to customer service software for retailers
4. From payments software for desktop developers, to payment software for SaaS developers
5. From AI software for diversity and inclusion leads, to diversity software for recruiters

Each have been fantastic lessons in what to do, and what not to do. Here are three quick tips on ensuring successful strategy pivots in your SaaS business.

Pivot the customer, not the product

In each of the examples above, we used (mostly) the same product – but adjusted the positioning and go-to-market to appeal to a different type of customer.

I see many SaaS companies trying to pivot their product; completely rebuilding their idea from scratch. That wastes all the hard work, and puts you further back from where you need to be.

Pivoting your target market should mean understanding your new customer so well it becomes a competitive advantage. It’s not a small decision: it means re-architecting your entire company, so do it well based on evidence, not assumptions.

Make decisions, avoid inertia

You might think that you can pivot and expand your target market, without dropping your existing GTM.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t work in most cases. It’s likely that you’re unable to resource both successfully, let alone make strategic plays in both camps.

This quickly leads to inertia: the enemy of momentum. There are two ways this embeds in your business:

• Increased resistance happens when people lose trust in the direction of travel because it doesn’t generate the results they are experiencing or expecting.
• Lost velocity when people are confused about the direction they should be moving in.

Making tough but necessary decisions is absolutely required. This should feed down to your go-to-market activities. Your sales and marketing should actively discriminate against bad-fit customers.

Don’t expect the pivot to work

Honestly, keep your expectations low. You’re not just flicking a magic switch that aligns everything the right way and unlocks that ARR.

You’re still going to be learning what customers want and need, and building to that.

Your teams will still be understanding how best to reach, engage, sell, and support.

You’ll all need to figure out whether the new customer economics make sense over the long-term.

You’ll need to build confidence in your execution. And the best way to do that is by basing your expectations on reality, by validating and testing performance in the real world rather than jumping headfirst.

Working through a pivot is hard

Trying to make these big changes happen is difficult, scary, and tense.

In my experience, execs who haven’t been through pivots before stroll into them without accurately estimating the struggle they’re about to unleash.

Managing up, as a product marketer, is so important. Being transparent about the bandwidth, the work, the checkpoints, and ensuring there are good feedback loops will help.

But it’s a two-way street. Founders, CEOs, and department leads need to make psychologically-safe spaces for honest feedback. Celebrate the successes, embrace failures with open arms, and trust that everyone is doing their best job.

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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Over the last few years I’ve hired or have helped hire tons of product marketers, experimenting with different questions and formats.

What I find works well – for the companies I’ve worked with and roles I’ve hired – is asking three specific questions that:

• Help me understand how they approach product marketing (and work in general)
• Gives them a chance to shine
• Opens an opportunity for reflection and learning

These questions take place in a ~30 minute chat that – whilst casual and conversational – is focused on extracting the meaty, juicy bits as quickly as possible.

Tell me about a product marketing project you’re proud of

I love this question because it lets candidates to explain something they’ve done that they were really happy with, where they were excited about the work. I find it helps candidates to relax into a conversation too, and let their personality shine through too.

I’m looking to see if candidates answer using STAR (Situation, Tasks, Actions, Results), and I’ll ask more targeted questions if not.

I’ll dig in further to ask about tradeoffs, how they collaborated with different people and teams, and try to uncover the specific role they played: were they a supporting actor, or were they running the show?

I also use this question to uncover their passion. In most cases, I want to work with product marketers who are interested in both the application and the theory of our craft. What did they like about it, what skills did they learn, where did they go for support?

Tell me about a product marketing project that could have gone better

I think eager self-improvement and a growth mindset is a really powerful trait in good product marketers. So this question is targeted to identify opportunities that, with hindsight, could have been avoided.

Here I’m looking for their maturity, how they approach accountability, and their proactivity in raising/solving challenges. I’m still looking for a STAR response to show the role they played in the project.

This question isn’t about admitting blame, but I think self-reflection is important. What can we do better next time, what challenges should we avoid?

I usually ask followup questions like “What would you do differently next time?” and great responses will include a core learning, with a disclaimer of ‘it depends on the context’.

Tell me about a time when you had to learn something new, inside or outside of work

Product marketing is so broad. Nobody has all the answers. That’s why I think proactive learning and application is important to tease out in the interview process.

Firstly, I ask for a situation that’s work-related or personal, because not everyone has a chance to learn new stuff at work.

I want to see how a candidate approaches the challenge. Did they identify a knowledge/skills gap early in the planning, or did they only spot it when they were in execution-mode? How did they figure out ‘what’ to learn?

If it’s a work/product marketing example, it’s always interesting to see how aware they are of the big world out there. Do they rely only on a narrow set of internal resources, or are they explorers looking for how others have tackled similar issues?

I ask targeted questions to tease out their critical analysis thought process. How did they know the solution they learnt would work? How did they weigh up different options?

How do you interview?

Disclaimer: the above is based on my experience hiring PMMs for specific types of companies, cultures, and is biased towards the traits I think are important. Your mileage may vary.

The interview questions and format that gets the best results for your business will be different. The traits, skills, and experience you’re looking for will impact the questions you ask – so don’t blindly ask the questions above without considering what you’re looking for.

Let me know what interview questions you ask in the comments.

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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After my post on four tips when hiring product marketers, I got quite a few messages about the last tip: hiring managers need to take bets on junior PMMs.

Unsurprisingly, most messages were exasperated.

They’ve identified that product marketing is a great match for their experience, skills, and interest – not to mention, it’s a HOT role.

But often their applications go ignored. There’s always more suitable candidates, and – as high-demand as product marketing is – many companies have been scared to hire juniors for lack of in-office training and mentorship.

So how should budding PMMs make their big break and get into product marketing?

P.S. Here’s my career journey into product marketing:

Revisit your resume and experience

PMMs entering the industry come from a variety of backgrounds already. I know product marketers who started their professional careers as marketing execs, sales development reps, content writers, customer support reps, customer success execs, product managers, technical writers… and many, many more.

And just think: each of these roles involves core elements of product marketing. But how well does your CV manage to showcase these?

• Researching and interpreting customer needs
• Organising and executing on cross-functional projects
• Communicating complex concepts in a simple, customer-friendly way
• Identifying the market landscape and evolving trends
• Building product knowledge and understanding how it solves customer problems

Detailing these foundational skills in your CV, regardless of the job role they were gained under, can help you stand out by speaking the language that hiring managers are looking for.

Build a portfolio

Go even further than just pad out your resume. Can you pull together a portfolio that showcases examples of all the key skills listed above?

This doesn’t have to be complex. Use Mural, Miro, or even Google Slides and create an interactive, engaging portfolio that showcases your skills, experience, and interests.

Use your portfolio to tell a cohesive story of how your skills helped companies achieve key goals.

Remember STAR:

• Situation – describe the problem that was faced
• Tasks – detail what were you asked to achieve
• Actions – showcase the work you did, the deliverables, and any alternatives you considered
• Results – finish on a high and shout loud about the impact you delivered

Less is more: don’t go overboard, and instead highlight the most relevant projects for the roles you’re applying.

It’s likely that you have lots of relevant experience under your belt already. For example, content that you’ve produced, the way you approached creating outbound email campaigns, or projects you worked on to improve the customer experience.

Identify companies with the right vibe

Getting a role as a new product marketer within the wrong business won’t just get you fired, but it’ll put you off the role for life.

As well as ensuring a good culture fit, you also need to consider the company’s approach to product marketing. Too focused on assumptions and internal-thinking means it’ll be harder to build strong foundations. Too corporate, and you might not get the scrappy experience that tests you under pressure.

For many first-time product marketers, I recommend finding companies where:

• A Senior PMM or Product Marketing Lead is hiring a PMM to train up
• A Director / Head of Product Marketing is hiring a PMM to work in an existing but small product marketing team
• A Head of Marketing with PMM experience is hiring a PMM to train up

Either of these will give you someone to work with and learn from, and give you exposure to the full breadth of product marketing.

Stay away from companies that use really corporate-language in their job descriptions. Ask about their on-the-job training and skill development programs. Look for ‘growth-mindset’ companies that are open to applicants even if they don’t meet 100% of the requirements.

Expand your network

Engaging in product marketing communities is not only going to give you more exposure to the ins-and-outs of product marketing, but gives you an opportunity to meet new folks and connect with future peers.

I can’t recommend the Product Marketing Alliance community on Slack strongly enough. It’s so great to see over 20k+ current and aspiring product marketers bonding and learning together.

Local PMA ambassadors also run some regular monthly meetups, where you can show up in-person or join Zoom chats. Participating in these is a great way of getting face time and absorbing the language and learnings of the community.

Bonus: Avoid doing free work

There have been some conversations across the PMM communities on LinkedIn and Twitter about whether product marketers should do free work by reviewing a company’s website or their industry and pulling together recommendations or new approaches, and sending to hiring managers in the hope of standing out.

As much as you can, avoid doing free work for companies that haven’t asked for it… and even then, protect your time and energy accordingly. The content marketing world has become very competitive with employers taking liberties. Let’s not let the product marketing world go the same way.

P.S.

Would you be interested in joining regular catchups for budding product marketers to learn from each other, exchange ideas, and talk to people who get you? Drop me a DM on LinkedIn, Twitter, or get in touch by email. I may be working on something to help you out!

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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Product marketing is in high demand. Companies of all shapes and sizes are finally realising that product marketers have a multiplier effect on product, marketing, and sales efforts.

And accordingly, there’s been a huge increase in the number of product marketers, although not enough supply to fulfil demand. Our ranks have also been boosted with talented colleagues from across the marketing, success, and sales spectrums making the move to product marketing roles and helping to fight the good fight.

I’ve hired or helped hire product marketers at all different levels (not to mention, having been through the hiring process multiple times myself).

Originally this post was going to be a rant, complaining about everything from the wilfully bad practices I’ve heard, to common misfires from people who should know better. But I decided to take the high road instead.

Here’s five brief tips to consider when you’re hiring a product marketer.

Be absolutely clear on what you’re looking for

While product marketers are like Swiss army knifes with skills applicable to everything from pricing to positioning to product launches, trying to blindly hire a PMM without a clear and pruned understanding of the main duties they’ll perform over the next 12-24 months is a recipe for disaster.

Think about what’s absolutely necessary: this will probably be product launch execution, customer/market insight, sales enablement.

Then what else is a nice-to-have? Think about the base skills you expect will make them successful: research, writing, collaboration, analysis. Maybe expertise within a specific industry, competitive intelligence, content strategy, product-led growth, strategy… whatever you expect to require from them over the next ~2 years.

Make sure these are clearly communicated in the job description as nice-to-haves, but not requirements. You’ll see fewer applications from minority groups, and miss out on the right talent for you.

Have a straightforward, unbiased recruitment process

What can you do in 30 minutes? Maybe relax in a long shower, or a hot bath. Get in a quick workout, or a few chapters of that book you just can’t put down.

What can’t you do in 30 minutes? Meet a product marketer, understand their background, identify and learn about relevant crossovers of experience, and make a decision about whether they’re worth putting through the process or not.

I’ve heard some really bad examples, particularly over the last few years with the move to remote hiring. Whilst nothing like this horrific example from Canonical, some companies are either wildly overcomplicating with multiple, superfluous steps, or badly over-indexing on biased gut-feel.

Here’s the process I’ve recommended before:

1. Application:
   • Require resume
   • No cover letters
   • Ask two questions in the application: ‘Why do you think you would be a good fit for this role?’ and ‘Tell us about a product marketing project you’re particularly proud of.’
2. CV screen:
   • Prioritise relevant resumes by experience and answers to the two questions
   • If applicant has significant professional experience, disregard education
   • If applicant has less professional experience, prioritize on skills demonstrated in other jobs
3. Recruiter screen:
   • 25 minute call to validate application
   • Understand what they’re looking for
   • Match with salary range
4. Hiring manager interview:
   • 45 minute video call
   • 10 minutes getting-to-know-you
   • 20 minutes interviewer-led discussion: dive into project experience, asking clear questions and expecting structured STAR (situation, tasks, action, results) answers
   • 15 minutes applicant-led discussion
   • Outcome: specific feedback on their suitability (strong yes, yes, no, hard no)
5. Meet the team interviews:
   • 30 minute video calls with 2/3 team members
   • 5 minutes getting-to-know-you
   • 15 mins interviewer-led discussion: relevant projects, learnings, culture-add questions, asking clear questions and expecting structured STAR answers
   • 10 minutes applicant-led discussion
   • Outcome: specific feedback on their suitability (strong yes, yes, no, hard no)
6. If tight call between 2-3 applicants, final calls with hiring manager focusing on working style
7. If questions on technical suitability, short (~1hr expected) take-home task detailing their approach to solving a problem with review call with hiring manager

Give clear feedback

If a hiring manager has spoken to an applicant, you owe them some feedback.

Great: “We really liked your approach to X. Unfortunately for this role, we’re looking for someone with more experience on Y.”

Bad: “You just don’t have the X-factor we’re looking for” For real. I know a recruiter and hiring manager has given this feedback before and they are 100% on my avoid list.

Sharing feedback is the payment-in-kind for the time the candidate has invested in your process. It’s a gift that helps them improve their search and understand their space in the market. Not giving constructive feedback is evil, no matter how busy you are.

And if you can’t qualify why you don’t think a candidate is suitable, then you will only find the answer by evaluating the process and your own biases. (And you might not like what you uncover.)

Take a bet on junior/mid-level product marketers

It’s common for mid-to-senior product marketers to get ~3-5 recruiter outreaches a week right now, if not in one day.

You can either stand out by offering higher salaries and innovative outreach to the cream of the crop, or you can take the more-rewarding path less travelled and take a bet on product marketers with less experience, but just as much smarts and motivation.

Whether you’re hiring someone into their first product marketing role from a customer success, content marketing, or even sales role, you need to evaluate for the skills that indicate product marketing thinking: customer empathy, product savviness, and collaborative working styles.

One of the most common misconceptions that I hear, as reasons why hiring more junior folks wouldn’t work, is that the hiring managers don’t have time to train them up.

I think this is an excuse. Firstly, if a manager can’t spend their time training and supporting a team-member, their priorities might not be aligned. Secondly, there’s a wealth of training and education programs available for product marketers, from the Product Marketing Alliance to my course, WTF is Go-To-Market?.

You can’t always hire the perfect PMM for your business, but trust me: you can build one.

What was your product marketing hiring process like?

I’m always interested in what hiring managers have set out, but what I find even more juicy is the candidate experience. Connect with me on LinkedIn, Twitter, or email and let me know what your best – and worst – hiring experience was like.

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 tips for hiring product marketers appeared first on Building Momentum.

You’ve heard me say it before, but it’s much more important to be the thing for someone, rather than something for everyone.

Here’s a video of a presentation I should have given at a virtual marketing event in February, but pulled out due to some ethical considerations.

Be The Thing for Someone: 5 Steps for Successful Go-To-Market

In this video, I’ll cover how B2B SaaS businesses don’t have to compete in crowded, saturated markets – they can make the decision to stop focusing on a broad market, and instead niche down on purpose, understand their customers, and take that insight to the market in a really targeted way.

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 Video: Be The Thing for Someone appeared first on Building Momentum.

If you’re looking for a standard ‘top 10 books that every product marketer should read’ with the usuals like Positioning (Ries & Trout), Obviously Awesome (April Dunford), and Play, Bigger, this isn’t the post for you.

Instead I want to offer some lesser-known, offbeat titles that I (and others) have read over the years.

Certainly, the books I recommend below have offered me either some unique wisdom that I couldn’t find anywhere else, an unusual approach to common challenges, or anecdotes and stories that have inspired my work.

This post contains affiliate links. If you use these links to buy something, I may earn a (very small) commission. Thanks!

P.S. Prefer to listen to audiobooks instead? Get a free trial of Audible here.

Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy

Michael Porter is the GOAT of business strategy, with every marketing student around the world learning about Porter’s Five Forces.

But his work goes much deeper, touching on value propositions, how we set our businesses up to have competitive advantages, and ultimately – my favorite line – that strategy is about choosing to make some customers unhappy, not being all things to all customers.

Monetizing Innovation: How Smart Companies Design the Product Around the Price

A few years ago, I was trying to figure out how to price our product for different types of customers, and what features each plan should receive.

This book was recommended, and it changed the game for me.

A must-read for anyone involved in building, planning, and implementing pricing strategy, Monetizing Innovation talks through how we’ve got it all backwards. We build the product, then decide the price… instead of understanding what customers will pay first, and building a product to meet their price-point second.

Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate

George Lakoff is “the father of framing”, according to the NYT, and this book doesn’t disappoint.

In fact, I wrote a post summarising it here.

Lakoff talks about “frames”, integrated mental models that we rely on to view the world. These paradigms can’t be built: they must exist as a concept, and can only be activated.

While the book talks about the messaging machine that supports the Republican party in the USA, there are so many parallels to our work as product marketers: the focus on clarity, on understanding our customers, and on activating through messaging and repetition.

Predatory Thinking: A Masterclass In Out-Thinking The Competition.

Dave Trott is a famous copywriter that I’ve been following since I studied advertising. Aside from his slightly annoying writing style, you’ll find a ton of useful lessons on how to stand out from the competition, attract attention, and get creative to overcome your challenges.

Often, we think that advertising is a world full of fun and creative challenges, where anything can be fixed with some out-of-the-box thinking or a sudden shower-initiated brainwave.

But what we don’t see is the hours spent carrying out research, focus groups, huddling around a whiteboard trying to connect the dots, or the frustration when the client doesn’t like the message.

Very similar to our work as product marketers, and a fun read.

Never Split The Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It 

Whether we’re trying to get internal buy-in for a new project, winning over partners, or supporting sales with objection handling content, negotiation is a core professional skill that product marketers might not think they have.

Chris Voss’s experience as a hostage negotiator is nothing compared to us trying to sell software, but his lessons leave you thinking about core principles you can integrate into your everyday work.

Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters

So this might be a book you’ve seen recommended before. But it’s worth repeating:if you create any type of strategy work, you need to read this.

Once you’ve read it, you’ll understand why all the failure of strategy you’ve experienced before happened. And you’ll know the simple steps you can take to start structuring your strategy work in a way that sets you up for success from the start.

Conscious Business: How to Build Value Through Value

In case you haven’t guessed yet, from all my posts, but I’m big on values. The company values, our principles for specific projects, the considered objectives and choices we set to help guide our process all matter a lot.

Conscious Business is a quick read that builds the foundations for acting with more purpose in everything you do.

Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Handbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell

Bill Campbell was an American football player turned marketing exec turned CEO turned advisor to some of the biggest names in software – including CEOs and leaders at Google, Facebook, and Apple.

This book captures many of the key lessons that Bill shared with those around him, many of them set in service-leadership, community, and making the hard decisions.

Many working relationships that we have with PMs, sales reps, and even execs are – like it or not – implicit coaching relationships. We can all benefit from recognising and practicing this skill with purpose.

The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business

From the author of Five Dysfunctions of a Team, this book covers the four steps to organisational health: build a cohesive leadership team, create clarity, overcommunicate clarity, and reinforce clarity.

While as product marketers we might not have the power to select our leadership teams, we still are responsible for helping to create, communicate, and reinforce clarity in our internal change-management work.

This book is a practical guide with many anecdotes and stories that will help you bring clarity to your business.

Other recommendations from smart people:

Predictably Irrational

Badass: Making Users Awesome

Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

Recommended by Andrea Saez: “PMM is half product, so knowing how product works is if anything an asset. You can’t have a PMM that’s entirely removed from the product world. The book outlines the typical frustrations many teams have when they focus on ‘building features’ and don’t take a step back to think ‘why’ they are building these features – and PMM happens to be part of helping to answer the ‘why’.”

Product Research Rules: Nine Foundational Rules for Product Teams to Run Accurate Research that Delivers Actionable Insight

Also recommended by Andrea Saez!

Do Less, Get More: Guilt-free Ways to Make Time for the Things (and People) that Matter

Recommended by Ishara Naotunna

Add yours here…

What’s your top product marketing-related book recommendation that most people won’t have heard of? Let me know: comment on this post, or drop me a tweet and I’ll add to the list.

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

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You go to the refrigerator, desperate for a cold and refreshing hit of natural sunshine: orange juice. You’re in luck – there are two options for you to choose from!

A freshly-squeezed juice using single variety oranges from Valencia. Or a supermarket own-brand ‘orange juice from concentrate’.

Which one will not just quench your thirst, but taste better? Which one will deliver more value to you in that moment?

It’s obvious: the freshly-squeezed juice with Valencian oranges will meet your need, delight you, and surpass your expectations.

The antidote to dilution is focus and confidence

What does this have to do with B2B SaaS product marketing, you ask?

I believe it’s more important to be the thing for someone, than something for everyone. This means proactively making a decision to include or exclude audiences through your product, marketing, and sales process – focus in action.

But making that decision needs to be an outcome of enough confidence – that the reality will match our expectations.

To do that, we have to learn from our customers and validate our assumptions. If we don’t, we run the risk of positioning on assumptions – damaging confidence, and leading to the onset of inertia.

And customers, prospects, and suspects in the market recognise the power of focus too. We’re more drawn to solutions that meet our needs exactly, that solve the exact problem we have, and that speak the same language.

The more diluted your focus and message, the more cognitive effort is required for the prospect to make sense of it in their world – and the higher likelihood that it doesn’t work as intended.

What does dilution look like in action?

How many of the marketing campaigns you’re currently running try to speak to multiple personas, instead of one?

Is your sales pitch the same for all stakeholders, and not tailored to the persona of your champion?

Is your product roadmap delivering value to specific personas, or building features that you hope will resonate across all groups?

If the answer to any of those was ‘yes’, you might want to revisit – it’s highly likely that you don’t understand your customers well enough.

Diluting focus is not a winning strategy. Diluting focus will not help you build traction. Diluting focus will only slow you down.

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

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The post Don’t dilute focus appeared first on Building Momentum.

I recently sat down with Josh and Nate from the Searching4SaaS podcast to talk about the role of product marketing in early-stage SaaS.

You can listen to the podcast above, or find it wherever you get your podcasts. You can also read the edited transcript below!

Big thanks to Josh and Nate for having me on!

What’s the biggest thing people get wrong about PMMs?

Product marketing is such a broad term, there is so much that you can do with it.

There are so many things that we can do or that we can be involved in. I think one of the biggest disservices that marketers or CEOs or founders give is not really giving product marketers the space to find their own way to help the business. I think often we get categorized as either one of two models.

Number one is just being an internal agency for sales enablement or content marketing teams. It’s just like, look, we need this one sheet. We need this data sheet. We need a deck. It’s horrible, I spent most of my first couple of jobs being a deck monkey. And it was horrible. It’s not a fulfilling job at all. We can be much more strategic than that.

The other model is that we can just be a conveyor belt for product teams. So whatever product teams ship, that’s it. We launch it out into the world, we write the release notes and maybe send an email to customers or whatever. Again, it’s really unfulfilling. It’s not it’s not a nice way to work.

And also misses out on the strategic value that product marketing can bring. And I think that’s because at it’s core, product marketing is a strategy role. We really have to understand who our customers are, what the business is doing, what’s happening in the market… and then try and draw those dots together.

It’s just that pace that people are yet to really twig them to at scale. There’s definitely companies and people out there who are advocating for this approach. But that’s the one message: product marketing is strategic. Don’t make that mistake, don’t try and force them into executional stuff all the time, make sure there’s that room for strategy as well.

JOSH: Does the fact that the word marketing is in the title kind of allude to that? All the things you described are things that traditionally marketers have looked at.

JDP: Exactly. You know product marketing is often seen as the fluffy people that make the deck after the fact, the ones that do execute on whatever strategy has already been decided, but we can step back from that and really understand what the landscape is saying, what we’re hearing from customers and have some input into the way that we move forward.

It’s just so much better for everyone involved. It works so much better.

How does research play in product marketing strategy?

You can go super deep into the research. But what I mean by strategy is all about understanding where you are today, where you want to be by a certain timeframe and the steps involved to make that happen. And then putting that into action. You don’t need to do super deep research all the time.

You can do really nice targeted pieces of customer research, competitive research, or just understanding more about your business goals and the way that the business system works.Some of those bits can really give you a lot of answers into how to really maximize the results that you’re going to get from a go-to market function, from a marketing perspective… there’s so many of these bits and pieces that’s impacted by what product marketers can do.

When do should a traditional PMM join a business?

I don’t think there’s anything really as a traditional product marketer, I think it we’re really versatile and that we can be thrown into a situation and just get what needs to be done,done. I think there is a time when you can say, “okay, we can benefit from some product marketing expertise and skills here”.

And I think that really does depend on the go-to market motion that set, the existing skillset of the team, and the biggest challenges that you’re facing over the next six to 12 months probably.

If we’re gonna think about, you know, a standard B2B SaaS startup, so imagine that the founder is a you know, a product person who’s taking on the sales ownership, and the go-to market is a traditional inside sales play. I think product marketing should be like the first or second marketer that you would hire now.

It used to be that the first person would be a demand generation, but that’s changed a lot because it’s significantly easier to access an audience now than it ever has been. You’ve got social media, you’ve got all of these outreach tools. You’ve got all of the advertising networks and things like that. It’s easier than ever to get in front of people.

But the challenge is, is to how do you make sure you get in front of the right people, the right audience, and then how do you pitch in the best way. How do you sell them on what your product is and how it can help them?

That’s one of the reasons we’ve seen such a big increase in demand for product marketers over the last 18 months to two years, is there is so much differentiation required now to kind of cut through the noise and product marketing is one of the best tools you can have to build that into the core of your go-to market.

Especially in teams where the majority skillset is kind of technical or there’s technical founding team. Product marketers are going to have a real big impact, the sooner the better.

I think that tech people are really great for thinking deep about the application of technology, but product marketers can really join the application of it to the use cases that a specific customer can get value from. And that’s where you’re going to connect the dots, and put the pedal to the metal, and really see things start to take off.

Do product marketers replace the things a startup CEO would do?

I think, you know, in the early in the journey, you have a CEO who is really close to the customer. They’ve got that past experience, they’ve been in that role before. And so they’ve got this really deep ingrained understanding, but as you scale the business, the CEO spends less time on sharing that viewpoint and advocating for them across product engineering, success, sales, marketing. It becomes less clear, and there’s more ambiguity.

Product marketing can come into these kinds of situations with a little bit of research, a little bit of thinking, and be able to bring everyone together around a single definition of who the customer is and how you best reach them advocate for the customer amongst all of those teams.

So yeah absolutely, that’s a really interesting way to look at it.

Where should a PMM sit in the reporting structure: product or marketing?

There’s a lot of conflict about it, a lot of strong opinions!

I’m biased. I’ve only ever worked in product marketing where we’re aligned to marketing teams. So we’re part of the marketing or broader growth team and we are primarily concerned with revenue, customer acquisition and adoption, retention, satisfaction kind of metrics.

I like that a lot because it’s really focused on the commercial aspect. And it’s very customer focused and there’s always a recognition of the channels that you’re using to communicate to the business, to the rest of the world.

But conversely, there are people that have only ever worked in product teams and love that really close connection with what’s on the roadmap, where things are, how they can, how product marketers can help product teams to influence the roadmap more around customer insights and help drive that part of the process as well.

I don’t think there’s any clear and cut answer. So around the best way to do it, I think experimentation is the best,best thing to see how it fits. I think some of those things are going to come out quite naturally during the first couple of years of having product marketing in the business anyway. But I think it’s very interesting.

I can’t imagine working for put a marketing team under product. I can’t, connect the dots yet in my head around how I would be most successful in that setup. But I guess it would just be a learning curve.

Where is the crossover between product marketing, and growth marketing or product growth?

JOSH: I could see someone coming from the Product side be doing marketing aspects, or a growth marketer type who’ll be writing onboarding emails, or a marketer ensuring the right features are highlighted. Those are where the lines start to bleed from me. Is that what you see too?

Yeah, I’ve done all of those bits and pieces whilst being in the marketing side and it’s worked pretty fine. I think even though we’re under marketing, it’s a super cross-functional role by default. You have to have connections and strong alignment with product, with success and with sales and the rest of the marketing team anyway.

I think it’s also interesting when you think about the goals of product marketing teams, what they want to or need to achieve your business over the next six months, 12 months, 18 months. Once you can be really clear on that, then it makes much more sense, and be like okay, well, product marketing is focused on this particular area so for now let’s align them onto this part of the team, or we’ll make sure they’ve got really strong connection with these people.

But again, one of the things that we don’t necessarily do so well is say, okay, this is, this is what product marketing is going to set out to achieve. We just kind of floats around a little bit.

It’s a really fluid role, a very fluid team. I think in terms of metrics the best situation I worked in was where we had two key metrics. One was net new ARR added each month, and the other was successful adoption of users to the product.

So the number of accounts that signed up the turn into paying customers, and those that hit whatever user goal was. That gave us two really distinct ways to think about it. The first part was about everything that happens before sign up or before the initial kind of payment point. So positioning, pricing, messaging, communicating features, the sales experience, stuff like that was something that we could improve ourselves or through our relationships with other teams.

And then the second part around successful adoption was about, is this the right product for this type of customer? Do we communicate better? Do we help them find out how to get started as quickly enough? Did they achieve that core goals early on enough and see the value in it?

Melding those two together was a really interesting a really interesting experience.

Should product marketing report directly to the CEO?

NATE: I wonder if it would make more sense for product marketing to report directly to the CEO, kind of an agency for the CEO?

Yeah. When you say that out loud, obviously it makes so much sense. All of every single role I’ve had, the product marketing plan has always been discussed with the CEO. It’s always: this is how we think of the positioning, this is what we’re learning, these are some problems we’ve seen in the sales funnel and this is how we’re thinking of fixing them.

You know, these are the broad goals of what we want to do from an adoption and activation perspective. So absolutely we should have that direct line in. The only reason that we don’t is… I’m not sure why we dont, I think that’d be really good experiment for somebody to run.

What’s the direction of product marketing?

It’s this is where I think product marketing is going to fragment in some ways over the next five or so years. I expect that we will see increase in strategy roles. So Strategy teams, Director of Strategy…we’ll probably still have product marketers under a strategy team who are responsible for kind of core market insights from customers, competitors, and general landscape kind of stuff.

And then I think we’ll see some of the more execution part of product marketing go to segment marketing teams that will focused on driving growth and adoption from particular customer groups.That’s where I think product marketing is probably going to be.

We are saying many more CMOs come from product marketing. I think another route for product marketing growth, as well is into chief of staff and COO roles. Anything that is about melding strategy with execution. I think we’re, we’re really strong in helping merge both of those worlds together.

What about fractional product marketers?

Yeah, it’s definitely something that’s grown, the concept has really come up over the last couple of months maybe. It’s really pretty new.

I think it’s really interesting. It’s probably something I’m going to be exploring over the next couple of years, but I think there’s probably two types of fractional PMMS that you might want.

One is one that can come in with a framework and experience: this is how we can do positioning, here’s the process, let’s work on it together, go through that, bring everyone around on why it’s the right direction, and there’s a lot of internal change management with things like positioning that we need to manage as well. And then sell it into the business and make sure it’s working and fitted nicely.

And then I think that is the strategic functional product marketer who can come in and be like, this is how we’ve done this before. Let’s go back to the basics. Let’s build the core artifacts that you need from personas all the way through to buyer journey, through to uderstanding of the broader customer journey, map out the sales enablement material that you need you know, the product announcement matrixes, and all this kind of stuff, which I think is really interesting as well.

But I think one of the, one of the downsides of this is that we miss the opportunity to focus on upskilling the product marketers and marketers that you already have.

That’s something that, one of my friends Alicia Carney and I are doing: a course to help upskill scrappy product marketers. But especially in Europe, there’s not a lot of career growth for product marketers, or an easy way to break into it. And so I think we need a bit more thinking there on how we manage the next generation as well.

What’s your WTF is Go-To-Market course about?

Alicia and I are both pretty involved in the product marketing community. And one of the questions we hear from almost everyone we speak to, whether they’re a new product marketer, someone who’s been in the role for a couple of years or even CEOs and CMOs is: I hear the words go-to-market all the time, but I don’t really understand what it is, how do all the bits connect together? I can read a definition of it, but what’s the connective tissue between all of these different building blocks?

And so that’s why we just called it WTF is Go-To-Market. People that have those questions are generally in their first three or four years, if not earlier for product marketing, we’re really focused on helping marketers in B2B technology companies.

That’s where our experience is mostly from. But also the frameworks and attitudes that we’ve developed as well best fit there. So there’s a lot of focus on understanding our customers, understanding the needs of the business, and connecting those bits together.

So thinking less about product marketing and go-to-market as just the checklist, and more about trying to understand what it is you’re really trying to achieve. Hopefully that’s what we’re going to help product marketers do. We’ve just invited our first cohort which is really cool.

We’ve been lucky enough to offer a scholarship as well, to improve diversity in the product marketing community sponsored by Crane VC, which is also an awesome thing that we can hopefully help to change..

The first first course is in February. It’s a six week course, and then we hope to do it every, probably every quarter. It’s really exciting. We’ve asked people to do video applications, if they feel comfortable, and we ask about the best product marketing projects they’ve worked on and the worst ones they’ve worked on.

And you can just see all of these lessons we’ve learnt, where we’ve had exactly the same experiences. So if we can help people manage those future ones a little bit better, then we’re not just going to see an impact on the results that product launches can drive the business, but also see that reflected in the career growth of people as well. And that’s, that’s the driving force behind it for us.

We’ve got people in the cohort from their first product marketing job all the way through to 40-something year old director level people, and we’ve got one CEO of a tech company in there as well. So it’s a real, really good mix of people.

What PMM characteristics should you look for in an up-and-coming potential PMM?

So I think the first part I’d say is empathy really about getting into the minds of our customers. We really need to see life from their perspective. If you take positioning, then the definition of positioning is about occupying a space in the mind of the customer. To do that effectively, you need to understand what is already going on in their head, what’s going on in their life for them.

And so unless we can do that really effectively, product marketing breaks down really quickly. So being able to do research, to be able to hypothesize and you know, validate or anything you need to do to really embody your customer, I think is really important. And that goes hand in hand with advocacy.

So representing that customer that you’ve built a solid understanding of, being able to understand the business goals and the business system as it were that you’re operating within and having the skills to navigate around that to drive the best outcomes I think is really important.

Product marketing breaks down if the work we’re doing is not used by the business. We can do all of the snazzy PDFs of personas and go-to-market strategy documents all we want, but unless it’s put into action and people are being consistent with it, it breaks down.

And then lastly, it’s having an understanding of what strategy is. It’s not solely the 10 year mission and vision. You need to understand that. But you need to understand what are the small steps that you can make today to push you forward between now and then, keeping in mind the intended outcomes that you want to achieve, and then being able to make choices that move you from A to B.

What one tip would you give?

I’ve been through three or four big pivots, changes in the way that businesses are operating, and one of the biggest tips I share with that your internal stakeholders are your customers as well.

So do the same thing. Understand what’s driving them, their jobs, pains, gains, and motivations, and then think backwards into how do you help them get to that desired state.

It’s just a customer, it’s exactly the same process, just a different outlook on it.

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

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Being the thing for someone is more important than being something for everyone.

Once you recognise this, you’ll see it everywhere. Successful businesses, products, value propositions, ads, sales pitches, and more all hinge on being able to convey that “This” is for “You”.

But making the decision to be the thing for someone is so difficult. You’ll spend hours deliberating if you should or shouldn’t, whether the opportunity is too small, how you should prioritize segments, and more.

Instead of thinking about this decision as a limiting function, think about it as a move of strength. You only have so many hours, so much brainpower: you can do so much more with so much less. Rather than diluting effort, you’ll concentrate energy.

To do this well, I think there are four key considerations.

How to define ‘someone’?

Having a tight understanding of your target customer is the most important, underpinning your business strategy.

Ultimately, you’re trying to identify a market group of customers: people linked by similar traits who have a similar problem that they’ll pay to solve.

This ‘market group’ should form your ideal customer profile – this linked post walks through an structured approach to help define yours.

How to know what ‘the thing’ is?

Your value proposition needs to be built on top of the customer you’ve defined. But value propositions aren’t created out of nothing – they need to be discovered through pattern-matching, both evidenced and intuition.

The inputs to your value proposition should be based on research (like my 19 customer development questions). From there, you’ll understand the customer’s:

• Jobs: common responsibilities and activities your customer does as part of their day-to-day
• Gains: their personal, professional, or business goals they want to achieve
• Pains: marks of failure and frustrations the customer must avoid
• Triggers: motivations that encourage them to solve their problem and switch away from their current solution

Ultimately, you’ll need to understand the value your customer desires: an element that they want to attain that:

1. Is useful
2. Is worth the effort (cost, time, energy)
3. Is a priority for them

Say no, don’t prioritize

One of the reactions you’ll have to counter is other teams taking the safe route of prioritizing the direction you’ve began to set in addition to everything they were doing before.

Take it from me: this doesn’t work well. This doesn’t bring clarity: it dilutes energy and effort even more. It creates inertia.

To counteract this, you need to get buy-in. As product marketers we don’t do all the work, but we make sure the work happens. Aligning all of the teams we work with and ensuring they have the right context from the market and the business means they’re set up to have the most impact.

Meet your business goals

Ultimately, the proof is in the pudding. Your teams need to see results, recognition that change is paying off.

Implementing a strategy built on the steps above won’t happen overnight, but you’ll need to ensure every team is fully committed. Marketing and sales need to be targeting the customer, and selling the same thing. Product need to build the thing for the customer. Any dilution will muddy the waters.

You need to show momentum and communicate what you’ve learnt at every stage. That means being transparent. Didn’t meet goals? Say why. Changing strategy? Say why.

It’s a journey

Being the thing for someone is a journey. You’ll learn, adapt, and evolve often. Embrace it, and bring everyone along for the ride.

Hold strong on the principle, and help everyone understand why.

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

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Most startups happen when someone finds a problem that they’ve experienced themselves, or discovered that someone else has.

Now the challenge is to find people who are ready to pay to solve the problem… and that can be hard. Generally there are a number of reasons that startup marketing and sales is hard:

1. People don’t want to hear they have a problem
2. They don’t think they have a problem
3. They don’t believe their problem can be fixed
4. They might think they have a different problem to be solved
5. They think there’s a different way to solve the problem

These challenges manifest in many different ways: lack of TOFU engagement, poor sales funnel metrics, more rejection than you’d like in the sales process – ultimately, hitting the bottom line.

But because we’re human, we try to cure the symptom rather than address the cause. A misdiagnosis means you tackle the small problems individually, rather than seeing the bigger picture. You’ll end up wasting time, effort, energy, and money trying to overcome small rocks… and underestimating the mountain ahead of you.

Along with everything else we’ve covered here on Building Momentum – like niches for riches, using unconventional wisdom, understanding your customer and their buying journey – I wanted to offer another principle that helps to prevent the pain from the source.

Be contentious

Contention means having an opinion, an assertion, and maintaining it in argument. That isn’t the same as ‘strong opinions, weakly held’. An unwavering belief that you’re comfortable to shout about and be known for.

Contentious beliefs in marketing and SaaS can be almost anything, from beliefs about pricing or product architecture, to the application of technology or in response to accepted wisdom about a particular problem.

Good contentious beliefs are based on customer insight. Bad contentious beliefs are internal assumptions, applied broadly.

In my post looking at a book on the American Republican party messaging machine, Don’t Think of an Elephant by George Lakoff, one of the main concepts is that frames (“mental structures that shape the way we see the world”) need to already exist in our customer’s minds to be activated. We cannot create framing, promote them, and expect them to be transmitted with success.

Contention leads to disqualification

Think about a newspaper that you actively choose not to read, or a store you choose not to shop at. Is the primary reason for that something that the business knows and promotes about themselves?

That’s an example of proactive disqualification in action.

Being contentious acts as a filter. It can draw in the believers, those who recognize the frame — and ward off those that aren’t a good fit.

Disqualification is at least 10x more important in product/marketing/sales, but often not a focus. Founders/marketers/sales reps are so keen to try and target everyone they possibly could, leading to the issues described in the first half of this post.

When you can attract the right prospects, and prevent bad-fit customers from getting into your pipeline, you’ll lose less energy, be more focused, and build a better understanding of what really matters to the intended audience without irrelevant noise.

This isn’t to say that you should only every talk to the believers, and ignore those who aren’t, creating an echo chamber. There’s a balance between hearing what you want, and hearing what you need.

Look to your customers to find opportunities for contention

Again — and I want to iterate this as strongly as possible — you need to discover how to be contentious in the mind of your customer. The framing needs to pre-exist – it cannot be forced. Talk to your best-fit customers, find out what they think about life, the universe, and everything in it. There, you’ll find opportunities to offer alternative viewpoints that resonate, and find it easier to grow your business.

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

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Earlier this year I was on the Competitive Enablement Show podcast with Klue! We covered a lot of ground, talking about some successes and failures, and how I think about competitive differentiation.

Below, you’ll find an edited transcript of our chat!

What was the inspiration for starting Building Momentum?

About five or six years ago, my boss told me that I needed to write more, to grow my personal brand but also to help others in that same situation. At the time, I was like, okay, yeah, sure….

But during that time I’ve needed to learn all of this stuff to help me. I’ve been looking for stuff online to help me get through the same kind of challenges that I’m writing about now, things like:

• How do you take a product from zero to one?
• How do you build positioning for the first time as a first time?
• How do you think about your sales process and start to map back to the collateral that you need?
• How do you think about competitors?
• How do you start to understand who could be against and how you message to that?

There are so many bits and pieces that people need on that journey. And I just decided to start writing. I actually started my Substack, I think in November or October last year. And it took me until February this year to actually publish a post.

But now I’ve been doing it since February religiously. It’s done so much. What makes it really good is that I get loads of people saying that it’s really helped them solve challenges and just learn more about what product marketing is and how to do it. So it’s really nice to see that, giving back to the community as well, and how I can help other people on that journey.

Where have you seen people fall short in terms of truly explaining how they’re different to the buyer?

I’ve seen it a lot. It’s when people are really close to the product and not necessarily in tune with what customers are thinking about. I think that one of the traps we fall into, is that we will think about how we differentiate through the lens of that product and the business, the features they’ve got, stuff like that.

But the question they should be asking is how are you different through the eyes of your customer instead of the buyer?

In most situations, your products are probably not going to be super different. You’re probably going to have, a couple of key differentiated features, but you’re probably targeting that same core group of customers as somebody else. And that means you have to work much harder to try and win them as a customer.

I think the next trap that I see a lot, is people go as far to describe the benefits their product delivers, like, how it will you save your time, do more with less, you can save money… and that’s cool, but it’s not necessarily useful.

People can still achieve those outcomes with a ton of different solutions: that might be competing products, might be people, it might be other solutions, and those benefits aren’t really going to galvanize your prospects.

They’re not really going to speed up that sales cycle, get them super excited to buy.

You’re comparing apples to apples: do you want a red one or do you want a green one?

In those kinds of situations we really have to go much further than benefits. And you’ve got to talk about the real value that someone’s going to gain when they use your product.

What’s an example of where you just were struggling to stand out?

My example is we were struggling to stand out to a customer, to the particular customer we wanted to win. I was at Kayako, which is a customer service SaaS company. I was hired there as the first product marketer.

We had big plans to reinvent the world of customer service, with a really strong vision to take it away from being a cost-center, and instead position customer service as a revenue generator.

We were building a whole new product from scratch and were really determined to fix those scenarios that we’ve all experienced: when you’re in touch with a company and, they pass you on from team to team, you have to repeat yourself all the time. You’re given a ticket number and then the customer service rep just forgets there’s an actual human behind the ticket… Those sort of experiences where you’re not treated as a real person.

So we planned our launch in advance and we followed all of the best practices that you would do to launch a product, to launch messaging and positioning. Wee did interviews, we developed messages, we tested it with our audience and so on. We launched feeling pretty good about it, super confident that we’d done all the groundwork and we’re really looking forward to just seeing everything, go up into the right.

And we landed on this really interesting messaging that spoke to the aspirations of leaders in our target companies. It was all about this new world of customer experience, and we were very excited about it. And so when we launched, we pressed, go on the platform… and everything just completely flopped.

It was awful. We’d gone from adding thousands of revenue a day with our previous product, the one we’d sunsetted, to adding zero in this new one. So two years of work down the drain, basically a total failure at launch – really bad.

We created a war room obviously, because that wasn’t good, we couldn’t sustain that started investigating what was happening.

And we found that in the interviews and research that we were doing, we found that the messaging we had developed just completely wasn’t resonating at all. So that meant people didn’t start a trial. They didn’t request demos. They didn’t buy from us.

So we looked into a bit more and started to analyze well, actually, who was that customer that we’re seeing on the website, and then the sales process, and who are the ones that we’d actually messaged to… and found they were completely different.

So we had messaged to those leaders and executives who cared about all this aspirational value, but the people coming to the website – the people that were discovering the product, taking it forward, championing it – just weren’t bothered at all. To them, our messaging, our website just looked like, meaningless marketing waffle.

There was no substance to it. It didn’t mean anything at all. They wanted tangible messaging, stuff that would speak to the pains, the problems they’re experiencing. They only need a bit of that long-term direction, but ultimately they just wanted to solve today’s pains, get those over and done with.

So we just hadn’t linked that real clear hierarchy from the features and the product that we had built, the benefits that we were delivering through those and the value they could gain.

So we’re in this war room, all sat around desks with dashboards up trying to pull together everything we had. And it was in the interviews we were running that we found our issues.

We were doing win-loss interviews anyway (if anyone’s not doing them, set them up, I’ve got a blog post on how to set that up). But they’re super, super valuable for just keeping tabs on people coming through your pipeline. What happened? Why didn’t they choose you? We literally spoke to probably a couple of hundred people in about a month or two. Just trying to find out, every lead, why did you, why didn’t you choose to go with us?

And it was in those conversations that we found, actually, yeah, like we’re not speaking to the right people. The people on the website, the people that are coming through the pipeline are, manager, titles. They’re not the executives, they’re not the directors. And it was a really quite humbling experience to have put so much energy into the process and feeling confident about it, only for it to be completely dashed at the last minute.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that whenever I do positioning now, the immediate next step is to work out what that buyer journey looks like. So mapping out all of those stakeholders that might be involved in that buying journey, and then figuring out where do you message the different levels along that journey? That’s super, super important.

What’s an example of where you had success in differentiation?

At Kayako, I was trying to learn everything as we were doing it. So I was going onto Google, talking to people and trying to figure out how to make these things happen. But at Headstart, I was able to put all of those lessons I’ve learned into practice and that was a really nice experience, comparatively.

So for context, Headstart is a diversity recruiting platform for campus recruiting teams. Big enterprise sales, hundreds of thousands of dollars in software to big 5,000 plus employee companies. And our champions at those companies we deemed as a socially conscious radical buyer.

So these were people that didn’t just care about the immediate benefits of solving those immediate problems, but they had a much longer-term strategic outlook on the overall value of our product and where it would take them as a business.

We found out through research, again, getting on the phone with people, interviewing, trying to find out, what they care about what’s going on in their lives.

And we messaged actually three different kind of frames of value in that process. Firstly was the business value: people needed their business is to be seen as innovative, to show that they were taking big public steps around diversity and inclusion in their market against their competitors.It was a big driver for their clients to be seen to be working with again, socially conscious companies.

The next frame was that kind of professional. So these people were quite savvy. They recognize that introducing those new initiatives would really help their professional standing. It would help them get the new promotion.

It would solve their team’s problems. They’d be responsible for those improved results. It would help them stand out in the job market. They could talk to something that had helped them improve the representation of their intakes and stuff like that.

And then lastly, we spoke to this kind of personal value. These people were like I said, socially conscious. They knew that diversity and inclusion is the right thing to do. They cared about all of these diversity issues. They’d experienced it. And they really wanted to do the right thing, make a real difference in the world.

And so we’re able to merge all of these bits together with a rational and a logical narrative or what I call the heart and brain narrative. The rational brain recognizes the cost savings, the ROI, the cold hard business impact. And then you’ve got this emotional heart story that, is all about the social impact and wanting to do good in the world.

And mashing both of those things was really successful from a positioning perspective and for the business results, our sales cycles and everything like that.

How do you understand the emotional side of your buyer?

The literal definition of positioning is to occupy a space in your customers.

And you’re not going to do that effectively unless you know what else is in there.

So that’s not stuff that’s just related to your product or the problem area that you’re trying to solve. What are they professional post personal goals? What do they believe in? What do they care about?

In this case, we found that these people were in this role because they wanted to make a difference to the talent. They wanted to give every graduate the best opportunities to improve their social standing. And that was one of the big levers for us that we were able to latch onto relatively early on in that process, and see that nobody else was talking about that in the market.

Everyone else was talking about the business impact. Nobody was connecting that back to “what can I, as an individual do to enact change?”. And if you think about this through the lens of 2020 with all of the racial equity protests around the world, it was super, super timely. So much of that opportunity was really heightened in the mind of the people that we were talking.

I think value is something that’s a priority for somebody, it’s something that they are motivated that to search, switch, or buy for something that they need to solve, there is a driving need behind that.

That might be something that comes from in the business. It might be a completely external factor, but there has to be that motivation in there. And if you can find that something that’s really altruistic.

Take HubSpot, for example, with their inbound marketing narrative. Of course, ads aren’t good. They’re expensive. But who wants to be pushing ads on people? You as a marketer would much rather people come to you. And that’s why I think that inbound narrative works so nicely is because it talks about what a marketer can do to improve. And enjoy and be happy at the way they’re doing marketing in a way.

How do you figure out what a buyer deem valuable to them?

It’s all about what the value is.

So a value is an element that your customer wants to gain. So it has to be useful to them. It’s got to be worth the efforts (i.e., worth the money, the time, or the energy), and it’s gotta be a priority for them. Ideally, that value that your customer is going to gain is going to pass all three of those tests.

And the way I’ve found best to discover them starts with super broad customer development, persona research. I think it’s disheartening to see how many companies will talk to customers to sell them or support them, but won’t necessarily talk to them just for learning opportunities, just to, find out what’s going on in life for them.

So I think a lot more people could do that.

What are two or three of the most important or valuable questions that you ask a customer to do like to learn from them?

I’ve got a blog post that lists out 19 different questions, so picking two is quite difficult for me. I think they’re all super, super valuable.

But if I absolutely had to, the first would probably be asking customers how they’ve attempted to solve their problems so far.

And the reason I love that is because you can then start to dig into, how did they solve it or how did they try to, why did it fail? What worked for them? What works you know what didn’t work? Why do they like it? Why didn’t they like it? And you’ll find out so much juicy stuff. You will start to understand, what competitors they’ve used, the processes they’ve trialed and failed at when you use it in sales conversations.

In discovery calls, for example, you also learn where the gaps were in that experience for you to lock up and seal the deal almost really valuable.

I think my second question would be “what’s changed in the last five years that makes our product so much more valuable?”. And that’s really nice for discovering this world change, if you read Andy Raskin’s narrative medium posts, but it’s really useful discovering all of these different trends that are on people’s minds and changes in their world that you might not have thought about at all. It provides a ton of insight into future opportunities for direction, for product, for marketing, for sales.

And you can also follow up with, “what’s going to change in the next five years?”. So you’re going to get ahead of the game. You’re going to be able to ask, from their current pains, their current context, the problems they’ve got right now, what is going to affect that’s going to prevent them, or maybe help them to be more successful and you can work all of that into your plans as well.

How do you merge customer value and the competitive landscape together?

My philosophy, for want of a better word, is that the dominant partner in the market equation is the demand side, is the customer.

And if we can accurately understand the market (which is a group of similar people that have similar pain points or problems that they’re willing to solve to pay to solve for), then that is much more stronger, and almost a shortcut (in context of early stage B2B companies) to momentum.

I think competitors come really into their own when you have that positioning and you’re looking for opportunities, what are the unmet needs? The unmet values that your customers just aren’t served by in the market.

Again, where are the gaps? There’s a really good book about blue ocean strategy: what are you, what could you do that your competitors aren’t doing? How do you fit that on its head?

And if you’ve got that and it’s backed up in evidence by your customers (what you’ve learned from them and what’s going on for them), that puts you in a really good position.

What’s a value nugget, and how have you used it successfully?

So this is something I started playing around with when I was at Kayako, basically in that horror story of a failed product launch.

We needed a way to link the features, to benefits, to the value that people were trying to gain from us. And so a value nugget is basically a way to package those bits up and provide a really clear hierarchy as well, so that you can use it in sales conversations or in marketing material. It makes a really good layout for a webpage, for example.

It’s comprised of those three bits in total. Firstly, what’s the value, the attribute or state that a buyer hopes to obtain?

The value is made up of one or more benefits: the advantage that a buyer gets when using a product. So it’s something that’s tangible that you can report on it, for example, usually, or it starts with a verb. And so an example might be, save time, increase customer satisfaction, increase, win rates, that kind of stuff. Those benefits gained by one or more features.

Again, you’re able to see this kind of hierarchy. Value is delivered by the benefit, which is delivered by a feature. And so that might be a specific piece of product functionality. It might be something less obvious, like an integration or a report, or it might be something that you wouldn’t think of, like a modern, clean UX, a design consideration, or, even service support, dedicated account managers, service features.

And then in the post you can find one of the things that I really like about it, is being able to move up and down that value nugget by asking why on the journey up and then how on the journey down. And this is good because it forces me to think about making it easy to navigate, but also ensuring that there’s real tight alignment between the features you’ve got and the value you say that you’re going to deliver.

And so it’s really key to building that cohesive narrative, and make sure that you’re not just selling your product, but then you can work backwards and start to build what you sell as well.

I used that at Kayako. I’ve used it everywhere since then, so it’s battle tested.

I did a blog post talking about Xerox and a story from the Challenger Customer book. If you’ve not read it, it’s where Xerox went from selling printers to K-12 school districts previously based just on their functionality — so printing color, that kind of stuff — to selling instead on how those printers led to increased student performance.

And so that’s quite a jump to say, “our printers are going to help you deliver better school results, increase your performance”, but is a really good story of using that research, discovering these kinds of unmet needs, being creative with messaging, and then, ultimately all holds up in this value nugget framework.

And so the example, one of their features is the ability to print full color workbooks. And so if we’re going to use the ‘why’ on the way up, why is that useful? That’s because it’s proven to encourage higher student performance.

Okay. So that’s great. And why is that important? Because it provides the best possible educational experience while managing budget pressures.

And so then we can ask how on the way back down, and one of the other benefits that is supporting that value. So the budget piece, how does it help support budget pressures? Because those educators can incorporate color without adding costs and how, because they have a on demand print feature.

And so when it’s laid out, you can go and find that on my newsletter, but you can see this transition really nicely all the way from those features to benefits, to value and all the way back down again, nicely packaged up.

And what I like about it as well is that it’s easy to train that narrative with sales teams. I found people pick it up really easily, especially you can give them a little cue cards for that kind of stuff.

And also for consistency, once you’ve got this real tight defined narrative that you’re using, you get everybody talking the same consistent story. And I think that’s always a good thing,

How do you track and think about lesser-known competitors?

So I think in some situations it’s helpful to think less about the terminology of competitors and more about, alternative solutions.

It’s broader. It gets us thinking about the companies we compete with day-to-day and gets us instead thinking about the solutions that people might be using to achieve those similar kinds of outcomes.

So some of them will be those direct competitors. They’re obvious, you’re familiar with them. You compete with them in most deals. You probably might also find these kinds of super niche solutions that might be set up just for one type of customer, or one really specific use case. I find that most companies will have them on that radar and individually they are not a big threat.

But when you look at them as a kind of lumped group, a single chunk on your market pie chart, that group is probably going to be bigger than you think. And I think most people should think about that a bit more.

How do you tackle a bigger number of smaller competitors?

It is tricky because of the volume of them. This is why, (again, caveating early-stage B2B) is that by focusing on the customer that you are best set up to win now, or in the near term is a shortcut to that kind of stuff.

So rather than focus on potentially all of the potential competitors, you’re much more focused in who your customer is. And that helps you build momentum through that.

I think it’s also interesting if you think not just about the software solutions as well, that compete with, so there are tons of other people-powered, but also other solutions that companies might have already that you also competing with that you just wouldn’t think about, homegrown solutions and, for example, there’s always a developer that thinks they can build whatever they need in a week.

There are going to be some businesses that have JIRA, for example, really big, heavy features that a marketing team might want to use a Asana, but they’re probably not going to get approval for that at all. If you’ve got a recruiting team willing to use Greenhouse and the company is paying for the Workday HRIS platform? Probably not going to happen.

So you’re competing with software already in house, these kind of existing vendors. Then you’ve got all the people: freelancers, consultants, agencies. Actual people, employees who can solve the same problem just through, data entry, for example or customer support, assigning tickets.

For example, in customer service, there are software solutions that can automatically assign conversations to the right people, depending on all of these factors. Most companies will just have one person or two people assigning tickets to individuals instead. It’s probably more expensive in the long run, but they just don’t know that another thing exists out there to solve that.

And so when we kind of position against these non-software competitors, we get an opportunity to be much more creative. The process is still the same: understand what unmet value that customer wants to have. And then in the actual execution you can get away from differentiation against products, because there’s not another product that you’re competing against.

It’s a trying to make sure that this person knows that you exist, that you can solve their problems. So you’re not trying to eke out the slightest element of feature differentiation. And instead, you’ve got this huge canvas to explore. And there’s so much opportunity within that to really speak to that core value that your customers really hoping to wants to needs to attain in their day-to-day.

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

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The post Podcast: What does it take to differentiate? appeared first on Building Momentum.

TL;DR: We’re launching a course, WTF is Go-To-Market, to help upskill marketers into the PMMs the world needs! Find out more and register interest here.

If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know how in-demand product marketers are right now.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen a huge increase in job postings. Product marketers are becoming CMOs. Everyone and their uncle is shouting at how important product marketing skills are in modern marketing teams.

That makes it harder than ever to hire good product marketers.

PMM is such a broad role. It’s different in almost every company. A lack of definition, roles, and responsibilities mean your PMMs are pulled from all different directions. The overlap between product, product ops, marketing, product marketing, sales, and sales enablement teams are blurred beyond disbelief.

If you hire a PMM from a large, established company, it’s likely they’re already specialized — and therefore might not have the right breadth of experience required.

But if you hire PMMs from startups, they may have super broad experience, but not the right level of depth needed to help take your business to the next stage.

And for the folks themselves, PMM career upskilling is hard.

Many marketers and PMMs of all levels want to become PMM experts, but the experience is hard to come by, and education opportunities are slim.

Most marketers don’t know what PMM is, so can’t support PMMs in their development. A lack of experienced Directors of PMM means there’s limited internal upskilling.

Most product marketing experience is learnt on the job.

Whilst there’s been a great increase in product marketing training from the Product Marketing Alliance, Pragmatic Marketing, and others… we think they’re all missing a crucial piece of the puzzle: actual experience meeting the product marketing needs of today’s fast-growth, high-ambition startups.

Answering the big question: WTF is Go-To-Market?

Whenever Alicia (my friend and product marketing life partner) and I talk to product marketers — both fresh and experienced — the number one question we get is ‘what is go-to-market?’.

Go-to-market strategy is critical for sustainable business growth, and a crucial part of the PMM skillset to grasp and put into action.

Many blog posts and courses will explain GTM and it’s components in theory… but theory means nothing if it’s not delivering value to your progression and your business.

The best way to grok GTM is to understand the foundations, learn by doing, and having a safe space to ask questions.

So… that’s what we’re doing.

Upskilling marketers into well-rounded product marketing experts

We’re launching WTF Is Go-To-Market: a unique, six-week short course for B2B startup marketers to build a go-to-market strategy, develop customer focus, and set the right foundations for an exciting Product Marketing career.

We’ll guide marketers through six, fully-formed modules from ground zero to a fully-formed strategy for your business:

1. Understand the functional GTM components
2. Learn how to really know your customer
3. What it means to define your value proposition
4. How to launch your product into the market
5. Why you need to communicate your GTM strategy
6. How to iterate your GTM strategy to success

Interested? Registrations close December 14th 2022, with the course set to run from February 7th to March 18th.

Have any questions? Drop us a note by email to wtfgotomarket@gmail.com

We’ll also be announcing a fully-paid scholarship program to help improve diversity, representation, and access to career progression amongst the PMM community.

This isn’t just another PMM course.

Alicia and I believe that product marketing changes the paths of individuals and businesses for the better. So let’s get started!

The post Building the next generation of product marketers appeared first on Building Momentum.

As a product marketer, I think we have an innate skill that many other teams don’t.

It’s our ability to connect the dots between all of the different inputs we deal with, and predict outcomes in our GTM systems.

Every day, we’re exposed to customers and their feedback, competitors, market trends, product features, product vision, processes, executional issues, business directives, and much more.

We subconsciously use these inputs to make multiple decisions every day, from the language we use in messaging, to the pricing strategies we recommend. Even more subconsciously is our use of second-order thinking.

What is second-order thinking?

To explain second-order thinking, we need to understand first-order thinking.

First-order thinking is simplistic; it’s the immediate impact and consequences of a decision. A problem exists, and a resolution is made. Let’s imagine that prospect feedback suggests pricing is too expensive; first-order thinking would be to make this cheaper.

Second-order — and even third-order — thinking requires ‘and then what?’ consideration. Your actions have consequences and implications.

Are those implications positive, or negative? Do they cause net harm?

In our expensive pricing example, first-order thinking is to reduce the price. Second-order thinking would be to examine the impact that a lower price might have on the business and it’s operations. Those effects might include:

• A reduction in perceived brand quality, which in turn reduces new business sales and increases churn

• Acquiring the wrong type of customers, which changes product vision

• Building a low-margin business, which will have knock-on effects across every team

Second-order thinking in action

Positioning is a great example of how we use second-order thinking every day, unaware.

When we review customer insights, identify customer value, and build messaging maps, we consider what the impact the values and language we use mean to our customers and our business.

First-order thinking might position a business as ‘something for everyone’ to maximize sales – and if you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that’s a fallacy and something to avoid.

Second-order thinking would look at how messaging should disqualify certain types of customers, and only appeal to the target segment. This has positive impacts on sales and marketing efficiencies, brand perception, and focuses the business on a specific ideal customer profile.

Proactively communicate second-order impacts

Whilst PMMs may use strategic thinking like this every day, many other teams are so focused in their executional work that they don’t have the cognitive space to think forward.

That means that all good-intentioned, smart work can quickly become a point of contention because the tradeoffs and positive impacts aren’t communicated effectively.

In our expensive pricing example, it’s likely that sales teams will advocate for lower pricing in response to customer feedback. If the decision was made to stick with current pricing, or even increase, the backlash would be visceral. But communicating the impact that price reductions would have, and what the impact of same/higher pricing will be, will help assuage concerns and manage expectations.

It’s important to apply second-order thinking to the second-order work you’re doing. What is the implication of this work for our teams, how will they respond? How can we create enough mutual understanding of the ‘decisionscape’ and help people see why decisions were made a certain way?

Aside: ‘decisionscape’ feels like a cool concept that I’m surprised doesn’t exist yet.

The decisionscape is the landscape of the decision – the inputs used, the process followed, the implications that arise, and the outcomes that are actioned. Ideally teams should see the clear path that was followed, the forks in the road mapped out, and how the decision leads to an optimal destination.

We do this by communicating the implications, being transparent, acknowledging the inputs and gaps, being clear on the asks, and creating a plan with our teams to build confidence in the strategy and execution.

Because focus — clarity, on the decisions we are making and why — and confidence equals momentum.

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The post Applying second-order thinking in go-to-market strategy appeared first on Building Momentum.

“I’m sorry to tell you that this is not your average course. If you’re expecting to party first, socialise second, and study third, you can leave the room right now, walk down to the office, and change course right now.”

That was Elsbeth, a steely Canadian advertising-exec-turned-course-leader. Day one, first sentence of the introduction session for our Advertising and Marketing Communications course.

The next three years saw us thrown headfirst into the theory and application of the core concepts of advertising. We began the course, expecting to become strategists, planners, account directions and creative directors at Europe’s top ad agencies. Our lecturers included everyone from academic experts on consumer behavior and analysis, to award-winning creative directors, to sharp strategy planners like Elsbeth.

I started university with the goal of beginning a career in public sector advertising. After a second-year internship, I’d been won over by the opportunity in B2B tech marketing, and started applying what I’d learnt to what was a cliche, dull and dreary.

Now 10 years later, I’ve been reflecting on the key things that advertising school taught me about marketing – and thought I’d share them here with you.

1. Marketing/advertising should drive behavior change

Marketing isn’t just about improving the brand, supporting sales, or generating unengaged leads. We need to go further and encourage behaviour change.

That might be an awareness change, like becoming someone’s source of industry news – one-time website visitors are vanity, but repeat visitors are a sign of behavior change. Or, it might be a purchase change; someone buying your product instead of something else.

A focus on improving brand perception by itself is relatively worthless if it doesn’t translate to changed behavior.

2. Use unconventional wisdom

I’ve written before about unconventional wisdom in narratives. Some of the most memorable and timeless advertising campaigns are driven by unconventional insights into the product and it’s manufacturing process.

While these examples are from older FMCG ads, there are still plenty of modern examples.

In B2B positioning, for example, we see brands build upon their support and account management, or focused on their people and their passion behind the industry. What can you tell your audience about the way you build your product and your insight into their challenges?

3. Use customer insights

One of the stories I remember from Elsbeth, the Canadian advertising lecturer, was from a product she worked on. A type of lemon-flavored butter to be used on chicken and turkey was marketed as an ingredient. As time passed, the team realized sales were growing in the hot summer months – unexpected, as sales normally peaked in the holiday period winter season.

After carrying out customer interviews, the team found that customers were buying it not for food, but for scenting their refrigerators to remove bad smells. After a quick repackaging, the business now had a second product line in an entirely new category to grow completely new purchase opportunities from, without cannibalizing their existing product category sales.

One of the biggest things I learnt was that qualitative research should be carried out first in almost every situation to understand the parameters and thought processes involved – assessing the ‘breadth’ first. Only then should qualitative surveys be used to measure the ‘depth’ and understand where patterns did, or didn’t exist.

4. Creative only works if combined with effective strategy

In line with lesson number 1 above, it’s pointless having excellent creative if it isn’t planned with an aligned strategy.

The best ad that the target market never sees is the worst ad that exists. The best placement with the worst creative that everyone sees is the biggest failure.

No matter if you’ve developed excellent campaign concepts or positioning or narratives, you need the aligning actions and tactics to make it successful.

One of my ex-creative director lecturers once remarked that creative advertising awards exist solely because otherwise, those ideas would never see light of day. While there is unlimited creative opportunity, it’s very rare that that creative is aligned to an effective strategy. Don’t make that mistake.

5. Don’t forget placement and distribution

What’s the fourth P of marketing? Product, price, promotion, and… ?

Place. It’s even in the heading there.

In traditional advertising, this might refer to anything from product availability (i.e. being in stock and available to purchase) and product placement (being on the right shelf in the supermarket), to ad placement (ads being in the right location for the target audience).

In B2B, I usually think of placement as marketing and sales distribution. How visible is our marketing promotion and sales visibility in the market? Are we being seen in the right places, is our sales process up to scratch, and are we reaching the right people?

Again, the best product or ad in the world would be pointless if marketing and advertising wasn’t displayed to the right people, in the right place, at the right time.

6. Balance new audience growth vs repeat purchases

Advertising will usually have a goal to create a behavior change in a new audience member, or to encourage repeat behavior.

Firstly, don’t combine the two. Be clear and focused in your messaging. Are you attracting a new lead, or are you trying to engage someone who already knows who you are and what you do?

Secondly, look at your audience and figure out the most effective path of least-resistance. Is it easier for you to encourage repeat purchases or account growth, over attracting a new customer? Or maybe the CAC of new customers outweighs the effort of account growth. Ideally, do both anyway. But be specific and thoughtful about it.

7. Your market position determines your marketing strategy

The market leader in your category is tasked with growing the market. Their marketing strategy is to create new purchase and usage events, grow the target audience of potential customers, and use brand to increase their share of mind.

The second and third in the market leaders list should try to increase their share of market. They need to work harder to convince the target audience that their brand should be in the consideration set – although this is sometimes easier than growing the market. Promotion should be focused less on brand, and more on benefit-led functionality, driving evaluation, and competitive differentiation.

Anyone else in fourth position or below, should forget trying to win a whole category right now. Instead, they should focus on winning a smaller sub-segment of the bigger market. This will help them drive more effective unit economics, whilst building an engaged base that, if it grows big enough, can tip them into a pole parent-market position.

Using these lessons in marketing

These concepts are key to my work in product marketing, and you’ll see these themes repeat throughout my posts on Building Momentum.

From being focused (on your customer, product value, and goals) to building confidence (through creative and physical execution and goal measurement), momentum is a result of decisions. And hopefully, those decisions are ones you’ve made proactively – and not the decisions that you decided not to make.

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One of my favorite Peloton instructors often talks about the concept of the shit shift.

It’s that moment when you’re in a run, or in a hard climb on the bike, or a testing yoga position, and you’re asking your body to do something it’s not used to.

For the first few minutes of it, it feels like torture. Your amygdala hijacks your inner voice. The fight-or-flight response is activated.

“I could just give up now… what if I slow down? Today’s not a race day…”.

And then something magical happens.

But of course, it’s not magical. It’s not supernatural, nor forced, nor a conscious decision. Your body just… happens.

It ‘does’. It acclimates. It’s still hard… but you can cope. You’re not in a state of flow, but your body knows to keep pushing. The fight-or-flight feeling dissipates.

There’s more space in your head for your consciousness to be heard. You realize that you are doing. You are doing something that you were going to give up on.

With each step, each push, each breath, you become more confident. More determined.

The determination comes from deep in your chest. It’s aching and heaving and moving you forward.

You have momentum, and you’re not stopping anytime soon.

I think the shit shift is an interesting analogy for the work we do in B2B SaaS, product marketing, sales… and why I talk about the need to build confidence in your positioning, messaging, go-to-market.

Without confidence – a belief you have faith in – it’s much easier to give up and give in. But there’s no ape brain sending fight-or-flight signals – it’s all conscious thought processing, which makes it feel 10x worse.

Confidence is not just sales or revenue. It’s positive reactions to marketing content. It’s the conversation where a prospect repeats your messaging back to you. It’s the CEO praising your team’s execution. It’s customer emails with happy quotes.

In early stage startups, confidence can be a hard thing to come across. The challenge of failing to find product/market fit, or a final ‘no’ to your biggest deal can kill confidence.

But… can you position the process as a shit shift?

Where the work is still hard and you may be teetering on the edge of success or failure, but the work is happening.

Where there is space for the conscience to be heard. This is the need for both definitions of focus: reduced priorities, maximum clarity.

Where each step, each push, builds confidence.

Focus plus confidence equals momentum.

Thanks for reading this slightly different post from me! 

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When I talk to startup founders, marketers, and commercial leads, they’re nearly always rushing around trying to do a hundred things at once. Everything is important, everything is a priority, and everything just requires work.

Their biggest challenges often arise from just two main causes:

• Lack of customer insight – who are they, why did they buy?

• Lack of market insight – what’s the landscape, who are the competitors, why do we lose to them?

To make progress and overcome these issues, the only answer is to spend more effort doing more work. Inescapable work that has no shortcuts. Work that enables more important high-value work, but requires time-consuming labour to carry out.

This work usually manifests in these ways:

• Reviewing their customers and prospects to find patterns

• Win/loss research to discover why a customer did or didn’t buy

• Evaluating competitors and building an over-complicated spreadsheet

Three product marketing systems to set up now

As in many other functions, I expect we’ll see the rise of ‘product marketing operations’ – a specific role designed to help PMM teams operate as efficiently as possible. The PMM Ops role will build scalable systems to take data and research, develop summaries, and provide usable outputs to PMMs and other teams with go-to-market, customer, competitor, and sales insights.

And just as product teams move away from project-based research to continual research, product marketing teams must do the same.

Here are three key product marketing operational systems that any startup marketer can set up and start making better decisions with reliable insight.

1. Reliable CRM prospect and customer data

Not enough sales/marketing/success teams work on data sanity in their CRM, missing out on the benefits from clean data. But when implemented and used, it becomes a really strong indicator of patterns and insight for tactical and strategic decisions.

In addition to the standard CRM data (like industry, company size, etc), you’re going to want to capture key fields at different object-levels that help you make better decisions. These will depend on your context, but generally look like this:

• Lead stage – capture information on ‘fit’ indicators like tech used or anything else that might indicate they are your ICP

• MQL stage – capture info that represents their challenges and motivations

• SQL stage – capture fields that tell you more about their buying process, key selection criteria, mindset

• Opportunity (early stage) – capture key decision-making criteria, their buying role, what they are trying to achieve, competitors in play

• Opportunity (later stage) – capture their reactions, must-haves, information on the project’s priority, product feedback

• Opportunity (closed) – capture their expectations of the partnership, as well as your CRM win/loss data

It’s key to make it really simple for sales to record data: there are Slack bots that can do this, or you can set up reminder emails using your CRM to remind reps to add the information required at each stage. You may need to add a data completeness spiff to your sales rep’s comp to ensure they add as much richness as possible.

This data serves as indicators of patterns, it won’t provide all the answers. But make sure you use it. Set up monthly or quarterly reports that go not just to your immediate team but also leadership. Create a Slack channel that posts each field in real-time to provide a pulse check into your deal flow.

2. Automated NoWL interviews

I’ve written before about win/loss processes and how valuable they can be, but most companies don’t know enough about top-of-funnel issues which can have a bigger impact on direction and strategy. It’s really valuable to include prospects who said ‘no’ at some point prior to opportunity in your research process.

I call this process NoWL, standing for No, Won, Lost. Check my previous post on win/loss for suggestions on how to set an automated system up, and how to make the most of the insight.

3. Competitor intelligence (CoIn)

Nearly every company I’ve worked at has tackled competitor intelligence in the same way: given the lowest paid person the job of creating a big spreadsheet that captures all their features, marketing, and pricing information.

This spreadsheet is summarily resigned to live in a Google Drive folder that’s never used.

Competitor intelligence should be usable and help with decision making by product, by sales, or by marketing. It should not be about creating a bible of information – it will never be socialized or used effectively.

Think about how different teams need competitor intelligence, and work backwards from there. For example:

• Sales teams need competitor landscape info for initial training, battlecards for regular updates, and real-time insight on how to beat them

• Product teams need general landscape knowledge, information on their market, and their unique claims; feature insight can be gleaned later on a project basis

• Marketing teams will need general landscape knowledge, how they differentiate, and their awareness in the market; marketing tactics can be evaluated later

This might lead to three pieces of work:

• One-page overviews of top competitors, their place in the landscape, who their market is, and how well known they are

• Summarised battlecards of key messaging and our defensive/offensive game plan against them

• Real-time insight to allow teams to react (or be proactive) to updates

With small teams who have a lot of shared domain experience, it’s often most effective to start in reverse order.

• Build the real-time feed using a Slack channel and space for discussion on sales insights, auto-post reviews for them from G2 or Capterra, send Google alerts straight into the channel

• Assign someone to spend a day on creating battlecards, and iterate monthly with direct feedback from sales

• Assign someone a week to create the first draft of a competitor overview before making it part of someone’s regular responsibilities

Build systems and processes as early as you can

Building a regular system of build, use, learn to iterate quickly is much more effective than revisiting behemoth documents twice a year.

You’ll have less manual work on your to-do list while using current, up-to-date insight to drive better decisions and react quickly to market changes.

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

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I was working remotely for two weeks when we launched the new Kayako. The launch – a huge deal for the 110 employees that had been working on the new product for the last two years – happened over Google Hangouts and Slack. Everyone joined a video call, with champagne and cake ready in the offices in London and Gurgaon, India.

Everyone had a part to play – it would only happen if everyone had typed a custom command in our Slackbot to take the old marketing website down, push the new one live, and remove the restrictions, finally opening up the new product to the world.

We were confident. The new Kayako was really different from anything else out there: a new customer service and live chat platform for companies that obsessed over their customer experience. It killed the concept of ‘tickets’, and instead promoted a single, effortless customer relationship across contact channels.

Our target market away from IT helpdesks and technical support teams to a new ‘customer-service-as-growth’ persona. With this, we released a new brand, pricing, and positioning. Gone was the dark blue, corporate feel that was a hangover from the 00’s; we created a brand that felt comfortable, personal, and effortless.

A few months in, that confidence had been chipped away by the reality we were facing. Low trial conversions. Product stability issues and bugs. Negative feedback. Revenue was falling. Accounts were cancelling after a few months.

We’d gone from adding thousands of dollars in new contracted monthly recurring revenue (CMRR) from the old product every month, to just hundreds.

It was bad. We got together in a war-room scenario: what was happening, and how do we fix it?

Aside from product issues, we identified areas of our go-to-market strategy that were seriously problematic. Although we had followed best practice, sought expert advice, and carried out research, we failed in three key areas: pricing, positioning, and onboarding.

How we failed at pricing strategy, and how we fixed it

In the run-up to the launch, we had worked with a pricing consultant who’d developed best practices and frameworks from his time at Microsoft. We learnt a lot; the engagements were helpful, productive, and we felt assured and confident in the strategy.

The process involved carrying out a survey to understand the value that customers gained from our product. There was a big spreadsheet, listing each features with a dollar value against them, depending on how big of a draw it was.We drilled into competitor pricing, looking at how we compared on features and value.

In hindsight, we should have known that a pricing process developed for billion dollar corporate organizations like Microsoft could never have worked for our ~$5m ARR startup.

Our launch pricing strategy was simple enough. Three plans – good, better, best. Similar to our biggest competitor, although a few dollars cheaper.

We knew it was failing.

1. Free trial signups dropped, because they were put off by the pricing page

2. Conversions to paid accounts were falling, because they couldn’t experience the value they were expecting

3. First month cancellations were high, because customers didn’t experience the value they expected for the price they were paying

We had followed pricing best practices as instructions, not inspiration.

Immediately, we stepped up our research. We were already doing win/loss calls, which gave us a head start into the challenges we were facing. We began to call customers, prospects, and anyone that had signed up to get their feedback.

Our suspicions were correct. The pricing wasn’t working because people couldn’t see the right plan for them, at a reasonable price, that represented good value for them.

So we went back to the drawing board, starting with our target market. Who were our customers?

We created a spectrum of customers, from individual users that just wanted a simple live chat tool, to large teams that wanted an enterprise-level customer service platform. By mapping them out, we could see where our focus should be in the short term: building revenue from mid-sized accounts, and building volume.

We then followed a value-based pricing process from Profitwell, with three stages.

Firstly, we quantified our personas. Who were they? How profitable were they? We could do this with the data we already had.

Secondly, survey customers and people in the target market to understand the features they value the most.

Then, ask those people for four price points with a willingness-to-pay survey:

1. How much would be too expensive? 

2. How much would be expensive, but not out of the question? 

3. What price would be a bargain? 

4. How much would be so cheap that you would question the quality?.

After analysing the results, we found that everything aligned with our customer spectrum. People who wanted a live chat tool wanted something very cheap or free. And those companies that wanted a full platform would be willing to pay significantly more. 

This was a big milestone. We had turned our innate understanding of our customers into quantified, evidenced results as the basis of our strategy. We were being led by our customers.

Our original plan had been to evaluate pricing every six months. If we had waited that long, we would have been in serious trouble. After implementing the new pricing structure, we constantly gathered feedback. We analysed, cohorted, pivot-tabled the fuck out of the performance numbers to see what was going on.

Over the coming months, we adapted and tested pricing multiple times. Sometimes we offered a free plan, sometimes without. We changed the numbers, the layout of the plan, the plan names, the features included or excluded, based on what we were hearing and seeing.

We forced ourselves to iterate. And that wasn’t easy; every change took at least a day’s worth of effort from three people just to implement, let alone plan, agree, and announce.

But our ability to react quickly was the difference between success and failure.

Getting positioning wrong, and turning it around

A common best practice is to lead with aspirational, ‘world change’ messaging; and to create a category that you can own.

As part of the product launch, we wanted to set ourselves apart from competitors. We thought the most effective way to do this was by creating a narrative, using Andy Raskin’s Medium posts as a guide.

His key to creating a narrative is to define the promised land, the world that your customers can achieve when they have your product.

Naively, we used this format as instruction again, not inspiration. We tried to build a category and narrative around ‘effortless customer experience’. It was really human: no more having to repeat yourself across departments, the end of being treated like a ticket number.

When we showed this to customers and prospects, it really resonated. So we went big. The messaging united our website, collateral, and sales deck.

But after the launch, we discovered it wasn’t actually working. We found we had focused almost exclusively on this aspirational world change so much that we hadn’t covered the functional benefits that our customers expected to see (and in some cases, prioritized more).

We were alienating our customers with high-level messaging. Although we had done research and testing, we had biased ourselves towards executives and decision-makers in more mature businesses, without realising that in most cases, that wasn’t our customer.

Armed with the knowledge we had from our pricing research, we were able to pick up interviews and calls with those people that were actually interested, and were actually the correct stakeholder at different stages of the buying process.

Often, those people were at smaller companies: like co-founders that needed something they could set up easily and forget about, or an ambitious customer service professional who was looking to make big changes to the way their orgs approached customer service.

We created a single Slack channel that automatically posted every bit of good, bad, and neutral feedback we received from customers and prospects across every feedback channel. This gave us a real-time pulse check, helping us refine our mental model of who our customers were and what they cared about. We also used this to create a regular Voice of the Customer report that helped communicate this across the rest of the business.

It reduced the distance between us and our customers: a direct feed into what they cared about, and what they didn’t. We had to forget our bias, removing our impression of what we thought they wanted – and actually listened to what they were saying. We let our customers lead us.

So it was time to flex that iteration muscle again. We could test, rollout, and update new messaging really quickly. Sometimes we’d change it every day by rewriting headlines, making small tweaks, or trying something completely different.

We were lucky enough to have instant access to making website changes, along with a fantastic in-house designers and marketing developers to help. We forced ourselves to iterate and experiment – everything could be reversed if it didn’t work out, with hardly any lasting risk.

Strong relationships with our sales and success teams were crucial too, allowing us to try out new messaging, test new demo structures, and try different ways of presenting our value.

From a broken onboarding process to a smooth welcome

In the run up to launching the product, we’d researched best practices for SaaS onboarding.

The majority follow a simple rule, called time-to-value. Your product’s goal is get your customers to experience value as soon as possible, for best chance of success. It’s pretty good; it means you don’t have to focus on helping users set your product up for use, and instead you can focus on getting them to a point of satisfaction.

Our product, however, needed a lot of setup to experience value. You had to set up your support email address, connect social accounts, invite your team, set up workflows, and much more.

This was way too much to do for someone just trialling the product. But there was no substitute: you had to commit completely. But we had still followed those rules as prescribed, instead of using it as inspiration. Our first onboarding process was set up around helping users set up the account. Obviously, this was not going to be effective.

The results were disappointing. Leads were signing up for trials, looking around for a few minutes, then leaving straight away.

We couldn’t let this go on. All the work we were putting in from the marketing side to get visitors to the website… the work we had put in to iterate our messaging… the huge strides we had made with pricing… were all for nothing. We were falling down at the last hurdle.

To understand what was happening, we used Fullstory to review what users were doing in their first experience. We found that the majority of people went straight to the worst place in the product. The place where nothing looks good, where no attention was paid during development, and where things got confusing, quickly. They were going to the admin area.

We really had no idea that users would go there within the first few minutes of signing up. We had to understand why, so following this line of investigation in our calls and interviews.

We tried to find out what it was that prospects were trying to discover that they couldn’t find elsewhere. The results were interesting – users were saying they wanted to learn what features we had, and how flexible the configuration options were.

They had been interested by the website, and now we realised the first experience needed to show not just the product, but it’s potential.

So we dialled up our product education efforts. As soon as someone signed up, we showed a two minute intro video, then we hit them again with three key points to drive the message home.

We added better information in the admin menu, not just describing the technical detail, but making it clear what the potential usage of each feature could be. We carried out research to understand the most logical grouping of admin features.

We added empty stages and dummy data that demonstrated the full range of capability, without requiring any setup. Our goal was to get to a place where users could see what working in the product was like from the moment they signed up.

We didn’t get this right first time. We tried to get a balance between providing education, and getting out of the way and letting users learn and explore for themselves.

We worked with our designers and frontend developers to iterate together. As we made progress, some users weren’t happy as we tried something weird. Generally, feedback was positive. We tried to distill complexity into more simple, logical areas.

Fullstory was really useful to instantly see results, and whether users were being successful with each version we tried. When we looked at cohort data, we found a clear connection between the educational onboarding experience, and higher trial conversions.

Reacting well

It took us about six months to right these wrongs. Over that time, we had increased the new CMRR we were adding each month by other 80%. Within 18 months of launch, the new product had become a $2m ARR product, and Kayako was then acquired on the strength of it’s growth.

In each of these three examples we were able to turn around a struggling product launch, and put it back on track. Three guidelines determined our reaction.

Best practices are inspiration, not instruction

The same goes for any advice, any tips, recommendations, talks, and blog posts. There are simply too many variables, too many unknowns, and too many inherent biases at play to use a best practice or process from one situation, and expect it to perform well.

That’s not to say we can’t take inspiration from them. So long as we are applying some critical analysis to assess how we should interpret that advice.

Let your customers lead you

Doing this can feel pretty strange, however obvious. Especially if, like this product launch, you’re moving towards a new audience, a new type of customer that you don’t fully understand yet.

It’s tempting to put something out that you think will work, because you don’t know enough yet. Positioning that’s created in an internal vacuum, or pricing that’s based on your competitors.

It’s really crucial to continually build an understanding of customers all the time. Continual research over one-off projects. We have to listen, set aside our own biases, get out of our heads, and really get into theirs.

Flex your iteration muscle

I’ve called it a muscle because unless you don’t do it often, it will be hard, it will hurt, and it is going to be uncomfortable.

As marketers, I think we’re conditioned to prefer one-off, big bang launches. We do the work, launch, move onto the next thing… with plans to revisit at some point in the future.

But we’re in 2020. Nothing lasts six months anymore. Your customer’s goals, gains, pains, and jobs change much more often than we think. And so does your business strategy. What was true, and worked well yesterday, might not be true tomorrow.

We found it extremely useful to implement pulse checks: small polls, real-time feeds, and regular evaluations to keep on top of what’s happening. The goal is to test two things: if your understanding is still correct, and if your execution is still effective.

Bringing it all together

I hope this gives you a few ideas on how we approached a failing product launch, and how we turned it around by really listening to our customers, constantly iterating, and using best practices as inspiration.

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

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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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