Don't dilute focus - Building Momentum

Hi, I’m James. Thanks for checking out Building Momentum: a newsletter to help startup founders and marketers accelerate SaaS growth through product marketing.

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.

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