Most customer interviews stay surface-level. Try as you might, you keep getting polite answers about workflows, tooling preferences, and general frustrations.

You nod along, take notes, and push a little to try and extract something meaningful. But more often than not, you walk away with a wishlist of “nice-to-haves”, or the same vague complaints you already knew.

What you don’t get is the stuff that actually drives decisions.

You don’t hear about the internal tensions and the pressure to prove ROI on a new initiative. You don’t hear about the awkward leadership conversation that made them rethink their priorities, or the missed target that quietly tanked morale.

You don’t get the emotion behind the decision-making; the sense of urgency, frustration, or even fear that pushes someone to act. And without that layer of insight, it’s hard to create messaging and positioning that actually lands.

People don’t search, switch, or buy because of abstract pain points or vague value props. They take action only when something hits a nerve, and
when your story mirrors their experience.

But how are you supposed to get there?

That’s where this question comes in:

“When you’ve had a horrible day and want to throw your laptop out the window, what’s happened?”

It’s one of the most useful questions I’ve come across in customer interviews, and I first heard it from my PMM partner, Alicia Carney.

It seems simple, maybe even a bit fluffy, but the emotional weight it carries makes it a goldmine for real insight.

This question doesn’t ask about budgets or roadmaps or specific product needs. It asks about pressure and friction, the moments that tip people over the edge. It’s those emotional spikes that give you something to anchor your messaging and positioning around.

Alicia shared a brilliant example of this from her time at a climate tech startup. She was speaking to a Group Product Manager at a fintech scaleup. On paper, this was a strong buyer profile: commercially minded, accountable for revenue, working in a growth-stage company.

When Alicia asked whether a climate API would ever make it onto her roadmap, the answer was blunt: “No, this isn’t relevant to us. I only prioritise based on incremental revenue.”

She didn’t just say no, but it was the kind of response that says, “Why are we even having this conversation?” The energy shifted, and the door started to close.

But then Alicia asked the laptop-out-the-window question…

The same PM opened up.

“Some days I feel like I’m working my ass off for this company to get richer. I feel lost and under-appreciated. I love my team and want to stay to support them, but I wish I had more of a sense of meaning and purpose here.”

Same person, but a completely different story.

And that’s the point.

There’s often a huge gap between how someone initially responds to a product question and what’s actually going on underneath.

In this case, the product felt irrelevant in isolation. But when framed through the lens of purpose and emotional impact, it became something else entirely. It became a vehicle to help her champion a new initiative. To push a meaningful project internally. To find more alignment between her personal values and her day-to-day work.

That shift didn’t just change Alicia’s understanding of the buyer, it shaped how she positioned the product. It helped her move from describing a feature (a robust API) to telling a more powerful story: this is your chance to pitch something that aligns with both business growth and personal purpose.

From that insight, she built messaging and enablement that reflected both commercial value and human motivation. She reframed the product around helping customers lead new conversations, pitch bold ideas to leadership, and ultimately make change happen from within.

And all of that started with a question that wasn’t about the product at all.

If your interviews keep circling the same abstract pain points, or you’re struggling to uncover what actually drives urgency, try that question.

Don’t just ask what tools they use or what’s missing. Ask what happens on the days that break them, because that’s where the real story begins… and that’s what you build your message around.

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 customer question that cuts through BS appeared first on Building Momentum.

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

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

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

… now ask them how many they actually engaged with.

The reality of modern marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How this shapes your positioning and messaging

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How this changes your sales narrative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How this should change your marketing

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

So what wins?

Clarity. Relevance. Proof. Urgency. Distinctiveness. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the toughest lessons I’ve learned in product marketing is that customer research doesn’t matter if no one uses it.

Product marketers love doing research. We geek out over customer interviews, win/loss reports, usage data, surveys, you name it. We spend hours synthesizing insights, finding patterns, and integrating it into our work.

And then?

It sits in a Notion doc. A slide deck. A beautifully crafted report that no one reads. It feels awful, knowing the effort that went into the research execution and detailed analysis… only for the business to just keep making decisions based on gut feel.

Research without action is wasted effort. The research we do as product marketers only drives impact when it’s impossible to ignore. So, here’s how you do that.

Make customer research essential by design

If you want customer research to matter, you need to connect it to real business needs from day one. Here’s how:

Tie every research project to a business decision

Customer insights aren’t useful in isolation. Before you do any research, ask:

• What decision does this research need to influence?
• Who will use this insight, and how?
• What’s the business outcome if we act on this?

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

Weak research goal: “Let’s run interviews to learn more about our ICP.”
Strong research goal: “We’re seeing slower sales cycles in mid-market deals. Let’s interview prospects to uncover specific objections and refine our messaging.”

Weak research goal: “Let’s validate our persona assumptions.”
Strong research goal: “Sales is struggling to close deals with finance leaders. Let’s talk to buyers in that role and identify what they need to justify purchasing.”

Research should be a means to an end, not an academic exercise. If you can’t map your research to a critical business challenge, reconsider whether it’s worth doing.

Create demand for your insights

If your research isn’t used, it’s usually because it wasn’t designed to be useful, necessary, and aligned with advancing key business initiatives.

The easiest way to guarantee your work gets ignored is to spring it on stakeholders after the fact.

Instead, make your research process collaborative from the start:

• Talk to your colleagues in sales, product, and success teams before kicking off research. Get specific: What patterns are they seeing? Where do deals get stuck? What objections come up most often?
• Engage product early. Go beyond just asking what behaviors are blocking adoption,work together to identify what research could help inform roadmap decisions, improve retention, or eliminate friction.
• Align with leadership. Don’t just ask what they wish they knew. Identify the strategic decisions they’re struggling with, and structure your research to give them the clarity they need.

This isn’t just about gathering input, it’s about making your research indispensable by directly influencing critical business decisions. When stakeholders help shape the questions, they’re far more likely to use the answers.

Validate assumptions, don’t just explore

Research focused on pure discovery is a distraction. You already have internal assumptions, use those to focus on research that validates what you believe to be true while uncovering what you don’t yet know. This ensures your findings are not only actionable but also drive real decisions that help you move faster and with confidence.

Instead of starting from a blank slate, begin by outlining key hypotheses based on existing data, customer conversations, and team insights. Then structure your research to confirm, refine, or challenge those assumptions, leading to clear next steps.

Discovery and validation shouldn’t be separate; they should work together in every research initiative. Don’t just ask open-ended questions; use the end of an interview to test different messaging options, show a mockup of a webpage, or present alternative value propositions. Ask customers how they perceive them, what resonates, and what feels off. This approach ensures that every insight isn’t just theoretical: it’s immediately tested, refined, and ready to drive action.

Translate research into decisions, not just insights

The fastest way to kill momentum? Deliver a 20-slide research report that no one has time to read.

Instead, make it stupidly easy for decision-makers to take action.

Try structuring your research deliverables like this:

• One-pager format: Summarize key insights, clear takeaways, and the action items that matter.
• Make insights instantly usable: Don’t just document customer pain points, turn them into real, testable assets. Convert research into ready-to-go sales decks, refined pitch scripts, or A/B testable website copy that teams can implement immediately.
• Decision-based recommendations: Clearly outline what should change based on your research, and why. Example:

“Many customers say they are confused by pricing.”
“50% of lost deals cite pricing complexity. We should simplify our structure by moving from per-seat to usage-based pricing.”

People are overwhelmed with information. Your job is to simplify and operationalize it so it actually drives decisions.

Keep insights relevant and embedded in every day use

Customer insights aren’t static,they should evolve with real changes in market dynamics, competitive shifts, or strategic priorities. If research becomes disconnected from business needs, it loses value.

To ensure research remains impactful:

• Create a centralized, living research hub (Notion, Confluence, etc.) where insights are easy to find and updated as needed.
• Refresh research only when necessary. Don’t update just for the sake of it. Refresh when something has materially changed that impacts your understanding of customers.
• Share insights in context. Make them a natural part of sales enablement, product roadmap discussions, and strategy meetings so they directly inform key decisions.
• Use the right research type for the right job. Qualitative research is ideal for discovering new patterns and exploring the customer landscape, while quantitative research helps validate those patterns, segment audiences, and measure impact at scale. Knowing when to use each ensures that insights are both rich and actionable.

Customer research isn’t just a box to check… but only if it’s plugged directly into your company’s biggest challenges and priorities.

Because the best research is the research that gets used.

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

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

The post Your customer research is failing if no one uses it appeared first on Building Momentum.

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.

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

The post Analysis: 16 years of Zendesk positioning appeared first on Building Momentum.

Time flies when you’re busy – and with the current environment, you’re probably stacked right now. I know, I feel ya.

BUT… please don’t forget sight of why we’re all here, doing our jobs: serving our customers.

If you’ve got new product GTMs to plan, a new deck to deliver, and positioning to polish, it’s very tempting to let your existing customer knowledge and assumptions carry you through.

Of course, the opportunity cost is that the gap between you and your customer gets slightly bigger, every week.

Here are some very light-touch, low-effort ways that you can put into practice this week.

Send a personalized email to a new customer

If you don’t have an automated win/loss interview process set up already, you’re missing out! But if you promise to set one up, you can do this in the meantime.

You hopefully have access to a list of recent won deals and new customer signups, whether that’s in Salesforce, Slack, or Hubspot.

Take a look through, familiarise yourself with the types of customers you’re winning – then select a few customers to email.

Say hi, introduce yourself, and ask three pointed questions:

1. What made you sign up with us?
2. How did we compare to other solutions out there?
3. Is there any initial feedback about our marketing, sales, and product experience that you think we should know?

You’ll get tons of interesting thoughts that will help you build more relevant marketing and sales content, understand your differentiators, and find opportunities to improve the funnel.

Check who’s engaging with your company’s LinkedIn account, and research their profiles

If your company uses LinkedIn as a social channel, you probably get a lot of likes and comments on those posts.

Maybe they’re customers, maybe they’re prospects, maybe they’re just interested in your product.

Desk research through LinkedIn snooping is a great and quick way to conduct a temperature check on what’s happening in your space.

Click through a few profiles and focus on:

• Job titles, types of companies, and how they describe their role
• Any personal intros, interests, and past experience
• Their other activity – comments on other posts, companies they follow, etc

You’ll build a more resilient picture of the people in your market and understand them more as people, not just an amorphous blob.

Create a quick poll on Twitter to gather feedback on a particular product feature or pricing

Similarly if your company has a decent amount of Twitter followers, perhaps there’s a way you can run a quick and dirty social poll that actually helps clarify something of value for you too.

I’m not talking about a ‘Coke or Pepsi?’ question – let’s go a bit deeper.

Maybe it’s something to do with your upcoming roadmap, or the most pressing challenges right now, or whether they expect to spend more on solving the problem or less in the next year.

Check customer reviews on G2 and Capterra and make a quick summary

There’s so much data on G2 that you’re probably not using effectively.

Line up your own profile and those of your top competitors, then start analysing.

Use all of the filters available – company size, user role, industry, region, and review category.

Sort reviews by ‘most helpful’ to see what questions your potential customers, or by ‘most recent’ to dig into current trends.

My tip here is to make your research into a brief summary to share with your product, marketing, and sales teams. Who knows – you might spot some good underserved needs or some good competitive information to help sales set landmines in their next call.

Take a quick look at the customer support tickets to identify common issues and address them

I’ve learnt so much by logging into Zendesk and scrolling through the most recent questions and concerns. Maybe you can make this a regular thing, 15 minutes every couple of days, to help spot trends and see if there are any quick wins that you can help drive.

Once, I was checking out recent support requests and found a customer was having trouble paying by a debit card. I checked with the bizops team who found we hadn’t enabled debit cards in our billing platform. With one click of a button, we’d unlocked it – and instantly nuked a potential blocker for revenue.

Join some customer success account review calls to see what’s on your customers mind

Similar to sales calls, your customers are going to be a great source of insight to help influence your roadmap, positioning, and strategy.

Best practice suggests CSMs should have quarterly reviews with their top customers, where they cover key results, product improvements, and plan for the months ahead.

These can serve as great ways to listen in, get a feel for how customers are successful with your product, and what issues they raise.

Review your website acquisition performance, including the top landing pages and ads

We all know the marketing tactics that we’re actually doing – but do you really know what’s working best?

Understanding your Google Analytics data can help you build a better picture of the buyer journey, how customers are finding you, what messaging they’re seeing and responding to best, and much more.

You can also see the top referrers of traffic, helping you identify potential channels to increase investment in, new partners to approach for co-marketing, and understand what prospects actually do when they come to your website.

Analyze product usage data and see what features customers are (or aren’t) using

This is pretty self-explanatory. If your customers aren’t using features that you’ve recently launched, maybe the message didn’t land – or maybe the feature isn’t fit for purpose.

Maybe there are obscure features they’re finding a ton of value in that can play a bigger part in your differentiation.

And who knows – you might find the data surprising, helping you reprioritise your product marketing efforts to grow awareness and adoption, rather than top-of-funnel engagement.

Ask sales reps to share their thoughts on recent customer trends

Your sales reps are a great conduit for understanding customers – albeit with a pinch of salt.

They’re on the phone, on demos, on meetings every day – learning what works, what doesn’t, and how to optimize the time they have.

So they know what customers respond to, what customers are saying about the market and competitors, and where they’re focusing for most success.

However, be warned – sales reps are inherently affected by recency bias. Their most recent experiences will define their answers.

Join a product demo call and see how the prospect responds to your positioning

This might take more than 10 minutes, but I can guarantee it will be worth your time.

I highly recommend making friends with sales reps, so you have a good constant pipeline of calls to join. You’re always framing these as customer listening calls (rather than reviewing the sales reps performance).

Take a notepad, note timestamps, and listen back to the calls on Gong for interesting snippets you want to refer back to later.

Perhaps you’re paying most attention to the discovery portion of the call, to understand their current situation and problems. Or maybe you want to understand their reaction to the elevator pitch and whether it resonates with them.

Regardless, you’ll learn a ton.

Join an online community to engage with customers

There are probably hundreds of Slack communities, LinkedIn groups, forums, newsletters and more for your particular industry. Sign up, log in, and let the wave of insight wash over you.

Whether you’re just lurking to see what folks are talking about, or getting engaged to provide support, advice and tips, they can be great sources for building relationships for market research calls, testing messaging, and more. Just don’t overtly ‘sell’ – you’re there to learn, not pitch!

Check out comments on competitors’ social media pages to learn their preferences and concerns

Trust me – your competitors are getting complaints on social media. Useful ammunition for your product and sales team.

And, if their social media team is also engaging their audience on more positive topics, maybe there’s something to learn about their customer’s preferences, and how you differ, to help improve your targeting and segmentation.

Build your empathy

These tips are not really tied to specific initiatives that you can run. They should be an inherent part of your product marketing process, a way to build empathy with your customers and act as a pulse check on the market.

That way, your gut can be trusted with more confidence – your internalised pattern-matching is powered by more accurate, recent, relevant information. And that’s how you’ll get more shots on target with your day-to-day work.

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

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

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

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

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

Examples

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

Kayako: Live Chat Statistics

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

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

How we used it

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

Headstart: Diversity & The Dream

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

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

How we used it

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

SmartFocus: Christmas 2014

Wow – this is 8 years ago!

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

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

How we used it

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

Bonus: Lune

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

How to create consumer research surveys

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

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

Define your audience

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

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

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

Set your questions

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

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

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

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

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

Run a pilot

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

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

Ensure reliability and trustworthiness

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

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

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

Crunch that data

Now it’s time to slice and dice that data until you carve perfect nuggets of statistical goodness.

If you’re using Pollfish, the platform already provides a tool to help you segment the data by demographic insights and answers to other questions. This is where you can analyse to find the deltas and gaps and correlations to provide great stats for your report.

Consider all the angles

Often surveys become a bit repetitive… 50% do this… 34% think that… A third of people read this... Try to avoid this.

Group 1 are more likely to X than Group 2. Group 3 do this X times, but this increases to Y times when they are Z.

You can also change how you present the stats. 50%…, Half of…, The majority of… all help you keep readers engaged – and help you tell a story.

You can also think about collecting qualitative data, which is great for human interest angles. These can make strong emotional connections and really embed your survey results in real life.

Design your report

Creating a PDF report or standalone web page is a great way to showcase your survey report in an engaging way. Don’t limit yourself to A4 pages – think about a long, flowing report that readers will peruse on their phone or at their computer.

You can get creative with graph design, showing stats as bar charts or pie charts or line graphs or whatever makes sense.

Unethically, this is your opportunity to convince readers that your stats tell the whole story. You can write the report like you would a story: presenting challenges, introducing the hero, selling the dream outcome, the roadblocks to get there, etc.

Repurpose, repurpose, repurpose

If you’ve invested so much time and effort and money in your survey, don’t let it flop. These stats can become a core part of your positioning and sales narrative, and provide months and months of juice for your content team.

• Tie in your report with events: hold online webinars or IRL conference talks to introduce your stats and hold space for discussion
• Introduce to your customers just as much as your prospects: they can be a big vehicle for distribution
• Think social by default: shareable images and videos
• Train your teams: build the survey results into your sales process at both the top and bottom of the funnel, generating interest and reiterating its importance throughout
• Arm your teams: make sure your sales, marketing, and customer success teams have the material, content, and collateral they need to use the outcomes you’ve discovered in their everyday work
• If the focus is PR, bring a PR team in early: they’ll be able to help guide and shape the survey with journalists to maximise hit rates
• Distribute: guest-post on partner sites, join partner webinars, add your stats to ‘top stats’ for inclusion and backlinks, syndicate content with publishers
• Repeat and repeat and repeat: repeat the outcomes you’ve discovered until everyone inside and outside your business knows them by heart

Your outcomes are only as good as your preparation

If you write a question that’s a bit too confusing, or set up a screening question incorrectly, your data is going to be skewed – and that’s not good.

Putting extra emphasis on preparing your survey pays dividends. If you can, work with a researcher who can craft the survey, manage responses, and analyse the data to give you the best outcomes.

You also need to understand how you will use the survey before you carry it out. Exploratory quantitative research helps nobody. Validate themes and understand likely directions through qualitative research first before going out to build your survey. Know exactly how you’ll repurpose the content to support different marketing and sales activities to avoid wasting time.

Lastly: don’t overdo these kind of campaigns – and when you do, do it well.. It’s become standard for ‘digital PR’ agencies to create crappy, linkbait surveys that are only tangentially connected to the business, that are weak and implausible – damaging brand perception.

Good luck! I’d love to see the surveys you’ve run – drop me a note or leave a comment!

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

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

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

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

Customer retention and expansion

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

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

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

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

Positioning to evolving value

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

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

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

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

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

Supporting pipeline generation

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

So do what you can to support marketing and sales.

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

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

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

Making efficiencies

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

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

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

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

Diamonds are forever, but downturns are temporary

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

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

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

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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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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.

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The post The importance of principles (or Okay… but how?) appeared first on Building Momentum.

As product marketers, we’re forever asking ‘why’.

• Why do customers struggle with this problem?
• Why did we build this feature?
• Why are we seeing more closed-won deals from a particular country?
• Why are we not getting traction with performance marketing on a particular channel?

We’re always trying to get to the core nugget of insight that has driven, or can drive, a specific action. (And remember: marketing is meant to drive behavior change).

But when we’re actually doing work ourselves, it’s easy to lose sight of that initial insight. Strategic work quickly becomes part of the everyday mundanity.

A one-pager is never just a one-pager

Whether it’s creating sales enablement one-pagers, updating the pitch deck, or crafting a new product launch rollout plan, it might seem super straightforward.

“Sales asked for this one-pager. We launched some new features, so we should update the pitch deck. This is our standard product rollout plan.”

But we’re never just updating a deck: we’re figuring out how to tell our story in a persuasive way that drives the conversation.

We’re not just creating a rollout plan: we’re looking to drive incremental revenue, better meet customer needs, and showcase our innovation.

And a one-pager is never just a one-pager. It might be intended to actually educate prospects on the problem, or persuade prospects of our differentiation, or support our prospect in championing our solution over others.

The two-bullet brief

Something I learnt (but, I raise my hand, haven’t practiced lately), is to add two bullet points to every document.

These two bulletpoints help me keep in mind what it is we’re actually trying to achieve. They help align work-in-progress reviewers and those giving feedback – and help us have higher value discussions.

At the top of every document or initiative you’re working on, make a quick note on the following:

• Audience and buying stage
• What success will look like

The first is obvious. How successful our work is depends on having a good, consistent understanding of the audience, so keeping in mind the specific type of customer – whether that’s a persona, an industry, or even an internal stakeholder – helps.

But we also need to consider where they are in their buyer journey. Are they early in their evaluation journey? Their needs – and your response – will change significantly.

The second bullet, you might call an outcome or the goal – but that can be too restrictive. We’re talking about success! In the best case scenario, what does this activity enable or achieve?

• Success of a product one-pager might look like an improvement in opportunity progression, with customers excited to learn more.
• Success of a website update might be prospects having an elevated understanding of our product differentiation with a positive impact on lead generation.

You might want to treat this as a hypothesis and approach it from an experimental perspective, but that can be overkill and confusing for people or organizations that don’t operate that way.

Think bigger

As product marketers, we’re experts in second-order thinking. Our actions have consequences and implications.

Let’s make sure that the work we do always has the right implications and work towards the best outcomes.

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

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Knowledge is power. You can make better decisions, and have more information to inform your execution.

Your go-to-market strategy depends on how well you understand your customers and the market, but most of the time product marketers are just guessing.

It’s so difficult to look for the right stats or validate assumptions, so often we… just don’t.

Luckily there’s a whole host of tools you can use to better understand your market – and help you make better decisions.

Audiense

Audiense is a great tool for social media insights. It’s great for identifying the size of potential customer segments that can be reached on social media, and building a richer picture of their interests, who influences them, and what/when they tweet.

You can search for specific keywords to identify people with specific job titles or interests to create and compare niche segments. Audiense also offers personality insights: an analysis based on the Big Five personality dimensions. This might sound like a nice-to-have, but understanding whether your customer base is rational or logical, empathetic or hard-hearted can really help you improve your messaging and ensure it resonates.

Sparktoro

Along the same lines as Audiense, but honestly more usable and friendly, is Sparktoro. By analysing public data, Sparktoro returns super simple and straightforward reports that include the demographics, behaviors, and interests of your audience.

You can analyze social accounts or websites, or search for general audiences that use certain words, follow certain accounts, or frequently visit specific websites: perfect for sneaky competitive intelligence. Because remember, understanding your audience means understanding your competitor’s audience too.

Sparktoro will also tell you about any press sites, podcasts, and YouTube channels your audience follow – something your performance marketing team will appreciate.

Pollfish

First-hand quantitative data is so important to help validate your assumptions, but it can be so expensive to work with research agencies.

Pollfish is one of a new breed of research platforms, with an integrated panel to give you super fast access to insights you won’t find anywhere else.

Pricing starts at just $145 with two screener questions to help you target the right audience based on almost any questions you want to ask.

The only tip is to that you’ll need to build your survey design skills to avoid leading questions, biasing responses, or capturing unintelligible data. You might need to find a research designer on Upwork or Fiverr to help.

You can ask almost anything: from competitor awareness, to brand perception, to testing messaging and positioning. Their weighting algorithm also averages out the results to give you representative results that you can use in PR.

Apollo

Primarily an outbound sales prospecting tool, Apollo is really useful to help marketers research their Ideal Customer Profile segments, build bottom-up market sizing, and begin to humanize your ICP.

You can create audiences by filtering on a whole host of individual and organisational options including title, locations, seniority, the technologies they’re using, and even the roles a company is hiring for.

Statista

We’ve all seen Statista results show up in Google when we’re trying to find stats, but have you ever actually searched on Statista first?

By amalgamating research reports, government stats, and other sources of data, Statista is a great place to find stats on… almost anything.

The only downside is that you’re likely to find adjacent data that’s close, but probably not exactly what you need. Pricing is pretty good too – $39/month for a year’s worth of access, or just under $2,000 for a month’s worth of indepth reports.

UserTesting / UsabilityHub

I’m adding these UserTesting and UsabilityHub together because they achieve pretty much the same job: an easy way to get real people to look at your stuff and tell you what they think.

This might be a new website homepage design to test the effectiveness of your messaging, or product screenshots to see how users react.

They’re a great way to get real, raw insights from people you don’t know. Highly recommend.

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 Seven go-to-market research tools to bookmark appeared first on Building Momentum.

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Based on Andrew’s experience running competitive programs at ZoomInfo and ClickUp, it has 90 minutes of content and frameworks that you can steal, copy, and see results – fast.

Use code James20 to get $20 off: find out more and buy now here.

“One area in my current role that I’m struggling with are the very short value props and elevator pitches for our new product releases. I’m strong at writing longer descriptions but when I really need to scale it down to one or two sentences I find it challenging. Do you have any good frameworks to help with this?”

I got this message from a Building Momentum subscriber on LinkedIn and thought it’d be worth sharing and expanding upon my answer.

As product marketers, we’re really comfortable writing long tomes of product copy. Give us a blank Google Doc and we can wax lyrical about the product, the value it delivers, how customers use it, and the future direction of the industry.

… But ask us to come up with headlines and short elevator pitches? It’s difficult!

There are so many things we want to say, so many angles to cover, and we need to get our key phrases and differentiators and category description in there too…

(And, even worse, we’re usually crafting copy for use by other teams, leading to copy by committee. Nothing good happens here).

There are a few short copy tricks and tips that I’ve picked up that can help you craft concise, captivating, creative statements. Keep these in mind when you’re drafting website copy, 25-word ‘about us’ descriptions, sales decks, digital ads, and more.

Remember, ABC

Something that’s stuck with me from journalism class: you should always write with accuracy, brevity, and clarity in mind.

• Accuracy: As well as accurate information, you need to accurately express what you’re writing through tone of voice, precision, and spelling/grammar.
• Brevity: You should get to the point in as few words as possible. Additional words often don’t make anything clearer, but add more cognitive effort for the reader to comprehend.
• Clarity: Avoid misunderstanding and ambiguity in your writing. Use simple language, avoid jargon, and be direct.

This blogpost has a ton of tips on how to make your writing accurate, brief, and clear: bookmark for future use.

Use rhetorical devices

As humans, we’re tuned to listen and engage more when we hear certain persuasive tactics. Rhetorical devices are techniques that you can steal to elevate your copy from drab to fab.

This post on ‘16 Rhetorical Devices That Will Make You Sound Like Steve Jobs‘ is one I’ve bookmarked and come back to time and time again. Here are my favorites:

• Aporia: A feigned statement of doubt by the speaker and a question to the audience.
  • “Now, how are we gonna communicate this? We don’t wanna carry around a mouse, right? What are we gonna do?”
• Antitheton: Two opposing facts of contrasting content.
  • “The kind of things you would find on a typical phone, but in a very untypical way now.”
• Climax: The increase from a weaker to a stronger expression. A word sequence is arranged in ascending order.
  • “First was the mouse. The second was the click wheel. And now, we’re gonna bring multi-touch to the market.”

Build an inspiration swipefile

Take notes of inspiring value propositions, engaging use of language, and creative copy execution.

Take a look at my post on good examples of messaging for some inspiration, and add your own.

Look outside your own industry and vertical too, from consumer products to heavy machinery manufacturers. You’re not so much interested in the words, but more how the statements are formed and crafted.

If you can, work with a copywriter

Product marketers are trained to become excellent at understanding customer needs. Copywriters are trained to become excellent at communicating in copy.

Working with a copywriter, whether in-house or freelance, will 100% help to level up your results.

Steal from your customers

If you’re talking to your customers regularly, carrying out market research, or even checking their profiles out on LinkedIn, then you’ve got a creative copy goldmine at your fingertips.

Sometimes, our customers can sum our product value up better than we ever could. You might be surprised at the gems you’ll discover.

Imagine customer conversations

Hopefully, you’ve been able to build significant empathy with your customers and feel in sync with who they are, their mindset, what their jobs/gains/pains/triggers are, and the value they desire.

If you can’t talk to customers, try imagining what they would say if you did ask them.

Some prompts that might be useful are things like:

• “So, what is [product] and why do you use it?”
• “What was life like before, and what’s life like now?”
• “Why do you recommend our product?”
• “Explain where our product compares to others in the market.”

Creative writing is an art

Hopefully some of these tips will help you find new inspiration or employ frameworks to improve the copy you’ve already created.

Creative writing is an art so again, think about working with an experienced copywriter to help you create copy that works for your business and customers.

Lastly, don’t be afraid to push the boundaries. Understand your brand voice, try different angles, and stick your neck out on the line: fortune favors the brave.

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

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

The post 6 tips to craft concise, captivating, creative value propositions appeared first on Building Momentum.

Over the last 5 years, I’ve cultivated a positioning process that I call Customer Value Positioning.

I’ve written about all of the component pieces on this newsletter so regular readers will recognise the themes, but it’s taken me the last 12 months to revise, simplify, and improve based on the feedback of over 20+ marketers.

With Customer Value Positioning (CVP), you’ll:

• Define the perfect website heading and slogan that resonates
• Detail exactly how your product helps your customer achieve their goals
• Describe the top three outcomes your customers desire
• Discover your ideal customer profile and build a fluff-free persona that aligns your sales, marketing, and product teams

And, just like the name might suggest, we’re basing the whole process on the only thing that matters: your customer.

Background: Why positioning needs more support

Last year I was named Positioning & Messaging Maestro of the Year 2021 by the Product Marketing Alliance.

Positioning is my jam: the intersection of customer-centricity, internal assumptions, and strategy in practice.

The literal definition of positioning is “to occupy a space in the customer’s mind,”… but how are we going to position effectively if we don’t understand what’s going on in their head?

Traditionally, marketers have relied on the ol’ trusty positioning statement, something that’s been around for ~30+ years. Unfortunately, it’s become a limp safety blanket for uninventive marketers and founders, crushing their innovations and aspirations into a maddening game of adlibs.

More recent positioning frameworks like Obviously Awesome have provided a much-needed boost and spotlight on positioning as a whole… but after talking to 100+ product marketers and founders over the last few years, it still leaves a gap:

• Positioning has so many subtle inputs, and is too intangible for many “casual” users to internalise no matter how good the book is
• Trying to connect the dots between the product you’ve built and the customers you think are good fit is difficult, because we’re so close to it that we can’t see the wood for the trees
• Usually these processes don’t have a tangible output – a mark of success that helps build momentum. A positioning document is great: but then what? How is that doc then translated to the website, or a tradeshow banner, or a sales deck?

Download The Customer Value Positioning framework

Introducing my battle-tested positioning process

Firstly, I want to mention that this framework builds on top of the work of many great marketers, and as such you’ll see echoes and similarities with the work of April Dunford, Myk Pono, Al Ries and Jack Trout, Andy Raskin, and more. If this framework can be a quarter as good as their work, I’ll be happy.

Secondly, customer value positioning is not strictly just a framework, it’s a battle-tested process.

It’s built to ensure that with the right inputs and the right questions asked, the outcome is the same: quality positioning that resonates with your customer, and showcases how your product supports them in obtaining the value they desire.

Let’s walk through the process.

Discover your buyer persona

Buyer personas are discovered, not created.

The most valuable input to this process is customer insight. You can use your internal assumptions, but please: go and ask 10-15 customers these questions.

Transcribe your interviews, extract each point into an online Mural board, then group and summarise the themes.

Then organize those themes into:

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

Make sure you’re also capturing some information on your customer’s psychographic profile. Are they early adopters and innovators, or laggards? Are they rational or emotional beings? Introverts or extroverts?

Describe the value your customers desire

I define value as an element that your customer wants to attain that:

• Is useful
• Is worth the effort (cost, time, energy)
• Is a priority for them

These might be the outcomes of solving problems and overcoming challenges, or new states that they can achieve by unlocking new capabilities.

You’ll see value themes jump out at you from the previous step. Describe why the value is important to the customer, with a value story following this script:

• Situation:
  • Today, our customer is… (what are they doing, what’s the situation that sets context for the value?)
• Problem:
  • However, …(the limitations or challenges that they’re experiencing)
• Implication:
  • This means…(what’s the downside of continuing in the current way?)
• Resolution:
  • By… (what does fixing the problem look like, not necessarily your product)
• Value:
  • … our customer will…(detail the value they can gain)

Detail how your product helps

We can’t promise that we’ll help customers achieve their outcomes without connecting it back to our product.

Think about the features within your product that support each desired value. These might be an obvious product capability like an integration, a less obvious consideration like a modern and clean UX, or even service elements like a dedicated account manager

Then list out the benefits that those features enable. Benefits are tangible advantages a buyer experiences when using your product; something they can report on, and usually starts with a verb. 

Define your positioning

Start at the bottom.

Frame of reference

April Dunford’s book explains how a frame of reference works with a great example. A wholegrain cake can be a diet muffin, or a paleo snack – depending on the target customer.

The frame of reference, or category, you define your product as will help target customers understand in a few words what you are, what you do, and whether they’re interested or not.

Think about the value your customer desires, the trends they’re experiencing in the market, and how they interpret your product.

Alternative solutions

Your biggest competitors are probably spreadsheets and people power, rather than technology vendors. Defining the alternative solutions that your customers actually use will help your frontline sales and marketing teams to consider how they frame your product in conversations and in marketing material, and provides a foundation to build shared understanding.

Are customers relatively green and new to the market, using niche cloud solutions? That requires different go-to-market tactics, compared to customers who use legacy enterprise hosted solutions.

Value statements

For each value story you created in the Describe stage, get creative.

Think about how you message and wordsmith the outcomes they seek. Start these with a verb: get, make, change, smash, unlock, break, bring, grow – the opportunities are endless.

Website homepage hero

I think the most obvious use of positioning is to decide what you say on the top of your website homepage, so it makes sense to just lock this down in the positioning process.

You’re going to write two things:

1. A creative heading that catches attention and appeals to the outcomes your customer desires
2. A matter-of-fact sentence that describes what your product is (frame of reference), and key values or benefits

You can find some examples of good homepage messaging here.

Remember the psychographic details you captured in the first stage? Use these to find your tone of voice. If your customer is an innovative extrovert, you have license to be more creative and wacky; if they’re more risk-averse and logical, you’ll need to focus on the facts more than feelings.

Four steps to focused customer value positioning

In four stages, you’ve:

• Discovered your ICP and built a fluff-free persona that aligns your sales, marketing, and product teams
• Described the top three outcomes your customers desire
• Detailed exactly how your product helps your customer achieve their goals
• Defined the perfect website heading and slogan that resonates

And this process works, regardless of your industry, target customer, or product.

This process always results in successful positioning.

Think back to the definition of positioning: “to occupy a space in the customer’s mind,”.

Following the Customer Value Positioning framework helps you position more effectively by understanding exactly what your customers care about, finding the gaps that exist, and occupying them with positioning that resonates.

Frequently asked questions

Who should be involved in this process?

I recommend the CEO, a marketing lead, a sales lead, and a product lead: people who have experience with customers, and are charged with directing teams to make change. Positioning often leads to new ideas: don’t waste that opportunity.

What customers should we talk to?

Your ‘best-fit’ customers (and non-customers like them): those that represent the best product/market fit, the best growth opportunity, the highest satisfaction with your product. Niche down for tighter results.

How long does this take?

Most teams will budget for a minimum of 4 weeks with ~4 hours of workshops a week, but often 6-8 weeks gives you the opportunity to set customer interviews, interpret findings, and validate your messaging with internal teams and external methods.

Do we have to do research interviews?

Yes. I feel extremely strongly that interviewing best-fit customers, prospects, and friendly people in the market is the best way to understand your customers. You can do this process by building on top of internal assumptions, but it will never be as strong. Focus on evidence over assumptions.

Can you help facilitate this process, or recommend others who can help?

Yes – book an intro call here.

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

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

The post Introducing the Customer Value Positioning framework appeared first on Building Momentum.

I care a lot about defining the value that our customers gain from our products.

Not the immediate, tangible benefits they achieve – but the true, ultimate value they derive.

I define value as an element that your customer wants to attain that:

• Is useful
• Is worth the effort (cost, time, energy)
• Is a priority for them

And ideally, all three things will be true. When we understand the true value our product enables customers to achieve, we are able to sell faster, charge more, fight commoditisation, and market more easily.

Value is deduced from the work we do to discover our personas. The patterns emerge in broad-to-narrow customer interviews as we understand more about their jobs (common activities), gains (personal/professional/organizational desires), pains (marks of failure and frustrations), and triggers (motivations to search/switch/buy).

This process can be messy. And sometimes it’s easy to miss the woods for the trees as value becomes less tangible, less related to how they use the product, and more about the tangentially-connected outcomes they’ll be able to achieve.

In my positioning process, I used to just extract value themes and then go straight into messaging, creating value nuggets that tie back to product features.

But as I rolled out more messaging to larger teams or in more complex arenas, I noticed that we had to go further, and give frontline sales and marketing teams the context of where our customers are today, the challenges they’re facing, and then showcase how fixing the problem enables value.

Introducing the value story

I use the SPIN selling framework as a foundation for telling a story about what our customers are doing, why that’s not great, and how much better life could be.

Here’s the framework:

• Situation:
  • Today, our customer is… (what are they doing, what’s the situation that sets context for the value?)
• Problem:
  • However, …(the limitations or challenges that they’re experiencing)
• Implication:
  • This means…(what’s the downside of continuing in the current way?)
• Resolution:
  • By… (what does fixing the problem look like, not necessarily your product)
• Value:
  • … our customer will…(detail the value they can gain)

Using the prompts for each section, it’s possible to craft a simple narrative that helps build empathy with customers.

It starts by detailing the situation our customers finds themselves in. Today, our customer is doing something – a painful process, achieving mediocre results, or struggling to make sense of something.

Then we learn the real problem they’re facing. The problem is not the situation; the problem is a blocker that prevents them from advancing.

Next we learn the implications of that – a core part that many gloss over. This is where we uncover the pain, the lost opportunity cost of what they could achieve.

Then we address the resolution. What steps would they take to fix the problem? This probably shouldn’t be anything to do with your product.

Lastly, we drill down on the value. By solving the problem, the customer will achieve a value.

Example

I’ll use the same example as I offer for value nuggets; that of Xerox, and how they moved from selling printers based on features, to instead sell the value of increased student education performance (read more on that here).

• Situation:
  • Today, our customer is… a school administrator, responsible for delivering quality student education experiences whilst managing slim budgets.
• Problem:
  • However, … students find it hard to retain information from their black-and-white workbooks, and there’s limited budget for alternative study methods
• Implication:
  • This means… students may not achieve good grades, reducing the school’s performance.
• Resolution:
  • By… printing workbooks in color, students will be more likely to focus and retain information, and
• Value:
  • … our customer will… provide the best possible educational experiences while managing year-over-year budget pressures

Using value stories

I find value stories an invaluable way at every stage of the positioning and messaging journey.

It helps sanity-check whether the ‘value’ is really important, or whether it’s missing an important point. It helps recenter messaging around the challenges and intended outcomes, providing structure. And it’s so useful for training sales reps on specific use cases, building a simple narrative to frame pitches, and for building website/marketing copy.

Ultimately, this is a simple way to help frame customer context for almost anyone who needs to get up-to-speed. We’re not using jargon or business-speak. We’re simply trying to detail what our customers are facing today, and how solving their problem will help.

Extract value, don’t make it up

It’s important to restate here that value stories shouldn’t be built on anything that sounds good. We can’t position based on assumptions, and we can’t just assume our customers think about.

We need to learn from our ideal customers through interviews and research.

Buyer personas must be discovered, not created.

Value stories must detail the challenges that our customers are facing.

This allows us to connect the dots and create messaging showing how our product supports customers in achieving those outcomes.

And only then can we position ourselves effectively in the minds of our customers.

Good luck!

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

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

The post Telling ‘value stories’ to guide your positioning appeared first on Building Momentum.

“I’m just starting some messaging framework / customer survey and research projects at work so these sessions and assignments (and all of your examples!) have been a GPS essentially – helping me to find the best route forward and navigate the roadblocks too!”

That’s a real quote from one of the students in our course, WTF is Go-To-Market?. We’re planning our second intake for later this year. Find out more and register your interest here.

I’ve written before about how buyer personas are discovered, not created – go read that post now if you haven’t already!

Here are five quick tips to help you build strong personas that are used by your teams.

Don’t name personas (but name them if you need to)

It’s not really best practice to name your personas anymore. No more ‘Marketing Mary’ or ‘Superstar Simon’.

Instead try to name your personas based on a key identifier: something to do with the value they desire, their goals, or their common jobs.

For example:

• Busy Business Owner
• Holistic Head of HR
• ROI-Obsessed Marketer

But in reality you might still need to name your personas to help your wider team to build empathy, as well as creating a shortcut to a shared understanding.

Make personas come alive

Trying to learn about the personas used in a business can be really boring. Walls of text, columns in a spreadsheet, and a dodgy stock photo that still has the watermark overlay on it.

Could you make your personas ‘real’ and provide more texture for those getting up-to-speed?

Perhaps you could:

• Record your research call and create a compilation video, organized into key themes
• Interview your sales reps and share a video of them walking through their experiences with that persona
• Pull together a scrapbook-style resource of quotes, social media profiles, recommended content, and more that allows readers to explore a persona in more depth

Think about the format

Don’t make sales reps and marketing folk read through huge docs to get the gist of a persona.

Think about their use-case for accessing persona information, and build specific formats that give them what they need.

You could try:

• A long-form doc for a deep-dive understanding
• A battlecard with top points to hit on calls
• An easy-to-skim PDF with screenshots and images and content snippets to build empathy

If you’ve already created the base content, don’t let that insight go to waste: multiply your efforts by repurposing quickly into formats your teams will use.

Build a feedback loop

Ideally, you’ll know about every prospect your sales reps come across that doesn’t fit into one of your personas – but not many teams are set up to monitor this.

If you don’t, you’ll soon wonder why your sales teams are losing to specific segments or why your metrics are dropping.

Get ahead of the curve:

• Ask reps to categorise the main persona in your CRM from a dropdown field – with an ‘Other’ option for those that don’t fit
• If that’s too much effort, use your ICP and demographic/firmographic indicators to auto-populate a field, and set up dashboards to monitor anomalies
• Set up a feedback line, whether in Slack or in the CRM.

Your work understanding personas helps marketing to reach the right people, and sales reps to pitch the best way. Publicising this process will help you gain more supportive buy-in and engagement when they know it’s going to help them.

Refresh personas regularly

Don’t just create personas and let them sit there for six months or longer. We’re in tech; things move quickly.

What was true yesterday, might not be true today.

Ensure your persona stay fresh:

• Keep tabs on effectiveness through qualitative feedback from teams, and quantitative (e.g. dashboards)
• Use all interviews you do (whether win-loss, customer interviews, market research) to help assess whether personas are still up-to-date and relevant
• Carry out desk research every so often: what do your target personas say on social media, what do their LinkedIn profiles say about their job, and what skills/responsibilities/challenges are they looking to hire for in their job ads?

Personas are foundational – don’t waste them

They can’t be treated as a one-and-done exercise. They need strengthening, testing, and evaluation to ensure they still fulfil their purpose.

Go back to your personas today: what’s no longer valid? Start the conversation, and kickstart the next stage of growth in your business.

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 Five tips for building personas that work appeared first on Building Momentum.

One of my favorite exercises to do with cross-functional teams – especially where there’s a mix of C-level execs, middle managers, and ICs – is the customer empathy challenge.

We get a group of people together, and each completes a customer empathy map. This is a tool from the product/UX world, designed to help understand your customer.

In our world, we’re using it to extract assumptions – what do we believe is true about our customers?

Now, it might seem like a simple enough question.

Initially, people often complain. “I don’t know why we’re doing this, why are we wasting time?”

Then, they give in and admit: “This is actually really hard. I don’t know enough.”

The resulting conversations are actually pretty fun to facilitate!

In every session, it turns out that that:

• Not everyone knows who the customer is
• Not everyone agrees who the customer is
• Those that do, have only a superficial understanding based on how the customer uses the product
• A few on the frontline of sales and success will know more, but their understanding is narrow in scope

This exercise shines a light on the dark spots, regardless of the whether the company has a customer-centric culture or not.

In most companies, the concept of ‘a customer’ starts and ends solely with the product. How they use it, how they’ll buy it, how we can draw them in.

But they fail to really understand their customer and the market they sell to. They don’t understand how their product fits into their customer’s lives.

How are we meant to position effectively, if we don’t understand the breadth of our customer’s existence?

How are we support to meaningfully differentiate if we don’t understand their world?

How are we supposed to make our customers care about us, if we don’t understand why they should care about us?

Customer empathy map prompts

The customer empathy map is made up of six sections.

Below, you’ll find 60 prompts – 5 per section – to help you explore your understanding of the customer.

Pre-order the physical cards now!

I’m turning these prompts into a pack of physical flashcards that you can use to facilitate workshops, test your knowledge, have fun while thinking about your customer, and find inspiration.

Limited availability. These will ship in around 3 months, and you’ll be involved in the progress from design to print. No-quibble refunds. Discounts available for multiple purchases: get in touch by Twitter, LinkedIn or email (jdp[@]buildingmomentum.io) to find out more!

Think & Feel

• What do they think about the company?
• What do they like or dislike about their role?
• Why do they stay at the company?
• What keeps them up at night?
• What inspires them about the industry they’re in?
• What do they think about the company strategy?
• What do they think their biggest challenges are?
• What do they think their biggest opportunities are?
• What do they think of your product?
• What do they think about your competitors?

Say & Do

1. What does their job require them to do?
2. How do they achieve their goals?
3. What do they do that might be outside of their role?
4. What do they say to their boss?
5. What do they say to their peers?
6. What do they say to their family and friends about the job?
7. What tools and products do they use?
8. What best practices are they following?
9. What would they say about your product?
10. What would they say about their problems?

Hear

1. What do they hear from their boss?
2. What do they hear from their peers?
3. What do they hear from their direct reports?
4. What do they hear from industry analysts?
5. What do they hear your company saying?
6. What do they hear about your company?
7. What do they hear about your competitors?
8. What do they hear their customers asking for?
9. What complaints do they hear from people in their business?
10. What do they hear from governments/regulators that could present opportunities or threats?
11. What good news and compliments do they hear from people in their business?

See

1. What do they see people in their business doing?
2. What do they see their competitors doing?
3. What do they see in industry news?
4. What do they see on social media?
5. What do they see in news/social media about your competitors?
6. What do they see in news/social media about your product and company?
7. What do they see industry leaders doing?
8. What do they see companies in other industries doing that inspires them?
9. What do they see their peers in other companies doing?
10. What do they see your company doing?
11. What do they see your competitors doing?

Pain (frustrations to avoid)

1. What stresses them out?
2. What do they hate about their job?
3. Why might they get fired?
4. Why might they leave the company?
5. What risks would be catastrophic for their business?
6. What is their executive team warning against in every all-hands?
7. What are the biggest threats the business is facing?
8. What’s the biggest threat the individual is facing in their career?
9. Why might the company fail?
10. What has caused their competitors to struggle?

Gains (selfish desires)

1. If they had a magic wand that could solve anything, what would it do?
2. What does solving their problem unlock?
3. What will get them a promotion?
4. What metrics would show the company is doing well?
5. What means they have succeeded at their job?
6. What does success mean for the company?
7. What would mean the company is an industry leader?
8. What does goal achievement unlock for the individual?
9. What does goal achievement unlock for the company?
10. What would make them proud of achieving?

To make customers care about you, first you need to understand them

A narrow working knowledge of your customer and their relationship with your product is not enough to build real customer empathy, deliver customer-centric outcomes, or help you build/position/market/sell effectively.

Using the customer empathy map challenge and these prompts will help you explore your current assumptions so you can align, agree, measure confidence, and discover where you need to carry out additional research to explore the known-unknowns.

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 60 prompts to build customer empathy appeared first on Building Momentum.

Let’s be honest: if you’re struggling to gain traction, there is no silver bullet that kickstart your growth.

I’ve seen this exact situation play out time and time again. An eager CEO or VP Sales, dismayed at plateauing growth (or worse), pins all hope on ‘the next thing’ to change the game. The next thing comes, and… as predicted, the results aren’t as expected. But never mind; “The next thing will help!”

There’s definitely a lot to say about keeping motivation up, or creating a reality distortion field to eke out extra performance. But a white lie can quickly snowball and create mismatched expectations which leads to ambiguity and inertia.

Traction is tricky to define, but people generally refer to it as top-of-funnel lead generation, sales revenue, and ‘being seen’ – a mixture of qualitative feels and quantitative evidence.

There’s no quick fixes, only work. Here’s some tips to help overcome the challenges you’re facing.

Positioning is strategy in action

The way you describe your product in your customer’s world is a vehicle to define your go-to-market strategy.

• Who is your customer, and what’s going on in their world?
• What value do they desire – and how does your product help them get closer?
• What are the features that matter – and how do you communicate that?
• How are you positioned in the market, against competitors, and priced?

But most of the time, the concept of positioning is relegated to just marketing fluff, ignoring the strategic process that goes into it.

Here’s how you remedy it.

Firstly, get your assumptions out on the table: who do you think your customers are, and what do they value? I recommend doing a customer empathy map to see not just where you and your team are aligned, but where you have low confidence – and where the gaps are.

Positioning (and strategy) is much easier when you are the thing for someone, rather than something for everyone. Focus on niche customer segments: a group of people linked by a common pain that they’ll pay to solve. You can’t please everyone either. Make the hard decisions and say no to certain segments.

The definition of positioning is “to occupy a space in your customer’s mind”. How are you supposed to do that effectively, if you don’t understand their world?

Research is key to that. Don’t just think about your product – look to build empathy with their broader jobs, pains, gains, and triggers.

Then look at how you differentiate. It’s much easier to compete for a customer, rather than compete against a competitor. Know the customer so well that you’re positioned as the best option for them against all others.

Once you’ve understood your customer and what they need, think about how you communicate to them. Elevate away from technical features and simple benefits, and instead focus on communicating the holistic value you customer desires.

Lastly, get creative! Step up your messaging with language and tone-of-voice that drives action. Life is too short to use boring words.

How does your customer buy?

The process that your buyers go through, complete with the questions they have, the touchpoints they interact with, what they need to move to the next stage, and who exactly is involved.

This process will broadly look like:

• Identify a need
• Explore how to solve it
• Evaluate solutions
• Negotiate and purchase
• Adopt
• Expand

At each stage, you can identify and rank opportunities to feed into marketing (like the channels and messages you use), sales (e.g. collateral, narrative, and process), and product (e.g. onboarding flows, product improvements, and so on).

Force progress through product launches

If you’re investing time and energy in building new product features, whether to support existing customers or to help attract new ones – but not planning how you introduce it into the world – then you’re missing out on free energy.

Haphazardly announcing a feature on social media isn’t a launch, and a blog post announcing a feature that nobody reads is a waste of time.

Developing a tiered approach to launching features will help you standardise how you release products out into the world. Think about the five A’s of feature releases: audience, awareness, action, affinity, and accountability.

Don’t just think about launches tactically either. Plan activity from first principles from the perception that you want to convey to your customers, your prospects, and others in the market.

There’s no silver bullet, only work

Traction depends on everyone putting the same step forward at the same time.

Positioning is the embodiment of your business strategy. Your buyers journey is how you meet them in the marketplace. And your product launch strategy is how you build perception, time after time.

Good luck!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The five A’s of successful feature releases

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

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

Audience

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

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

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

For example:

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

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

Awareness

Every feature release checklist in the world has:

• Email
• In-app notification
• Social

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

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

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

For example:

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

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

Action

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

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

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

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

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

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

Affinity

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

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

For example:

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

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

Accountability

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

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

In the meantime, we can all start somewhere.

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

For example, we might report on:

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

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

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

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

Just start with your next feature:

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

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

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

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One of the most common questions I get is “what are examples of good positioning?”.

Unfortunately, it’s really hard to just ‘teardown’ positioning without knowing the strategy and decisions behind it.

While it’s easy to assess from the outside, there are many, many variables that affect the outcome of positioning from business strategy and customer feedback, to the experience and ability of those involved in the process.

If positioning is strategic, it would be foolish to think we can understand how objectively ‘good’ it may or may not be without knowing the context.

So that’s why – generally – I don’t do teardowns or criticize positioning.

But, I do offer examples of how I think positioning has been crafted well. It’s always possible to appreciate the craftsmanship that’s gone into how a company is presenting themselves to the world.

I want to offer a few examples of both good positioning and good messaging, in the hope you can find inspiration and confidence to level up your positioning.

Examples of good positioning

First up is Shipamax – although, spoiler alert, I helped them.

Throughout the process, we discovered that their key buyers were looking for specific pieces of value that weren’t being addressed by competing solutions. By building these insights into the positioning, we were able to speak directly to customer value – and that translates into differentiation that galvanizes buyers.

For example, we understood that technical buyers wanted to be more directly involved in business growth, and not just seen as a supporting function. They also had grand plans to innovate processes across the business, but couldn’t get this done with a standard vanilla OCR solution.

We built this directly into the positioning, and then had some fun with messaging: ‘at last’ to speak to unblocking frustrations, ‘in a way that vanilla OCR just can’t’ as a not-so-subtle hat tip to alternative solutions.

Next, Truelayer. No affiliation this time!

I think this is a great example of clarity in positioning.

Firstly, the headline speaks to the value for the buyer: instant access to open banking.

Then, the description tells you how, and what the impact of that is.

It’s so simple that almost anyone can look at this and instantly grok who, how, what, and why.

To improve, I’d only recommend throwing some proof points into it. How quickly, exactly, can someone get up and running? Let’s quantify just how ‘instant’ ‘instant access’ is.

Lastly, Soldo.

One thing companies often want to do is outposition their competitors. If they go one way, we follow.

We assume this is because they have some unique experience or insights – but often, it’s the blind leading the blind.

I like this example from Soldo because it positions clearly in the gaps, the unmet area between the old and new worlds of expense management:

• New world: things like Pleo – easy spending with company cards, built for the spender
• Old world: things like Concur – expense management built for the company

We can see in the hero section how Soldo have communicated the value for both audiences – and then used proof points below to provide evidence.

Good examples of messaging

I wanted to highlight a few examples of where messaging could easily have been staid, boring, and bland – but has been given a new lease of life.

Coda is a great example of creativity in messaging. This could have easily been ‘no more spreadsheets’ or ‘say goodbye to spreadsheets’ – but somehow they summoned the courage to land on a pun with a swear word.

Front is a quality example of using tone-of-voice in messaging, just within a few words at the top of the homepage.

‘Make millions of customers feel like one in a million’ is aspirational, yet down-to-earth – and I expect they’ve landed on a value that their customers want to achieve. In fact, I bet they pulled this from a customer interview.

‘Front is your hub for all things customer communication’ just sounds like a friend telling you what it is. Simple, honest, direct, no fluff.

Lastly, Stripe. If you know about Stripe, you’ll know how many products they offer: the breadth, depth, and complexity.

I love how simple the homepage hero section is, for just a complex business.

Many other companies would’ve wanted to showcase their expertise and complexity as a badge of honor, but not Stripe.

Their mission and a really simple sentence communicates a number of different things to those arriving on the site:

• What Stripe does: payments infrastructure for the internet
• Who it’s for: startups to large enterprises
• What Stripe build (software and APIs)
• Social proof: millions of businesses
• The value customers achieve: accept payments, send payouts, and manage businesses online

But, it doesn’t feel overbearing or complicated. It’s accurate, brief, and clear.

What do you think?

What do you think is an example of good positioning? Maybe you think your messaging is great? Let me know!

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

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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.

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

The post Podcast: What does it take to differentiate? appeared first on Building Momentum.

If you’re in SaaS, you definitely know about Hubspot’s inbound marketing funnel…

… and you’ll also know it’s replaced by their flywheel:

If you’re in a billing or bizops role, you probably know about the Zuora 9 Keys to Subscription Success.

And if you’re in Customer Success, you probably know of Gainsight’s Periodic Table.

These are all examples of a custom methodology that these companies have developed to help guide not just their product strategy, but their product narrative.

Any company can develop a methodology. Those that do it well are able to stand out, sell higher value, and sell faster by educating their prospects, customers, and the market of a new way to operate.

Why create your own methodology?

There are a few different ways to differentiate from your competitors, but the most resilient option is to have an opinion.

This doesn’t necessarily mean have an opinionated product (but it could do).

It means to have a certain view of how the vertical, industry, and jobs you’re supporting can be done better – usually based on your own unique wisdom.

By presenting a new mental model (if it works!), you’re able to convince prospects that you have the upper-hand, experience, nous, and specialism. It gives you an opportunity to build a stronger product strategy that’s built around the process, cementing your ability to better meet those customer needs.

And, when converted to your sales narrative, you’re able to do one of my favorite types of sales experiences: the whiteboard map. This is where your sales rep can pull out your customer’s challenges and aspirations through discovery conversation, jotting them on the board in seemingly random positions – before going in for the kill and wrapping it all in your methodology. Suddenly, random points become part of an interconnected map on the path from chaos to success. I’ve only ever seen this work well.

Building a methodology: examples

Example 1

At Kayako, we looked to build a methodology for delivering something we called ‘unified customer service’. UCS was part of our manifesto, a new way of approaching customer service strategy.

We began with some principles.

Firstly, the model needed to be built on verbs, active elements that described the core tasks someone needed to master to unlock UCS.

The model also needed to work in a number of different contexts, with prompts like these to guide our thinking:

• The market – The customer service shift means it’s critical that I:
• Our customer’s business – To deliver an effortless customer experience, I must:
• Our customer themselves – To get better at customer service, I must improve my ability to:
• Our product – With Kayako, I can:
• Our marketing – Take a look at this blog post on how to:
• Our roadmap – These features help our customers to:

Lastly, we paraphrased context from Zuora’s 9 Keys guide to set the scene of how the blueprint should work:

• These seven steps serve as a foundational blueprint for building and scaling an effortless customer service experience.
• Some of these may seem more immediately relevant to your business, but eventually all of them have to be addressed.
• While individual keys may be prioritized at different times, a business must focus on the collective set as a whole.
• This introductory guide is intended to outline these concepts in very broad terms.
• This section sets out how these steps help businesses achieve UCS.

For each part of the framework, we added notes on:

• Why the step is necessary
• How it can be achieved
• What the specific requirements were
• Why it’s important
• What’s blocking people from doing it now
• The problem and implication that not doing so presents
• The approach that businesses should take to overcome

After a lot of research, back-and-forth, and experimenting, we developed this:

8 Steps to Unified Customer Service:

1. Capture – Gather the right data and learn about your customer and what they’re doing in real-time
2. Interact – Communicate with your customer on the right channel, at the right time
3. Understand – Apply what you know about your customer and their context to make every interaction as personal as possible
4. Resolve – Provide the perfect response that answers all of your customer’s questions, and head off the next issue too.
5. Measure – Measure the impact of your effortless customer service experience on your business goals
6. Improve – Test and experiment to discover processes that work for you and your customers
7. Scale – Ensure your team, tools and processes are ready for success

We used it in some conversations and validated with customers, but unfortunately never got a chance to use it!

Example 2

At another company, we really needed a framework to help distill our narrative into something that could be repeated over-and-over, turning our product feature set into a toolbox for achieving distinct outcomes.

We distilled what we knew about both the achievements our customers were making and internal thinking about what else the product could support to create a ‘five star framework’. This had real legs, although was relatively short-lived due to changing priorities!

How to build your own methodology

In both of my experiences, we used mostly our internal understanding of our customers and the industry to determine the stages and steps in our methodology. This was fine… but in hindsight, we over-thought it. Without external insight, we were left second-guessing the maturity of our customers and the market.

If I were to do it again, I’d focus solely on our customers jobs-to-be-done map, and use that research to form the basis of our framework.

It’s really important to extract, simplify, and reduce the knowledge you gain into core steps that can be followed and put into practice by your ideal customers. This means if your customer is an advanced thinker, go to the same level. Otherwise, always err on the side of caution and message for the lowest common denominator. Being unnecessarily smart won’t do you any favors.

Think about your visualization from the beginning and involve a designer if you can. Are you a building a cyclical process, a puzzle to be completed, or a maturity framework? This can have a big impact on the way you build and frame your methodology.

Lastly, validate with internal experts, customers, and other friendly folks in the market. Your framework — and the resulting product strategy and narrative you build from it — won’t be successful if it doesn’t resonate with the intended audience.

Show ‘how’ with your methodology

Getting your methodology right can set a solid foundation to break through the market, differentiate in the mind of your customers, and speed up sales by offering not just the product, but the methodology for success. Good luck!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Niching down in action

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making it tangible

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Growing in an ecosystem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bringing it all together

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

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

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

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I read Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate by George Lakoff, a renowned linguist – and I think it’s a must-read for anyone who works on positioning and messaging for their business.

With decades of experience, Lakoff writes about the US GOP party and their messaging machine — or rather, the foundational cognitive functions they understand to help them build awareness, influence political discourse, and own the narrative.

In SaaS, we can apply many of the same concepts to how we think about our positioning and messaging to drive awareness and influence, define categories, and build narratives.

Without plagiarizing too much, here’s a summary that may help you take your positioning and messaging to the next level.

It’s all about the framing

Frames are “mental structures that shape the way we see the world”. These are built-in, default concepts that guide our psyche and our understanding of life and the universe.

Frames already exist in your customers mind — influenced by their peers, the media, education, and more.

A frame might be a customer’s view of their problem, and the solution they think they need. It might be their opinion of a particular piece of software or brand. It might even be their interpretation of their problem.

Frames are hard to build from scratch, although they can be broken down and rebuilt piece-by-piece.

Frames need to exist to be activated

One of the core concepts is that frames must pre-exist in order to be understood.

Many, many SaaS companies are currently contemplating whether to name a category, or align with another. Popularised by Play Bigger, to differentiate you need to distinguish your proposition away from the competitors by creating a new category.

However some folks have taken this to new, weird, and almost unrecognisable heights. Odd naming that doesn’t quite stick, tangential application of concepts from other industries, and too much verbatim HiPPO (the highest paid person’s opinion) language.

One of my favorite quotes on category creation is from Andy Raskin:

Unless the core concept of the category can resonate that well, it’s unlikely to hit the mark. (See the difference between Drift’s former ‘Conversational Marketing’ category and their new ‘Revenue Acceleration’ category, in my opinion at least!).

Similarly in sales, we want to pitch and have prospects nod their head and agree with everything we say – not scratch their head in confusion, overloaded with cognitive effort.

Repetition works

Lakoff says that repetition is key, broadcasting a message until it becomes an unconsciously held belief.

When done well, category creation builds upon existing concepts and then activates them, bringing them into everyday public discourse. Of course, this is easier to do in our niche stakeholder audiences rather at national-scale political messaging.

Everything you put out into the world should cite the same core concept over and over again. It should build the frame in the mind of your audience piece-by-piece, strengthening the neural networks and priming their subconscious for your approach.

Frame your features

Lakoff uses the ‘tax relief’ framing as an example of understanding a core belief (taxes should be lower) and building the surrounding frame (‘relief’ meaning to release burden).

And we can use the same concepts in the way we name product features. For example, ‘invoice generation’ is plain and straightforward; ‘invoice automation’ feels smart and helpful.

Build the messaging machine

One of the most interesting parts of the book that isn’t covered in detail is the huge messaging operation that sits behind the Republican party. It’s not just the politicians and the policywonks, but a coordinated army of researchers, theorists, intellectuals, training programs, media relations, pollsters, and more.

I think there’s a ton of opportunity to think about building a messaging machine in your business. It shouldn’t just be the product marketing or marketing team who own, test, and iterate on messaging; every team should be brought into the process with a common goal in mind.

• Every team should be trained on the messaging, from the theory to the execution
• There should be clear learning and validation goals to help iterate successfully
• Feedback loops should be obvious and well-managed, to quickly pass learnings from the frontline back to the intelligence center

The book is highly recommended for anyone in the messaging and positioning realm. Buy it, and let me know what you think!

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Today I want to walk you through one of my favorites, a Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) map.

A job map is a single document that details the steps your customers go through to ‘hire’ a product for a ‘job’ they need to do. I think every business needs one job map per customer persona, per product.

By breaking down their process to find, complete, and review their job, we can improve our understanding of the customer – and optimize our product, marketing, and sales to better meet their needs.

What is ‘jobs-to-be-done’?

Firstly, a recap. Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) theory posits that people buy products and services to get a “job” done. Those jobs are mostly functional, however also have emotional and social components that also need to be fulfilled. Success comes from achieving the “job”, rather than gaining the tools to complete it.

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

Why use a job map?

Rather than user story maps, job maps don’t look at the individual actions that somebody takes in this journey, like clicks or searches, but instead look at the macro stages and micro-tasks that someone will do in their search to be successful.

Traditionally they have a lot of value in product management and can provide a foundation for the product discovery process. But I like to use them for two reasons: they’re really simple to communicate, and they base your product in the customers world, not yours.

I believe that everyone in a business, from backoffice teams to sales and marketing, should have knowledge of what your customers are trying to achieve. It’s logical that a culture that focuses on customer-first empathy will deliver maximum customer value.

Here’s a simple example of a Job Map.

The three blocks at the top detail the macro stages – I’ll come onto those in a second.

Underneath, you’ll also see the steps that the customer takes within each stage. For example, within the ‘Finding content’ stage the customer undertakes multiple steps. These steps are sometimes actions, but can also be decisions and considerations to be evaluated.

This map example also goes further to identify product opportunities. This works by surveying customers on the importance of each step, and how satisfied they are with their current ability to achieve it. By calculating Importance + (Importance – Satisfaction) to create an Opportunity score, we see where customers report their unmet needs, which could be opportunities for you to focus on.

JTBD map stages

To achieve the job, your customer will likely process through many or all of these stages.

It’s not as simple as just planning the job, doing the job, reviewing the job. There may be many more decisions, considerations, and inputs required to determine how the job should be done, what success looks like, or even if they’re ready to do it in the first place.

Again, many of these stages will take place, but maybe not all. You can simplify this by focusing just on the beginning, middle, and end of the job.

You can also dig deeper into your JTBD map by adding more levels. For example, each macro stage in your map may one or more jobs within it.

Linking JTBD stages to your product offering

In this table below, you can see how companies can improve their product offering by better meeting customer needs at each stage. This might be anything from offering simpler planning, to making set-up easier, or improving monitoring.

Communicating JTBD Maps

Job maps provide a single document that help everyone understand what a customer is trying to achieve and the stages they move through.

It’s a great basis for a really visual workflow explainer. Below is an example I’ve used before to show how visual it can be.

In the example, you’ll see:

• Macro stages along the job
• Activities at each stage
• Workflow elements to show the cycles and paths that take place in the process

They’ve also included what a customer is thinking and feeling at each stage. Again, this is great for bringing more empathy into your business. Detailing emotions your customer feels can also create more product opportunities for delight, as opposed to the cold, hard facts of the Opportunity/Importance/Satisfaction maths above.

Start your JTBD map journey

Realistically, you’re not likely to have user researchers available to spend time building this out. So let’s bring it back to basics.

To start building your JTBD map, ask a few people with domain or customer experience to put together their thoughts individually, before bringing together and talking it through.

Within a two hour workshop, you can have a good, solid draft of an initial JTBD map. From here, you’ll be able to measure your confidence at each stage – what do we have evidence for, and what may be based purely on assumptions?

With this information, you can go to customers and friendly people in the market to validate in casual conversations. You can iterate as you learn more.

An ideal scenario would be hiring a user researcher to carry out interviews, ethnographic research, and more to develop a JTBD map without organizational influence — helping develop a more pure understanding of your customers.

But for now, build your JTBD map, validate it, and socialize amongst your teams. Bring customer empathy into more conversations, and start identifying opportunities to better meet customer needs, delight customers, and optimize your business.

The post Why you need a jobs-to-be-done map appeared first on Building Momentum.

I bet that you’ve seen bold claims on B2B websites or sales decks and though… nah I don’t believe it. Me too.

Everyone uses statistics and proof points in their marketing but too often, I see claims that just don’t make sense:

• Weird, convoluted language – caveated with a paragraph of super small text

• Odd phrasing to convey a distant impact, when really it’s held together by a thread

• Orwellian language and spin that says something but means nothing

But proof points are really important in B2B marketing. They work to persuade your audience that your product/service works and achieves the outcomes that are important to stakeholders.

B2B must ultimately contribute to revenue generation or cost reduction – proof points are how we show that impact.

How do you determine the proof points you should actually use?

Choosing proof points

Using the wrong stat could be the difference between getting in the evaluation set or not. There’s no point using proof points that your customers don’t care about. Not only do irrelevant stats take up valuable marketing space, they take up cognitive space.

1. Understand value

That’s why it’s important to understand the ultimate value that your product delivers to customers.

Regular readers will know that understanding your value your customers are seeking (and how you help them achieve that!) is the most single important thing you can do to build momentum in your business.

This helps you build the mental model that your potential customers operate in, and help you understand how you position around that.

That might mean focusing less, or more, on the functional features (and their immediate proof points) – and instead, more on aspirational benefits or second-order impacts.

2. Connect proof points to value

Throwing in random stats here-and-there again will confuse your buyer. It’s important to deliver a focused message: you help customers achieve X as a result of Y, using Z – and proving it.

I call this a value nugget.

A value nugget is a way to package up your product features and benefits, while providing a clear hierarchy to navigate effortlessly in sales conversations and marketing.

A value nugget is comprised of:

You can move through the value nugget by asking ‘why’ and ‘how’. This makes it easier to train a narrative and talk track that can be navigated in real-time.

Crafting strong messaging with value nuggets

When using this, keep in mind that your value is probably not an immediate outcome of your product, but rather a second-order impact.

An example I’ve shared before is Xerox. When marketing their printers, they used stats that showed that the impact their products had on school learning and education outcomes – not just how fast their printers were.

How to create proof points

Sometimes, you’ll have stats ready to hand that you can already slot into your marketing. Other times, you’ll have to create them.

A tip: elements of value

Use the Elements of Value pyramid (detailed in this post on competitive differentiation) to see if there are elements you could mention that you haven’t thought of yet.

Ask customers before they sign

A good practice – if it works for your sales process – is to ask prospects for stats during the sales process. Not only can these be used to build a business case and provide fodder for Customer Success engagements and renewal conversations, but you can use them to determine the impact your product has after 3, 6, 9, 12 months of use.

You can ask customers for hard stats like conversion rates, revenue, or volumes. But you can also ask for softer stats that are less scientific, but potentially more meaningful: how many hours they think they spent on tasks, how happier their team are, etc.

Collect these in the sales process, ask successful customers how those numbers have changed – and build from there.

The survey approach

This is something that I noticed a company do before and I love it. It’s not the most scientific, but it does help you create a pool of stats that you can use that tie directly to the impacts your customers are hoping for.

Survey your customers with questions like these:

1. Do you agree or disagree with this statement? [Product] has helped our business to [increase revenue].

2. By what percentage do you think [revenue would have increased] WITHOUT [product]?

3. By what percentage do you think [revenue has increased] WITH [product]?

This approach gets you three great stats:

• The percentage of customers that say your product has helped grow revenue

• The average percentage revenue increase that customers say your product has contributed

• A stat to help you say “Customers say using our product adds x% more revenue than without”

I like these stats because they’re a mixture of social proof and actual impact. Yes, they aren’t scientifically quantified – but if you’re in a pinch, they’re great substitutes.

And in most cases, what your customers ‘think’ your impact has been is potentially more valuable than what it actually was.

“What if our numbers aren’t great?”

If the statistics that matter aren’t great, I have four options.

1. Consider if they are really the best metrics to use

2. Start a cross-functional project determined to improve that number

3. Find other stats that may contribute to the intended outcome but are not directly linked

4. Be honest: “Right now we have X% impact, and we’re dedicated to improving this all the time”

Never lie about stats – always have a doc ready to go that shows the source and calculations if anyone asks, particularly in countries like the UK where the Advertising Standards Authority can ask for proof of claims.

Use proof points to build momentum

Proof points are crucial to show you have real impact on metrics that your customers care about.

Don’t just throw anything down on the website – take the time to consider what stats your customers want to improve, and then find the statistics that will help you get in the consideration set and move the deal forward.

Avoid caveated messaging – be clear, simple, and direct. Honest, upfront messaging is alway the best policy.

How are you using proof points in your marketing? Leave a comment and share your thoughts:

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Just as I have before, I think every marketer in the world has had at least one significant failure under their belts.

That might be a product launch that flopped. Feature launches that missed the mark. Messaging and positioning that just didn’t work. The heavy marketing campaign with negative ROI.

In my experience, I think many marketing teams miss a crucial step that the product world has embraced: the need to validate. We work on big projects based on assumptions without thinking how they might perform in the real world.

And then we’re surprised when they flop.

Undeterred, we chalk failures down to misfires. We move onto the next project… and the circle repeats, ad infinitum.

In the product world, John Cutler (who you should follow on Twitter!) designates a product team that work like this to be a ‘feature factory’. These teams are tasked with building features and shipping them without much concern as to whether they actually help solve customer problems.

In the marketing world, I call these kind of teams ‘conveyor belts’.

Conveyor belt marketing teams just take whatever comes down the pipe – like product features, new marketing campaign ideas, messaging, collateral requests – and just run with it.

Ideas, campaigns, launches are just put into the world with best intentions, but weak discipline as to whether they will actually have an impact.

And new tactics, new projects are always coming down the assembly line (from leadership, from product or sales teams) – so any mistakes and missteps are never long-lived enough. We’ll do better with the next one!

Don’t be a conveyor belt marketing team

Please, I implore you. And it’s not too difficult – any teams can start getting better today.

First, start with strategy

What’s your company strategy? What’s your marketing strategy? What are the big questions your marketing team are trying to answer or prove to move the business forward?

It’s surprising how many teams don’t have these in place.

I’m a fan of the Good Strategy, Bad Strategy ‘strategy nugget’. The book is a must-read.

Three steps to develop strategy:

1. A clear diagnosis of your current situation and context: you need to know where you’re coming from to determine where you’re going to go

2. Principles that will guide you through the next phase of execution and learning: key word is ‘principles’: a truth or proposition that you hold beliefs in

3. Aligned tactics that detail ways in which the principles will be applied to the situation: the steps you will take to move forward

As the book details, many teams think strategy is a declaration of the goals they will achieve. That is not strategy.

Then, link tactics to goals to strategy

OKRs!

You do need to set goals that get you close to achieving your strategy. And then you need to align those tactics underneath so you can measure them accurately.

Sometimes, it’s not possible to link some work to discrete metrics. Product marketing, is notoriously difficult to measure although somewhat possible by looking at the first-, second-, and even third-order impacts of work. For example, working to improve product messaging will hopefully make website conversions increase, improve sales outbound response rates, and reduce sales cycle times.

Don’t forget to validate

Validation does not always mean long, drawn-out tests to check if something works!

Validation can be quick and simple. Use your internal teams (preferably with a wide range of people) to check what‘s missing, what’s incorrect, and what could be better. Throwing something in front of a few friendly customers might be enough.

When validating, I try to see if the idea and then the execution is heading in the right direction to ensure the objective will be met.

For example creating buyer personas – these will be mostly used by the sales and marketing team – so share them with a few internal people to see if they are useful and helpful ways to think about the market.

To test positioning and messaging, test in PPC ads and landing pages or with sales outbound teams to see if it will be more resonant with your customers.

The biggest tip I can offer is… don’t actually build before you need to. This post from Strategyzer is one I revisit regularly. If you can validate and learn something before building, then try to do it as quickly and efficiently as possible.

That might mean:

• Regularly created PDF one-pagers to test with audiences as you work through a messaging project, rather than a big-bang launch

• A landing page and PPC ads, rather than a big PR push

• ‘Wizard of Oz-ing’ a potential new service before you invest in building product features

• Blog posts and quick surveys to test engagement, rather than a huge research report

Lastly, review and communicate

Hold regular retrospectives: what worked well and what didn’t? What actions and improvements should we think about next time?

Share what you’ve learnt within your wider teams and help build a wider collective consciousness of decisions, learnings, and understanding of how your customers and other stakeholders react and function.

And refresh your strategy as you learn more. Strategy is not a set-and-forget exercise – it should evolve as you learn more about your customers, market, and your executional capabilities.

Don’t be a conveyor belt marketing team

If you’re stuck deep into a conveyor belt way of working, change won’t happen overnight – but even the smallest changes can make a big difference.

If you’re struggling to make improvements, try these small steps:

• Strategy – for a project, set out a quick diagnosis and share your principles for moving forward

• Goals – look for a simple measure of success that isn’t delivered or not delivered, but a metric that can be monitored and improved, and work collaboratively with those directly responsible

• Validate – get some customer input into an idea before executing; I guarantee you’ll leave with better ideas than when you started

• Communicate – don’t finish a project and forget about it; revisit in 4-6 weeks and see how it was received, the results, and ask others for their opinion

Once you can free yourself from a conveyor-belt way of working, you’ll be more empowered, more strategic, and deliver better results. Good luck!

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Inbound marketing. Robotic process automation. Customer success. Conversational marketing. Revenue intelligence.

We’ve all heard these categories bounce around, coined by their relevant organizations. Building a category is sexy: take the Play Bigger book, Drift’s meteoric rise in the B2B SaaS discourse, and Andy Raskin’s narrative work as proof.

But most startups worry too much about defining the category they’ll create and eventually win in time, and not enough time thinking about the frame of reference that will give them the upper-hand right now.

What’s the difference?

• A category is about coining the ‘new game’ that the ‘winners’ are able to play, that ‘losers’ aren’t.

• A frame of reference is the perspective through which a product is positioned

A product can be in a category and have a frame of reference. Hubspot is a marketing automation platform (frame) in the inbound marketing category.

I think early-stage startups can deliver better, quicker results by nailing their frame of reference, instead of contemplating their category design journey.

Focus on your frame of reference

April Dunford’s book explains how a frame of reference works with a great example.

Imagine a muffin made from the healthiest ingredients you can find: nuts, wholemeal grains, and all the quinoa/acai/superfoods you can imagine. Let’s call it a diet muffin.

Now imagine two customers:

1. A young bodybuilder really into their fitness who meticulously plans every meal

2. A busy middle-aged mum on the go

Both are equally as likely to buy the product – it’s tasty, nutritious, and can help them with their goals and meets their jobs to be done.

But do you think the bodybuilder is likely to buy ‘a diet muffin’? Or are they more likely to purchase a ‘paleo energy snack’?

Conversely – is a busy mum going to feel like a ‘paleo energy snack’ is what she needs? Or does a ‘diet muffin’ resonate much more with her?

How to determine your frame of reference

There are many elements that can determine or influence the frame of reference you use:

• Who your customer is

• What they search for

• What they think they want

• Market trends

• Competitors, their capabilities and their frames of reference

• Analyst research

Here are some tips on how to deduce the most accurate and potentially successful frame of reference for your product.

1. Don’t be obsessed with creating a category

For the majority of startups, it’s highly unlikely you need to create a category in the first place. At least right now.

April Dunford suggests there are three ways to ‘win’ a frame of reference:

1. Head to head: position to win an existing market

2. Big fish, small pond: position to win a subsegment of existing market

3. Create a new game: position to win a category you create

Remember, a market is a group of similar customers with similar characteristics that are looking to solve a similar problem. Markets are not defined by vendors – they are defined by the customer.

If you are competing directly for a customer, go head to head or look to win a niche part of the market. These strategies don’t require the effort involved to design and launch and market a category – you can ride the coattails of a defined market frame of reference already.

If you definitely want and need to own a category, check out my short post on category design.

2. Know your customer

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times.

The literal definition of positioning is “to occupy a space in the mind of the customer”. It is absolutely crucial to understand what else is going on for them, so we can identify the space we can own.

Look beyond the immediate problem area you are solving. Look to the key jobs, pains, gains, and triggers that your personas and stakeholders have. What are their aspirations? What do they really struggle with? What are they accountable for?

Remember, buyer personas are discovered – not created. Talk to your customers and learn not just who they are, but what makes them tick.

3. Focus on value

Value are elements that your customer wants to attain that is useful, worth the effort (cost, time, energy), and urgent.

Let’s use the diet muffin example above.

• A bodybuilder does not value diet foods that will help them lose weight. But a bodybuilder does value food that provides increased energy with minimal health impact.

• The mum does not value the nutritional benefits of paleo food… but does appreciate a healthy, nutritious snack she can eat whilst out-and-about.

Same product, different value for different customers.

Tune out the tactical and biased internal voices clouding your value messaging judgement, and instead rely on what comes out of your customer’s mouth. Adapt your messaging to their interpretation and beliefs – don’t force your internal product narrative on them.

Even successful category creation relies on the same principles. Category creation must recognize, name, and define an emerging belief and practice that already exists. Gainsight recognized the customer success approach, and coined it. Drift did the same with conversational marketing… but may not be so successful with its new ‘revenue acceleration’ approach.

Nothing lasts forever

We’re not writing the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy; the answer to life, the universe, and everything cannot be summed up in two digits.

As you learn more about your customer and the market, and as your product and competitors adapt, your frame of reference is going to evolve. Today you might be an ecommerce customer service helpdesk; tomorrow, a DTC customer happiness solution.

Revisit your positioning regularly – every six months. Test and iterate with your ear to the ground – don’t just make big internal assumptions. Be led by your customers.

The goal of defining the frame of reference for your product – whether entering an existing category or designing a new one – is to build momentum. A successful frame of reference allows you to focus your message for an audience, and build confidence in your execution.

And, if you’re a regular reader you’ll know that focus + confidence = momentum.

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90% of buyer personas are ignored.

Well, I made the number up… but I bet it’s not too far off.

Back in 2012, ‘Marketing Mary’ buyer personas were all the rage. Where did our customers go on holiday? What books do they read? What brand of car do they drive?

Full of creative information… but lacking anything useful.

And here we are, in 2021, and I think most startups are still stuck in the past.

Why does this happen? Why are personas fluffy pictograms of faux customers, when we have tons of data and insight at our fingertips? Why are buyer personas ‘built’ through internal workshops, rather than ‘discovered’ through qualitative interview and quantitative survey research?

Maybe we just don’t know what a good persona explainer should do, let alone what a good persona explainer should look like.

What is the goal of a buyer persona?

Buyer personas are designed to help your internal teams build an understanding of the types of people they will interact with in the market.

They need to do just three things.

1: Represent the stakeholders actually involved in the buying journey

The sales and marketing process is a science as much as it is an art. It’s a process. Every time someone recognizes a need and looks for a solution, they will be following a reasonably well-travelled path within a small number of variances. It’s not rocket science.

So your buyer personas need to cover the people who are actually involved, and understand what role they play.

2: Provide a shortcut to easily recognize and understand the person

Personas need to easily identifiable – ideally on face value or with some simple deduction. The people who will actually use buyer personas (like your sales reps or field marketers) will need to recognize the persona through quick pattern matching: job titles, functions, industries, budget sizes, etc. They won’t have time to address a flowchart just to determine which sub-persona a prospect belongs to.

And then they need information that helps them understand them. Not just enough to know them – like their job title and responsibilities – but to understand what makes them tick. Are they an innovator, power hungry for promotion? Maybe they’re more likely to be risk-averse and prefer stability to change? What scares them, worries them, excites them?

When reviewing buyer personas, I ask myself these three questions to sense check my understanding:

• Who are you?

• What do you do?

• Why do you do it?

If I can answer these and believe in the answers, then I feel close to understanding and empathizing with the customer.

3: Provide information that helps tailor the marketing and sales approach

This doesn’t mean list off all the resources a persona might be interested in. Someone using your persona docs is there for a reason: they want help to tailor their interactions with that persona.

So don’t just leave them high and dry. Give them what they want: how should they adapt the proposition to this persona? What should they call out and highlight… and what should they put to the back-burner?

Key elements of good buyer personas

With these goals in mind, what should a buyer persona that actually fulfills these goals look like?

• Demographics: Location, Title, Function, Reports to, Experience, Role in buying process, Other defining characteristics

• Firmographics: Number of employees, Revenue, Funding, Industry/Vertical, Other defining characteristics

• Psychographics: Adoption tendencies, Introvert/Extrovert, Personality traits (innovator, maintainer, etc)

• 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

• Value messaging: using the value nugget framework, detail the features, benefits, and overall value of our product to this persona

How should you research buyer personas?

It’s possible to do buyer personas really quickly – but it’s also easy to spend tons of time and not have anything useful to show for it.

I’d recommend three stages to your persona research process. These steps take your internal knowledge and expertise, validate at a small scale, and then learn about bigger patterns that may exist.

Firstly, jot down your internal thinking. I use a customer empathy map exercise for this:

• Who are these people? What common attributes (job title, team, years of experience, for example), unite them?

• What do they think, hear, see/do, and feel about the world and your problem area?

• What are their goals, and what pains do they have?

If you’re following the process detailed in my post linked above, you’ll go through a round of review that highlights areas of agreement, disagreement, and things you still need to learn.

Next, hold your research interviews. Your internal work will have given you enough insight around the key problem areas you’re solving to frame the conversation.

Use my 19 customer development question template to interview customers across five categories:

1. Segmentation – who they are

2. Problem discovery – what broad challenges do they have?

3. Problem validation – what do they think of the problem we’re solving?

4. Product discovery – what do they think would solve their problems, and how?

5. Product validation – what do they think of our product and would it work for them?

Lastly (if you can) validate your research insights with a quantitative survey. This is useful if cost-effective and if you need to understand the variance of any variables within the persona.

You can do this through survey platforms that offer their own audience panels like Pollfish – just don’t forget to ask rigorous screening questions.

You’ll want to ask specific questions that give you insights into elements that may differ significantly, or are less clear on a small scale. Are your product marketer personas aligned under product orgs or marketing orgs? Is there a patterns that exists with that answer and their key metric goals? Who in their team makes the final buying decision, and are they responsible for the success of the buying function, or not?

Discover personas, don’t create them

I learnt these lessons the hard way.

I’ve written and talked about a product launch where we followed all the best practices, and the launch completely failed. Part of that was a huge oversight in our personas.

We thought there were just two – Sienna, a growth-minded customer experience leader, and Gary, a technical IT support desk manager. We built our experience around these – aspirational messaging that talked to their departmental visions, and pricing that aligned with their needs.

Of course we had done the research interviews and had lots of internal workshops to build them out. Our mistake was creating these personas from wishful thinking. They did exist in the market… but they were were rare unicorns.

After we emerged from the failed launch, we took a step back. We re-evaluated our customer and prospect base. Instead of two, we found five more discrete personas that we could serve in much more detail with the same effort.

We sense-checked with research interviews, making sure we understood what they were looking for and how they could gain value from our product. We ran a quantitative survey that not only let us know what their preferred features (and therefore pains/gains were), but their willingness to pay as well.

After implementing these new five personas across our marketing and sales journey, from content to pricing, we saw conversions rise, revenue increase, and more engagement as a whole.

All we did was discover the personas that already existed in the market, and we built our go-to-market strategy around them.

Simple enough, in hindsight.

Hopefully this post has given you some ideas on how to craft a persona that actually helps, based on research, and support your internal teams with the right information.

The more focus (clarity, as well as attention) you have on your prospects, the more confidence you’ll build. And focus + confidence = momentum.

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

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The post Buyer personas are discovered, not created appeared first on Building Momentum.

If I see the “buyers are x% through their journey before they talk with you” stat one more time…. *shakes fist*.

But yes, the concept stands. The power is in the buyer’s hands. Caveat emptor stands no more.

Buyers request meetings knowing more about your product, your competitors, and the market landscape than ever before.

So how do you stand out, challenge preconceptions, and persuade them that you have the best solution for them?

Your unconventional wisdom

Presenting unconventional wisdom is a core part of many story-driven sales narrative frameworks:

• Andy Raskin’s ‘world change’ and ‘enemy’

• Gartner’s ‘sense-making’ framework

• The Challenger Sale ‘reframe’

Introducing a unique insight that goes against commonly-accepted knowledge has a number of goals:

1. To position your company and product as an innovator

2. To differentiate from competitors by reframing the problem and value to be achieved

3. To create excitement and motivation or fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) with the prospect

But often, these insights don’t perform as expected.

Instead of unique wisdom that shifts the narrative… we get a generic, dull, and obvious rehashing of the world we already know.

‘Competitive’ product capabilities are retold with macro-level sprinkles of ‘customers expect more’ or ‘technology has changed’ thrown in for good measure.

So what makes unconventional wisdom… unconventional?

Unconventional wisdom that wins

I posit there are three elements that make your unconventional wisdom / world change / sense-making strategy / reframe really pop, and get you the results you want.

1. It’s staring them in the face

Sometimes, your customer can’t see the forest for the trees. They’re so close to their immediate, tangible problems to be solved that they are blind to… or choosing to ignore.

Right now, they’re standing at a forked path in the woods; one way leads to heaven, the other to hell. Can you help them zoom out and see the the bigger picture?

Take Drift’s earlier unconventional wisdom: forms suck. Of course! How could we not see that before?!

2. It’s a rational statement that drives an emotional response

Just like the Drift example above, you can feel the exasperation.

Good nuggets of unconventional wisdom will be a purely rational statement, based on fact and truth and natural laws.

But they’ll tug at the heartstrings, make you feel dumb, or galvanize your ambition.

Here’s an example:

This is the story of Nina – a young woman who grew up in a working-class family from a dodgy part of London. She went to school that was in measures for low performance. She received free school meals as a result of a low family income. She worked at a supermarket part-time to put herself through a good university, even after receiving education grants. She received a good grade, and applied for a graduate role in your company.

But so did Thomas, an Eton student from Surrey who interned at Goldman Sachs and received the same grade from the same university.

If you were the recruiter with both resumes on your desk… who would you put forward: Thomas or Nina? Be honest.

On paper, Thomas is the best candidate. In reality, Nina has shown more grit, determination, and ability. But the recruiting screening process isn’t designed to spotlight people’s potential.

Telling a story like this with an emotional edge takes a conventional situation, causes people to look inwards and ask themselves the hard questions.

3. It’s a blocker to their aspirations and ambitions

Telling someone they’re not going to achieve their goal is a surefire way to either get an attentive audience, or get ignored.

When you can back this up with proof, you’ll be able to point out the mistakes and missteps before they’re made. These need to be grounded in reality, and you need to have a solid path to help them overcome these new hidden barriers, and get them to success.

Hubspot’s inbound marketing narrative did this well. Outbound marketing was making lead generation more expensive and less effective – you’re not going to meet your revenue and growth without change.

Strong unconventional wisdom blames the game, not the tools

When you’re bringing in an unconventional wisdom narrative element, make sure it’s not telling them they’re stupid. Instead, help them make sense of the world – it’s not their fault.

There is something happening – to their buyers, to their market, to their organization – that is causing them stress and pain. Not only will you let them in on the secret that nobody else knows… you have the key to fix their challenges too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

• win more deals

• drive higher average contract values

• shorten your sales cycle 

• improve your positioning and marketing

• improve your forecasting ability

• better understand and react to the market

What is a win/loss analysis program? 

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

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

• Why they chose you, or chose an alternative solution

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

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

• What their buying process was like

• How they think about the value your product is delivering

• What’s going on in their business

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

How do I set up a win/loss process?

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

1: Capture information in your CRM

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

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

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

Win/Loss reason code fields

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

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

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

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

2: Create a win/loss research interview program

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

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

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

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

Choose your audience

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

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

Set up your outreach

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

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

• Working with the product research team

• Not looking to sell

• Looking to learn from their expertise

• Able to speak at a time that suits them

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

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

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

Have the call

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

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

You’ll want to understand key areas like:

• Their perception of the product and company

• Their experience in the sales/marketing process

• Their interpretation of your products value and pricing

• Their thoughts on the competitor landscape

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

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

Create a summary for each call

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

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

• Their behavior – process details, actions they took

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

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

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

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

3: Collate, share, discuss, utilise

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

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

Democratize access

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

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

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

Proactively share

• Share interesting tidbits and new learnings in your team updates

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

Package up your insights

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

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

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

Utilize

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

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

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

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

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

Every opportunity is a learning opportunity

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

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

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

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

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

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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Imagine you’re building a plane. Would you test that it flies? Yes. Why don’t you test your positioning too?

• You’ve done customer research: you know what they want from their experience

• You’ve done some product thinking: you’ve got the basics down, and married with a vision for supersonic travel

• You’ve designed the plane: it looks great and people like it

Are you going to bet money that it flies?

Now imagine that you just shipped it. You start rolling it out, training teams how to use it, and promote the innovative new design and experience to the world.

The plane manages to take off – just about, it’s unstable. Once it’s in the air, there’s soft drinks, but no water to drink. Customers and crew scream as the smallest turbulence turns the in-air experience into a rollercoaster.

Maybe you missed a core step that ensures not only your plane flies, but it flies according to expectations and that the end-to-end experience works.

Awkward analogy aside, this is what happens in most positioning projects.

You’ve worked through a process, did research, added in your company vision, did the wordsmithing, and happy with the results.

Now you’re building the decks, updating the website. You’re betting it’s going to work… but is it going to have the desired effect? Is it going to drive more leads, create more urgency, and help you win new revenue?

Now it’s launched. What happens to sales morale when it doesn’t hit the mark? What about executive growth expectations when the pipeline gets harder to fill?

What to test

Hopefully, you’re designing positioning and value messaging that’s built on customer insight, not assumption. But even so, how do you ensure that it’s going to be effective? Are you flying blind?

The goal is to not so much to measure individual results, but more to build confidence in the direction, the concept, and give yourself the ability to iterate from the get-go. A lack of confidence can cause inertia to set in.

I suggest testing positioning to check performance through five different lenses.

• Attraction: is the messaging going to cut through and be noticed, and increase marketing engagement?

• Interest: is it going to convey enough to create a position in their mind, make it easier to start sales conversations?

• Desire: does it spark a fire or persuade through FOMO1 or FUD2, create evangelists, increase galvanization in sales conversations?

• Action: does the messaging drive the right activity, in the right way, through the marketing/sales process – and ultimately increase win rates?

How to test your positioning

Here are some ways you can test positioning, ensure it performs, and iterate quickly if not.

PPC landing pages

Set up Google Ads for top keywords (e.g. brand, competitors, use-case or JTBD phrases), and create a landing page with the new messaging, plus a lead form. Monitor ad clickthrough rates, time on page, and form conversion rates. Tag each lead with a campaign, so you can check for qualitative measures – are they more galvanized?

Outbound email campaigns

This tells you a whole load of things that can help suss out whether you’re on the money, or if you need to rethink a concept. I suggest using Apollo.io to draw up a list of relevant contacts that meet your persona qualification. Then, create 2-4 sequences that highlight different values.

Check you’re not bodging the execution of this – keep the emails short, use 3-5 emails in the sequence over a period of 6 weeks, and ask a simple question to encourage a reply. You’ll be able to measure open rates (did the subject line positioning interest them?) and reply rates (did it encourage them to reply? are they persuaded to find out more?).

User testing

Can you mockup a web page, put it in front of your intended audience, and ask them to tell you what they think? Wynter is the easiest way to do this for B2B SaaS audiences, although you can also use other survey panels or research agencies to make this happen.

Target your audience based on job titles, industry, and company size, then show a page. Wynter will ask multiple questions to give you qualitative insights into how your positioning is perceived, what respondents didn’t think was clear, and how it could be improved.

Friendly customers

Probably the easiest way to test positioning, but also the most dangerous! Your customers chose your product to meet their problems, and will be biased towards that – they might have difficulty understanding what the new positioning means if they aren’t the intended customer.

Position the call as ‘taking part in a research project’, and aim to set 3-10 conversations with people ideally performing different stakeholder roles (e.g. decision maker, budget holder, technical evaluator).

Kick off the interview by explaining you’re testing a new way to explain your product, and either walk them through a sales deck, or show them a web page mockup. Give the pitch, then let them take control and ask them to drive – go through the deck/page and just speak their thoughts.

You’ll get a ton of information – just make sure to transcribe and make notes on inflection, areas of interest, dejected tones, and so on.

‘Tiger team’ the marketing/sales process

Probably the trickiest to do, but also the highest return. Can you bring an SDR, a sales rep, and a marketer together and task them with using the new positioning in targeted campaigns through targeted paid marketing, retargeting, outbound sales, and the sales process?

This is useful not only for measuring the impact on the full experience, but how well your team can internalize the new positioning. Is it something they believe in? Do they need continual support? What questions are they asking, what elements are they not confident about?

The benefit is that the positioning team can be super synchronized with the reaction from prospects. Every email reply, every ad click, every call and demo can be recorded and reviewed for insight. Again, ensure best practices are met and understand whether negative results are an execution issue or a strategy challenge. Try to use the sales reps who are most comfortable with discovery, ambiguity, and objection handling. You’ll need to think about incentives too, and ensure those assigned to the project don’t miss out on commissions for new exploratory work.

Cheatcode: build evidence throughout the positioning process

In my positioning practice, we use four stages to test elements from the beginning.

Firstly, we start with assumptions – who do we think are our best-fit customers today? Using an empathy map to draw out thoughts, align the cross-functional positioning workgroup, and see how confident we are.

Secondly, we carry out customer interviews that build evidence. We transcribe, pull out themes, and use this insight to build personas.

Thirdly – the bit that’s hardest to do without facilitation – is keep asking the question for every suggestion that comes up when building value messaging: “do we have evidence?” Bringing the conversation back down to reality – away from the bias and assumptions that we all have – makes much stronger and defensible positioning.

Lastly, we follow the tactics outlined above to test the areas we have low-confidence in. Akin to unit-testing software, we can unit-test positioning to build confidence in the end result.

Test with momentum in mind

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

If your positioning is seen or heard by your ideal customer and it doesn’t occupy a space in their mind and encourage them to take action, does it work?

Probably not. You’ve focused your messaging on a customer and their problems – now test it in the market and build your confidence in it. Because focus + confidence = momentum.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter @jdomanpipe.

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Probably the most overused, yet most misunderstood word in SaaS?

Go-to-market is often used to refer to everything that happens in a business outside of engineering and core functions like finance and HR.

Often this isn’t defined as a single strategy, but as an amalgamation of everything you’re already doing. Even to those in the know, GTM can feel really intangible – and extremely difficult to communicate internally.

And if it’s difficult to communicate amongst different teams, are you sure you’re all rowing in the same direction?

Ultimately, it needs to be a summary of:

• how you are literally taking (through marketing and sales)…

• …the product you have (and are) building…

• …to the market (who, and in which landscape)

Your go-to-market plan needs to convey target customer, your product and positioning, pricing, and distribution channels.

You probably have strategies for all of these pieces, but aligning these together under one GTM strategy can really help focus the message, refine rough edges, and bring everyone on the journey together.

One slide to rule them all

Get the template here

This is not a replacement for more in-depth documentation, but a way to reduce your core strategies and actions into one simple slide that can be shared internally.

The first column covers your customers:

• Summarise your target market – beginning with your ICP segment, the teams you sell to, and the job title personas in your core audience

• Pull out the unique value that your product delivers, which aligns with your customers expectations and needs. Reminder: these need to be based in reality, not fiction.

The second column covers your product and landscape:

• Category – what’s the frame of reference for your product?

• Key differentiators – what are they key features that your product delivers that others don’t?

• Competitors – who are your top immediate competitors, and how do you differ from them? Also describe any alternative solutions that customers use to achieve similar outcomes.

Lastly, communicate distribution channels (sales and marketing):

• Sales strategy – how do you sell and engage prospects, what are the key actions in the sales process?

• Pricing – what’s the pricing goal, how much does the product cost, and what is the target average revenue per account?

• Marketing strategy – how are you finding prospects in the market, what are the key channels you’re using, what’s your customer acquisition cost?

• Elevator pitch – how should everyone who reads the slide explain what your product delivers?

Communicate better, finetune strategy, and increase alignment

I’ve used slides like this before as a summary in presentations to give teams context and grounding on how their work connects to the go-to-market process.

Whether you already have a defined GTM strategy or not, it’s always an interesting process to review within these boundaries with some questions in mind:

• Can you spot misalignment in your GTM, rough edges across the components that create some friction?

• Are there still questions around who your customers are and their problems, your product differentiators, or how you compete?

• Does everyone understand why your price is what it is?

• Are people actually using the customer value / product differentiator points in conversations?

One of the most powerful pieces of this template is sharing drafts with people across your business. After reviewing the slide, would they fundamentally disagree with the points you’ve detailed?

If so, you may need to revisit your underlying strategies to unlock higher levels of alignment. Focusing your you go-to-market strategy creates confidence, which in turn builds momentum.

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

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

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At Kayako, we wanted to burn down the existing concept of customer service software that was focused on ‘tickets’ and ‘departments’ using the all-too-often emotional experience of being treated like a ticket number, and getting passed around from pillar to post between teams.

We all know what that feels like, and we used this emotional enemy – a concept that our audience had experienced, could believe, and can rally against – to our advantage. 

At the same time, we talked about how better customer service is not just a nice concept, but it’s good for business: improving your service builds loyalty, leading to repeat orders, and more word of mouth referrals that grow your business. This is the economic incentive that aligned with our audience: raising customer service from a cost-center to a profit-center.

See this framework in action

Hubspot: inbound marketing

Hubspot popularized inbound marketing. Display advertising, PPC, and tradeshows weren’t working as well as they did, but deep down, in our hearts, it’s not the way we want to win customers. We want customers to find our company organically and to like us so much they buy our product or service – we don’t want to spam them with hard sale messages or trick them into a purchase. The “old way” was an emotional enemy that passionate marketers and CEOs wanted to kill.

The inevitable upside – growing your business with more traffic and more leads that drive more sales with this new inbound marketing concept – is the economic incentive. Who’s going to say no to more sales?

Drift: forms suck

Drift has a similar story. Why on earth are we gating content, when we want people to actually read it? The emotional enemy is the form: we’ve all closed a page that asks us to complete a ten-field form before getting a one-page PDF. Is that the way we really want to treat our potential customers? Is that how we would want to be treated?

The economic incentive? “Connect your sales teams to future customers, now.” It aligns with their audience of marketers, sales leads, and CEO on the economic level against their incentives: more conversations equals more opportunities, which leads to higher (and faster!) revenue growth.

Further reading

This isn’t a new concept; the use of an enemy in company narrative has been popularized by Andy Raskin, like this great nugget of advice:

One of the most powerful ways to turn prospects into aspiring heroes is to pit them against an antagonist. … Naming your customer’s enemy differentiates you — not directly in relation to competitors (which comes off as “salesy”), but in relation to the old world that your competitors represent.

Andy Raskin

Sales conversations no longer stall on ‘what and how’, but move faster because the ‘why’ is more personal at both economic and emotional levels. Assigning an emotional enemy creates positive affinity and removes objections, while the economic pull creates urgency and helps build a rational business case.

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