Outbound sales can seem like a dark art.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do outbound with purpose and focus

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

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

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

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

Understand the outbound process

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

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

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

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

All outbound relies on excellent, excellent discovery

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

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

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

Scalable outbound sells the problem, not the product

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

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

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

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

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

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

Incentives matter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What goes in, comes out

Outbound is a science.

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

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

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

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

It’s difficult, but not impossible

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

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

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

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I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, due to my work and things my friends are also working on. I’ve helped create, rollout, and scale second and third products.

There definitely is a right and wrong way to build your second product. I actually think that in an ideal world, your second product should be a product you acquire, rather than build yourself – I’ll explain why later.

But first, let’s look at the usual way a second product comes about, and then how I think it should be done.

A typical second product story

I’m talking about a second actual product, not just a major feature of an existing product. A second product that should have it’s own dedicated product/engineering teams and a separate go-to-market.

What usually happens is this: your founder or someone in the exec team spots an adjacent problem that your company should solve. They either suggest – or dictate – that the second product is something that must be done – it’s critical to the future success of the business and NOW is the time to branch out, to build upon the traction you’re experiencing.

So it’s assigned to a product manager, with an exec sponsor. The PM goes away and starts thinking about the product.

As most PMs are prone to do, they’re closer to the delivery of features than the development of a proposition. So they come back with a plan to build the thing and get it going. The exec sponsor goes back and gets the green light – this is a huge money-making opportunity!

Maybe a product marketer gets involved. As we are prone to do, we ask hard questions about the customer, the opportunity, the proposition.

“We just need to build the thing!” they say. “We’ll find customers who care about this when we’ve built it!”

Dutifully, the PMM carries on, supporting the proposition development and planning the GTM. Launch comes, and… the reaction isn’t quite as hoped.

“But the first, original product is a success! How could this happen?”

Well, it was different back then.

• The founder started the company probably because they experienced the pain firsthand
• They had unique wisdom that gave them shortcuts to pinpoint pains and develop the proposition
• They were probably working closely with customers to develop the product from day 1
• The gap between the interpretation of the problem and the execution was more narrow – maybe a CEO, a CTO, and a few engineers.

Now – with best intentions – the second product is a bit more difficult.

• The founder may not have experienced the second problem as deeply as the first problem
• They may not have as deep unique insight, or it’s based on outdated context
• Survivorship bias means the founder underestimates the amount of constant iteration and rethinking they did the first time round
• The interpretation gap is wider – understanding and context has to filter through a PM, an exec sponsor, and a founder both ways

So, through no fault of their own, the founders expectations and the reality of what the PM can deliver is out of sync. That misalignment – of the market opportunity, of the requirements to compete, of the deep context to be understood – is painful.

Building a second product (the right way)

Here’s how I think – and have seen – second products built the right way.

Firstly, an adjacent problem is identified from several sources including existing customer interviews, sales conversations, and the objective synthesization of market opportunities from the exec team.

It’s handed to a product marketer and product manager, who – as a team – are tasked with validating and quantifying the opportunity. A research sprint is undertaken: desk research for current solutions to the problem, existing customer interviews, and new market interviews too.

A business case is developed, detailing customer segments, the market landscape, and an initial draft of a competitive proposition. Opportunities are highlighted: what could the first next step be? What customer segment would make an easy first target? Where are the underserved needs in the market today?

This is reviewed and receives sign-off, empowering the product team to start building an MVP. At the same time, the product marketer works to iterate the go-to-market package: drafting and testing messaging, researching a distribution strategy, working with a sales/marketing ‘tiger team’ to start defining the GTM.

In constant contact with interested customers and prospects, the product team begin to ship product that’s tested by real hands. Quick feedback loops enable users to provide feedback on workflows and screens that the engineering team can pick up to improve without a longwinded selection process.

At some point, momentum starts snowballing – users begin to love it, issues decrease, and your initial sales/marketing results are exceeding expectations. Product/market fit has been achieved.

Of course, it never really happens like this – there’s usually a few more hiccups along the road. But hopefully you’ll recognise some of the smoothness, the natural pull and eagerness from the market, and the ‘start with the customer’ approach.

Or, could you acquire a product?

I think that, more than ever, acquiring a company as your ‘second product’ makes a ton of sense.

Not only are you acquiring the technology – which, with a well-resourced plan, can be integrated into your own stack – but you’re acquiring customers. They already had the pain, and they searched for a solution to solve it.

You’re acquiring expertise. Those founders, the product managers, the engineers all have more context on the customer problem to be solved than your team can learn quickly – even though the problem is adjacent.

And you’re buying experience. What worked? What didn’t work? What does the market want, need, what are competitors doing, how does selling and marketing work best?

These shortcuts – hopefully – would make it easier to build momentum with a second product. You can learn where the overlap are between your existing product customer base and your acquired base so you can figure out the cross-sell motion. You’ve already got revenue, a baseline for growth, and tactical plans to start optimizing from.

Regardless, look for focus + confidence

As longtime Building Momentum readers will know, momentum is the output of confidence + focus. If you have focus (in the customer, the problem, the product) and confidence (that reality will match expectations) – you will build momentum.

Whether you’re acquiring your second product, aspiring to build it “the right way”, or struggling through a mess, finding ways to increase focus and confidence will serve you well.

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

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Presenting our company position and narrative to the world is fraught with second-guessing how it resonates. 

One day, the CEO hears something from a customer that doesn’t sit right and demands a rewrite. Or a new marketer starts, and they think the website copy needs updating.

And when we role out new positioning/messaging, we often rely on just our internal assumptions and gut feel. Maybe we get feedback from one or two friendly customers.

But that’s not enough. We need look for external indicators that it will be successful, rather than just rely on our assumptions. 

You can’t A/B your way to high performing positioning. Positioning, by default, should mean something to someone; it won’t appeal to everyone. Your go-to-market must discriminate.

Validate your positioning like a software developer

I think about validating positioning similar to how software teams roll out new products: an internal alpha stage, and then an external beta stage.

We want to build confidence in our positioning and messaging at multiple levels, and ultimately ensure that it performs the way we expect it to perform.

I think that’s an important point to make. We can feel confident about something… for no reason at all. Rather than expect reality to match our expectations, we should build our expectations based on reality.

Alpha stage

The goal of your alpha test stage is to use internal teams. We want to see how well they think it will perform, based on their experience. The goal is to pass a 60% threshold of satisfaction, explore edge cases and limits, and find conflicts.

Sales reps and customer success managers who are on the frontline of customer interactions will help understand whether the problems and values you’ve extracted are commonplace within your existing customer base – or if you’ve gone on an irrelevant tangent.

They’ll be able to give you examples of customers that it will resonate with – and customers that will reject it.

Their insight will help you understand the general direction, but might not be best-placed to feedback on the exact destination. So take their feedback with a pinch of salt.

Beta stage

Once we’ve passed alpha, we can look to external sources to understand whether positioning is going to perform the job it’s intended to do. Here are some ways you can put messaging to the test in a controlled manner.

Presenting to existing customers

I don’t usually recommend sharing new positioning with existing customers.  They’ve bought into your product for a reason, and you might upset them if presenting them with a different story.

However, you can continue to interview your customers and ask them about their role, company, and their experience with your product. Take their feedback with caution: you’ll want to continue building patterns and identifying anomalies. 

Success is when they repeat the messaging back at you, without being prompted. This will show that customers identify and resonate with your pitch. This comes naturally when you have a deep, foundations-first understanding of who they are and what they care about.

Market research

Use a platform like UserTesting to get real feedback from real people in your target market. 

We used this with great results at Kayako to get instant feedback on our website, looking to understand:

• How they interpreted our website and messaging
• What was unclear
• What other companies they think are similar, and why

What’s great about platforms like this is that users are encouraged to navigate your website whilst talking out loud and vocalizing their thoughts. This way, you get more real and raw feedback – rather than polished, curated feedback that might happen from surveys or interviews. 

Google and social ads

We can validate positioning through paid ads on Google searches for relevant keywords, and social ads. But both have a different purpose.

Google ads can help test whether positioning performs at the middle-of-the-funnel to capture consideration-led interest and intent. 

Users have found a category or a type of product they’re interested in. Will your ad copy encourage them to click? Then, on the landing page you have another opportunity to expand upon your ad copy and play with messaging to encourage them to fill out an interest form or take a trial. 

Social ads are an opportunity to capture TOFU interest. Because targeting can be so precise (to job titles, industries, and even interests) and because ads can easily disappear into the feed, our ads can focus instead on validating whether positioning and messaging captures attention.

“Tiger team”

It’s all well and fine testing the individual components of your positioning… but the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. 

If you can, and if it’s worth it, consider proposing a ‘tiger team’: a cross-functional group of representatives across marketing, sales, and success to bring new positioning to life throughout the buyer journey. You’ll be able to identify follow-on, second-order impacts of positioning on things like sales velocity, the onboarding experience, and customer satisfaction as a whole. 

They’ll need the flexibility and support of the business to iterate and make recommendations, but ultimately can be a crucial part of ensuring new positioning and messaging is brought to life in a de-risked, prepared way. 

Additional reading: how to test your positioning

Avoid A/B testing

A/B testing can be a great get-out clause when everyone has an opinion – but is rarely beneficial.

I recommend setting out an iterative approach instead. Communicate the approach to build/measure/learn how positioning performs:

• Build positioning based on the evidence and high-confidence assumptions you have 
• Measure performance based on the intended impact (like conversion rates, sales wins)
• Learn what those results mean: right customer, wrong message – or the other way round? 
• Start the process again until satisfied

Alpha and beta test to success

Don’t go to market without validating your positioning. You’ll look like a lemon, and it’s a huge waste of time and energy.

Instead, check with your internal team. Improve. Then, check it works (and performs better) than your previous baseline). Improve. Launch. Simple.

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

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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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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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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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Nearly every first-time founder I’ve worked with believes their new product is a total gamechanger, a completely new, never-been-done-before innovation that’s going to create a category and spark a new market.

But when I work with second-time founders or career CEOs, their new products are nearly always positioned as a step-change to an existing category.

When we look at new products, new categories, or new methodologies that pop up every day, they could all have exponential potential to change your customers life.

But introducing them as truly revolutionary isn’t always the best approach.

The California Roll

In this article, Nir Eyal talks about how Japanese restaurants introduced sushi to the American public in the 1970’s. In a market where fish was cooked, not raw, and seaweed was strictly something found on a beach and not eaten, how could they convince consumers to try something completely foreign to them?

The answer? The California Roll. Rice, avocado, cucumber, sesame seeds, and crab meat – with a small sliver of nori seaweed holding it together.

In a perfect example of new product innovation, sushi restaurateurs combined an existing product concept with the taste preferences of a new market – reducing barriers to entry and serving as an entry point into the world of sushi.

But early-stage first-time founders usually don’t want to create and sell a California roll – it’s not as exciting.

Instead, they create their own version of fugu: confusing, weird, off-putting, even dangerous.

In these scenarios, at a minimum you risk confusing potential customers and failing. At worst, you alienate them and get a bad reputation.

In B2B SaaS however, most likely prospects probably just won’t believe what you’re selling can help them.

Surely, if they have a discrete problem, then they need a tool that solves that – not something completely new that helps them achieve something they’ve never experienced?

So how do you create a narrative that blends ingenuity and innovation with familiarity and comfort? By designing your product pitch around the concept of evolution, not revolution.

Andy Raskin has posted before about how category creation must be based on a new game that your customers see others playing – not just assumptions or wishful thinking.

Instead of a complete revolution to an existing market, can you create and test a narrative around your product as an evolution of an existing process, category, or belief system?

Anchoring

Hubspot did this with inbound marketing: the old way doesn’t work, the new way does. Zuora did this with the subscription economy: people don’t want to buy anymore, they want to rent. Drift did this with conversational marketing: people don’t want to fill out forms, they want to talk to companies.

By anchoring to existing formats, you’re reducing the cognitive load on the customer. You’re connecting the dots for them, rather than hoping they’ll make the connection themselves.

Educate on life with and life without

Can you help prospects understand where they are today – what they’re missing out on, what their real expenses are, and where their problems will be if they don’t fix something?

And can you present an example of where they could be – their gains achieved, pains solved, costs reduced, money made, free of problems and worries?

Andy Raskin calls this the promised land – the state your customer will exist in after they have made their journey. This is never just as simple as a problem solved – it’s a new way of being.

Monsters

When presenting an evolution message, how do you make sure that people can only get there with you? By promoting the monsters and enemies that prevent prospects from achieving their promised land.

This might be anything from the existing processes they work with, their organization’s change environment, and the systems they use, to the beliefs they have. Limitations, boundaries, blockers – find the most effective narrative that helps prospects who want to improve realize they are incapable of doing so without you.

NIHITO

Nothing important happens in the office.

You might have your finger on the pulse, have all the relevant domain experience, and be super tuned into the market – but still miss out on potential interesting angles because of your bias.

It’s crucial get out of your head and into the mind of your customer. Positioning by assumption doesn’t work. Learning from your customers does.

Evolution is the natural selection of what works

We know enough about evolution from biology to know that natural selection rewards those who test, who adapt, who build on top of existing concepts.

An evolutionary narrative doesn’t restrict you from innovation or experimenting – but it does require you always think back to your customer’s view of the world, and how to bring them along the journey.

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Although following ‘category design’ principles, most categories that SaaS companies are ‘creating’ are not actually categories.

They might be good ways to describe their product, and offer a marketing shortcut to own a phrase.

But a category isn’t really ‘created’ – it’s defined.

Name the process, not the product

Category Design is a discipline of creating and monetizing new markets in a noisy world. The journey starts first with understanding the problem that you desire to solve. The problem is the proxy for the category and is the strategic element you see missing in the world. That unsolved problem is what keeps you up at night, and drives you to build a product, company and category to solve it.

Play Bigger

A category is a new market that’s defined by a problem experienced by a group of buyers.

Most category projects start by looking internally: what’s a classy, unique way to describe what does our product does? What’s a nice, brandable phrase that we can use in marketing?

That misses a huge opportunity to find a term that is grounded in evidence, not assumption.

Strong category design describes the new game that your customers can play when their problem is solved.

That comes from deeply understanding your customer, and knowing not just their jobs-to-be-done, but their mindset. What’s going on for them in their role and in their business? Ask your customers:

• How has our product changed your life?

• What does our product free you up to focus on instead?

• If you didn’t have our product, what would life be like instead?

When you can define the promised land your customers can achieve, you’re better equipped to name the process through which it is achieved.

Sense-check your category naming

When trying to name your category, ask yourself: will your customers organically admit to it?

Test with this phrase:

Yes, we do [category name].

The category has to be grounded in your buyers and users’ reality. Will they accept it as part of their role (and therefore, their identity)? Will they start bond with others through it, create and join communities, and use the terminology in their CV or mention in interviews, unironically?

Do you need to design a category in the first place?

Nope. Markets do already exist, and creating a category is a long-term commitment. It’s not for everyone.

April Dunford suggests there are three ways to determine your frame of reference:

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

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

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

If your business goals need immediate clarity and return on investment, defining a category is probably not for you. If you have the space and can invest long-term, get started.

Thinking of your category as a frame of reference for your product in the mind of your customer is a better way to look at it. What do you need to create that space? What shortcuts – existing markets, trends, competitors and alternatives – can you use in that pursuit?

How to define your category

• Niche down on your Ideal Customer Profile

• Deeply understand your customer’s jobs, gains, pains, and motivations

• Use that insight to develop customer-led value messaging

• Develop your strategic narrative – undeniable world change, enemies, promised land, and your magic capabilities

• Combine your messaging and narrative to investigate the best frame of reference for your product in the mind of your customer, that aligns with your business goals

• Put a tiger team on it to test and iterate through friendly customer/prospect conversations, internal presentations, outbound emails, sales decks, paid marketing, organic marketing, external presentations, etc.

• Launch – with a marketable lightning strike

Alternatively, give this ‘Minimum Viable Category Design’ workshop plan from VC Pietro Bezza a go – a nice, structured way to think about your product in a new market.

Who’s done a good job of category design?

There are two great examples in tech that always come to mind.

Drift’s Conversational Marketing

A few weeks ago, I met a CMO named Yvette in the office kitchen at OpenView Venture Partners. She was chewing on a bagel during a lunch break from the VC firm’s all-day speaker event, and she was clearly upset.

“How in the world,” Yvette said, reaching for the cream cheese, “am I going to inform my team that our entire approach to marketing is wrong?”

Andy Raskin

Undeniably, Drift did a great job of building their Conversational Marketing category.

• World change: messaging is the primary way people communicate

• Enemy: forms – why gate something with a static form?

• Promised land: connect to your customers in minutes

• Magic: chatbot and live chat for sales conversations

They then executed perfectly with content, training, partner channels, events, a book – literally every trick in the book. There are over 5000+ people on LinkedIn with ‘conversational marketing” in their job descriptions or titles.

Aside: Drift’s new ‘Revenue Acceleration’ category doesn’t have quite the same impact, and is probably more of a good way to describe their product, rather than naming the new game that winners play.

Gainsight’s Customer Success

It doesn’t even sound like a category anymore – it’s just the way that you do account management now.

From the mental model to educate buyers on a new game to huge events, content, and community, Gainsight took a nascent phrase and turned it into a movement that’s now used by over 428,000 people to describe their job on LinkedIn.

What market will assist you in building momentum?

Defining your market – whether through a category, or by using another existing category that already exists – helps focus your strategy and execution. And focus + confidence = momentum.

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