Have you ever sat in a presentation where someone puts up a slide titled “Our ICP” and it reads:

“B2B SaaS companies, $10M-$50M ARR, 50-200 employees, North America.”

And someone in the room asks: “So… that’s like 8,000 companies. Which ones should we actually call?”

Silence.

I see this pattern constantly. Companies with reasonable-sounding ICPs built entirely on firmographics: company size, industry, revenue range, location… nothing else.

That’s not an ICP.

Six months later, they’re still stuck in the same place.

• Marketing can’t deliver the right leads
• Sales teams spray and pray without focus
• Win rates stay flat
• Churn goes up
• The team burns out

The problem isn’t work ethic or the budget: it’s your ICP definition.

Most ICPs tell you what a company is, but they don’t tell you when that company is ready to buy.

Situation influences purchase more than firmographics

The thing about firmographics is, they’re static and tell you literally nothing. They describe a company’s characteristics, but not their context.

A “Series B SaaS company” could be crushing it or bleeding cash. They could have a world-class GTM engine… or a pipeline held together with hope and spreadsheets.

One is browsing, and the other is buying.

But a “Series B SaaS company that just missed their board forecast by 40% and realized their pipeline has no repeatable process” is in a completely different state. That’s a company in a situation… and situations create urgency.

Let me give you a real example.

At Headstart, before I joined, the ICP was purely firmographic. Consulting and professional services companies, specific revenue range, offices in certain locations. Standard stuff.

It wasn’t working. The messaging was generic. Sales cycles were long. There was no pattern to wins.

So we shifted the definition. We started targeting companies that had published in their annual reports that diversity, equity, and inclusion was a strategic priority.

That was the trigger.

Once a company published that commitment, we knew they were serious.

We could reference their own language back to them. We could connect with people inside those organizations who personally cared about this work. The motivation was already there.

Everything changed. The sales team knew exactly who to target and when. The messaging got sharper because it could speak to a specific moment: the moment leadership made a public commitment. Close rates improved noticeably.

Why?

We stopped fishing in the ocean, and started fishing where the fish were already biting.

This is what I mean by situational ICP. The question isn’t “who is our ideal customer?” The real question is “What happened the week before they started looking for us?”

Was it a failed product launch?

A new executive who exposed gaps in the GTM? A competitor win that blindsided them?

A board meeting that went sideways?

A public commitment they now need to deliver on?

That specific moment, that trigger, is your real ICP.

When you shift to situational thinking, three things happen

Your messaging gets sharper.

You’re not writing for “B2B SaaS companies.”

You’re writing for “B2B SaaS companies whose last product launch flopped and the CEO is demanding answers.”

That specificity cuts through the noise and validates the pain before you even pitch the solution. It makes your prospect feel seen.

Your targeting gets easier.

You can build content around the trigger event, not just the company size.

Target companies with new hires in key roles. Companies that just announced funding. Companies that published commitments in annual reports. Companies that failed a compliance audit.

This powers ABM, outbound, and your entire content strategy.

Your close rates improve.

Because you’re reaching companies when they’re actually ready to change.

Most of your market is stuck in inertia.

They know they have a problem, but the emotional cost of change feels too high.

But companies in a situation? They’ve already overcome that inertia.

Something broke. Someone’s mad. The status quo isn’t acceptable anymore.

You’re not convincing them they have a problem… you’re showing up exactly when they’re ready to solve it.

Quick diagnostic: is your ICP sharp enough?

Before we go further, let’s diagnose your current ICP. Score yourself honestly on these 5 questions:

1. Can you describe their “horrible day” in specific detail?

If you can’t describe the exact moment their day falls apart, you don’t understand their pain well enough to sell to it.

2. Can your sales team spot the difference between a good-fit and bad-fit lead in 5 minutes?

A sharp ICP gives your team conviction. They should confidently disqualify a bad fit early in the conversation.

3. Does your ICP exclude at least 70% of your total market?

Narrow focus isn’t limiting… the opposite! It’s liberating! It lets you build messaging that actually resonates.

4. Is there less than 2 steps between your feature and their revenue or cost outcome?

Every step is a chance for them to lose interest. “Close 30% more deals” is stronger than “better project management leading to faster shipping leading to more revenue.”

5. Are you seeing momentum with this segment?

If you’re not seeing faster cycles, higher win rates, and better retention, your ICP might be theoretically correct but practically wrong.

If you can’t confidently say yes to at least 4 of these, your ICP is probably costing you deals.

Fix 1: Listen to sales calls

Don’t skim – actually listen!

Your job is to find the moment of maximum frustration, the point where the prospect’s voice changes where they sound tired, or angry, or desperate.

That emotion is your trigger. Write down the exact situation they describe.

For example, you might hear: “The CFO presents a messy pipeline report to board. CEO asks pointed questions the VP Sales can’t answer. VP Sales gets told to ‘fix it in 30 days or we’ll find someone who can.’ They start Googling solutions that night.”

That’s a trigger. That’s the moment they became a strong, high-potential, motivated buyer.

Fix 2: Build your “Negative ICP”

Pull a list of your highest-churn customers. What do they have in common? Industry patterns? Size? Mindset? Buying motion?

Write down the 5 attributes that scream churn, and turn that into a one-pager for your sales and marketing team. Make it easy for them to disqualify bad fits early, avoid targeting them in paid marketing, etc.

This is critical: disqualification is more important than qualification.

Every hour your team spends on a bad-fit prospect is an hour they’re not spending on someone who’s actually ready to buy.

You’re not trying to build the perfect persona; you’re trying to get sharp enough that your messaging actually resonates.

And remember: your ICP isn’t static. It’s going to evolve every 6 months as you learn what’s working and what’s not. You might refine it to be even more niche, or broaden slightly as you find success in adjacent markets.

This is what I call the positioning loop:

• Clarity (define your ICP)

• Conviction (commit to it)

• Consistency (execute for 6 months)

… so you can actually learn fast and narrow, without spraying and praying.

The fear of narrowing down is real

Every time I’ve recommended narrowing an ICP, I’ve gotten pushback from founders and CEOs.

“If we go that narrow, we’ll leave 90% of the revenue on the table.”

“We need to keep it broad so we can see what sticks.”

“Our product works for everyone in this category.”

The fear is real. Nobody wants to miss being the next Salesforce because they niched too early.

But trying to be everything to everyone is the fastest way to become nothing to anyone.

You can’t build authority with a broad ICP.

Authority requires a point of view.

And a point of view requires choosing who you’re for… and who you’re not.

I worked with a seller who focused on an uncomfortably narrow ICP. They only sold to one specific customer type, in a specific region. Their pitch was three sentences. Their close rate was ridiculously high. Customers barely asked questions before signing.

When I asked if they worried about leaving money on the table, they said: “No. I worry about trying to serve everyone poorly instead of serving someone exceptionally well.”

That stuck with me.

Because narrowing your ICP doesn’t shrink your business. It expands your impact.

When you’re crystal clear on who you serve, three things happen:

1. Your messaging gets sharp enough to cut through the noise

2. Your sales team can spot good fits instantly

3. Your product roadmap has a clear direction

The hardest part of strategy is saying no. But it’s also the most important part.

Stop fishing in the ocean

In B2B, you don’t sell to company profiles. You sell to people in companies in specific situations that they desperately want to escape.

So here’s what I’d challenge you to do:

• Stop building ICPs on demographic filters

• Stop defining your market by company size and job titles alone

• Instead, ask: “What happened the week before they started looking for us?”

• Find that moment

• Build your messaging around it

• Target companies when they’re in that situation

Because that’s when they’re ready to buy, when you can actually help them move forward.

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

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

The post Stop selling to job titles, and start selling to situations instead appeared first on Building Momentum.

A good story isn’t enough. You can write the sharpest narrative in your category, build a killer deck, and train your team to the script.

But if that story never makes it into how your team speaks, builds, and sells… it doesn’t matter.

Most teams treat positioning like a one-and-done project. They ship a deck, update the copy, and move on.

Great teams do more. They treat positioning like a loop. A system. A habit. Something they revisit, reinforce, and refine over time.

And when they do, positioning becomes a growth driver, not a forgotten artefact.

That’s where the Positioning Loop comes in.

It’s not a framework. It’s a cycle. One that helps you move beyond theory and actually embed positioning into your go-to-market motion – day in, day out.

The Positioning Loop has three phases:

• Get clarity
• Build conviction
• Be consistent

Here’s how to actually do it.

Get clarity

This is where most get stuck.

You craft a compelling story that earns nods and comments until you realise it doesn’t answer the right questions.

Clarity isn’t word polish. It’s decision making.
You must define:

• Exactly which customer you serve
• The problems you relentlessly solve
• What you’re replacing, and why you’re better

At Paddle, we went beyond just looking for product market fit. We started asking: is this company likely to act now? Are they feeling the urgency?

That’s what led us to focus on buyer moment fit – not just who could benefit from our product, but who was actually primed to engage now.

We built a short list of signals to help us identify these moments: had they just raised a round? Recently hired in finance or ops? Expanded into the US? Each one gave us clues that the buyer was not only a good fit, but ready for a conversation.

That changed how we told our story. We weren’t speaking to some abstract ICP. We were targeting companies in motion, and it showed up everywhere from outbound copy to demo calls.

That shift didn’t just make our messaging clearer… it made it usable. Because when you know exactly who you’re speaking to and why they care right now, every part of go-to-market gets sharper.

If your positioning doesn’t make you uncomfortable, it’s probably too safe.

Build conviction

Having clarity is one thing. Getting the team to believe is another.

Sure, you roll out the story. Slides get saved. But a few weeks in, everyone has defaulted back to old language.

Belief doesn’t live in slides. It lives in lived experience.

At Paddle, we leaned into this. To help the team believe, we invited real customers into all-hands so people could hear unfiltered quotes. We plastered those quotes on posters everywhere. We celebrated great calls and shared snippets of the language that prospects used, so reps would know what to look out for.

This was strategic reinforcement: when sales walked into the market, they’d hear exactly the pains we were teaching them to talk to. The story would feel real. They’d believe it more, pitch more robustly, and bring more energy into every conversation.

How to help conviction stick:

• Turn personas into real humans. Use call clips, quotes, live stories so the pain becomes tangible
• Flag every win where the new messaging was part of the success. Share that fast
• Make positioning a visible part of the environment, like Slack, meetings, and even the office

You earn conviction; it can’t be enforced. 

Be consistent

If your message morphs every quarter, it stops being positioning. It becomes noise.

In my article on Zendesk’s positioning evolution, I charted how their narrative evolved over time, but never flipped. From scrappy startup to enterprise-friendly leader, they stuck to a single tension point: simplicity at scale in customer service. That consistency gave it strength.

Your team needs time to absorb. Your buyers need time to remember.

In When Should You Reposition Your Brand? I outlined five real reasons to change positioning. Rarely is it because you lost one deal or a competitor launched new features. Most teams only need to revisit their story every 6 to 12 months. It gives you enough signal to make deliberate decisions about how to evolve.

Consistency isn’t rigidity. It’s giving your message a fighting chance to embed.

Psst… it’s a loop, remember?

• Clarity builds belief.
• Belief drives execution.
• Execution sharpens the message.
• Rinse, repeat.

The more consistently you run this loop, the more clearly you see what’s working… and what’s not.

When you stick with a story, patterns emerge. Your team stops saying “we’re not sure if it’s landing” and starts saying “this line always gets a nod” or “people get stuck here.”

You move past guesswork. You gather real-world evidence. You start making sharper decisions about what to double down on, what to drop, and how to improve.

This is why the loop matters. Not just to maintain alignment, but to drive smarter iteration over time.

Positioning is a muscle. The more you run the loop, the more you understand how to grow – and how to get better.

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

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The post The repeatable system to level up your positioning appeared first on Building Momentum.

Me too.

Maybe the sales team is being asked to close 500 deals in a year, but your ICP is so niche that there are barely 600 companies in the world that even qualify.

Maybe leadership is convinced that a new outbound campaign will generate millions in pipeline, but there’s no data to show if there are enough companies in the market to make that possible.

In those moments, having a solid handle on TAM, SAM, and SOM is one of the few ways to bring the conversation back to reality.

These acronyms get thrown around all the time… but if we’re being honest, most people—at every level—don’t fully understand the terms or how to calculate them.

The good news is that these numbers aren’t as complicated as they seem. And once you get a handle on them, you’ll be able to sanity-check your strategy before you waste time, effort, and money chasing something completely unrealistic.

Explaining TAM, SAM, and SOM

• TAM (Total Addressable Market) – The dream scenario. If every single company that could use your product actually did, this is how big the opportunity would be.
• SAM (Serviceable Addressable Market) – Now let’s get real. This is the slice of the TAM you can actually sell to today, based on your product’s capabilities, your go-to-market motion, and other practical constraints.
• SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market) – The realistic market. Out of your SAM, this is the subset of companies that are actively looking for a solution and could realistically buy in the next 12 months.

Illustrating with an example

Let’s make this real with an example. We’ll follow Toward, a fake SaaS company that sells an AI-powered marketing website CMS built for tech startups.

Toward has set a goal of $10M in new ARR this year, but no one has checked whether the market can actually support this. (Sound familiar?)

I’ll walk through this example in TAM, SAM, and SOM calculations (and go further to sanity-check the revenue plan) to bring strategy back to reality.

How to go from TAM to SOM

Step 1: Find your universe (TAM)

TAM is your total potential market: every company that could theoretically use your product, regardless of whether you can sell to them today.

It’s easiest to use the firmographics from your ICP to find your TAM.

• Company size – Who benefits most from your product? (e.g., 50-1,000 employees)
• Revenue range – What company scale makes sense? (e.g., $10M+ ARR)
• Geography – Where are your potential customers located? (e.g., North America and Europe)
• Industry – Who actually needs your product? (e.g., tech companies with marketing teams)

How to Calculate TAM:

Pull lists from Apollo.io, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, or Crunchbase. These tools let you filter by firmographics like company size, revenue, and industry.

The final count is your TAM—the number of potential customers if every single one of them bought your product.

Example: Toward’s TAM

Toward defines its ICP as tech companies with 50-1,000 employees. They find 40,000 companies globally that fit these parameters. That’s the TAM.

Step 2: Start to incorporate reality (SAM)

If TAM is your theoretical market, SAM is your realistic one—the companies you can actually sell to and support today.

Product Fit:

• Are you a good fit for every company in your TAM?
• Remove companies that don’t use the necessary supporting tech. (e.g., if your product integrates only with Salesforce, remove companies using other CRMs.)
• Remove companies that don’t experience your targeted pain points, or don’t have specific teams or roles in the business

Go-To-Market Fit:

• Do you have the resources to target every segment?
• If you have a high-touch enterprise sales model, remove companies that expect a self-serve experience.
• Exclude segments that don’t have the budget or business need for your solution.

Unfortunately, this kind of data isn’t something you can just filter for in a database.

You’ll need to make informed assumptions and use additional data sources to refine your SAM:

• Your sales team and customer success managers likely have a good sense of which companies are a fit and which aren’t… and importantly, how many
• Platforms like BuiltWith help identify which companies use specific tech stacks.

Combining these approaches will help you determine a best guess of your SAM, even if it’s just a rough percentage.

Example: Toward’s SAM

Toward realizes they can only serve companies using HubSpot or Salesforce as their CRM. After filtering, their TAM of 40,000 drops to 7,500 companies—that’s their SAM.

Step 3: Now it’s time to get real (SOM)

Now it’s time to get real.

Not every company is actively looking to buy. Your Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) needs to represent the companies actually in-market this year.

Most companies aren’t looking to buy or switch to a new tool every year. Try to estimate a percentage of those that might be.

If in doubt, assume that ~20% of your SAM is actively evaluating solutions in a given year.

If your demand gen team is using tools like Bombora, 6sense, or G2 Intent data, you might be able to see who is actively searching for software categories and use that too.

Example: Toward’s SOM

With a SAM of 7,500 companies, Toward estimates that ~1,500 (20%) are actually in-market this year. That’s their SOM.

Working SOM into a revenue plan

Now for the fun part.

Once you have a realistic market size, you need to validate whether your revenue goals align with what’s actually possible.

It’s one thing to say there are enough companies out there; it’s another to ensure your funnel can realistically convert them into customers at a rate that makes sense.

Step 4: Model the funnel

To make sure your revenue targets are grounded in reality, follow these steps:

1. Estimate your win rate

• Look at your historical SQL-to-Closed-Won conversion rate. If you don’t have historical data, use industry benchmarks. For B2B SaaS, 5-10% is typical.
• Assume a 10% win rate for this example.

2. Work back from revenue goals

• Define your ARR goal. Let’s say it’s $10M.
• Determine your ACV (Average Contract Value).
• If your typical deal size is $50K, then you need 200 closed-won deals.

3. Map out your funnel, step-by-step

Each stage of the funnel has a drop-off. You need to work backward to see how many leads you’ll need at the top of the funnel.

• If your SQL to Closed-Won rate is 10%, you need 2,000 SQLs.
• If your MQL to SQL rate is 20%, you need 10,000 MQLs.
• If your Lead to MQL conversion rate is 5%, you need 200,000 leads.
• If your cost per lead is $50, then you need a $10M marketing budget: probably way too high for your current resources. That’s just bad economics.

4. Adjust for Reality

If the numbers don’t add up, something has to change:

• Can you increase ACV? If you raise prices or upsell, you need fewer deals.
• Can you improve conversion rates? If you optimize SQL-to-Closed-Won from 10% to 15%, you need fewer leads.
• Can you lower cost per lead? If you improve targeting, partnerships, or inbound strategy, you might reduce the size of the marketing investment.  

5. Extend even further

Even after adjusting, you can go a level deeper:

• Sales velocity: How long does it actually take to close deals? If deals take 6+ months, can you realistically close 200 in a year?
• Pipeline coverage: Does your pipeline have enough volume at each stage to meet targets? Most companies do a 1:3 ratio… but sometimes you’ll need 1:5 coverage in trying times. 
• Churn & Expansion: Are existing customers churning, or do you need to drive expansion revenue to hit your ARR goal? Understanding the balance between retention, expansion, and net-new acquisition is critical to setting the right revenue strategy.

Recap: Toward’s funnel is not good

Toward’s conversion rates mean they’d need 200,000 leads to hit their revenue target.

Their budget isn’t even close to $10M, so they need to rethink expectations or adjust strategy.

Tip: It’s not about the actual numbers

Understanding these numbers helps prevent wasted time, effort, and budget on chasing opportunities that don’t exist. It gives you a framework to set realistic targets and build sustainable go-to-market strategies.

But the real power of TAM, SAM, and SOM isn’t just about calculating them. It’s about using these to have tangible, reasonable and strategic conversations about your go-to-market strategy. 

If your SOM doesn’t support your revenue goal, it’s a red flag.

You either need to rethink your pricing, your win rates, or your entire approach to customer acquisition. This could mean anything from expanding into new verticals, raising prices, going up-market, or fixing your leaky sales funnel. 

Before you commit to that aggressive growth plan, step back. Run your TAM, SAM, and SOM numbers. See if the math actually works. If it doesn’t, adjust now—before pipeline targets are missed, budgets are wasted, and your boss starts scrambling for answers.

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 startup marketer’s guide to TAM, SAM, and SOM (without the fluff) appeared first on Building Momentum.

Before we get into it, please know this isn’t about one specific situation, but it’s a recurring pattern I’ve seen firsthand, heard from other PMMs, and watched unfold repeatedly. And it’s definitely not true of every org.

In my first official PMM role at a midmarket, ‘old-school’ SaaS company, we worked with two types of product managers: a technical PM and a commercial PM.

The technical PM owned product delivery: engineering, integrations, and ensuring the product experience aligned with back-office operations and processes. They weren’t just focused on execution, they were thinking about how to build a scalable, reliable foundation that could support growth and long-term success.

The commercial PM was responsible for commercial success: pricing, the feature roadmap, sales feedback, competitive positioning, and aligning product decisions with broader market needs. They weren’t just thinking about what to build, they were thinking about why it mattered and how it would drive growth.

And then there was us, in product marketing, driving product launches, positioning and messaging, sales enablement, marketing campaigns, and making sure everything connected back to the business impact.

The shift from specialization to survival

But over the last 10 years, both PMs and PMMs have been stretched thin, forced into becoming jacks-of-all-trades. Especially in startups, where companies prioritize agility and speed over clear specialization.

PMs were told to be the ‘CEO of the product,’ PMMs were handed the lofty title of ‘CMO of the product.’

But what actually happened? The ‘CEO of the product’ role was left vacant.

Sales leadership stepped into the gap, not because they were best suited for it, but because someone had to own the business outcomes. When short-term revenue wins became the priority, long-term commercial strategy fell by the wayside.

Product managers became backlog managers, caught in the cycle of delivering features without owning their impact. They do discovery, they ensure good UX, but they rarely drive the commercial outcomes that define a product’s success.

And on the product marketing side, the ‘CMO of the product’ title never really materialized. PMMs got spread even thinner, expected to cover enablement, demand gen, launches, and GTM without real influence over product strategy. We bring market insights, positioning, and messaging, yet too often, we’re left applying a coat of polish to decisions made without us.

The problem: execution without strategy

So instead of a true “CEO-CMO” partnership driving the product, we have two roles drowning in execution.

Reacting instead of leading.

Shipping instead of shaping.

Disconnected from what actually makes products successful: a sharp vision, disciplined execution, and a clear path to commercial impact.

It’s time to demand more

PMs need to do more than deliver features, they need to own the business outcomes.

Every roadmap decision should be taken with revenue impact, competitive differentiation, and market positioning in mind.

If they’re not thinking that way, they’re not doing their jobs.

PMMs: take back your influence

Stop waiting for a seat at the strategy table. Take it.

Force commercial thinking into roadmap discussions. Challenge feature priorities that don’t drive growth, and ensure the product isn’t just built, but built to win.

Otherwise, we’re just putting lipstick on a backlog. The best PM-PMM partnerships don’t just ship features. Together, they shape products that win.

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 PMs need to step up: demand more from them 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.

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

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

Get my new free positioning course

Over the holidays, I created Stand Out in 7 Days – my new free positioning course to help you go from drab to fab.

In just 7 days, you’ll learn how to:

Clarify your unique value
Build messaging that grabs attention
Attract the right customers (and close more deals)

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

Sign up today and your first lesson will land in your inbox immediately.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be more Fat Duck, less Cheesecake Factory

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

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

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

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

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

What this can teach us about B2B product marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simple, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positioning is strategy, and everything is your product

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Absolutely not.

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

So what do you do? You capitalize on it!

You decide to double down on your current strategy.

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

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

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

The brief is simple. Scale what’s working.

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

Sounds great.

Except… 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to build positioning, messaging, and narrative that is memeable.

And I don’t mean putting your positioning statement over an image…

Or coming up with a quirky tagline to fit in a meme like this one…

But I bet that, regardless of whether you’re extremely online or not, you instantly understand these memes.

You know when these are used, how they’re used.

The emotions they’re conveying.

You’ll know the format of the text that should go over the images, even without seeing them before.

And what’s more, you’ll share them and maybe create them yourself. You can share ideas, emotion, logic, and pretty much guarantee a reaction – with just an image of a cat.

You need to do the same for your positioning.

The essence of your positioning needs to transmit all the same things: the idea, the vision, emotion, targeting, and a reaction.

The goal is for those who hear your positioning to understand it, to embody it, and to transmit it onwards.

To grasp the idea, for it to stick.

And, as the definition of positioning says, to ‘occupy a space in the mind of your customer’.

But, JDP, how?

I honestly think it’s pretty simple, but it needs dedicated effort – and an understanding that positioning is an evolving journey.

1. Define a niche group of target customers
2. Talk to them – understand what their lives are like
3. Find the patterns that exist in their jobs, pains, gains, and triggers
4. Connect the dots between the value they want, and how your product helps them
5. Define a heart-and-brain narrative based on unconventional wisdom
6. Test it, and see what feedback is like

In my free Customer Value Positioning framework, you’ll see that I focus on defining the heading and paragraph that exists in your website homepage hero section.

This is, without a doubt, where your memeable positioning needs to work the hardest. As soon as someone lands on your site, they’ve gotta ‘get it’. Fully, deeply, instantly without delay.

So experiment with the language you use. It’s so easy to fall back to boring professionalspeak that ultimately says nothing.

You want your customers to understand innately, to feel something, to be motivated, to feel urgency… so your language has to reflect that.

What to avoid

I don’t think you can build memeable positioning that:

• Has been crafted internally, without basing on hard evidence from your target customers
• Focuses on features and benefits, instead of value
• Is broad and untargeted – remember, it’s better to be the thing for someone rather than something for everyone
• Doesn’t use the same language your customers use
• Isn’t focused on your customers – you need separate messaging for your PR pitching, for investors, for employees
• Isn’t connected to a part of their lives that they recognise – it must be connected to an aspiration, a fear, a thought they all have

Meme once, repeat ad infinitum

Really, memeable positioning is just good positioning.

And so long as it starts – and ends – with how your customers are living their lives, you’ll be on the right track.

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

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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.

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

The post 10+ ways to get closer to your customers this week appeared first on Building Momentum.

Getting to product/market fit will make or break your business. Defined as the point where your product or service satisfies the needs and wants of a particular market, it’s tricky to achieve, difficult to measure, and doesn’t actually mean you’re more likely to be successful.

But, as with everything, it’s a proxy for being on the right track – for building momentum.

There are a few signs that you’ve achieved product/market fit:

1. Strong demand – a “pull” from the market
2. High retention and engagement
3. Positive word-of-mouth – customers advocate for you without prompt
4. High Net Promoter Score (NPS)
5. The “Sean Ellis Question” – 40% or more customers say they would be disappointed if your product/service was not available

There’s a ton of content out there on common product/market fit mistakes – things like focusing too much on features, building in a vacuum of customer insight, and building a proposition that people like, but nobody will pay for.

But what’s not shared often are the human mistakes that we can make on the journey to find product-market fit. I’ve seen all of these mistakes happen, multiple times, over the last ~12 years – and made most of them too.

If you’re at an early-stage startup, or building a new product from 0-1, keep these in mind.

Product or market or fit evolves organically – without a clear decision

Let’s take an example from my experience: a small, HR tech startup developing diversity recruitment technology for enterprise businesses.

In my first few weeks, we quickly discovered that our target customer – Head of D&I roles – were super interested in the product, but didn’t have the budget or authority to implement within their business. But who did? A role in the recruiting business – a Head of Graduate Recruitment.

We talked about this a lot internally and reviewed all of the feedback we had – from sales notes to customer feedback and opinions from our advisors.

But rather than make a clear decision and communicate it internally to announce that we had learnt something new, and we’d be switching our approach, we let it linger. We didn’t want to burn the work we’d already done, and in hindsight we fell into the sunk cost fallacy trap.

By trying to keep our options open, we’d actually made an own-goal.

We weren’t all aligned on who our customer was. Product managers were focusing on our new target, but Sales still wanted to explore opportunities with existing D&I relationships. This meant feedback was fuzzy and inconsistent – we were getting mixed messages, and not enough insight into our evolved market.

And, at the middle of it stood me and the CEO, trying to pacify both sides and find common ground to let us move forward. In hindsight, the decision was the CEOs to make – their lack of declaring a way forward and asking teams to ‘disagree and commit’ was a mistake.

Panicking, and implementing a “spray-and-pray” approach

One of the most dangerous things I think you can do in pre-PMF stages (and, you know anytime!) is say ‘we want to sell the product to anyone!’

Being something for everyone doesn’t work when you’re scaling – so why would it work when you’re just getting started?

There usually comes a time when you’re exploring PMF and things don’t seem to be going well. You’re not getting the right feedback, sales aren’t happening, or maybe your funding is running dry.

It’s SO TEMPTING to say fuck it, let’s just try selling it to anyone. Of course, it’s never said like that. It’s usually positioned as ‘let’s explore adjacent markets’… or someone says ‘I have a potential call with… is it worth it?’.

You’ll also see the flipside happen too: your product becomes a shapeshifter. One minute, it’s an invoicing solution for SaaS businesses. The next, it’s a fully-featured billing platform. To another prospect, it’s a headless API for subscription management.

For sales reps, especially those who are used to selling agency or retainer services, the discovery phase becomes less about disqualification (remember, more important than qualification!) – and more about understanding what the customer needs to sell a custom solution.

Bad Idea. Without a single, defined product proposition to qualify prospects against, it becomes so difficult to understand what is and isn’t working.

Lack of structured feedback process

PMF is a giant experiment, so why don’t you treat it like one?

Willy-nilly, haphazard reactions aren’t sustainable. I’ve seen this happen because people think they’re being agile, hoping to learn quicker.

But what actually happens, just like all the above, is an own-goal. Your approach splits. Your market becomes disjointed with the product. The product moves away from the market. Harder to get consistent feedback. Harder to make decisions.

At a previous company, we did treat PMF as a hypothesis. We had structured conversations about our target ICP, about the lessons we were learning, and experimented with propositions together. And it worked.

Here’s what I’d recommend:

• Use an experiment canvas to define what you’re looking for
• Revisit regularly to discuss findings and measure against expectations
• If it’s not working, use a structured approach to deducing whether it’s the strategy or the execution
• Share feedback without bias, as much as possible

I’ve also been in the position where there was no structured approach to feedback, and everything was based on gut-feel and the most recent sales conversations. It’s not fun. The pressure is on, and you’re stuck in a vicious and cruel circle of pain. Avoid.

Remember, PMF is iterative

Try as we might, it’s probably not going to happen overnight. Your journey to product/market fit is just that – a journey.

Enjoy the journey, navigate the product/market fit map, and try not to take too many wrong turns.

Good luck!

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

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Do we all know what tech debt means?

“Technical debt… is the consequence of software development decisions that result in prioritizing speed or release over the [most] well-designed code… It is often the result of using quick fixes and patches rather than full-scale solutions.”

When something is created without thinking through the second-order implications – something that product marketers are good at – debt is created. You’ve solved today’s problem, but you just have a different problem in the future.

Just like real financial debt, you can borrow money – but in this case, it’s time. You can pay it off slowly – fixing things adhoc. Or you take the plunge to save and repay it all at once with a rewrite. But be careful – you’re borrowing future time. Spend too much without the ability to repay and you might go bankrupt.

And just like financial debt and tech debt, you can also incur positioning debt.

Different types of positioning debt

In a number of different ways, quick fixes and patches to ‘fix’ positioning without proper consideration can definitely solve today’s problem, but present you more issues in the future.

Credit cards: Positioning to win a deal

Ah, the trusty credit card. I bet you’ve got many in your pocket.

Small, easy to use, always accepted – adapting your positioning to win a deal can really help turn a prospect into a customer.

Sure, maybe it’s only a small white lie (“We serve many enterprise customers!”) or just over-exaggerating features (“Yep, all automated, you don’t even have to click a button!”).

But it will only be a short while until the balance needs paying. Customer complaints. Churn. Bad G2 reviews. Product teams trying to build retention features, less focus on new biz priorities, and the house of cards starts to crumble.

Loans: Positioning for every campaign

Consistency in your positioning matters – probably more than you think it does.

If you’re creating new messaging for every campaign, you’re losing impact. Rather than having one message across all of your campaigns, you’re now attracting and winning customers on multiple different angles.

And at some point, you’ve got to pay the piper.

Say there’s a reactive campaign you created to scramble against a competitor’s news. At the same time, you’ve got thought leadership messages on a nascent angle you’re starting to explore. And your SDRs are using last quarters collateral with your ‘grow revenue’ messaging – but now the industry is in cost-saving mode.

Now you have to support at least three different strands across the go-to-market horizon. You can probably pay these back, a bit a time just like a loan, spread out over a few months or even longer.

But loans mean you don’t have the money/time to spend today, because of your prior commitments. And you don’t have any spare cash/hours, so it’s difficult to save for the next big spend.

Mortgages: Hasty repositioning projects

Repositioning your product and business is a lot like buying a house (stick with me here…!).

Every mortgage needs a downpayment. You can save for ages – in the case of positioning, by carrying out market research and getting ahead of the game. Or, you can move forward with the meagre minimum deposit, but not get the best results

Mortgages have valuations. If you’ve committed to positioning and then take it to market, you’re going to quickly find out whether it works or not. Do your research poorly and you’ll pay above market-value.

And are you sure you’re choosing the right house/positioning to begin with? What if you do it quickly, invest a lot of effort and time, but quickly outgrow it? Will you be stuck there, unable to move? Will you tack on extensions to your positioning, weird outhouses and follies that don’t match the style?

Just like mortgages, big positioning projects are affected by the economy too. Last year’s ‘invest in growth’ message can get wiped out in a matter of weeks as inflation and interest rates bite, with companies now favoring vendors with cost-efficiency messages. Can you quickly ‘re-mortgage’ without losing too much impact and finding worse terms?

Avoiding positioning debt

There are three things you can do to repay positioning debt and prevent getting there in the first place. Spoiler: it’s just positioning best practices.

Have a niche ideal customer profile that your entire business is aligned on building, marketing to, selling to, and supporting. This drives efficiencies and impact – but it does require hard conversations and discipline. You need to drive consistency.

In the early days while you’re still finding product/market-fit you have luxury to play around with positioning without much impact on your market perception. When you’re starting to scale and double-down, you have less wiggle room. This means you need more confidence in your positioning: that reality is going to meet expectations. You need to know how it’s going to perform, having tested and adapted it as necessary.

Lastly, building a constant pipeline of customer interviews, market research, and review will help you keep a pulse check on the market so you can react faster, adapt constantly, and look out for warning signs that you’re not keeping up with your debts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Working with assumptions (without validating or iterating)

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

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

How to get back on track

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

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

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

They say jump, you say ‘how high?’

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

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

How to get back on track

You have two options.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to get back on track

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This worked with an astonishingly high close rate.

Why did this work?

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

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

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

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

Can you build a business case tool?

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

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

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

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

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

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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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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.

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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.

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“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?

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

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

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

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

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

How to define ‘someone’?

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

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

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

How to know what ‘the thing’ is?

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

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

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

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

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

Say no, don’t prioritize

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

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

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

Meet your business goals

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

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

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

It’s a journey

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

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

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

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I recently sat down with Ishara Naotunna, behind the Spill The Marketing Beans podcast.

In 28 minutes, we got through so much, including: my battle-tested positioning process, the types of customers you should talk to and who should be involved, how to test new messaging, how to activate messaging internally, how to know you need new positioning… and much more!

Watch the video below, or read the slightly-edited notes below!

Transcript

On the traditional positioning statement…

I think that the standard positioning format statement that everyone uses is probably the worst thing that could happen in, especially in SaaS, because it reduces our value of our product and what customers, one down to just a statement that gets repeated and parroted.

Nobody really believes in it. It just becomes meaningless words.

On my positioning process…

So my positioning process, I call it customer-led value positioning. Because it does what it says on the tin. It is focused on who our customers are. And we’re trying to understand the value that our product delivers them.

Get assumptions on paper first

So that process generally starts by trying to get all of the assumptions out that our core internal team have about who our customers are, what they want to achieve, and what the value is that our product delivers.

The reason we do this is because otherwise later in the process, you’re going to have all of these biased assumptions come up and you’re going to be finding reasons to include or exclude them later on, rather than having a really honest conversation upfront, and asking, “how confident are we about this specific thing?”. If a CMO or a product manager has this one belief, it’s a good opportunity in the research that we’re going to go do to test whether that is true, or whether it’s just a one-off that we’ve seen in one customer.

We really want to try and find patterns. Positioning is about patterns. And so that’s really cool, getting those assumptions out first of all, super important. The output of that is something called a customer empathy map. And we use that as a really rough basis to guide our customer research that we’re going to do.

Do customer research

I have a list of like 19 questions that I rely on and try and get a good enough spread across all of them from maybe 10, 15 interviews if we can.

Those interviews are with customers. They are with prospects, with people that we know in the market, analysts, other people that have some knowledge around the problem space that we’re solving. Those questions fall into four categories.

The first part is about segmentation. Who was the person that we were interested in? What do they do? What’s their job? Who do they report to? All of the kind of standard stuff that you might as.

The next piece we want to ask about are the general problems that they have, so problem discovery. We’re trying to get a really broad view of who our customers are, what they care about, what’s going on in their day to day, stuff like that.

The reason we do that, and start really broad, is because the literal definition of positioning is to find a space in our customers’ minds that we can occupy. How are we going to do that if we don’t know what is already in their head?

So we have to start super, super broad, and that might be specific software challenges, like they’re trying to do this specific thing with this category of software, or it might be professional goals. They want to get a promotion that’s on their mind at the minute, or they might have really personal goal, to make them more money, or save time so they can go home and do other stuff.

After we’ve done that, we have the opportunity to dig in a bit more on the problem that we think those customers have. And so we’re validating that problem to some extent. And so we’re trying to ask questions about how, does this affect you? What other impact does it have?

And then lastly. in this questioning process, we’re trying to understand, after giving a brief explanation of what our product does, how it would work for them. Would it save them time, how do they think it would change their life? What would the ultimate value and benefits be, from their perspective?

So those four sections give a ton of data. The next step is to just go through and find all of the patterns amongst those and try to understand where are the big things that we might want to rely on later? What are the top important themes that are coming out?

Create personas

So we’ve got all of our assumptions out, we’ve talked to customers. The next step for me in my process is creating personas. These aren’t personas in the kind of usual fluffy marketing sense.

We’re relying on evidence, not assumptions, and we’re focusing on four key elements: their jobs, so the responsibilities and their day-to-day activities, tasks. Their pains: things that frustrate them, annoy them, they want to get rid of. Elements that they want to gain, things that they would love to have, things that they’re trying to achieve.There’s not always necessarily an opposite pain to gain, but sometimes there is. And lastly, their triggers, or the motivations, what’s galvanizing someone to take action, to search, to switch or to buy something.

So we have a really nice tight understanding of what our persona is. And you might have two of them or three of them, depending on how many people are in your kind of core stakeholder group.

Extract customer value themes

From there we then get to the really important part, which is trying to extract the value the customer wants to achieve, wants to gain. That might be solving a pain. It might be reacting to a trigger. It might be achieving something, or doing a job better.

I have a quite tight definition for what the value should be. I think a value is something that is useful to the customer, it’s a priority for them – so there’s some urgency behind it – and it’s something that’s going to be worth the cost, the time, or the effort to make it happen.

Ultimately the value should meet all three of those. Otherwise it’s, fine, but it’s not going to be as strong as it could be. And so we run all of these values, all of these themes that we’re pulling out in personas and try to identify “does it meet all three” and get some level of prioritization in there as well.

So that’s a really simple way in this process of going from super raw, unstructured data to now, for this customer, we know these are the things that person really wants. These are the things that this person is really going to get use out of. They are really invested in solving it because there’s some urgency behind it. And it’s something that they are going to see a positive ROI from.

Get creative

Super simple. Then we can get a bit creative, which tries to tease out those values and we put them into sentences statements to try and understand how all of the benefits that our features deliver are all linked together.

I have something called a value nugget, which is the hierarchy between benefits features and proof points. So we try and package all of these up together and you’ll have multiple value nuggets.

But the interesting thing about them is that you can move up or move down really easily. So you can move up by asking “why” and moving down by asking “how”. Say you are starting with the value that we help you save time.

Why is that important? Because of this particular benefit, you’re going to be able to do something else that’s more valuable instead. Why is that? Because we’re going to help you do it through these particular features in our product.

And then you can move up in a similar way, by asking how, and it’s a really easy way to train out as well with sales teams, and really easy to give to marketers, to create website copy as well.

So all of that gets wrapped up in a tagline, a slogan, the typical things you might see on the top hero section of a website page. Just a really brief description of all these things for our customer. How do we summarize the ultimate value and benefits that our product delivers?

And we see how that goes.

Launch, test, iterate

We put the positioning out to test it. We message it according to the different channels, we try to prove out confidence in it. Is it successful in the ways that we want it to be? Whether that’s through the sales reps, through pitch decks, through outbound emails, through Google ads. Ultimately we just learn more, iterate and it just becomes a really nice self fulfilling prophecy. As we get smarter, we get more focused and we get more confident about what we’re doing.

Should you frame customer interviews with assumptions?

Often you’ll start the conversation with something in mind.

The last part of the interview is going to be validating your product. So you’re going to give them a really quick detailed description, and then ask them “what do you think of that? How do you think you would benefit?”

Often you’ll start these conversations and as you learn more about who they are, what’s going on in their life, you will often see a light bulb switch on in your mind, where you slightly twist the description that you’re going to give of your product in a way that opens it up, that is different from what you had originally. And that’s really interesting. We’re start to see how people doing the interview react slightly to what we’re hearing from customers.

And when that happens, it’s actually better than having a really strict and discrete description. Because again, we’re trying to learn, we’re trying to find the edges of what our positioning should be. And that’s really interesting to see happen.

What type of customers should you speak to in the positioning process?

I usually rely on best-fit customers. Again, this is an assumption and there are different ways to look at it.

Best fit for your business might be the ones that deliver the most revenue. Or it might be the customers that are the most evangelistic about what you’re doing, or the customers that have the best product/market fit with today.It really depends on the stage of your business, and what you think you need next — that can be difficult to determine.

But you don’t just want to speak with happy customers, because they’re only going to tell you what you wants hear. So you want to try and understand from customers from across the spectrum really.

But the most important thing I would recommend is to look outside of your customer base. To speak to people in the market. Purely because if you think about the average website conversion, you’re probably only getting 2% or 3% of visitors to your website that convert to leads. That means you’re missing out on 97% of people that came to your website who weren’t interested enough.

And so by really learning from those top of funnel, potential prospects and customers, that’s where you can start to understand where are the edges of my customer base or my ideal customers? Is there more we can do to expand that pool, or maybe we need to be more focused on excluding some potential customers as well?

Who should be involved in the positioning process?

I found that it works best with five or six people maximum. The reason we want more than just two or three is because some of the work we’re going to do is about looking for patterns. And so we want to split up groups so that they can do effectively half the work each, and then review what the other has done to check for mistakes.So there’s a logistics piece in there.

But also by involving people from the marketing team from sales, from customer success, usually someone from product… I also think is important for CEOs to be involved in this process as well, because ultimately positioning is a representation or even a driver of your business strategy. It’s really cool to get that in that kind of opinion into the room, but also make sure that executive level people are exposed to the insights that are coming from customers.

How do you test positioning?

So it really depends on what the company wants to achieve. Some companies will just be like, okay, we need new positioning: we need to get something out there because we know what we have today doesn’t work.

And that will be really quite simple because it’s just going to be shared among internal people. Do we feel confident that this positioning is better than what we have today? Yes or no? We build up from there, we start to iterate and then launch externally.

The other part is when we are maybe taking in a different angle, we’re trying to test it a bit more slowly. There’s a bit more risk involved. That’s when we need to try and break it down into “what are the things that we expect positioning to do for us?”. So it can’t just be a blanket catch-all, “let’s put it out there, see how it performs”. It can’t just be something that is done super discreetly.

It needs to be something where you’re going to get confidence that it’s doing the job it’s meant to do. You think about software development testing. They will have an alpha process where it’s done internally. They’ll have a beta process where they are testing it with a small number of customers.

So that could be I want a couple of people to pick this up entirely, use it in pitches and see how it works. We’ll give them a couple of weeks to see that process run through. Or with our marketing team, can we set up some campaigns, some Google ads or some social campaigns, for example, that rely on this new messaging to see how it performs.

One of the things I think is really interesting is when you can do all this cross functionally, So in my experience, what we’ve done is pulled together a tiger team: a really cross-functional group of five or six people from different teams, give them this messaging, this new positioning and say “hey, go and put this into action with this group of customers, and over five or six weeks, you will have much more information as to how it needs to improve, what works and what doesn’t work, and what you need to do to build more confidence in that.

Positioning isn’t going to be something that you set and forget, it’s something that needs to be visited over and over again. We’re never going to have a hundred percent confidence that positioning is good, or better, or works: it’s just something we’re putting out into the world, building our confidence in over time.

How do you activate positioning in your business?

So let’s imagine that you have done with the testing and you’re really happy with it. Now we’re going to present it to the rest of the business and say, “hey, get on with it”. The worst thing you can do is do an all-hands presentation and expect people to use it.It’s not going to happen, not going to work well at all.

The activation of positioning has a couple of different levels. The core piece should be about making your customer’s lives real in the minds of your sales reps and the rest of your team. So you really have to bring the customer to life.

Literally, if you can, do interviews, do all-hands interviews with customers, interview them, do podcasts, internal podcasts, anything you can do to help the rest of the team, understand who the customer is, what’s going on in their lives, what they care about. That’s really key because otherwise they’re not going to have anything to ground the value that you’re delivering on later, it’s just all a little bit too abstract for them.

So if we have actually done that piece, and that takes time, if we’re starting to make our customer’s experiences real for our team, then we can train out the positioning and messaging. We can do the decks and the templates and all of this kind of stuff. And it’s much stronger, because it’s connected to really core piece of empathy for our customers.

And that way people won’t just repeat it, it won’t just be parroted like the standard positioning statement is. But it’s something that people can connect to and it’s something that they will embody and have more confidence in themselves, and that’s going to help them tell the story better.

How should you position against a sea of alternatives?

Firstly, I think it’s more important to use the phrase alternative solutions than competitors, because if you ask your customers or potential customers how they are achieving a piece of value, they will tell you… If you asked 10 people, half of them will tell you they don’t do that at all. Or they’ve got somebody they pay to do that. They’ve got an agency or a freelancer. Maybe one or two people will tell you they using software to do that. There’s a whole world of other ways people are trying to achieve the same value.

So if we’re looking at that purely on a software-to-software comparative level, we’re not really going to understand, the real ultimate thing a customer is trying to achieve. Often there will be one or two, maybe three or four competitors that have really similar things. Yeah. The only thing I’ve seen successfully done is by focusing the customer segment deeper nicher become more narrow, because that way you’re not just going to have one small differentiator, you’re going to have the differentiator for this customer, and that is going to set you apart. April Dunford calls it being a big fish in a small pond.

That works really, well. And it also, again, gives you a bit more of a strategy. If you are struggling to compete against one competitor, try and niche away, angle away from the same market. And you will see that not only you’re going to win more deals, you’re going to see more momentum in this whole process as well, because they are seeing much more of their own jobs, pains, gains, and triggers represented in the way you’re going to market.

What are the telltale signs that show a repositioning is required?

The biggest signs I’ve seen are the ones that are qualitative, like feedback from sales reps. And it’s tricky, because sales reps act at very one-to-one level: everything is about this next deal or this deal.

So the role of product marketers in this is to actually try and understand from qualitative interviews, with sales reps, what’s not working and then try and look for the patterns that exist within those.

That, I think is probably the best way to find out there’s actually an issue with core positioning. And sometimes it’s going to be a small thing, it’s maybe not the right frame of reference for example.

Other times, you’ll just have a lot of things that you need to redo completely. You don’t know who you are, what you’re doing, why for some customers should choose you.

I do positioning consulting with other companies as well, and I think the number one reason people come to me is because they have 10 sales reps, and every sales rep tells a different story when they get on the phone to somebody. There’s no consistency in that messaging and that narrative and that’s going to make your product weaker. It’s not going to instill the same values in your customers. And that’s really important: the consistent narrative, consistent go-to market story is really really key.

What should product marketers know about positioning?

I think to get a really solid foundation of positioning, product marketers should really double down on the way they connect data and insights from customers to business challenges they are seeing.

We’re trying to get… almost like intuition when you’re talking to customers, like, oh, okay, yeah, I think this might be a thing. And sometimes we would just let it go.

But otherwise, a lot of times you say, actually, this might be impacting this metric over there.

Because positioning is part of the whole go-to-market system. Sometimes it’s a bit too fluffy and intangible, but again, to understand how positioning impacts business metrics I think is really, really core.

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

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The post A customer-centric approach to positioning appeared first on Building Momentum.

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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Positioning can be neglected for a whole number of reasons. Usually, speed of execution throws out any plans for a structured approach to positioning. Shortcuts become common.

New messages, new themes, new features and benefits, new narratives are lackadaisically attached to your messaging without coherent care and attention. “It does the job,” you think. “It won’t be there forever. We’ll revisit it soon.”

But that never happens. The chances of revisiting fades. The messaging just becomes baked in, part of the furniture. Everyone accepts it. Where did it come from? Nobody knows for certain – but everyone uses it, so it must be great.

The slippery slope

Just like a neglected property, everything might look fine on the outside… but inside it’s rotten.

And just like rot, neglected positioning starts to infect everything else too.

New upcoming features are treated the same: a bit of wordsmithing, run it past the boss – and click, it’s on the website.

“Wordsmithing” loses any creativity. It now means “look at a thesaurus and use a synonym”.

“Value” is forgotten. Faster, easier, simpler, time-saving, more efficient, more flexible, the first, the only, best-in-class, modern, all-in-one.

First-order thinking wins. Do this, get that: use our new feature to save time on process.

When was the last time anyone spoke to a customer or prospect that wasn’t on a sales call? Nobody knows.

When this kind of thing happens, it won’t be obvious. It will show up in many different ways. Death by a thousand cuts.

Slower sales cycles. Unmotivated prospects. Falling conversion rates. Tyre-kickers. Team attrition. A big push on sales comp plans and spiffs to grow the pipeline: “the top rep gets a Ferrari”.

Inertia sets in.

Test your confidence

Positioning is a really crucial step to consider thoughtfully in everything you do – whether that’s release a new product, change pricing, make platform updates, or even communicate failures.

Sometimes, you’ll want to run a full positioning project: segmentation, research, value messaging.

Sometimes, you don’t have the time or the need to run a full project. You can get by with a few casual conversations, or a quick email to a friendly customer. Maybe you have solid internal customer-representation from sales, customer success, and product marketing colleagues.

In these situations, measure your confidence.

Are you feeling comfortable and confident that the positioning you’re about to use will hit the mark? Is it resilient and based on evidence?

Or perhaps you’re not feeling sure: the positioning has been developed within your team without any other internal validation. Or it’s really important to get it right, so you need more eyes on it.

Whatever you do, don’t neglect positioning

Be mindful of the positioning messages that you’re creating and putting out into the world.

• Do they fit well, or does it feel discombobulated?

• Are they based on evidence, or are they assumptions?

• Were they developed with care and attention, or were they an afterthought?

Neglected positioning will pull you down and prevent you from making real progress. And as regular readers will know, momentum is the output of focus and confidence.

Can you improve focus (by reducing breadth and increasing clarity) and build confidence (through measurement, testing, and iteration) in your positioning?

Here’s hoping.

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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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Take a look around the B2B SaaS Space, and you’ll see these messages proclaimed by almost everyone.

“Our product is the fastest.”

“Ours is the only…”.

“We’re an all-in-one solution.”

So what?

Startups generally suck at describing the value of their product. They rely on generic ad libs that provide zero competitive differentiation, full of weasel words.

This happens when deciding the messaging – usually founders, sales leaders, and growth marketers – think about how to make the product sound sexy.

People want to hear that things are fast, that it’s comprehensive, that it’s feature-rich – right?

No. They want to know what your product will do for them.

So we need to convey our product value in a way that resonates.

What is value?

A value is an element that your customer wants to attain that:

1. Is useful

2. Is worth the effort (cost, time, energy)

3. Is a priority for them

Every value you communicate should meet these three tests.

• Is a faster product useful? It could be, for time-sensitive processes.

• Is an all-in-one product worth the cost to a customer that only has part of the problem you’re solving? Probably not.

• Trying to sell a videoconferencing platform to Zoom? Probably not a priority for them.

Understanding the exact value you deliver helps you:

• differentiate and stand out from your competition

• sell faster, as a result of increased buyer motivation

• build a moat around your product and brand

• become more efficient, by building a tight and repeatable sales/marketing process

• make much better decisions across the business, from product and engineering to finance

But… how do you discover what value you deliver to begin with?

Deducing value

It all starts by being focused on your customer.

You need to know who you are targeting – be uncomfortably narrow with your Ideal Customer Profile.

Then, do your research. Speak to customers, prospects, friendly people in the market, analysts and experts in the field.

Ask your customers and prospects these 19 customer development questions, and make notes for all the things they said. Pull them up on a whiteboard or Mural board and you’ll get something like this:

Finding patterns – the diamonds in the haystack – can be tricky. Use a small group to review each section, group cards that have similar themes and create a summary – and then use another small group to review and validate.

You’ll also want to keep an eye out for unusual statements that you didn’t expect to hear. The more unguarded your interviewees are, the more honest they’ll be about their challenges – providing you with the perfect insight to resonate hard.

Once you’ve got your summaries for each question, look to extract four elements to build your persona:

• Key jobs – common activities that your customer does as part of their day-to-day

• Top 3 gains – their personal, professional, or business goals they want to achieve

• Top 3 pains – marks of failure and frustrations the customer must avoid,

• Likely triggers – their motivations to search for a way to solve their problem and switch away from their current solution

Once you’ve defined these, you’ll see clear distinctions in what your customer is hoping to achieve, avoid, or take action on. These will provide the basis for providing your value messaging.

Communicating value through value nuggets

It’s crucial to connect the dots from your product features, through to the tangible benefits they deliver, through to the value your product is delivering. And back them up with proof points.

I call this a value nugget: a way to package your product features and benefits around a clear hierarchy to navigate effortlessly in sales conversations and marketing.

A value nugget is comprised of:

• A value: an attribute or state that the buyer hopes to attain.

• One or more benefits: the advantage a buyer gets when using your product.

• Benefits are gained via features: a specific piece of functionality that’s used by your customer.

• Benefits are justified through proof: stats or testimonials that can be highlighted to provide social proof, additional context, and evidence that it works.

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.

Good value messaging is specific

There’s no excuse for describing your product in broad terms anymore. Good value messaging needs to cut straight through the noise to the heart of someone who cares. It makes you stand out, and gives you a platform to stand for.

It’s not enough to be something for anyone. Don’t miss the opportunity to be the thing for someone.

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

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

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

Why? Not for the reasons you might expect.

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

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

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

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

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

Source

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

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

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

What causes a poor change environment?

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

These issues are likely to include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Build your process around the change environment

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

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

• Understand it within your ICP and personas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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But I think those reasons are manifestations of misconceptions.

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

What’s value?

Value can be determined with three different questions:

1. Is it an important enough priority?

2. Is it worth the effort?

3. Will it be useful?

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

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

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

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

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

Overcoming objections in the buyer journey

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

Preparation is key

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

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

• What are their priorities?

• What are their options?

• How will we perform against our competitors?

• What is their competition doing?

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

• What is the cost of inaction?

• What is the cost of change?

• What are the upsides and benefits to be realized?

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

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

1. Feel, felt, found

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

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

Usage:

• I understand how you feel.

• I / others have also felt this way.

• However, I / others found that…

2. Priorities

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

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

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

Usage:

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

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

3. Clarify and question

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

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

Usage:

• Can you explain the features you feel are missing?

• How would you use this feature?

• How do you achieve this today?

• What’s the benefit of that?

• How do you achieve the same outcome today?

• What’s the driving force behind this requirement?

• Is this feature a deal breaker?

4. Justification

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

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

Usage:

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

5. Proactive

Goal: pre-empt objections and face them head on

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

Usage:

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

Moving beyond objections

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

1. What do you think of that?

2. How does that sound?

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

4. Is this a blocker?

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

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

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

Focus tightly, test your confidence, and build momentum.

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

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

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

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

Fast forward to today.

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

The sales deck is a tool for momentum

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

• Introduce your prospect to your company and product

• Grab their interest and convert it to desire

• Persuade the prospect that your product solves their problem

• Stand out from (and drive away) alternative solutions

• Galvanize the prospect into taking next steps

Sales decks generally fall somewhere on a scale.

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

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

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

Four tips to rethink your sales deck

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

There is not ‘one’ sales deck

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

• Overview deck that we send before a call

• Slides we run through in a first call

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

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

• Slides used every quarter in customer success calls

• …etc

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

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

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

Less text, more conversation

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

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

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

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

Train reps on using SPIN questioning and framing in conversations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Write a consistent story with your customer

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

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

• An undeniable world change that your prospect agrees is happening

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

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

• Your product value, framed as magic capabilities

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

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

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

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

Galvanize the opportunity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rethinking your sales deck: where to start?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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.

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Positioning-by-assumption doesn’t work. When we want to build momentum, supercharge growth, and increase sales, we need real customer insight to build powerful positioning.

Sure, assumptions – the result of our experiences – are useful, a form of internalized pattern matching. But our biases, limited exposure, and and a lack of subject matter expertise often prevent assumptions from being useful in the real world.

Sometimes we can go further. We can determine inferences; conclusions we draw based on our observations. While these may begin in good faith, these (again) can often be biased and pre-determined in nature. What may start as truthful observations can quickly become layered in opinion. There are always three truths: your truth, their truth, and the real truth.

So we should aim to build evidence. Direct from your customer.

But it’s difficult to know where to start. Who do you ask? What do you ask? How do you use that information?

I’m sharing my customer development cheatsheet – 19 high-value questions designed to extract maximum insight from customer research interviews.

Get started

How to use the template

These questions are designed to get information in five areas.

Segmentation

Purpose: understand the lay of the land, and who has responsibility for the problem area

• Who handles [problem area] at your business? Why?

• Tell me about your role at [company]?

• How much time is spent by your team managing [problem area]?

Problem Discovery

Purpose: Understand your customer’s perception of their challenges, their responsibilities, and what they think it’s important. We want to understand what’s going on for them overall.

• What’s the hardest part of your day?

• What activities take up the most time in your day?

• If you had a magic wand, what could be done to improve your experience with [problem area]?

• What’s the hardest part about being a [job title]?

• What are your biggest/most important professional responsibilities and goals?

• What are your biggest/most important personal responsibilities and goals?

Problem Validation

Purpose: Start to dig into their relationship with your problem area, and understand how they would perceive success and failure

• Tell me about your relationship with [problem area] – how much time/effort/energy is spent on it, and why?

• How important is [solving the problem] to you?

• What would winning at this look like?

• What are your biggest obstacles to winning?

• What does losing at this look like?

• How have you attempted to solve this problem so far?

Product Validation

Purpose: After sharing a brief overview (e.g. a one-page PDF, a website mockup, or a short demo), start to understand how a customer resonates with your current product thinking.

• What do you think of this product?

• How would this product solve your problem?

• How do you imagine this would change your life? / How has our product changed your life?

• What has changed in the last 5 years that has made this much more valuable?

Using the template

You’ll see the questions down the left column.

The first two columns you’ll see are Assumptions and Confidence.

In Assumptions, take an hour and state your current assumptions for each question – and mark your confidence against it – high, medium, or low. This is a really quick exercise that will tease out how well you know your ICP.

Next, set up interviews with current customers, prospects, and friendly people in the market. I’ve left four columns, but ideally the more customers you speak to, the stronger the patterns (aim for 10-15). Record the calls, make transcripts, and make notes.

Then review all the notes to look for patterns – jot those down in the next column.

Extracting insights

Now we have evidence, so we need to turn it into usable information.

For each persona that’s apparent – key stakeholders in the buying process, discovered throughout your research and experience – review the evidence and refine into these four categories:

• Key jobs – common activities that your customer does as part of their day-to-day

• Top 3 gains – their personal, professional, or business goals they want to achieve

• Top 3 pains – marks of failure and frustrations the customer must avoid,

• Likely triggers – their motivations to search for a way to solve their problem and switch away from their current solution

Evidence over assumption

Momentum is an outcome of focus and confidence.

To build confidence, you need to really understand what’s going on for your customer – their view of the world, their challenges, and what they care about.

So set up some calls, and get started.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter @jdomanpipe.

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A misguided founder is asked who the ideal customer is. “Everyone!” That’s the genius of it! Everyone in the world will need this product!”

The same applies to eager early-stage B2B startup marketers, founders, and sales leads. “We will sell to every company in the industry.” Revisit a few months later… and you’ll find are still in the same place. Trying to sell to everyone – SMBs, midmarket, enterprise – without much success.

But those who narrowed their focus on a particular, specific type of customer will usually be further along. They’ll have evidence of traction, be starting to build their ‘mini-brand’, and a pipeline to match.

Why? Niching down brings a multitude of value to early startups: improving alignment, reducing ambiguity across all teams, and bringing people from product to success together to build for the right person. The priority is velocity.

Many startups are reticent to get niche and narrow. “We’ll lose too much time,” or “we need to sell to anyone who’ll take it,” overpowers target-focused teams. And in six months, they wonder why they aren’t seeing any patterns in their data, let alone closed won deals.

Enter the Ideal Customer Profile.

What’s an Ideal Customer Profile?

An ICP is a hypothetical representation of a best-fit customer for your business today. Let’s break it down:

• Hypothetical – a method for testing and iteration, not a hard rule

• Representation – a depiction, caricature that’s easily recognisable

• Best-fit – objective assessment of the type of customers that you can market to, sell to, and support effectively

• Today – that you can market/sell/support today (or in the very short-term)

ICPs aren’t personas – they don’t describe a person. They describe the company, the firmographics, and any identifying information that makes it easier to recognize them in the marketplace.

An Ideal Customer Profile probably contains information like:

• Industry

• Number of employees

• Revenue

• Growth rate

• Geographies

• Target market (e.g. sells to B2B or B2C)

• Attributes (e.g. tech stack)

• Behavior (e.g. company goals and daily activities)

• Business challenges

ICP fails

I see two common issues with startups using ICPs in their go-to-market strategy.

Balancing breadth

Firstly, the profile has to be broad enough to support marketing and sales activity, yet specific enough to provide a yes/no qualification with a high likelihood of converting to a customer. Unfortunately, the symptom for ICPs that are both too broad or too specific is the same: lack of traction.

ICP as fantasy

Secondly, I’ve seen some teams use ICP as a theoretical device; a dream of the perfect customer… if only they actually existed. An ICP must be based in evidence, or at least be a structured, hypothesis-based attempt to discover a customer segment that will react strongly to your current proposition.

In these scenarios, ICPs become meaningless busywork rather than a strong guiding light for teams across the business.

Bringing structure to your ICP journey

Most ICP advice on the internet just tells you to research your current customers, look for common patterns, and then document it. Easy.

Not so simple… especially if you’re just starting out.

Notion (the VC, not app) has a great resource guide on ICPs, and I’ve used their ICP template multiple times to bring structure to this part of GTM.

Without repeating their post, I’ll summarise the key steps with my tips below:

1. List the possibilities: get “uncomfortably narrow” and list out all of the segments that you could serve. Use your existing customers, current prospects, market research, and more for inspiration. Segment via industry, revenue, number of employees, geographies, and anything else that can used to create a representation of an ideal customer.

2. Size the opportunities: add a bottoms-up TAM calculation or a proxy for the size of the market in the Addressable Value column. Tip: use lead-gen tools to search for lists of companies that match the descriptions you’ve created.

3. Assess Product Market Fit: agree the criteria that match the capabilities of your product with the needs of the customer. Try to keep them simple with Yes or No answers, like “accepts card payments” or “receives 1000s of customer emails each day”. Use an obvious ratings system for scores. Average out the criteria score for each segment.

   • On obvious rating systems; I use 5 for yes or high, 3 for maybe or medium, 1 for low, 0 for no. This create clearer delineations between scores, for easier prioritization.

4. Assess their propensity to buy: using the same approach, list criteria that defines how easy it is to do business with those segments. These criteria might range from simple (are their employees easy to find on LinkedIn?), to complex (does this segment require custom setup? are they willing to do business with a startup?). Use the same scoring system and average it up.

Then, the fun bit: combine the PMF criteria and propensity to buy score for each segment, and explore in conjunction with the addressable value you detailed.

• Are certain segments bigger markets, but harder to sell to?

• Are there high PMF segments you could reach today, but don’t have big markets?

• Do any segments stand out particularly high or low in either category that challenges current thinking?

You’re then left with a prioritized list of Ideal Customer Profiles that you can discuss, make decisions on, and – most importantly – use as a hypothesis to experiment with your go-to-market.

Validating the ICP

Ultimately, your ICP is a bet that you’re making. Are we able to build/market/sell/support these companies effectively? Hopefully, your ICP is based on current activity, and becomes a refinement rather than a redo. Then, validation is less of an issue: continue to do the work, see the results.

For those where an ICP is new and untested, think about the odds of success along the bet. Based on what you know and have done, is the biggest unknown whether you can market to them, or sell to them? This helps understand where to focus your validation efforts. It might be useful to assign a small cross-functional ‘tiger team’ to focus just on ICP customers before rolling out to the rest of the business.

ICP is strategy

An ideal customer profile is a tool to speed up your go-to-market by aligning product, marketing, sales, and success on the type of organization you are building for.

Don’t let it become a stale artefact. ICPs should adapt every six months as you learn more, better understand your performance with segments, and narrow down the ideal customers for your business.

If an ICP doesn’t work out… that’s fine, it’s expected. The ICP is a device to test our hypothesis, whether we can build for/market/sell/support this customer effectively. Look for qualitative signals (lack of excitement and urgency) just as much as quantitative ones (responses to marketing/sales activity, revenue).

Use the ICP as an alignment tool. Embed the profile across the business in conjunction with personas to reiterate the customers that you’re building and solving for (and importantly, who you are not solving for). Velocity – how much is achieved in a certain time period – will increase as a result of reduced ambiguity.

Eventually your ICP will broaden, as a halo effect of success organically introduces you into adjacent segments. But that’s another challenge.

In the meantime, remember: niches for riches*.

• For non-Americans: ‘niches’ rhymes with ‘riches’ in American English (yep, like “nitches”…)

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

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It’s no secret that the most effective teams are the most aligned too.

Although I’d hazard a guess that – for most organizations – alignment is focused on internal business goals. Priorities, imperatives, strategic pillars, mission and vision. Ways of working, values, responsibilities.

But how many teams are fully aligned on the foundation of their business: the customer?

Take the empathy map challenge

I bet if you asked five people across your business to explain your archetypal customer, you’d end up with five completely different versions. So that’s what you should do.

Ask a few people to take one hour of their day, and complete an empathy map individually – and importantly, mark each note if it’s an assumption, or if it can be evidenced.

Get them back, and see how they differ. You’ll not only uncover what your team know about customers and can provide evidence to back up, but you’ll see the type of assumptions that people are making across your business. These might be strong and correct – but could be limiting and even damaging to your business.

With that insight, you’ll be empowered to make changes – and have evidence that there’s a need to focus on building knowledge.

What is an empathy map?

An empathy map is a concept borrowed from the UX world, with the aim of articulating what is known about a particular type of user, and creating a shared understanding.

There are different versions available, but this is the one I use:

The empathy map is made up of six sections: four in a grid, and two summaries underneath.

• Say & Do: What does your customer say about their business, challenges, and your product? What steps do they take?

• Hear: What do they hear from friends, colleagues, the media, passers-by? What is influencing them?

• See: When they look at the marketplace, what do they see? What do they see from your competitors? What are they reading or watching?

• Think & Feel: What emotions is your customer feeling? What’s their interpretation of their challenges, their options, and how they want to do business?

In the two sections underneath, apply some critical analysis and summarise the insights above through two opposite lenses:

• Pains: What are the challenges and frustrations your customer is facing? What does failure look like? What does your customer want to avoid?

• Gains: What does success look like? What does your customer stand to gain from solving their challenges?

Assess these at three levels to be super strong: business outcomes, professional outcomes, and personal outcomes.

Shared understanding is a foundational competitive advantage

In air navigation, the rule of 1 in 60 applies. For every one degree traveled off course for 60 miles, the plane will land 1 mile off the intended destination.

As an analogy, every person in your business is one plane. Teams are squadrons. A startup is an entire air force.

Without aligning teams on their core understanding of your customers – and course correcting where necessary – you’ll never end up in the same place.

But what would you achieve if you could get all teams focused on the same intended destination?

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Positioning: “the place that a brand occupies in the minds of the customers,”

At least, that’s what Wikipedia says. And yet… I’ve always thought it’s weird when other positioning methodologies start with competitive alternatives and world changes, before agreeing who the customer actually is.

Most positioning conversations are inwardly-focused on the product, the company, the mission. What we know, what we think, our assumptions about customers and their world. Everything is viewed through the rose-tinted, biased view of our company.

I think this is a fundamental mistake that most B2B startups make.

How is our brand supposed to occupy a space in our customers minds if we don’t know what else is in their heads?

What is positioning-by-assumption?

It starts small and innocuously. The sales rep who’s seen a pattern in their wins. The CEO, influenced by the latest hot-shot unicorn. The marketer, spotting a gap in the market. A technical co-founder thinking their tech stack is a differentiator.

These honest assumptions can quickly snowball into huge decisions that set a new path for the company – only for it to melt away as soon as it meets the market.

But strong positioning needs to be based evidence and insight direct from customers.

The strongest positioning is when:

• You’ve identified a space in your customer’s mind that actually exists

• You can build a defensible moat of opinion to own that space

• That opinion becomes an integral shortcut in your customer’s understanding of the world

Drift is a great example of strong positioning in action:

• Marketers and sales reps are concerned about the majority people who come to their website but don’t convert

• Drift says that forms are to blame, and that conversational marketing tools are better

• Suddenly, it clicks; of course chat is better than forms

• And the category is created

I believe the strongest positioning happens when you start with your customer. Early-stage startups have the best opportunity to do this, and start right.

Assumptions have a wide impact

I’ve made the same mistake of positioning-by-assumption many times before – including this example, where we created messaging that resonated with visionary budget holders rather than the champions we actually sold to (because we assumed they would think the same).

Positioning that is based on untested assumptions will likely impact the business in the following ways:

• The positioning team like it, but sales/marketing struggle to understand – so they hook onto one message (probably ease of use or time saved) that they can parrot

• The majority of the first sales conversation is spent walking the prospect through the message, rather than the proposition

• Outreach emails become solely focused on features, rather than value

• Product teams get caught in a prioritization loop, as they can’t decide what to build to support the positioning

Ultimately it sets you further back than before you rolled out the new message – leaving you scratching your head, wondering what to do… but blind as to the cause.

But at this stage, most teams will try to fix the symptoms, rather than the cause.

You’ll re-educate sales on messaging, forcing them to push the on-brand message. Product teams will be tasked with just getting back to building, with a direction to ‘build something small and iterate from there’. Marketing will ask if customer segmentation is correct, because nobody seems to be responding in the expected way.

The alternative isn’t difficult

Imagine the alternative. Your team want to improve positioning, based on what you’ve learnt over the last six months.

• We start with customer segmentation, and niche down on the market problem groups1 we are going to support

• Once we have an idea, we ideate on an empathy map for each group. What do they think, feel, see, hear, say, and do? What do we think they want to gain, and what do they want to avoid?

• Armed with the empathy map, we form a proto-persona – literally a prototype of a persona – that covers their demographics, firmographics, psychographics, gains and pains.

• Armed with this, we test our assumptions internally – what feels right, what’s not correct?

• We set up 10-20 research calls with customers, prospects, and people in the market. The conversations cover five areas: segmentation, problem discovery, problem validation, product discovery, product validation.

• These areas give us a whole range of insights to help us to slightly adjust our understanding, or highlight that our assumptions are completely false.

This process helps us refine our focus and align on a customer. It means the positioning team start from a shared understanding of ‘what we think about our customers’. It means we have created a hypothesis (the proto-persona) of what we expect to find in the market to evaluate our discovery against.

If we skipped straight to research calls, internal teams won’t feel heard. They feel they have some unique insight that’s been ignored – and will be more likely to reject the new positioning.

If we skipped the hypothesis building and didn’t create a proto-persona, people in the positioning team will use their own interpretation (of the customer, market, and problems). Rather than starting from a single, agreed interpretation, you’ll start from many differing opinions.

If we didn’t do research calls, then we wouldn’t be positioning for a customer, we’d be positioning for an imaginary creature that just doesn’t exist. It is always possible to do these – enterprise B2B startups often insist that research calls are impossible, but find a ton of value above-and-beyond the positioning purpose when they actually make it happen.

The best positioning is defensible. When someone asks ‘why message X?’, you must be able to tie that back to a customer insight.

Assume, then test

Assumptions are useful. I’m strongly of the belief that assumptions, gut-feeling, and intuition are internalized pattern-recognition. The challenge, however, is extracting assumptions affected by our many biases from those which are grounded in true insight.

In my work with early-stage B2B startups, we rely a lot on untested assumptions about the world. But it’s important that we learn from real people. It’s important that we learn about their lives, their goals, and what’s going on for them. It’s important that we can find a real space that exists in our customer’s head. Because that’s positioning.

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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