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.

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

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

Most SaaS websites treat product imagery like a checkbox: drop in a dashboard, a mockup, maybe a stock photo of someone pretending to use a laptop. Done.

But none of that really helps people understand what your product actually does, or why they should care. And if they can’t get that quickly, they’re probably not going to dig deeper.

Product imagery isn’t decoration.

It’s proof. It’s storytelling. More than that, it should reinforce the message you’re trying to land. Every visual you include should add clarity or conviction, rather than just filling a gap.

The product images that work best help people feel the value of your product before they even read the headline.

Here are some of my tips and examples to help you brief product images that just work better.

What product imagery is actually for

Most visuals are wasted. They’re either too vague to be useful, or too dense to be legible. The goal of product imagery is to make your story click faster, deeper, and more believably than words alone.

Product imagery should back up the story you’re telling. It’s there to support your positioning and make your product feel real, not just sit alongside the copy.

Every image is a chance to signal something specific. If there’s a mismatch and your copy is pointing in one direction and your visuals say something else, it won’t work.

The best visuals don’t just support the narrative. They give people a way to visualise outcomes, not just features. They make the product easier to grasp, easier to remember and easier to trust.

Design for first impressions, not power users

Your product is built for people who use it every day. But your website and your deck are for people seeing it for the first time.

So while your existing customers might love the complexity and power, your marketing visuals need to massively simplify. Design for first impressions, not power users

Your product is built for people who use it every day. But your website and your deck are for people seeing it for the first time.

So while your existing customers might love the complexity and power, your marketing visuals need to simplify to deliver a more efficient mental model for viewers.

Stop showing the full UI

Screenshots of the full product interface feel like the obvious thing to show, but trust me: they’re rarely the right choice.

A full UI can look dense, busy, and difficult to decode, especially for someone who’s never seen your product before. They don’t know what matters. They don’t know where to look.

Here’s a real example from Intercom that shows where this can go wrong:

The intention is to show the power of the inbox. But the execution is overwhelming. The screenshot takes up a huge amount of space, there’s no visual hierarchy, and it’s unclear what you’re supposed to notice or care about.

It’s the UI version of word vomit. Everything is shown, but nothing lands.

Instead, I strongly suggest creating a consistent lo-fi language for your UI:

• Strip out the noise
• Crop the screen
• Blur the background or grey out irrelevant sections.
• Use redacted bars to simulate text.
• Replace real data with visual placeholders.

Lo-fi UI images give you control. It helps focus attention on what matters without overwhelming your user.

Here’s an example from Kayako (RIP):

Notice how only the relevant pieces are shown. The logic blocks on the left clearly map to the action happening on the right, without needing a full, high-fidelity product walkthrough. Everything else is greyed out, abstracted, or simplified. There’s just enough context to make the idea land.

This is what good lo-fi looks like. It’s clean. It’s focused. It tells a story.

If your product has lots of capability, great. Don’t try to show it all at once. Sequence it. Let the visuals build understanding step by step.

Show moments, not manuals

Product snippets are more useful than full-screen views because they help you isolate and elevate specific features, without forcing someone to make sense of the entire UI all at once.

A snippet is a self-contained piece of your product. It might be a single card, a chart, a dropdown menu, a modal. It’s something that stands on its own and represents a meaningful moment or capability.

Snippets give you flexibility. You can feature them alone, group several together, or build out a visual story using them as ingredients. They’re perfect for ads, landing pages, and decks where space and attention are limited.

Here’s an example from Remote that shows it in action:

You’re seeing multiple small UI elements brought together to tell a cohesive story. Each piece is simple enough to understand on its own, but together they hint at the broader capability without feeling overwhelming.

When used well, snippets help your product feel more dynamic, more real, and more relevant to the user’s world.

Don’t default to screenshots

Screenshots are useful in the right formats, like sales decks where you want to leave a particular impression. But they’re not always the right choice, especially when they’re trying to carry the full weight of your story on their own.

Clean, abstracted visuals of your product or features can be just as effective, and more so when they’re overlaid with illustrations to demonstrate movement or actions.

Here’s a great example from Front:

It’s simple, clean, and highly intentional. You immediately understand the concept being communicated without needing to parse a full UI. The illustration does just enough to land the idea, and nothing more.

And here’s another from Kayako that mixes illustration with lo-fi UI to land a slightly different feeling:

The use of blueprint lines is to reinforce the positioning: that this is something new, useful, and thoughtfully designed. It doesn’t try to over-explain. It creates mood and clarity at the same time.

That’s the power of a well-designed visual. It helps tell the story faster and better than a screenshot ever could.

They also let you dial in the emotion. A good illustration can soften the tone, bring in personality, and still be incredibly clear. The key is knowing what the image is there to communicate.

Make people feel like it’s for them

Even if your product isn’t fully localised, your visuals can still be.

Swap out currencies. Use familiar formats. Show names and languages that feel native to the audience. These small tweaks build relevance fast.

While you probably won’t need to go to this length, Remote localises images into 20+ locales… even dealing with long German words.

Even a few small changes like showing the right language, currency, or field labels can make it feel like the product was designed with them in mind.

Build a world, not a one-off

Instead of using lorem ipsum or fake placeholder data, create a consistent narrative that appears across your product visuals.

At Kayako, we introduced Brewfictus, a fictional coffee shop. The same customer tickets and internal team showed up everywhere from the website, and demos, to onboarding flows and ads.

Here’s one of the visuals we used. A fictional support thread, shown both as a live chat and a logged help desk ticket was just one of the 5 scenarios, 5 team members, and 5 customers that we designed for continuity, making the whole experience feel more real.

It grounded the product in a relatable use case—and helped people imagine themselves using it.

If you’re curious how far we took it, go check out the old Kayako site on the Wayback Machine. We built out Brewfictus across the entire site, it’s all still there: https://web.archive.org/web/20250328101152/https://kayako.com/

Show movement, not noise

Some ideas are better shown with motion.

A quick animation. A looped gif. A scroll or toggle to show how something works.

It doesn’t need to be complex. In fact, it shouldn’t be. Motion should serve the point, whether that’s showing a change, revealing an interaction, or contrasting two states.

Here’s an example from Kayako:

It’s clean, subtle, and purposeful. You immediately understand what’s happening. That’s all you need. It gets the point across without needing narration or additional visuals.

Use just enough to make it easier to understand, and no more.

Avoid stock images, duh

If you sell software, show the software.

Stock photos don’t hurt because they’re cheesy. They hurt because they introduce ambiguity. What am I looking at? What does this have to do with your product?

Visuals should make your product feel real, useful, and relevant. That could mean a literal UI shot. It could mean a stylised mockup. But it should always feel grounded in what you actually offer.

The real job of product imagery

Whether you like it or not, the truth is your visuals are doing one of two things: either helping someone believe, or making them work harder to understand.

Good product images should reduce friction, build trust, make benefits feel obvious… and outcomes feel within reach.

That’s what you’re aiming for. Images aren’t just decoration, or to fill th space, or just ‘showing the UI’.

Be intentional. Tell the story clearly, and let your visuals do the heavy lifting.

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

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

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Let’s get one thing straight: Product Marketing does not own product launches.

Sure, PMMs handle the launch plan, messaging, GTM strategy, and enablement, but if a launch is treated as just a marketing exercise, it’s already doomed. A successful product launch is a full-company initiative.

Too many PMMs get stuck in the “feature launch” grind, pushing out blog posts, crafting sales decks, and running internal enablement. They’re optimizing for activity, not impact. A true product launch isn’t just a bigger feature release; it’s a business-level event that requires company-wide alignment and execution.

Product launches need more than PMM hustle. They require leadership, influence, and cross-functional ownership. So how do you make that happen?

Feature launches vs. true product launches

PMMs often focus on shipping feature updates, launching one-off marketing campaigns, and moving on to the next thing. But feature launches aren’t the same as full-scale product launches. This cycle creates tunnel vision: ship a feature, make a marketing splash, move on.

A successful product launch is not just about announcing a new feature, though that’s part of it. It’s about creating market impact. Without a strategic approach, a launch fails to gain traction, teams operate in silos, and the product struggles to achieve its business goals.

What makes a product launch different?

A true product launch is a business event that drives adoption, revenue, and strategic positioning. It requires:

• Product readiness and differentiation: The product must be both technically sound and positioned in a way that clearly sets it apart in the market
• Pricing and packaging strategy: Clearly defined pricing tiers, upgrade paths, and value-based messaging must be finalized before launch
• Operational readiness: Finance, legal, and RevOps need scalable pricing models, CRM configurations, and compliance reviews completed ahead of launch
• Sales enablement: Sales teams must understand the product’s value, competitive differentiation, and how to confidently sell it
• Customer success preparation: Onboarding materials, training sessions, and proactive engagement plans must be in place to drive retention
• Coordinated marketing execution: Multi-channel campaigns must align with sales efforts, market timing, and customer needs

If these foundational elements aren’t in place, the launch is just another announcement.

Leading a product launch without authority

Influence is more important than control when leading a successful product launch. You won’t always have direct authority over every team, but you can drive alignment, accountability, and momentum by setting clear expectations and ensuring everyone is rowing in the same direction.

Define what success looks like

Every team must understand what a successful launch looks like beyond just launch day. Success isn’t just about press coverage or website visits; it’s about customer adoption, sales impact, and long-term retention.

• Set clear objectives tied to business goals, whether that’s revenue targets, customer activation rates, or pipeline generation
• Weigh trade-offs between short-term wins and long-term growth. Should the focus be on user adoption now, or is revenue the key metric?
• Link these objectives back to your GTM strategy and the key bets you’re making with this launch

Clarify roles and responsibilities

A launch quickly derails when teams aren’t clear on who owns what. Assign ownership early: who is responsible for sales enablement, pricing approvals, customer support training, and marketing execution? When ownership is clear, accountability follows.

• As a PMM, act as a program manager, not just a project manager
• Identify a Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) for each workstream and ensure they have the authority and capacity to execute
• Work with leadership to ensure the launch is a priority for each DRI, not just another task on their list
• Set clear expectations: each DRI owns their workstream, communicates progress up/down/across, and manages their project plan
• Rather than micromanaging, empower all DRIs to take responsibility

Create urgency and sustained momentum

Without urgency, launches stall. Set milestones leading up to launch, communicate progress frequently, and remove blockers early. Build internal excitement, celebrate wins along the way, and maintain post-launch energy by reinforcing the impact of the launch.

• Plan internal communications as carefully as external ones. A product launch is also a change management initiative; teams need to understand what’s coming, why it matters, and how it affects them
• Set clear expectations across the business, outlining what to expect during the launch and what role each team plays in making it successful
• Ensure department leaders are aligned and communicating the right message, so the entire company moves in sync
• Use execs to drive alignment: when they reinforce priorities, teams listen

Proactively manage dependencies

Product launches involve multiple moving parts across teams. Mapping dependencies early prevents last-minute chaos. One of the most critical aspects of program management is forcing teams to talk to each other.

• Encourage workstream DRIs to take ownership of their needs rather than waiting for others to anticipate blockers
• Set up a weekly sync where DRIs align on interdependencies, track them in the project plan, and flag concerns before they escalate
• Reinforce that asking for help or resources early is a strength, not a weakness. Transparency is key (and expected)

Schedule pre-mortems and post-mortems

Expect iterations; don’t be surprised by them. When you make iteration part of the plan, you’ll get better feedback without last-minute chaos.

• Schedule pre-mortems before launch to anticipate roadblocks, identify risks, and ensure teams are aligned on what success looks like
• After launch, hold post-mortems to gather sales insights, analyze customer feedback, and assess real-world performance
• Build in time to refine positioning, update enablement materials, and tweak the launch strategy based on learnings

Sustaining momentum after launch

Too many teams treat launch as the finish line when, in reality, it’s just the start.

• Track adoption metrics and customer feedback to identify areas for improvement
• Reinforce sales enablement with updated objection handling and refined messaging
• Keep the product integrated into marketing and sales motions to sustain awareness and pipeline growth
• Ensure product and customer success teams are working together, not just for adoption, but to help users thrive

If you treat launch day as the end, you’ll miss the real opportunity: long-term impact and sustained success.

Keeping momentum after launch separates the products that thrive from the ones that fade…. and how you execute post-launch is what ultimately determines your long-term success.

Bringing it all together

Treating a product launch as just a marketing event is a mistake.

A great product launch is a business initiative, not just a marketing campaign.

The best PMMs don’t just market launches; they lead them.

A launch isn’t successful when you ship, it’s successful when your product wins.

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 big misconception about product launches appeared first on Building Momentum.

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

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

And then?

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

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

Make customer research essential by design

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

Tie every research project to a business decision

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

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

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

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

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

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

Create demand for your insights

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

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

Instead, make your research process collaborative from the start:

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

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

Validate assumptions, don’t just explore

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

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

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

Translate research into decisions, not just insights

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

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

Try structuring your research deliverables like this:

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

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

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

Keep insights relevant and embedded in every day use

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

To ensure research remains impactful:

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

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

Because the best research is the research that gets used.

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

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

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

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
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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.

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

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

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

The many faces of product marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understand the customer…

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

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

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

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

… then build collaborative loops internally…

Here’s an unfortunate hard truth.

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

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

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

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

…before bringing the product to market.

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

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

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

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

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

PMM is the chameleon of marketing

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

But product marketing is often a thankless role.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Just like your value proposition, you’re going to find most success when you tailor the differentiators you use to two things: the primary stakeholder, and the buyer journey stage.

I learnt the value proposition lesson the hard way, when we launched a new product but had messaged towards executive-level concerns on the homepage – without realising that the folks coming to our website were mostly managers. They didn’t care about the aspirational messaging, and instead needed more tangible content.

It’s exactly the same with the differentiators that you’ll want to call out.

Showcase the wrong differentiators to the wrong person at the wrong time, and you’ll be missing out on impact, momentum, and revenue.

But first, what’s a differentiator?

Your competitive differentiators are just that… what makes you different from your competitors. It’s not your pricing, your product features, or your branding.

I like using the Bain Elements of B2B Value Pyramid to illustrate value and differentiators.

The pyramid starts at the base with “table stakes,” which are the basic requirements and functional elements of value that customers expect from any product. As we move up the pyramid, the elements of value become less tangible and more about the implications of using the product – first within the organization, then what matters to the individual buyer.

The next level is “functional value,” which includes things like product performance and reliability. Above that is “ease of doing business value,” which includes things like responsive customer service and streamlined ordering processes.

Moving further up the pyramid, we come to “individual value,” which includes things like reputation assurance and reduced anxiety. At the top of the pyramid is “inspirational value,” which includes hope, vision, and social responsibility. Here, differentiators aim to align the vendor with the buyer’s cultural and ethical worldview.

The pyramid is a useful tool for understanding your competitive differentiators because it shows that not all differentiators are created equal. The most tangible and functional elements of value may be important, but they may not be what ultimately sets you apart from the competition. By understanding the different levels of value in the pyramid, you can more effectively communicate the unique benefits of your product to each stakeholder at each stage of the buyer journey.

You can read more about the pyramid here.

Take a minute to read through and understand the different groupings: tablestakes, functional value, ease of doing business value, individual value, and inspirational value.

You can’t really create differentiators, only discover them. What is it about your product that draws buyers to you, and not to others?

Aligning value differentiators

My experience suggests that there are two main ways to segment and combine differentiators: by the stakeholder, and the funnel stage. It looks something a bit like this:

Let’s take a look at the two axes.

Differentiators by stakeholder

Just like my failed product launch example above, the type of stakeholder you’re communicating to changes the starting point.

Generally:

• Users are concerned with the day-to-day. They want information features, they want to build a functional understanding of your product.
• Managers want functional information, but they’re looking for benefits too. They want to understand what the product is going to help them achieve over a medium timeframe.
• Execs are more interested in the aspirational direction that your product can support them to achieve in the long-term.

This will definitely vary, but generally I’ve seen these patterns repeated many times over the last ~12 years.

Differentiators by buyer journey

Your buyer journey is not the sales funnel. Hopefully you’ve got a good understanding of the expedition they go on to solve problems and buy solutions.

• At the awareness stage, your differentiators should focus on grabbing attention and building interest. You want to differentiate your product from the competition and highlight its unique value with what matters most to the stakeholder. You’re answering the ‘why’ at this stage.
• At the consideration stage, your differentiators should focus on providing more detailed information about how it addresses the buyer’s specific needs. You want to demonstrate how your product solves their problems better than the competition, and provide evidence of its effectiveness. You’re answering ‘how’ at this stage.
• At the purchase stage, you should focus on reinforcing the buyer’s decision to choose your product by highlighting differentiators that answer and reinforce the specific ‘what’ that each stakeholder is looking for.

Putting these both together

So if we combine both the primary stakeholder and the funnel stage, we get something like this:

At the awareness stage, you want to stand out and resonate with the differentiators that your stakeholder is going to engage with the most.

• For users, that’s things that will make their life easier – time savings, how much more organized they can be, the configurability.
• For managers, it’s about individual value – what do they stand to gain from working with you? Things like reputational assurance or the reduced anxiety they’ll feel using your product.
• For execs, you’ll engage best on inspirational value. Aspirational differentiators that get them pumped up about what they could achieve in the long-term.

During the consideration stage, you’re showcasing ‘how’ your product helps the stakeholder to achieve all the stuff you just said in the awareness stage.

• For users, show functional differentiators, the performance and economic impact of your product.
• For managers, make it real and show how your product differentiators make it easier to do business.
• For execs, it’s individual value differentiators that appeal most at this stage. You’ve said what the long-term vision is, but now the differentiators that matter will give them confidence.

Finally, at the purchase stage your differentiators are not high-level aspirational things – but rather, the extremely tangible components – because you’ve already sold the story and highlighted your unique values that separates you from the pack on the intangible.

• For users, tablestake differentiators will get them motivated. Price, specifications, and compliance.
• For managers, it’s that functional value that will help them – the performance and economic impact
• For execs, differentiators that matter here are about the ease of doing business with your product – configurability, responsiveness, fit, quality, and so on.

An example

Here’s how the matrix might look for a project management tool. See how the potential differentiators at each stage map back to the elements discussed in the B2B Elements of Value pyramid?

So what does this all mean?

Understanding your competitive differentiators is critical to your success – even more so, knowing where and when to use them.

Using the Bain Elements of B2B Value Pyramid and the framework above, you can align them to the needs and priorities of each stakeholder at each stage of the buyer journey. You can stand out from the competition, and provide the right mix of value to the right stakeholders at the right time.

Remember though: differentiators cannot be created; they can only be discovered. By focusing on what makes your product or service unique in the mind of your customer, you can provide value that truly resonates with your customers, build momentum, and find success.

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

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

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

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

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

But first, when should positioning evolve?

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

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

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

Zendesk’s positioning evolution

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

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

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

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

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

What we can learn from Zendesk

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

Target customer: From IT to any company

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

Value proposition: Reinventing the helpdesk, to the better choice

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

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

Frame of reference: From helpdesk to multichannel and more

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

Market trends: Web 2.0 to speed and scalability

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

Key takeaways

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

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

So what can we learn?

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

Zendesk over the years

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

2007

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

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

2008

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

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

2009

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

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

2010

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

2011

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

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

2012

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

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

2013

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

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

2014

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

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

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

2015

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

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

2016

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

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

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

2017

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

2018

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

2019

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

2020

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

2021

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

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

2022

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

2023

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

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

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Quickly after starting at Headstart – an early-stage enterprise HR AI SaaS company – I noticed two major things.

Firstly, our brand identity was corporate and stale.

Just because we were selling to the largest businesses on the planet didn’t mean we were destined to be blue and bland.

Secondly, our mission was to prove that people are more than a piece of paper, and deliver the next generation of diverse, future leaders into business. It was more than a product – it was our responsibility.

How could we inspire action around such an important social movement with a brand look-and-feel that was stuck in the early 00’s?

Here’s how.

But first… Branding vs Positioning

Positioning, if you’re a regular reader, is about occupying a space in the mind of your customer. It’s about being The Thing For Someone (rather than something for everyone), delivering clear and differentiated value, and discriminating against bad-fit prospects.

Branding, on the other hand, is how your positioning is brought to life with the visual look and feel, your messaging and tone of voice, and the vibe you portray to the world. To be successful, branding has to be consistent and recognizable – once you’ve got it, use it – everywhere.

And positioning should always come first. Decide who you are, and then explore how you best show it.

Headstart case study

We started with refreshing our mission, revisiting positioning, and bringing life into our tone of voice.

We said au revoir to ‘Prioritise diverse candidates’ and hello to ‘Making recruiting fair’ – levelling up from benefit to value.

We leaned into contention, opinion, and focused on the dichotomy at stake between discrimination and fairness – we needed to find and activate the radicals in our target market, those who were motivated and engaged to change their approach.

So when it came to the visual identity, we knew what we had to do.

No more ‘typical business branding’. We leaned into a look-and-feel inspired by movements like Extinction Rebellion – bold, brash, chaotic, in your face. Unmissable.

Icons and design elements, sticker visuals, vibrant and bold block colors, big capital letters, thick bold sans-serif fonts.

We thought there’s no better way to visualise our mission than by including humans in our identity. Diverse humans: people of all races, disabilities, backgrounds, styles. Confident humans.

We knew we were onto a winner when we saw the mockup below.

Then… we put it into practice.

Our sales deck no longer looked like a sales deck… It was a manifesto. Big, bold slides. Eye-catching, almost distracting templates designed to surprise.

Our event collateral looked like handouts at a rally, not just a brochure.

Our social accounts were more like that of a cause, than a SaaS company.

We also asked the designer to deliver assets, templates, and elements that we could easily recreate in Canva, to scale brand design without needing continual design support.

So, how much did this cost? How long did it take?

Traditionally, brand redesigns cost tens of thousands, take months, and have to be signed off by a committee of people.

Well, no – that’s simply an unconscious decision that you make.

This took us about five weeks, from start-to-end. By focusing on reusable assets and templates, we could speed up the process, creating assets that we needed and asking the designer to perfect. And approvals were simple: just me and the CEO.

Did it work?

• Qualitatively yes – we received tons of great feedback on it from prospects, partners, and folks in the market.
• Quantitatively? Honestly, who knows. Covid hit just as we rolled it out, so we’ll never know.

But without a question, I’m really proud of how well this came together.

Branding tips for product marketers

Most product marketers will have a tangential relationship with brand: it’s something you might get involved in, but probably just as an aside.

But, product marketing really should be more involved in the whole process.

From identifying and bringing clarity to the target customer, to developing positioning that’s designed to resonate with them, and then representing the customer voice in the creative review room.

But there are a few things you can do to support the process:

• Collate together customer research with business strategy – who your target customer is, why they’re the target customer, and what the opportunity is.
• Provide positioning that links the value your target customers desire back to your product features and benefits. Without clear connections between them and proof points, you can make outrageous claims that aren’t supported by reality – which then creates a bigger gap between the brand and what you can deliver.
• If you have some input over the branding process, push for a small review group – avoid branding by committee.
• Don’t let the branding project run away. Use a tight, well-defined brief that delivers in multiple milestones.
• Think about how you’ll use the branding in conjunction with positioning. Plan with deliverables in mind, but create a simple system of templates and guidelines that you can work with.

Good luck!

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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.

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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.

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

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

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

A typical second product story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, it was different back then.

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

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

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

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

Building a second product (the right way)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or, could you acquire a product?

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

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

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

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

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

Regardless, look for focus + confidence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize

Set this up early, and stand your ground.

I really like using ICE prioritization as a starting point.

ICE stands for :

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reduce, reuse, recycle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At every opportunity, restate strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t forget to develop yourself

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

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

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

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

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Yes, we’re product marketers. MQLs can sometimes be a dirty word to us.

But you know what’s going to score you brownie points with your fellow marketing and sales teams? Delivering projects that drive marketing qualified leads!

Here are two, pretty simple projects that you could get done – in less than two weeks – that will help you become the belle of the marketing all-hands.

These are great opportunities to show off your product marketing skills and support your marketing and sales teams with new call-to-actions as part of your buyer journey.

Create a pre-recorded demo video

It sounds pretty simple, and yeah, it actually is.

Offering a pre-recorded demo video on your website, gated behind a form asking for just an email, is one of the simplest data-for-information exchanges you can set up. It’s a perfect soft call-to-action for website visitors that don’t want to sign up for a trial, don’t want to speak to sales, but want to see more than just the information on your website.

Your demo video should be like the actual demos your sales teams give – or at least, should give. It definitely shouldn’t be feature-heavy, and it definitely shouldn’t bore viewers.

Your demo video should focus on the outcomes and value your product delivers, not the features. Instead of the standard “you click here, do this, and then see that happen,” voiceover, you want to tell a story that combines your product features, benefits, and ultimate outcomes into a packaged nugget of value (funnily enough, I call these value nuggets).

Here’s a simple outline for your first pre-recorded demo video.

1. The situation, problem, and implication of what the customer’s life is like today – be clear on who the target customer is, the impact through their organization, professional, and personal lenses. Use 1 or 2 slides.
2. Value they desire – the three ideal outcomes that your product solves (that they want to achieve). Use 1 slide.
3. Switch to a product screen recording. For each value, create a narrative that walks through;
   • Importance of the outcome
   • The progress to achieve the outcome with your product, connecting features to benefits
4. Recap each value, and finish with overall messaging in one slide.

Making these happen can be complex, if you’re after a super high production quality video. You can start with something you can make in Apple iMovie or Descript. Maybe work with a pre-sales or customer success manager to perfect the flow and capture a screen recording that you can chop up. Make a scrappy first version, and then see if you can get the budget to work with someone from Fiverr, Upwork, or a local student to perfect it.

Then, distribution: get it up on a separate ‘[product name] demo video’ page, gated behind an email form, then start linking to it – here are a few quick ideas:

• Review past and upcoming content plans to find opportunities to post a soft call-to-action
• Use in marketing email campaigns – send a one-off email to your entire prospect database, then build it into regular newsletters and lead nurture campaigns
• Let sales reps use an ungated version of the video as an alternative call-to-action in their nurture campaigns and cold emails: ‘Can I send you a quick demo video?’
• Promote in retargeting paid acquisition campaigns to visitors who viewed the website but didn’t sign up
• Include it in follow-up emails to all leads collected at online and IRL events

The placement of your demo video in the buyer journey should be determined by what you know about your buyer journey – make sure that it’s a logical progression between your buyer’s previous step, viewing the video, and the next step (likely, talking to sales).

P.S. Don’t forget to add a ‘book a demo’ section on the webpage, and make it really simple for those who view the video to put their hand up for sales interaction.

A one-two punch: regular demo webinars

You’ve gone to the effort of designing a demo script that speaks to your product value, benefits, and features. You’ve made it into a recorded demo video.

But not everyone likes demo videos – they need a bit more interaction. And not everyone wants to speak to sales.

So, get the most juice out of your efforts and set up regular – weekly, bi-weekly, monthly – demo webinars.

These will be approx 30 minute sessions that you can host as a product marketer – trust me, you’ve got this! – or with a customer success or pre-sales rep. And they’ll follow pretty much the same flow as the demo video:

1. Introduce the problem you’re solving and the challenge that customers are experiencing
2. Present how you help
3. Walk through the similar narrative: value > benefits > features
4. Maybe bulk up with a case study
5. 10 minutes at the end for an AMA, so folks can get their questions answered live

My recommendation is to use Demio for effortless webinars. Use a few slides from your sales deck, practice a few times to build confidence in your pitch and delivery, and make it human. Tell stories. Your viewers will love it. Maybe brand it ‘The [Product] Rundown’ or ‘[Product] 101’.

You’ll promote your regular webinars in pretty much the same way. Throw up a webpage where you can update the date of the next webinar and the registration link, then drive traffic to it through very similar methods as above:

• Call-to-action in content
• Add a call-out in every prospect-facing newsletter
• Share with sales reps to include in cold emails as an alternative to replying
• Try some paid retargeting campaigns, maybe paid social on LinkedIn to target a specific market
• Include a link to the webinar page on every ‘thank you’ page from your other gated content – give those leads a place to go next
• Share it via organic social and create some snazzy banners to share

These will feel much easier to carry out than creating a demo video, because they’re more human and natural. But, creating a demo video first will really help set the scene and perfect what you’ve got to say, and how you’re going to say it.

Make SaaS tangible with demos

I think this is a principle that we can all lean into more. SaaS is pretty intangible sometimes – a bunch of buttons and fields on a webpage.

When we link that to the bigger problems we’re helping customers to achieve, we’ll do better. When we show the outcomes that our features solve, we’ll do better. When we talk about our product in a human way, we’ll do better.

Good luck, and hit me up if you’d like some examples of good demo videos and demo webinars!

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 Two things every product marketer can do right now to grow MQLs appeared first on Building Momentum.

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

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

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

Working with assumptions (without validating or iterating)

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

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

How to get back on track

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

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

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

They say jump, you say ‘how high?’

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

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

How to get back on track

You have two options.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to get back on track

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

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

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

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

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

The post Product marketing shortcuts don’t work appeared first on Building Momentum.

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Think about the products and tools you use at work and in your personal life.

Everything you use is designed to help you accomplish a task in a particular way. A job-to-be-done, with success criteria. Therefore, nothing in life is purely functional. Everything is functional, plus something else.

• Your shower gel might rid you of dirt – and also have a nice smell to make your shower more enjoyable.
• The sofa you sit on is comfortable to sit on – but is also a visible signifier of your design choices (budget notwithstanding)
• The laptop or phone you’re using right now? An all-in-one lifestyle device to help you live life the way you want to
• The CRM your sales team use is not just a record-tracking tool, it’s a decision-making platform for business growth

All of the product design choices and all of the marketing, sales, positioning, messaging decisions were consciously defined to not just be functional, but to help you achieve the job and meet the success criteria.

Now think about the software you market or sell.

Are you just selling task completion – or are you actually selling more than that? And if you are… what would change if you decided to do so consciously?

We build software, but sell outcomes

We shouldn’t be marketing or selling software. We should be selling value, an outcome that your customer wants to attain that:

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

Sometimes this value is clearly messaged, linking the features of your product through benefits to value. I call this a ‘value nugget‘.

Sometimes, that value ISN’T communicated well – and it becomes muddy, confusing, damaging.

Without a clear understanding of the value your customers desire – and why – you’ll find it harder to sell and market. Functional messaging is obtuse: a blunt and binary approach.

But when you sell value, you create more. The whole of the value is greater than the sum of its parts. You can charge more. Loyalty and satisfaction goes up. You sell more, faster.

And just like the products you use in your own life, customers buy things to complete jobs that will meet their success criteria. Sometimes that will be obvious: more revenue.

But actually, I think more often the success criteria customers actually make purchase decisions on is not obvious. Sometimes, a particular product is bought just because it’s the only one the data protection team will sign off on, even if it’s not best-in-class. Or because it’s the one with the best brand recognition. In an example I use often, Salesforce isn’t bought because it’s ‘easy to use’, but because it’s an industry standard, which means a faster sales rep ramp time.

We sell software as a service, but we actually offer an experience

If you work at a SaaS company, I’ll bet you money (tip jar here!) that you’re doing all of these already:

• Creating content and campaigns that speak not just to your product’s capabilities, but to the broader concerns your customer has in their role
• Creating content marketing not just about your core product, but how to get better results in your industry overall
• Training customers with a customer success team, who give support on how to do their jobs better and achieve better outcomes
• Building product features that helps customers solve adjacent problems and achieve sub-jobs

SaaS is more than software.

SaaS now encompasses the whole experience that we deliver to help customers find, buy, use, and stay engaged with us.

But we don’t consciously acknowledge this. We still think we’re selling and supporting software through various components of our business.

If anything, we might put together a buyer journey map which looks at the holistic experience a customer has with our business.

But to take it further, we can create a job-to-be-done map that addresses not just the tasks a customer completes with our product, but looks at the broader process they follow to get something done.

This can then provide the evidence and inspiration to power rest of your ‘Outcomes-as-an-Experience’ strategy:

• Product ideas to support adjacent problems and sub-tasks
• Marketing content on the broader challenges to attract, educate, and retain customers
• Ideas to build customer success and consulting services that support overall completion of the job, not just the tasks

Warning: don’t rely on internal assumptions

It’s dangerous to rely on your own internal assumptions. Everyone is too close to the product and it’s specific capabilities. Everyone is too invested in its success. Whilst you might have done the job before, you’re likely more mature than the majority of your market.

It really is as simple as talking to customers directly to understand what they want to achieve and how. Just keep an open mind, ask questions, and you’ll learn exactly what you need to take your business to the next level.

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

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

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

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

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

An internal comms framework to save

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

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

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

Action plan components

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

Let’s look at people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tips for maximum internal comms results

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

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

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

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

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

The post Product marketing is internal comms appeared first on Building Momentum.

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

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

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

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

Examples

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

Kayako: Live Chat Statistics

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

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

How we used it

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

Headstart: Diversity & The Dream

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

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

How we used it

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

SmartFocus: Christmas 2014

Wow – this is 8 years ago!

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

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

How we used it

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

Bonus: Lune

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

How to create consumer research surveys

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

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

Define your audience

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

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

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

Set your questions

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

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

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

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

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

Run a pilot

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

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

Ensure reliability and trustworthiness

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

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

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

Crunch that data

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

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

Consider all the angles

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

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

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

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

Design your report

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

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

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

Repurpose, repurpose, repurpose

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

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

Your outcomes are only as good as your preparation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Having the courage to acknowledge problems

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

Maintaining trust when things aren’t going so well

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

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

Discovering buyer personas

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

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

The sales deck as the ideal home for your narrative

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

Share snippets from sales to enable and encourage

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

About Launch Awesome

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Validate your positioning like a software developer

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

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

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

Alpha stage

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

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

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

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

Beta stage

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

Presenting to existing customers

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

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

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

Market research

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

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

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

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

Google and social ads

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

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

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

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

“Tiger team”

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

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

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

Additional reading: how to test your positioning

Avoid A/B testing

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

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

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

Alpha and beta test to success

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

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

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

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

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

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

Customer retention and expansion

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

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

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

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

Positioning to evolving value

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

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

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

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

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

Supporting pipeline generation

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

So do what you can to support marketing and sales.

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

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

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

Making efficiencies

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

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

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

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

Diamonds are forever, but downturns are temporary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breaking it down

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where’s best to start?

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

What would you change?

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

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

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Often, product managers and product designers don’t really understand product marketing. Maybe we’re there to just add some sparkle on the feature messaging.

But I’ve found the Double Diamond to be a helpful way to frame where PMM can add value to the product development process, pull out the specific inputs/outputs from each stage, and help others understand the role we play.

What is the Double Diamond?

Created by the UK’s Design Council in the mid 00s, the Double Diamond is a framework to show how, ideally, design happens. Each diamond is split into two halves, representing divergence-convergence.

The first diamond is all about discovering and then defining the problem. The second diamond is how you develop and deliver the solution.

Doing the right thing

The first diamond is how you make sure you’re solving the right problems.

Diverging, during the ‘discover‘ phase, is really about understanding user/market needs through research and insights. We want to look at the world from a pure, unbiased, unencumbered perspective to build a rich picture of user needs through a variety of sources, like:

• Market research
• Customer interviews
• User research
• Competitor insights
• Internal stakeholders
• Technology research

Product marketers, working with UX researchers or product managers, can provide a huge source of insights here with the bread-and-butter of our work.

After broadening the potential, it’s time to converge and define the problem that will be selected.

Having collected research and information, this stage is about creating structured insights that can be used to prioritize problems to be solved through a number of frames, like:

• What’s feasible?
• What problem matters most to our customers?
• Which aligns best with our business mission?
• Which helps us meet our business goals?

This is typically more the work of a product manager, but product marketers can still help by creating synthesised insights (like personas) and supporting prioritization work by representing the voice of the customer.

Doing the thing right

Once you’ve selected a problem opportunity to work on, the second diamond looks at how you solve the chosen problem in the right way.

The divergence phase, develop, is a collaboration between product management, product designers, and engineers. Here, develop might start by wireframing and prototyping potential solutions, refining and validating.

Product marketers can help this part of the process by engaging in ideation workshops and again, representing customers.

This can take a lot of trial and error until the team begin executing on a specific solution to deliver.

With iteration in mind, you might not actually be building code, but perhaps some other indication of the concept: prototypes, landing pages, or ‘wizard-of-oz’ solutions to validate with your customers.

This is often a play between PMs and Engineering until a release plan is developed. Product marketers might get involved in planning and running a beta phase, or maybe planning and executing a full go-to-market launch.

It’s an iterative process

The double diamond is not a linear approach.

It’s expected to be an iterative process, constantly evolving, circling back between stages to ensure that you’re ultimately going to be building the right thing in the right way that delivers value to your customers.

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

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

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

• Audience and buying stage
• What success will look like

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

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

Define principles for hot project

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

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

Principles can help you both:

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

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

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

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

Explore Vision to Values

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

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

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

Principles matter

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

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

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

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

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

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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I’m writing this whilst a little bit sick, so the below is a short and sweet post. Drop me a note and let me know what topics you’d like to see covered in upcoming posts.

SPIN is a sales methodology developed by Neil Rackham after studying more than 35,000 sales calls over 12 years.

The SPIN framework covers the different questions that are asked, posted, and answered throughout a sales engagement:

• Situation – what customers are doing today
• Problem – the challenge they are (or will be) facing
• Implication – the consequences they will experience as a result of the problem
• Need-payoff – the value, the outcome, that the customer can achieve by solving the problem

I think it’s more than just a sales methodology. I think it’s a great acronym to use in everyday product marketing work, ensuring that we’re constantly thinking about our customers.

If we’re not rooting our collateral, copy, deliverables, enablement, and strategy overall in the world our customers are living, then we’re not doing our job right.

We need to think about the specifics of what customers are doing today and the resulting mess, chaos, and pain they are (or will be) experiencing.

And we need to think not just about the immediate outcomes (the tangible benefits), but that our messaging is focused on the value they desire.

Our messaging needs to honestly pass the ‘so what?’ test. Say your feature helps you save time. So what? What does that mean – what’s the pay-off that you’re actually able to gain?

SPIN is probably the most useful framework for every product marketer to know and use. Give it a try today!

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

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The post Every product marketer needs to know about SPIN appeared first on Building Momentum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remember, ABC

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

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

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

Use rhetorical devices

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

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

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

Build an inspiration swipefile

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

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

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

If you can, work with a copywriter

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

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

Steal from your customers

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

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

Imagine customer conversations

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

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

Some prompts that might be useful are things like:

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

Creative writing is an art

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sorry, but it’s true. Most demo videos suck.

They drone on about microscopic features. They’re too long. They’re a condescending mess of tacky cliches, awkward video cuts, and rhetorical questions in an attempt to feign engagement.

Just as every stage in the buyer journey needs a different sales deck, every demo video should be tailored to the stage of the buyer journey.

This means that yes, sometimes a 10 minute video that deep-dives into features and technical information can be really useful – for prospects who are far down the sales process and need to review the product async.

That same video isn’t going to work as the call-to-action in a cold outreach email.

Here are three types of demo video that you might need in your buyer journey, and how to frame each video in the right way to drive momentum in the buyer journey.

The explainer video

The explainer video is the one you might be using ungated on your website, linking to in cold outreach, and sharing on social media.

Too many explainer videos actually explain the wrong thing. It shouldn’t explain what the product is and how it works. It should explain who the product is for, and why they should care.

These should be around 2 minutes at most, and answer these key questions:

• Is this for me?
• Does it solve a problem I have?
• Why would we use it?

Explainer videos should be accurate, brief, and clear: and this is what makes them hard. The narrative the video tells is more important than what is shown on screen.

Avoid using screen-capture product videos, because they’ll quickly overwhelm attention and distract from your narrative. And definitely don’t use scammy, ‘whiteboard drawing’ style animation with stock images.

I really recommend investing in an explainer video using a video agency or freelancer who can walk you through the process, give you pointers, and make your explainer video work harder for you.

Below is a great example: ‘What is Slack?’.

The ‘tell me more’ video

The ‘tell me more’ video is one you’ll send to prospects when they’re interested in finding out more. Maybe they’ve filled out a lead form and you want to give them some more information, or maybe they need to share something internally with colleagues who can’t make an initial discovery call.

A ‘tell me more’ needs to convey the same information you’d share in a 5 minute elevator pitch, but hopefully in around 2-3 minutes.

Here, we can expand upon the same narrative we used in the explainer video above to add more color. The video needs to identify:

• Who the product is for
• What problem it solves
• Why the customer would use it
• What the product is
• How it works
• Any results or proofpoints

These can be more in-depth but still light enough to cover the key points in an engaging way.

Below is an example of a ‘tell me more’ that I created. I’m not saying it’s great – it’s definitely too cringe – but I’d definitely give it a B+. If I were to redo it now, I’d get rid of the American voiceover, and show more product screenshots in here too.

The walkthrough video

Walkthrough videos are your opportunity to get deep and showcase the best of your product: but don’t forget to always tell a consistent story, grounded squarely from your customer’s perspective.

Depending on the circumstances, these videos might be used as a gated demo, or as a post-meeting resource.

These videos can walk through your product workflows, get nitty-gritty in the specifics of why your product is built the way it is, and show an end-to-end walkthrough of the customer or end-users experience.

They can be longer, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be engaging.

And importantly, these can’t just be product-centric. You still need to explain the importance of each feature and frame how it supports the customer to achieve their intended goals and gain value from your product.

Here’s an example from ~6 years ago, where Alicia and I created a walkthrough video that was originally gated behind a lead form.

Apart from the embarrassing quality (we did it entirely ourselves!), I still like how we framed the narrative from a customer’s perspective, showed how the customer and end-user experiences intertwined, and made it feel engaging with a personal intro and outro from Alicia herself!

Make every video you make work harder

Think about each context you need demo videos for, and what they need to achieve.

Think about what your prospect needs to know from their perspective on their buying journey.

Then unite both with a consistent, customer-centric narrative that focuses on the value they ultimately desire.

Then get creative.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Background: Why positioning needs more support

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download The Customer Value Positioning framework

Introducing my battle-tested positioning process

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

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

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

Let’s walk through the process.

Discover your buyer persona

Buyer personas are discovered, not created.

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

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

Then organize those themes into:

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

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

Describe the value your customers desire

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

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

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

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

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

Detail how your product helps

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

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

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

Define your positioning

Start at the bottom.

Frame of reference

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

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

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

Alternative solutions

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

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

Value statements

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

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

Website homepage hero

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

You’re going to write two things:

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

You can find some examples of good homepage messaging here.

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

Four steps to focused customer value positioning

In four stages, you’ve:

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

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

This process always results in successful positioning.

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

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

Frequently asked questions

Who should be involved in this process?

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

What customers should we talk to?

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

How long does this take?

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

Do we have to do research interviews?

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

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

Yes – book an intro call here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introducing the value story

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

Here’s the framework:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Example

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

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

Using value stories

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

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

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

Extract value, don’t make it up

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

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

Buyer personas must be discovered, not created.

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

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

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

Good luck!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For example:

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

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

Make personas come alive

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

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

Perhaps you could:

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

Think about the format

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

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

You could try:

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

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

Build a feedback loop

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

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

Get ahead of the curve:

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

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

Refresh personas regularly

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

What was true yesterday, might not be true today.

Ensure your persona stay fresh:

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

Personas are foundational – don’t waste them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positioning is strategy in action

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

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

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

Here’s how you remedy it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does your customer buy?

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

This process will broadly look like:

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

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

Force progress through product launches

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

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

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

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

There’s no silver bullet, only work

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

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

Good luck!

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

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

The post Traction trouble? Here’s where to start. appeared first on Building Momentum.

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

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

Big thanks to Josh and Nate for having me on!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does research play in product marketing strategy?

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

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

When do should a traditional PMM join a business?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should product marketing report directly to the CEO?

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

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

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

What’s the direction of product marketing?

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

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

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

What about fractional product marketers?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What one tip would you give?

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

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

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

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

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The post Podcast: Product marketing for SaaS appeared first on Building Momentum.

In the UK, traditionally ‘Media Studies’ further education is considered to be a ‘Mickey Mouse’ subject – a pejorative way to tarnish ‘soft’ topics against harder subjects like maths and science.

But you know what? Unlike algebra in maths, I actually learnt a ton of stuff that I still use in my day-to-day work.

In this post I want to explain two big theories that you can use to build stronger and more resilient narratives in your marketing, positioning, and sales narrative.

Todorov’s Equilibrium Theory

This theory is applicable to nearly every story I can think of: a core component of the narratives that govern, influence, and form our world.

What’s the theory?

There are five stages:

1. There is an equal balance and initial equilibrium.
2. The equilibrium is disrupted by an event. (Disequilibrium)
3. There is recognition of the disruption occurring.
4. There is an attempt to repair the damage done by the disruption.
5. A return or restoration of a new equilibrium at the end of the narrative.

What does this look like, in practice?

Think back to your favorite movie: it starts with an equilibrium, where context is introduced. Quickly, an event happens that causes damage, whether physical, mental, or emotional. The disruption is recognized, before our protagonist goes on a journey to fix the issue, right the world, and win the affection of the love interest.

In business we can think about the stories we tell our prospects:

1. The world used to be fine: things worked as they were meant to.
2. Suddenly, something happens: a world change, a technological innovation, a new challenge
3. You feel the pain of it through these metrics, these are the symptoms you face as part of that problem
4. But, you can fix it with our product – this is what the process could be like
5. When you’re live, you’ll be back to normal – and seeing even better results

How can we use this?

It’s no longer as simple as thinking about the beginning, middle, and end of a story.

When understanding, building, and training narratives we need to think about the full picture, and this theory helps:

1. What was life like before?
2. What happened to disrupt the equilibrium?
3. How was it recognised?
4. How can it be fixed? What does that journey look like?
5. What is life like after?

Using Equilibrium Theory can help you build more empathy for customers, grounding your work in their lives.

Propp’s Character Theory

Once you understand this, you’ll see this theory in use in every movie you watch – sometimes it’s a trope, sometimes it’s done with more consideration.

What’s the theory?

Every story has characters that fit into these seven archetypes

1. The protagonist/hero (the character around whom the action revolves)
2. The antagonist/villain (opposes the hero)
3. The dispatcher/boss (sends the hero on the quest)
4. The helper/sidekick (aids the hero)
5. The donor/fairy godmother (gives the hero advice or a useful object)
6. The princess/the girl (motivation & reward for the hero)
7. The false hero/the betrayer (often a helper who turns on the hero and is punished)

They may be a ‘sole’ archetype, or fulfil several roles during the story.

What does this look like in practice?

Let’s take a fairytale example: Little Red Riding Hood

1. Protagonist: Little Red Riding Hood
2. Villain: Big Bad Wolf
3. Dispatcher: The mother, sending LRRH to her grandmother’s
4. Helper: The woodcutter
5. Donor: The woodcutter, with an axe
6. Princess: LRRH
7. False hero: The Big Bad Wolf, for pretending to be the grandmother

How do we apply this to SaaS marketing, you ask? Let’s take Drift as an example.

1. Protagonist: The prospect’s marketing team
2. Villain: Forms!
3. Dispatcher: The end-customer, who hates forms
4. Helper: Drift
5. Donor: Drift, and their platform
6. Princess: The end-customer, and their money!
7. False hero: Forms, pretending to be good ways to ask for details from prospects

How can we use this?

Whether you’re aligned to Andy Raskin’s World Change framework, narrative design, or any other narrative framework, are you missing elements that could help you tell a stronger story? Do you understand the full scope of the characters, roles, and actors that are performing in your market, and within your marketing/sales narrative?

By better understand the roles that your internal and external stakeholders play, you can reframe conversations, think bigger, and develop new ways to guide the narrative in your favour.

Layering theory will simplify, not complicate

Whenever I mention these to people, the most common response is something like “That sounds too complex.” And my response would be “Yes, because simplification is complex by design.”

When we start with well-researched and validated frameworks or theories as a basis for our narratives, we’re able to save time and cognitive energy. Not only is it easier to shortcut initial thoughts, but these systems and tropes and stereotypes are embedded in the minds of our customers, thanks to the modern media machine. The frames already exist for you to build from.

Just don’t forget to use these frameworks as inspiration, not instruction.

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

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The post Applying literary narrative theory to B2B positioning appeared first on Building Momentum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be contentious

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

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

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

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

Contention leads to disqualification

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

That’s an example of proactive disqualification in action.

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

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

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

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

Look to your customers to find opportunities for contention

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

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

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The post Be contentious: the importance of disqualification appeared first on Building Momentum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The five A’s of successful feature releases

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

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

Audience

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

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

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

For example:

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

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

Awareness

Every feature release checklist in the world has:

• Email
• In-app notification
• Social

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

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

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

For example:

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

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

Action

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

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

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

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

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

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

Affinity

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

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

For example:

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

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

Accountability

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

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

In the meantime, we can all start somewhere.

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

For example, we might report on:

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

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

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

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

Just start with your next feature:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Examples of good positioning

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

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

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

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

Next, Truelayer. No affiliation this time!

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

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

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

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

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

Lastly, Soldo.

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

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

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

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

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

Good examples of messaging

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you think?

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

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

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

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

What was the inspiration for starting Building Momentum?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you understand the emotional side of your buyer?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s all about what the value is.

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

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

So I think a lot more people could do that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you merge customer value and the competitive landscape together?

My philosophy, for want of a better word, is that the dominant partner in the market equation is the demand side, is the customer.

And if we can accurately understand the market (which is a group of similar people that have similar pain points or problems that they’re willing to solve to pay to solve for), then that is much more stronger, and almost a shortcut (in context of early stage B2B companies) to momentum.

I think competitors come really into their own when you have that positioning and you’re looking for opportunities, what are the unmet needs? The unmet values that your customers just aren’t served by in the market.

Again, where are the gaps? There’s a really good book about blue ocean strategy: what are you, what could you do that your competitors aren’t doing? How do you fit that on its head?

And if you’ve got that and it’s backed up in evidence by your customers (what you’ve learned from them and what’s going on for them), that puts you in a really good position.

What’s a value nugget, and how have you used it successfully?

So this is something I started playing around with when I was at Kayako, basically in that horror story of a failed product launch.

We needed a way to link the features, to benefits, to the value that people were trying to gain from us. And so a value nugget is basically a way to package those bits up and provide a really clear hierarchy as well, so that you can use it in sales conversations or in marketing material. It makes a really good layout for a webpage, for example.

It’s comprised of those three bits in total. Firstly, what’s the value, the attribute or state that a buyer hopes to obtain?

The value is made up of one or more benefits: the advantage that a buyer gets when using a product. So it’s something that’s tangible that you can report on it, for example, usually, or it starts with a verb. And so an example might be, save time, increase customer satisfaction, increase, win rates, that kind of stuff. Those benefits gained by one or more features.

Again, you’re able to see this kind of hierarchy. Value is delivered by the benefit, which is delivered by a feature. And so that might be a specific piece of product functionality. It might be something less obvious, like an integration or a report, or it might be something that you wouldn’t think of, like a modern, clean UX, a design consideration, or, even service support, dedicated account managers, service features.

And then in the post you can find one of the things that I really like about it, is being able to move up and down that value nugget by asking why on the journey up and then how on the journey down. And this is good because it forces me to think about making it easy to navigate, but also ensuring that there’s real tight alignment between the features you’ve got and the value you say that you’re going to deliver.

And so it’s really key to building that cohesive narrative, and make sure that you’re not just selling your product, but then you can work backwards and start to build what you sell as well.

I used that at Kayako. I’ve used it everywhere since then, so it’s battle tested.

I did a blog post talking about Xerox and a story from the Challenger Customer book. If you’ve not read it, it’s where Xerox went from selling printers to K-12 school districts previously based just on their functionality — so printing color, that kind of stuff — to selling instead on how those printers led to increased student performance.

And so that’s quite a jump to say, “our printers are going to help you deliver better school results, increase your performance”, but is a really good story of using that research, discovering these kinds of unmet needs, being creative with messaging, and then, ultimately all holds up in this value nugget framework.

And so the example, one of their features is the ability to print full color workbooks. And so if we’re going to use the ‘why’ on the way up, why is that useful? That’s because it’s proven to encourage higher student performance.

Okay. So that’s great. And why is that important? Because it provides the best possible educational experience while managing budget pressures.

And so then we can ask how on the way back down, and one of the other benefits that is supporting that value. So the budget piece, how does it help support budget pressures? Because those educators can incorporate color without adding costs and how, because they have a on demand print feature.

And so when it’s laid out, you can go and find that on my newsletter, but you can see this transition really nicely all the way from those features to benefits, to value and all the way back down again, nicely packaged up.

And what I like about it as well is that it’s easy to train that narrative with sales teams. I found people pick it up really easily, especially you can give them a little cue cards for that kind of stuff.

And also for consistency, once you’ve got this real tight defined narrative that you’re using, you get everybody talking the same consistent story. And I think that’s always a good thing,

How do you track and think about lesser-known competitors?

So I think in some situations it’s helpful to think less about the terminology of competitors and more about, alternative solutions.

It’s broader. It gets us thinking about the companies we compete with day-to-day and gets us instead thinking about the solutions that people might be using to achieve those similar kinds of outcomes.

So some of them will be those direct competitors. They’re obvious, you’re familiar with them. You compete with them in most deals. You probably might also find these kinds of super niche solutions that might be set up just for one type of customer, or one really specific use case. I find that most companies will have them on that radar and individually they are not a big threat.

But when you look at them as a kind of lumped group, a single chunk on your market pie chart, that group is probably going to be bigger than you think. And I think most people should think about that a bit more.

How do you tackle a bigger number of smaller competitors?

It is tricky because of the volume of them. This is why, (again, caveating early-stage B2B) is that by focusing on the customer that you are best set up to win now, or in the near term is a shortcut to that kind of stuff.

So rather than focus on potentially all of the potential competitors, you’re much more focused in who your customer is. And that helps you build momentum through that.

I think it’s also interesting if you think not just about the software solutions as well, that compete with, so there are tons of other people-powered, but also other solutions that companies might have already that you also competing with that you just wouldn’t think about, homegrown solutions and, for example, there’s always a developer that thinks they can build whatever they need in a week.

There are going to be some businesses that have JIRA, for example, really big, heavy features that a marketing team might want to use a Asana, but they’re probably not going to get approval for that at all. If you’ve got a recruiting team willing to use Greenhouse and the company is paying for the Workday HRIS platform? Probably not going to happen.

So you’re competing with software already in house, these kind of existing vendors. Then you’ve got all the people: freelancers, consultants, agencies. Actual people, employees who can solve the same problem just through, data entry, for example or customer support, assigning tickets.

For example, in customer service, there are software solutions that can automatically assign conversations to the right people, depending on all of these factors. Most companies will just have one person or two people assigning tickets to individuals instead. It’s probably more expensive in the long run, but they just don’t know that another thing exists out there to solve that.

And so when we kind of position against these non-software competitors, we get an opportunity to be much more creative. The process is still the same: understand what unmet value that customer wants to have. And then in the actual execution you can get away from differentiation against products, because there’s not another product that you’re competing against.

It’s a trying to make sure that this person knows that you exist, that you can solve their problems. So you’re not trying to eke out the slightest element of feature differentiation. And instead, you’ve got this huge canvas to explore. And there’s so much opportunity within that to really speak to that core value that your customers really hoping to wants to needs to attain in their day-to-day.

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

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

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

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P.S. In case you missed it last week – I’m launching a course with Alicia Carney to help upskill product marketers. Find out more and register interest at WTFGoToMarket.com.

P.P.S. Thank you for being part of the Building Momentum journey! We’ve just hit a milestone – if we were all in a room, we’d be a crowd this big!

I wrote about this in The Overview #24 – don’t overestimate your customer’s maturity. A lot of people reached out sharing their experiences, so I thought would be good to cover in a bit more detail.

All too often, we imagine our customers to be so experienced and advanced that unless we keep building new bells-and-whistles, they won’t come or stay. But even the tallest, shiniest skyscrapers are built on solid foundations.

Your customer vision is not their reality

I bet that right now your product managers, sales reps, your CEO has a vision in mind of your customer.

In their mind, your customer is a Steve Jobs/Olivia Pope superhuman: revered, with thin-frame glasses that frame steely grey eyes, within which swells a unique outlook on life, the universe, and everything.

They’re smart. Passionate. Powerful. Full of wisdom, a guru in your industry. A savant, brought to earth by the corporate gods to disrupt processes, obliterate workflows, and bring about the second coming. They’re constantly assessing their options, with the power to to smite your company into obscurity at the slightest displeasure, or instill you upon a gold pedestal and bow to your greatness.

In reality, your customer probably cares about your product for… maybe 10 minutes a month? Probably much less.

They’re struggling to summon the energy today, let alone go the extra mile for just a pat on the back. They’ve got a busy family life, working from home isn’t the best setup for them, and while they want to do the best job they can… well, you know how it is. They’ve got a ton of responsibilities, they’re understaffed, and there’s a hundred other problems that they need to solve (or at least, decide to tackle later on).

Overestimating your customers is a big mistake

It’s easy to let your imagination run away from you, and you’ll build, position, market, and sell in ways that just don’t match what your customer wants, needs, or expects.

Overestimating customers starts internally, innocently enough.

Your PMM team pick up on one customer who, admittedly, may be more mature than the rest in your market. A sudden swell of forward-thinking innovation sweeps your product team into envisioning the future. A sales rep thinks they can impress a customer by promising a snazzy feature that doesn’t actually exist yet.

You’re at the intersection of your customer’s problem space and the cutting edge of technology. It’s only natural that you’ll begin to elevate your base, unwillingly.

What damage can it do? A lot.

Building the wrong features, lost sales opportunities, and confusion on customers wants contributes to the enemy of momentum: inertia.

Increased resistance and lack of velocity means things feel harder, stickier, more difficult. Motivations wear down, and a spiral of despair sets in.

Build a solid foundation

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, we cannot rely on assumptions about our customers. There’s simply too much at stake – both lack of ROI on work invested, and missed opportunity costs.

We need accurately grok and iterate our understanding of:

• our customer’s jobs, pains, gains, and triggers
• their buyer journey
• their change environment

Your understanding of these should power product strategy, positioning, the sales pitch, and everything else that your business does.

The artifacts you develop should be documented, revisited, questioned, and socialized at every opportunity. And that’s where the challenge lies – getting adequate buy-in on the legitimacy of the research, and ensuring it’s used to provide direction to everyday decisions.

NIHITO

Nothing important happens in the office.

Get out there, understand who your customers are, and what they really need. Come up with clever ideas, but validate them with your market first. Don’t position your product based on assumptions – test as much as you need.

Remember the momentum equation: focus + confidence = momentum.

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

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

The post Don’t overestimate your customer appeared first on Building Momentum.

How much effort are you wasting internally based on seemingly smart — but unvalidated — internal ideas?

Over the last few years, thanks to the efforts of John Cutler, Theresa Torres and others, tech companies have embraced a new product management paradigm of opportunities, bets, iteration, and slices.

The intention behind this new world is to move away from big bang releases and instead ship value across the whole chain in iterative chunks. This requires continuous customer development, using the opportunity tree framework, building job-to-be-done maps, and generally being more receptive to a more fluid, less structured flow from insights to development to feedback.

Moving from internal to external opportunity generation

The goal is to move away from inward-facing insights and instead move to better understand and build for your customers. This means less off-the-cuff ideas, no more chasing competitor features just for “parity”, and the end of the HiPPO approach to product management.

And when it’s done well, teams should see increases in adoption, satisfaction, revenue, and speedier time-to-market.

Continuous customer development is one of the most exciting but underutilised tools in the product manager/product marketing/UX research toolkit.

Continually listening to the market and building a better understanding of customer needs can only be a good thing. From here, prioritizing those opportunities on their potential impact against the size of the “bet” and building only the minimum to increase confidence should mean we build resilient insight to feedback workflows.

The problem is that it’s so easy for us to justify building new features based purely on internal ideas, sizing them as small bets and foregoing customer validation because of overconfidence in our internal worldview.

Like in the TikTok above, we put the whole business value chain into motion. This doesn’t just waste time and money, but it’s distracting. Not only are there missed opportunity costs (from either building the thing right, or building the right thing instead), but it breaks down trust across teams. And as regular readers will know, confidence is a crucial part of the momentum equation.

Building an insight-driven product process

So how do we overcome the strong (and in some cases, overbearing) pull to build based on internal gut instincts?

Let’s use the “momentum equation” (Focus + Confidence = Momentum).

Focusing on customers and their jobs to be done

We need to build focus in the customers and opportunities we prioritize. This means having a really deep understanding of who our customers are, their jobs/pains/gains/triggers, and the common jobs they look to solve.

In practice, this means a consistent and structured approach to customer development. It’s not enough to do a positioning process with interviews, and then forget about researching the market ever again. You need to supplement projects with ongoing customer research. This might be a regular cadence of market research interviews for broad insights, as well as win/loss interviews for more tactical feedback.

We also need to use positioning as strategy, by detailing the value our customers desire and directing product efforts to better deliver those values.

I always recommend building a jobs-to-be-done map of your customers core jobs, allowing you to understand your product in context of your customers goal. You can also use JTBD maps to identify opportunities, by measuring satisfaction versus importance at every step.

Finally, opportunity trees are still relatively rare in practice, although the theory is solid. By focusing on the outcome and working backwards to identify different potential solutions (whether through product, service, or other methods), we can identify more innovative, out-of-the-box ideas with greater impact at lower cost.

Validate opportunities before (and during) development

Determining how much confidence your teams need before building something can be tricky.

But you know what’s easier to gauge? The inverse: how much work they would feel comfortable throwing away if a feature wasn’t working out.

Part of the new paradigm is to think of product development less as features, and more as bets. How much risk are you willing to take?

Luckily, we’re not making bets on a random roulette spin. We have the luxury of other confidence-building tools at our disposal: time, research, and iteration.

We can choose to spend more time considering a bet to gain all the required information – or we can move fast.

We could invest a lot of research effort to perfect the designs and ensure it met customer needs – or we could operate on low-fidelity signals to get things moving.

And we could build the full, end-to-end workflow – or just the first part to test demand before building the rest of it.

In practice, there are tons of ways that we can build confidence in the opportunities we build, from validating wireframes with friendly customers to operating a “wizard-of-oz” feature, and more.

The bigger challenge is to create a product and engineering team culture where iteration, delivering slices of value, and comfort making bets is accepted and lived.

Move at the same speed as your customers

One of the issues I’ve experienced is that it’s really easy for companies to think their customers are just as advanced as your team are, and therefore need all the bells and whistles you can dream of.

But your customers aren’t experts. They have a million other things going on that aren’t even vaguely related to your product or problem space. We can’t expect them to be as knowledgeable, foward-thinking, and visionary as your CEO, product team, or technologists.

The danger is that you move faster than your customers, and that alienates them. They lose confidence, and jump ship – while you’re left with a dodgy mix of simple and advanced product features.

But by using some of the ideas above, you’ll always be on the same page as your best customers, moving at the same speed. Great ideas will be validated quickly, while riskier bets will take longer to iterate from bad to great. You’ll ship product faster, customers will be happier, and you’ll have a solid foundation for aligning the rest of the business on what you’re building, and 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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If you’re in SaaS, you definitely know about Hubspot’s inbound marketing funnel…

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

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

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

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

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

Why create your own methodology?

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

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

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

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

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

Building a methodology: examples

Example 1

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

We began with some principles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8 Steps to Unified Customer Service:

1. Capture – Gather the right data and learn about your customer and what they’re doing in real-time
2. Interact – Communicate with your customer on the right channel, at the right time
3. Understand – Apply what you know about your customer and their context to make every interaction as personal as possible
4. Resolve – Provide the perfect response that answers all of your customer’s questions, and head off the next issue too.
5. Measure – Measure the impact of your effortless customer service experience on your business goals
6. Improve – Test and experiment to discover processes that work for you and your customers
7. Scale – Ensure your team, tools and processes are ready for success

We used it in some conversations and validated with customers, but unfortunately never got a chance to use it!

Example 2

At another company, we really needed a framework to help distill our narrative into something that could be repeated over-and-over, turning our product feature set into a toolbox for achieving distinct outcomes.

We distilled what we knew about both the achievements our customers were making and internal thinking about what else the product could support to create a ‘five star framework’. This had real legs, although was relatively short-lived due to changing priorities!

How to build your own methodology

In both of my experiences, we used mostly our internal understanding of our customers and the industry to determine the stages and steps in our methodology. This was fine… but in hindsight, we over-thought it. Without external insight, we were left second-guessing the maturity of our customers and the market.

If I were to do it again, I’d focus solely on our customers jobs-to-be-done map, and use that research to form the basis of our framework.

It’s really important to extract, simplify, and reduce the knowledge you gain into core steps that can be followed and put into practice by your ideal customers. This means if your customer is an advanced thinker, go to the same level. Otherwise, always err on the side of caution and message for the lowest common denominator. Being unnecessarily smart won’t do you any favors.

Think about your visualization from the beginning and involve a designer if you can. Are you a building a cyclical process, a puzzle to be completed, or a maturity framework? This can have a big impact on the way you build and frame your methodology.

Lastly, validate with internal experts, customers, and other friendly folks in the market. Your framework — and the resulting product strategy and narrative you build from it — won’t be successful if it doesn’t resonate with the intended audience.

Show ‘how’ with your methodology

Getting your methodology right can set a solid foundation to break through the market, differentiate in the mind of your customers, and speed up sales by offering not just the product, but the methodology for success. Good luck!

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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My first real job in marketing began with a data entry gig as part of an internship: sorting out Excel lists of leads, importing and de-duplicating into a CRM. What was expected to take two weeks took two days instead. So I broadened out: writing some blog posts, tweeting, and playing around with the website. I was employee number four

Fast forward 10 months, and I’d been working with them throughout my last year of university, and fell nicely into a full-time position in the now-10 people startup. We were PredictiveIntent: a flexible recommendation platform, first developed for mobile network operator media portals (remember those?).

Our audience then? Anything, and anyone. The sales team (the CEO and one sales rep) were trying to nail down any opportunity, any pilot, any conversation they could. Funded with an initial $2m seed – in traction-based tranches – meant incentives were mismatched with the expected progress, and so the behavior was rewarded.

The most consistent interest we’d seen was from the eCommerce world. Retailers wanted to increase average order values, increase conversion rates, and deliver a more relevant experience (on the expectation it would grow loyalty and revenue).

In this post, I’m going to cover the three elements we used to focus our efforts to build traction, turn an API platform into something tangible, and join a mutually-rewarding ecosystem… and how these three steps took us to an acquisition within 13 months.

Niching down in action

We were trying to sell our technology: an ultra-configurable recommendation and personalization platform that used a number of different algorithms to determine the best content to put in front of a user, based on what they were doing, what they had done, and what was known about them.

The co-founders had come from the mobile world, developing and selling mobile internet technology to network operators. But timing – namely the rapid growth of internet-enabled 3G phones – meant their problems dissipated over night. Without a coordinated strategy, they’d succumbed to a common mistake – trying to sell something to anyone. This meant our messages were broad, and confusing. Marketing activity was disjointed. The engineering team had no focus.

A few months into my internship, whilst I was working part-time, I’d began a more coordinated marketing and sales approach for the eCommerce industry, and we’d scored our first customer – an online Christian bookstore from the Midwest.

This was enough validation for us to narrow and niche. We restructured our website to speak the customer’s language and began to focus solely on solving an online retailer’s central problems: growing revenue, and saving on costs.

With a narrower value proposition, we tried multiple ways to sell the product. At its core, it was an API that required developer integration and quite a lot of setup. At the time – early 10’s – most retailers would have a Head of eCommerce, a business buyer that wasn’t technical. Any technical slides were an instant put-off.

So we changed the way we described the product to a core and components, delivered in combination in plans. We offered PersonalMerchant (simple, structured, with as little integration as possible) and PersonalMerchant Pro (requiring heavy custom integration and setup). The top plan acted as an anchor, pushing most prospects towards the main plan.

By naming and defining the plans, we made an intangible API platform into a real thing, a package that a non-technical buyer could understand and purchase.

Making it tangible

Even with a slimmed down proposition, we were struggling to get real traction: a plethora of closed-wall eCommerce platforms available meant every customer was using something different – or worse, their own.

At the same time, we started talking to our first customer on the Magento platform. Back then it was an independent company, one of the first platforms to follow the commercial open-source model. They offered the core for free which anyone could use, and they charged extra for a Pro platform with extra features and support.

Magento had built the first app store for eCommerce platforms, Magento Connect. Anyone could create a plugin and market it via the marketplace with direct installation to a self-hosted Magento instance.

I remember checking Google Trends for the Magento search term, a steady upward trajectory. Within a few weeks, I’d suggested and fought for us to prioritise an integration, targeting a quicker time-to-close and improving our deal velocity with a more focused ideal customer profile.

And it worked. Being able to claim (and prove) installation in under 60 minutes was a godsend for proof-of-concept trials, whilst we worked on building a strong business case for our $50,000 annual contract value target.

Focusing on one platform and creating an integration that we could literally give away for free was driving deals, and traction was building.

At the same time, Magento were building out their partner network, with one person on the ground in Europe. So we jumped straight in. We signed up for their top-tier paid partner program, which gave us the opportunity to train their account managers, get better visibility on the marketplace, and take part in co-marketing activities.

Growing in an ecosystem

A rising tide lifts all boats: Magento was booming. Conferences in Las Vegas has grown from a few hundred people to 10,000. A community of developers, agencies, software providers, and retailers all connected, eager to learn and advance together. So we went all in.

We dug deeper into the Magento world, looking for tech agencies that had top-tier classes and building joint propositions together. We took control of usual partner relationship mechanics, and flipped it to work in our advantage.

During the sales process, a client would introduce us to their eCommerce agency to scope out the technical integration. At this point, we would also start partner conversations and invite them to become ‘certified’, allowing them to re-sell the integration they were going to build anyway, and profit from a partner margin.

We did this for every third-party we came into contact with, and created a certified partner program complete with sales training, collateral, co-marketing events, and of course, generous margins for them. We transformed traditionally intangible partner relationships into a tangible program.

We specialized in the pincer-sale – approaching the customer direct, and orchestrating partner activity to drive engagement and ultimately contracts.

We started saying no to non-Magento deals – one-off integrations weren’t worth our time anymore. We removed the other integration platforms from our website. We had truly found product-market fit with a targeted, growing market.

Marketing agencies would recommend us, and they would manage the process. The same with conversion rate optimization consultants, email providers, and more. We were relatively well-known in the industry, despite having less than 20 employees based in two rooms in a co-working space on the south-coast of England.

Bringing it all together

We were not alone – many other software providers were trying to do the same. One of those companies was Emailvision, a French email marketing platform that was growing fast.

Within 6 months of an introduction, Emailvision had acquired PredictiveIntent, using the technology to create a unified eCommerce marketing platform with personalization and recommendation technology at the core, using the partner network we had created as a core sales channel, and using the Magento integration as a core driver of sales and marketing.

In this post, I hope you can see how three important principles – niche focus, making the intangible tangible, and utilising ecosystems – lead us from unfocused with no traction, to high-growth and eventual acquisition.

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I read Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate by George Lakoff, a renowned linguist – and I think it’s a must-read for anyone who works on positioning and messaging for their business.

With decades of experience, Lakoff writes about the US GOP party and their messaging machine — or rather, the foundational cognitive functions they understand to help them build awareness, influence political discourse, and own the narrative.

In SaaS, we can apply many of the same concepts to how we think about our positioning and messaging to drive awareness and influence, define categories, and build narratives.

Without plagiarizing too much, here’s a summary that may help you take your positioning and messaging to the next level.

It’s all about the framing

Frames are “mental structures that shape the way we see the world”. These are built-in, default concepts that guide our psyche and our understanding of life and the universe.

Frames already exist in your customers mind — influenced by their peers, the media, education, and more.

A frame might be a customer’s view of their problem, and the solution they think they need. It might be their opinion of a particular piece of software or brand. It might even be their interpretation of their problem.

Frames are hard to build from scratch, although they can be broken down and rebuilt piece-by-piece.

Frames need to exist to be activated

One of the core concepts is that frames must pre-exist in order to be understood.

Many, many SaaS companies are currently contemplating whether to name a category, or align with another. Popularised by Play Bigger, to differentiate you need to distinguish your proposition away from the competitors by creating a new category.

However some folks have taken this to new, weird, and almost unrecognisable heights. Odd naming that doesn’t quite stick, tangential application of concepts from other industries, and too much verbatim HiPPO (the highest paid person’s opinion) language.

One of my favorite quotes on category creation is from Andy Raskin:

Unless the core concept of the category can resonate that well, it’s unlikely to hit the mark. (See the difference between Drift’s former ‘Conversational Marketing’ category and their new ‘Revenue Acceleration’ category, in my opinion at least!).

Similarly in sales, we want to pitch and have prospects nod their head and agree with everything we say – not scratch their head in confusion, overloaded with cognitive effort.

Repetition works

Lakoff says that repetition is key, broadcasting a message until it becomes an unconsciously held belief.

When done well, category creation builds upon existing concepts and then activates them, bringing them into everyday public discourse. Of course, this is easier to do in our niche stakeholder audiences rather at national-scale political messaging.

Everything you put out into the world should cite the same core concept over and over again. It should build the frame in the mind of your audience piece-by-piece, strengthening the neural networks and priming their subconscious for your approach.

Frame your features

Lakoff uses the ‘tax relief’ framing as an example of understanding a core belief (taxes should be lower) and building the surrounding frame (‘relief’ meaning to release burden).

And we can use the same concepts in the way we name product features. For example, ‘invoice generation’ is plain and straightforward; ‘invoice automation’ feels smart and helpful.

Build the messaging machine

One of the most interesting parts of the book that isn’t covered in detail is the huge messaging operation that sits behind the Republican party. It’s not just the politicians and the policywonks, but a coordinated army of researchers, theorists, intellectuals, training programs, media relations, pollsters, and more.

I think there’s a ton of opportunity to think about building a messaging machine in your business. It shouldn’t just be the product marketing or marketing team who own, test, and iterate on messaging; every team should be brought into the process with a common goal in mind.

• Every team should be trained on the messaging, from the theory to the execution
• There should be clear learning and validation goals to help iterate successfully
• Feedback loops should be obvious and well-managed, to quickly pass learnings from the frontline back to the intelligence center

The book is highly recommended for anyone in the messaging and positioning realm. Buy it, and let me know what you think!

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Today I want to walk you through one of my favorites, a Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) map.

A job map is a single document that details the steps your customers go through to ‘hire’ a product for a ‘job’ they need to do. I think every business needs one job map per customer persona, per product.

By breaking down their process to find, complete, and review their job, we can improve our understanding of the customer – and optimize our product, marketing, and sales to better meet their needs.

What is ‘jobs-to-be-done’?

Firstly, a recap. Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) theory posits that people buy products and services to get a “job” done. Those jobs are mostly functional, however also have emotional and social components that also need to be fulfilled. Success comes from achieving the “job”, rather than gaining the tools to complete it.

You can read more about the JTBD methodology here, but watch Clayton Christensen in this primer:

Why use a job map?

Rather than user story maps, job maps don’t look at the individual actions that somebody takes in this journey, like clicks or searches, but instead look at the macro stages and micro-tasks that someone will do in their search to be successful.

Traditionally they have a lot of value in product management and can provide a foundation for the product discovery process. But I like to use them for two reasons: they’re really simple to communicate, and they base your product in the customers world, not yours.

I believe that everyone in a business, from backoffice teams to sales and marketing, should have knowledge of what your customers are trying to achieve. It’s logical that a culture that focuses on customer-first empathy will deliver maximum customer value.

Here’s a simple example of a Job Map.

The three blocks at the top detail the macro stages – I’ll come onto those in a second.

Underneath, you’ll also see the steps that the customer takes within each stage. For example, within the ‘Finding content’ stage the customer undertakes multiple steps. These steps are sometimes actions, but can also be decisions and considerations to be evaluated.

This map example also goes further to identify product opportunities. This works by surveying customers on the importance of each step, and how satisfied they are with their current ability to achieve it. By calculating Importance + (Importance – Satisfaction) to create an Opportunity score, we see where customers report their unmet needs, which could be opportunities for you to focus on.

JTBD map stages

To achieve the job, your customer will likely process through many or all of these stages.

It’s not as simple as just planning the job, doing the job, reviewing the job. There may be many more decisions, considerations, and inputs required to determine how the job should be done, what success looks like, or even if they’re ready to do it in the first place.

Again, many of these stages will take place, but maybe not all. You can simplify this by focusing just on the beginning, middle, and end of the job.

You can also dig deeper into your JTBD map by adding more levels. For example, each macro stage in your map may one or more jobs within it.

Linking JTBD stages to your product offering

In this table below, you can see how companies can improve their product offering by better meeting customer needs at each stage. This might be anything from offering simpler planning, to making set-up easier, or improving monitoring.

Communicating JTBD Maps

Job maps provide a single document that help everyone understand what a customer is trying to achieve and the stages they move through.

It’s a great basis for a really visual workflow explainer. Below is an example I’ve used before to show how visual it can be.

In the example, you’ll see:

• Macro stages along the job
• Activities at each stage
• Workflow elements to show the cycles and paths that take place in the process

They’ve also included what a customer is thinking and feeling at each stage. Again, this is great for bringing more empathy into your business. Detailing emotions your customer feels can also create more product opportunities for delight, as opposed to the cold, hard facts of the Opportunity/Importance/Satisfaction maths above.

Start your JTBD map journey

Realistically, you’re not likely to have user researchers available to spend time building this out. So let’s bring it back to basics.

To start building your JTBD map, ask a few people with domain or customer experience to put together their thoughts individually, before bringing together and talking it through.

Within a two hour workshop, you can have a good, solid draft of an initial JTBD map. From here, you’ll be able to measure your confidence at each stage – what do we have evidence for, and what may be based purely on assumptions?

With this information, you can go to customers and friendly people in the market to validate in casual conversations. You can iterate as you learn more.

An ideal scenario would be hiring a user researcher to carry out interviews, ethnographic research, and more to develop a JTBD map without organizational influence — helping develop a more pure understanding of your customers.

But for now, build your JTBD map, validate it, and socialize amongst your teams. Bring customer empathy into more conversations, and start identifying opportunities to better meet customer needs, delight customers, and optimize your business.

The post Why you need a jobs-to-be-done map appeared first on Building Momentum.

I bet that you’ve seen bold claims on B2B websites or sales decks and though… nah I don’t believe it. Me too.

Everyone uses statistics and proof points in their marketing but too often, I see claims that just don’t make sense:

• Weird, convoluted language – caveated with a paragraph of super small text

• Odd phrasing to convey a distant impact, when really it’s held together by a thread

• Orwellian language and spin that says something but means nothing

But proof points are really important in B2B marketing. They work to persuade your audience that your product/service works and achieves the outcomes that are important to stakeholders.

B2B must ultimately contribute to revenue generation or cost reduction – proof points are how we show that impact.

How do you determine the proof points you should actually use?

Choosing proof points

Using the wrong stat could be the difference between getting in the evaluation set or not. There’s no point using proof points that your customers don’t care about. Not only do irrelevant stats take up valuable marketing space, they take up cognitive space.

1. Understand value

That’s why it’s important to understand the ultimate value that your product delivers to customers.

Regular readers will know that understanding your value your customers are seeking (and how you help them achieve that!) is the most single important thing you can do to build momentum in your business.

This helps you build the mental model that your potential customers operate in, and help you understand how you position around that.

That might mean focusing less, or more, on the functional features (and their immediate proof points) – and instead, more on aspirational benefits or second-order impacts.

2. Connect proof points to value

Throwing in random stats here-and-there again will confuse your buyer. It’s important to deliver a focused message: you help customers achieve X as a result of Y, using Z – and proving it.

I call this a value nugget.

A value nugget is a way to package up your product features and benefits, while providing a clear hierarchy to navigate effortlessly in sales conversations and marketing.

A value nugget is comprised of:

You can move through the value nugget by asking ‘why’ and ‘how’. This makes it easier to train a narrative and talk track that can be navigated in real-time.

Crafting strong messaging with value nuggets

When using this, keep in mind that your value is probably not an immediate outcome of your product, but rather a second-order impact.

An example I’ve shared before is Xerox. When marketing their printers, they used stats that showed that the impact their products had on school learning and education outcomes – not just how fast their printers were.

How to create proof points

Sometimes, you’ll have stats ready to hand that you can already slot into your marketing. Other times, you’ll have to create them.

A tip: elements of value

Use the Elements of Value pyramid (detailed in this post on competitive differentiation) to see if there are elements you could mention that you haven’t thought of yet.

Ask customers before they sign

A good practice – if it works for your sales process – is to ask prospects for stats during the sales process. Not only can these be used to build a business case and provide fodder for Customer Success engagements and renewal conversations, but you can use them to determine the impact your product has after 3, 6, 9, 12 months of use.

You can ask customers for hard stats like conversion rates, revenue, or volumes. But you can also ask for softer stats that are less scientific, but potentially more meaningful: how many hours they think they spent on tasks, how happier their team are, etc.

Collect these in the sales process, ask successful customers how those numbers have changed – and build from there.

The survey approach

This is something that I noticed a company do before and I love it. It’s not the most scientific, but it does help you create a pool of stats that you can use that tie directly to the impacts your customers are hoping for.

Survey your customers with questions like these:

1. Do you agree or disagree with this statement? [Product] has helped our business to [increase revenue].

2. By what percentage do you think [revenue would have increased] WITHOUT [product]?

3. By what percentage do you think [revenue has increased] WITH [product]?

This approach gets you three great stats:

• The percentage of customers that say your product has helped grow revenue

• The average percentage revenue increase that customers say your product has contributed

• A stat to help you say “Customers say using our product adds x% more revenue than without”

I like these stats because they’re a mixture of social proof and actual impact. Yes, they aren’t scientifically quantified – but if you’re in a pinch, they’re great substitutes.

And in most cases, what your customers ‘think’ your impact has been is potentially more valuable than what it actually was.

“What if our numbers aren’t great?”

If the statistics that matter aren’t great, I have four options.

1. Consider if they are really the best metrics to use

2. Start a cross-functional project determined to improve that number

3. Find other stats that may contribute to the intended outcome but are not directly linked

4. Be honest: “Right now we have X% impact, and we’re dedicated to improving this all the time”

Never lie about stats – always have a doc ready to go that shows the source and calculations if anyone asks, particularly in countries like the UK where the Advertising Standards Authority can ask for proof of claims.

Use proof points to build momentum

Proof points are crucial to show you have real impact on metrics that your customers care about.

Don’t just throw anything down on the website – take the time to consider what stats your customers want to improve, and then find the statistics that will help you get in the consideration set and move the deal forward.

Avoid caveated messaging – be clear, simple, and direct. Honest, upfront messaging is alway the best policy.

How are you using proof points in your marketing? Leave a comment and share your thoughts:

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Here’s the truth: In B2B, nobody is going to buy your product randomly.

Unlike B2C, there’s no impulse purchase. There’s no buying on the off-chance it might be useful, something to keep in the back pocket.

Your product is only ever going to be bought when it provides value: that is, it delivers elements the buyer wants which are useful, a priority, and worth the effort (cost/time/energy).

But don’t be disappointed. This is an opportunity to focus – and as regular readers will know, focus + confidence = momentum.

We need to understand the contexts that decide when your buyers recognise their need exists and what propels them through the evaluation process.

We need understand the motivations and triggers that lead your best-fit customers to search for a solution, switch from their status quo, and buy your product.

What are motivations and triggers?

Triggers are stimuli that impact the motivations someone has. Often, these are events that take place that disrupt an equilibrium. In this context, triggers might be things like company funding announcements, career growth, or industry news.

Motivations are the guiding principles which affect the way someone behaves in response to the trigger. There are four types of motivations:

• Positive – positive accolades

• Negative – negative fear

• Intrinsic – internal self-driven

• Extrinsic – external forces

These combine in a really nice matrix that looks like this…

… which shows the four ultimate principles that affect how someone behaves:

• Desire

• Reward

• Threat

• Fear

These principles subconsciously guide your buyers and stakeholders through the purchase journey. And knowing how to use them will help you sell more, sell faster, and better convey the value you’re delivering.

Extracting motivations and triggers

To understand the motivations and triggers that affect your customers, we need to talk with them.

My 19 customer development questions are designed to pull these out through customer research by asking questions like their biggest personal/professional goals, what winning/losing looks like, and how your product would change their life.

We also need to supplement this insight with win/loss interview research, to dig into the exact scenarios that your prospects were walking through when they began the evaluation process.

I then use a simple framework like this, designed to think through the triggers and motivations that drive people to action.

First we consider the lenses that someone can operate through.

• Personal: me, myself and I

• Professional: me at work

• Organizational: work

And then we look at the different timeframes under consideration.

• Immediate pains: self-explanatory; ongoing frustrations

• Short-term: tangible problems that can be solved

• Mid-term: aspirational achievements

• Long-term: visionary undertakings

With each combination, we can think through both the triggers (events and other stimuli) and subsequent motivation (desires, threats, fears, rewards) that drive someone to action.

Using motivations and triggers in marketing/sales

Now, the fun part. We’ve got real evidenced insight from customers, we’ve mapped it to the different lenses/timeframes that our buyers operate in. How do we use this valuable information to help us win more?

Here are a few examples of how you can use triggers and motivations in marketing and sales.

1. Use content marketing to showcase the potential rewards available

2. Drive up the fear and threats at risk through content, using social proof for added evidence

3. Highlight triggers through paid ads and create more trigger opportunities

4. Use influencers and highlight their status to speak to the rewards that can be gained

5. Create an award process to promote intrinsic desires

6. Integrate desires into your positioning, using self-actualization as a value for competitive differentiation

7. Ensure threats and fears are highlighted in your sales pitch: make sure everyone knows what losing looks like

8. Through paid ads, content, and sales outreach, drive up the pain of same

Sell more faster with triggers and motivations

Whether through highlighting the potential rewards, promoting the achievements, or dialling up the fear of failure, it’s important to understand the contexts that your best-fit customers experience and the psychological factors that affect their thought process – and then use them in your marketing/sales.

By focusing on the specific triggers and motivations that cause your customer to take action and influence their behavior, you can take charge of those to sell more, faster.

How are you using triggers and motivations in your marketing and sales? Leave a comment and share your thoughts:

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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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In SaaS, we compete against alternative solutions every day. They might be your mainstream competitors, niche providers, bums-in-seats, agencies, outsourcers, in-house technology, or any other number of categories.

One of the questions I get asked a lot is, where do competitors fit into the positioning process? Shouldn’t we evaluate our competitors and their messaging early on, to make sure we differentiate? But also so we can steal things from them? What are they doing that we should be doing? How do we stand out against them?

However, my belief is that we should reframe the narrative away from competing against providers, to competing for customers. The onus should be on understanding our customer and building the process to win them.

Competitors in the positioning process

The positioning process I’ve developed – that I call Customer-Led Value Positioning – starts with who your customer is.

The reason for this? As we know, the definition of positioning is “to occupy a space in your customer’s mind”. How are you going to do that if you don’t know what else is going on in their head? Key to this is understanding their broader mindspace – their personal, professional, and business responsibilities.

Competitors in positioning become more interesting when you think about the alternative solutions customers use to meet their needs.

In my persona research template, we ask how interviewees have attempted to solve their challenges before. Often, answers to these do include competing products – but sometimes a whole host of other ways people have tried to overcome their pain-points.

By using the alternative solutions your customer is thinking about as a starting point, we’re already focusing on a much more niche and actionable set of insights than just ‘other products in a broad vendor-defined category’.

And then as we go through the positioning process and understand the value our customers are seeking, we look to competitive differentiators. Often, these are features that only we can provide – but as you’ll see in the linked post, the higher up the B2B elements of value pyramid, the more valuable attributes are intangible and experiential.

So if we are:

1. Starting with our customers and the solutions they have in mind

2. Understanding exactly what our customers want

3. Determining how we differentiate with a mixture of tangible and intangible attributes

… then why do we need to think about competitive positioning?

Play offense and defense

At multiple points through the buying journey, our customers make multiple choices that depend if our product will be part of their final evaluation set, where they actively consider our solution against others with a purchase in mind.

But our competitive positioning needs to start way before the evaluation phase. We need to stand out and influence our customer’s thought process, to position our product as a must-have, and others as second-rate solutions.

We can do this through content and through awareness-level tactics, but it needs to be baked into your positioning.

Tip: if you haven’t already, create an eBook on “What to consider when evaluating [category] solutions” right now.

And when we get to the evaluation stage, we need to proactively and reactively message within the competitive context, as well as focusing on the broader customer value and how we meet their tangible needs.

Especially in sales conversations, we need to be playing two games against our competitors all the time:

1. Offense: Proactively detailing where competitors fall down, how we’re better suited to the customer’s needs, and why our value is more important to the customer than that offered by others

2. Defense: Predicting the attacks that competitors might make, explaining the reasoning behind those attacks (whether rooted in reality or in wishful thinking), and reshaping the customer’s idea of what’s important

Competitive messaging

These games need to be played in the language of our customers, in the context of what’s valuable to them – all based on our understanding of their jobs, pains, gains, and triggers, and the resulting value they hope to achieve.

Your top-of-funnel positioning needs to speak directly to the needs of your customer, subconsciously setting the scene to help your potential customers understand the landscape.

This doesn’t mean using phrasing like “the only all-in-one solution”. Can you message that differentiation with more context instead?

This is where unconventional wisdom really comes into play. What is the revelation that only you have foreseen and understood? What elements of value are you uniquely positioned to play and own, and why? What does the customer want to achieve that can only be achieved effectively and successfully when working with you?

Example

I worked with Shipamax, a SaaS machine learning tech startup to update their positioning. We discovered that buyers valued flexibility to run multiple processes with different types of documents through one provider. And that competing solutions were inflexible, requiring a lot of manual setup to process new types of documents. And so we landed on our tagline:

This spoke not only to what the customer valued, but how they differentiated in the market.

Competitive positioning

I think we should move away from a narrow approach to competitors, and embrace a more open approach that focuses on who our customers are, and what they’re trying to achieve.

From there, it’s easier to understand the alternative solutions they might consider so we can proactively position our value and competitive differentiators to influence the customer.

Then, we can play offense and defense against competitors in marketing and sales conversations, and even in how we set and execute product and business strategy.

Let’s stop competing against providers, and compete for customers instead.

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Just as I have before, I think every marketer in the world has had at least one significant failure under their belts.

That might be a product launch that flopped. Feature launches that missed the mark. Messaging and positioning that just didn’t work. The heavy marketing campaign with negative ROI.

In my experience, I think many marketing teams miss a crucial step that the product world has embraced: the need to validate. We work on big projects based on assumptions without thinking how they might perform in the real world.

And then we’re surprised when they flop.

Undeterred, we chalk failures down to misfires. We move onto the next project… and the circle repeats, ad infinitum.

In the product world, John Cutler (who you should follow on Twitter!) designates a product team that work like this to be a ‘feature factory’. These teams are tasked with building features and shipping them without much concern as to whether they actually help solve customer problems.

In the marketing world, I call these kind of teams ‘conveyor belts’.

Conveyor belt marketing teams just take whatever comes down the pipe – like product features, new marketing campaign ideas, messaging, collateral requests – and just run with it.

Ideas, campaigns, launches are just put into the world with best intentions, but weak discipline as to whether they will actually have an impact.

And new tactics, new projects are always coming down the assembly line (from leadership, from product or sales teams) – so any mistakes and missteps are never long-lived enough. We’ll do better with the next one!

Don’t be a conveyor belt marketing team

Please, I implore you. And it’s not too difficult – any teams can start getting better today.

First, start with strategy

What’s your company strategy? What’s your marketing strategy? What are the big questions your marketing team are trying to answer or prove to move the business forward?

It’s surprising how many teams don’t have these in place.

I’m a fan of the Good Strategy, Bad Strategy ‘strategy nugget’. The book is a must-read.

Three steps to develop strategy:

1. A clear diagnosis of your current situation and context: you need to know where you’re coming from to determine where you’re going to go

2. Principles that will guide you through the next phase of execution and learning: key word is ‘principles’: a truth or proposition that you hold beliefs in

3. Aligned tactics that detail ways in which the principles will be applied to the situation: the steps you will take to move forward

As the book details, many teams think strategy is a declaration of the goals they will achieve. That is not strategy.

Then, link tactics to goals to strategy

OKRs!

You do need to set goals that get you close to achieving your strategy. And then you need to align those tactics underneath so you can measure them accurately.

Sometimes, it’s not possible to link some work to discrete metrics. Product marketing, is notoriously difficult to measure although somewhat possible by looking at the first-, second-, and even third-order impacts of work. For example, working to improve product messaging will hopefully make website conversions increase, improve sales outbound response rates, and reduce sales cycle times.

Don’t forget to validate

Validation does not always mean long, drawn-out tests to check if something works!

Validation can be quick and simple. Use your internal teams (preferably with a wide range of people) to check what‘s missing, what’s incorrect, and what could be better. Throwing something in front of a few friendly customers might be enough.

When validating, I try to see if the idea and then the execution is heading in the right direction to ensure the objective will be met.

For example creating buyer personas – these will be mostly used by the sales and marketing team – so share them with a few internal people to see if they are useful and helpful ways to think about the market.

To test positioning and messaging, test in PPC ads and landing pages or with sales outbound teams to see if it will be more resonant with your customers.

The biggest tip I can offer is… don’t actually build before you need to. This post from Strategyzer is one I revisit regularly. If you can validate and learn something before building, then try to do it as quickly and efficiently as possible.

That might mean:

• Regularly created PDF one-pagers to test with audiences as you work through a messaging project, rather than a big-bang launch

• A landing page and PPC ads, rather than a big PR push

• ‘Wizard of Oz-ing’ a potential new service before you invest in building product features

• Blog posts and quick surveys to test engagement, rather than a huge research report

Lastly, review and communicate

Hold regular retrospectives: what worked well and what didn’t? What actions and improvements should we think about next time?

Share what you’ve learnt within your wider teams and help build a wider collective consciousness of decisions, learnings, and understanding of how your customers and other stakeholders react and function.

And refresh your strategy as you learn more. Strategy is not a set-and-forget exercise – it should evolve as you learn more about your customers, market, and your executional capabilities.

Don’t be a conveyor belt marketing team

If you’re stuck deep into a conveyor belt way of working, change won’t happen overnight – but even the smallest changes can make a big difference.

If you’re struggling to make improvements, try these small steps:

• Strategy – for a project, set out a quick diagnosis and share your principles for moving forward

• Goals – look for a simple measure of success that isn’t delivered or not delivered, but a metric that can be monitored and improved, and work collaboratively with those directly responsible

• Validate – get some customer input into an idea before executing; I guarantee you’ll leave with better ideas than when you started

• Communicate – don’t finish a project and forget about it; revisit in 4-6 weeks and see how it was received, the results, and ask others for their opinion

Once you can free yourself from a conveyor-belt way of working, you’ll be more empowered, more strategic, and deliver better results. Good luck!

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Inbound marketing. Robotic process automation. Customer success. Conversational marketing. Revenue intelligence.

We’ve all heard these categories bounce around, coined by their relevant organizations. Building a category is sexy: take the Play Bigger book, Drift’s meteoric rise in the B2B SaaS discourse, and Andy Raskin’s narrative work as proof.

But most startups worry too much about defining the category they’ll create and eventually win in time, and not enough time thinking about the frame of reference that will give them the upper-hand right now.

What’s the difference?

• A category is about coining the ‘new game’ that the ‘winners’ are able to play, that ‘losers’ aren’t.

• A frame of reference is the perspective through which a product is positioned

A product can be in a category and have a frame of reference. Hubspot is a marketing automation platform (frame) in the inbound marketing category.

I think early-stage startups can deliver better, quicker results by nailing their frame of reference, instead of contemplating their category design journey.

Focus on your frame of reference

April Dunford’s book explains how a frame of reference works with a great example.

Imagine a muffin made from the healthiest ingredients you can find: nuts, wholemeal grains, and all the quinoa/acai/superfoods you can imagine. Let’s call it a diet muffin.

Now imagine two customers:

1. A young bodybuilder really into their fitness who meticulously plans every meal

2. A busy middle-aged mum on the go

Both are equally as likely to buy the product – it’s tasty, nutritious, and can help them with their goals and meets their jobs to be done.

But do you think the bodybuilder is likely to buy ‘a diet muffin’? Or are they more likely to purchase a ‘paleo energy snack’?

Conversely – is a busy mum going to feel like a ‘paleo energy snack’ is what she needs? Or does a ‘diet muffin’ resonate much more with her?

How to determine your frame of reference

There are many elements that can determine or influence the frame of reference you use:

• Who your customer is

• What they search for

• What they think they want

• Market trends

• Competitors, their capabilities and their frames of reference

• Analyst research

Here are some tips on how to deduce the most accurate and potentially successful frame of reference for your product.

1. Don’t be obsessed with creating a category

For the majority of startups, it’s highly unlikely you need to create a category in the first place. At least right now.

April Dunford suggests there are three ways to ‘win’ a frame of reference:

1. Head to head: position to win an existing market

2. Big fish, small pond: position to win a subsegment of existing market

3. Create a new game: position to win a category you create

Remember, a market is a group of similar customers with similar characteristics that are looking to solve a similar problem. Markets are not defined by vendors – they are defined by the customer.

If you are competing directly for a customer, go head to head or look to win a niche part of the market. These strategies don’t require the effort involved to design and launch and market a category – you can ride the coattails of a defined market frame of reference already.

If you definitely want and need to own a category, check out my short post on category design.

2. Know your customer

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times.

The literal definition of positioning is “to occupy a space in the mind of the customer”. It is absolutely crucial to understand what else is going on for them, so we can identify the space we can own.

Look beyond the immediate problem area you are solving. Look to the key jobs, pains, gains, and triggers that your personas and stakeholders have. What are their aspirations? What do they really struggle with? What are they accountable for?

Remember, buyer personas are discovered – not created. Talk to your customers and learn not just who they are, but what makes them tick.

3. Focus on value

Value are elements that your customer wants to attain that is useful, worth the effort (cost, time, energy), and urgent.

Let’s use the diet muffin example above.

• A bodybuilder does not value diet foods that will help them lose weight. But a bodybuilder does value food that provides increased energy with minimal health impact.

• The mum does not value the nutritional benefits of paleo food… but does appreciate a healthy, nutritious snack she can eat whilst out-and-about.

Same product, different value for different customers.

Tune out the tactical and biased internal voices clouding your value messaging judgement, and instead rely on what comes out of your customer’s mouth. Adapt your messaging to their interpretation and beliefs – don’t force your internal product narrative on them.

Even successful category creation relies on the same principles. Category creation must recognize, name, and define an emerging belief and practice that already exists. Gainsight recognized the customer success approach, and coined it. Drift did the same with conversational marketing… but may not be so successful with its new ‘revenue acceleration’ approach.

Nothing lasts forever

We’re not writing the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy; the answer to life, the universe, and everything cannot be summed up in two digits.

As you learn more about your customer and the market, and as your product and competitors adapt, your frame of reference is going to evolve. Today you might be an ecommerce customer service helpdesk; tomorrow, a DTC customer happiness solution.

Revisit your positioning regularly – every six months. Test and iterate with your ear to the ground – don’t just make big internal assumptions. Be led by your customers.

The goal of defining the frame of reference for your product – whether entering an existing category or designing a new one – is to build momentum. A successful frame of reference allows you to focus your message for an audience, and build confidence in your execution.

And, if you’re a regular reader you’ll know that focus + confidence = momentum.

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Nearly every first-time founder I’ve worked with believes their new product is a total gamechanger, a completely new, never-been-done-before innovation that’s going to create a category and spark a new market.

But when I work with second-time founders or career CEOs, their new products are nearly always positioned as a step-change to an existing category.

When we look at new products, new categories, or new methodologies that pop up every day, they could all have exponential potential to change your customers life.

But introducing them as truly revolutionary isn’t always the best approach.

The California Roll

In this article, Nir Eyal talks about how Japanese restaurants introduced sushi to the American public in the 1970’s. In a market where fish was cooked, not raw, and seaweed was strictly something found on a beach and not eaten, how could they convince consumers to try something completely foreign to them?

The answer? The California Roll. Rice, avocado, cucumber, sesame seeds, and crab meat – with a small sliver of nori seaweed holding it together.

In a perfect example of new product innovation, sushi restaurateurs combined an existing product concept with the taste preferences of a new market – reducing barriers to entry and serving as an entry point into the world of sushi.

But early-stage first-time founders usually don’t want to create and sell a California roll – it’s not as exciting.

Instead, they create their own version of fugu: confusing, weird, off-putting, even dangerous.

In these scenarios, at a minimum you risk confusing potential customers and failing. At worst, you alienate them and get a bad reputation.

In B2B SaaS however, most likely prospects probably just won’t believe what you’re selling can help them.

Surely, if they have a discrete problem, then they need a tool that solves that – not something completely new that helps them achieve something they’ve never experienced?

So how do you create a narrative that blends ingenuity and innovation with familiarity and comfort? By designing your product pitch around the concept of evolution, not revolution.

Andy Raskin has posted before about how category creation must be based on a new game that your customers see others playing – not just assumptions or wishful thinking.

Instead of a complete revolution to an existing market, can you create and test a narrative around your product as an evolution of an existing process, category, or belief system?

Anchoring

Hubspot did this with inbound marketing: the old way doesn’t work, the new way does. Zuora did this with the subscription economy: people don’t want to buy anymore, they want to rent. Drift did this with conversational marketing: people don’t want to fill out forms, they want to talk to companies.

By anchoring to existing formats, you’re reducing the cognitive load on the customer. You’re connecting the dots for them, rather than hoping they’ll make the connection themselves.

Educate on life with and life without

Can you help prospects understand where they are today – what they’re missing out on, what their real expenses are, and where their problems will be if they don’t fix something?

And can you present an example of where they could be – their gains achieved, pains solved, costs reduced, money made, free of problems and worries?

Andy Raskin calls this the promised land – the state your customer will exist in after they have made their journey. This is never just as simple as a problem solved – it’s a new way of being.

Monsters

When presenting an evolution message, how do you make sure that people can only get there with you? By promoting the monsters and enemies that prevent prospects from achieving their promised land.

This might be anything from the existing processes they work with, their organization’s change environment, and the systems they use, to the beliefs they have. Limitations, boundaries, blockers – find the most effective narrative that helps prospects who want to improve realize they are incapable of doing so without you.

NIHITO

Nothing important happens in the office.

You might have your finger on the pulse, have all the relevant domain experience, and be super tuned into the market – but still miss out on potential interesting angles because of your bias.

It’s crucial get out of your head and into the mind of your customer. Positioning by assumption doesn’t work. Learning from your customers does.

Evolution is the natural selection of what works

We know enough about evolution from biology to know that natural selection rewards those who test, who adapt, who build on top of existing concepts.

An evolutionary narrative doesn’t restrict you from innovation or experimenting – but it does require you always think back to your customer’s view of the world, and how to bring them along the journey.

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One of my favorite Peloton instructors often talks about the concept of the shit shift.

It’s that moment when you’re in a run, or in a hard climb on the bike, or a testing yoga position, and you’re asking your body to do something it’s not used to.

For the first few minutes of it, it feels like torture. Your amygdala hijacks your inner voice. The fight-or-flight response is activated.

“I could just give up now… what if I slow down? Today’s not a race day…”.

And then something magical happens.

But of course, it’s not magical. It’s not supernatural, nor forced, nor a conscious decision. Your body just… happens.

It ‘does’. It acclimates. It’s still hard… but you can cope. You’re not in a state of flow, but your body knows to keep pushing. The fight-or-flight feeling dissipates.

There’s more space in your head for your consciousness to be heard. You realize that you are doing. You are doing something that you were going to give up on.

With each step, each push, each breath, you become more confident. More determined.

The determination comes from deep in your chest. It’s aching and heaving and moving you forward.

You have momentum, and you’re not stopping anytime soon.

I think the shit shift is an interesting analogy for the work we do in B2B SaaS, product marketing, sales… and why I talk about the need to build confidence in your positioning, messaging, go-to-market.

Without confidence – a belief you have faith in – it’s much easier to give up and give in. But there’s no ape brain sending fight-or-flight signals – it’s all conscious thought processing, which makes it feel 10x worse.

Confidence is not just sales or revenue. It’s positive reactions to marketing content. It’s the conversation where a prospect repeats your messaging back to you. It’s the CEO praising your team’s execution. It’s customer emails with happy quotes.

In early stage startups, confidence can be a hard thing to come across. The challenge of failing to find product/market fit, or a final ‘no’ to your biggest deal can kill confidence.

But… can you position the process as a shit shift?

Where the work is still hard and you may be teetering on the edge of success or failure, but the work is happening.

Where there is space for the conscience to be heard. This is the need for both definitions of focus: reduced priorities, maximum clarity.

Where each step, each push, builds confidence.

Focus plus confidence equals momentum.

Thanks for reading this slightly different post from me! 

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What makes you different compared to competitors?

You’ve probably been asked this question before, and answered with something similar to the below:

• Our product is our differentiator.

• No, actually, our people are our competitive differentiation.

• Our pricing: economies of scale make us cheaper whilst providing the same service.

• Customers love our design-led ethos, that makes us stand out.

But, is it really?

If you workshopped your competitive differentiator internally, relied on biased interpretations of competitor strengths and weaknesses from your team, then… honestly? I’d say you don’t know the real answer.

What is a differentiator?

Definition: something that enables a difference or distinction to be made.

In the context of B2B SaaS, a differentiator is an element of your product, service, worldview, or other method that positions you away from competitors in some aspect.

Often, marketers and founders early in the journey will rely on objective differentiation: the product, the service, the performance, the economic value – or my pet peeve, configurability.

Standout SaaS companies, especially those that grow faster, understand earlier on that what makes them distinct is not something that can be shown or demonstrated or modelled – but it’s something the customer can believe in… something they can buy into.

Think about category creation – it’s not about naming a new type of product, but about naming a new game people are playing.

The B2B Elements of Value Pyramid

This diagram, created by Bain, extends Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to order the motivations of B2B buyers. Read more about the pyramid here.

The base begins with table stake, basic requirements, and functional value like the product or the price.

As we go up the pyramid, elements of value become less tangible and more about the implication of using the product – first within the organization, then what matters to the individual buyer.

The pyramid tops out with purpose – hope, vision, and social responsibility. Here, differentiators aim to align the vendor with the buyer’s cultural and ethical worldview.

Think about some SaaS products you know. Take Drift:

• Yes, there is functional product value.

• The product delivers high impact implications to the organizations.

• It allows individual buyers to signal their innovation and become more marketable themselves in the job market.

• They build community and a category through their vision of transforming the way companies connect with their customers.

• They offer a bright spark of hope in an otherwise grey sea of same-same, from their tone of voice to their visual brand to their events to their product launches.

Discovering your differentiators

Notice I said discover your differentiators, not define them.

Many marketers I know don’t know about the different elements of value above and therefore struggle to determine what their competitive differentiators might be.

But they’re also usually looking inward to find the answers.

NIHITO: Nothing Important Happens In The Office – Pragmatic Marketing

The best way to understand why you are different in the market is to look to your customers and others in the market.

Follow the questions in my customer development framework, and ask them to your customers, friendly experts, and non-affiliated other buyers in the market. Ask your competitor’s customers too.

From here, you’ll be able to define your personas: their jobs, pains, gains, and triggers. This forms the basis of the value your customers desire. From there, discovering your differentiators is simple. What value are your customers wanting that they can’t get elsewhere?

Maybe they are super price sensitive, so price is a distinction – or your product is a 100% fit for their needs.

But it’s more likely that you’ll best differentiate when you can meet higher-level needs as well. Help an organization deliver on qualitative goals. Allow the buyer to become more marketable. Set a vision that buyers can literally buy into.

And there will be more than one differentiator, more than one element of value that you’re meeting. See the Drift example above. So make sure to prioritize them in a way that aligns with your persona’s triggers, their motivations for searching, switching, or buying.

As an example, at Headstart our personas were radically progressive, so we prioritized our ethos and vision. We still promoted the economic benefits and savings, but led with the heart, and followed with the brain.

What’s your competitive differentiator?

Next time, don’t just wing it. Look to your customers and prospects to understand why you matter to them.

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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.

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If there’s one thing I tell everyone, it’s that it’s much more valuable to be ‘the thing for someone’. Niches for riches.

But look around many SaaS websites, and it’s obvious they haven’t learnt the lesson yet. They’re trying to be something for everyone.

This is often a goal for early-stage founders and sales leaders.

“We can sell to everyone!”

“Our market is everyone who’s ever had this problem!”

And yet… it never quite works out.

Spreading focus too thin, and trying to be something for everyone, has a slim chance of success. It also has a high probability of negative impact.

Your value proposition becomes muddied, as your external positioning confuses both ends of the market.

Marketing can’t quite deliver. Either there aren’t enough leads, they’re not the right type, or CAC is too high, or LTV is too low.

Sales resources become stretched and inertia sets in. In my experience, most sales reps want to sell bigger and bigger deals, so they neglect smaller prospects. But reps become dissatisfied with the lack of momentum from bigger prospects. And then they flip-flop back and forth, aimlessly without a sales plan.

Product teams fight: priorities compete, sales asks win, and customer advocacy takes a hit.

Pricing becomes a mess. You’re either priced too cheap and therefore leaving tons of cash on the table. Or, you’re too expensive, losing out on a big chunk of low-effort high-reward revenue.

Internal discussions go on for ages about whether to remove pricing on the website. When sales win the argument to remove prices, you see an increase in tweets and complaints that you’re losing out on business.

Culture flails between the inevitable struggle as hires from both scrappy self-service startups and the enterprise SaaS world butt heads with each other.

Good go-to-market should discriminate

If to discriminate is to “make a distinction in the treatment of different categories”, that’s what your go-to-market should do.

Disqualification is much more important than qualification.

The way you go-to-market should disquality bad-fit prospects out. They should – politely – be discouraged from moving forward from the moment they land on your website or engage with your sales reps.

Of course, you don’t want to scar them for life; they might be the next big market you move into. But today, say ‘thanks, but no thanks’.

Meanwhile, your ideal customers should be welcomed with an experience tailor made for them. Roll out the red carpet and make the whole experience effortless for them from the first click.

Make sure these components are aligned

Pay attention to these components, to sanity-check how focused your GTM is for today’s ideal customers:

Positioning and messaging

Know your customer. Extract their jobs, pains, gains, and triggers. Understand the value your product can deliver for them – and build your messaging around it.

Everything from the phrasing in your ads and headline on the homepage, to the illustrations on your website and the customer logos you choose to promote, matter.

Buyer journey

It’s not as simple as self-service vs inside sales. Buyers will have many different needs and questions based on their company stage, maturity, and change environment.

What should your meeting decks look like? Do they expect to receive send-over decks too? What about PDF one-pagers?

And onboarding: should it be a white-glove service, or should it be self-activation with lots of educational content?

Pricing

Do potential customers need to know the prices before they sign up or request a demo, or is price not the most important factor?

What’s the right value metric: number of seats, utilization, or a flat platform fee?

What’s the number that’s borderline expensive, but at which they would still consider?

Customer support expectations

In my experience, this is the biggest indicator of whether your GTM is working as expected (although, customer support is often neglected in GTM planning).

Is your customer success program set up and aligned with the types of customers you’re bringing onboard?

Are you focusing on self-service content and in-product chat, or are you providing 1 customer success manager for every 10 customers? Do you deliver personalized QBRs on how to maximize adoption and results, or do you just send new feature emails to your product admins?

GTM evolves, but be considerate about it

As you grow and learn more, it’s natural that your go-to-market will evolve along with your customers and the market opportunity. Some businesses will find themselves being pulled upmarket by bigger customers – others will try to force a change.

Especially if you have aggressive funding, you rightly have the space and opportunity to explore multiple GTM motions – just make sure that your choices are considered, and decisions made with aligned tactics and execution.

But at the early stage, trying to be something for everyone risks spreading your focus too thin.

And in this community, we know that a tight focus + increasing confidence = building momentum.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

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Let’s say your business is really good at tracking who you compete against.

Each deal tracks an ‘incumbent solution’ field, a ‘competing against’ field, and when you lose to one of them, that’s captured in your win/loss accordingly. From this data, you have a pretty good idea of who your biggest competitors are.

Your battlecards are updated with the necessary information that help sales reps to guide competitive conversations (and win):

• Strengths

• Weaknesses

• Opportunities

• Threats

• Offensive attack

• Defensive attack

• Anecdotes

• Win stories

Altogether, you have a pretty good idea of how to beat your top three competitors.

Except… are they actually your biggest competition?

Look to the top of the funnel

The top of the funnel stage – attraction, awareness, or whatever funnel design you subscribe to – is often ignored as a source of competitive insight and focus.

It’s much easier to prevent losses later in the funnel than it is to widen the pool of potential wins, isn’t it? Not always.

There’s a pool of prospects and potential customers that engage with you at the top of the funnel. That pool is n big.

There’s also an ocean of prospects and potential customers that don’t engage with you. That ocean is potentially n¹⁰ big.

Your actual competitors…

That ocean of potential customers are all solving their problems with an existing alternative solution, or sourcing new ones.

Here are some examples of different alternative solutions that you may want to consider as key competitors.

Niche solutions

You might be a horizontal email marketing platform. But I bet there’s also a vertical email platform for DTC commerce brands between $5-10m revenue for teams focused on building community that integrates directly into their little-known ecommerce platform technology.

How are you going to get in front of them and convince them you’re the better partner?

Existing vendors

Not the same as any of the above – these might be existing software providers that currently solve problems for another department, team, or business unit. But with the land-and-expand tactic as one of the most prevalent ways to grow SaaS revenue, you can bet that existing vendors are trying to get in front of your buyer stakeholders.

And what’s more, they’re already approved, trusted, and have internal champions already in your business. How are you going to discover those opportunities exist, let alone beat procurement?

Agencies/outsourcing

Potential prospects might just be outsourcing everything to an agency. Agencies exist for everything, from total ownership of email marketing and project management, to recruiting, product engineering, and sales.

How are you going to convince a prospect to ditch and agency and bring the process something in-house?

Freelancers and contractors

Some businesses will bring in niche freelancers and contractors for executional expertise they don’t have in-house; for example, diversity recruiting, deployment processes, or ecommerce merchandising. It’s easier, less risk, and a faster time-to-ramp.

Can you compete against a playbook – or help those with the playbook work smarter instead?

Consultants

The 2020s will see huge growth in the ‘fractional CxO’ model.

When organizations have the executional resources but lack the strategic expertise, they look to consultants. These might be traditional large full-service organizations, or experts that have gone it alone to offer ‘fractional’ executive time.

How will you compete against consultants already in-situ, as well as those where consultants may be offering to run the show? And even further: can you convince consultants to bring you in to their clients?

People power

‘Hiring more people’ is always an option, and sometimes just expected for companies facing specific challenges around volume and throughput. When expertise is not required, only raw manhours and energy, some organizations won’t be used to solving solutions in any other way.

How do you a) get in front of those people, b) convince them there’s a different way, c) build trust and change their mindset?

In-house tech solutions

I bet every SaaS business has at least one example where a developer in a prospect’s business has said “We could build that in a week”. Obviously, they fail – but there are so many businesses out there with their own home-grown solutions that manage everything from small repetitive tasks to huge, critical parts of their business operations.

Can you overcome those objections and provide a solution that works for them and their needs?

Set yourself up to beat TOFU competitors

In terms of process, it’s exactly the same. Understand your customer, understand your competitive landscape, define your positioning, and execute with focus.

Positioning becomes even more important against TOFU competitors. How do you stand for something? How do you bring unconventional wisdom to the narrative? How do you promote your unique value?

When you can do this effectively, you’ll build a bigger top-of-funnel pool, win more clients, and build momentum.

The post Your biggest competitor is not who you think it is appeared first on Building Momentum.

If I see the “buyers are x% through their journey before they talk with you” stat one more time…. *shakes fist*.

But yes, the concept stands. The power is in the buyer’s hands. Caveat emptor stands no more.

Buyers request meetings knowing more about your product, your competitors, and the market landscape than ever before.

So how do you stand out, challenge preconceptions, and persuade them that you have the best solution for them?

Your unconventional wisdom

Presenting unconventional wisdom is a core part of many story-driven sales narrative frameworks:

• Andy Raskin’s ‘world change’ and ‘enemy’

• Gartner’s ‘sense-making’ framework

• The Challenger Sale ‘reframe’

Introducing a unique insight that goes against commonly-accepted knowledge has a number of goals:

1. To position your company and product as an innovator

2. To differentiate from competitors by reframing the problem and value to be achieved

3. To create excitement and motivation or fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) with the prospect

But often, these insights don’t perform as expected.

Instead of unique wisdom that shifts the narrative… we get a generic, dull, and obvious rehashing of the world we already know.

‘Competitive’ product capabilities are retold with macro-level sprinkles of ‘customers expect more’ or ‘technology has changed’ thrown in for good measure.

So what makes unconventional wisdom… unconventional?

Unconventional wisdom that wins

I posit there are three elements that make your unconventional wisdom / world change / sense-making strategy / reframe really pop, and get you the results you want.

1. It’s staring them in the face

Sometimes, your customer can’t see the forest for the trees. They’re so close to their immediate, tangible problems to be solved that they are blind to… or choosing to ignore.

Right now, they’re standing at a forked path in the woods; one way leads to heaven, the other to hell. Can you help them zoom out and see the the bigger picture?

Take Drift’s earlier unconventional wisdom: forms suck. Of course! How could we not see that before?!

2. It’s a rational statement that drives an emotional response

Just like the Drift example above, you can feel the exasperation.

Good nuggets of unconventional wisdom will be a purely rational statement, based on fact and truth and natural laws.

But they’ll tug at the heartstrings, make you feel dumb, or galvanize your ambition.

Here’s an example:

This is the story of Nina – a young woman who grew up in a working-class family from a dodgy part of London. She went to school that was in measures for low performance. She received free school meals as a result of a low family income. She worked at a supermarket part-time to put herself through a good university, even after receiving education grants. She received a good grade, and applied for a graduate role in your company.

But so did Thomas, an Eton student from Surrey who interned at Goldman Sachs and received the same grade from the same university.

If you were the recruiter with both resumes on your desk… who would you put forward: Thomas or Nina? Be honest.

On paper, Thomas is the best candidate. In reality, Nina has shown more grit, determination, and ability. But the recruiting screening process isn’t designed to spotlight people’s potential.

Telling a story like this with an emotional edge takes a conventional situation, causes people to look inwards and ask themselves the hard questions.

3. It’s a blocker to their aspirations and ambitions

Telling someone they’re not going to achieve their goal is a surefire way to either get an attentive audience, or get ignored.

When you can back this up with proof, you’ll be able to point out the mistakes and missteps before they’re made. These need to be grounded in reality, and you need to have a solid path to help them overcome these new hidden barriers, and get them to success.

Hubspot’s inbound marketing narrative did this well. Outbound marketing was making lead generation more expensive and less effective – you’re not going to meet your revenue and growth without change.

Strong unconventional wisdom blames the game, not the tools

When you’re bringing in an unconventional wisdom narrative element, make sure it’s not telling them they’re stupid. Instead, help them make sense of the world – it’s not their fault.

There is something happening – to their buyers, to their market, to their organization – that is causing them stress and pain. Not only will you let them in on the secret that nobody else knows… you have the key to fix their challenges too.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

The post Unconventional wisdom in positioning narratives appeared first on Building Momentum.

I’ve written before about how sales decks are more than just a presentation to be talked over.

Instead, your sales deck is a prop.

When sales reps use it as a conversation starter, they’ll be able to engage, learn from, and persuade the prospect.

But to do that, you need to encourage your team to ask questions, listen, and use that to frame or reframe your product in the best light.

In this post, I’m going to walk through a sales deck I created in a previous role, along with the the framing used by sales reps and the questions asked throughout to keep the conversation on track.

Recap: SPIN questioning

We trained sales reps to use the SPIN framework to navigate the conversation.

• Situation: how they are doing something today

• Problem: the challenge that arises

• Implication: the impact of their incumbent solution

• Need-Payoff/Value: the impact that a new solution that solves the challenge would deliver

In the case of a demo, we would ideally be armed with enough information from the discovery call to know the prospects top three challenges. This would provide enough framing for the call from the get-go.

Example: Kayako sales deck

This deck was used as the Kayako sales demo deck from our relaunch in 2016, where I led go-to-market strategy and execution, including positioning, messaging, customer development, inbound marketing, and sales strategy/enablement. Check out this post for more context on our relaunch.

Kayako is customer service software that helps businesses to deliver effortless customer service across live chat, email, support portals, and social media. It was acquired by ESW Capital in March 2018.

For context, this deck was used in the sales demo meeting stage. It followed a discovery call by an SDR, who would check for BANT qualification and discover the motivations behind searching/switching for a new solution. All leads were inbound trials; they had signed up for a free trial.

Slide 1: Framing

The title of this slide would be changed to one of three of our core value drivers (see slide 5 below), depending on which was deduced as the most relevant from the discovery call.

Goal: Make a memorable impression and hold space in the customers mind for the call

Talk track: Introduce Kayako and detail our goal – in this case, to help organizations grow personal customer relationships.

Questions:

• Clear up anything not gained from the discovery call

• Ask about their day, any big projects they were working on, etc.

Slide 2: Agenda

Taking a moment to set the scene allowed us to align on the outcome of the call and make sure it met everyone’s needs.

The rep would introduce themselves and their experience helping similar companies, before asking for brief intros from everyone else on the call. This would help the sales rep adjust their talk track accordingly.

Goal: Set the scene for the call

Talk track: Introduce today’s agenda, ask if there’s anything else the prospect would like to get out of this call, introduce the rep, and learn more about who’s on the call.

Questions:

• Who do we have on the call today?

• I’m going to walk through … Is there anything else you’d like to cover today?

Slide 3: Challenges

We understood our market – mostly eCommerce retailers and SaaS businesses – pretty well. Presenting our interpretation of the challenges they were facing were our stake in the ground. Customers would engage with these and agree – in which case, we were going to be a good fit. If they didn’t engage or find some connection with these, they were going to be a bad fit. We would be transparent about this upfront – disqualification is even more important than qualification in SMB sales.

Goal: Present our insight, gain alignment

Talk track: Top challenges we understand organizations like yours to be facing, learn about their specific challenges

Questions:

• From our [discovery] call the other day, you mentioned that [problem] is a challenge, can you tell me more

• How do these fit with the challenges you’re facing, is there any similarity?

• Focus on specific challenge, e.g. How have your customer’s expectations around support changed over the last few years? / Are you finding more customers contact you multiple times across channels to get support? / Have you found it difficult to make decisions based on data because of [situation]?

Slide 4: Go on the offensive

We competed strongly on our belief that the way customer service has been done – the old game – is a point of failure. The only way to be successful is to understand your customer as as whole, not just their support tickets. By presenting a ‘life without/life with’ illustration, we were able to make our philosophy more tangible and make a clear case.

Goal: Attack competitor viewpoint, detail our philosophy and how we are uniquely placed to deliver this

Talk track: The illustration on the left is typical of almost every other customer service tool out there. Every customer query becomes nothing more than a ticket number, it’s impersonal, there’s tons of unhelpful information that agents have to tackle before they even get to the request. We think this is wrong. Kayako makes customer service personal, creating a single timeline for your customer’s requests and their customer journey across all interactions with you.

Questions:

• How are you finding [current platform]?

• Where are you in trials with other competitors? What are your thoughts on them?

• What are you doing today to understand your customer and provide personal support experiences?

• What challenges arise from not being able to understand the customer journey?

• If you could, what do you think would change?

Slide 5: Present our value

As a result of the challenges we understood from the market, plus additional framing from the demo call so far, this slide was our opportunity to present our solution’s core value drivers.

Reps would link these back to stories they’ve heard from the prospect in the call, or from case studies. For example when talking about supporting customers as a team, they would share a quick anecdote on how Company X has been able to cut resolution time in half by allowing non-support staff to collaborate on conversations.

Goal: Reiterate our three core value drivers, double-down on the most relevant points based on understanding so far, link to demo

Talk track: With our personal customer experience philosophy and the challenges we discussed, we built Kayako to ensure you can stay personal as you grow and scale, work together as a team to provide the highest level of quality support, and have all the data you need to truly understand your customer.

Questions:

• So far, what do these mean to you? How do these resonate with what you’re hoping to achieve with your customer support platform?

• Based on our conversation so far, I’d say that Y is the most pressing for you right now, is that fair?

• In the demo coming up, I’m going to run through the core ways we help you achieve these goals. Is there anything else that I should focus on?

Slide 6: It’s demo time

Our standard product demo would be split into three sections, showing how our product helps overcome the top three challenges and any others the prospect has raised. Sales reps were given a crib sheet to follow with key steps and key points to follow, using the value nugget format to show how intangible value was formed of tangible benefits, delivered by product features.

Product demos would not involve clicking through each button or page, or showing an complicated workflow. These would be covered in a follow up pre-sales meeting, if required at all. The aim of this demo is to provide enough tangible insight into what working in the product is like.

Goal: Showcase exactly how the Kayako product helps deliver those three values, plus other areas of interest to the prospect

Questions:

• SPIN questioning would be used throughout, asking prospects to explain the situation, problem, implication, and needs-payoff/value for core, relevant challenges

For example:

• 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 [find value].”

Slide 7: Social proof

Based on signals picked up during the conversation, as well as anything from the discovery call, sales reps could reactively or proactively tackle any objections at this point with framing that imbued trust, scalability, and social proof.

Reps would use the Feel/Felt/Found, Priorities, Justification, or Proactive approaches to objection handling, making sure to move the conversation forward.

Goal: Combat objections

Talk track: Kayako is trusted by organizations of all sizes to deliver personal customer support, used by over 130,000 support pros. [Combat objections].

Slide 8: Finish on a success story

After tackling any objections, we wanted to leave a positive impression and have one last push at persuading further engagement. By presenting a quick case study – often navigating to the prospect’s support portal to show the product in action – we were able to create some FOMO, ground the product in a physical form, and offer relevant anecdotes on how similar customers have achieved the same kind of outcomes the prospect is looking for.

Goal: Showcase a relevant success story, leave a positive lasting impression

Talk track: I hope today’s session has given you a taste of how Kayako can help you provide effortless customer service. Before we finish up, I just wanted to offer a quick example of how a similar company is using Kayako and seeing great results. [expand]

Slide 9: Push it forward

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. We used this as a way to learn what the prospect’s buying process would be so we could prioritize or deprioritize accordingly. We aimed to galvanize the conversation, using what we knew about their challenges or sometimes offering deadlines to create urgency and momentum.

Goal: Understand the prospect buying process and build momentum

Talk track: So this is the process that customers follow with us to get up-and-running really quickly, often from start to finish within four weeks. After today’s call, your trial now has 14 days left. Once you’ve made your selection and agreed terms, we’ll help you out with onboarding before going live. You’ll also get expert ongoing support from our success team to help you make the most and help you [overcome biggest challenge].

Questions:

• “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?”

Tips: how to use your sales deck as a conversation starter

• Use and train reps with the SPIN question format to dig from situation to value in real-time

• Go light on text

• Challenge – offer some type of contentious, unconventional wisdom

Lastly, remember; there is no single sales deck. Make sure you’ve understood the buyer journey to determine exactly what the buyer – and your business – need from each meeting in the sales process.

Thanks for reading! Let’s connect on Twitter and LinkedIn, and let me know what you thought.

The post Using sales decks as a conversation tool appeared first on Building Momentum.

Do you know the story of how Xerox went from selling printers to selling improved student performance?

It’s a masterclass in the switch from selling features to selling value.

A summary:

• Xerox were struggling to sell their premium products in the K12 education sector

• Sales reps and marketers focused on technical features and benefits; more vibrant colors, the latest tech, and less waste

• But their customers still bought on price, often in a competitive bid situation

• They knew they needed to change the story using customer insights

• After surveying customers, they found that their buyers were focused on outcomes that increase student performance

• After further research and creative thinking, they arrived at a compelling value proposition: color printouts help students perform better in school

• They surveyed customers and students to back this claim up with data: 77% said color helped them focus and remember things better

• Rather than selling technical features, their reps could sell a solution to a critical challenge

• Rather than competing on price, their reps are able to have high-urgency, non-competitive conversations with buyers who are motivated to pay a premium

Want to learn more? Read The Challenger Customer or check out this recap.

The Xerox example presents two interesting takeaways for B2B SaaS companies.

Firstly, Xerox found success when they changed their narrative away from technical features and solutions to helping customers achieve value.

Remember what value is?

A value is an element that your customer wants to attain that:

Read more: What is value?

And secondly, they didn’t just lead with a marketing message – they linked the value they delivered, through to product benefits, through to features, and backed it up with proof points.

I call this hierarchy a value nugget.

A value nugget is a way to package up your product features and benefits, while providing a clear hierarchy to navigate effortlessly in sales conversations and marketing.

A value nugget is comprised of:

You can move through the value nugget by asking ‘why’ and ‘how’. This makes it easier to train a narrative and talk track that can be navigated in real-time.

Read more: Crafting strong messaging with value nuggets

Value nugget teardown

I wanted to give a quick example of how a value nugget can be used to provide the basis for strong messaging.

I’ve extracted different elements from Xerox’s latest K12 Education datasheet and transposed them into the value nugget framework. I’ve tried to distill elements using closely-located copy from the datasheet to show the relationships between the value that’s being communicated through to the proof-points being used.

Here, we’re looking at two distinct values:

1. Broadening the spectrum of learning in the classroom

2. Provide the best possible educational experiences while managing year-over-year budget pressures

Let’s take the second example and use the ‘how’ method to travel down the elements.

Moving down by asking ‘how’:

• We help K12 educators to provide the best possible educational experiences while managing year-over-year budget pressures (value)

• How? Educational institutions can:

  • Incorporate more color without adding more costs (benefit)

    • How? Through on-demand printing (feature)

    • How? 50% cost savings by printing what they needed, when they needed it in-house (proof point)

  • Encourage higher student performance (benefit)

    • How? By printing full-color workbooks (feature)

    • How? Because reading comprehension is 14% better with color (proof point)

    Get up to speed in no time (benefit)

    • How? Our printer has a small footprint, is high-output, scalable, and complementary with existing devices (feature)

    • How? Our customers see a 25% increase in productivity (proof point)

How could you use value nuggets in your messaging?

Although not a perfect example due to limited information (just one datasheet!), hopefully you can see how the value nugget framework works to connect product features to tangible benefits to aspirational value – and back your claims up with proof.

Instead of training teams with details they won’t use – or will forget! – value nuggets provide an opportunity to distill your product into a format that’s memorable with a hierarchy that can be traversed in real-time.

With this teardown, I hope you can see how value nuggets provide one way to package your product features, benefits and value into easily-consumable bites of insight.

Improving your messaging – and empowering others to tell it successfully – means your sales reps and marketers will be more focused, more confident, and build momentum.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

The post Teardown: Xerox value messaging appeared first on Building Momentum.

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.

Help me out and Like or RT the tweet below!

The post What is “value”? appeared first on Building Momentum.

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.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

If you enjoyed this post, will you share it with your network?

The post Understanding your prospect’s change environment appeared first on Building Momentum.

Your biggest competitor is not another SaaS business. It’s not a spreadsheet. Not a person. Not an agency.

Your biggest competitor is what they are using today. Inertia.

They’re using a process that’s working. They’re spending a comfortable amount of money doing so. They’ve got buy-in, alignment on how it works, and they’re in a regular motion.

But your sales process, positioning, product strategy is all built around them embracing a new world. The promised land. The opportunity.

But… change hurts. Change costs. Change is disruptive.

You’re expecting them to implement a new product, pay more for it, pick up new processes, train their teams, get to grips with a new system… For what?

The promise of value in the future may shine bright… but is it enough?

How do you light a fire under their derrière, and get them to take action?

Four ways to drive status-quo dissatisfaction

Here are four approaches I’ve found useful to find new angles for positioning and messaging that touches a nerve.

Promote the pain

In your customer development, make sure you understand the broad problems your prospect is facing.

• What’s the hardest part of their day?

• What’s the hardest part about being a [job title]?

• What are your biggest obstacles to winning?

• What does losing at this look like?

Can you shadow them doing their day-to-day work? In a recent call with a prospect, we discovered every hire they made required 20+ hours of total work to process (excluding interviews). Times that by multiple hires… and it’s a lot.

Your prospects are likely spending unnecessary cash, time, and energy solving problems that you can dial up to 11.

Can you build a personalized business case that focuses not just on the expected gains, but on the explicit (money, time) and implicit (effort, impact) savings that customers achieve with you?

Can you highlight the painpoints in your topline messaging? Generally, people prefer to save over gain.

Intensify the risk

Inaction is not a positive experience for anyone. They still experience the pain and the problems they tried to solve, but the appetite for change is low – even though champions and users will be chomping at the bit to access new tech that can take them to the next level.

Organizations that need to play it safe will be less receptive to innovation and less likely to embrace new technology for the sake of it.

But they do care about the intrinsic risks to their business: reduced customer satisfaction, falling revenue, decreasing margins, negative press, and any challenges that arise from a PESTEL analysis.

Can you position some of your product value as a preventative risk reduction strategy? Can you show that your product reduces the frequency of severe events, reduces the severity of them, or reduces the occurrence overall?

Highlight the missed opportunities

What are your prospects missing out on when they don’t use your product?

• What would winning at this look like?

• How would this product solve your problem?

• How has our product changed your life?

• What has changed in the last 5 years that has made this much more valuable?

Uncover the opportunity costs, the benefits that could have been realized. This is not the same as the benefits they could gain.

These will often be linked to a company’s growth plans: revenue, customers, efficiency. But can you find the discrete, distinct occasions – the individual cuts that make up death by a thousand cuts?

Make it personal

Stagnation sucks for employees. Can you dial up the personal pains of the individuals involved and drive enough momentum in them to make change happen?

Users want to work less. Managers want to get a promotion. Directors want to build their internal company profile. VPs want industry recognition.

Can you take advantage of these desires, highlight the personal costs of inaction, and offer a solution that appeals to these fundamental motivations?

Tear their world apart to build it up

It’s not enough to just share a perfect, idealized vision of the world a customer enters when they buy your product. Unless you can convince them there is a burning need to embrace it, you’ll end up dragging them kicking and screaming over the line.

To drive urgency in your prospect’s world, you’ll need to give them something to worry about: highlight their current pains, intensify risks, highlight the opportunity cost, and make it personal.

Thanks for reading! Let’s connect on Twitter and LinkedIn, and let me know what you thought.

The post Four ways to highlight the “pain of same” appeared first on Building Momentum.

A great lead comes in: a real household name, with money to spend. They get through your SDR team qualification with ease. The AE’s discovery call goes swimmingly. The demo is great. And then they ask one single question that threatens to derail the entire conversation.

Prospect: “Do you have [feature]?”

AE: “No, but it’s on our roadmap.”

Prospect: “Do you know when it will be available?”

AE: “No. I can check with our team and get back to you.”

And the opportunity disappears, never to be seen again.

Why does this happen?

It’s not because you don’t have the feature available right now.

It’s not because your sales rep doesn’t know what the feature will be available. Usually, it’s an “nice-to-have” compared to the main product anyway.

This phenomenon happens when the sales rep doesn’t understand what the prospect expects the feature to resolve, and what benefit they are attempting to realize from it.

Without this knowledge it’s difficult to overcome objections, like re-prioritizing the importance the overall solution. This trough of momentum makes it difficult to build the urgency needed to move the deal forward.

To overcome, reps need confidence in their understanding of the customer and their problems. This confidence enables them to set expectations, dig deeper with questioning, and move the issue forward.

Usually, this skill comes from reps with domain knowledge: those who’ve done the work before or have intimate knowledge of the workflows involved. SaaS businesses with small teams, or those that are scaling rapidly, will find it harder to educate their team well enough to handle feature objections.

And then (even more annoyingly) you’re missing out on the rich and valuable information to feed back from the sales process to the product team. It makes it harder to gain mid-funnel feedback that could impact product prioritization, and unlock a lot more sales.

So how can you empower sales reps with the information and tactics they need to overcome these objections and push the opportunity forward?

Overcoming feature objections

Luckily, reps can maneuver around these conversations with a little help from the basic roadmap information you may already have.

Splitting your roadmap into ‘landing shortly’, ‘near term’, and ‘planned’ timelines helps your team set those relative expectations with prospects and have more productive conversations.

Educate your team on the problems to be solved

One prerequisite to overcoming objections is to give sales and success teams enough information, without overloading them on the technical details.

There are many different ways to align product, marketing, and sales, but I’d recommend the Jobs To Be Done methodology.

You can read more about the JTBD methodology here, but watch Clayton Christensen in this primer:

JTBD can quickly become imperious for customer-facing teams, but you can use the core concepts to help them understand what customers and users are trying to achieve.

There are five key components of a ‘job’ to be achieved:

1. Who: Who is the executor of the job, who will be overcoming the problem?

2. What: What’s the objective that the job executor wants to achieve?

3. How: What is the process the job executor will follow to achieve the objective?

4. Why: What are the intended outcomes that indicate success from completing the job?

5. When/where: What contextual factors matter in this scenario?

Using this framework when communicating the problems under investigation and features to be launched helps sales teams ground product development in a story they can internalize and retell.

Set expectations, question, move forward

Armed with that knowledge, give your team the tactics to overcome those objections.

Here are some template approaches to ensure your roadmap helps, and doesn’t hinder, your team’s sales conversations.

Landing shortly

These are features that are currently under planning and development that your product team have 95% confidence will be implemented within the next few months. The designs are set, the technical build is estimated, and we know what problem it’s intended to solve.

Set expectations:

• This is something our product team is working on right now, it’s slated to be available this quarter.

• We’re expecting this to [solve problem] by [method].

Question them:

• How would you use that?

• Is it a feature you’ve used before? How do you achieve it today?

• How is that met by the other solutions you’re evaluating?

Move them forward:

• Ask if they would be interested in seeing the mockups, or getting early-access when it’s available

Near-term

These are features that you expect to deliver next quarter: they may be loosely scoped, but the opportunity exists to get information that will validate your problem/product assumptions.

Set expectations:

• We’re planning to start on this in the next few months for it to be available next quarter.

• So far, we understand the problem to be solved is [explain problem].

Question them:

• How would you use this feature?

• How will that impact your business and workflow?

• What problem would it solve for you?

• What benefit do you expect to realize from this, and why?

• Is it a deal-breaker to moving forward with our solution shortly?

Move forward:

• Take notes to understand their problem and share with the product team, to both provide additional validation and see whether the planned features will meet their needs

• Dial up the urgency and the pain their other problems are causing, that can be solved instantly with your solution today

Planned

Planned items are in the proposal and ideation stage. Set those customer expectations as such, and deep-dive for details on how customers would use these features. These situations are helpful for impacting development prioritization when there’s a dollar amount available to be indicative of future opportunities.

Set the expectation:

• I know it’s something our product team are evaluating this right now, but need more information on how to best solve this.

• So far, we’re expecting to help customers [solve broad problem area] and achieve [result].

Question them:

• How would you use this feature?

• How will that impact your business and workflow?

• How do you do this today?

• What problem will it solve for you?

• How do you achieve the same outcome today?

• Is the capability a deal-breaker for this type of solution?

• What’s the driving force behind this requirement?

Move forward:

• If their requirements are complex, confirm by email to make sure there’s no misunderstanding

• Explain that the feedback will really help the product direction, and ask if they’ll be open to contact by the product team

• If the deal isn’t a requirement to moving forward, explain how getting onboard now is an opportunity to be involved in the product design and beta process and ensure their needs are taken into account

Avoid saying no and ensure the feedback loop is closed

It’s too easy to say no, shutting down the conversation.

If you can, attempt to turn it back round to the features you do have  by re-prioritizing the problems you can solve.

But taking the time to understand requirements and feed that insight back helps product teams to build solutions that accurately meet the needs of your prospects and customers.

Taking note of the problems and features that prospects are interested in, even if the feature delivery is some time away, can also help with re-engaging in the future.

Thanks for reading! Let’s connect on Twitter and LinkedIn, and let me know what you thought.

If you found this post helpful, will you share it with your network?

The post Overcoming product roadmap sales objections appeared first on Building Momentum.

Your sales team has been working hard on two particular opportunities. The first one comes back with a signed contract. There’s a sigh of relief, and after the celebratory gong it’s on to the next. 

For the second, instead of a signed contract, you get a rejection email . You lost to a competitor. There’s a sigh of annoyance, and after sending a hail mary to see if the deal can be saved, you move on.

Sound familiar? Of course it does. 53% of opportunities are lost.

But if you’re just moving onto the next opportunity without having a framework to review and learn, you’re always going to be a step behind.

In this post, I’m going to walk through three steps to learn and improve with a simple win/loss analysis program. With this process, you’ll:

• win more deals

• drive higher average contract values

• shorten your sales cycle 

• improve your positioning and marketing

• improve your forecasting ability

• better understand and react to the market

What is a win/loss analysis program? 

The goal of win/loss analysis is to understand why an opportunity was closed and passing those insights back into the business. These insights can feed into product development, improve the sales and marketing process, and reshape business strategy.

From both won and lost opportunities, you’ll want to understand:

• Why they chose you, or chose an alternative solution

• What they liked / didn’t like about the sales process

• How they think about the market, your competitors, and your product

• What their buying process was like

• How they think about the value your product is delivering

• What’s going on in their business

It’s key that someone other than sales – preferably a product marketer – manages the win/loss program. A product marketer should be skilled at spotting patterns at different levels and thinking through to first- and second-order impacts.

How do I set up a win/loss process?

I’ve detailed three stages to think through when building a useful win/loss process, focusing on high-volume data, objective research, and utilizing insights.

1: Capture information in your CRM

You’ll want to ensure every opportunity has completed, mandatory fields at time of close that ask the rep to enter their understanding of why the deal did or didn’t progress.

These don’t have to be difficult, clunky, or overbearing – but they do need to be communicated with the common goal in mind: to increase the number of deals that we win as a business. You might feel some pushback from sales reps who think you’re evaluating them, or from CSMs who want to protect their relationship with the customer – so make sure to build understanding and trust in the process.

Hopefully over time, your throughput of opportunities will begin to provide some insight at a statistically-significant scale, helping you be more confident in the actions you’ll take with that data.

Win/Loss reason code fields

• Close reason – dropdown.
  • Win reasons. Try to distill the key point of influence that motivated a buyer to make the purchase decision. Your reasons should represent the above-and-beyond reasons, and should be worded as such. Avoid using single word reasons like ‘feature’ or ‘price’, and try to capture the specific sentiments that led to the win.
    • High feature fit
    • Bargain price
    • Beat competitor propositions
    • Highly motivated buyer
    • Excellent sales skill
    • Confident social proof
    • Positive brand affinity
    • No single reason
    • Other
  • Loss reasons. Depersonalize loss reasons from the rep and place emphasis on the points of failure in the sales process and the prospect’s evaluation. These will encourage reps to be more specific and less defensive.
    • Sales process miss
    • Lack of urgency
    • Lack of authority
    • Lack of expertise – prospect lacks knowledge
    • Deprioritised – lack of internal bandwidth
    • Predetermined decision – not a real opportunity
    • Poor product understanding
    • Poor brand perception
    • High switching costs
    • Poor qualification
    • Wrong target
    • No budget
    • Insufficient budget
    • Other
  • Close reason note – free text field. Encourage reps to leave full sentences that explain their thoughts on why the win/loss reason was selected.
  • Closed next steps – checkboxes. Ask the rep to select what should happen to the rep next. Evaluate this to see whether you’re able to reignite opps later on, burning opps completely, or ending conversations in good standing.
    • Handover to CSM – set a task for CSM
    • AE to revisit – set a task for an AE to reconnect, as there may be another sales opportunity soon
    • BDR to recycle – set a task for a BDR to reconnect, as the contact should be nurtured
    • Within this section, ask reps to check whether prospects are:
      • Friendly, good to engage – okay for CSMs / product marketers / etc to follow up with
      • Hostile, do not engage – remove from sales queues and do not contact
  • Lost opp, prospect next step – dropdown. Try to capture what the next step for the prospect in their journey is. Use this to rethink objection handling, the discovery process, and positioning against alternative solutions.
    • No change
    • Renew/re-engage current provider
    • Switch to competitor
    • Search still underway
    • Other

These four fields will help you understand why an opportunity closed, what should happen next, and what the prospect is doing next.

Evaluating these regularly, and asking follow-up questions to reps, can give you some really powerful insights to adjust your processes and get ahead to ensure other deals don’t slip too.

Having an ‘other’ field for the win/loss reasons allows you to regularly review other reasons and see if they need to be included in your main list, or if they are just anomalies.

2: Create a win/loss research interview program

Whatever objections sales or success have, it’s really imperative that prospects are engaged for objective research by an impartial, non-sales team member.

This is where you can get really juicy details, hear how customers think about the world, and better understand their mindset.

You’ll capture key snippets to help improve marketing conversion rates, elements to dial down in the sales process, and small product wins that could have a huge impact on conversion.

Automate and streamline it as much as possible to remove resource, but don’t let this valuable source of insight get deprioritized. Your hit rate of calls booked is likely to be around 30%.

Choose your audience

If you’re capturing CRM data as above, exclude hostile prospects – and you may want to skip prospects where the AE will re-engage within a certain timeframe.

Hopefully you’re tagging stakeholders in your CRM against a persona, so you can focus automated outreach on champions to provide a continual stream of general insights. You can also do manual outreach to learn from other stakeholders as and when needed.

Set up your outreach

Using your CRM or email marketing platform, set up a low-touch sequence of personal, friendly outreach emails set over roughly six weeks from the close date.

Positioning win/loss calls as strict research activities can work well. In those emails, explain that you’re:

• Working with the product research team

• Not looking to sell

• Looking to learn from their expertise

• Able to speak at a time that suits them

You may want to incentivize the conversation to catch those that need some motivation – I’ve found offering the choice between a personal gift-card or a donation to charity works well.

Schedule meetings using Calendly or just good ol’ calendar back-and-forth. Ask for both a phone number (in case they don’t show up), as well as confirm the meeting will be via Zoom/Google Hangouts/etc.

Don’t forget to plug in some reminder emails 24hrs and 1hr before the call, providing any links again.

Have the call

Ask if they’re comfortable for you to record the call so you can take notes later – most will agree.

Have a set list of interview questions arranged by topic, but don’t stick to them rigidly. Ensure the call is fluid, and that it feels like a conversation. Offer pauses and allow the interviewee to fill in the gaps. Use open-ended questions. Ask them to walkthrough from end-to-end, to provide rough timings, to add color and personal details to help bring their full experience to life.

You’ll want to understand key areas like:

• Their perception of the product and company

• Their experience in the sales/marketing process

• Their interpretation of your products value and pricing

• Their thoughts on the competitor landscape

• Their general experiences in their role and what matters to them

During the call, make quick notes on key things that stood out, so you have a list of areas to dig into using the recording after.

Create a summary for each call

These summaries will be useful for either CSMs or for AEs/BDRs in the future when they re-engage. Make key notes on:

• Their profile – their persona, segmentation, jobs to be done

• Their behavior – process details, actions they took

• Their fit – their thoughts on the product and experience, competitors, etc.

• Their pain – their business challenges they were looking to solve, other problems they experience, etc

You’ll want to tag the summaries with key points from the journey, so you can pull them up later when reviewing personas, buyer journey, product plans, etc.

Interpret each research call as objectively as you can. You’re not looking to prove or disprove things at this stage, for fear of biasing your interpretation.

3: Collate, share, discuss, utilise

The value of both win/loss tactics is not achieved by docs just sitting somewhere in a CRM or in a folder, never to be read again.

Make sure these insights are fuelling action and satisfying curiosity across the business.

Democratize access

• Have a CRM dashboard that summarises key win/loss CRM fields

• Create a single source-of-knowledge in your intranet for all win/loss interview notes

• Post every win/loss CRM update and published summary to a Slack channel, and promote it every month.

Proactively share

• Share interesting tidbits and new learnings in your team updates

• Run a regular lunch-and-learn session that highlights interesting stories – especially if you can involve the sales rep to give their side of the story

Package up your insights

• Create monthly/quarterly reports using CRM data and analyze to help support sales, product, and marketing tactics and strategy

• Include win/loss updates in your Voice of Customer reports, sharing them widely to help teams feel closer to the customer

• When you have significant enough insight into a particular themes, create a focused pack of evidence and start to build buy-in to overcome challenges or innovate further

Utilize

• Work with product teams to use win/loss insights in product strategy

• Use your insights in quarterly planning for sales and marketing to improve processes, tweak messaging, or try something different

• Gain exec buy-in as a sponsor for your win/loss efforts and encourage them to bring win/loss summaries into leadership meetings

• Create win/loss review segments in your regular sales meetings and work with a rep to explain how the deal went, what the outcome was, and invite feedback and suggestions on how to replicate or avoid certain aspects

• Pull up summaries and reports when working on regular updates to personas, buyer journey docs, positioning and messaging, product roadmaps – they are artifacts and evidence that fuel your iteration in those processes

Every opportunity is a learning opportunity

You’re going to lose ~50% of your deals anyway, so make sure you take something positive away from them.

The win/loss streams of work detailed in this post give you the best of both worlds: CRM data at scale to support sales enablement and further investigation, objective research interviews to step back and look at the bigger picture, and ensuring insights are used across the business.

The sales and marketing process is – at its heart – an assumption-testing exercise. Where better to learn what’s needed to iterate, than from your wins and losses?

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

The post How to always win, even from deals you lost appeared first on Building Momentum.

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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The post The sales deck: a tool for momentum appeared first on Building Momentum.

I was working remotely for two weeks when we launched the new Kayako. The launch – a huge deal for the 110 employees that had been working on the new product for the last two years – happened over Google Hangouts and Slack. Everyone joined a video call, with champagne and cake ready in the offices in London and Gurgaon, India.

Everyone had a part to play – it would only happen if everyone had typed a custom command in our Slackbot to take the old marketing website down, push the new one live, and remove the restrictions, finally opening up the new product to the world.

We were confident. The new Kayako was really different from anything else out there: a new customer service and live chat platform for companies that obsessed over their customer experience. It killed the concept of ‘tickets’, and instead promoted a single, effortless customer relationship across contact channels.

Our target market away from IT helpdesks and technical support teams to a new ‘customer-service-as-growth’ persona. With this, we released a new brand, pricing, and positioning. Gone was the dark blue, corporate feel that was a hangover from the 00’s; we created a brand that felt comfortable, personal, and effortless.

A few months in, that confidence had been chipped away by the reality we were facing. Low trial conversions. Product stability issues and bugs. Negative feedback. Revenue was falling. Accounts were cancelling after a few months.

We’d gone from adding thousands of dollars in new contracted monthly recurring revenue (CMRR) from the old product every month, to just hundreds.

It was bad. We got together in a war-room scenario: what was happening, and how do we fix it?

Aside from product issues, we identified areas of our go-to-market strategy that were seriously problematic. Although we had followed best practice, sought expert advice, and carried out research, we failed in three key areas: pricing, positioning, and onboarding.

How we failed at pricing strategy, and how we fixed it

In the run-up to the launch, we had worked with a pricing consultant who’d developed best practices and frameworks from his time at Microsoft. We learnt a lot; the engagements were helpful, productive, and we felt assured and confident in the strategy.

The process involved carrying out a survey to understand the value that customers gained from our product. There was a big spreadsheet, listing each features with a dollar value against them, depending on how big of a draw it was.We drilled into competitor pricing, looking at how we compared on features and value.

In hindsight, we should have known that a pricing process developed for billion dollar corporate organizations like Microsoft could never have worked for our ~$5m ARR startup.

Our launch pricing strategy was simple enough. Three plans – good, better, best. Similar to our biggest competitor, although a few dollars cheaper.

We knew it was failing.

1. Free trial signups dropped, because they were put off by the pricing page

2. Conversions to paid accounts were falling, because they couldn’t experience the value they were expecting

3. First month cancellations were high, because customers didn’t experience the value they expected for the price they were paying

We had followed pricing best practices as instructions, not inspiration.

Immediately, we stepped up our research. We were already doing win/loss calls, which gave us a head start into the challenges we were facing. We began to call customers, prospects, and anyone that had signed up to get their feedback.

Our suspicions were correct. The pricing wasn’t working because people couldn’t see the right plan for them, at a reasonable price, that represented good value for them.