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.

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The post The big misconception about product launches appeared first on Building Momentum.

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

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

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

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

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

Send a personalized email to a new customer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click through a few profiles and focus on:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ask sales reps to share their thoughts on recent customer trends

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regardless, you’ll learn a ton.

Join an online community to engage with customers

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

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

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

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

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

Build your empathy

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll start by saying I’m no pricing expert. But I have, as a product marketer at various companies of different stages, both been involved in and led pricing conversations… usually because nobody else has the experience. And you probably will (or have been) in the same situation.

I think it’s important that PMMs can work on pricing projects because of the obvious impact that it has on revenue.

But for those who haven’t had sight of pricing before, it’s a minefield. What, when, how, where, why?

In this post I’m going to walk through what a typical pricing project might look like for a standard B2B SaaS product. I don’t have a proper, academic approach – but I do focus on what I think is right, and what I’ve found works. As always, your mileage may vary – and if you’re following this process, remember that I write to give you inspiration, not instructions.

Principles

Here are some principles I’ve tried to internalise that guide my approach and thinking around pricing.

Price before product

If you’ve built your product and THEN decide what to charge for it, you’re wasting time and energy.

• Most startups will focus on the product first – the features it’s going to have, what it’s going to do
• Then, they’ll think about the cost – it’s taken us $X amount to build, or costs $Y to service
• They then use a cost-plus approach to set a price by adding an extra 50% – 80% margin
• They then look at the value that the product delivers, before working out what customers would be most interested

See how much riskier that is?!

Instead, smart startups will:

• Examine the market and select a group of customers to service
• Define the value those customers want to achieve
• Determine how much customers will pay to access a product that delivers that value
• Depending on the price customers will pay, plan how much they can spend to build/service, and set their own costs
• Finally, use the cost guidelines to develop the product

See how much more straightforward and rational that is? You’re more likely to hit gold earlier, rather than struggling to find traction.

Price problems are probably a positioning problem

“It’s not the price that people don’t like, but what they understand they are – or are not – getting for that price.”

That was the motto of a pricing consultant we worked with in a previous business and it’s stuck with me ever since.

All commerce is an exchange – value, for money.

• If your customers don’t understand the value your product delivers them, they’re unlikely to pay more money for it.
• If your customers believe your product delivers the value they need at a reasonable price, they’ll buy.
• If your customers think your product delivers more than the value they need at a bargain price, they’ll probably rip your hand off for it.

Pricing goes hand-in-hand with positioning.

Margin matters

In recent years gone by, how much profit you make when providing a product or service is usually here nor there – it was all about growth!

Not any more. Showing sustainable growth is crucial for sanity, let alone fundraising.

Analysing the COGS – cost of goods sold – means you can consider where pricing should be set so that it at least covers costs, if not deliver a 40% – 80% margin.

Process

Here’s what a typical pricing project might look like.

Set pricing objectives

Getting alignment on pricing objectives was actually one of the first posts I wrote about product marketing.

Your pricing is not going to exist in a vacuum. It does not exist for its own sake. It exists to support your business goals – so you should move forward with a clear understanding of what job the pricing is intended to do.

Pricing can be used to achieve many different objectives, from maximizing profit and growing market share, to reducing churn or discouraging new entrants.

You can download my pricing objectives process and template here.

Define your pricing strategy

Once you’ve agreed and discussed what pricing is expected to support, you can define your pricing strategy to support your objectives.

Your strategy should contain a review of the situation so far, the objectives set out, and then offer principles that will guide how you move forward.

There are a number of potential price strategies that you can choose from:

• Value-based pricing – determined by what customers will pay
• Competitive pricing – based on what competitors charge
• Price skimming – setting high pricing to capture demand from big spenders, then reducing pricing to capture lower layers of the market
• Cost-plus pricing – adding a margin on top of your costs
• Penetration pricing – offering attractive low prices to gain a foothold in the market
• Economy pricing – pricing low to build volume, so you can drive down costs through economies of scale
• Dynamic pricing – changing prices depending on demand

For example, you may build a strategy that is 70% penetration pricing and 30% cost-plus, with the intention of striking a balance between setting pricing low enough to be competitive – but enough to cover costs and contribute margin.

Note: we’re not talking about specific numbers yet.

Keep on customer research

Hopefully, you’re already working in lockstep with research underway to understand the market, segment them, identify the buying journey, buying group, personas, understand the value they desire, and more! This will help you to hit the ground running with strong inputs. Here’s my post on 19 customer development questions you should be asking.

The personas that you discover (don’t create them!) are going to be super useful to analyse the results from other research in this project. Understanding the value that they desire – and where they’re coming from, in the form of a value story – matters much more than the features they like.

Carry out specific pricing research

Once you’ve understood the personas that you want to sell to, now you can find people who fit those guidelines to three things:

• The ‘value metric’ they prefer to be charged by – seats, numbers of landing pages, number of customers, etc.
• Understand what features they value the most – to help you design the packages and pricing tiers you’ll offer
• Uncover how much they’ll be willing to pay for your product.

For context, I recommend reading the PriceIntelligently SaaS Pricing Strategy ebook and their blog post on value metrics here.

You’ll want to run a survey with four sections:

• Questions: Qualification info about them and their company – so you can match them against personas
• Questions: Value metrics – asking what is most important when it comes to pricing
• Questions: Feature preference analysis – asking which features are most and least important, so you can match up against personas to design packaging
• Description: Showcase your product with a landing page, product screenshots, or a demo video so your respondents can understand how your product is positioned and the value it delievrs
• Questions: Willingness to pay – asking for price points the respondent feels is too expensive, high but would consider, a bargain, too cheap

Here’s an example survey I captured in my Swipe File from Hiten Shah that walks through qualification, feature preference analysis, and WTP questions.

When it comes to the WTP analysis, you’ll need to carry out a Van Westerndorp analysis. Sounds complicated, right? It’s really not. Here’s a template – complete with walkthrough video! – that you can copy and follow.

The output is a graph like this that tells you the highest and lowest acceptable prices, and the optimal price point – where the most people think pricing is neither too cheap or too expensive.

Competitor research

At the same time, you’ll want to be understanding how your competitors… compare on pricing. You’ll want to look at a broad range of alternative solutions that customers can use to accomplish the same outcome and achieve the same value – because your biggest competitors are not who you think they are.

You’ll want to carry out general competitor research on their pricing tiers, positioning, product features – but don’t over-rotate on what competitors are doing. Rather than compete against competitors, we want to compete for customers – to be the ones who understand and service them best.

Draft and first review

If you’ve got this far, you’ve now acquired a ton of insight and understand what pricing needs to achieve for your business and the principles that will guide your pricing implementation, what your competitors are charging, plus:

• Your personas, the value they desire, etc.
• What customers think they should be charged against
• What features they think are most and least important
• The price points they think are too expensive, too cheap, and just right.
• All of the above, by specific segments and personas

Unfortunately there’s no quick and easy tips at this stage, except to say that it all has to go in the melting pot that is your consciousness to be considered, evaluated, analyzed, until you’ve come up with an initial perspective.

Your first draft is not going to be perfect, so don’t try too hard. Instead it should be a first checkpoint – a sanity check that you’re on the right path. If you’re in a typical SaaS business, you’ll probably create good/better/best pricing tiers.

Review it with the core stakeholders invested in pricing and ask for feedback and input. What works, what doesn’t work? What might be challenging?

Margin review and iterations

Once you have specific feedback on the direction, it’s time to check your margins and make sure you’re working towards something that will be long-term profitable for the business. You can find my post on creating a revenue model here to start working out your COGS.

With your finance team, understand what good margins look like for your business. A typical SaaS business will push for 70% margin, but this may be lower if you’re in an aggressive growth phase or higher if you’re moving into profit mode.

With these margins in mind, you’ll be able to iterate on your pricing draft and work in conjunction with the stakeholder group to improve. This might take one or two rounds… or might take more. What’s important is to continually revisit the pricing objectives that you have agreed at the start of the project. There’s nothing worse than the goalposts changing the game, or stress caused by misalignment.

Testing

I don’t mean A/B testing pricing on the website – you probably don’t have enough traffic to be statistically-significant, it’s difficult to track and follow through to purchase, and it may upset customers who bought at a higher price if you’re also testing a lower one.

Instead, test pricing in a similar way to how you might test positioning – alpha-test it with internal teams, beta-test it with friendly customers or in a cross-functional ‘tiger team’ to present pricing to real customers.

Generally, your pricing is going to exist in its form for around 6 months – long enough to get valid signals on effectiveness, and short-enough that it’s not going to create huge compounding problems. You’ll also want to think about the second-order effects of pricing: it may reduce the number of closed-won deals to begin with, but the customers that do buy may expand at faster rates to cover the gap and more.

Get approval

With all of this insight and feedback in mind, work with your stakeholders to get approval and final sign-off. Make it clear that pricing is an iterative process – it’s never one-and-done. You’ll want to build a plan to revisit and re-evaluate every three or six months to make sure you’re reacting to the market and setting yourselves up for success.

Implement

Depending on how your business is organized, this can be super easy… or super difficult. There’s no way to tell until you’re in the process either. Sorry!

Bringing it all together

Pricing is a beast. I highly recommend breaking it down into stages that work for your business, whether that means using the process outlined above, or adapting into whatever makes sense.

The principles, objectives, and strategy that you define will have a huge impact on the effectiveness of your pricing in action – so don’t skip the crucial conversations that need to happen to build alignment and level up your thinking.

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 How to define pricing for brand new products appeared first on Building Momentum.

Your pricing page is the second most important page of your entire website (after the homepage). It’s probably your second most highly-trafficked page, it can make or break someone’s decision to sign up for your trial or request a demo.

And unless you work at a large company with pricing analysts or deep pockets for expensive pricing consultancy projects, the design of your pricing page is probably going to fall down to two groups: product marketing, and brand design.

If there are no product marketers involved in your pricing page design, then what are you still doing here? Go and start collaborating on it now!

In an absence of direction, it can be difficult to know how you should think about the pricing page, let alone what should go on it.

Here are some of the core considerations that I’d think about when crafting a compelling pricing page.

What’s your pricing page hero heading?

Don’t just put ‘Pricing’ at the top of your pricing page. It’s a wasted opportunity to frame the rest of the page and set the scene for how you want potential prospects to interpret the dollar amounts that follow.

Take a look at these random samples from a selection of SaaS companies.

What do you notice?

Some are focused on their pricing being straightforward, simple, transparent. Start for free. No credit card required.

Others reiterate the value of the product. Build stronger relationships, organize your work, make teamwork more productive.

Others choose to highlight a combination of pricing and product value: everything you need, always know what you’ll pay.

Takeaway: Reiterate value

Hopefully, at this stage of your buyers journey, you know that buyers have questions they need to answer before they can move forward.

For some types of product, this might be something straightforward like “Is there a free trial?”, or “What’s included in the price?”, or “Is the product worth this price?”. It might be more complex, requiring your hero heading to elaborate on the specifics of your product, pricing, and value prop.

What should you call your product packages?

Most SaaS products will use a three-plan Good/Better/Best packaging structure, all increasing in price. Sometimes you’ll have a freemium entry tier too.

When developing these packages, we’ll stress for days on the dollar amounts but give little thought about the descriptive names that we’ll use internally and externally that almost everyone who engages with your brand will encounter at some point.

Generally, there a few options.

A ‘Good/Better/Best analogy’ approach will see you name plans in increasing levels of specialness, like:

• Silver, Gold, Platinum
• You can even get creative, like Freshdesk did with a nature-themed Sprout / Blossom / Garden / Estate / Forest

You may want to help users self-select a plan that’s right for them, like:

• Starter / Professional / Expert
• Team / Growth / Enterprise

Or maybe it’s about product capabilities:

• Support / Engage / Convert
• Inbox / Chat / Integrate

Takeaway: It depends (start with the customer-centric approach first)

Ultimately the names of your product packages will depend on the way your product is architected, whether compartmentalised by capabilities or if features can be accessed by different tiers of customers.

I recommend starting with the customer approach first – what will resonate with customers as they scan your site? What phrasing will they self-select as?

What plan should we highlight?

This isn’t even a question – the real question is, which plan to highlight?

Adding a border, additional coloring, or badges can help a plan stand out. Usually, you’d use this to highlight the plan that most customers will select – the one that should catch their eye.

But it doesn’t have to be. You can experiment with placement, and depending on the intention of your design, highlight other plans that impact the perception of others.

Take Zendesk’s pricing page for example. They’ve highlighted their Suite Professional plan as an anchor, their highest page. Your eye is drawn there first. £79! Does that mean the £39 plan or the £65 plan is actually a great deal? I think so.

And now Asana: their £9.49 plan feels like an absolute steal compared to the £20.99 plan.

Takeaway: It’s all about perception

Unless your TAM is extremely small, we’re thinking about visitors in groups of thousands. What is going to have the biggest impact on the majority of visitors? Not edge-cases; the broad strokes of normal folk that visit your site.

All you can do is create multiple variations, and test in-house to see how they feel. Pricing is just as much as art as it is science.

The big one: to price, or not to price?

It really annoys me when I see Twitter and LinkedIn influencers trashing companies for not publishing pricing on their pricing page.

In my opinion, it’s 100% acceptable to have ‘by application only’ pricing on your website. If your customers are comfortable with that.

In an oft-quoted trope, customers that have small budgets will sweat the small stuff, bargaining over $5 discounts. Smaller customers are more likely to want – NEED – pricing on your website to decide whether they continue to evaluate or not.

More mature businesses usually move slower. They don’t make rash decisions. Budgets are larger (but not unlimited) … but everything can be negotiated. There’s a process for that. If the product says it does the right thing, we’re potentially interested. And so exact pricing is not necessarily required at the point in their journey in which they visit your pricing page (but they may want a ballpark figure in the discovery call).

Takeaway: It depends (on your pricepoint)

If your product is primarily self-service, then show pricing. If it’s mostly inbound-sales under $20k a year, show pricing. If it’s over $50k you’ll probably need to sell the value as well as the pricing structure, so don’t show pricing.

Of course you can always experiment. If you do show pricing, try ‘Pricing on request’ in place of a $ amount for your highest plan and see if you can eek out higher ACVs. Or if you’re already hiding pricing, try showing a ‘Starts at’ $ figure as a benchmark to set expectations.

Build, measure, learn

The last tip I can leave you with, is pricing is never done in a vacuum. Your product progress, sales skills, market landscape, the macro-economic environment, and whether Mercury is in retrograde can have a huge impact on how your pricing page is perceived by potential prospects.

Make sure you have a strong cadence to iterating. Put something out there, build a hypothesis for it. Measure the numbers, review the metrics. Make inferences, get feedback. Try again. Good luck!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Working with assumptions (without validating or iterating)

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

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

How to get back on track

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

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

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

They say jump, you say ‘how high?’

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

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

How to get back on track

You have two options.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to get back on track

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This worked with an astonishingly high close rate.

Why did this work?

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

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

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

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

Can you build a business case tool?

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

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

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

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

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

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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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“What are your thoughts on product marketing KPIs?” is one of my must-ask interview questions.

Our work is so diverse, varied, and cross-functional that honestly, VP Marketing folks are scared of us.

They’re often super comfortable with demand gen roles: MQLs, conversion rates, CTRs. But product marketing? Inexperienced VPMs will often utter the dreaded phrase “So, how many datasheets are you going to produce this quarter?”

There’s no quick and easy answer to how you measure product marketing – and it really depends on the question you ask.

Here’s my attempt at breaking down the different questions you might be trying to answer, with an action plan for each that you can take back to the metaphorical office tomorrow.

Measure the impact of product marketing

How do you measure the impact of product marketing? Well, how long is a piece of string? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is a really common question that many early in the product-marketing-hiring journey will ask, perhaps roles where the PMM is reporting into the CEO or a first-time founder, or where the marketing director comes from a non-tech background.

Product marketing might seem complicated to outsiders, but it’s not an amorphous blob. We don’t weave magic (as much as we’d like to claim).

We usually work on a number of projects at one time, using our knowledge, skills, and experience to solve problems to improve an outcome. The trick is defining what the project is, and what metrics should be moved.

Some of these projects will be casual and everyday support, but sometimes you’ll be spending a ton of time on something – and need to prove you’re having an impact.

In these cases, I recommend setting out clear project briefs using an experiment canvas like the one below.

Of course, edit or reword this rough layout into something that works for you and your business. But broadly, an experiment canvas will be made up of:

• The assumption you’re testing
• A hypothesis statement that details what you’re testing, what you expect to achieve, and the timeframe for achieving it.
• Details on how the work will happen, and how the measurement will happen
• The results achieved
• Whether you validated or didn’t achieve the result, and what any next steps are to be

This can serve as a handy way to align stakeholders around the projects you’re working on, and also give your work a clear steer for success.

Measure the success of product marketing

Often, this question is phrased as ‘measure the success of product marketing’… but often is intended to be ‘measure the success of the product marketer’. Be very clear which one you are asking/answering.

The success of product marketing should ultimately track against the main needle-moving metric for your business each year.

For most traditional businesses, this will be revenue. For other companies, it might be a north-star product usage metric.

Each quarter, I’d expect to see product marketing work on projects that look to improve a specific metric that has an exponential impact on the main metric.

For example, a business needs to grow revenue in 2023.

• Q1 PMM projects focus on improving sales win rates.
• Q2 looks at above-the-funnel positioning to grow awareness and relevance.
• Q3 is tracking outbound sales performance.
• Q4 focuses on supporting MQL to Opp numbers.

Sometimes the focus on the main metric will change depending on the weather or the general mood in the business. And we need to look at the trends and the direction of travel, not ad-hoc metrics or enforced OKRs that don’t make sense.

Product marketing is collaborative, so the success of product marketing always depends on the relationships that exist between our stakeholder teams.

And we might run, inform, advise the work – but not have an active role in delivering or implementing. The success of product marketing cannot be based on a single metric, whether achievement or failure – but the whole of product marketing is more than the sum of its parts.

Monitor the performance of the product marketing team

I’ve phrased this in a specific way, but as above, some people ask this question and aren’t entirely clear in what they really mean: how do we monitor or measure the performance of a product marketing manager on a personal, role level?

This is probably the hardest question to answer.

Ultimately, you’ll need to measure their performance based on the job description you (hopefully) spent time carefully crafting, the role levels and expectations that you (hopefully) can lean on for consistency, and clear indicators of company culture.

Can you measure the performance of a product marketer on a single metric? No. On a single project? No. On the first underwhelming quarter? No.

On a consistent trend of underperformance? Definitely. On an unforgivable behavior? Absolutely. On a lack of response to well-attempted coaching? Sure.

The lack of clear metrics that product marketing owns is often confused with lack of accountability. It isn’t. Hold product marketers to account on the impact and the success they drive for your business.

Don’t track deliverables

Don’t bother trying to track product marketing with the number of deliverables created. It does nothing except drive busywork.

In fact, it has the inverse effect. Using metrics like the number of datasheets or webpages created, as a proxy for productivity, actually lessens the total impact that your product marketing team can deliver.

Evolve your approach

As you and your product marketing team mature, you’ll find new ways to monitor and measure product marketing through things like control groups, incremental revenue, testing, and more. Your approach will evolve and that’s a good thing.

Just remember to be clear on the questions you’re trying to answer. Impact isn’t success, and success isn’t performance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For example:

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

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

Make personas come alive

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

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

Perhaps you could:

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

Think about the format

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

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

You could try:

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

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

Build a feedback loop

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

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

Get ahead of the curve:

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

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

Refresh personas regularly

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

What was true yesterday, might not be true today.

Ensure your persona stay fresh:

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

Personas are foundational – don’t waste them

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

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

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

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The post Five tips for building personas that work 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.

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.

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

The post Be contentious: the importance of disqualification appeared first on Building Momentum.

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.

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

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

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

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

• Orwellian language and spin that says something but means nothing

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

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

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

Choosing proof points

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

1. Understand value

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

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

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

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

2. Connect proof points to value

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

I call this a value nugget.

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

A value nugget is comprised of:

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

Crafting strong messaging with value nuggets

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

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

How to create proof points

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

A tip: elements of value

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

Ask customers before they sign

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

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

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

The survey approach

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

Survey your customers with questions like these:

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

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

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

This approach gets you three great stats:

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

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

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

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

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

“What if our numbers aren’t great?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Use proof points to build momentum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then we’re surprised when they flop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t be a conveyor belt marketing team

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

First, start with strategy

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

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

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

Three steps to develop strategy:

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

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

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

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

Then, link tactics to goals to strategy

OKRs!

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

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

Don’t forget to validate

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

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

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

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

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

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

That might mean:

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

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

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

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

Lastly, review and communicate

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

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

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

Don’t be a conveyor belt marketing team

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Your sales team has been working hard on two particular opportunities. The first one comes back with a signed contract. There’s a sigh of relief, and after the celebratory gong it’s on to the next. 

For the second, instead of a signed contract, you get a rejection email . You lost to a competitor. There’s a sigh of annoyance, and after sending a hail mary to see if the deal can be saved, you move on.

Sound familiar? Of course it does. 53% of opportunities are lost.

But if you’re just moving onto the next opportunity without having a framework to review and learn, you’re always going to be a step behind.

In this post, I’m going to walk through three steps to learn and improve with a simple win/loss analysis program. With this process, you’ll:

• win more deals

• drive higher average contract values

• shorten your sales cycle 

• improve your positioning and marketing

• improve your forecasting ability

• better understand and react to the market

What is a win/loss analysis program? 

The goal of win/loss analysis is to understand why an opportunity was closed and passing those insights back into the business. These insights can feed into product development, improve the sales and marketing process, and reshape business strategy.

From both won and lost opportunities, you’ll want to understand:

• Why they chose you, or chose an alternative solution

• What they liked / didn’t like about the sales process

• How they think about the market, your competitors, and your product

• What their buying process was like

• How they think about the value your product is delivering

• What’s going on in their business

It’s key that someone other than sales – preferably a product marketer – manages the win/loss program. A product marketer should be skilled at spotting patterns at different levels and thinking through to first- and second-order impacts.

How do I set up a win/loss process?

I’ve detailed three stages to think through when building a useful win/loss process, focusing on high-volume data, objective research, and utilizing insights.

1: Capture information in your CRM

You’ll want to ensure every opportunity has completed, mandatory fields at time of close that ask the rep to enter their understanding of why the deal did or didn’t progress.

These don’t have to be difficult, clunky, or overbearing – but they do need to be communicated with the common goal in mind: to increase the number of deals that we win as a business. You might feel some pushback from sales reps who think you’re evaluating them, or from CSMs who want to protect their relationship with the customer – so make sure to build understanding and trust in the process.

Hopefully over time, your throughput of opportunities will begin to provide some insight at a statistically-significant scale, helping you be more confident in the actions you’ll take with that data.

Win/Loss reason code fields

• Close reason – dropdown.
  • Win reasons. Try to distill the key point of influence that motivated a buyer to make the purchase decision. Your reasons should represent the above-and-beyond reasons, and should be worded as such. Avoid using single word reasons like ‘feature’ or ‘price’, and try to capture the specific sentiments that led to the win.
    • High feature fit
    • Bargain price
    • Beat competitor propositions
    • Highly motivated buyer
    • Excellent sales skill
    • Confident social proof
    • Positive brand affinity
    • No single reason
    • Other
  • Loss reasons. Depersonalize loss reasons from the rep and place emphasis on the points of failure in the sales process and the prospect’s evaluation. These will encourage reps to be more specific and less defensive.
    • Sales process miss
    • Lack of urgency
    • Lack of authority
    • Lack of expertise – prospect lacks knowledge
    • Deprioritised – lack of internal bandwidth
    • Predetermined decision – not a real opportunity
    • Poor product understanding
    • Poor brand perception
    • High switching costs
    • Poor qualification
    • Wrong target
    • No budget
    • Insufficient budget
    • Other
  • Close reason note – free text field. Encourage reps to leave full sentences that explain their thoughts on why the win/loss reason was selected.
  • Closed next steps – checkboxes. Ask the rep to select what should happen to the rep next. Evaluate this to see whether you’re able to reignite opps later on, burning opps completely, or ending conversations in good standing.
    • Handover to CSM – set a task for CSM
    • AE to revisit – set a task for an AE to reconnect, as there may be another sales opportunity soon
    • BDR to recycle – set a task for a BDR to reconnect, as the contact should be nurtured
    • Within this section, ask reps to check whether prospects are:
      • Friendly, good to engage – okay for CSMs / product marketers / etc to follow up with
      • Hostile, do not engage – remove from sales queues and do not contact
  • Lost opp, prospect next step – dropdown. Try to capture what the next step for the prospect in their journey is. Use this to rethink objection handling, the discovery process, and positioning against alternative solutions.
    • No change
    • Renew/re-engage current provider
    • Switch to competitor
    • Search still underway
    • Other

These four fields will help you understand why an opportunity closed, what should happen next, and what the prospect is doing next.

Evaluating these regularly, and asking follow-up questions to reps, can give you some really powerful insights to adjust your processes and get ahead to ensure other deals don’t slip too.

Having an ‘other’ field for the win/loss reasons allows you to regularly review other reasons and see if they need to be included in your main list, or if they are just anomalies.

2: Create a win/loss research interview program

Whatever objections sales or success have, it’s really imperative that prospects are engaged for objective research by an impartial, non-sales team member.

This is where you can get really juicy details, hear how customers think about the world, and better understand their mindset.

You’ll capture key snippets to help improve marketing conversion rates, elements to dial down in the sales process, and small product wins that could have a huge impact on conversion.

Automate and streamline it as much as possible to remove resource, but don’t let this valuable source of insight get deprioritized. Your hit rate of calls booked is likely to be around 30%.

Choose your audience

If you’re capturing CRM data as above, exclude hostile prospects – and you may want to skip prospects where the AE will re-engage within a certain timeframe.

Hopefully you’re tagging stakeholders in your CRM against a persona, so you can focus automated outreach on champions to provide a continual stream of general insights. You can also do manual outreach to learn from other stakeholders as and when needed.

Set up your outreach

Using your CRM or email marketing platform, set up a low-touch sequence of personal, friendly outreach emails set over roughly six weeks from the close date.

Positioning win/loss calls as strict research activities can work well. In those emails, explain that you’re:

• Working with the product research team

• Not looking to sell

• Looking to learn from their expertise

• Able to speak at a time that suits them

You may want to incentivize the conversation to catch those that need some motivation – I’ve found offering the choice between a personal gift-card or a donation to charity works well.

Schedule meetings using Calendly or just good ol’ calendar back-and-forth. Ask for both a phone number (in case they don’t show up), as well as confirm the meeting will be via Zoom/Google Hangouts/etc.

Don’t forget to plug in some reminder emails 24hrs and 1hr before the call, providing any links again.

Have the call

Ask if they’re comfortable for you to record the call so you can take notes later – most will agree.

Have a set list of interview questions arranged by topic, but don’t stick to them rigidly. Ensure the call is fluid, and that it feels like a conversation. Offer pauses and allow the interviewee to fill in the gaps. Use open-ended questions. Ask them to walkthrough from end-to-end, to provide rough timings, to add color and personal details to help bring their full experience to life.

You’ll want to understand key areas like:

• Their perception of the product and company

• Their experience in the sales/marketing process

• Their interpretation of your products value and pricing

• Their thoughts on the competitor landscape

• Their general experiences in their role and what matters to them

During the call, make quick notes on key things that stood out, so you have a list of areas to dig into using the recording after.

Create a summary for each call

These summaries will be useful for either CSMs or for AEs/BDRs in the future when they re-engage. Make key notes on:

• Their profile – their persona, segmentation, jobs to be done

• Their behavior – process details, actions they took

• Their fit – their thoughts on the product and experience, competitors, etc.

• Their pain – their business challenges they were looking to solve, other problems they experience, etc

You’ll want to tag the summaries with key points from the journey, so you can pull them up later when reviewing personas, buyer journey, product plans, etc.

Interpret each research call as objectively as you can. You’re not looking to prove or disprove things at this stage, for fear of biasing your interpretation.

3: Collate, share, discuss, utilise

The value of both win/loss tactics is not achieved by docs just sitting somewhere in a CRM or in a folder, never to be read again.

Make sure these insights are fuelling action and satisfying curiosity across the business.

Democratize access

• Have a CRM dashboard that summarises key win/loss CRM fields

• Create a single source-of-knowledge in your intranet for all win/loss interview notes

• Post every win/loss CRM update and published summary to a Slack channel, and promote it every month.

Proactively share

• Share interesting tidbits and new learnings in your team updates

• Run a regular lunch-and-learn session that highlights interesting stories – especially if you can involve the sales rep to give their side of the story

Package up your insights

• Create monthly/quarterly reports using CRM data and analyze to help support sales, product, and marketing tactics and strategy

• Include win/loss updates in your Voice of Customer reports, sharing them widely to help teams feel closer to the customer

• When you have significant enough insight into a particular themes, create a focused pack of evidence and start to build buy-in to overcome challenges or innovate further

Utilize

• Work with product teams to use win/loss insights in product strategy

• Use your insights in quarterly planning for sales and marketing to improve processes, tweak messaging, or try something different

• Gain exec buy-in as a sponsor for your win/loss efforts and encourage them to bring win/loss summaries into leadership meetings

• Create win/loss review segments in your regular sales meetings and work with a rep to explain how the deal went, what the outcome was, and invite feedback and suggestions on how to replicate or avoid certain aspects

• Pull up summaries and reports when working on regular updates to personas, buyer journey docs, positioning and messaging, product roadmaps – they are artifacts and evidence that fuel your iteration in those processes

Every opportunity is a learning opportunity

You’re going to lose ~50% of your deals anyway, so make sure you take something positive away from them.

The win/loss streams of work detailed in this post give you the best of both worlds: CRM data at scale to support sales enablement and further investigation, objective research interviews to step back and look at the bigger picture, and ensuring insights are used across the business.

The sales and marketing process is – at its heart – an assumption-testing exercise. Where better to learn what’s needed to iterate, than from your wins and losses?

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

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