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

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

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

A typical second product story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, it was different back then.

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

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

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

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

Building a second product (the right way)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or, could you acquire a product?

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

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

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

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

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

Regardless, look for focus + confidence

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

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

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

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Do we all know what tech debt means?

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

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

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

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

Different types of positioning debt

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

Credit cards: Positioning to win a deal

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

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

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

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

Loans: Positioning for every campaign

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mortgages: Hasty repositioning projects

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

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

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

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

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

Avoiding positioning debt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An internal comms framework to save

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

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

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

Action plan components

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

Let’s look at people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tips for maximum internal comms results

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Having the courage to acknowledge problems

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

Maintaining trust when things aren’t going so well

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

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

Discovering buyer personas

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

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

The sales deck as the ideal home for your narrative

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

Share snippets from sales to enable and encourage

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

About Launch Awesome

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

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

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The post AMA: Alicia & James on a failed product launch (and more) appeared first on Building Momentum.

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

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

What is the Double Diamond?

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

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

Doing the right thing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doing the thing right

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s an iterative process

The double diamond is not a linear approach.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The explainer video

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ‘tell me more’ video

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

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

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

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

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

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

The walkthrough video

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Make every video you make work harder

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

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

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

Then get creative.

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

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

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P.S. In case you missed it last week – I’m launching a course with Alicia Carney to help upskill product marketers. Find out more and register interest at WTFGoToMarket.com.

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I wrote about this in The Overview #24 – don’t overestimate your customer’s maturity. A lot of people reached out sharing their experiences, so I thought would be good to cover in a bit more detail.

All too often, we imagine our customers to be so experienced and advanced that unless we keep building new bells-and-whistles, they won’t come or stay. But even the tallest, shiniest skyscrapers are built on solid foundations.

Your customer vision is not their reality

I bet that right now your product managers, sales reps, your CEO has a vision in mind of your customer.

In their mind, your customer is a Steve Jobs/Olivia Pope superhuman: revered, with thin-frame glasses that frame steely grey eyes, within which swells a unique outlook on life, the universe, and everything.

They’re smart. Passionate. Powerful. Full of wisdom, a guru in your industry. A savant, brought to earth by the corporate gods to disrupt processes, obliterate workflows, and bring about the second coming. They’re constantly assessing their options, with the power to to smite your company into obscurity at the slightest displeasure, or instill you upon a gold pedestal and bow to your greatness.

In reality, your customer probably cares about your product for… maybe 10 minutes a month? Probably much less.

They’re struggling to summon the energy today, let alone go the extra mile for just a pat on the back. They’ve got a busy family life, working from home isn’t the best setup for them, and while they want to do the best job they can… well, you know how it is. They’ve got a ton of responsibilities, they’re understaffed, and there’s a hundred other problems that they need to solve (or at least, decide to tackle later on).

Overestimating your customers is a big mistake

It’s easy to let your imagination run away from you, and you’ll build, position, market, and sell in ways that just don’t match what your customer wants, needs, or expects.

Overestimating customers starts internally, innocently enough.

Your PMM team pick up on one customer who, admittedly, may be more mature than the rest in your market. A sudden swell of forward-thinking innovation sweeps your product team into envisioning the future. A sales rep thinks they can impress a customer by promising a snazzy feature that doesn’t actually exist yet.

You’re at the intersection of your customer’s problem space and the cutting edge of technology. It’s only natural that you’ll begin to elevate your base, unwillingly.

What damage can it do? A lot.

Building the wrong features, lost sales opportunities, and confusion on customers wants contributes to the enemy of momentum: inertia.

Increased resistance and lack of velocity means things feel harder, stickier, more difficult. Motivations wear down, and a spiral of despair sets in.

Build a solid foundation

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, we cannot rely on assumptions about our customers. There’s simply too much at stake – both lack of ROI on work invested, and missed opportunity costs.

We need accurately grok and iterate our understanding of:

• our customer’s jobs, pains, gains, and triggers
• their buyer journey
• their change environment

Your understanding of these should power product strategy, positioning, the sales pitch, and everything else that your business does.

The artifacts you develop should be documented, revisited, questioned, and socialized at every opportunity. And that’s where the challenge lies – getting adequate buy-in on the legitimacy of the research, and ensuring it’s used to provide direction to everyday decisions.

NIHITO

Nothing important happens in the office.

Get out there, understand who your customers are, and what they really need. Come up with clever ideas, but validate them with your market first. Don’t position your product based on assumptions – test as much as you need.

Remember the momentum equation: focus + confidence = momentum.

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

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

The post Don’t overestimate your customer appeared first on Building Momentum.

How much effort are you wasting internally based on seemingly smart — but unvalidated — internal ideas?

Over the last few years, thanks to the efforts of John Cutler, Theresa Torres and others, tech companies have embraced a new product management paradigm of opportunities, bets, iteration, and slices.

The intention behind this new world is to move away from big bang releases and instead ship value across the whole chain in iterative chunks. This requires continuous customer development, using the opportunity tree framework, building job-to-be-done maps, and generally being more receptive to a more fluid, less structured flow from insights to development to feedback.

Moving from internal to external opportunity generation

The goal is to move away from inward-facing insights and instead move to better understand and build for your customers. This means less off-the-cuff ideas, no more chasing competitor features just for “parity”, and the end of the HiPPO approach to product management.

And when it’s done well, teams should see increases in adoption, satisfaction, revenue, and speedier time-to-market.

Continuous customer development is one of the most exciting but underutilised tools in the product manager/product marketing/UX research toolkit.

Continually listening to the market and building a better understanding of customer needs can only be a good thing. From here, prioritizing those opportunities on their potential impact against the size of the “bet” and building only the minimum to increase confidence should mean we build resilient insight to feedback workflows.

The problem is that it’s so easy for us to justify building new features based purely on internal ideas, sizing them as small bets and foregoing customer validation because of overconfidence in our internal worldview.

Like in the TikTok above, we put the whole business value chain into motion. This doesn’t just waste time and money, but it’s distracting. Not only are there missed opportunity costs (from either building the thing right, or building the right thing instead), but it breaks down trust across teams. And as regular readers will know, confidence is a crucial part of the momentum equation.

Building an insight-driven product process

So how do we overcome the strong (and in some cases, overbearing) pull to build based on internal gut instincts?

Let’s use the “momentum equation” (Focus + Confidence = Momentum).

Focusing on customers and their jobs to be done

We need to build focus in the customers and opportunities we prioritize. This means having a really deep understanding of who our customers are, their jobs/pains/gains/triggers, and the common jobs they look to solve.

In practice, this means a consistent and structured approach to customer development. It’s not enough to do a positioning process with interviews, and then forget about researching the market ever again. You need to supplement projects with ongoing customer research. This might be a regular cadence of market research interviews for broad insights, as well as win/loss interviews for more tactical feedback.

We also need to use positioning as strategy, by detailing the value our customers desire and directing product efforts to better deliver those values.

I always recommend building a jobs-to-be-done map of your customers core jobs, allowing you to understand your product in context of your customers goal. You can also use JTBD maps to identify opportunities, by measuring satisfaction versus importance at every step.

Finally, opportunity trees are still relatively rare in practice, although the theory is solid. By focusing on the outcome and working backwards to identify different potential solutions (whether through product, service, or other methods), we can identify more innovative, out-of-the-box ideas with greater impact at lower cost.

Validate opportunities before (and during) development

Determining how much confidence your teams need before building something can be tricky.

But you know what’s easier to gauge? The inverse: how much work they would feel comfortable throwing away if a feature wasn’t working out.

Part of the new paradigm is to think of product development less as features, and more as bets. How much risk are you willing to take?

Luckily, we’re not making bets on a random roulette spin. We have the luxury of other confidence-building tools at our disposal: time, research, and iteration.

We can choose to spend more time considering a bet to gain all the required information – or we can move fast.

We could invest a lot of research effort to perfect the designs and ensure it met customer needs – or we could operate on low-fidelity signals to get things moving.

And we could build the full, end-to-end workflow – or just the first part to test demand before building the rest of it.

In practice, there are tons of ways that we can build confidence in the opportunities we build, from validating wireframes with friendly customers to operating a “wizard-of-oz” feature, and more.

The bigger challenge is to create a product and engineering team culture where iteration, delivering slices of value, and comfort making bets is accepted and lived.

Move at the same speed as your customers

One of the issues I’ve experienced is that it’s really easy for companies to think their customers are just as advanced as your team are, and therefore need all the bells and whistles you can dream of.

But your customers aren’t experts. They have a million other things going on that aren’t even vaguely related to your product or problem space. We can’t expect them to be as knowledgeable, foward-thinking, and visionary as your CEO, product team, or technologists.

The danger is that you move faster than your customers, and that alienates them. They lose confidence, and jump ship – while you’re left with a dodgy mix of simple and advanced product features.

But by using some of the ideas above, you’ll always be on the same page as your best customers, moving at the same speed. Great ideas will be validated quickly, while riskier bets will take longer to iterate from bad to great. You’ll ship product faster, customers will be happier, and you’ll have a solid foundation for aligning the rest of the business on what you’re building, and why.

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

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

The post Focus and confidence in product appeared first on Building Momentum.

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

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

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

What is ‘jobs-to-be-done’?

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

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

Why use a job map?

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

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

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

Here’s a simple example of a Job Map.

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

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

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

JTBD map stages

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

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

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

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

Linking JTBD stages to your product offering

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

Communicating JTBD Maps

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

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

In the example, you’ll see:

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

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

Start your JTBD map journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve written before about how sales decks are more than just a presentation to be talked over.

Instead, your sales deck is a prop.

When sales reps use it as a conversation starter, they’ll be able to engage, learn from, and persuade the prospect.

But to do that, you need to encourage your team to ask questions, listen, and use that to frame or reframe your product in the best light.

In this post, I’m going to walk through a sales deck I created in a previous role, along with the the framing used by sales reps and the questions asked throughout to keep the conversation on track.

Recap: SPIN questioning

We trained sales reps to use the SPIN framework to navigate the conversation.

• Situation: how they are doing something today

• Problem: the challenge that arises

• Implication: the impact of their incumbent solution

• Need-Payoff/Value: the impact that a new solution that solves the challenge would deliver

In the case of a demo, we would ideally be armed with enough information from the discovery call to know the prospects top three challenges. This would provide enough framing for the call from the get-go.

Example: Kayako sales deck

This deck was used as the Kayako sales demo deck from our relaunch in 2016, where I led go-to-market strategy and execution, including positioning, messaging, customer development, inbound marketing, and sales strategy/enablement. Check out this post for more context on our relaunch.

Kayako is customer service software that helps businesses to deliver effortless customer service across live chat, email, support portals, and social media. It was acquired by ESW Capital in March 2018.

For context, this deck was used in the sales demo meeting stage. It followed a discovery call by an SDR, who would check for BANT qualification and discover the motivations behind searching/switching for a new solution. All leads were inbound trials; they had signed up for a free trial.

Slide 1: Framing

The title of this slide would be changed to one of three of our core value drivers (see slide 5 below), depending on which was deduced as the most relevant from the discovery call.

Goal: Make a memorable impression and hold space in the customers mind for the call

Talk track: Introduce Kayako and detail our goal – in this case, to help organizations grow personal customer relationships.

Questions:

• Clear up anything not gained from the discovery call

• Ask about their day, any big projects they were working on, etc.

Slide 2: Agenda

Taking a moment to set the scene allowed us to align on the outcome of the call and make sure it met everyone’s needs.

The rep would introduce themselves and their experience helping similar companies, before asking for brief intros from everyone else on the call. This would help the sales rep adjust their talk track accordingly.

Goal: Set the scene for the call

Talk track: Introduce today’s agenda, ask if there’s anything else the prospect would like to get out of this call, introduce the rep, and learn more about who’s on the call.

Questions:

• Who do we have on the call today?

• I’m going to walk through … Is there anything else you’d like to cover today?

Slide 3: Challenges

We understood our market – mostly eCommerce retailers and SaaS businesses – pretty well. Presenting our interpretation of the challenges they were facing were our stake in the ground. Customers would engage with these and agree – in which case, we were going to be a good fit. If they didn’t engage or find some connection with these, they were going to be a bad fit. We would be transparent about this upfront – disqualification is even more important than qualification in SMB sales.

Goal: Present our insight, gain alignment

Talk track: Top challenges we understand organizations like yours to be facing, learn about their specific challenges

Questions:

• From our [discovery] call the other day, you mentioned that [problem] is a challenge, can you tell me more

• How do these fit with the challenges you’re facing, is there any similarity?

• Focus on specific challenge, e.g. How have your customer’s expectations around support changed over the last few years? / Are you finding more customers contact you multiple times across channels to get support? / Have you found it difficult to make decisions based on data because of [situation]?

Slide 4: Go on the offensive

We competed strongly on our belief that the way customer service has been done – the old game – is a point of failure. The only way to be successful is to understand your customer as as whole, not just their support tickets. By presenting a ‘life without/life with’ illustration, we were able to make our philosophy more tangible and make a clear case.

Goal: Attack competitor viewpoint, detail our philosophy and how we are uniquely placed to deliver this

Talk track: The illustration on the left is typical of almost every other customer service tool out there. Every customer query becomes nothing more than a ticket number, it’s impersonal, there’s tons of unhelpful information that agents have to tackle before they even get to the request. We think this is wrong. Kayako makes customer service personal, creating a single timeline for your customer’s requests and their customer journey across all interactions with you.

Questions:

• How are you finding [current platform]?

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

• What are you doing today to understand your customer and provide personal support experiences?

• What challenges arise from not being able to understand the customer journey?

• If you could, what do you think would change?

Slide 5: Present our value

As a result of the challenges we understood from the market, plus additional framing from the demo call so far, this slide was our opportunity to present our solution’s core value drivers.

Reps would link these back to stories they’ve heard from the prospect in the call, or from case studies. For example when talking about supporting customers as a team, they would share a quick anecdote on how Company X has been able to cut resolution time in half by allowing non-support staff to collaborate on conversations.

Goal: Reiterate our three core value drivers, double-down on the most relevant points based on understanding so far, link to demo

Talk track: With our personal customer experience philosophy and the challenges we discussed, we built Kayako to ensure you can stay personal as you grow and scale, work together as a team to provide the highest level of quality support, and have all the data you need to truly understand your customer.

Questions:

• So far, what do these mean to you? How do these resonate with what you’re hoping to achieve with your customer support platform?

• Based on our conversation so far, I’d say that Y is the most pressing for you right now, is that fair?

• In the demo coming up, I’m going to run through the core ways we help you achieve these goals. Is there anything else that I should focus on?

Slide 6: It’s demo time

Our standard product demo would be split into three sections, showing how our product helps overcome the top three challenges and any others the prospect has raised. Sales reps were given a crib sheet to follow with key steps and key points to follow, using the value nugget format to show how intangible value was formed of tangible benefits, delivered by product features.

Product demos would not involve clicking through each button or page, or showing an complicated workflow. These would be covered in a follow up pre-sales meeting, if required at all. The aim of this demo is to provide enough tangible insight into what working in the product is like.

Goal: Showcase exactly how the Kayako product helps deliver those three values, plus other areas of interest to the prospect

Questions:

• SPIN questioning would be used throughout, asking prospects to explain the situation, problem, implication, and needs-payoff/value for core, relevant challenges

For example:

• Situation:
  • “How are you doing this today?” / “So today, you’re doing…”
• Problem: 
  • “What’s difficult about this?” / “When you’re doing [x], you struggle to…”
• Implication:
  • “What’s the impact of this?” / “And this means you can/can’t…”
• Need-Payoff/Value:
  • “If you could fix [problem], what would that achieve?” / “When you can [overcome problem], that would allow you to [find value].”

Slide 7: Social proof

Based on signals picked up during the conversation, as well as anything from the discovery call, sales reps could reactively or proactively tackle any objections at this point with framing that imbued trust, scalability, and social proof.

Reps would use the Feel/Felt/Found, Priorities, Justification, or Proactive approaches to objection handling, making sure to move the conversation forward.

Goal: Combat objections

Talk track: Kayako is trusted by organizations of all sizes to deliver personal customer support, used by over 130,000 support pros. [Combat objections].

Slide 8: Finish on a success story

After tackling any objections, we wanted to leave a positive impression and have one last push at persuading further engagement. By presenting a quick case study – often navigating to the prospect’s support portal to show the product in action – we were able to create some FOMO, ground the product in a physical form, and offer relevant anecdotes on how similar customers have achieved the same kind of outcomes the prospect is looking for.

Goal: Showcase a relevant success story, leave a positive lasting impression

Talk track: I hope today’s session has given you a taste of how Kayako can help you provide effortless customer service. Before we finish up, I just wanted to offer a quick example of how a similar company is using Kayako and seeing great results. [expand]

Slide 9: Push it forward

This slide showed the basic steps involved, and we explained how customers could get up-and-running with the product, and what after-sales support would be like. We used this as a way to learn what the prospect’s buying process would be so we could prioritize or deprioritize accordingly. We aimed to galvanize the conversation, using what we knew about their challenges or sometimes offering deadlines to create urgency and momentum.

Goal: Understand the prospect buying process and build momentum

Talk track: So this is the process that customers follow with us to get up-and-running really quickly, often from start to finish within four weeks. After today’s call, your trial now has 14 days left. Once you’ve made your selection and agreed terms, we’ll help you out with onboarding before going live. You’ll also get expert ongoing support from our success team to help you make the most and help you [overcome biggest challenge].

Questions:

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

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

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

Tips: how to use your sales deck as a conversation starter

• Use and train reps with the SPIN question format to dig from situation to value in real-time

• Go light on text

• Challenge – offer some type of contentious, unconventional wisdom

Lastly, remember; there is no single sales deck. Make sure you’ve understood the buyer journey to determine exactly what the buyer – and your business – need from each meeting in the sales process.

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

The post Using sales decks as a conversation tool appeared first on Building Momentum.

Your biggest competitor is not another SaaS business. It’s not a spreadsheet. Not a person. Not an agency.

Your biggest competitor is what they are using today. Inertia.

They’re using a process that’s working. They’re spending a comfortable amount of money doing so. They’ve got buy-in, alignment on how it works, and they’re in a regular motion.

But your sales process, positioning, product strategy is all built around them embracing a new world. The promised land. The opportunity.

But… change hurts. Change costs. Change is disruptive.

You’re expecting them to implement a new product, pay more for it, pick up new processes, train their teams, get to grips with a new system… For what?

The promise of value in the future may shine bright… but is it enough?

How do you light a fire under their derrière, and get them to take action?

Four ways to drive status-quo dissatisfaction

Here are four approaches I’ve found useful to find new angles for positioning and messaging that touches a nerve.

Promote the pain

In your customer development, make sure you understand the broad problems your prospect is facing.

• What’s the hardest part of their day?

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

• What are your biggest obstacles to winning?

• What does losing at this look like?

Can you shadow them doing their day-to-day work? In a recent call with a prospect, we discovered every hire they made required 20+ hours of total work to process (excluding interviews). Times that by multiple hires… and it’s a lot.

Your prospects are likely spending unnecessary cash, time, and energy solving problems that you can dial up to 11.

Can you build a personalized business case that focuses not just on the expected gains, but on the explicit (money, time) and implicit (effort, impact) savings that customers achieve with you?

Can you highlight the painpoints in your topline messaging? Generally, people prefer to save over gain.

Intensify the risk

Inaction is not a positive experience for anyone. They still experience the pain and the problems they tried to solve, but the appetite for change is low – even though champions and users will be chomping at the bit to access new tech that can take them to the next level.

Organizations that need to play it safe will be less receptive to innovation and less likely to embrace new technology for the sake of it.

But they do care about the intrinsic risks to their business: reduced customer satisfaction, falling revenue, decreasing margins, negative press, and any challenges that arise from a PESTEL analysis.

Can you position some of your product value as a preventative risk reduction strategy? Can you show that your product reduces the frequency of severe events, reduces the severity of them, or reduces the occurrence overall?

Highlight the missed opportunities

What are your prospects missing out on when they don’t use your product?

• What would winning at this look like?

• How would this product solve your problem?

• How has our product changed your life?

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

Uncover the opportunity costs, the benefits that could have been realized. This is not the same as the benefits they could gain.

These will often be linked to a company’s growth plans: revenue, customers, efficiency. But can you find the discrete, distinct occasions – the individual cuts that make up death by a thousand cuts?

Make it personal

Stagnation sucks for employees. Can you dial up the personal pains of the individuals involved and drive enough momentum in them to make change happen?

Users want to work less. Managers want to get a promotion. Directors want to build their internal company profile. VPs want industry recognition.

Can you take advantage of these desires, highlight the personal costs of inaction, and offer a solution that appeals to these fundamental motivations?

Tear their world apart to build it up

It’s not enough to just share a perfect, idealized vision of the world a customer enters when they buy your product. Unless you can convince them there is a burning need to embrace it, you’ll end up dragging them kicking and screaming over the line.

To drive urgency in your prospect’s world, you’ll need to give them something to worry about: highlight their current pains, intensify risks, highlight the opportunity cost, and make it personal.

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

The post Four ways to highlight the “pain of same” appeared first on Building Momentum.

A great lead comes in: a real household name, with money to spend. They get through your SDR team qualification with ease. The AE’s discovery call goes swimmingly. The demo is great. And then they ask one single question that threatens to derail the entire conversation.

Prospect: “Do you have [feature]?”

AE: “No, but it’s on our roadmap.”

Prospect: “Do you know when it will be available?”

AE: “No. I can check with our team and get back to you.”

And the opportunity disappears, never to be seen again.

Why does this happen?

It’s not because you don’t have the feature available right now.

It’s not because your sales rep doesn’t know what the feature will be available. Usually, it’s an “nice-to-have” compared to the main product anyway.

This phenomenon happens when the sales rep doesn’t understand what the prospect expects the feature to resolve, and what benefit they are attempting to realize from it.

Without this knowledge it’s difficult to overcome objections, like re-prioritizing the importance the overall solution. This trough of momentum makes it difficult to build the urgency needed to move the deal forward.

To overcome, reps need confidence in their understanding of the customer and their problems. This confidence enables them to set expectations, dig deeper with questioning, and move the issue forward.

Usually, this skill comes from reps with domain knowledge: those who’ve done the work before or have intimate knowledge of the workflows involved. SaaS businesses with small teams, or those that are scaling rapidly, will find it harder to educate their team well enough to handle feature objections.

And then (even more annoyingly) you’re missing out on the rich and valuable information to feed back from the sales process to the product team. It makes it harder to gain mid-funnel feedback that could impact product prioritization, and unlock a lot more sales.

So how can you empower sales reps with the information and tactics they need to overcome these objections and push the opportunity forward?

Overcoming feature objections

Luckily, reps can maneuver around these conversations with a little help from the basic roadmap information you may already have.

Splitting your roadmap into ‘landing shortly’, ‘near term’, and ‘planned’ timelines helps your team set those relative expectations with prospects and have more productive conversations.

Educate your team on the problems to be solved

One prerequisite to overcoming objections is to give sales and success teams enough information, without overloading them on the technical details.

There are many different ways to align product, marketing, and sales, but I’d recommend the Jobs To Be Done methodology.

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

JTBD can quickly become imperious for customer-facing teams, but you can use the core concepts to help them understand what customers and users are trying to achieve.

There are five key components of a ‘job’ to be achieved:

1. Who: Who is the executor of the job, who will be overcoming the problem?

2. What: What’s the objective that the job executor wants to achieve?

3. How: What is the process the job executor will follow to achieve the objective?

4. Why: What are the intended outcomes that indicate success from completing the job?

5. When/where: What contextual factors matter in this scenario?

Using this framework when communicating the problems under investigation and features to be launched helps sales teams ground product development in a story they can internalize and retell.

Set expectations, question, move forward

Armed with that knowledge, give your team the tactics to overcome those objections.

Here are some template approaches to ensure your roadmap helps, and doesn’t hinder, your team’s sales conversations.

Landing shortly

These are features that are currently under planning and development that your product team have 95% confidence will be implemented within the next few months. The designs are set, the technical build is estimated, and we know what problem it’s intended to solve.

Set expectations:

• This is something our product team is working on right now, it’s slated to be available this quarter.

• We’re expecting this to [solve problem] by [method].

Question them:

• How would you use that?

• Is it a feature you’ve used before? How do you achieve it today?

• How is that met by the other solutions you’re evaluating?

Move them forward:

• Ask if they would be interested in seeing the mockups, or getting early-access when it’s available

Near-term

These are features that you expect to deliver next quarter: they may be loosely scoped, but the opportunity exists to get information that will validate your problem/product assumptions.

Set expectations:

• We’re planning to start on this in the next few months for it to be available next quarter.

• So far, we understand the problem to be solved is [explain problem].

Question them:

• How would you use this feature?

• How will that impact your business and workflow?

• What problem would it solve for you?

• What benefit do you expect to realize from this, and why?

• Is it a deal-breaker to moving forward with our solution shortly?

Move forward:

• Take notes to understand their problem and share with the product team, to both provide additional validation and see whether the planned features will meet their needs

• Dial up the urgency and the pain their other problems are causing, that can be solved instantly with your solution today

Planned

Planned items are in the proposal and ideation stage. Set those customer expectations as such, and deep-dive for details on how customers would use these features. These situations are helpful for impacting development prioritization when there’s a dollar amount available to be indicative of future opportunities.

Set the expectation:

• I know it’s something our product team are evaluating this right now, but need more information on how to best solve this.

• So far, we’re expecting to help customers [solve broad problem area] and achieve [result].

Question them:

• How would you use this feature?

• How will that impact your business and workflow?

• How do you do this today?

• What problem will it solve for you?

• How do you achieve the same outcome today?

• Is the capability a deal-breaker for this type of solution?

• What’s the driving force behind this requirement?

Move forward:

• If their requirements are complex, confirm by email to make sure there’s no misunderstanding

• Explain that the feedback will really help the product direction, and ask if they’ll be open to contact by the product team

• If the deal isn’t a requirement to moving forward, explain how getting onboard now is an opportunity to be involved in the product design and beta process and ensure their needs are taken into account

Avoid saying no and ensure the feedback loop is closed

It’s too easy to say no, shutting down the conversation.

If you can, attempt to turn it back round to the features you do have  by re-prioritizing the problems you can solve.

But taking the time to understand requirements and feed that insight back helps product teams to build solutions that accurately meet the needs of your prospects and customers.

Taking note of the problems and features that prospects are interested in, even if the feature delivery is some time away, can also help with re-engaging in the future.

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

If you found this post helpful, will you share it with your network?

The post Overcoming product roadmap sales objections appeared first on Building Momentum.

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

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

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

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

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

• win more deals

• drive higher average contract values

• shorten your sales cycle 

• improve your positioning and marketing

• improve your forecasting ability

• better understand and react to the market

What is a win/loss analysis program? 

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

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

• Why they chose you, or chose an alternative solution

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

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

• What their buying process was like

• How they think about the value your product is delivering

• What’s going on in their business

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

How do I set up a win/loss process?

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

1: Capture information in your CRM

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

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

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

Win/Loss reason code fields

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

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

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

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

2: Create a win/loss research interview program

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

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

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

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

Choose your audience

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

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

Set up your outreach

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

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

• Working with the product research team

• Not looking to sell

• Looking to learn from their expertise

• Able to speak at a time that suits them

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

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

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

Have the call

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

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

You’ll want to understand key areas like:

• Their perception of the product and company

• Their experience in the sales/marketing process

• Their interpretation of your products value and pricing

• Their thoughts on the competitor landscape

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

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

Create a summary for each call

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

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

• Their behavior – process details, actions they took

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

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

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

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

3: Collate, share, discuss, utilise

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

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

Democratize access

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

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

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

Proactively share

• Share interesting tidbits and new learnings in your team updates

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

Package up your insights

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

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

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

Utilize

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

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

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

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

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

Every opportunity is a learning opportunity

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

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

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

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

The post How to always win, even from deals you lost appeared first on Building Momentum.

I was working remotely for two weeks when we launched the new Kayako. The launch – a huge deal for the 110 employees that had been working on the new product for the last two years – happened over Google Hangouts and Slack. Everyone joined a video call, with champagne and cake ready in the offices in London and Gurgaon, India.

Everyone had a part to play – it would only happen if everyone had typed a custom command in our Slackbot to take the old marketing website down, push the new one live, and remove the restrictions, finally opening up the new product to the world.

We were confident. The new Kayako was really different from anything else out there: a new customer service and live chat platform for companies that obsessed over their customer experience. It killed the concept of ‘tickets’, and instead promoted a single, effortless customer relationship across contact channels.

Our target market away from IT helpdesks and technical support teams to a new ‘customer-service-as-growth’ persona. With this, we released a new brand, pricing, and positioning. Gone was the dark blue, corporate feel that was a hangover from the 00’s; we created a brand that felt comfortable, personal, and effortless.

A few months in, that confidence had been chipped away by the reality we were facing. Low trial conversions. Product stability issues and bugs. Negative feedback. Revenue was falling. Accounts were cancelling after a few months.

We’d gone from adding thousands of dollars in new contracted monthly recurring revenue (CMRR) from the old product every month, to just hundreds.

It was bad. We got together in a war-room scenario: what was happening, and how do we fix it?

Aside from product issues, we identified areas of our go-to-market strategy that were seriously problematic. Although we had followed best practice, sought expert advice, and carried out research, we failed in three key areas: pricing, positioning, and onboarding.

How we failed at pricing strategy, and how we fixed it

In the run-up to the launch, we had worked with a pricing consultant who’d developed best practices and frameworks from his time at Microsoft. We learnt a lot; the engagements were helpful, productive, and we felt assured and confident in the strategy.

The process involved carrying out a survey to understand the value that customers gained from our product. There was a big spreadsheet, listing each features with a dollar value against them, depending on how big of a draw it was.We drilled into competitor pricing, looking at how we compared on features and value.

In hindsight, we should have known that a pricing process developed for billion dollar corporate organizations like Microsoft could never have worked for our ~$5m ARR startup.

Our launch pricing strategy was simple enough. Three plans – good, better, best. Similar to our biggest competitor, although a few dollars cheaper.

We knew it was failing.

1. Free trial signups dropped, because they were put off by the pricing page

2. Conversions to paid accounts were falling, because they couldn’t experience the value they were expecting

3. First month cancellations were high, because customers didn’t experience the value they expected for the price they were paying

We had followed pricing best practices as instructions, not inspiration.

Immediately, we stepped up our research. We were already doing win/loss calls, which gave us a head start into the challenges we were facing. We began to call customers, prospects, and anyone that had signed up to get their feedback.

Our suspicions were correct. The pricing wasn’t working because people couldn’t see the right plan for them, at a reasonable price, that represented good value for them.

So we went back to the drawing board, starting with our target market. Who were our customers?

We created a spectrum of customers, from individual users that just wanted a simple live chat tool, to large teams that wanted an enterprise-level customer service platform. By mapping them out, we could see where our focus should be in the short term: building revenue from mid-sized accounts, and building volume.

We then followed a value-based pricing process from Profitwell, with three stages.

Firstly, we quantified our personas. Who were they? How profitable were they? We could do this with the data we already had.

Secondly, survey customers and people in the target market to understand the features they value the most.

Then, ask those people for four price points with a willingness-to-pay survey:

1. How much would be too expensive? 

2. How much would be expensive, but not out of the question? 

3. What price would be a bargain? 

4. How much would be so cheap that you would question the quality?.

After analysing the results, we found that everything aligned with our customer spectrum. People who wanted a live chat tool wanted something very cheap or free. And those companies that wanted a full platform would be willing to pay significantly more. 

This was a big milestone. We had turned our innate understanding of our customers into quantified, evidenced results as the basis of our strategy. We were being led by our customers.

Our original plan had been to evaluate pricing every six months. If we had waited that long, we would have been in serious trouble. After implementing the new pricing structure, we constantly gathered feedback. We analysed, cohorted, pivot-tabled the fuck out of the performance numbers to see what was going on.

Over the coming months, we adapted and tested pricing multiple times. Sometimes we offered a free plan, sometimes without. We changed the numbers, the layout of the plan, the plan names, the features included or excluded, based on what we were hearing and seeing.

We forced ourselves to iterate. And that wasn’t easy; every change took at least a day’s worth of effort from three people just to implement, let alone plan, agree, and announce.

But our ability to react quickly was the difference between success and failure.

Getting positioning wrong, and turning it around

A common best practice is to lead with aspirational, ‘world change’ messaging; and to create a category that you can own.

As part of the product launch, we wanted to set ourselves apart from competitors. We thought the most effective way to do this was by creating a narrative, using Andy Raskin’s Medium posts as a guide.

His key to creating a narrative is to define the promised land, the world that your customers can achieve when they have your product.

Naively, we used this format as instruction again, not inspiration. We tried to build a category and narrative around ‘effortless customer experience’. It was really human: no more having to repeat yourself across departments, the end of being treated like a ticket number.

When we showed this to customers and prospects, it really resonated. So we went big. The messaging united our website, collateral, and sales deck.

But after the launch, we discovered it wasn’t actually working. We found we had focused almost exclusively on this aspirational world change so much that we hadn’t covered the functional benefits that our customers expected to see (and in some cases, prioritized more).

We were alienating our customers with high-level messaging. Although we had done research and testing, we had biased ourselves towards executives and decision-makers in more mature businesses, without realising that in most cases, that wasn’t our customer.

Armed with the knowledge we had from our pricing research, we were able to pick up interviews and calls with those people that were actually interested, and were actually the correct stakeholder at different stages of the buying process.

Often, those people were at smaller companies: like co-founders that needed something they could set up easily and forget about, or an ambitious customer service professional who was looking to make big changes to the way their orgs approached customer service.

We created a single Slack channel that automatically posted every bit of good, bad, and neutral feedback we received from customers and prospects across every feedback channel. This gave us a real-time pulse check, helping us refine our mental model of who our customers were and what they cared about. We also used this to create a regular Voice of the Customer report that helped communicate this across the rest of the business.

It reduced the distance between us and our customers: a direct feed into what they cared about, and what they didn’t. We had to forget our bias, removing our impression of what we thought they wanted – and actually listened to what they were saying. We let our customers lead us.

So it was time to flex that iteration muscle again. We could test, rollout, and update new messaging really quickly. Sometimes we’d change it every day by rewriting headlines, making small tweaks, or trying something completely different.

We were lucky enough to have instant access to making website changes, along with a fantastic in-house designers and marketing developers to help. We forced ourselves to iterate and experiment – everything could be reversed if it didn’t work out, with hardly any lasting risk.

Strong relationships with our sales and success teams were crucial too, allowing us to try out new messaging, test new demo structures, and try different ways of presenting our value.

From a broken onboarding process to a smooth welcome

In the run up to launching the product, we’d researched best practices for SaaS onboarding.

The majority follow a simple rule, called time-to-value. Your product’s goal is get your customers to experience value as soon as possible, for best chance of success. It’s pretty good; it means you don’t have to focus on helping users set your product up for use, and instead you can focus on getting them to a point of satisfaction.

Our product, however, needed a lot of setup to experience value. You had to set up your support email address, connect social accounts, invite your team, set up workflows, and much more.

This was way too much to do for someone just trialling the product. But there was no substitute: you had to commit completely. But we had still followed those rules as prescribed, instead of using it as inspiration. Our first onboarding process was set up around helping users set up the account. Obviously, this was not going to be effective.

The results were disappointing. Leads were signing up for trials, looking around for a few minutes, then leaving straight away.

We couldn’t let this go on. All the work we were putting in from the marketing side to get visitors to the website… the work we had put in to iterate our messaging… the huge strides we had made with pricing… were all for nothing. We were falling down at the last hurdle.

To understand what was happening, we used Fullstory to review what users were doing in their first experience. We found that the majority of people went straight to the worst place in the product. The place where nothing looks good, where no attention was paid during development, and where things got confusing, quickly. They were going to the admin area.

We really had no idea that users would go there within the first few minutes of signing up. We had to understand why, so following this line of investigation in our calls and interviews.

We tried to find out what it was that prospects were trying to discover that they couldn’t find elsewhere. The results were interesting – users were saying they wanted to learn what features we had, and how flexible the configuration options were.

They had been interested by the website, and now we realised the first experience needed to show not just the product, but it’s potential.

So we dialled up our product education efforts. As soon as someone signed up, we showed a two minute intro video, then we hit them again with three key points to drive the message home.

We added better information in the admin menu, not just describing the technical detail, but making it clear what the potential usage of each feature could be. We carried out research to understand the most logical grouping of admin features.

We added empty stages and dummy data that demonstrated the full range of capability, without requiring any setup. Our goal was to get to a place where users could see what working in the product was like from the moment they signed up.

We didn’t get this right first time. We tried to get a balance between providing education, and getting out of the way and letting users learn and explore for themselves.

We worked with our designers and frontend developers to iterate together. As we made progress, some users weren’t happy as we tried something weird. Generally, feedback was positive. We tried to distill complexity into more simple, logical areas.

Fullstory was really useful to instantly see results, and whether users were being successful with each version we tried. When we looked at cohort data, we found a clear connection between the educational onboarding experience, and higher trial conversions.

Reacting well

It took us about six months to right these wrongs. Over that time, we had increased the new CMRR we were adding each month by other 80%. Within 18 months of launch, the new product had become a $2m ARR product, and Kayako was then acquired on the strength of it’s growth.

In each of these three examples we were able to turn around a struggling product launch, and put it back on track. Three guidelines determined our reaction.

Best practices are inspiration, not instruction

The same goes for any advice, any tips, recommendations, talks, and blog posts. There are simply too many variables, too many unknowns, and too many inherent biases at play to use a best practice or process from one situation, and expect it to perform well.

That’s not to say we can’t take inspiration from them. So long as we are applying some critical analysis to assess how we should interpret that advice.

Let your customers lead you

Doing this can feel pretty strange, however obvious. Especially if, like this product launch, you’re moving towards a new audience, a new type of customer that you don’t fully understand yet.

It’s tempting to put something out that you think will work, because you don’t know enough yet. Positioning that’s created in an internal vacuum, or pricing that’s based on your competitors.

It’s really crucial to continually build an understanding of customers all the time. Continual research over one-off projects. We have to listen, set aside our own biases, get out of our heads, and really get into theirs.

Flex your iteration muscle

I’ve called it a muscle because unless you don’t do it often, it will be hard, it will hurt, and it is going to be uncomfortable.

As marketers, I think we’re conditioned to prefer one-off, big bang launches. We do the work, launch, move onto the next thing… with plans to revisit at some point in the future.

But we’re in 2020. Nothing lasts six months anymore. Your customer’s goals, gains, pains, and jobs change much more often than we think. And so does your business strategy. What was true, and worked well yesterday, might not be true tomorrow.

We found it extremely useful to implement pulse checks: small polls, real-time feeds, and regular evaluations to keep on top of what’s happening. The goal is to test two things: if your understanding is still correct, and if your execution is still effective.

Bringing it all together

I hope this gives you a few ideas on how we approached a failing product launch, and how we turned it around by really listening to our customers, constantly iterating, and using best practices as inspiration.

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

If you enjoyed this post, will you it with your network?

The post From failed product launch to $2m ARR appeared first on Building Momentum.

A company grew from 40 to 140 people in a year’s time. They had grown considerably on their existing product that a repeatable product/marketing/sales process. As such, they hired people to execute that effectively – the scalers.

To meet growth expectations, they began to hire people with different skills to develop a new product and build a marketing and sales engine from scratch to take over as the existing product plateaued – the explorers.

This cultural dissonance created ambiguity. Was the old product worth it anymore? Was the new one better? If the new one isn’t growing fast enough, is the old one better? What type of customer was more important? How should we be spending our time?

Warring debates between the two factions held up any decision. Indecision and competing priorities resulted in multiple consecutive quarters of disappointingly low growth. Inertia had infiltrated.

If momentum is the goal, then inertia is the enemy.

What causes inertia?

Inertia happens in two ways.

Increased resistance

The first is through increased resistance, where it feels like getting blood out of a stone whilst walking through mud. Try as hard as you might, obstacles eventually block every path.

It’s most likely from the more esoteric thinkers in your team, where ripple-down effects are most dangerous. It’s manifested through politics and infighting, misguided debates, and bike-shedding. Decisions, large and small, are bogged down with unreasonably metaphorical what-ifs and gotchas.

Increased resistance happens when people lose trust in the direction of travel because it doesn’t generate the results they are experiencing or expecting.

Lack of velocity

The second is a lack of velocity. Velocity, if anyone remembers high school physics, is speed in a specific direction. Often, this infiltrates businesses under the radar, when the guards are down, disguised as busywork. A thousand monkeys bashing on typewriters will look like they’re hard at work. But are they close to writing the entire works of Shakespeare?

When faced with a lack of velocity, the immediate response from managers is to monitor the work, the deliverables, the outputs. This is akin to measuring the speed, in the velocity equation – how fast are we going? But that won’t tell you if your team are moving in the desired direction.

Velocity is lost when people are confused about the direction they should be moving in.

Ultimately, these causes of inertia occur when there is uncertainty, ambiguity, and misalignment.

Ambiguity and inertia

Startups are a lesson in managing ambiguity and the chaos that it can cause. It feels like current advice is to only hire smart people who can deal with uncertainty – but you also need people that can work on discrete, executable tasks too. Can you define the skillsets required, and set both sides up to deliver business value?

Releasing ambiguity on a team is not likely to work, regardless of how smart your people may be. Personal interpretations, assumptions, and misaligned incentives can cause havoc – and prevent teams from rowing in the same direction together. Can you list the logical questions to be answered, create a framework for reviewing new information, and set rational expectations on milestones and success?

Hiding uncertainty from people also doesn’t work; it builds resistance and friction, and creates a false sense of security on both sides. Can you be super transparent on the challenges, educate teams on the impact and ramifications of discoveries, and create low-friction feedback loops?

Your big hairy audacious goal, mission and vision might suit some people in your teams – but others will likely need the peace of mind that comes with short-term clarity. Can you create a definitive but living, breathing understanding of today’s business-as-usual activity, upcoming priorities, and how they ladder up into your longer-term goals?

Most projects that involve an entire organization dealing with ambiguity are run with an aura of importance, ambitious goals, and high expectations. Can you reframe each ambiguous challenge as a hypothesis, with a rational prediction and clear understanding of what success looks like?

Taming inertia

When you take control of the causes of inertia – a lack of direction, uncertainty, and misalignment – you have an opportunity to use every lesson learnt as a battle you’ve won in the war for momentum.

It’s really important to ensure not only is everyone is rowing in the same direction, but everyone is learning the same lessons. That communal knowledge drives increased focus, whilst framing every outcome as a win builds confidence. And focus + confidence = momentum.

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