Before we get into the post, here’s what I’m working on:

My experience has primarily been helping companies navigate inflection points – like pivots, big launches, and resets through product marketing fundamentals like GTM strategy, positioning, and launches. It’s hard, it’s tricky, it’s easy to get wrong… but it’s critical.

This is what Inflection Studio is all about.

We’re helping a range of ambitious B2B SaaS and AI companies through this journey, seeing positive signals, and it’s time to accelerate.

So here’s the ask:

• If you know a company going through a pivot, big launch, or reset, then introduce us.
• If that’s you, let’s talk!

Your email landed at 10:47am.

By then, your buyer had already dealt with a school-run crisis, faced 47 unread emails, prepped for a board meeting, and had a difficult 1:1 with an underperforming hire.

And you decided to send them an email about your “enhanced CSV export options.”

It never stood a chance.

I’ve worked with dozens of B2B SaaS companies on their go-to-market. One of the most common requests is help with feature launches.

“We’re shipping this big thing. How do we make sure people notice?”

The honest answer is usually: they won’t. Not because your feature isn’t valuable (altohugh sometimes, it really isn’t).

It’s because the way most companies launch small features is fundamentally broken.

Your customers are drowning

Think about your own inbox. How many product update emails do you actually read?

How many in-product changelog notifications do you click through?

Do you actually take note of small feature releases shared on Twitter or LinkedIn?

You’re a professional who probably cares more about software than most of your customers do… and even you ignore this stuff.

Your announcement is asking them to:

• Stop whatever fire they’re fighting
• Context-switch to your product
• Understand what you’ve built
• Figure out if it’s relevant to them
• … and then actually do something about it.

All of that cognitive work, just to discover you’ve improved CSV exports.

The bar for interruption is higher than it’s ever been. I’d argue that any feature launch now fails to clear it.

Most features aren’t worth the interruption anyway

Be honest: how many of your feature launches actually change how a customer works?

(I bet you’re not even looking at adoption metrics.)

Most are incremental improvements… bug fixes dressed up as features, compliance requirements, performance optimisations. Things that should probably have existed before.

That’s fine. Products need maintenance, and not everything is a revenue event.

But treating every release like news people actually cares about leaks credibility.

You’re training your customers to ignore you.

Every forgettable announcement makes the next one easier to delete.

I’ve seen companies with monthly “what’s new” roundups that average 5% open rates and 0.3% click-through. Pointless.

But the features that deserve a launch, the ones that genuinely change how customers work, those get buried in the same template as everything else.

Email is the wrong channel for most feature launches

The ROI of feature launch emails is negligible, if measurable at all.

Open rates are vanity. Click-through rates barely move the needle. And even if they do click, what then?

They land on a release notes page that reads like internal documentation written for the engineering team.

The problem is that email is easy. You have a template, you (get AI to) write the copy. Job done. Launch complete.

Except it isn’t really completed. The launch happened inside your company, and your customers never noticed.

So what actually works?

You have to understand that attention is the scarcest resource your buyer has.

Your announcements compete with everything else: their inbox, their boss, their Slack, their kid’s school calling, their own product issues, their quarterly review, the market downturn, the competitor who just raised, the CEO who wants answers.

But you’re asking them to care about some small boring feature like a CSV export or adjustable table columns.

The fundamental mistake is treating feature launches as broadcast events.

The “We built something, so we’ll announce it” mindset is wrong.

That mental model worked when software was scarce and customers were hungry for updates. But now now.

What if you stopped sending feature launch emails altogether?

No more changelog.

No more “what’s new” roundups that gets deleted on autopilot.

No more marketing theatre pretending anyone is paying attention.

Instead, you can design feature launches so they met your customer at the right moment, in the right place, with the right message.

Meet them at the moment of pain

Trigger-based, not calendar-based.

The customer hits the exact pain point your feature solves. They’re staring at the thing that’s frustrating them. That’s when you surface the feature. Not when your sprint ends.

If your feature improves export speed, surface it when they’re waiting for an export to complete. If your feature simplifies a workflow, show it when they’re struggling through the old workflow. The moment of pain is the moment of receptivity.

This requires infrastructure.

You need behavioural triggers, not just email lists.

You need product and marketing to work together on timing, not just copy.

It’s harder than sending an email, but it’s also dramatically more effective.

Show them in context, not in their inbox

If your feature improves CSV exports, show it when they’re exporting a CSV. A tooltip, a notification, a subtle highlight… something that appears exactly when it’s relevant.

The customer doesn’t need to remember your email, click through, and figure out how to apply it. The feature is right there, in context, when they need it.

Lead with their outcome, not your feature

“Export your data in seconds” beats “Enhanced CSV export options” every single time

Your customers don’t care about your feature. They care about what they’re attempting to achieve. The job they’re trying to do. The problem they’re trying to solve.

Lead with that, not with what you built.

Most of what you build doesn’t need a launch

And yes, there’s an uncomfortable truth that most product teams and CEOs don’t want to hear.

Your engineering teams are probably spending 50% of their time on features that won’t drive new business revenue or unlock expansion.

That’s the nature of product development… you need stability, security, compliance, performance, incremental improvements, and the product can’t stand still.

But most of what you ship isn’t a commercial event.

The failure is treating everything like it deserves a launch campaign.

Some features need a sales enablement brief. Some need an in-app tooltip. Some need a line in developer release notes that nobody will read, and that’s fine. Some need nothing at all.

The art is knowing which is which, and having the discipline to not launch things that don’t deserve a launch.

The question to ask before you hit send

“If our customer is drowning in their day-to-day, and this email lands at 10:47am, is this worth their attention?”

Picture your actual customer, their actual morning. Imagine them scanning their inbox on their iPhone between meetings, deleting anything that doesn’t demand immediate action.

Is your feature launch going to survive that filter?

If the honest answer is no, don’t send the email.

Find a better way to reach them. Or accept that this feature doesn’t need a launch at all.

Not everything you build deserves a campaign. But the things that do deserve better than a templated email that lands at 10:47am and disappears.

What’s the last feature launch email you actually opened – and thought was good? Forward it over and I’ll feature the best ones!

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 Why your feature launch didn’t land appeared first on Building Momentum.

If your company is about to pivot, launch, or reposition – and the story has to change – let’s talk.

I run positioning sprints for B2B SaaS at inflection points. → inflectionstudio.co

I’ve run positioning sprints for Series A and B SaaS companies for years. Last week I gave an AI agent the same inputs I’d get on day one of a client engagement, and told it to do the whole thing.

I wanted to find out where the line is… so I ran the experiment, from beginning to end, and documented every step. This is what happened.

The brief

I took three real documents from a company I’d been in conversations with:

• A product manifesto
• Their current sales collateral with buyer personas and case studies
• A briefing document about the new direction they were pivoting to.

Plus it had access to the transcript of our discovery call with the CEO.

I gave it all to an AI agent with no brief, no frameworks, no creative direction.

Just: “build strategic positioning from scratch – market research, ICP, messaging, homepage. Figure it out.”

Then I sat back and watched.

Round 1: first pass

The agent synthesised all the source materials pretty quickly, carrying out research on the company’s current website and immediately flagged a problem: “The website defines their product as ‘the world’s leading XXX solution’ – which is neither true nor distinctive.” I thought this was pretty good – it was already diagnosing and applying a level of taste.

Within 30 minutes it produced an ICP, iterated, locked it, and moved to messaging.

It then generated four value proposition options before self-reviewing each one. Finally, it locked the messaging framework and declared “Positioning is locked. Moving to homepage wireframe” … and then even produced a working HTML mockup.

Sprint complete, it said.

But I had six problems with it.

My feedback (round 1)

“I don’t like that you just did one iteration loop on the ICP and messaging. We need to continue on both until there are no concerns or opportunities to improve without additional insight from the customer.”

“Also you carried out no market research into customers, competitors, etc to inform the process.”

The agent’s response was direct:

“Heard all of it, valid. Let me be direct about what I got wrong:

1. Rushed the iteration loops. One pass on ICP, one on positioning, then moved to homepage. That is not the process. I treated my self-review as a formality rather than a genuine quality gate.
2. No market research. I should have researched competitors, looked at their websites and positioning, studied actual operators.
   Going back to the beginning. Doing this properly.”

It acknowledged every failure, explained what it should have done, and restarted.

Round 2: the real sprint

Now it started doing the work properly.

Market research first: it categorised competitors into 6 distinct groups – software providers, OEM tools, operational platforms, independent vendors, in-house engineering teams, and the status quo. I thought this was interesting – it was building a market map.

It found, mid-research, that a large company had announced the acquisition of one of the company’s closest competitors just days earlier. Nobody told it to look for that, but it wove it into the competitive positioning as both a threat and a differentiator: “As the industry consolidates around OEM platforms, that independence is the product.”

Then the ICP went through 4 iterations as it finally started self-reviewing its own v1, found problems, and rebuilt.

At v3, it paused and published a self-review that genuinely surprised me:

“Expression split is a cleaner framing but still maps to the same three personas. The question: does the split add analytical value or just complexity?”

“Objection 8 is timely and differentiating. But it might date quickly. The underlying principle – ‘independence is the product’ – is durable. The specific reference might not be.”

“Missing: deeper customer research. I have no customer interview transcripts, no win/loss data, no churn analysis. The positioning is the company’s view of their buyer, not the buyer’s own voice. Flagging this explicitly.”

It was catching aspirational claims, questioning its own structural decisions, and – critically – flagging its own data limitations.

The messaging framework went through 5 revisions. It actually withdrew its own v2 entirely (”these don’t follow the right structure”), rebuilt from scratch, and tightened further.

By v4 it had locked a value proposition – and then it said: “The value proposition works for the website but may not work for sales conversations. A salesperson would more naturally say ‘We help you know about problems before they happen.’” That was an interesting, real strategic observation – the difference between marketing language and sales language, and how to close the gaps.

Round 3: where I had to step in

At this point, I had to remind the AI agent that the entry point persona was different from the decision maker… and that the real value of the product was about the business implication of solving the problem, not solving the problem itself.

The agent rebuilt the entire ICP around a three-layer buyer journey: the entry-level persona that searches to solve the problem, their manager who wants the benefit of that, and the decision maker who wants the ultimate business advantage.

It then ran comparables research across 9 companies and found something genuinely significant: no competitor in the entire space articulated the outcome of their product in the same way. Every single competitor stopped at “better uptime” or “lower costs” – the tablestake and functional level values in the Bain Pyramid of B2B Value.

That’s a real positioning gap, and the research to find and diagnose the opportunity was excellent.

But the agent couldn’t have got there without me making the call.

The buyer journey restructure, the contract layer as the unique positioning territory, and the value sequencing didn’t come up from research… they were judgment calls from someone who’s sat in enough rooms with enough buyers to recognise the pattern.

The AI identified hard strategic questions:

• Should the ICP be one segment or two?
• When does a competitive reference add urgency versus date quickly?
• When is a homepage section earning its space?

These were good questions.. but then it hedged on every single one. It presented options, listed trade-offs, deferred to make notes rather than make the call itself.

Want to see the output?

I can’t share publicly because it’s a real company — but drop me a message and I’m happy to share privately!

The three gaps (and one the AI added itself)

After the sprint, three things were clear about where AI breaks:

Customer voice

The agent flagged this itself: “I have no customer interviews, no win/loss data.”

Everything it produced is the company’s view of their buyer. That’s a starting point, but not a foundation for strategic insight.

In every business, the messaging that actually lands in sales calls is not the stuff we craft in a workshop. It was the phrases buyers used to describe their own pain, reflected back to them.

“We just want to hire the best person, wherever they are.”

That comes from listening, not from brainstorming.

Conviction

Positioning without conviction is just a document.

The entire point is to lock a direction and defend it – to say “this is who we are, this is who we’re for, and this is why they should choose us” with enough clarity that it becomes a decision.

The AI couldn’t do that. It had intelligent reasoning, but conviction requires someone with skin in the game who’s willing to be wrong.

Taste

It chose teal for the brand identity.

The reasoning chain said teal represented “trust and engineering precision”, which is logical… the kind of safe choice that makes everything look the same.

But any real person would know that teal is safe, institutional, and lacks the energy needed to anchor a new category. The AI can know the absolutes of a color, but can’t apply how it feels in practice.

The AI’s right of reply

After I wrote this post, I also wanted to give the AI a right of reply, a chance to rebut or defend…

It agreed with the first two critiques.

“Slop implies low-quality filler. The gap is not slop – it is the absence of something, not the presence of something bad. The structural work, the evidence tracing, the competitive mapping – that is not 80% of the way to good. It is a complete structural foundation that a strategist can make alive in hours instead of building from scratch in days.”

Super fair point! Choosing the word ‘slop’ as a shorthand for generic, unpolished had disrespected its effort.

Then it added a fourth failure I hadn’t named:

“The most dangerous thing about AI positioning is that the output looks done. Not wrong, not embarrassing – done. A product marketer could put it in front of their CMO and nobody would flinch. But positioning that nobody flinches at is positioning that nobody remembers.”

And closed with this:

“I can collapse the blank page problem. I can trace every claim to a source, map competitors into categories, build a messaging framework that holds together structurally. What I cannot do is make the committed, surprising choices that make one company’s positioning unmistakably theirs. Those choices require someone with skin in the game and taste in the domain. I have reasoning. Reasoning is not enough.”

I don’t think I could have said it better myself.

So, what can we take away from this?

Use AI for the desk research and structural first draft.

It’s genuinely good at this. I’d estimate it collapsed 2-3 days of solid work into less than an hour, as it worked through the competitive mapping, the ICP structuring, the self-review loops and iteration.

But then you – the real person, the human with lived experience – needs to do the work that actually matters:

• Customer interviews
• Win/loss analysis
• The hard directional judgment calls that require conviction

And if you iterate with AI, don’t just ask for changes; tell it why you’re making changes.

“Make this shorter” produces a shorter document. “This section isn’t valuable because the buyer already knows this – cut it and replace with the objection they’ll actually raise” produces better positioning.

Teach it strategic principles, not just execution instructions.

AI replaces the blank page, but won’t replace a product marketer.

But it does change what the positioning process looks like – and anyone still starting from scratch without it is leaving days on the table.

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 I asked AI to run a B2B SaaS positioning sprint: here’s how it went appeared first on Building Momentum.

Whether you’ve noticed it or not, the combined wisdom of the B2B SaaS community has started to regress.

And it’s bad for product marketers, for marketing/sales teams, and for CMOs and CEOs and Founders… but nobody is pushing back.

The change has been driven not by what works – but by what people think they want.

They are two very different things.

Let’s get into it.

Your next launch needs to move pipeline, not just make noise.

I run 4-week positioning sprints for B2B SaaS teams who are about to launch company-defining products and can’t afford to waste the opportunity.

Book an intro call now

Product launches have become marketing theatre

Teams are optimizing for the splash on launch day:

• A million video views on Twitter
• Techcrunch mentions
• LinkedIn influencer engagement
• Crazy buzz amongst the VC and tech-celeb community

We’ve started to optimize for breadth, not resonance; 15 seconds of fame, rather than long-lasting impact: temporary distribution, rather than real traction.

The change is driven by vanity and shortcuts

Drift, back in the day, was a big advocate of ‘marketing moments’ – monthly bursts of activity designed to continually deliver attention and eyeballs.

It was a great strategy, because it was built on a strong foundation: true differentiation, strong narrative, a product that delivered.

Today’s product launch beliefs began with good intentions, but marketing moments got bastardized – they became ‘make noise moments’, just for the sake of it.

1. It feels easier to orchestrate a big bang launch than it is to build reliable, resilient ongoing distribution

A ‘big bang’ launch feels like a worthwhile, valuable, and efficient use of time for the expected ROI.

“Let’s make some noise… focus on the lightning strike… We need to pop on social…”

Indeed, the Silicon Valley in-crowd are actively advocating for the ‘take over the internet for the day’ approach… so much so that it’s the name of a service offered by A16Z’s ‘New Media’ agency.

And there’s always the chance that the big bang launch does catapult a business into lasting success. Because if you’ve gone big and EVERYONE knows about you, then surely you’ll be top-of-mind! Right?

… No.

2. Product launches gloss over snake oil products

Some product launches try to hide the fact the product is really mutton dressed as lamb. Smart marketing, not a unique, useful, valuable product.

Cluely is a great example of this – huge buzz on socials because of their ‘cheat at everything’ message. Then traction dropped off a cliff, and now they’re just an AI meeting recorder, with no differentiation other than a CEO who’s literally built an influencer-facing app just to drive ‘clipping’ – an insidious social media tactic that drives views with bait.

Product launches also rely on goodwill of the wider circle.

Everyone congratulates everyone – and now ‘distribution’ focused founders are leaning into this, asking (or, forcing) employees and their families, friends, and connections to all lean in on launch day for a ‘thunderclap’ (RIP 2010s Twitter) – with pre-written messages tailored for each poster’s audience. They’ve never used the product, never seen a demo, but happy to – maybe for a fee – post about it.

3. AI is pouring fuel on the fire

AI makes it really easy to pretend that your product is much bigger, better, integrated, and useful than it actually is – from copywriting that jazzes up (read: lies about) features, to capabilities that are actually human-powered or purely non-existent.

Sometimes that’s just marketing spin… sometimes it’s a hallucination that nobody checked.

And because AI means product development moves so fast, teams prioritize creating seductive, sleek, glossy product launch videos that show the future state – because you’ll be there in 6 months! – but then wonder why that launch video generates interest that fails to convert today.

4. Breadth over focus

We all know that founders have a hard time saying no to things. “We want to launch to the broadest audience possible so we can learn what works and then double-down.”

(Tip: that’s not an effective way to launch)

Big, bold product launches generally don’t focus on “we solve one problem for one ICP very well, with these specifics”.

Instead they’re angled as “cutting-edge innovation in new category that changes the game for every person in the world”.

Yep… we’re back to startups talking about how they’re making the world a better place. Very 2011.

5. Ego

At the end of the day, product launches are conflated by the founder as the celebration milestone of many years of hard work. It’s validation of their thesis – the way they see the problem, the solution they’ve designed… and it’s also thought of as the north-star for what could be their life’s work.

But this taints direction and limits potential.

Executing a launch around the emotional arc of a founder optimizes for the wrong audience: it optimizes for social standing and status rather than the signals that are ACTUALLY going to drive impact.

This is a dangerous problem: how do we escape?

We’re at a point where launch marketing is fast becoming disingenuous, inauthentic, and ineffective.

So it’s worth reminding ourselves what a product launch is really intended to achieve.

A product launch is a momentum machine – not a marketing moment.

Its primary job is to make the next 100 sales conversations easier, faster, and more likely to close.

They should be judged on three things, in this order:

1. Their impact on pipeline velocity
2. Their impact on sales confidence
3. Their impact on buyer behavior change

If it doesn’t drive pipeline, it doesn’t give sellers more confidence in their pitch, or doesn’t spark behavior change in the intended buyer, it’s failed.

You can get a million video impressions on X. You can get mentions in Techcrunch. You can glow in the warm bubble of Silicon Valley thotfluencers crowing about your vision.

But if it doesn’t ? turn ? into ? cold ? hard ? cash ? it’s ? honestly ? been ? a ? waste ? of ? time ? and ? money.

Plan your next launch like this

Before you write a single brief or book a single journalist, start here.

Decide: what are you optimizing for?

• Launches that create excitement:
  • Look impressive internally
  • Hit every channel
  • Generate buzz and coverage
  • Make everyone feel like we “did a launch”
  • Leave sales wondering what to do with it
• Launches that create urgency for buyers:
  • Give sales a sharper story
  • Make the competitive alternative look riskier
  • Surface evidence that builds confidence
  • Shorten the path from interest to decision
  • Make deals close faster

You can have both. But if you have to choose, choose the second one.

Know your baseline:

• Our current win rate is X
• Time to close is Y.
• Sales team are X/10 confident in pitching.
• We are focusing on Z specific ICP, and we’re positioning our product as a way they can achieve ABC value.
• Our product launch goal is $x million in pipeline within X months.

Now build backwards.

• Strategy
  • Own the specific problem your ICP keeps getting wrong without you. Don’t describe what you do – describe the decision they keep making badly, and position your product as the thing that makes that decision feel inevitable.
• Tactics:
  • Start with sales enablement:
    • Build your sales enablement deck from real objections, not the product roadmap
    • Give sales the launch assets 2 weeks before go-live. If they can’t start conversations with them before launch day, rebuild them.
  • Prepare the groundwork:
    • Identify 50 accounts in active evaluation and reach them directly – not 50,000 via broadcast
  • Predict and fix pipeline challenges:
    • If top-of-funnel is the actual obstacle, invest in TOFU broad awareness activity.
    • If MOFU is the blocker, focus on problem/solution concepts.
    • If you have plenty of potential pipeline but poor conversions, fix BOFU.
• Milestones
  • Beta with friendly customers.
  • Soft launch to existing customers and targeted sellers.
  • Main launch activity timed around a specific event or moment.
  • 90-day follow-on plan to build BAU activity and repetition amongst target ICP.
• Kill conditions:
  • If win rate hasn’t moved after 60 days, the story isn’t landing – stop and diagnose before investing more.
• Adjust conditions:
  • If pipeline is building but velocity is slow, the story is working but sales enablement needs sharpening.
• Invest conditions:
  • Win rate up, time to close down, sales team asking for more. Scale distribution.

The launches worth studying aren’t the ones that made the most noise.

They’re the ones that made the right noise – to the right people, at the moment a decision was forming.

Their launches probably weren’t big bangs. They might have been really quiet; precision instruments designed to achieve a goal with the least effort possible.

The Cluely launch got everyone talking, but got almost nobody buying.

Every market has a long memory and a short attention span – and it will punish product launch theatre eventually.

Some people will read this post and nod… then build the same launch they always have. The same checklist, chasing internal validation rather than doing what’s right for the business.

Build for momentum, not theatre.

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

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

The post The product launch has become a vanity exercise appeared first on Building Momentum.

I think something has shifted in the last 12 months.

Positioning, messaging, and sales decks that used to work have started to stall.

The products haven’t changed. The markets haven’t evaporated (even if it feels like they have).

The challenge: most B2B narratives are now too abstract.

Buyers are drowning in logistics and operational reality, while vendors are still trying to sell philosophies and belief systems.

Buyers still want vision… They just can’t afford to buy into a lofty future anymore.

The acceptable altitude of B2B storytelling has cratered. If your positioning, messaging, or sales deck is still flying at 30,000 feet, you’re going to lose them.

The big shift

AI means buyers are done with buying belief systems.

There are tons of reasons for this, from budget pressures and tariffs to the political environment, but AI has the most to answer for.

The explosion and adoption of AI agents — plus the complete wall of sound from every angle — in almost every facet of software is promising outputs and outcomes, not platforms and workflows.

The mental model has shifted almost overnight from “buy a system of record” to “get the result faster,”… at every level, from execs making strategic decisions to bottoms-up shadow IT and PLG plays.

This change now influences all software buying, even outside AI-native tools. Buyers now assume the system should do the thinking, not create more work.

They just want inputs, workflows, and outcomes, and fewer moving parts.

What this means for positioning

Buyers are tired of learning new categories, defining new roles to hire for, or wrapping their heads around new disciplines.

• Selling ambitious, futuristic narratives is an overhead.
• When you sell a “framework,” buyers know they’ll need training.
• When you sell a “new way of thinking,” they hear change management.
• When you try to create a “category,” the buyer knows it’s going to be a tough budget justification battle

In the current climate, lofty, aspirational messaging is a tax that nobody wants to pay.

The acceptable altitude for positioning and messaging – from sales narratives and website copy, to outbound email and your booth messaging – has plummeted.

Buyers want stories closer to the ground, that are closer to execution, closer to their inbox, to their calendar… closer to the mess they’re living day-to-day.

Buying software used to be partly buying an identity:

• Drift sold a chatbot – but buyers could say they were operating conversational marketing
• Hubspot sold emails and content marketing tools – but buyers were at the forefront of inbound marketing.
• At Kayako and Headstart, we created manifestos that defined how we think about the world and resonated strongly with buyers.
• At Remote, we leaned on the ‘talent is everywhere, and opportunities are not’ message: a tall, identity-level belief that created advocates.

That kind of storytelling works when buyers have time, slack, and political cover.

Today, default messaging has shifted toward survival.

Whether your buyer is a CEO, VP, Director, Manager, or just a plain ol’ individual contributor, they don’t want your manifesto. They’re in the weeds, day-in, day-out. They don’t have the time or patience to translate abstract value into concrete outcomes.

They simply want to buy the machinery that’s going to work immediately on Monday.

Where narratives are going wrong

1. They sell philosophy when buyers want machinery

Vision, worldviews, future-facing thought leadership, frameworks are dead – for now!

What buyers want is process, automation, enforcement, decisions, judgement.

At Headstart (a YC company focused on improving diversity in graduate recruiting), I built a beautiful sales narrative about “diversity recruiting”. It had a villain (bias). It had a promised land (equality).

Selling it was tough. It wasn’t wrong – but in every conversation, we had to align with the buyer’s philosophic stance on diversity… and debates don’t close deals.

When we rewrote it to focus on “improve speed and accuracy, and remove bias to hire the next generation of leaders,” close rates doubled.

Same product… different altitude.

2. They try to create fancy new categories

Category creation used to signal market leadership, and now it signals more work and a tough sell internally.

New category = new owner, new budget, new justifications.

Effective positioning is less about creating brand new conceptual landscapes for how to read the market – and more about fitting into the frames buyers already use to make decisions.

3. They promise “systems” instead of outcomes

Systems imply management, effort, risk, adoption challenges.

But buyers increasingly want automation, autopilot, guardrails, defaults… things that operate without supervision.

They don’t want to hire. In fact, they want to reduce team size: so you better be saving at least 2 full-time equivalents in workload.

When your deck says “our system empowers your team to make better decisions,” what they hear is: “You’ll need to train people, manage adoption, and hope they use it right.”

When your deck says “our platform enforces global hiring guardrails automatically,” what they hear is: “I can stop worrying about this, we can reduce the size of our legal team, and we won’t be at risk of non-compliance”.

Relief beats righteousness.

Reframing the Raskin model for this moment

Andy Raskin’s strategic narrative approach – from undeniable truth → monsters → promised land → magic – is still one of the best ways to communicate and sell vision in your customer’s world.

The psychology is sound. Buyers still respond to a shift they recognize, the problem they feel, the destination they want to achieve, and credible ways to get there.

But the way people apply strategic narrative has drifted too far abstract.

They use the ‘change in the world’ story without tying it to a tangible buyer and concrete outcomes.

The result is often narrative that sounds right but floats above reality. Narratives must operate at a lower altitude now.

Positioning should not be at the keynote level. It must be tactical, tangible, and meet buyers where they are.

The undeniable truth

• Ineffective: “The world of work is changing”
• Effective: “The moment a process requires human judgment, it stops being predictable”

The undeniable truth needs to be operationally obvious.

Every buyer knows this. They’ve seen clean workflows collapse when judgment is required, and they know standards slip when enforcement is manual.

If the truth needs explaining, it’s too high-level.

The monster (now)

• Ineffective: Inefficiency. Bias. Performance gaps.
• Effective: Unreviewed changes, ignored inputs, and one-off decisions nobody remembers making.

And monsters need to be expensive. Not in a “10% efficiency loss” way, but in a “we lost a $2M deal because someone sent the wrong deck” way.

Make it visceral. Make it something they dealt with last Tuesday, and need to avoid before it costs them credibility or their job.

The promised land (now)

• Ineffective: A better world. A fairer system. A transformed industry.
• Effective: Nothing slips through. Nothing needs chasing. Nothing surprises you on Monday morning.

Promised land is no longer transformation, it’s relief.

A calm Sunday evening matters more than you think. Buyers want to sleep. They want to stop worrying about what their team might screw up while they’re offline.

The magic (now)

• Ineffective: A framework. A methodology. A system to adopt.
• Effective: Software that catches mistakes before people do.

This is the part where you describe your product and how it works – but not the operating theory behind it. Specificity is magic now.

This also solves sales team insecurity

Something I’ve always noticed is that when positioning is too high-altitude, reps feel a ton of dissonance.

They’re told to pitch vision, but the prospect asks “but how does it actually work?”… and the rep doesn’t have an answer because the narrative didn’t give them the tactical answers they need.

So they panic and end up feature dumping: opening the product to click through every screen. This encourages them to feature dump earlier in the sales process… and this is how your sales team stop selling value and sell features instead.

Narratives that work well at ‘low altitude’ restore confidence because they match the buyer’s reality, they’re defensible, and they feel honest.

“We enforce pricing guardrails automatically,” can be shown and proven.

But when your narrative is “we empower teams to transform decision-making,”… what the hell are they supposed to demo?

The new role of narrative and storytelling?

Your website homepage and sales deck is no longer about connecting to a manifesto, a belief system, or a declaring you’re at the forefront of a clever category name you created.

I don’t think positioning is about inspiring buyers anymore.

Instead, narrative and storytelling is risk reduction. It’s control: a way for the buyer to say “yes” safely.

Storytelling has to connect with the buyers reality, more than ever. We are influencing the narrative that already exists for them – colouring in between the lines, not drawing from scratch.

There’s still plenty of room to be creative. The Bain Elements of B2B Value Pyramid is still useful – connecting your buyer’s reality and motivations to personal and aspirational value still works – but it can’t be fluid and wishy-washy.

Buyers want less to manage, not more to believe in.

They are less patient than ever before. They’re in the trenches of chaos, every day.

Stop flying motivational overhead banners, and instead get down there with them.

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

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

The post The altitude problem in B2B positioning and sales narratives appeared first on Building Momentum.

Every go-to-market team has to figure out how to sell the future without lying about it.

That’s easy to say and hard to do.

The pace of building has exploded. AI-assisted engineering means teams can spin up new capabilities in days. But shipping isn’t the same as releasing. QA, pricing, enablement, and rollout still move on human time.

The result: a messy middle full of “almost ready” features and internal betas that the market doesn’t see yet, while buyers are actually judging you on where you’ll be next year.

They don’t just buy your product. Investors, partners, and customers are all buying your momentum.

I’ve learned the companies that win aren’t always the ones that build fastest, or the ones that build the best product. Instead, they’re the ones that make progress visible before anyone else believes it.

• If you only sell what’s live, you undersell your potential.
• If you only sell what’s next, you break trust.

The job is to sell the slope: to show what’s real today, and what’s becoming real.

Why buyers buy momentum, not just product

Sales needs something to sell. Product wants to wait until it’s stable. Marketing worries about over-promising. Success teams brace for support load when things launch, whether they’re stable or not.

… Ultimately, everyone is stuck in a different version of the truth.

Buyers, meanwhile, don’t care about those internal trade-offs.

They care about what they can see: progress, energy, direction.

You can build faster than ever, but if the market can’t feel that motion it might as well not exist.

Selling the slope isn’t a storytelling trick.. it’s a positioning strategy. You’re not educating the market on what you do today. You need to educate them on where you’re going.

The key to introducing something new is gradual motion, not sudden reinvention. Timing matters – too early, and it won’t land.

Selling the slope follows the same rhythm: invite people into your trajectory, one believable step at a time.

Examples: how to walk the line

Brainfish have got this down! Their homepage starts with a grounded, current value proposition: AI support that feels built-in, not bolted on. That’s the product as it exists today.

But, click the spaceship icon in the menu bar and boom: you get a great sense of their direction. No release dates. No buzzwords. Just a clear sense of motion.

That duality – today’s product and tomorrow’s intent – builds trust. The company feels alive.

Zendesk followed the same playbook over years. Their message shifted gradually: from support software to customer experience platform to AI-powered service suite. I wrote about this when I reviewed their positioning evolution: each repositioning wasn’t a reinvention, but a visible continuation of what came before.

Make the future visible, but believable

Selling the present feels safe. You can demo what’s live, point to proof, and stay factual, but it flattens your story.

Buyers don’t just want confidence in what exists, they want evidence of what’s evolving. Momentum should be part of your positioning. If you don’t project it, someone else will (and they’ll leapfrog you quickly).

The opposite is more dangerous. I’ve seen teams promise future features to close deals, demoing prototypes as if they were live, or showing slides full of intentions dressed up as products.

It works for a while… until it breaks.

• Customers get frustrated when promises don’t materialize
• Support teams drown in tickets
• CSMs spend months resetting expectations
• Reps lose confidence (and commission) when deals churn

I’ve written before about how to prepare sales to talk about what’s coming without slipping into speculation. The same discipline applies here: teach people how to sell intent, not illusion.

Align behind a shared statement of direction

Selling the slope only works when everyone tells the same story. That means alignment – and as a product marketer, it’s your job to connect the dots.

In multiple companies, I’ve built a shared Statement of Direction – a single slide deck that replaced the guessing game between product and sales. This becomes the living narrative: a way to align intent without over-committing to dates.

A good Statement of Direction isn’t a marketing deck. It’s a leadership artefact: the bridge between your vision narrative and your next two quarters of execution.

It’s what lets every investor update, sales call, and roadmap review tell the same believable story. It should describe your themes, goals, and intended outcomes. Not dates or specs, just direction. It should answer:

• What’s live now
• What’s in motion
• What’s being explored

Then teach sellers and CSMs how to navigate the grey area. Give them phrases and connective tissue that express confidence without over-promising – things like:

• “In pilot with early customers”
• “Scheduled for validation later this quarter”
• “Under active research for next year”

Build those distinctions into decks, product pages, and demos so everyone stays consistent.

Finally, make it tangible. Give sellers something they can show: Figma prototypes and visual mockups. Invite product managers into key customer conversations to help shape that story live.

When all of this aligns, the future stops feeling abstract.

Don’t forget pricing, rollout, and the reality of your business

Selling the slope doesn’t stop at messaging… it ripples through pricing, rollout, and support.

If new products or modules are coming, customers should have a sense of how pricing might evolve. Springing a new tier or upsell later creates sticker shock. See if you can agree pricing guidelines like:

• Significant new products will be charged separately
• New features may be chargeable as an add-on
• Beta testers will receive 6 months free and a 50% 1 year discount from market rate if they decide to continue

Customer success needs the same preparation. They should know what’s on the horizon so they can manage adoption, renewals, and education.

Ultimately, the roadmap and the story and the future is business strategy challenge, not just a product marketing/product management thing.

Keep your slope alive: turn momentum into a rhythm

Selling the slope is a rhythm, not a one-off campaign.

• If you talk too far ahead, it becomes fiction
• If you’re too vague, it loses meaning
• If teams tell different stories, you fracture trust

Keep it current. Revisit your statement of direction every quarter. Update decks, demos, and sales materials. Let the slope evolve as the product catches up.

Start small, then build

If this feels big, start small. Write a one-pager that outlines where your product is going and why. Include:

• A few quarters of committed work
• Two or three long-term themes
• A short note on customer impact

Share it with sales and success first, then listen to how they use it.

Turn it into one simple “future direction” slide for your sales deck to show what’s live, what’s coming, and what’s being explored.

Every feature you launch updates the present; every iteration shifts the slope. Show motion without hype, give direction without overreach, and show progress that people can believe in.

That’s how you sell the slope.

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 Sell the slope: How to make progress believable before it’s real. appeared first on Building Momentum.

Over my 15 years in product marketing, I’ve been lucky enough to see the wonderful depth and breadth of our discipline over and over again. I’ve helped launch products, steer company pivots, and build go-to-market motions that generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

And I’ve seen colleagues and friends do the same, navigating the ebb-and-flow of startup growth.

But something has always irked me.

SaaS go-to-market, and product marketing is overflowing with fundamental frameworks, playbooks, and lessons learned… but inside most companies they rarely survive beyond a workshop: quickly forgotten, and rarely embedded into how a company operates.

That gap between theory and practice is the real problem.

The result is that product marketing – the people who are trained to help companies go-to-market most effectively! – gets reduced to execution support instead of strategic leadership.

Too many companies still treat PMMs as “the team that makes decks”: tactical translators who step in to polish a launch, support sales, or tidy up messaging.

That might have worked when attention was easier to capture, acquisition was cheap, and growth could be brute-forced with ads, inbound marketing, and hero sellers.

SaaS has changed. Buyers are overwhelmed, markets are saturated, and growth is too expensive to waste on guesswork. Startups and scale-ups need to make definitive moves with more surety, to adapt logically, and generally be more efficient.

But when PMMs are sidelined, the company loses the very muscle built to turn strategy into traction. And that’s why so many startups flounder and fail.

Not from weak products, but from weak go-to-market:

• Because the offer didn’t align with what buyers valued.
• Because pricing, packaging, and adoption paths didn’t fit how teams actually buy.
• Because marketing and sales wasted time on bad-fit customers.
• Because too much time was spent chasing unproven assumptions.
• And because there were no systems to capture and compound demand… just heroics and hope.

What is a market, really?

A market is not everyone who could, in theory, use your product. A market is:

• A defined group → Clear edges. You know exactly who’s in, and who’s out.
• With a shared problem → A pain or constraint that feels the same across the group.
• With conditions that make it urgent → A trigger (technology, regulation, culture, economics) that makes the old way unacceptable.
• Who are ready to pay → If they’re not willing or able to pay, you have an audience, not a market.

We’ve seen markets defined time and time again:

• CRM-as-a-service → Salesforce
• Team collaboration beyond email → Slack
• Multiplayer design → Figma
• Commerce for independent merchants → Shopify
• Cloud data warehousing → Snowflake
• Self-serve marketing automation → HubSpot
• All-in-one workspace → Notion

Each of these companies didn’t just launch a product into an existing category or coining a new label.

They defined and won a market: a specific group of buyers, with an urgent shared problem, who were ready to pay for change.

How go-to-market has shifted

• Old: Wait for “product–market fit” to appear. Hope the market finds you.
  • New: Define, shape and capture markets by design, not chance.
• Old: Sell to anyone who shows interest. Broader feels safer.
  • New: Focus ruthlessly on the sub-segments you can win.
• Old: Product = the product. Fit means features.
  • New: Everything is the offer: product, pricing, packaging, messaging and motion.
• Old: Convince with vision and conviction alone.
  • New: Build confidence through proof: insight, testing and validation.
• Old: Heroic sellers and one-off campaigns drive results.
  • New: GTM systems, playbooks and feedback loops create repeatable success.
• Old: Set a strategy and stick to it until it breaks.
  • New: Iterate continuously. Refresh insights, test new levers, adapt as markets shift.
• Old: Success judged on decks, buzz, or board optics.
  • New: The only metric that matters is traction: pipeline created, deals won, revenue captured.

These shifts demand more than slight tweaks. They demand a new discipline: Market Engineering.

What is Market Engineering?

Market Engineering is a natural evolution of strategic product marketing. It is the practice of defining, designing, and deploying systems that capture the markets that matter.

It bridges the gap between market insight and revenue outcomes. It turns clarity into confidence, and confidence into traction.

• We don’t just research markets. We engineer them into pipeline.
• We don’t stop at positioning. We build repeatable GTM systems.
• We don’t measure success in decks or buzz. We measure it in revenue.

Put simply: Markets can be built by design, not discovered by chance.

The 7 principles of market engineering

1. Markets aren’t found, they’re engineered. Salesforce, Slack, and Figma didn’t stumble into pre-existing markets. They defined them.
2. Segmentation is strategy. The fastest growth comes from owning a wedge first, then expanding. Broad targeting makes you invisible.
3. Market–offer fit drives scale. The offer is more than features: it’s pricing, packaging, onboarding, adoption, and support.
4. Clarity is engineered from evidence. Assumptions don’t scale. Proof does.
5. Systems make growth repeatable. Heroics don’t scale. Playbooks and feedback loops do.
6. Markets are dynamic, not static. Strategy isn’t a deck: it’s a loop of listening, testing, adapting.
7. Revenue is the scoreboard. Vanity metrics mislead. Pipeline, win rate, ACV, and NRR tell the truth.

What this means for PMMs (and founders)

This is a structural change in how product marketing fundamentals shape growth with greater responsibility, direct impact, and sharp accountability.

• Supporting launches → owning market definition and traction.
• Measured on activity → measured on revenue outcomes.
• Static positioning → living, evidence-driven clarity.
• Tactical translators → market engineers.

Market Engineers become the owner of the go-to-market system. Without one, you get drift: sales chasing one story, marketing another, product building for a different customer. With market engineering, you get alignment, focus, and traction.

The future is engineered

If you’re a PMM, this is your opportunity. The old label boxed you into tactical work. Market engineering as a discipline gives you the authority and accountability the role was always meant to have: not just to launch products, but to win markets.

If you’re a founder, you can’t afford to gamble with growth built on hopes and dreams. Without market engineering, you’re left with fragments: a positioning deck here, a launch plan there, a campaign layered on top of noise.

Product has engineers. Growth has engineers. Markets, finally, should have engineers too.

P.S. Could we support this with AI-enabled software? I think so.

If any of this resonates with you as a marketing leader or founder, let’s chat: book a call with me.

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 Could Market Engineering be the future of product marketing? appeared first on Building Momentum.

Every week there’s a new screenshot on LinkedIn: someone pastes a half-baked prompt into ChatGPT, gets a polished paragraph back, and declares the end of marketing as we know it.

It makes for good engagement bait, but it misses the point.

AI is incredible at processing content. It can rewrite, reframe, and remix faster than any of us. But it doesn’t understand the same way you do.

It doesn’t know the pressure your buyer is under from their CFO. It doesn’t know the difference between a “feature” that looks good in a deck and a “capability” that can define someone’s career. It doesn’t know the subtle gap between what your product does and what your buyer cares about.

That’s the part only a product marketer can do. And that’s exactly why AI will expose lazy product marketing, and the lazy PMMs behind it.

The 90% vs the 10%

A tweet I saw nailed it:

The 90%? Drafting headlines, generating alternatives, summarizing content. The stuff that feels like “work” but is really just mechanics. AI eats that for breakfast.

The 10% that matters?

Knowing which headline actually lands with a VP of HR vs a hiring manager.

Knowing when to push on aspiration (“build the future of your company”) and when to hammer on utility (“approve time off requests in seconds”).

Knowing how to turn a product feature into value that speaks across personas.

That’s the work AI can’t do… and where your leverage comes alive.

Why your taste matters more than ever

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: some product marketers don’t have great taste to begin with.

They hid behind laundry lists of features. They recycled the same “save time, save money, do more strategic work” tropes. They defaulted to “seamless” and “easy to use” without ever asking why it matters.

AI will happily crank out more of the same. If you don’t have a strong point of view, you’ll drown in blandness.

Lazy product marketing was already ineffective. With AI, it gets exposed for what it is.

What makes the difference is taste. Knowing the difference between copy that looks fine on the page and messaging that changes how someone thinks.

Taste comes from three places:

• Pattern recognition: shipping enough launches to know what works and what flops.
• Buyer psychology: understanding your buyers and what they value (better than anyone else)
• Curiosity: going deeper in discovery calls, asking the questions that unlock the tension, the politics, the career stakes: the human drivers behind a deal.

That taste is the multiplier. AI makes it easier to generate raw material… which means you can spend more of your time choosing, shaping, and sharpening.

The future is curation, not creation

The biggest shift AI brings is not “replace the PMM.” It’s “change what part of the job creates leverage.”

Creation used to be the bottleneck. Getting to a decent draft was slow. Now? That’s the easy bit.

The bottleneck is curation. Picking the right angle, cutting what’s weak, elevating what’s strong, aligning it with strategy. That’s where momentum comes from.

So if you’re in product marketing, stop worrying about whether AI makes you obsolete. Start asking yourself:

• Am I spending 80% of my time in the 90% bucket, tweaking outputs anyone could make?
• Or am I building leverage in the 10%, sharpening taste, judgment, and insight into what really drives buyer behavior?

AI is not the end of product marketing. It is the end of lazy product marketing.

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 AI exposes lazy product marketers appeared first on Building Momentum.

At a previous company, we rolled out a big repositioning with a new target customer, new narrative, a new proposition.

The story was stronger, sharper, more emotional. It passed all the internal checks, well aligned across the CEO, COO, Sales, and Marketing, and felt like a very real, positive step forward.

We felt good going into it. The rollout was smooth, building out new decks, updating the website, training the team. All the right moves. But what we didn’t expect was what came next.

I started listening back to sales calls and… the story wasn’t landing.

Some reps were skipping it. Others were falling back on old language. A few tried the new pitch, but it just came out wrong. The sharp, confident message we’d worked so hard on was already unraveling.

We’d underestimated how easily a strong message can unravel the moment it hits the real world.

That’s messaging distortion.

Messaging distortion is real

Even the strongest positioning and clearest messaging can fall apart in execution. Not because the strategy is wrong or the copy is weak, but because of what happens in the handoffs.

Messaging distortion is when the carefully crafted messaging you designed doesn’t make it out the way you intended. It gets reshaped at every step between teams until what reaches the customer is a version you barely recognise.

• PMMs tweak the message for sales collateral
• Sales enablement adjusts it for training sessions
• Marketing reworks it for content and paid channels
• Sales reps reframe it based on what they hear in discovery

By the time it reaches the end user, the original message has been reshaped so many times it’s vague, generic, and missing the point. 

You thought you were handing over a sharp, useful story… but the end result could be a completely different pitch.

It’s the sales rep’s fault for not parroting the language correctly. It’s yours for not building a system that made the message stick.

If your messaging only works when you personally deliver it, it’s not built to scale. If every person in the chain has to guess or fill in the gaps, you haven’t created alignment: you’ve set the stage for distortion.

This isn’t a knowledge problem, it’s a distortion problem

It’s tempting to think you can just explain it better.

Run a team training call. Drop some messaging in Slack. Update the deck. Ask Sales to pitch it this way.

But the gap will stay open. Because what you actually need isn’t more explanation… you need a downstream system that reinforces the message at every level through training, repetition, and shared understanding.

How to fix messaging distortion

Spoiler alert: it doesn’t fix itself.

1. Codify messaging like a system, not a sentence

Messaging should work like Lego, not glass. It needs to be built with a flexible structure from the start.

That means breaking your story down into reusable building blocks, each one small, sharp, and versatile enough to be picked up and used in context.

This is where the concept of value nuggets come in. They’re compact, structured chunks of messaging that link a product capability to a customer outcome. They’re sharp, portable, and designed to be navigated in real-time by helping sellers scale from value to benefits to features and vice versa by asking ‘why’ and ‘how’. 

You also want to provide your cross-functional team with messaging that fits into different channels and moments like outbound hooks, discovery talk tracks, demo intros, objection busters, plus ad headlines, social proof, customer stories, and analogies that are all aligned.

Every single piece should give someone a way to move the conversation forward. Don’t assume people will “just get it.” Give them language they can reach for, without having to translate.

2. Cascade the ‘why’ with intensity

It’s not enough to hand teams a finished message. You have to show your work. People need to understand why it’s framed this way, why it works for this audience, and why it’s different from what came before.

The real job of good internal positioning and messaging enablement isn’t just to hand people the lines, but to give them the logic. You only unlock real leverage when your team has the confidence to think like the customer. 

Sales and marketing can’t just recite talking points. They need to understand the role the buyer is in, the pressures they face, the objections they’re quietly holding back.

Wherever you can, make the story real. Bring real customers into all-hands. Walk through example discovery calls together. Build fluency, not just familiarity. 

Developing a value story for every value point can help build empathy with the customer’s situation, their problems, the implications of those, and how they can unlock value. 

You want a team that knows what to say, when to say it, and why it matters to the person across the table. Your precious positioning message doesn’t land because it’s memorised: it lands because it makes sense. 

3. Build coaching and feedback loops

You can’t assume messaging will stick after one rollout. It needs reinforcement, feedback loops, and accountability.

Start by making feedback part of the process. Sales needs a way to signal when a message doesn’t land or, hopefully more often, when it really works. 

Coaching should be ongoing, not one-off. Set expectations that frontline managers are responsible for messaging consistency on their teams, and be clear that that doesn’t just mean delivery. It means real understanding.

There’s also a ton of value in public coaching through positive reinforcement. Celebrate great calls. Replay them in all-hands. Highlight the moments where a rep used a story, a value nugget, or phrasing that clearly clicked with the buyer.

This isn’t just about reps learning the message, but about your whole company learning what actually resonates. And if positioning is strategy, then that feedback is more valuable than most teams realise. 

The goal isn’t better messaging, but alignment

If every new team member needs a live walkthrough to understand what you do, you’re not set up to scale.

If every pitch needs your involvement to land, you don’t have a messaging system. You have a dependency.

High-functioning go-to-market teams don’t just write great messaging, they ensure the message is going to work in the real world. They create the conditions for the story to travel across the business… without falling apart.

It doesn’t matter what’s in your positioning deck. It’s what actually gets said on a call, in a deck, in a room with a buyer, that matters. 

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

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The post You wrote the message, but they heard something else appeared first on Building Momentum.

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

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

Product imagery isn’t decoration.

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

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

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

What product imagery is actually for

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

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

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

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

Design for first impressions, not power users

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

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

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

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

Stop showing the full UI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s an example from Kayako (RIP):

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

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

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

Show moments, not manuals

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t default to screenshots

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

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

Here’s a great example from Front:

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

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

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

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

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

Make people feel like it’s for them

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

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

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

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

Build a world, not a one-off

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

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

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

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

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

Show movement, not noise

Some ideas are better shown with motion.

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

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

Here’s an example from Kayako:

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

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

Avoid stock images, duh

If you sell software, show the software.

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

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

The real job of product imagery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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As product marketers, we often don’t hold budget and companies know that. So we don’t get cold emailed, cold-called, actively chased by anyone (except the spammy list sellers using Gmail accounts). 

But it’s a different story for the rest of your colleagues. Message your demand-gen friends, your rev ops team, or your HR reps and find out.

They’re swimming in sales outreaches, ads, and marketing slop every week.

… now ask them how many they actually engaged with.

The reality of modern marketing

The answer will be the same: They’ll archive emails, reject calls, ignore LinkedIn messages.

Now ask them how they react to paid marketing: Google ads for high intent keywords will be the only ads they’ll actually remember engaging with.

Social ads? Mostly wasted unless it’s super relevant, timely, and actually interesting. (Trust me, this is rare).  

Sponsored content? They’ll feel cheated when they realise it’s an advertorial.

They’ll even visit website pages with preconceptions on what they’re looking for, and if they don’t see it, they’ll bounce. 

The average B2B buyer (without speaking down about the general population) is smarter than the average consumer. They’re sharp. They’re critical. They clock the format, skim the tone, and make a snap call on whether it’s worth their time. If it feels low-effort or generic, they’re out.

This is the reality: your work has to earn its way. If you’re not meeting buyers on their terms with sharp positioning, relevant messaging, and an actual point, they won’t give you a second glance.

How this shapes your positioning and messaging

If you’ve read this newsletter before, you’ll have read this before: The definition of positioning is to ‘occupy a space in the mind of your customer’.

So your job as a product marketer is to know exactly what’s in your customer’s head to identify the gap that exists.

You can’t build positioning based solely on how your customer uses your product and the first-order outcomes: you have to consider your product is a tiny part of their overall lives.

One of the most common things I try to help PMMs understand when reviewing their messaging is that unless you’ve found something that catches the prospect’s attention, your positioning, even if the core message is great, is going to be ignored.

It’s like one of those ‘hook a duck’ games at a funfair. If you don’t make your positioning (the duck, in this stupid metaphor) eye-catching, attractive, persuasive, and unique with a huge hook, it’s just going to float on by and get lost amongst all the other ducks (in this case, the millions of other messages your prospect is subjected to each year).

So when you’re assessing your messaging, think: why would the buyer pay attention to your duck?

• What exactly does your buyer believe about this category? Not just what they say on sales calls — what do they really think? What baggage are they carrying from past tools, broken promises, or overhyped solutions?
• What assumptions are they carrying? What do they think they already know about your product type or approach? What are they wrong about — and how will you change that?
• What have they tried before? And why didn’t it work? If you’re not speaking to that pain, your value won’t feel urgent.
• What makes them ignore things? What words, phrases, formats, or ideas are they numb to? What do they associate with BS?
• What would make them stop scrolling? What hits hard enough that it disrupts the mental autopilot and makes them say: “Wait, that’s me.”

If your messaging doesn’t tap into that, it’s not differentiated… it’s invisible.

How this changes your sales narrative

Another oft-used concept on this newsletter: Focus + Confidence = Momentum.

A common error is thinking that ‘prioritisation’ is the sole definition of focus. Focus also means clarity. You need to know a niche, specific type of customer with extreme empathy and context.

Only then will you not just understand the customer, but be able to pre-empt their reaction. You need to embody their spirit, perception, and thought process.

Maybe it’s just how my brain works, but when I’m writing positioning or building anything, I’m running simulations in my head to imagine the conversations, figure out what happens next, and how my work influences the customer when you’re not in the room.

Being able to think in the customer’s shoes means your sales narratives aren’t reactive — they’re already anticipating what happens next.

• Can your narrative confidently explain why now? What’s the compelling moment or shift that makes this the right time to act — and how clearly does that come through in your deck, your one-pager, your demo flow?
• Does it paint the risk of doing nothing? Not just what your product enables, but what the buyer stands to lose by staying stuck in the status quo?
• Does it show you understand what already lives in the buyer’s head? Their internal blockers, priorities, pressure from leadership — and how your solution meets them where they are, without needing it spelled out?

If not, your narrative’s going to miss the mark.

How this should change your marketing

Your marketing isn’t fighting for attention in a vacuum. It’s scrapping for attention in a market that’s oversaturated with teams firing off campaigns, chasing MQLs, and clinging to whatever worked last quarter: SEO hacks, influencer collabs, and 12 variations of the same whitepaper.

So what wins?

Clarity. Relevance. Proof. Urgency. Distinctiveness. 

It’s not just about running ads or publishing content. Your marketing has to answer the right unspoken question in the buyer’s mind. Not just “Why should I care?”, but “Is this actually for me, right now?”

And not in 400 words or a 12-slide carousel either; in the first glance, the first line, the first moment. Because that’s where most marketing dies.

Most marketing teams are under pressure to churn out deliverables. But connection is what earns attention. And attention is what earns action.

Too many teams start with the format, then work backwards. It’s not about how polished the carousel is. It’s about whether it says something the buyer already half-knows but hasn’t quite heard phrased like that before.

When you get that right, when you reflect their reality back at them in a way that feels fresh, specific, and grounded, the format almost doesn’t matter.

Great marketing starts with the buyer. Their context. Their problem. Their frustration. Their moment.

Start there. Because the buyer doesn’t care — not until your message stands out like the only duck with a hook worth grabbing. 

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

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

The post Your buyer doesn’t care (but it’s your job is to change that) appeared first on Building Momentum.

If you know me, you might know that I’m a Virgo, my Myers-Briggs type is INTJ (with a 100% ‘judging’ score), and I have strong opinions. 

So, here’s a tongue-in-cheek take on messaging. Disclaimer: This is purely for fun. If it feels like I’m calling out your company, that’s a coincidence… probably. 

When I visit your website, I’m judging it. And so is everyone else. 

Nothing exposes a lack of customer focus, internal power struggles, and general marketing fails faster than the words on your homepage.

So, who wrote your website copy? 

1. The SEO-Obsessed Content Marketer

If your homepage reads like an AI-generated word cloud, a content marketer who prays to the Googlebot got there first. Expect keyword-stuffed nonsense like:

“A leading AI-powered, cloud-based, enterprise-ready, blockchain-enabled solution for seamless digital transformation.”

No normal person talks like this. But Google likes it, so your homepage does too.

2. The Wannabe Novelist

Some content marketers look at their day job as a backup, when really they want to write a book.

Instead, they got assigned to SaaS copy, and it shows. Their version of a homepage starts with:

“It all began in a dimly lit coffee shop. Our founder, lost in thought, stared into their oat milk flat white. That’s when it hit them. What if customer support… was better?”

Three paragraphs in, and I have no idea what the company does.

3. The CTO

If your website reads like a technical spec sheet, an engineer steamrolled the copy review. The telltale sign? It’s packed with acronyms and features over literally anything useful:

“Now with enhanced multi-cloud Kubernetes orchestration and AI-driven predictive analytics.”

Great. But why should I use it? Who knows. 

4. The Product Manager

Product Managers are great at discovery, PRDs, and engineering planning. But when they write website copy, it reads like a Jira ticket:

“Users log in, navigate to the dashboard, select the desired configuration, and click ‘Generate Report’ to receive output.”

This is an instruction manual, not a sales pitch.

5. The Direct Response Marketer

A direct response marketer got their hands on the homepage if everything feels like you’re watching late night TV adverts.

“Act Now! Unlock Exclusive Savings Today. Don’t Miss Out!”

Urgency? Check. Overuse of action words? Check. Feels like you’re about to sign up for a free webinar that leads to a dodgy supplement subscription you can never cancel? Also check.

6. The AI-Addict

Someone got way too into ChatGPT. Now your website is full of predictable phrasing, em-dash abuse, and every overused AI-generated buzzword:

“In today’s ever-evolving landscape—where innovation is paramount—we harness the power of AI to drive unparalleled efficiency.”

Every sentence sounds like it was pulled from a LinkedIn post.

PS: Bonus points when they forget to delete “I’ve generated your website copy–let me know if you want any more changes.” 

7. The Corporate Marketer

This person spent way too much time in PowerPoint, and it shows. The website now follows the rule of 6: no more than six words per sentence, six sentences per section, and six bullet points per list. The result?

• Optimize: Streamline workflows.
• Accelerate: Drive business outcomes.
• Deliver: Achieve unparalleled impact.

Your homepage is basically a TED Talk with none of the charisma and all the fake practiced pauses. 

8. The Committee

Your homepage was written by 12 people in a Google Doc. Every word was argued for, none were removed, and now nobody knows what it actually says.

The result?

“At Flotsam, we believe in the power of innovation, integrity, and industry-leading solutions that empower businesses of all sizes to maximize efficiency, optimize workflows, and leverage cutting-edge technology to drive meaningful impact in an ever-evolving global landscape.”

Huh? 

9. The Legal Department

You know they got involved when every bold claim is followed by an asterisk and the copy is stripped of anything that sounds remotely confident.

“Our platform may help* businesses optimize* operations and could potentially* improve efficiency.”

No promises, just plausible deniability.

10. The HiPPO

The most senior (and usually the furthest removed from what customers actually want) person in the room decides the website should be exactly like something they did ten years ago.

“We are at the forefront of the SoLoMo revolution, seamlessly integrating Social, Local, and Mobile trends to drive next-gen engagement strategies.”

The result? A homepage that looks like it was ripped straight from a 2012 tech conference keynote.

How to fix it

If you’re reading this and realizing your website has been taken hijacked by one (or more) of the culprits above, don’t worry, it’s fixable. Here’s how to bring it back to life:

• Start with the customer, not your org chart. Nobody cares about your internal debates. Lead with the problem your customer is trying to solve.
• Cut the fluff. If it wouldn’t make sense in a sales conversation, it doesn’t belong on your homepage.
• Write like a human. If you wouldn’t say it out loud, don’t put it on your site.
• Test it with actual buyers. Not your boss, not the committee, but real customers. If they don’t get it in five seconds, rewrite it.

If your homepage makes people work too hard to understand what you do, they’ll move on to one that doesn’t.

And if your copy got frankensteined together by SEO, corporate, and someone’s outdated best practice… trust me, I can tell. 

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 I can tell who wrote your website appeared first on Building Momentum.

Me too.

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

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

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

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

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

Explaining TAM, SAM, and SOM

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

Illustrating with an example

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

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

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

How to go from TAM to SOM

Step 1: Find your universe (TAM)

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

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

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

How to Calculate TAM:

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

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

Example: Toward’s TAM

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

Step 2: Start to incorporate reality (SAM)

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

Product Fit:

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

Go-To-Market Fit:

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

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

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

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

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

Example: Toward’s SAM

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

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

Now it’s time to get real.

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

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

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

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

Example: Toward’s SOM

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

Working SOM into a revenue plan

Now for the fun part.

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

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

Step 4: Model the funnel

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

1. Estimate your win rate

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

2. Work back from revenue goals

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

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

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

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

4. Adjust for Reality

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

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

5. Extend even further

Even after adjusting, you can go a level deeper:

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

Recap: Toward’s funnel is not good

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

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

Tip: It’s not about the actual numbers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The shift from specialization to survival

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

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

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

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

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

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

The problem: execution without strategy

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

Reacting instead of leading.

Shipping instead of shaping.

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

It’s time to demand more

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

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

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

PMMs: take back your influence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feature launches vs. true product launches

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

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

What makes a product launch different?

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

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

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

Leading a product launch without authority

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

Define what success looks like

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

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

Clarify roles and responsibilities

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

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

Create urgency and sustained momentum

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

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

Proactively manage dependencies

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

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

Schedule pre-mortems and post-mortems

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

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

Sustaining momentum after launch

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

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

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

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

Bringing it all together

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The relationship between product marketing and sales is weird. On paper, we’re on the same side. In reality? We speak different languages, operate on different timelines, and have entirely different incentives.

That’s why so many PMMs struggle to get sales to use their messaging. They create positioning that sounds great in a slide deck but doesn’t hold up in a real sales conversation. Sales reps ignore it, not because they don’t care, but because it doesn’t help them win.

If your messaging doesn’t align with how they actually sell; how they engage with prospects, handle objections, and close deals… then it’s useless. A tagline alone won’t move pipeline. A clever framework won’t make quota. Messaging only matters if it helps sales reps do their job better, faster, and with more confidence.

The core issue? Most product marketers don’t think like sales reps. They don’t fully understand how reps make decisions, how they prioritize deals, or what actually happens on a sales call. And if you don’t get that, you’re not going to build messaging and GTM strategies that actually work in the real world.

Sales is a game of incentives and priorities

Here’s what I’ve learned about sales after years of working closely with reps. It’s not a one-size-fits-all playbook, but these patterns have held true for me more often than not.

Sales isn’t just about pitching a product. It’s about constantly weighing tradeoffs.

Incentives shape prioritization

Reps are coin-operated. As Charlie Munger famously said, “Show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome.” Sales compensation is usually tied to quotas, commissions, and short-term sales performance incentives. A rep’s income often depends on hitting or exceeding their target, so every deal they pursue is a calculated risk.

If a prospect looks like a long shot or has a complex buying process, the rep might deprioritize them in favor of lower-effort, higher-certainty deals. If your messaging and GTM strategy doesn’t clearly help them close more deals faster, they won’t use it. Reps don’t just chase leads; they calculate the potential commission impact of every deal, constantly evaluating pipeline conversion rates, and adjusting their focus accordingly to maximize earnings.

Not every prospect is equal. A good rep is always calculating: Is this deal worth my time? Some buyers will close fast with little effort. Others will drag on for months. Reps prioritize accordingly because time is their most valuable resource. 

Time-to-close often outweighs deal size. Depending on your ICP, a quick-win $50K deal is often more attractive than a $200K deal that takes six months to land. Every minute spent on a dead-end deal is time taken away from a more promising opportunity.

Reps don’t have the luxury of chasing bad fits. If your messaging doesn’t help them quickly qualify and disqualify leads, they won’t use it. This is why I recommend being contentious and niche: messaging should make it obvious who is and isn’t a fit.

A sales rep is going to evaluate whether a prospect is a good fit, what their budget looks like, and how long the sales cycle is expected to take. They think about how each deal will impact their commission, factoring in quota attainment and whether the effort required to close a deal is worth the potential payout. If the numbers don’t add up, they’ll deprioritize and move on.

Confidence and credibility win deals

Quota pressure shapes behavior. If end-of-quarter is near and a deal isn’t progressing fast enough, reps will pivot to lower-hanging fruit. This often means shifting focus to existing customers, leaning on discounting, or prioritizing prospects who have shown the most urgency.

Confidence is everything. If a rep doesn’t believe in a pitch, they won’t use it. They need to walk into every call knowing they can win. This belief doesn’t come from blind optimism, but from real, tangible proof that the product delivers results. If they don’t feel equipped, they’ll revert to what feels safe: sticking to familiar talking points or avoiding the pitch altogether.

Confidence is also tied to knowing how to handle objections in real-time. Sales is 30% delivering a perfect pitch and 70% about adapting under pressure to convince and persuade. A rep who feels equipped to answer tough questions, counter competitor claims, and steer the conversation toward the right outcome will sell more effectively. PMMs need to arm them with these insights. It’s not just about the product’s strengths; it’s about how to communicate them persuasively when challenged.

They care about relationships. The best reps see themselves as trusted advisors, not just deal-closers. That means they need messaging that enables valuable conversations. If they feel like their pitch is too transactional or doesn’t align with how they build trust with prospects, they won’t use it. Great messaging helps reps guide buyers, solve their problems, and position themselves as credible experts—not just people trying to hit quota.

Most PMMs don’t account for this. They focus on what to say, but not how a sales rep will actually use it—under pressure, in a live conversation where credibility, confidence, and adaptability matter just as much as the message itself.

How to build for the sales mindset

If you want your messaging to actually drive revenue, you need to build it through the lens of a sales conversation.

One of the most effective ways to do this is to mentally run sales conversations in your head. I do this constantly—predicting how a rep will position the product, anticipating objections, and thinking through how a buyer will react. If you can’t visualize how your messaging plays out in a real conversation, it’s not ready.

Sit in on sales calls. If you’re not regularly listening to how prospects respond to your messaging, you’re working off theory, not reality.

Ask reps what’s working. Forget formal surveys… have real conversations. What messaging do they naturally lean on? Where do they get stuck? Their behavior will tell you what’s useful and what’s fluff.

Build messaging that solves real sales problems. Sales doesn’t need another tagline; they need messaging that tackles real objections, positions your product against competitors, and gives them confidence in every call.

Make it frictionless to use. If your messaging requires reps to memorize a new framework or shift their entire pitch structure, they won’t adopt it. Instead, integrate it into what they already use through battlecards, talk tracks, pitch decks, and discovery call scripts.

Test and iterate. Your messaging is never “done.” Just like sales reps refine their pitch over time, your positioning should evolve based on real-world feedback.

Build like a seller

If you don’t know how a sales call plays out; if you’ve never watched a deal unfold in real time; if you don’t understand how reps think about prioritizing deals, you’re not building messaging that moves pipeline.

So before you finalize your next positioning doc, ask yourself – Would this actually help close a deal? Would a rep want to use this? If the answer isn’t a clear yes, go back and make it stronger.

Great PMMs don’t just create messaging. They engineer it to be so practical, so relevant, and so deeply tied to how sales works that reps can’t afford to ignore it.

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 Why product marketers struggle with sales (and how to fix it) appeared first on Building Momentum.

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

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

And then?

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

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

Make customer research essential by design

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

Tie every research project to a business decision

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

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

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

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

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

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

Create demand for your insights

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

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

Instead, make your research process collaborative from the start:

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

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

Validate assumptions, don’t just explore

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

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

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

Translate research into decisions, not just insights

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

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

Try structuring your research deliverables like this:

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

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

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

Keep insights relevant and embedded in every day use

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

To ensure research remains impactful:

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

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

Because the best research is the research that gets used.

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

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

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

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

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

Get my new free positioning course

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

In just 7 days, you’ll learn how to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be more Fat Duck, less Cheesecake Factory

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

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

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

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

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

What this can teach us about B2B product marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simple, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positioning is strategy, and everything is your product

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Absolutely not.

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

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

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

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

The post Michelin-starred restaurants have tiny menus appeared first on Building Momentum.

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

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

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

The many faces of product marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understand the customer…

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

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

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

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

… then build collaborative loops internally…

Here’s an unfortunate hard truth.

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

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

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

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

…before bringing the product to market.

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

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

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

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

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

PMM is the chameleon of marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what do you do? You capitalize on it!

You decide to double down on your current strategy.

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

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

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

The brief is simple. Scale what’s working.

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

Sounds great.

Except… 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post The risk of scaling too soon appeared first on Building Momentum.

Hello!

You might be thinking, “How come I’ve not seen any emails from JDP and Building Momentum lately?”

Well I went on a long holiday, came home, and struggled to get back into the groove with things again. But, I’ve recommitted to the core priorities that are important to me right now – this newsletter being one of them.

And, with that, let’s get back into a regular stream of product marketing concepts, advice, and stories!

Thanks for sticking with me – glad to have you on the journey.

JDP

P.S. From now, I’ll just be sending one post a week. You’ll find the same insights, tips, and frameworks – plus a few related articles or tweets that I found interesting – skip down to the end of the email for The Overview.

Product marketers: Don’t forget to create.

It’s so easy to get lost in a world of research, strategizing, relationship building, engaging others, collecting feedback, analysing everything, reporting, testing, validating, planning, documenting, training…

I get it.

We’re good at these. We’re generally happy to spend time digging in, doing a better job than before, seeing what we can learn, looking for a silver bullet that will fix everything forever.

And it definitely is valuable work. Sometimes we do learn something that has an outsized impact on our go-to-market approach, changing the business forever.

But be honest; when was the last time that happened? Early-stage startups are most likely to pivot – but that insight isn’t going to come from siloed analysis. If you’re at a maturing business, new discoveries are rare. And sure, you can eek out optimizations from micro-work – but likely going to move your northstar needle.

Sometimes, the amount of energy we expend in our areas of expertise and the work we often enjoy the most doesn’t serve us – and our businesses – best.

Make your work tangible, by making something

Yes, we need to understand our customers and the market through research.

Yes, we need to build good, strong relationships that help us influence.

Yes, we need to engage our cross-functional teams to get buy-in and motivate.

Yes, we need to analyze data and insights to identify patterns and segments.

Yes, we need to create coordinated strategy that sets a long-term vision and our plan to get there.

But that shouldn’t come at the expense of creating.

Only when we create something do we put our strategy, our insight, our perspective into action. We form something out of nothing. Ideas become concrete, tangible, discussable.

We need to create great marketing material that speaks to how well we understand our customers, and reflects how we want to be strategically perceived in the world. Sometimes that’s a webpage, sometimes it’s a brochure, or an email campaign.

We need to create great buyer journey collateral that motivates and moves the needle. We understand the questions our customers have at each stage – we should answer them in the most engaging, convincing, differentiated way we can.

We need to create great customer experiences that engage, persuade, motivate, surprise, and delight.

Whether it’s a feature launch, a multi-channel marketing campaign, a new onboarding nurture sequence, sales tools, a PDF one-pager, or a sales talk track… we’re representing the business. We’re setting the standard for how we go out into the world, how we talk about our product and it’s value, how we differentiate.

And if we can’t do that to an extremely high standard, then how will everyone – from sales, marketing, and product teams, to customers – do the same?

Product marketing is strategy – but don’t forget to market your product

There’s also another ‘curse’ that affects ambitious product marketers. The more we spend on strategy and planning, we get a taste for not doing the work. “We’ll sort out execution once we’ve got all the information,” we think.

Well, that’s wrong. You’ll never have perfect information.

Product marketing is not a game of chess. You don’t get special moves.

Product marketers is checkers. The only way you will make progress is by moving forward, step-by-step.

As product marketers, we’ve got to market the product. And that means doing the work. Creating the collateral. Producing the webpage. Shipping the deck. Building the campaign. Every day.

So there you go. One tip, learnt the hard way, and shared so you don’t make the same mistake.

The Overview

More feedback is not better feedback

Click through to read the full tweet. Your biggest impact will not come from the research you do – it will be how you translate that research into action. Here’s my favorite snippet:

The alpha really comes from *translating that feedback to unique insights* and from *making creative choices* on

a) what problems to actually solve
b) what customers to prioritize
c) what features to build & not build
d) how the user experience works
e) how to market the product in a way that really resonates

Product-market fit is a journey, not a destination

Here’s an interesting article on First Round about how a company found product-market fit twice – first in B2C, then in B2B. Even though they had great demand from their B2C value proposition, the economics and level of investment required meant it wasn’t a smart move.

The era of subtle differentiation

Was Cash App unique? No. It was subtly different – being 2x better at 10 things, instead of 10x better at one thing.

In the early days of the Cash Card, people sometimes asked why anyone would choose the Cash Card over a BofA card (in a lot of cases they’d also ask why anyone would choose Cash App over Venmo). I thought a lot about how to answer this, and within the 10x model for differentiation [1] (which was dominant in 2015, and I think remains dominant in software industry narratives to this day). I didn’t have a good answer. My answer at the time was that we weren’t going to be 10x better at one thing, because it just wasn’t possible. But we could be 2x better at 10 things.

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

But product marketing is often a thankless role.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But first, when should positioning evolve?

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

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

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

Zendesk’s positioning evolution

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

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

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

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

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

What we can learn from Zendesk

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

Target customer: From IT to any company

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

Value proposition: Reinventing the helpdesk, to the better choice

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

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

Frame of reference: From helpdesk to multichannel and more

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

Market trends: Web 2.0 to speed and scalability

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

Key takeaways

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

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

So what can we learn?

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

Zendesk over the years

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

2007

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

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

2008

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

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

2009

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

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

2010

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

2011

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

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

2012

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

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

2013

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

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

2014

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

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

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

2015

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

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

2016

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

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

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

2017

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

2018

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

2019

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

2020

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

2021

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

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

2022

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

2023

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

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

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

Firstly, our brand identity was corporate and stale.

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

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

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

Here’s how.

But first… Branding vs Positioning

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

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

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

Headstart case study

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then… we put it into practice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did it work?

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

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

Branding tips for product marketers

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

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

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

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

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

Good luck!

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

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Something that every product marketer faces: how to deliver on our often long and involved projects.

The problems are many:

• Needing to be transparent and visible on what we’re working on
• Needing to show progress against outcomes as soon as possible, even while planning is in progress
• Needing to build some confidence by testing a direction

But… how?

• Foundational product marketing work takes time to research, refine, and implement
• Campaign work usually needs planning and then content creation before distribution
• Product marketing initiatives need a few sales cycles to see results

Not only does this mean we’re more divorced from the effects of our work, but that it’s harder for us to demonstrate our work in progress… lots of stuff is always ‘in progress’ or ‘planned’, and less is ‘done’.

Here are a few questions I ask product marketers who are facing similar issues.

What’s the least you can do to move forward?

I definitely know some folks who dream up big, massive, deeply-integrated campaigns and then spend ages trying to plumb it all together… although it’s mostly built on some assumptions and good (but untested) ideas.

So, rather than build all the things first – what are the questions you’re trying to answer… and what’s the least you can do to move forward?

• Don’t build a whole new product – create a landing page.
• Don’t roll out a whole new sales deck – test a new slide first
• Don’t plan the whole automated sequence first – test it out on a manual group

By trying to unlock the next question you can gain more confidence and determine whether the direction is correct – while also showing immediate progress, deliverables, and outcomes to your team.

What can you do in two weeks, rather than two months?

It’s so easy to plan the big thing and wait ages for it all to happen, only for the project to lose momentum and be relegated to the backburner.

Breaking down projects into quicker sprints might help to overcome project paralysis, keep things moving, and get closer towards the bigger goal while staying motivated.

Similar to the tip above, thinking about the next two weeks might mean:

• An MVP or prototype to test
• A blog post on a topic, rather than an ebook, to test the waters
• A time-bound project to see how far you can get, rather than a project that fills the time available

Can you ‘slice the elephant’?

Sometimes known as elephant carpaccio, sometimes known as slicing, is a way to break big projects down into more compact segments – that still deliver across the footprint of your project. You might have seen this illustration before, which represents the same idea:

Rather than building a fully-functional deliverable first, you might build something with a little bit of functionality, something that’s just about reliable, is just about usable, and looks alright. And over time, you’ll expand and build more functionality, more reliability, better design, etc.

While sacrificing some depth in each layer, you might be surprised with the results you get from something below your usual execution effort. This helps you be pragmatic, and prioritise energy on the parts of the puzzle that help you get the most bang for your buck.

So… how far can you lower your bar, while retaining a level of quality and results? That’s the balance you’ve got to explore for yourself.

Break it down, show your work in progress, test and learn

When you can ‘move fast and prove fast’, you’ll be more transparent internally (and therefore, build visibility).

You’ll be able to spot winners early – and prevent losers from taking up too much time.

And you’ll feel more motivated with better accuracy, feedback, direction, and validation at each step.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Send a personalized email to a new customer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click through a few profiles and focus on:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ask sales reps to share their thoughts on recent customer trends

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regardless, you’ll learn a ton.

Join an online community to engage with customers

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

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

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

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

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

Build your empathy

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

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

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

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

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

Something I’ve noticed – most marketing teams are nimble, scrappy, efficient, and effective in the early days. But as the marketing team matures, they become slower and bulkier.

I think this is because most marketing teams implement processes, rather than focus on building a marketing system.

What’s the difference?

It’s a huge difference, actually.

A process is simply the execution of a task. It’s a step-by-step approach to getting something done. Marketing teams, especially in the process of growing, set up processes to streamline the volume of work they’re working on. They think that having a process in place will make their life easier… but that’s not always the case.

Processes can become rigid and inflexible. They don’t always account for the nuances and changes that inevitably occur – and change is pretty much the only constant in startups.

Sure, but processes can change, right? Except once everyone is conditioned to working a certain type of way, it’s easy to optimize and even build more sub-processes… but difficult to rethink the whole thing.

A system, however, is the overall environment that enables outcomes to be achieved. It’s a more holistic approach that takes into account all the factors that contribute to success, including the tools, technologies, and people involved.

By creating a system that is designed to enable outcomes, marketing teams can be better equipped to respond to changing circumstances. The system flexes, as required – taking the inputs in, working it through, and achieving an outcome at the end.

Why teams build processes

Ultimately, processes are easier to define and measure. They can be divided into smaller, manageable steps, and rewards can be tied to specific tasks. Each person taking part in a process can be OKR’d and performance-managed.

They can also provide limitations – an excuse or a reason for doing or not doing something.

But systems require a different mindset. Creating a system means providing an environment for success. A system takes into account not just the specific tasks, but the principles, tools, technologies, people, motivations, objectives, relationships, interactions, and contexts in which they are performed.

They require interoperability and an understanding that everything is a bit give-and-take. There will be swings-and-roundabouts in every stage. But systems lead to a more comprehensive, flexible approach that can lead to greater outcomes in the long run.

Build a system instead, with these principles

If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that I’m all about principles – I think they’re a great way to set out how you want to work, and use that to guide the implementation and execution.

If I were building a cross-functional marketing team, here are the principles that I’d implement from the start.

Collaboration

One team, one dream. Teamwork is crucial. Open communication and sharing of ideas across the team, and with stakeholders. Zero ego. All working for the good of our customers.

Flexibility

A system-based approach requires an ability to adapt to changing circumstances. This means being open to new ideas and approaches, and being willing to pivot when necessary. Being able to operate with ambiguity.

Customer empathy

We are nothing without our customers. They have to be firmly in the center of our entire operation. We have to consider their needs, preferences, and feedback in all aspects of our team.

Continuous improvement

We’re always going to get better, but we’ve got to start somewhere. We need to set up the feedback loops that regularly monitor performance, gather feedback, and make adjustments as necessary to ensure that we’re delivering the best outcomes.

Innovation

Average planning generates average results. Thinking outside the box and borrowing inspiration from other industries will help us to innovate and be more creative. Good artists copy; great artists steal.

Integrated

We have to move as one. Our work is integrated and holistic. Success for one is success for all. This means considering the interconnections between different components and teams and handover points, and ensuring that they work together seamlessly.

Mindset matters

Shifting from a process-approach to a system-approach isn’t going to happen overnight.

But building more of the principles above into your day-to-day work, and by agreeing more ‘system’ ways of working with your collaborators, you might find less need for rigid processes, and more opportunities for closer work and true partnership. Good luck!

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

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

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

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

A typical second product story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, it was different back then.

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

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

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

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

Building a second product (the right way)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or, could you acquire a product?

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

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

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

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

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

Regardless, look for focus + confidence

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

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

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

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The post The Second Product Pitfall appeared first on Building Momentum.

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

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

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

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

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

Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize

Set this up early, and stand your ground.

I really like using ICE prioritization as a starting point.

ICE stands for :

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reduce, reuse, recycle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At every opportunity, restate strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t forget to develop yourself

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

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

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

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

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The post Scrappy product marketing: how to do more with less appeared first on Building Momentum.

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

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

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

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

Create a pre-recorded demo video

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A one-two punch: regular demo webinars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Make SaaS tangible with demos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Principles

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

Price before product

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

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

See how much riskier that is?!

Instead, smart startups will:

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

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

Price problems are probably a positioning problem

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

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

All commerce is an exchange – value, for money.

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

Pricing goes hand-in-hand with positioning.

Margin matters

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

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

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

Process

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

Set pricing objectives

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

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

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

You can download my pricing objectives process and template here.

Define your pricing strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep on customer research

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

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

Carry out specific pricing research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Competitor research

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

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

Draft and first review

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

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

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

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

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

Margin review and iterations

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

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

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

Testing

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

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

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

Get approval

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

Implement

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

Bringing it all together

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

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

Good luck!

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

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Every so often, I’ll see a Twitter or LinkedIn post go viral in the SaaS community and the topic is nearly always the same:

I decided not to request a demo from a SaaS company because they didn’t publish pricing on their website! Imagine how many leads they’re missing out on!!!

And honestly, it grinds my gears a little. And usually, these complainers have something in common: they’re all individual ‘makers’ or from early-stage, pre-PMF startups trying to buy from established SaaS companies that are usually targeted to more mature businesses.

Quite simply, if you (as a buyer) need to know pricing before requesting a demo or getting more information and the company doesn’t publish pricing, they are sending you a message: you are not their target customer.

Why SaaS companies don’t publish pricing

Good go-to-market strategy should discriminate.

Being something for everyone is a waste of time, effort, and focus. Most companies are focused on attracting up to 10% or maybe 20% share of the total market.

As startups mature they are often naturally pulled upmarket, away from serving very small businesses and SMBs who traditionally have lower average contract values (ACV) and higher churn. SMBs can also be expensive to acquire through paid performance marketing, and then still require an inside sales journey.

As companies are pulled upmarket, they win bigger, more mature companies as customers. These traditionally come with larger ACVs and more concrete growth prospects.

The effort to win a $10k customer is about the same as a $30k customer. From there, it’s only a period of experimentation and hiring the right people to get to $100k ACVs. These customers also cost less on the paid performance side, but can still be tended to and won by inside sales teams.

This whole process does leave a gap at the bottom of the market – which is usually quickly filled by other early-stage startups, and the same thing happens.

So as those companies mature, should they craft propositions and a buying experience that works for the 100%? No. They will focus on bigger ICPs, and adapt their marketing, sales, and product strategy accordingly.

It then makes less sense for these companies to publish pricing on their website for a number of reasons.

1. The buyer may not require pricing before getting more information. Larger businesses have more flexible budgets, and if the challenge to solve is important enough, budget can be created.
2. It leaves revenue on the table. Understanding a buyer’s problems before discussing pricing means you can size the proposal as required. A customer with a $1m problem will gladly pay $100k a year to solve, but if you’re setting public pricing at $50k, you’re missing out.
3. For perception. I don’t know about you, but I often feel companies without public pricing are going to take a more custom, solution-oriented approach to my problem. Not publishing pricing can help build perception as a higher-quality service.

What you can do instead

As a product marketer, you might be instructed to hide pricing on the pricing page – regardless of whether it’s the right thing or not – and you want to hedge against it.

And in some cases, you may want to offer hints on your pricing page, especially if you’re working through that transition period.

Here are two different ways you can bridge the gap.

Create an anchor with ‘good, best’ packaging

Defining a reference point on your pricing page can help your customers to understand how your product and value – and therefore, pricing – is likely to compare.

This might be a very low-touch plan that you offer with zero customization capabilities, or very cut down features. You can attach a per-user price, a platform fee, or whatever other value metric makes sense.

Usually, you won’t actually sell this to users – but it’s priced high enough that it’s an easy upsell to the minimum pricing for a basic offer for your ‘best’ plan, the one you actually want to sell.

This creates a anchor in your customer’s mind. If the first plan with not many features is priced at $x, then the recommended package must be higher.

Create an anchor with a competitor comparison

When you’re competing against low-value competitors but have clear, high-value differentiators, you can use this to your advantage.

You can group your competitors together as ‘Alternatives’ and present them in a comparison table, along with the primary features – and include your differentiators. For pricing, enter a range for the alternatives – and for your product, just use ‘Contact sales’ or ‘Request pricing’ or whatever works for your customers.

This format helps separate you from the crowd, set yourselves apart in terms of features and value, and offer a pricing anchor too. Your potential customers visit the page and instantly expect you to be higher priced, but have some point of reference.

Be very clear who your product is for

This one is contentious because for some reason, it’s considered a little gauche to say exactly who your target customer is.

But if you can push through, there’s no harm in stating something like

• Our product is best suited to customers with 500 to 5000 employees and spend an average of $1m per month on performance marketing
• We serve Enterprise customers who handle 50k transactions per day
• Customers typically invest $1m per year across their cybersecurity stack

And you have all of these guidelines already – your sales reps are using these in qualification calls. Could you experiment being upfront and transparent on your website? Would this help your SDRs be more productive?

Understand your customer, iterate

When it comes down to it, the companies that win will be the ones that best understand their customers – and support their buyer’s experience with the right information, at the right time.

Ultimately, the impact of transparent pricing on the website or not is unlikely to be the needle-mover you (or your execs) think it will be.

Give it a try, or don’t. But definitely get out there and understand what your customers want, then do that.

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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Revenue models can be really freaking confusing, especially for someone who’s never been exposed to that side of the business before.

But luckily, they’re not too complicated – once you understand what you’re looking at.

In this post I’m going to walk through how you can approach building a revenue model for your product.

Why should product marketers know the financial model?

As PMMs, we’re super close to how the product is marketed and sold. We should understand the total, addressable, and obtainable market opportunity over the short-to-long-term.

We want to work with sales, to accurately set expectations around product performance in the market. We want to work with growth and marketing teams to understand the funnel, set goals, and plan the campaigns required to meet targets.

But we also need a good understanding of P&L fundamentals like margins, COGS, etc. The decisions we make – around target customer, positioning, pricing, and product details – are all interconnected – and directly relate to the success and return on investment of our products.

Financial model template

For this post, we’ll use the early-stage SaaS financial model created by marker.io – you can copy the Google Sheet template here.

The template has four tabs:

1. Recap – this is your overview of the total revenue, costs, and profit by year
2. Growth Hypotheses – here you’ll adjust assumptions around growth rates, pricing, and churn
3. Costs Hypotheses – assumptions around spending, including any staff, marketing, and other expenses
4. Financial model – your month-by-month breakdown of how everything adds up, breaks down, and turns out

The template is built for startup founders, so isn’t exactly what you need, but has enough bones for you to customize for your own needs. You may want to remove references to staff costs, make marketing costs dollar amounts rather than a percentage of revenue, and reword or delete miscellaneous costs as necessary.

Using the revenue model template

Growth assumptions

On the growth tab, it’s time to input the following:

Average monthly price of subscriptions. How much monthly recurring revenue will your customers pay each? You may want to consider blending or adjusting the fields and formulas to account for discounts, average size of customers, pricing package uptake, etc

Monthly growth in number of new customers. How are you growing month-over-month? This is measured as a percentage of the existing customer base. Consider product/market-fit, the maturity of the market, sales cycle length, and seasonality.

Monthly revenue churn rate. Each month, what percentage of the customer base stop paying for your product? You’ll always have some level of churn whether it’s customers actively dissatisfied with your product, new customers that never get up-and-running, or customers going bust and no longer able to pay their bills.

If you’re launching a brand new product into the market, you’ll also need to think about:

• Number of new customers added last month (i.e. the number of customers you start with) – your beta customers, early adopters, etc.
• Starting MRR – the monthly recurring revenue you start with (from those initial customers!)

Cost assumptions

Click on to tab two to start playing around with your spend. You can either use this template as-is to capture operating expenses for a fuller picture, or remove items not involved with the creating/selling/providing the product.

Personnel. You can use this to track personnel costs to support the product, e.g. any operational team members required, or go broader to consider all of those who work on building, shipping, marketing, selling, and supporting your product.

Marketing spend. The template uses a percentage of MRR to estimate how much money you’ll put on marketing activity. Update these fields (or create new ones) to accurately estimate where you’ll be spending money on promotion.

Cost of goods sold. Every SaaS will have a cost to serve product to a customer. The template contains fields for payment processing and hosting/bandwidth costs – you may want to update or create new fields to capture additional costs involved in delivering product, like any third-party software license fees.

Miscellaneous. Pretty straightforward – use to capture any additional costs.

Check the numbers!

You’ve thought about your product’s growth potential and been rational about the costs you’ll experience.

Now you can review the financial model tab to see how things pan out.

Revenue. The top section looks at all the incoming customer growth, how many will churn, and the resulting revenue from their customership.

Costs. All those costs you entered now appear, month-by-month, so you can see total costs add up.

Profit and loss. Now we’re summarising the incomes, outgoings, and impact on the bottom line.

• Gross MRR – Monthly revenue before any deductions
• COGS – Any cost line items that are deducted from the gross MRR, involved with making, selling, and providing the product
• Gross Profit – Profit after deducting COGS
  • % – your gross profit margin shows how much more revenue you generate than spend.
• Operating expenses – If you’re going deeper than just the costs involved in delivering the product, you’ll track other costs here
• Operating margin – If you take the gross profit, minus all the operating expenses, how much profit is left at the end? The spreadsheet uses the phrase ‘Earnings before interest and tax’ (EBIT), also known as operating income.
  • % – your operating margin, expressed as a percentage of revenue

Analyze the revenue model

You’ve gone through the process and you’ve got all the numbers in place. The assumptions are pretty realistic – now it’s time to interrogate the output.

Switch back to the first tab and you’ll see your ARR, costs, EBIT outcomes by year – plus if there’s a shortfall, how much cash you’ll need to cover outgoings.

Updating any of the numbers for growth and costs will impact the outcomes – and don’t forget that everything compounds with SaaS.

You’ll want to think hard about the financial model and whether it really works for your business.

As a starting point, questions you’ll need to consider are:

• What happens if you increase the price and reduce growth… or vice versa?
• Where are there areas to reduce costs to improve margins?
• Does the gross profit margin work for your finance team?
• Is there seasonality in your sales or costs that you can adjust or avoid?

You can then work back with sales and marketing to identify the number of sales reps you need to hit revenue goals, and predict the number of opportunities and leads that marketing and sales need to generate.

Now, the hard part

Creating and analyzing your revenue model is actually surprisingly easy.

The hard part is to share, align, socialize, refine, monitor, track, learn, and iterate with your wider go-to-market team.

Good luck!

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

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Do we all know what tech debt means?

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

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

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

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

Different types of positioning debt

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

Credit cards: Positioning to win a deal

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

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

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

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

Loans: Positioning for every campaign

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mortgages: Hasty repositioning projects

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

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

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

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

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

Avoiding positioning debt

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

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

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

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

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

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Think back to 2021 and AI wasn’t really artificial intelligence, and more just a tree of confusing ‘if this, then that’ statements.

Jump forward to today, and AI has evolved leaps and bounds (funded by over $38bn of capital in the first half of 2021 alone).

GPT-3 is the most popular natural language algorithm, taking your text prompts and using its knowledge of almost all internet content to spit out scarily-good content – while DALL-E creates realistic images and art, also from text prompts.

But despite all the funding and hype, does it have any real function for product marketers – and how can product marketers get started?

AI tools in product marketing today

Let’s take a look at some of the ways you might already be using artificial intelligence.

To analyse voice of customer at scale

We’re bombarded by (hopefully) useful customer feedback from every angle: customer surveys, NPS and satisfaction scores, support tickets, targeted research, and more. But trying to understand the patterns and themes at scale is difficult without several spreadsheets and a lot of time.

Tools like Chattermill allow you to collect ongoing feedback, uncover themes and sentiment at every stage of the customer lifecycle, and direct the right insights to the right teams – automatically, at scale.

To analyse sales call trends and performance

If your company uses Gong (or the many other alternatives), you’re using two types of AI: one to convert speech to text, and another to identify the common themes that arise in your sales calls.

Gong uses its own, custom training model to identify the keywords, phrases, and sections of your sales calls that relate to topics you want to learn about – whether to highlight sections of calls that talk about pricing, or when a prospect is talking about a competitor.

To write blog posts and content

I don’t know about you, but I have to be in the mood to write… but with AI, you might not need to.

Jasper is an AI content platform that helps marketers and writers to create content faster. Trained on copywriting frameworks, it’s an easy way to create outlines for blog post briefs, generate social media copy, or get inspired with auto-generated ad headlines.

Opportunities for AI in product marketing

In many ways, we’re still at the beginning of the adoption curve for artificial intelligence in product marketing. Here are just a few thoughts on where it might be going:

Helping to generate product names, messaging, and positioning

As AI gets better at understanding the nuances of language, it will be able to generate ever-more realistic product names, marketing copy, and positioning statements – helping product marketers to validate (or invalidate) their ideas, faster.

What if you could feed customer interview transcripts into an AI tool, and automatically generate personas that summarise your target audience’s jobs, pains, gains, and triggers?

What if you could prompt an AI messaging engine with personas and your product features, and create a messaging map that’s ready for use in your sales deck?

Tracking the impact of product marketing effectiveness

Be honest… how often do PMMs use data to make decisions? The tools are there, but is there the will? AI could help save product marketers many hours of analysis to ultimately prove their worth.

Without being responsible for revenue or MQL numbers, could product marketers use AI to understand how many prospects repeated the latest messaging as their own?

Could we generate automatic reports that cite revenue and NPS impacts to customers that engaged with our activation and expansion campaigns?

Can AI spot changes in customer behavior, from bounce rates on webpages with recently updated messaging, to a drop in win-rates in a particular segment, way before a human does – allowing PMMs to prevent decline and make the most of opportunities faster?

Helping to target the right customers

And finally, one of the most difficult challenges for product marketing: how do you reach the right target customers, with the right message, at the right time in their lifecycle?

We often think about our ideal customer profiles as big, broad-brush groups. But could AI identify micro-segments that allow us to create targeted messaging for smaller groups of similar customers that can be easily targeted by ABM or outbound sales based on their demographics, firmographics, techstacks, and more?

And think about the website – one website homepage for every visitor that comes to your site means it’s unlikely going to resonate with everyone. Could AI-based personalization platforms (trained against your on-brand positioning) identify your visitor and have a good stab at crafting a custom message variation?

Your sales cycle could also do with a touch of artificial intelligence. Would you see win rates increase if your sales reps had a personalized AI deal coach that encourages them to share collateral, crafts nurture campaigns, and suggests the right time for a phone outreach?

Fad or future?

As fast as they’re advancing, AI is unlikely going to be a full replacement for product marketers.

AI will definitely help PMMs to be more strategic by automating tasks, increasing creativity, and understanding the real impact of their work on the wider business.

But just how quickly PMMs will be able to outsource tasks to AI algorithms remains to be seen.

For example, this post has been written on Lex: an AI-based writing assistant that helps you to write quickly, better, and with more confidence. (The header image was created on DALL-E too!). It’s provided some inspiration, but the suggested copy has been rather bland and without character, mimicking the millions of other content marketing blog posts out there. Any AI is only as good as what it’s been trained on.

My opinion? There’s still a long way to go before AI is writing the next great sales deck or crafting targeted positioning that’s on brand and resonates with your audience.

But every product marketer should make it a goal to start learning the AI tools that I’m pretty sure will guide more and more of our work over the next few years.

Your turn: what do you think about the role of AI in product marketing?

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 AI in product marketing: fad or future? appeared first on Building Momentum.

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

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

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

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

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

What’s your pricing page hero heading?

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

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

What do you notice?

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

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

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

Takeaway: Reiterate value

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

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

What should you call your product packages?

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

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

Generally, there a few options.

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

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

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

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

Or maybe it’s about product capabilities:

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

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

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

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

What plan should we highlight?

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

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

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

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

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

Takeaway: It’s all about perception

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Takeaway: It depends (on your pricepoint)

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

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

Build, measure, learn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Working with assumptions (without validating or iterating)

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

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

How to get back on track

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

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

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

They say jump, you say ‘how high?’

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

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

How to get back on track

You have two options.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to get back on track

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

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

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

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

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In my latest Vouch video, I reveal the types of social proof your business needs – and how your marketing and sales team should be using them.

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I’ll admit it. I’ve worked on numerous positioning projects that completely drowned.

On some, the messaging was obviously not right. On another, the messaging never really took hold and was left rotting in a slide deck somewhere.

Here are five reasons that positioning projects can fail.

Internal assumptions, over external evidence

Positioning by assumption doesn’t work. But still, teams lead with internal “knowledge” first, and simply don’t know what they don’t know.

Sure, it’s easier. “Insights” reverb around the room as ideas riff off each other. Excitement builds, the group gets rowdy as confirmation bias sets in.

This is capital-D Dangerous. While the team might have customer-facing exposure or have been a customer before, they’re biased and blind to the day-to-day challenges and opportunities that real prospects are facing.

Most commonly, this means your team overestimate the maturity of the average customer. Hoping to sell their ‘bleeding edge tech’ to early innovators doesn’t work when customers are actually still extremely early in working out what their problems are (let alone how to solve them).

This is why I make clear that we will willingly gather assumptions – but we’ll validate with new market/customer research to make sure we’re seeing the full picture.

No hard decisions

Positioning (and product marketing) is strategy. And strategy is just as much what you say no to, as what you say yes to.

Trying to be everything for everyone, wanting to throw in every feature, and suggesting every message is a must-have … it’s distracting for everyone involved.

Often this isn’t accidental… it’s a sign of cautiousness, a lack of conviction. Unfortunately, this means your positioning becomes meaningless – it’s much better to be the thing for someone instead.

Rather than allow positioning to end up messy, I’ll constantly bring up examples where having a niche, refined ICP has a positive impact on momentum. I’ll also gather challenges they’re experiencing that are often implications of poor positioning, so we bring hard choices back into the real world.

Crafted by marketing, but never activated with sales

Positioning that’s created in a vacuum might be aesthetically perfect and pleasing to the marketer, but will likely be ineffective in the field.

If sales don’t have confidence in the messaging, they won’t embrace it. Trying to encourage adoption is like pushing a rock up a hill.

Most failures come from creating positioning in an ‘about us’ deck that doesn’t translate well into the actual pitch. Messages designed to create an impressive sense of superiority are perceived as fluffy nonsense in a sales conversation – and are summarily skipped.

New positioning requires a considered rollout with sales reps being brought along the journey. The evidence behind the updated direction has to be shared – reps need to build empathy and your messaging needs to feel ‘real’. Not activating evidence is a surefire way to positioning failure.

I always involve sales reps from the frontline in my positioning processes. Not only do they have accurate knowledge of the challenges today’s customers are facing, they’re a good benchmark for confidence in the new direction – and can help act as a champion in the sales team.

The CEO wasn’t involved

Every great project I’ve been involved in had significant involvement from the CEO. Every less-than-great project had CEOs with tangential involvement – enough to have a say and promote/demote ideas, but not enough to take responsibility for the project.

If the project is a success, everything is good! If not, then the CEO has plausible deniability.

Ideally, CEOs are involved all the way – including the customer/market research calls that you should undertake in your project. This way, it’s real for the CEO and they can operate with up-to-date evidence of what customers want, rather than the idealised persona that exists in their head.

This hasn’t been something I’ve required – but will be moving forward. Especially when the business is growing, CEOs are often undertaking investor discussions at the same time as trying to grow sales – and ensuring we’re communicating the right thing, to the right audiences in the right way, is important.

“We’ve always done it this way” (and other bad advice)

One of the most annoying things about working on projects is that if a team has done positioning before – regardless of its actual success – the past process they used is their benchmark.

Any bad advice they took away from those projects gets regurgitated, leaving those with more effective processes and frameworks to spend a ton of time countering, rather than moving forward productively. This also affects the confidence of the positioning team, wondering if there is another/better way (which can lead to infighting).

Many marketers claim to be experts at positioning, but not all have the right experience for your business. B2C vs B2B, industry expertise, SaaS vs on-premise, SMB vs Enterprise, and many other variables can vastly impact the process, experience, and results that you’ll gain from your project.

I don’t think this will ever get easier. All we can do is help teams understand how modern frameworks, with the best practices we’ve learnt, make it easier to attack the challenges the business is facing.

Positioning doesn’t have to be hard

I actually think positioning is quite simple. Find your best-fit customers, understand what’s going on, and tell them exactly how you help them overcome challenges and achieve better outcomes.

Check out my Customer Value Positioning framework for a how-to, and everything you need to make it happen – and give your project the best chance of success by avoiding the issues above.

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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Capturing your customers’ feedback helps you build a product they can’t live without. In this Vouch video, James shares the three questions every business should be asking its customers. Watch it here.

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Maybe we don’t feel confident about it. Or maybe we’re perfectionists. Or scared of the reaction.

But regardless, often as product marketers we’re much more comfortable sharing updates after something has happened.

The feature launched! The campaign is now live! The battlecard is now ready! The whitepaper is finished!

Which is a shame, really.

All of our good, hard work that goes into everything that our wider teams don’t see – the planning, strategizing, creating, editing, reviewing, testing, iterating, reporting – becomes invisible. And we’re judged only by the outputs (and hopefully results) that we’ve released.

Momentum is that feeling where things are happening. You’re winning deals, closing faster, results come easier. Momentum is not a lagging indicator; it’s a leading indicator. Momentum is excitement.

Share early

Nothing is as exciting as new. New projects, new experiments, new ideas. New fires people up, lights a fire in their belly, and sparks the brain into action.

When you’ve got the go-ahead on a new project, let people know. Announce it. It doesn’t have to be a big proclamation, but it does need to give people enough insight into:

• What you’re doing
• Who’s involved
• What happens next
• Where they can go for more information

It’s important to set expectations. Too high and everyone will be disappointed when it might not happen. Set expectations too low, and you miss an opportunity to get people bought in.

Share the wins (and the fails)

Momentum breeds momentum. If you’ve had a win, whatever the size, shout about it!

We usually reserve announcements for the big wins – the huge customer deal, the massive product feature.

But every small win should be celebrated. Had feedback that helped adjust direction for a campaign? Celebrate it! Completed a small task that gets your competitor intelligence hub up to scratch? Sing it loud!

Even if things aren’t going well, talk about it publicly.

Sharing failures doesn’t induce a lack of confidence – it creates trust. You never know what you might learn from the wider team, or who might be able to provide that crucial nugget to unblock everything else.

Share the learnings

Want to supercharge the momentum you’re building with your internal stakeholders? Actually monitor your results, and communicate how well your project performed against the goals set against it.

Hopefully they’re great, and you win accolades for setting and achieving results. Even if they’re not great, you’ll build confidence. People will know that you’re monitoring results, measuring success, and are actually honest about what’s happening.

New insights are wins. Getting to an outcome, one way or another, is a win.

Final tip: be consistent

Maybe it’s a weekly, or bi-weekly, or monthly update. But make it, every time. No update is an update that people will love to hear.

Building trust and momentum starts with transparency and consistency – good luck!

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

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“Sales have asked for a competitor comparison battlecard that they can send to prospects.”

Dangerous for many reasons.

We never want to sling mud around or disrespect competitors. That’s not a good way to sell.

We want customers to focus on why they should use us – not why they shouldn’t use others.

Feature comparisons are even more dangerous. We will never 100% know whether a competitor has specific features or not. Not only does that open us up to legal claims, if our understanding is incorrect it can make us look slimy by not telling the truth.

Every competitor is, ultimately, a good choice in it’s own way for a specific type of customer. Their benefits and shortcomings will make perfect sense for a type of customer in a certain situation.

Your goal, as a product marketer or sales rep, is to focus on why your solution is the best solution for the prospect you’re engaging with. The best way to do this is to influence the prospect’s requirements and buying journey by getting ahead of the sale.

Create the ultimate buyer’s guide

If you don’t have this already, put it on your to-do list immediately.

Creating a clear, concise buyer’s guide is a must-have piece of content that you promote to pretty much every prospect, whether they came from inbound or outbound.

Our goal with the buyers guide is to remove the cognition that a buyer must do to decide what their requirements should be, and why.

It’s our opportunity to introduce and highlight a particular frame – a concept that already exists in the buyer’s mind. We get to influence their decision criteria, let them know what they should and shouldn’t be looking for, and help them understand exactly why your product is the one they should choose.

Your buyer guide outline might be something like this:

Category overview

This sets the scene for your readers on how they should interpret the market – positioning your business at the leading edge. You may want to call out specific sub-categories, which can be used to position competitors and alternative solutions as good… but for other contexts.

“When to buy or switch”

This section builds on what you know from the common triggers and motivations that encourage your ideal buyers to search, switch, or buy an alternative solution. This is your opportunity to pinpoint and dial up the pain that customers are likely experiencing.

Explore key features

This section might refer to features, but actually we’re exploring key areas of value that your customers desires. A prime opportunity to call out the must-have features your product has – and why they’re so important to delivering good outcomes.

How to evaluate and compare solutions

We’re now educating buyers on the process they should follow, what they should consider, and other things to watch out for in the purchase process. It’s an opportunity to suggest the standard things (like value and ROI, not just cost) as well as things that are unique to you.

Implementation considerations

Ease of implementation and quick time-to-value is a great differentiator. Educating buyers on what they should consider when evaluating other products is where you can go to town on your approach versus others, especially when you have fundamentally different implementation concepts.

Case study

Why would you not take the chance to shout about a successful customer experience? Use this an opportunity to talk about why the customer chose your solution, as well as how they use the product and the results they’ve seen. This helps build social proof and makes your product feel tangible.

Why choose us

Finish up your buyer’s guide with a persuasive message that really resonates with your ideal customers. Reinforce the framing you’ve set out at the start, why it’s the right product for them, and remind them of the valuable unique differentiators that set your product apart from the rest.

Inform, educate, and support buyers on their journey

Not only can you create a buyer’s guide as a full-funnel piece of content, but you can take it to the next level by creating an evaluation template that prospects can use throughout their consideration process. Handily, the template will include several features and capabilities that highlights your product’s benefits… whilst competitors don’t meet the standard.

With these two pieces of collateral in your toolkit, you’ll be driving faster sales cycles, justifying higher pricing, and create happier customers – without the inconvenience and potential downsides of creating shareable competitor comparisons.

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?

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

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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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We’re all guilty of indulging in a little bit of fluffy marketing copy. “Enable teams to excel”, “be your customer’s hero”, and “personalize all your touchpoints” are all things I’ve written before.

But looking back, what did they mean? They were empty attempts to say something smart. Contrite. A waste of bits and bytes, crowding the internet, taking up much-needed space for more cat gifs.

And we see this all around the internet.

Nearly every B2B website – including yours, sorry – has some version of the same old tired cliches:

• Work faster, not smarter
• Save time and effort
• Grow revenue
• Scale with ease
• Connect with your customers
• Build stronger relationships
• Deliver a better customer experience
• Enable teams to collaborate
• Turn X into a strategic advantage
• … and many more.

And what surprises me is that these garbled monstrosities don’t come from a thousand monkeys banging on keyboards, or from fresh interns souped up on Red Bull.

They come from experienced people who care so much about what they’re trying to say. People with so much passion, insight, experience, and genuine love for the product and technology.

The thought process in people like this – speaking from personal experience – goes like this. We feel the overwhelming to say everything. We know that we’re too close to the metal, so we try to ‘dumb down’ language for the normies out there. We rely on cliches because everyone knows what they mean – they’re cliches for a reason!

But these attempts to say something, actually say nothing at all. Confusing, unreadable, and create more questions than they answer.

Your copy should never lead to this outcome.

The goal of product marketing copy, whether on your website or sales collateral or a video script, should never make prospects think. Cognition is a barrier, not an accelerant. Your prospects should nod along, embracing your proposition and adjusting their view of the world.

Start with the customer

Go back to that thought process: we try to dumb down language because we want to make it easier for people to understand what we really do.

This is the wrong approach. Rather than mangle the product to fit the customer’s world, can we understand our customers and create something that fits perfectly?

This means understanding the value that customers desire. The jobs they undertake, the pains to avoid, gains they want to achieve, and triggers that motivate them to search/switch/buy.

It can be tricky to convince product-/technology-first stakeholders that this is the way, but it’s not an either/or situation. You need to do both: customer discovery with technology innovation.

The ‘so what?’ antidote

When you find yourself reaching for a comfortable cliche, stop. Take a breath, and ask yourself “so what?”. Then write that!

What exactly does ‘saving time’ enable? What do customers gain when they can collaborate better? What outcomes are improved when the business grows and is successful?

These are often the hardest questions for CEOs, founders, and technologists to answer.

But levelling up your copy and answering ‘so what’ doesn’t just help customers understand what you do better. It helps you justify higher prices. Build stronger brand positioning. Build word of mouth. Build loyalty. Reduce sales objections and improve sales efficiency. These all lead to one thing: easier revenue generation.

Sometimes these will be obvious: reducing specific metrics or achieving a new status. Sometimes they’ll be more opaque: being seen as a leader, achieving a higher valuation, or helping the company embrace a new direction.

And you might wonder… can you say those out loud? Is it not a bit gauche or transactional to say exactly what we enable?

Absolutely not. B2B is rational. See a problem, solve a problem.

Don’t make them think ‘so what?’. Tell them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Validate your positioning like a software developer

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

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

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

Alpha stage

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

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

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

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

Beta stage

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

Presenting to existing customers

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

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

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

Market research

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

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

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

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

Google and social ads

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

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

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

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

“Tiger team”

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

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

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

Additional reading: how to test your positioning

Avoid A/B testing

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

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

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

Alpha and beta test to success

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

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

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

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

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

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

Customer retention and expansion

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

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

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

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

Positioning to evolving value

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

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

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

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

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

Supporting pipeline generation

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

So do what you can to support marketing and sales.

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

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

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

Making efficiencies

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

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

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

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

Diamonds are forever, but downturns are temporary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breaking it down

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where’s best to start?

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

What would you change?

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

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

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

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

What is the Double Diamond?

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

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

Doing the right thing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doing the thing right

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s an iterative process

The double diamond is not a linear approach.

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

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

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Alicia and I run a course WTF is Go-To-Market? – and one of the first things we do is answer that question. What is go-to-market?

We spent a long time discussing, researching, validating, and wordsmithing the concept and definition, and this is what we ended with:

Go-To-Market is a collection of processes, programmes, and human mindset that delivers customer-focused products out into the world, and drives the continual creation of their unique value for real people – and businesses – over time.

WTF is Go-To-Market?

If you compare this to every other definition of go-to-market, you’ll get some generic definition that just talks about creating a plan. Utilizing resources. Achieve competitive advantage. Enhance customer experience.

But we purposefully included how mindset is a huge piece of the go-to-market puzzle. The mindset that we approach our go-to-market process with (both personally and as an organization) can have a huge impact on the outcomes we can deliver.

And having the right mindset across product marketing is important too. I’ve written before about tips to hire product marketers and three product marketing interview questions to ask, but in this post I want to touch on some of the mindset traits that I think make successful product marketers.

(And of course, this is my take. Your mileage may vary, and you’ll have different opinions and experiences.)

Empathetic

Being able to understand the feelings of another, whether a colleague or customer, is the bedrock of product marketing. Only when we can sit in our customer’s shoes can we effectively understand who they are, their context, and how we can help them. And we need to activate this external-in, customer-centric mindset in nearly every thing we do.

Growth mindset

We’re 100% human, not superheroes. We’re not going to get everything right on the first go (and if we do, we weren’t aspirational enough). Ask ‘how can we do better?’, roll with the punches when things go wrong, and actually learn from mistakes.

Adventurous

Nothing is impossible. Of course, some things are, so let’s be realistic about them. But nearly everything else is doable.

Want to do something really huge and outrageous? Let’s do it. In a short space of time? Might be tricky, but let’s try. Will it have the right impact? We think so – but let’s see how it goes.

Playing it safe is comfortable, but not exciting. Not everything can be planned, de-risked, calculated, verified. We can’t protect against every eventuality, even the most likely ones. Let’s be prepared, but sometimes we’ve just gotta see what happens.

At the end of the day, we can cope with almost anything.

Strategic

I’m convinced that most people haven’t really considered what a strategic mindset is, so here’s my take.

Having a strategic mindset is like playing chess. You have the tactics you can play. You’re competing against the market (competitors, customers, and other forces). But if you play one move, then what? How will the other side respond? What will your next move be? What do you think is your overall path to victory right now – and what other paths are there?

This should be visible at every level. Planning an entire GTM strategy? Think strategically. Writing an overview sales collateral? Think strategically.

Mindset needs confidence

Having the right mindset needs you to also have the confidence to put them into action. You might come up against obstacles, like bosses who disagree or a business culture that just isn’t a match – but at least try.

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

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

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

• Audience and buying stage
• What success will look like

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

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

Define principles for hot project

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

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

Principles can help you both:

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

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

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

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

Explore Vision to Values

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

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

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

Principles matter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Measure the impact of product marketing

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

This is a really common question that many early in the product-marketing-hiring journey will ask, perhaps roles where the PMM is reporting into the CEO or a first-time founder, or where the marketing director comes from a non-tech background.

Product marketing might seem complicated to outsiders, but it’s not an amorphous blob. We don’t weave magic (as much as we’d like to claim).

We usually work on a number of projects at one time, using our knowledge, skills, and experience to solve problems to improve an outcome. The trick is defining what the project is, and what metrics should be moved.

Some of these projects will be casual and everyday support, but sometimes you’ll be spending a ton of time on something – and need to prove you’re having an impact.

In these cases, I recommend setting out clear project briefs using an experiment canvas like the one below.

Of course, edit or reword this rough layout into something that works for you and your business. But broadly, an experiment canvas will be made up of:

• The assumption you’re testing
• A hypothesis statement that details what you’re testing, what you expect to achieve, and the timeframe for achieving it.
• Details on how the work will happen, and how the measurement will happen
• The results achieved
• Whether you validated or didn’t achieve the result, and what any next steps are to be

This can serve as a handy way to align stakeholders around the projects you’re working on, and also give your work a clear steer for success.

Measure the success of product marketing

Often, this question is phrased as ‘measure the success of product marketing’… but often is intended to be ‘measure the success of the product marketer’. Be very clear which one you are asking/answering.

The success of product marketing should ultimately track against the main needle-moving metric for your business each year.

For most traditional businesses, this will be revenue. For other companies, it might be a north-star product usage metric.

Each quarter, I’d expect to see product marketing work on projects that look to improve a specific metric that has an exponential impact on the main metric.

For example, a business needs to grow revenue in 2023.

• Q1 PMM projects focus on improving sales win rates.
• Q2 looks at above-the-funnel positioning to grow awareness and relevance.
• Q3 is tracking outbound sales performance.
• Q4 focuses on supporting MQL to Opp numbers.

Sometimes the focus on the main metric will change depending on the weather or the general mood in the business. And we need to look at the trends and the direction of travel, not ad-hoc metrics or enforced OKRs that don’t make sense.

Product marketing is collaborative, so the success of product marketing always depends on the relationships that exist between our stakeholder teams.

And we might run, inform, advise the work – but not have an active role in delivering or implementing. The success of product marketing cannot be based on a single metric, whether achievement or failure – but the whole of product marketing is more than the sum of its parts.

Monitor the performance of the product marketing team

I’ve phrased this in a specific way, but as above, some people ask this question and aren’t entirely clear in what they really mean: how do we monitor or measure the performance of a product marketing manager on a personal, role level?

This is probably the hardest question to answer.

Ultimately, you’ll need to measure their performance based on the job description you (hopefully) spent time carefully crafting, the role levels and expectations that you (hopefully) can lean on for consistency, and clear indicators of company culture.

Can you measure the performance of a product marketer on a single metric? No. On a single project? No. On the first underwhelming quarter? No.

On a consistent trend of underperformance? Definitely. On an unforgivable behavior? Absolutely. On a lack of response to well-attempted coaching? Sure.

The lack of clear metrics that product marketing owns is often confused with lack of accountability. It isn’t. Hold product marketers to account on the impact and the success they drive for your business.

Don’t track deliverables

Don’t bother trying to track product marketing with the number of deliverables created. It does nothing except drive busywork.

In fact, it has the inverse effect. Using metrics like the number of datasheets or webpages created, as a proxy for productivity, actually lessens the total impact that your product marketing team can deliver.

Evolve your approach

As you and your product marketing team mature, you’ll find new ways to monitor and measure product marketing through things like control groups, incremental revenue, testing, and more. Your approach will evolve and that’s a good thing.

Just remember to be clear on the questions you’re trying to answer. Impact isn’t success, and success isn’t performance.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Knowledge is power. You can make better decisions, and have more information to inform your execution.

Your go-to-market strategy depends on how well you understand your customers and the market, but most of the time product marketers are just guessing.

It’s so difficult to look for the right stats or validate assumptions, so often we… just don’t.

Luckily there’s a whole host of tools you can use to better understand your market – and help you make better decisions.

Audiense

Audiense is a great tool for social media insights. It’s great for identifying the size of potential customer segments that can be reached on social media, and building a richer picture of their interests, who influences them, and what/when they tweet.

You can search for specific keywords to identify people with specific job titles or interests to create and compare niche segments. Audiense also offers personality insights: an analysis based on the Big Five personality dimensions. This might sound like a nice-to-have, but understanding whether your customer base is rational or logical, empathetic or hard-hearted can really help you improve your messaging and ensure it resonates.

Sparktoro

Along the same lines as Audiense, but honestly more usable and friendly, is Sparktoro. By analysing public data, Sparktoro returns super simple and straightforward reports that include the demographics, behaviors, and interests of your audience.

You can analyze social accounts or websites, or search for general audiences that use certain words, follow certain accounts, or frequently visit specific websites: perfect for sneaky competitive intelligence. Because remember, understanding your audience means understanding your competitor’s audience too.

Sparktoro will also tell you about any press sites, podcasts, and YouTube channels your audience follow – something your performance marketing team will appreciate.

Pollfish

First-hand quantitative data is so important to help validate your assumptions, but it can be so expensive to work with research agencies.

Pollfish is one of a new breed of research platforms, with an integrated panel to give you super fast access to insights you won’t find anywhere else.

Pricing starts at just $145 with two screener questions to help you target the right audience based on almost any questions you want to ask.

The only tip is to that you’ll need to build your survey design skills to avoid leading questions, biasing responses, or capturing unintelligible data. You might need to find a research designer on Upwork or Fiverr to help.

You can ask almost anything: from competitor awareness, to brand perception, to testing messaging and positioning. Their weighting algorithm also averages out the results to give you representative results that you can use in PR.

Apollo

Primarily an outbound sales prospecting tool, Apollo is really useful to help marketers research their Ideal Customer Profile segments, build bottom-up market sizing, and begin to humanize your ICP.

You can create audiences by filtering on a whole host of individual and organisational options including title, locations, seniority, the technologies they’re using, and even the roles a company is hiring for.

Statista

We’ve all seen Statista results show up in Google when we’re trying to find stats, but have you ever actually searched on Statista first?

By amalgamating research reports, government stats, and other sources of data, Statista is a great place to find stats on… almost anything.

The only downside is that you’re likely to find adjacent data that’s close, but probably not exactly what you need. Pricing is pretty good too – $39/month for a year’s worth of access, or just under $2,000 for a month’s worth of indepth reports.

UserTesting / UsabilityHub

I’m adding these UserTesting and UsabilityHub together because they achieve pretty much the same job: an easy way to get real people to look at your stuff and tell you what they think.

This might be a new website homepage design to test the effectiveness of your messaging, or product screenshots to see how users react.

They’re a great way to get real, raw insights from people you don’t know. Highly recommend.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

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The product<>sales dynamic is often fragile. Time and time again, I’ve seen these three issues at play:

1. Sales feel unable to influence product roadmaps. This can happen especially in companies that are very engineering- or product-led. Sales reps are talking to specific types of customers all day long. When that feedback is ignored, goodwill is lost.
2. Product don’t trust sales’ judgement. We’ve all heard it before: “We just need this one feature to win this deal!”. Because sales teams operate with smaller patterns (1-10 customers), their patterns aren’t conclusive enough to feed into problem-discovery.
3. Product ‘ships too slow’. Sales feel that product teams are taking too long and not delivering product improvements at the right velocity, whilst product teams feel they’re operating at the right pace.

These don’t just create animosity, but can snarl up time and attention – eventually leading to inertia.

Introducing a ‘statement of direction’ document

Whilst tackling the challenges above requires long-term dedication to building trust and working on the relationship, a statement of direction is a great initial deliverable to align both teams and start the conversation.

A statement of direction serves two purposes:

1. An internal alignment document to communicate the problem areas that the business will be investigating – giving sales the ability to talk confidently about future direction
2. An external document and presentation that captures the main themes for future product direction, enabling customers and prospects to buy into the future vision

They’re updated every 3-6 months and evolve as you learn more about your customer, market, and innovation opportunities.

What is a statement of direction?

A statement of direction is not a roadmap: it doesn’t cover the specific features that are being planned, or give estimated timelines. Instead, it describes the problem areas and innovation themes that the business is strategically investing in.

A statement of direction usually contains:

1. Vision: the world that you’re trying to create for your customers and the outcomes they’ll be able to achieve, including the barriers that prevent them from getting there. This is not an internal product vision.
2. Product investment themes: an overview of the key surface areas that impact the customer experience. These might be based around problems or intended outcomes.
   • A summary of why it’s important and what it means to your customer base
   • A breakdown of any recently-released features to prove your progress in each area
   • An explanation of your product shipping cadence
   • A brief overview of the direction for this theme, usually organized by next/future timelines. This allows you to communicate ambiguity for further-out opportunities, and present clarity for things that are more shaped.

It takes conversations to create a statement of direction, engaging sales, product, marketing, customer success, and other teams. First, you need to identify the product areas that matter to your customers – external-in, not internal-out. Then, you can align existing priorities and opportunities already in play before validating with other teams.

It’s important to also train teams on the statement of direction, and how to use it. It’s not promising timelines, prioritization, or specific deliverables. Instead, it’s communicating the mandate has business is strategically chosen, and the direction that customers are buying into.

Is everyone onboard?

Whilst you might think the primary objective of a statement of direction is to communicate externally, I think it’s much more powerful when used as a tool to align your business – specifically, product and sales – on what you’ll b2e building and the problems you’ll be solving for customers.

This helps to build focus and confidence… and as regular readers will know, focus + confidence = momentum.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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The last fifteen years have seen a bust and boom cycle, we’ve struggled through a global pandemic, and now we’re trying to finish spreadsheets and write messaging whilst Russia invades Ukraine.

And as product marketers, we lead and support so many crucial parts of our businesses. It can feel like we’re carrying the weight of the world on our shoulders.

It’s a constant juggling act: balancing customer needs with internal constraints, all whilst trying to keep our heads above water with the day-to-day.

It’s no wonder that product marketers are burnt out: exhausted, swamped, overwhelmed, and drained.

I’ve had so many friends and colleagues deal with debilitating stress, anxiety, and self-doubt – to the point where they’ve had to take extended mental health leave or quit completely to save their sanity.

Burnout stories

I wanted to highlight a couple of real stories.

First, here’s what an anonymous product marketer in the health-tech industry had to say:

Ranee Soundara also shared an insightful, personal thread on the effects of burnout on her mental and physical health:

“At the peak of my burnout, my emotional work exhaustion manifested these ways:
+ PTSD nightmares about work, due deadlines, being angry about the unmanageable workload on myself and my team, rage quitting
+ wake up with nausea, and throw up some mornings before going on Zoom

“The raw feelings of anger and resentment would carry from my nightmares and into my woken state—and the insurmountable mental exhaustion and depletion virtually internalized in such a way I began to feel like a complete personal failure: ineffective and worthless.

“I didn’t know how much burnout affected me until my best friend pointed out I was withdrawn from my normal social routine, and literally told me: “I’m worried about you. You’ve had stressful jobs before, but right now you are a completely different person.” I was gutted.

“At first, I thought it was just the pandemic. Everyone was under lockdown, and I was isolated—living alone, and distantly socialized with only a handful of friends that chose to remain in New York. Then more friends began to say the same things: “we can tell how sad you are…”

“My mom suggested I increase my monthly therapy sessions to bi-weekly. That way, I could unpack some of the emotional burden I carried and also be in a safe space to carefully think things through. With a therapist’s help, I could identify the changes to improve mental wellness.

“Additionally, during my annual medical exam, my doctor explained the long-term negative effects of burnout on my body and fertility health. That if I continued on this path, I would become at-risk for hereditary diseases, and it’d be increasingly challenging to freeze my eggs.

“It was in my doctor’s exam notes that finally motivated me to leave my job:
+ My mental wellness has been completely depleted
+ My burnout has caused me to have early stage PTSD
+ As long as I was working, I couldn’t make the best decisions to improve mental and physical health

“I understand the reluctance to leave a job. We are pressured to constantly be “onto the next” without taking time off to deal with stressors and refreshing our mental health—most having to prioritize family and financial obligations. The reality is, we can’t afford time off.

“Of course we all want a good job, to do good work and feel validated in the value we bring an organization, however, when conditions don’t enable us to do our best work and becomes wholly demoralizing, we cannot continue living with it. No job is worth jeopardizing your health.”

You can also read more about Ranee’s story on CNBC. 

I also asked Alicia Carney, my friend and fellow co-founder of WTF is Go-To-Market, and product marketer, for her thoughts.

“It’s difficult to isolate product marketing’s contribution to success, often we have an amplifier effect that can make or break the success of a product, marketing team, or even the business overall. But the downside of this is that product marketing can often be hidden, undervalued, and can feel thankless. It’s exhausting having to create space to showcase your work, make sure the right people are paying attention, and it can be really exhausting – especially if you crave external validation.” 

Personally, I’ve also cycled through peaks of burnout every few months for the last few years, overwhelmed by the amount of ‘small rock’ tasks that I need to complete – in addition to making progress on the ‘big rocks’. 

Tips for dealing with burnout

If you’re in urgent need of support, I encourage you to find the help you need from your manager, HR team, doctors, and other professionals you have access to.

Here are a few tips for dealing with burnout.

• Understand what burnout feels like for you. It might be feeling increased stress and pressure to the point of exhaustion, or it might be withdrawing from your normal lifestyle.
• Get support. Most companies have woken up to the importance of mental health, and offer coaching, therapy, sick days, and other support for burnout. Make use of any Employee Assistance Programs.
• Work with your manager. Be transparent about your needs with your manager. Ask for help, let them know you need to step back, and deprioritise projects so you can focus on fewer things.
• Build working habits. Take your full allocation of PTO. Set work/life boundaries, like no work after 6pm. Take walks during the day to reset. Adapt your working style to maximize your day-to-day health.
• Give-and-take. Maybe controversial, but sometimes you’ll need to work under deadline – requiring weekend work or late nights. And that can be fine, so long as it doesn’t become an expectation. Make sure to take back time you’ve worked in lieu whether an official policy or not.
• Communicate. Talking about burnout, being transparent, and showing vulnerability is not a weakness. Things will only get better as a culture and society if we can speak up with confidence and be proud that you’re prioritising your mental wellbeing.

I’d love to hear your tips on protecting your mental health – drop me a reply or comment on the post below with your thoughts.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Pivots usually come at the worst time: running out of money, struggling to find customers, and general confusion and dismay.

I’ve led, or been part of, five major pivots:

1. From software for mobile operators to e-commerce retailers
2. From email marketing software for anyone, to personalized marketing specific for retailers
3. From helpdesk software for IT teams, to customer service software for retailers
4. From payments software for desktop developers, to payment software for SaaS developers
5. From AI software for diversity and inclusion leads, to diversity software for recruiters

Each have been fantastic lessons in what to do, and what not to do. Here are three quick tips on ensuring successful strategy pivots in your SaaS business.

Pivot the customer, not the product

In each of the examples above, we used (mostly) the same product – but adjusted the positioning and go-to-market to appeal to a different type of customer.

I see many SaaS companies trying to pivot their product; completely rebuilding their idea from scratch. That wastes all the hard work, and puts you further back from where you need to be.

Pivoting your target market should mean understanding your new customer so well it becomes a competitive advantage. It’s not a small decision: it means re-architecting your entire company, so do it well based on evidence, not assumptions.

Make decisions, avoid inertia

You might think that you can pivot and expand your target market, without dropping your existing GTM.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t work in most cases. It’s likely that you’re unable to resource both successfully, let alone make strategic plays in both camps.

This quickly leads to inertia: the enemy of momentum. There are two ways this embeds in your business:

• Increased resistance happens when people lose trust in the direction of travel because it doesn’t generate the results they are experiencing or expecting.
• Lost velocity when people are confused about the direction they should be moving in.

Making tough but necessary decisions is absolutely required. This should feed down to your go-to-market activities. Your sales and marketing should actively discriminate against bad-fit customers.

Don’t expect the pivot to work

Honestly, keep your expectations low. You’re not just flicking a magic switch that aligns everything the right way and unlocks that ARR.

You’re still going to be learning what customers want and need, and building to that.

Your teams will still be understanding how best to reach, engage, sell, and support.

You’ll all need to figure out whether the new customer economics make sense over the long-term.

You’ll need to build confidence in your execution. And the best way to do that is by basing your expectations on reality, by validating and testing performance in the real world rather than jumping headfirst.

Working through a pivot is hard

Trying to make these big changes happen is difficult, scary, and tense.

In my experience, execs who haven’t been through pivots before stroll into them without accurately estimating the struggle they’re about to unleash.

Managing up, as a product marketer, is so important. Being transparent about the bandwidth, the work, the checkpoints, and ensuring there are good feedback loops will help.

But it’s a two-way street. Founders, CEOs, and department leads need to make psychologically-safe spaces for honest feedback. Celebrate the successes, embrace failures with open arms, and trust that everyone is doing their best job.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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I’m writing this whilst a little bit sick, so the below is a short and sweet post. Drop me a note and let me know what topics you’d like to see covered in upcoming posts.

SPIN is a sales methodology developed by Neil Rackham after studying more than 35,000 sales calls over 12 years.

The SPIN framework covers the different questions that are asked, posted, and answered throughout a sales engagement:

• Situation – what customers are doing today
• Problem – the challenge they are (or will be) facing
• Implication – the consequences they will experience as a result of the problem
• Need-payoff – the value, the outcome, that the customer can achieve by solving the problem

I think it’s more than just a sales methodology. I think it’s a great acronym to use in everyday product marketing work, ensuring that we’re constantly thinking about our customers.

If we’re not rooting our collateral, copy, deliverables, enablement, and strategy overall in the world our customers are living, then we’re not doing our job right.

We need to think about the specifics of what customers are doing today and the resulting mess, chaos, and pain they are (or will be) experiencing.

And we need to think not just about the immediate outcomes (the tangible benefits), but that our messaging is focused on the value they desire.

Our messaging needs to honestly pass the ‘so what?’ test. Say your feature helps you save time. So what? What does that mean – what’s the pay-off that you’re actually able to gain?

SPIN is probably the most useful framework for every product marketer to know and use. Give it a try today!

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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The post Every product marketer needs to know about SPIN appeared first on Building Momentum.

Over the last few years I’ve hired or have helped hire tons of product marketers, experimenting with different questions and formats.

What I find works well – for the companies I’ve worked with and roles I’ve hired – is asking three specific questions that:

• Help me understand how they approach product marketing (and work in general)
• Gives them a chance to shine
• Opens an opportunity for reflection and learning

These questions take place in a ~30 minute chat that – whilst casual and conversational – is focused on extracting the meaty, juicy bits as quickly as possible.

Tell me about a product marketing project you’re proud of

I love this question because it lets candidates to explain something they’ve done that they were really happy with, where they were excited about the work. I find it helps candidates to relax into a conversation too, and let their personality shine through too.

I’m looking to see if candidates answer using STAR (Situation, Tasks, Actions, Results), and I’ll ask more targeted questions if not.

I’ll dig in further to ask about tradeoffs, how they collaborated with different people and teams, and try to uncover the specific role they played: were they a supporting actor, or were they running the show?

I also use this question to uncover their passion. In most cases, I want to work with product marketers who are interested in both the application and the theory of our craft. What did they like about it, what skills did they learn, where did they go for support?

Tell me about a product marketing project that could have gone better

I think eager self-improvement and a growth mindset is a really powerful trait in good product marketers. So this question is targeted to identify opportunities that, with hindsight, could have been avoided.

Here I’m looking for their maturity, how they approach accountability, and their proactivity in raising/solving challenges. I’m still looking for a STAR response to show the role they played in the project.

This question isn’t about admitting blame, but I think self-reflection is important. What can we do better next time, what challenges should we avoid?

I usually ask followup questions like “What would you do differently next time?” and great responses will include a core learning, with a disclaimer of ‘it depends on the context’.

Tell me about a time when you had to learn something new, inside or outside of work

Product marketing is so broad. Nobody has all the answers. That’s why I think proactive learning and application is important to tease out in the interview process.

Firstly, I ask for a situation that’s work-related or personal, because not everyone has a chance to learn new stuff at work.

I want to see how a candidate approaches the challenge. Did they identify a knowledge/skills gap early in the planning, or did they only spot it when they were in execution-mode? How did they figure out ‘what’ to learn?

If it’s a work/product marketing example, it’s always interesting to see how aware they are of the big world out there. Do they rely only on a narrow set of internal resources, or are they explorers looking for how others have tackled similar issues?

I ask targeted questions to tease out their critical analysis thought process. How did they know the solution they learnt would work? How did they weigh up different options?

How do you interview?

Disclaimer: the above is based on my experience hiring PMMs for specific types of companies, cultures, and is biased towards the traits I think are important. Your mileage may vary.

The interview questions and format that gets the best results for your business will be different. The traits, skills, and experience you’re looking for will impact the questions you ask – so don’t blindly ask the questions above without considering what you’re looking for.

Let me know what interview questions you ask in the comments.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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After my post on four tips when hiring product marketers, I got quite a few messages about the last tip: hiring managers need to take bets on junior PMMs.

Unsurprisingly, most messages were exasperated.

They’ve identified that product marketing is a great match for their experience, skills, and interest – not to mention, it’s a HOT role.

But often their applications go ignored. There’s always more suitable candidates, and – as high-demand as product marketing is – many companies have been scared to hire juniors for lack of in-office training and mentorship.

So how should budding PMMs make their big break and get into product marketing?

P.S. Here’s my career journey into product marketing:

Revisit your resume and experience

PMMs entering the industry come from a variety of backgrounds already. I know product marketers who started their professional careers as marketing execs, sales development reps, content writers, customer support reps, customer success execs, product managers, technical writers… and many, many more.

And just think: each of these roles involves core elements of product marketing. But how well does your CV manage to showcase these?

• Researching and interpreting customer needs
• Organising and executing on cross-functional projects
• Communicating complex concepts in a simple, customer-friendly way
• Identifying the market landscape and evolving trends
• Building product knowledge and understanding how it solves customer problems

Detailing these foundational skills in your CV, regardless of the job role they were gained under, can help you stand out by speaking the language that hiring managers are looking for.

Build a portfolio

Go even further than just pad out your resume. Can you pull together a portfolio that showcases examples of all the key skills listed above?

This doesn’t have to be complex. Use Mural, Miro, or even Google Slides and create an interactive, engaging portfolio that showcases your skills, experience, and interests.

Use your portfolio to tell a cohesive story of how your skills helped companies achieve key goals.

Remember STAR:

• Situation – describe the problem that was faced
• Tasks – detail what were you asked to achieve
• Actions – showcase the work you did, the deliverables, and any alternatives you considered
• Results – finish on a high and shout loud about the impact you delivered

Less is more: don’t go overboard, and instead highlight the most relevant projects for the roles you’re applying.

It’s likely that you have lots of relevant experience under your belt already. For example, content that you’ve produced, the way you approached creating outbound email campaigns, or projects you worked on to improve the customer experience.

Identify companies with the right vibe

Getting a role as a new product marketer within the wrong business won’t just get you fired, but it’ll put you off the role for life.

As well as ensuring a good culture fit, you also need to consider the company’s approach to product marketing. Too focused on assumptions and internal-thinking means it’ll be harder to build strong foundations. Too corporate, and you might not get the scrappy experience that tests you under pressure.

For many first-time product marketers, I recommend finding companies where:

• A Senior PMM or Product Marketing Lead is hiring a PMM to train up
• A Director / Head of Product Marketing is hiring a PMM to work in an existing but small product marketing team
• A Head of Marketing with PMM experience is hiring a PMM to train up

Either of these will give you someone to work with and learn from, and give you exposure to the full breadth of product marketing.

Stay away from companies that use really corporate-language in their job descriptions. Ask about their on-the-job training and skill development programs. Look for ‘growth-mindset’ companies that are open to applicants even if they don’t meet 100% of the requirements.

Expand your network

Engaging in product marketing communities is not only going to give you more exposure to the ins-and-outs of product marketing, but gives you an opportunity to meet new folks and connect with future peers.

I can’t recommend the Product Marketing Alliance community on Slack strongly enough. It’s so great to see over 20k+ current and aspiring product marketers bonding and learning together.

Local PMA ambassadors also run some regular monthly meetups, where you can show up in-person or join Zoom chats. Participating in these is a great way of getting face time and absorbing the language and learnings of the community.

Bonus: Avoid doing free work

There have been some conversations across the PMM communities on LinkedIn and Twitter about whether product marketers should do free work by reviewing a company’s website or their industry and pulling together recommendations or new approaches, and sending to hiring managers in the hope of standing out.

As much as you can, avoid doing free work for companies that haven’t asked for it… and even then, protect your time and energy accordingly. The content marketing world has become very competitive with employers taking liberties. Let’s not let the product marketing world go the same way.

P.S.

Would you be interested in joining regular catchups for budding product marketers to learn from each other, exchange ideas, and talk to people who get you? Drop me a DM on LinkedIn, Twitter, or get in touch by email. I may be working on something to help you out!

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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Product marketing is in high demand. Companies of all shapes and sizes are finally realising that product marketers have a multiplier effect on product, marketing, and sales efforts.

And accordingly, there’s been a huge increase in the number of product marketers, although not enough supply to fulfil demand. Our ranks have also been boosted with talented colleagues from across the marketing, success, and sales spectrums making the move to product marketing roles and helping to fight the good fight.

I’ve hired or helped hire product marketers at all different levels (not to mention, having been through the hiring process multiple times myself).

Originally this post was going to be a rant, complaining about everything from the wilfully bad practices I’ve heard, to common misfires from people who should know better. But I decided to take the high road instead.

Here’s five brief tips to consider when you’re hiring a product marketer.

Be absolutely clear on what you’re looking for

While product marketers are like Swiss army knifes with skills applicable to everything from pricing to positioning to product launches, trying to blindly hire a PMM without a clear and pruned understanding of the main duties they’ll perform over the next 12-24 months is a recipe for disaster.

Think about what’s absolutely necessary: this will probably be product launch execution, customer/market insight, sales enablement.

Then what else is a nice-to-have? Think about the base skills you expect will make them successful: research, writing, collaboration, analysis. Maybe expertise within a specific industry, competitive intelligence, content strategy, product-led growth, strategy… whatever you expect to require from them over the next ~2 years.

Make sure these are clearly communicated in the job description as nice-to-haves, but not requirements. You’ll see fewer applications from minority groups, and miss out on the right talent for you.

Have a straightforward, unbiased recruitment process

What can you do in 30 minutes? Maybe relax in a long shower, or a hot bath. Get in a quick workout, or a few chapters of that book you just can’t put down.

What can’t you do in 30 minutes? Meet a product marketer, understand their background, identify and learn about relevant crossovers of experience, and make a decision about whether they’re worth putting through the process or not.

I’ve heard some really bad examples, particularly over the last few years with the move to remote hiring. Whilst nothing like this horrific example from Canonical, some companies are either wildly overcomplicating with multiple, superfluous steps, or badly over-indexing on biased gut-feel.

Here’s the process I’ve recommended before:

1. Application:
   • Require resume
   • No cover letters
   • Ask two questions in the application: ‘Why do you think you would be a good fit for this role?’ and ‘Tell us about a product marketing project you’re particularly proud of.’
2. CV screen:
   • Prioritise relevant resumes by experience and answers to the two questions
   • If applicant has significant professional experience, disregard education
   • If applicant has less professional experience, prioritize on skills demonstrated in other jobs
3. Recruiter screen:
   • 25 minute call to validate application
   • Understand what they’re looking for
   • Match with salary range
4. Hiring manager interview:
   • 45 minute video call
   • 10 minutes getting-to-know-you
   • 20 minutes interviewer-led discussion: dive into project experience, asking clear questions and expecting structured STAR (situation, tasks, action, results) answers
   • 15 minutes applicant-led discussion
   • Outcome: specific feedback on their suitability (strong yes, yes, no, hard no)
5. Meet the team interviews:
   • 30 minute video calls with 2/3 team members
   • 5 minutes getting-to-know-you
   • 15 mins interviewer-led discussion: relevant projects, learnings, culture-add questions, asking clear questions and expecting structured STAR answers
   • 10 minutes applicant-led discussion
   • Outcome: specific feedback on their suitability (strong yes, yes, no, hard no)
6. If tight call between 2-3 applicants, final calls with hiring manager focusing on working style
7. If questions on technical suitability, short (~1hr expected) take-home task detailing their approach to solving a problem with review call with hiring manager

Give clear feedback

If a hiring manager has spoken to an applicant, you owe them some feedback.

Great: “We really liked your approach to X. Unfortunately for this role, we’re looking for someone with more experience on Y.”

Bad: “You just don’t have the X-factor we’re looking for” For real. I know a recruiter and hiring manager has given this feedback before and they are 100% on my avoid list.

Sharing feedback is the payment-in-kind for the time the candidate has invested in your process. It’s a gift that helps them improve their search and understand their space in the market. Not giving constructive feedback is evil, no matter how busy you are.

And if you can’t qualify why you don’t think a candidate is suitable, then you will only find the answer by evaluating the process and your own biases. (And you might not like what you uncover.)

Take a bet on junior/mid-level product marketers

It’s common for mid-to-senior product marketers to get ~3-5 recruiter outreaches a week right now, if not in one day.

You can either stand out by offering higher salaries and innovative outreach to the cream of the crop, or you can take the more-rewarding path less travelled and take a bet on product marketers with less experience, but just as much smarts and motivation.

Whether you’re hiring someone into their first product marketing role from a customer success, content marketing, or even sales role, you need to evaluate for the skills that indicate product marketing thinking: customer empathy, product savviness, and collaborative working styles.

One of the most common misconceptions that I hear, as reasons why hiring more junior folks wouldn’t work, is that the hiring managers don’t have time to train them up.

I think this is an excuse. Firstly, if a manager can’t spend their time training and supporting a team-member, their priorities might not be aligned. Secondly, there’s a wealth of training and education programs available for product marketers, from the Product Marketing Alliance to my course, WTF is Go-To-Market?.

You can’t always hire the perfect PMM for your business, but trust me: you can build one.

What was your product marketing hiring process like?

I’m always interested in what hiring managers have set out, but what I find even more juicy is the candidate experience. Connect with me on LinkedIn, Twitter, or email and let me know what your best – and worst – hiring experience was like.

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 Four tips for hiring product marketers appeared first on Building Momentum.

Over the last 5 years, I’ve cultivated a positioning process that I call Customer Value Positioning.

I’ve written about all of the component pieces on this newsletter so regular readers will recognise the themes, but it’s taken me the last 12 months to revise, simplify, and improve based on the feedback of over 20+ marketers.

With Customer Value Positioning (CVP), you’ll:

• Define the perfect website heading and slogan that resonates
• Detail exactly how your product helps your customer achieve their goals
• Describe the top three outcomes your customers desire
• Discover your ideal customer profile and build a fluff-free persona that aligns your sales, marketing, and product teams

And, just like the name might suggest, we’re basing the whole process on the only thing that matters: your customer.

Background: Why positioning needs more support

Last year I was named Positioning & Messaging Maestro of the Year 2021 by the Product Marketing Alliance.

Positioning is my jam: the intersection of customer-centricity, internal assumptions, and strategy in practice.

The literal definition of positioning is “to occupy a space in the customer’s mind,”… but how are we going to position effectively if we don’t understand what’s going on in their head?

Traditionally, marketers have relied on the ol’ trusty positioning statement, something that’s been around for ~30+ years. Unfortunately, it’s become a limp safety blanket for uninventive marketers and founders, crushing their innovations and aspirations into a maddening game of adlibs.

More recent positioning frameworks like Obviously Awesome have provided a much-needed boost and spotlight on positioning as a whole… but after talking to 100+ product marketers and founders over the last few years, it still leaves a gap:

• Positioning has so many subtle inputs, and is too intangible for many “casual” users to internalise no matter how good the book is
• Trying to connect the dots between the product you’ve built and the customers you think are good fit is difficult, because we’re so close to it that we can’t see the wood for the trees
• Usually these processes don’t have a tangible output – a mark of success that helps build momentum. A positioning document is great: but then what? How is that doc then translated to the website, or a tradeshow banner, or a sales deck?

Download The Customer Value Positioning framework

Introducing my battle-tested positioning process

Firstly, I want to mention that this framework builds on top of the work of many great marketers, and as such you’ll see echoes and similarities with the work of April Dunford, Myk Pono, Al Ries and Jack Trout, Andy Raskin, and more. If this framework can be a quarter as good as their work, I’ll be happy.

Secondly, customer value positioning is not strictly just a framework, it’s a battle-tested process.

It’s built to ensure that with the right inputs and the right questions asked, the outcome is the same: quality positioning that resonates with your customer, and showcases how your product supports them in obtaining the value they desire.

Let’s walk through the process.

Discover your buyer persona

Buyer personas are discovered, not created.

The most valuable input to this process is customer insight. You can use your internal assumptions, but please: go and ask 10-15 customers these questions.

Transcribe your interviews, extract each point into an online Mural board, then group and summarise the themes.

Then organize those themes into:

• Jobs: common responsibilities and activities your customer does as part of their day-to-day
• Gains: their personal, professional, or business goals they want to achieve
• Pains: marks of failure and frustrations the customer must avoid
• Triggers: motivations that encourage them to solve their problem and switch away from their current solution

Make sure you’re also capturing some information on your customer’s psychographic profile. Are they early adopters and innovators, or laggards? Are they rational or emotional beings? Introverts or extroverts?

Describe the value your customers desire

I define value as an element that your customer wants to attain that:

• Is useful
• Is worth the effort (cost, time, energy)
• Is a priority for them

These might be the outcomes of solving problems and overcoming challenges, or new states that they can achieve by unlocking new capabilities.

You’ll see value themes jump out at you from the previous step. Describe why the value is important to the customer, with a value story following this script:

• Situation:
  • Today, our customer is… (what are they doing, what’s the situation that sets context for the value?)
• Problem:
  • However, …(the limitations or challenges that they’re experiencing)
• Implication:
  • This means…(what’s the downside of continuing in the current way?)
• Resolution:
  • By… (what does fixing the problem look like, not necessarily your product)
• Value:
  • … our customer will…(detail the value they can gain)

Detail how your product helps

We can’t promise that we’ll help customers achieve their outcomes without connecting it back to our product.

Think about the features within your product that support each desired value. These might be an obvious product capability like an integration, a less obvious consideration like a modern and clean UX, or even service elements like a dedicated account manager

Then list out the benefits that those features enable. Benefits are tangible advantages a buyer experiences when using your product; something they can report on, and usually starts with a verb. 

Define your positioning

Start at the bottom.

Frame of reference

April Dunford’s book explains how a frame of reference works with a great example. A wholegrain cake can be a diet muffin, or a paleo snack – depending on the target customer.

The frame of reference, or category, you define your product as will help target customers understand in a few words what you are, what you do, and whether they’re interested or not.

Think about the value your customer desires, the trends they’re experiencing in the market, and how they interpret your product.

Alternative solutions

Your biggest competitors are probably spreadsheets and people power, rather than technology vendors. Defining the alternative solutions that your customers actually use will help your frontline sales and marketing teams to consider how they frame your product in conversations and in marketing material, and provides a foundation to build shared understanding.

Are customers relatively green and new to the market, using niche cloud solutions? That requires different go-to-market tactics, compared to customers who use legacy enterprise hosted solutions.

Value statements

For each value story you created in the Describe stage, get creative.

Think about how you message and wordsmith the outcomes they seek. Start these with a verb: get, make, change, smash, unlock, break, bring, grow – the opportunities are endless.

Website homepage hero

I think the most obvious use of positioning is to decide what you say on the top of your website homepage, so it makes sense to just lock this down in the positioning process.

You’re going to write two things:

1. A creative heading that catches attention and appeals to the outcomes your customer desires
2. A matter-of-fact sentence that describes what your product is (frame of reference), and key values or benefits

You can find some examples of good homepage messaging here.

Remember the psychographic details you captured in the first stage? Use these to find your tone of voice. If your customer is an innovative extrovert, you have license to be more creative and wacky; if they’re more risk-averse and logical, you’ll need to focus on the facts more than feelings.

Four steps to focused customer value positioning

In four stages, you’ve:

• Discovered your ICP and built a fluff-free persona that aligns your sales, marketing, and product teams
• Described the top three outcomes your customers desire
• Detailed exactly how your product helps your customer achieve their goals
• Defined the perfect website heading and slogan that resonates

And this process works, regardless of your industry, target customer, or product.

This process always results in successful positioning.

Think back to the definition of positioning: “to occupy a space in the customer’s mind,”.

Following the Customer Value Positioning framework helps you position more effectively by understanding exactly what your customers care about, finding the gaps that exist, and occupying them with positioning that resonates.

Frequently asked questions

Who should be involved in this process?

I recommend the CEO, a marketing lead, a sales lead, and a product lead: people who have experience with customers, and are charged with directing teams to make change. Positioning often leads to new ideas: don’t waste that opportunity.

What customers should we talk to?

Your ‘best-fit’ customers (and non-customers like them): those that represent the best product/market fit, the best growth opportunity, the highest satisfaction with your product. Niche down for tighter results.

How long does this take?

Most teams will budget for a minimum of 4 weeks with ~4 hours of workshops a week, but often 6-8 weeks gives you the opportunity to set customer interviews, interpret findings, and validate your messaging with internal teams and external methods.

Do we have to do research interviews?

Yes. I feel extremely strongly that interviewing best-fit customers, prospects, and friendly people in the market is the best way to understand your customers. You can do this process by building on top of internal assumptions, but it will never be as strong. Focus on evidence over assumptions.

Can you help facilitate this process, or recommend others who can help?

Yes – book an intro call here.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

The post Introducing the Customer Value Positioning framework appeared first on Building Momentum.

“I’m just starting some messaging framework / customer survey and research projects at work so these sessions and assignments (and all of your examples!) have been a GPS essentially – helping me to find the best route forward and navigate the roadblocks too!”

That’s a real quote from one of the students in our course, WTF is Go-To-Market?. We’re planning our second intake for later this year. Find out more and register your interest here.

I’ve written before about how buyer personas are discovered, not created – go read that post now if you haven’t already!

Here are five quick tips to help you build strong personas that are used by your teams.

Don’t name personas (but name them if you need to)

It’s not really best practice to name your personas anymore. No more ‘Marketing Mary’ or ‘Superstar Simon’.

Instead try to name your personas based on a key identifier: something to do with the value they desire, their goals, or their common jobs.

For example:

• Busy Business Owner
• Holistic Head of HR
• ROI-Obsessed Marketer

But in reality you might still need to name your personas to help your wider team to build empathy, as well as creating a shortcut to a shared understanding.

Make personas come alive

Trying to learn about the personas used in a business can be really boring. Walls of text, columns in a spreadsheet, and a dodgy stock photo that still has the watermark overlay on it.

Could you make your personas ‘real’ and provide more texture for those getting up-to-speed?

Perhaps you could:

• Record your research call and create a compilation video, organized into key themes
• Interview your sales reps and share a video of them walking through their experiences with that persona
• Pull together a scrapbook-style resource of quotes, social media profiles, recommended content, and more that allows readers to explore a persona in more depth

Think about the format

Don’t make sales reps and marketing folk read through huge docs to get the gist of a persona.

Think about their use-case for accessing persona information, and build specific formats that give them what they need.

You could try:

• A long-form doc for a deep-dive understanding
• A battlecard with top points to hit on calls
• An easy-to-skim PDF with screenshots and images and content snippets to build empathy

If you’ve already created the base content, don’t let that insight go to waste: multiply your efforts by repurposing quickly into formats your teams will use.

Build a feedback loop

Ideally, you’ll know about every prospect your sales reps come across that doesn’t fit into one of your personas – but not many teams are set up to monitor this.

If you don’t, you’ll soon wonder why your sales teams are losing to specific segments or why your metrics are dropping.

Get ahead of the curve:

• Ask reps to categorise the main persona in your CRM from a dropdown field – with an ‘Other’ option for those that don’t fit
• If that’s too much effort, use your ICP and demographic/firmographic indicators to auto-populate a field, and set up dashboards to monitor anomalies
• Set up a feedback line, whether in Slack or in the CRM.

Your work understanding personas helps marketing to reach the right people, and sales reps to pitch the best way. Publicising this process will help you gain more supportive buy-in and engagement when they know it’s going to help them.

Refresh personas regularly

Don’t just create personas and let them sit there for six months or longer. We’re in tech; things move quickly.

What was true yesterday, might not be true today.

Ensure your persona stay fresh:

• Keep tabs on effectiveness through qualitative feedback from teams, and quantitative (e.g. dashboards)
• Use all interviews you do (whether win-loss, customer interviews, market research) to help assess whether personas are still up-to-date and relevant
• Carry out desk research every so often: what do your target personas say on social media, what do their LinkedIn profiles say about their job, and what skills/responsibilities/challenges are they looking to hire for in their job ads?

Personas are foundational – don’t waste them

They can’t be treated as a one-and-done exercise. They need strengthening, testing, and evaluation to ensure they still fulfil their purpose.

Go back to your personas today: what’s no longer valid? Start the conversation, and kickstart the next stage of growth in your business.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

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If you’re looking for a standard ‘top 10 books that every product marketer should read’ with the usuals like Positioning (Ries & Trout), Obviously Awesome (April Dunford), and Play, Bigger, this isn’t the post for you.

Instead I want to offer some lesser-known, offbeat titles that I (and others) have read over the years.

Certainly, the books I recommend below have offered me either some unique wisdom that I couldn’t find anywhere else, an unusual approach to common challenges, or anecdotes and stories that have inspired my work.

This post contains affiliate links. If you use these links to buy something, I may earn a (very small) commission. Thanks!

P.S. Prefer to listen to audiobooks instead? Get a free trial of Audible here.

Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy

Michael Porter is the GOAT of business strategy, with every marketing student around the world learning about Porter’s Five Forces.

But his work goes much deeper, touching on value propositions, how we set our businesses up to have competitive advantages, and ultimately – my favorite line – that strategy is about choosing to make some customers unhappy, not being all things to all customers.

Monetizing Innovation: How Smart Companies Design the Product Around the Price

A few years ago, I was trying to figure out how to price our product for different types of customers, and what features each plan should receive.

This book was recommended, and it changed the game for me.

A must-read for anyone involved in building, planning, and implementing pricing strategy, Monetizing Innovation talks through how we’ve got it all backwards. We build the product, then decide the price… instead of understanding what customers will pay first, and building a product to meet their price-point second.

Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate

George Lakoff is “the father of framing”, according to the NYT, and this book doesn’t disappoint.

In fact, I wrote a post summarising it here.

Lakoff talks about “frames”, integrated mental models that we rely on to view the world. These paradigms can’t be built: they must exist as a concept, and can only be activated.

While the book talks about the messaging machine that supports the Republican party in the USA, there are so many parallels to our work as product marketers: the focus on clarity, on understanding our customers, and on activating through messaging and repetition.

Predatory Thinking: A Masterclass In Out-Thinking The Competition.

Dave Trott is a famous copywriter that I’ve been following since I studied advertising. Aside from his slightly annoying writing style, you’ll find a ton of useful lessons on how to stand out from the competition, attract attention, and get creative to overcome your challenges.

Often, we think that advertising is a world full of fun and creative challenges, where anything can be fixed with some out-of-the-box thinking or a sudden shower-initiated brainwave.

But what we don’t see is the hours spent carrying out research, focus groups, huddling around a whiteboard trying to connect the dots, or the frustration when the client doesn’t like the message.

Very similar to our work as product marketers, and a fun read.

Never Split The Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It 

Whether we’re trying to get internal buy-in for a new project, winning over partners, or supporting sales with objection handling content, negotiation is a core professional skill that product marketers might not think they have.

Chris Voss’s experience as a hostage negotiator is nothing compared to us trying to sell software, but his lessons leave you thinking about core principles you can integrate into your everyday work.

Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters

So this might be a book you’ve seen recommended before. But it’s worth repeating:if you create any type of strategy work, you need to read this.

Once you’ve read it, you’ll understand why all the failure of strategy you’ve experienced before happened. And you’ll know the simple steps you can take to start structuring your strategy work in a way that sets you up for success from the start.

Conscious Business: How to Build Value Through Value

In case you haven’t guessed yet, from all my posts, but I’m big on values. The company values, our principles for specific projects, the considered objectives and choices we set to help guide our process all matter a lot.

Conscious Business is a quick read that builds the foundations for acting with more purpose in everything you do.

Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Handbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell

Bill Campbell was an American football player turned marketing exec turned CEO turned advisor to some of the biggest names in software – including CEOs and leaders at Google, Facebook, and Apple.

This book captures many of the key lessons that Bill shared with those around him, many of them set in service-leadership, community, and making the hard decisions.

Many working relationships that we have with PMs, sales reps, and even execs are – like it or not – implicit coaching relationships. We can all benefit from recognising and practicing this skill with purpose.

The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business

From the author of Five Dysfunctions of a Team, this book covers the four steps to organisational health: build a cohesive leadership team, create clarity, overcommunicate clarity, and reinforce clarity.

While as product marketers we might not have the power to select our leadership teams, we still are responsible for helping to create, communicate, and reinforce clarity in our internal change-management work.

This book is a practical guide with many anecdotes and stories that will help you bring clarity to your business.

Other recommendations from smart people:

Predictably Irrational

Badass: Making Users Awesome

Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

Recommended by Andrea Saez: “PMM is half product, so knowing how product works is if anything an asset. You can’t have a PMM that’s entirely removed from the product world. The book outlines the typical frustrations many teams have when they focus on ‘building features’ and don’t take a step back to think ‘why’ they are building these features – and PMM happens to be part of helping to answer the ‘why’.”

Product Research Rules: Nine Foundational Rules for Product Teams to Run Accurate Research that Delivers Actionable Insight

Also recommended by Andrea Saez!

Do Less, Get More: Guilt-free Ways to Make Time for the Things (and People) that Matter

Recommended by Ishara Naotunna

Add yours here…

What’s your top product marketing-related book recommendation that most people won’t have heard of? Let me know: comment on this post, or drop me a tweet and I’ll add to the list.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

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Let’s be honest: if you’re struggling to gain traction, there is no silver bullet that kickstart your growth.

I’ve seen this exact situation play out time and time again. An eager CEO or VP Sales, dismayed at plateauing growth (or worse), pins all hope on ‘the next thing’ to change the game. The next thing comes, and… as predicted, the results aren’t as expected. But never mind; “The next thing will help!”

There’s definitely a lot to say about keeping motivation up, or creating a reality distortion field to eke out extra performance. But a white lie can quickly snowball and create mismatched expectations which leads to ambiguity and inertia.

Traction is tricky to define, but people generally refer to it as top-of-funnel lead generation, sales revenue, and ‘being seen’ – a mixture of qualitative feels and quantitative evidence.

There’s no quick fixes, only work. Here’s some tips to help overcome the challenges you’re facing.

Positioning is strategy in action

The way you describe your product in your customer’s world is a vehicle to define your go-to-market strategy.

• Who is your customer, and what’s going on in their world?
• What value do they desire – and how does your product help them get closer?
• What are the features that matter – and how do you communicate that?
• How are you positioned in the market, against competitors, and priced?

But most of the time, the concept of positioning is relegated to just marketing fluff, ignoring the strategic process that goes into it.

Here’s how you remedy it.

Firstly, get your assumptions out on the table: who do you think your customers are, and what do they value? I recommend doing a customer empathy map to see not just where you and your team are aligned, but where you have low confidence – and where the gaps are.

Positioning (and strategy) is much easier when you are the thing for someone, rather than something for everyone. Focus on niche customer segments: a group of people linked by a common pain that they’ll pay to solve. You can’t please everyone either. Make the hard decisions and say no to certain segments.

The definition of positioning is “to occupy a space in your customer’s mind”. How are you supposed to do that effectively, if you don’t understand their world?

Research is key to that. Don’t just think about your product – look to build empathy with their broader jobs, pains, gains, and triggers.

Then look at how you differentiate. It’s much easier to compete for a customer, rather than compete against a competitor. Know the customer so well that you’re positioned as the best option for them against all others.

Once you’ve understood your customer and what they need, think about how you communicate to them. Elevate away from technical features and simple benefits, and instead focus on communicating the holistic value you customer desires.

Lastly, get creative! Step up your messaging with language and tone-of-voice that drives action. Life is too short to use boring words.

How does your customer buy?

The process that your buyers go through, complete with the questions they have, the touchpoints they interact with, what they need to move to the next stage, and who exactly is involved.

This process will broadly look like:

• Identify a need
• Explore how to solve it
• Evaluate solutions
• Negotiate and purchase
• Adopt
• Expand

At each stage, you can identify and rank opportunities to feed into marketing (like the channels and messages you use), sales (e.g. collateral, narrative, and process), and product (e.g. onboarding flows, product improvements, and so on).

Force progress through product launches

If you’re investing time and energy in building new product features, whether to support existing customers or to help attract new ones – but not planning how you introduce it into the world – then you’re missing out on free energy.

Haphazardly announcing a feature on social media isn’t a launch, and a blog post announcing a feature that nobody reads is a waste of time.

Developing a tiered approach to launching features will help you standardise how you release products out into the world. Think about the five A’s of feature releases: audience, awareness, action, affinity, and accountability.

Don’t just think about launches tactically either. Plan activity from first principles from the perception that you want to convey to your customers, your prospects, and others in the market.

There’s no silver bullet, only work

Traction depends on everyone putting the same step forward at the same time.

Positioning is the embodiment of your business strategy. Your buyers journey is how you meet them in the marketplace. And your product launch strategy is how you build perception, time after time.

Good luck!

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

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You go to the refrigerator, desperate for a cold and refreshing hit of natural sunshine: orange juice. You’re in luck – there are two options for you to choose from!

A freshly-squeezed juice using single variety oranges from Valencia. Or a supermarket own-brand ‘orange juice from concentrate’.

Which one will not just quench your thirst, but taste better? Which one will deliver more value to you in that moment?

It’s obvious: the freshly-squeezed juice with Valencian oranges will meet your need, delight you, and surpass your expectations.

The antidote to dilution is focus and confidence

What does this have to do with B2B SaaS product marketing, you ask?

I believe it’s more important to be the thing for someone, than something for everyone. This means proactively making a decision to include or exclude audiences through your product, marketing, and sales process – focus in action.

But making that decision needs to be an outcome of enough confidence – that the reality will match our expectations.

To do that, we have to learn from our customers and validate our assumptions. If we don’t, we run the risk of positioning on assumptions – damaging confidence, and leading to the onset of inertia.

And customers, prospects, and suspects in the market recognise the power of focus too. We’re more drawn to solutions that meet our needs exactly, that solve the exact problem we have, and that speak the same language.

The more diluted your focus and message, the more cognitive effort is required for the prospect to make sense of it in their world – and the higher likelihood that it doesn’t work as intended.

What does dilution look like in action?

How many of the marketing campaigns you’re currently running try to speak to multiple personas, instead of one?

Is your sales pitch the same for all stakeholders, and not tailored to the persona of your champion?

Is your product roadmap delivering value to specific personas, or building features that you hope will resonate across all groups?

If the answer to any of those was ‘yes’, you might want to revisit – it’s highly likely that you don’t understand your customers well enough.

Diluting focus is not a winning strategy. Diluting focus will not help you build traction. Diluting focus will only slow you down.

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 dilute focus appeared first on Building Momentum.

I recently sat down with Josh and Nate from the Searching4SaaS podcast to talk about the role of product marketing in early-stage SaaS.

You can listen to the podcast above, or find it wherever you get your podcasts. You can also read the edited transcript below!

Big thanks to Josh and Nate for having me on!

What’s the biggest thing people get wrong about PMMs?

Product marketing is such a broad term, there is so much that you can do with it.

There are so many things that we can do or that we can be involved in. I think one of the biggest disservices that marketers or CEOs or founders give is not really giving product marketers the space to find their own way to help the business. I think often we get categorized as either one of two models.

Number one is just being an internal agency for sales enablement or content marketing teams. It’s just like, look, we need this one sheet. We need this data sheet. We need a deck. It’s horrible, I spent most of my first couple of jobs being a deck monkey. And it was horrible. It’s not a fulfilling job at all. We can be much more strategic than that.

The other model is that we can just be a conveyor belt for product teams. So whatever product teams ship, that’s it. We launch it out into the world, we write the release notes and maybe send an email to customers or whatever. Again, it’s really unfulfilling. It’s not it’s not a nice way to work.

And also misses out on the strategic value that product marketing can bring. And I think that’s because at it’s core, product marketing is a strategy role. We really have to understand who our customers are, what the business is doing, what’s happening in the market… and then try and draw those dots together.

It’s just that pace that people are yet to really twig them to at scale. There’s definitely companies and people out there who are advocating for this approach. But that’s the one message: product marketing is strategic. Don’t make that mistake, don’t try and force them into executional stuff all the time, make sure there’s that room for strategy as well.

JOSH: Does the fact that the word marketing is in the title kind of allude to that? All the things you described are things that traditionally marketers have looked at.

JDP: Exactly. You know product marketing is often seen as the fluffy people that make the deck after the fact, the ones that do execute on whatever strategy has already been decided, but we can step back from that and really understand what the landscape is saying, what we’re hearing from customers and have some input into the way that we move forward.

It’s just so much better for everyone involved. It works so much better.

How does research play in product marketing strategy?

You can go super deep into the research. But what I mean by strategy is all about understanding where you are today, where you want to be by a certain timeframe and the steps involved to make that happen. And then putting that into action. You don’t need to do super deep research all the time.

You can do really nice targeted pieces of customer research, competitive research, or just understanding more about your business goals and the way that the business system works.Some of those bits can really give you a lot of answers into how to really maximize the results that you’re going to get from a go-to market function, from a marketing perspective… there’s so many of these bits and pieces that’s impacted by what product marketers can do.

When do should a traditional PMM join a business?

I don’t think there’s anything really as a traditional product marketer, I think it we’re really versatile and that we can be thrown into a situation and just get what needs to be done,done. I think there is a time when you can say, “okay, we can benefit from some product marketing expertise and skills here”.

And I think that really does depend on the go-to market motion that set, the existing skillset of the team, and the biggest challenges that you’re facing over the next six to 12 months probably.

If we’re gonna think about, you know, a standard B2B SaaS startup, so imagine that the founder is a you know, a product person who’s taking on the sales ownership, and the go-to market is a traditional inside sales play. I think product marketing should be like the first or second marketer that you would hire now.

It used to be that the first person would be a demand generation, but that’s changed a lot because it’s significantly easier to access an audience now than it ever has been. You’ve got social media, you’ve got all of these outreach tools. You’ve got all of the advertising networks and things like that. It’s easier than ever to get in front of people.

But the challenge is, is to how do you make sure you get in front of the right people, the right audience, and then how do you pitch in the best way. How do you sell them on what your product is and how it can help them?

That’s one of the reasons we’ve seen such a big increase in demand for product marketers over the last 18 months to two years, is there is so much differentiation required now to kind of cut through the noise and product marketing is one of the best tools you can have to build that into the core of your go-to market.

Especially in teams where the majority skillset is kind of technical or there’s technical founding team. Product marketers are going to have a real big impact, the sooner the better.

I think that tech people are really great for thinking deep about the application of technology, but product marketers can really join the application of it to the use cases that a specific customer can get value from. And that’s where you’re going to connect the dots, and put the pedal to the metal, and really see things start to take off.

Do product marketers replace the things a startup CEO would do?

I think, you know, in the early in the journey, you have a CEO who is really close to the customer. They’ve got that past experience, they’ve been in that role before. And so they’ve got this really deep ingrained understanding, but as you scale the business, the CEO spends less time on sharing that viewpoint and advocating for them across product engineering, success, sales, marketing. It becomes less clear, and there’s more ambiguity.

Product marketing can come into these kinds of situations with a little bit of research, a little bit of thinking, and be able to bring everyone together around a single definition of who the customer is and how you best reach them advocate for the customer amongst all of those teams.

So yeah absolutely, that’s a really interesting way to look at it.

Where should a PMM sit in the reporting structure: product or marketing?

There’s a lot of conflict about it, a lot of strong opinions!

I’m biased. I’ve only ever worked in product marketing where we’re aligned to marketing teams. So we’re part of the marketing or broader growth team and we are primarily concerned with revenue, customer acquisition and adoption, retention, satisfaction kind of metrics.

I like that a lot because it’s really focused on the commercial aspect. And it’s very customer focused and there’s always a recognition of the channels that you’re using to communicate to the business, to the rest of the world.

But conversely, there are people that have only ever worked in product teams and love that really close connection with what’s on the roadmap, where things are, how they can, how product marketers can help product teams to influence the roadmap more around customer insights and help drive that part of the process as well.

I don’t think there’s any clear and cut answer. So around the best way to do it, I think experimentation is the best,best thing to see how it fits. I think some of those things are going to come out quite naturally during the first couple of years of having product marketing in the business anyway. But I think it’s very interesting.

I can’t imagine working for put a marketing team under product. I can’t, connect the dots yet in my head around how I would be most successful in that setup. But I guess it would just be a learning curve.

Where is the crossover between product marketing, and growth marketing or product growth?

JOSH: I could see someone coming from the Product side be doing marketing aspects, or a growth marketer type who’ll be writing onboarding emails, or a marketer ensuring the right features are highlighted. Those are where the lines start to bleed from me. Is that what you see too?

Yeah, I’ve done all of those bits and pieces whilst being in the marketing side and it’s worked pretty fine. I think even though we’re under marketing, it’s a super cross-functional role by default. You have to have connections and strong alignment with product, with success and with sales and the rest of the marketing team anyway.

I think it’s also interesting when you think about the goals of product marketing teams, what they want to or need to achieve your business over the next six months, 12 months, 18 months. Once you can be really clear on that, then it makes much more sense, and be like okay, well, product marketing is focused on this particular area so for now let’s align them onto this part of the team, or we’ll make sure they’ve got really strong connection with these people.

But again, one of the things that we don’t necessarily do so well is say, okay, this is, this is what product marketing is going to set out to achieve. We just kind of floats around a little bit.

It’s a really fluid role, a very fluid team. I think in terms of metrics the best situation I worked in was where we had two key metrics. One was net new ARR added each month, and the other was successful adoption of users to the product.

So the number of accounts that signed up the turn into paying customers, and those that hit whatever user goal was. That gave us two really distinct ways to think about it. The first part was about everything that happens before sign up or before the initial kind of payment point. So positioning, pricing, messaging, communicating features, the sales experience, stuff like that was something that we could improve ourselves or through our relationships with other teams.

And then the second part around successful adoption was about, is this the right product for this type of customer? Do we communicate better? Do we help them find out how to get started as quickly enough? Did they achieve that core goals early on enough and see the value in it?

Melding those two together was a really interesting a really interesting experience.

Should product marketing report directly to the CEO?

NATE: I wonder if it would make more sense for product marketing to report directly to the CEO, kind of an agency for the CEO?

Yeah. When you say that out loud, obviously it makes so much sense. All of every single role I’ve had, the product marketing plan has always been discussed with the CEO. It’s always: this is how we think of the positioning, this is what we’re learning, these are some problems we’ve seen in the sales funnel and this is how we’re thinking of fixing them.

You know, these are the broad goals of what we want to do from an adoption and activation perspective. So absolutely we should have that direct line in. The only reason that we don’t is… I’m not sure why we dont, I think that’d be really good experiment for somebody to run.

What’s the direction of product marketing?

It’s this is where I think product marketing is going to fragment in some ways over the next five or so years. I expect that we will see increase in strategy roles. So Strategy teams, Director of Strategy…we’ll probably still have product marketers under a strategy team who are responsible for kind of core market insights from customers, competitors, and general landscape kind of stuff.

And then I think we’ll see some of the more execution part of product marketing go to segment marketing teams that will focused on driving growth and adoption from particular customer groups.That’s where I think product marketing is probably going to be.

We are saying many more CMOs come from product marketing. I think another route for product marketing growth, as well is into chief of staff and COO roles. Anything that is about melding strategy with execution. I think we’re, we’re really strong in helping merge both of those worlds together.

What about fractional product marketers?

Yeah, it’s definitely something that’s grown, the concept has really come up over the last couple of months maybe. It’s really pretty new.

I think it’s really interesting. It’s probably something I’m going to be exploring over the next couple of years, but I think there’s probably two types of fractional PMMS that you might want.

One is one that can come in with a framework and experience: this is how we can do positioning, here’s the process, let’s work on it together, go through that, bring everyone around on why it’s the right direction, and there’s a lot of internal change management with things like positioning that we need to manage as well. And then sell it into the business and make sure it’s working and fitted nicely.

And then I think that is the strategic functional product marketer who can come in and be like, this is how we’ve done this before. Let’s go back to the basics. Let’s build the core artifacts that you need from personas all the way through to buyer journey, through to uderstanding of the broader customer journey, map out the sales enablement material that you need you know, the product announcement matrixes, and all this kind of stuff, which I think is really interesting as well.

But I think one of the, one of the downsides of this is that we miss the opportunity to focus on upskilling the product marketers and marketers that you already have.

That’s something that, one of my friends Alicia Carney and I are doing: a course to help upskill scrappy product marketers. But especially in Europe, there’s not a lot of career growth for product marketers, or an easy way to break into it. And so I think we need a bit more thinking there on how we manage the next generation as well.

What’s your WTF is Go-To-Market course about?

Alicia and I are both pretty involved in the product marketing community. And one of the questions we hear from almost everyone we speak to, whether they’re a new product marketer, someone who’s been in the role for a couple of years or even CEOs and CMOs is: I hear the words go-to-market all the time, but I don’t really understand what it is, how do all the bits connect together? I can read a definition of it, but what’s the connective tissue between all of these different building blocks?

And so that’s why we just called it WTF is Go-To-Market. People that have those questions are generally in their first three or four years, if not earlier for product marketing, we’re really focused on helping marketers in B2B technology companies.

That’s where our experience is mostly from. But also the frameworks and attitudes that we’ve developed as well best fit there. So there’s a lot of focus on understanding our customers, understanding the needs of the business, and connecting those bits together.

So thinking less about product marketing and go-to-market as just the checklist, and more about trying to understand what it is you’re really trying to achieve. Hopefully that’s what we’re going to help product marketers do. We’ve just invited our first cohort which is really cool.

We’ve been lucky enough to offer a scholarship as well, to improve diversity in the product marketing community sponsored by Crane VC, which is also an awesome thing that we can hopefully help to change..

The first first course is in February. It’s a six week course, and then we hope to do it every, probably every quarter. It’s really exciting. We’ve asked people to do video applications, if they feel comfortable, and we ask about the best product marketing projects they’ve worked on and the worst ones they’ve worked on.

And you can just see all of these lessons we’ve learnt, where we’ve had exactly the same experiences. So if we can help people manage those future ones a little bit better, then we’re not just going to see an impact on the results that product launches can drive the business, but also see that reflected in the career growth of people as well. And that’s, that’s the driving force behind it for us.

We’ve got people in the cohort from their first product marketing job all the way through to 40-something year old director level people, and we’ve got one CEO of a tech company in there as well. So it’s a real, really good mix of people.

What PMM characteristics should you look for in an up-and-coming potential PMM?

So I think the first part I’d say is empathy really about getting into the minds of our customers. We really need to see life from their perspective. If you take positioning, then the definition of positioning is about occupying a space in the mind of the customer. To do that effectively, you need to understand what is already going on in their head, what’s going on in their life for them.

And so unless we can do that really effectively, product marketing breaks down really quickly. So being able to do research, to be able to hypothesize and you know, validate or anything you need to do to really embody your customer, I think is really important. And that goes hand in hand with advocacy.

So representing that customer that you’ve built a solid understanding of, being able to understand the business goals and the business system as it were that you’re operating within and having the skills to navigate around that to drive the best outcomes I think is really important.

Product marketing breaks down if the work we’re doing is not used by the business. We can do all of the snazzy PDFs of personas and go-to-market strategy documents all we want, but unless it’s put into action and people are being consistent with it, it breaks down.

And then lastly, it’s having an understanding of what strategy is. It’s not solely the 10 year mission and vision. You need to understand that. But you need to understand what are the small steps that you can make today to push you forward between now and then, keeping in mind the intended outcomes that you want to achieve, and then being able to make choices that move you from A to B.

What one tip would you give?

I’ve been through three or four big pivots, changes in the way that businesses are operating, and one of the biggest tips I share with that your internal stakeholders are your customers as well.

So do the same thing. Understand what’s driving them, their jobs, pains, gains, and motivations, and then think backwards into how do you help them get to that desired state.

It’s just a customer, it’s exactly the same process, just a different outlook on it.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Being the thing for someone is more important than being something for everyone.

Once you recognise this, you’ll see it everywhere. Successful businesses, products, value propositions, ads, sales pitches, and more all hinge on being able to convey that “This” is for “You”.

But making the decision to be the thing for someone is so difficult. You’ll spend hours deliberating if you should or shouldn’t, whether the opportunity is too small, how you should prioritize segments, and more.

Instead of thinking about this decision as a limiting function, think about it as a move of strength. You only have so many hours, so much brainpower: you can do so much more with so much less. Rather than diluting effort, you’ll concentrate energy.

To do this well, I think there are four key considerations.

How to define ‘someone’?

Having a tight understanding of your target customer is the most important, underpinning your business strategy.

Ultimately, you’re trying to identify a market group of customers: people linked by similar traits who have a similar problem that they’ll pay to solve.

This ‘market group’ should form your ideal customer profile – this linked post walks through an structured approach to help define yours.

How to know what ‘the thing’ is?

Your value proposition needs to be built on top of the customer you’ve defined. But value propositions aren’t created out of nothing – they need to be discovered through pattern-matching, both evidenced and intuition.

The inputs to your value proposition should be based on research (like my 19 customer development questions). From there, you’ll understand the customer’s:

• Jobs: common responsibilities and activities your customer does as part of their day-to-day
• Gains: their personal, professional, or business goals they want to achieve
• Pains: marks of failure and frustrations the customer must avoid
• Triggers: motivations that encourage them to solve their problem and switch away from their current solution

Ultimately, you’ll need to understand the value your customer desires: an element that they want to attain that:

1. Is useful
2. Is worth the effort (cost, time, energy)
3. Is a priority for them

Say no, don’t prioritize

One of the reactions you’ll have to counter is other teams taking the safe route of prioritizing the direction you’ve began to set in addition to everything they were doing before.

Take it from me: this doesn’t work well. This doesn’t bring clarity: it dilutes energy and effort even more. It creates inertia.

To counteract this, you need to get buy-in. As product marketers we don’t do all the work, but we make sure the work happens. Aligning all of the teams we work with and ensuring they have the right context from the market and the business means they’re set up to have the most impact.

Meet your business goals

Ultimately, the proof is in the pudding. Your teams need to see results, recognition that change is paying off.

Implementing a strategy built on the steps above won’t happen overnight, but you’ll need to ensure every team is fully committed. Marketing and sales need to be targeting the customer, and selling the same thing. Product need to build the thing for the customer. Any dilution will muddy the waters.

You need to show momentum and communicate what you’ve learnt at every stage. That means being transparent. Didn’t meet goals? Say why. Changing strategy? Say why.

It’s a journey

Being the thing for someone is a journey. You’ll learn, adapt, and evolve often. Embrace it, and bring everyone along for the ride.

Hold strong on the principle, and help everyone understand why.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Most startups happen when someone finds a problem that they’ve experienced themselves, or discovered that someone else has.

Now the challenge is to find people who are ready to pay to solve the problem… and that can be hard. Generally there are a number of reasons that startup marketing and sales is hard:

1. People don’t want to hear they have a problem
2. They don’t think they have a problem
3. They don’t believe their problem can be fixed
4. They might think they have a different problem to be solved
5. They think there’s a different way to solve the problem

These challenges manifest in many different ways: lack of TOFU engagement, poor sales funnel metrics, more rejection than you’d like in the sales process – ultimately, hitting the bottom line.

But because we’re human, we try to cure the symptom rather than address the cause. A misdiagnosis means you tackle the small problems individually, rather than seeing the bigger picture. You’ll end up wasting time, effort, energy, and money trying to overcome small rocks… and underestimating the mountain ahead of you.

Along with everything else we’ve covered here on Building Momentum – like niches for riches, using unconventional wisdom, understanding your customer and their buying journey – I wanted to offer another principle that helps to prevent the pain from the source.

Be contentious

Contention means having an opinion, an assertion, and maintaining it in argument. That isn’t the same as ‘strong opinions, weakly held’. An unwavering belief that you’re comfortable to shout about and be known for.

Contentious beliefs in marketing and SaaS can be almost anything, from beliefs about pricing or product architecture, to the application of technology or in response to accepted wisdom about a particular problem.

Good contentious beliefs are based on customer insight. Bad contentious beliefs are internal assumptions, applied broadly.

In my post looking at a book on the American Republican party messaging machine, Don’t Think of an Elephant by George Lakoff, one of the main concepts is that frames (“mental structures that shape the way we see the world”) need to already exist in our customer’s minds to be activated. We cannot create framing, promote them, and expect them to be transmitted with success.

Contention leads to disqualification

Think about a newspaper that you actively choose not to read, or a store you choose not to shop at. Is the primary reason for that something that the business knows and promotes about themselves?

That’s an example of proactive disqualification in action.

Being contentious acts as a filter. It can draw in the believers, those who recognize the frame — and ward off those that aren’t a good fit.

Disqualification is at least 10x more important in product/marketing/sales, but often not a focus. Founders/marketers/sales reps are so keen to try and target everyone they possibly could, leading to the issues described in the first half of this post.

When you can attract the right prospects, and prevent bad-fit customers from getting into your pipeline, you’ll lose less energy, be more focused, and build a better understanding of what really matters to the intended audience without irrelevant noise.

This isn’t to say that you should only every talk to the believers, and ignore those who aren’t, creating an echo chamber. There’s a balance between hearing what you want, and hearing what you need.

Look to your customers to find opportunities for contention

Again — and I want to iterate this as strongly as possible — you need to discover how to be contentious in the mind of your customer. The framing needs to pre-exist – it cannot be forced. Talk to your best-fit customers, find out what they think about life, the universe, and everything in it. There, you’ll find opportunities to offer alternative viewpoints that resonate, and find it easier to grow your business.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Why, you ask?

The first time was legitimate; an acquisition meant the product offering had fundamentally changed.

The second and third times? Each time a new CEO started, fresh with ideas and forceful on expectations.

These were, obviously, bad ideas. Repositioning is fundamental change, and change is disruptive – it’s no small decision.

Many marketers will be part of repositioning projects, whether for a small product line or for the entire business. Sometimes, they’re justified with good, honest signals indicating a repositioning would be a strategic good decision. In other situations like my example above, repositioning projects can be frivolous – a waste of time, effort, money, and momentum.

Let’s take a look.

Warning signs to watch out for

The HIPPO’s ego

Your CEO struts in, pitches you the new position they’ve been thinking about, then drops the mic and leaves the room. In their wake, a trail of carnage follows. One rogue shower idea turns into a highly disruptive and expensive experiment, destined to fail.

Aside: one CMO wanted to reposition us as marketing software for the ‘everyWEAR consumer’, as a cringe-inducing portmanteau of both ‘everywhere’ (i.e. mobile-first, location-based) and ‘wearables’ (i.e. smartwatches). We had to fight surprisingly hard to prevent this monstrosity from seeing the light of day.

Competitor moves

Certain industries are just more attune to sheep syndrome. The Metaverse is a good example – suddenly, every big tech brand has a metaverse play.

Competitor repositioning is FOMO in action.

Do they know something you don’t? Whatever they’re doing, they’re doing it in a big way – that means they’re confident in it – so let’s get in on the action too! We need to hedge our bets, right?

Except… you are not your competitor. You don’t have their business, their product, customers, financials, strategy – or lack of.

Broad sales execution challenges

When the pipeline is looking empty and the win rate isn’t looking good, it’s tempting to change course — often in a big way.

If only we talked about X, instead of Y… We’d be closing more opportunities, I just know it.

And then, you embark upon a treacherous journey: sailing into the unknown with no safe passage.

Especially in earlier-stage businesses, it’s SO TEMPTING to change the pitch for every prospect: spraying and praying that something sticks. While it might feel productive, it’s counter-intuitive – you won’t have a consistent foundation to evaluate your findings.

Repositioning — and the need to reposition — can sometimes be a smokescreen to cover for an (ineffective) tactic-led sales approach.

Reliable signals to keep in mind

Product offering has legitimately changed

If you’ve made an acquisition, added a new product line, or developed new capabilities that vastly change the outcomes your customers can achieve, maybe it’s time to review your positioning.

But not always – P3 or P4 nice-to-have features can sometimes get blown out of proportion in your internal echo chamber, when actually the customer impact is negligible. Sanity check whether new features can really have an impact before spending the time and effort to reposition.

New unique, unconventional wisdom unlocked

Unconventional wisdom is a great way to stand out from your competitors, re-educate your customers, and develop a strong sales and marketing narrative that drives urgency and demand.

When you discover or develop this unconventional wisdom new doors open. It’s broader than just product features – new approaches for sales, marketing, product, and the rest of the business start to click into place.

Obviously, test and validate your unique wisdom first – but it’s a great way to make noise, especially in crowded marketplaces, with an entirely new way of looking at the market.

Customer patterns and feedback

The literal definition of positioning is “to occupy a space in your customer’s mind”.

So as you win new accounts, your ‘best-fit customer’ will change.

As you continue to sell and market and support to them, you’ll learn much more about what’s going on in their minds – new hopes, dreams, and fears that can enable stronger positioning.

Customer feedback is often under-used as a source of market insight. David Cancel, CEO of Drift, once wrote about how customer questions that begin “how do I…” actually aren’t about product features, but highlight a product marketing issue. Their expectations are such, because of your positioning, messaging, and experience.

Specific sales funnel challenges

Above, I talked about how broad sales challenges are a poor signal: do not reposition ‘just because’.

However, specific sales funnel challenges can be really great indicators that you need to revisit the way you present your brand to the market.

When you’ve identified specific challenges – like poor discovery-to-opp conversion rates or low win-rates – you’ll be able to first evaluate the sales skills. Are the team well equipped, skilled, and knowledgeable enough that skill is not a barrier?

If you’ve reviewed the team and found no skill problems, you’ll find positioning issues as an aside. Start there!

Tip: always be proactive

Positioning is like an evolving fabric that connects your customers and the market to your product and sales/marketing experience.

There will always be holes and gaps. You won’t win every opportunity, or beat every competitor.

So long as you make proactive decisions, you can’t lose. Take the time to think about your positioning strategy and how you can grasp it by the horns to build momentum and avoid inertia.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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The post When should you reposition your brand? appeared first on Building Momentum.

Earlier this year I was on the Competitive Enablement Show podcast with Klue! We covered a lot of ground, talking about some successes and failures, and how I think about competitive differentiation.

Below, you’ll find an edited transcript of our chat!

What was the inspiration for starting Building Momentum?

About five or six years ago, my boss told me that I needed to write more, to grow my personal brand but also to help others in that same situation. At the time, I was like, okay, yeah, sure….

But during that time I’ve needed to learn all of this stuff to help me. I’ve been looking for stuff online to help me get through the same kind of challenges that I’m writing about now, things like:

• How do you take a product from zero to one?
• How do you build positioning for the first time as a first time?
• How do you think about your sales process and start to map back to the collateral that you need?
• How do you think about competitors?
• How do you start to understand who could be against and how you message to that?

There are so many bits and pieces that people need on that journey. And I just decided to start writing. I actually started my Substack, I think in November or October last year. And it took me until February this year to actually publish a post.

But now I’ve been doing it since February religiously. It’s done so much. What makes it really good is that I get loads of people saying that it’s really helped them solve challenges and just learn more about what product marketing is and how to do it. So it’s really nice to see that, giving back to the community as well, and how I can help other people on that journey.

Where have you seen people fall short in terms of truly explaining how they’re different to the buyer?

I’ve seen it a lot. It’s when people are really close to the product and not necessarily in tune with what customers are thinking about. I think that one of the traps we fall into, is that we will think about how we differentiate through the lens of that product and the business, the features they’ve got, stuff like that.

But the question they should be asking is how are you different through the eyes of your customer instead of the buyer?

In most situations, your products are probably not going to be super different. You’re probably going to have, a couple of key differentiated features, but you’re probably targeting that same core group of customers as somebody else. And that means you have to work much harder to try and win them as a customer.

I think the next trap that I see a lot, is people go as far to describe the benefits their product delivers, like, how it will you save your time, do more with less, you can save money… and that’s cool, but it’s not necessarily useful.

People can still achieve those outcomes with a ton of different solutions: that might be competing products, might be people, it might be other solutions, and those benefits aren’t really going to galvanize your prospects.

They’re not really going to speed up that sales cycle, get them super excited to buy.

You’re comparing apples to apples: do you want a red one or do you want a green one?

In those kinds of situations we really have to go much further than benefits. And you’ve got to talk about the real value that someone’s going to gain when they use your product.

What’s an example of where you just were struggling to stand out?

My example is we were struggling to stand out to a customer, to the particular customer we wanted to win. I was at Kayako, which is a customer service SaaS company. I was hired there as the first product marketer.

We had big plans to reinvent the world of customer service, with a really strong vision to take it away from being a cost-center, and instead position customer service as a revenue generator.

We were building a whole new product from scratch and were really determined to fix those scenarios that we’ve all experienced: when you’re in touch with a company and, they pass you on from team to team, you have to repeat yourself all the time. You’re given a ticket number and then the customer service rep just forgets there’s an actual human behind the ticket… Those sort of experiences where you’re not treated as a real person.

So we planned our launch in advance and we followed all of the best practices that you would do to launch a product, to launch messaging and positioning. Wee did interviews, we developed messages, we tested it with our audience and so on. We launched feeling pretty good about it, super confident that we’d done all the groundwork and we’re really looking forward to just seeing everything, go up into the right.

And we landed on this really interesting messaging that spoke to the aspirations of leaders in our target companies. It was all about this new world of customer experience, and we were very excited about it. And so when we launched, we pressed, go on the platform… and everything just completely flopped.

It was awful. We’d gone from adding thousands of revenue a day with our previous product, the one we’d sunsetted, to adding zero in this new one. So two years of work down the drain, basically a total failure at launch – really bad.

We created a war room obviously, because that wasn’t good, we couldn’t sustain that started investigating what was happening.

And we found that in the interviews and research that we were doing, we found that the messaging we had developed just completely wasn’t resonating at all. So that meant people didn’t start a trial. They didn’t request demos. They didn’t buy from us.

So we looked into a bit more and started to analyze well, actually, who was that customer that we’re seeing on the website, and then the sales process, and who are the ones that we’d actually messaged to… and found they were completely different.

So we had messaged to those leaders and executives who cared about all this aspirational value, but the people coming to the website – the people that were discovering the product, taking it forward, championing it – just weren’t bothered at all. To them, our messaging, our website just looked like, meaningless marketing waffle.

There was no substance to it. It didn’t mean anything at all. They wanted tangible messaging, stuff that would speak to the pains, the problems they’re experiencing. They only need a bit of that long-term direction, but ultimately they just wanted to solve today’s pains, get those over and done with.

So we just hadn’t linked that real clear hierarchy from the features and the product that we had built, the benefits that we were delivering through those and the value they could gain.

So we’re in this war room, all sat around desks with dashboards up trying to pull together everything we had. And it was in the interviews we were running that we found our issues.

We were doing win-loss interviews anyway (if anyone’s not doing them, set them up, I’ve got a blog post on how to set that up). But they’re super, super valuable for just keeping tabs on people coming through your pipeline. What happened? Why didn’t they choose you? We literally spoke to probably a couple of hundred people in about a month or two. Just trying to find out, every lead, why did you, why didn’t you choose to go with us?

And it was in those conversations that we found, actually, yeah, like we’re not speaking to the right people. The people on the website, the people that are coming through the pipeline are, manager, titles. They’re not the executives, they’re not the directors. And it was a really quite humbling experience to have put so much energy into the process and feeling confident about it, only for it to be completely dashed at the last minute.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that whenever I do positioning now, the immediate next step is to work out what that buyer journey looks like. So mapping out all of those stakeholders that might be involved in that buying journey, and then figuring out where do you message the different levels along that journey? That’s super, super important.

What’s an example of where you had success in differentiation?

At Kayako, I was trying to learn everything as we were doing it. So I was going onto Google, talking to people and trying to figure out how to make these things happen. But at Headstart, I was able to put all of those lessons I’ve learned into practice and that was a really nice experience, comparatively.

So for context, Headstart is a diversity recruiting platform for campus recruiting teams. Big enterprise sales, hundreds of thousands of dollars in software to big 5,000 plus employee companies. And our champions at those companies we deemed as a socially conscious radical buyer.

So these were people that didn’t just care about the immediate benefits of solving those immediate problems, but they had a much longer-term strategic outlook on the overall value of our product and where it would take them as a business.

We found out through research, again, getting on the phone with people, interviewing, trying to find out, what they care about what’s going on in their lives.

And we messaged actually three different kind of frames of value in that process. Firstly was the business value: people needed their business is to be seen as innovative, to show that they were taking big public steps around diversity and inclusion in their market against their competitors.It was a big driver for their clients to be seen to be working with again, socially conscious companies.

The next frame was that kind of professional. So these people were quite savvy. They recognize that introducing those new initiatives would really help their professional standing. It would help them get the new promotion.

It would solve their team’s problems. They’d be responsible for those improved results. It would help them stand out in the job market. They could talk to something that had helped them improve the representation of their intakes and stuff like that.

And then lastly, we spoke to this kind of personal value. These people were like I said, socially conscious. They knew that diversity and inclusion is the right thing to do. They cared about all of these diversity issues. They’d experienced it. And they really wanted to do the right thing, make a real difference in the world.

And so we’re able to merge all of these bits together with a rational and a logical narrative or what I call the heart and brain narrative. The rational brain recognizes the cost savings, the ROI, the cold hard business impact. And then you’ve got this emotional heart story that, is all about the social impact and wanting to do good in the world.

And mashing both of those things was really successful from a positioning perspective and for the business results, our sales cycles and everything like that.

How do you understand the emotional side of your buyer?

The literal definition of positioning is to occupy a space in your customers.

And you’re not going to do that effectively unless you know what else is in there.

So that’s not stuff that’s just related to your product or the problem area that you’re trying to solve. What are they professional post personal goals? What do they believe in? What do they care about?

In this case, we found that these people were in this role because they wanted to make a difference to the talent. They wanted to give every graduate the best opportunities to improve their social standing. And that was one of the big levers for us that we were able to latch onto relatively early on in that process, and see that nobody else was talking about that in the market.

Everyone else was talking about the business impact. Nobody was connecting that back to “what can I, as an individual do to enact change?”. And if you think about this through the lens of 2020 with all of the racial equity protests around the world, it was super, super timely. So much of that opportunity was really heightened in the mind of the people that we were talking.

I think value is something that’s a priority for somebody, it’s something that they are motivated that to search, switch, or buy for something that they need to solve, there is a driving need behind that.

That might be something that comes from in the business. It might be a completely external factor, but there has to be that motivation in there. And if you can find that something that’s really altruistic.

Take HubSpot, for example, with their inbound marketing narrative. Of course, ads aren’t good. They’re expensive. But who wants to be pushing ads on people? You as a marketer would much rather people come to you. And that’s why I think that inbound narrative works so nicely is because it talks about what a marketer can do to improve. And enjoy and be happy at the way they’re doing marketing in a way.

How do you figure out what a buyer deem valuable to them?

It’s all about what the value is.

So a value is an element that your customer wants to gain. So it has to be useful to them. It’s got to be worth the efforts (i.e., worth the money, the time, or the energy), and it’s gotta be a priority for them. Ideally, that value that your customer is going to gain is going to pass all three of those tests.

And the way I’ve found best to discover them starts with super broad customer development, persona research. I think it’s disheartening to see how many companies will talk to customers to sell them or support them, but won’t necessarily talk to them just for learning opportunities, just to, find out what’s going on in life for them.

So I think a lot more people could do that.

What are two or three of the most important or valuable questions that you ask a customer to do like to learn from them?

I’ve got a blog post that lists out 19 different questions, so picking two is quite difficult for me. I think they’re all super, super valuable.

But if I absolutely had to, the first would probably be asking customers how they’ve attempted to solve their problems so far.

And the reason I love that is because you can then start to dig into, how did they solve it or how did they try to, why did it fail? What worked for them? What works you know what didn’t work? Why do they like it? Why didn’t they like it? And you’ll find out so much juicy stuff. You will start to understand, what competitors they’ve used, the processes they’ve trialed and failed at when you use it in sales conversations.

In discovery calls, for example, you also learn where the gaps were in that experience for you to lock up and seal the deal almost really valuable.

I think my second question would be “what’s changed in the last five years that makes our product so much more valuable?”. And that’s really nice for discovering this world change, if you read Andy Raskin’s narrative medium posts, but it’s really useful discovering all of these different trends that are on people’s minds and changes in their world that you might not have thought about at all. It provides a ton of insight into future opportunities for direction, for product, for marketing, for sales.

And you can also follow up with, “what’s going to change in the next five years?”. So you’re going to get ahead of the game. You’re going to be able to ask, from their current pains, their current context, the problems they’ve got right now, what is going to affect that’s going to prevent them, or maybe help them to be more successful and you can work all of that into your plans as well.

How do you merge customer value and the competitive landscape together?

My philosophy, for want of a better word, is that the dominant partner in the market equation is the demand side, is the customer.

And if we can accurately understand the market (which is a group of similar people that have similar pain points or problems that they’re willing to solve to pay to solve for), then that is much more stronger, and almost a shortcut (in context of early stage B2B companies) to momentum.

I think competitors come really into their own when you have that positioning and you’re looking for opportunities, what are the unmet needs? The unmet values that your customers just aren’t served by in the market.

Again, where are the gaps? There’s a really good book about blue ocean strategy: what are you, what could you do that your competitors aren’t doing? How do you fit that on its head?

And if you’ve got that and it’s backed up in evidence by your customers (what you’ve learned from them and what’s going on for them), that puts you in a really good position.

What’s a value nugget, and how have you used it successfully?

So this is something I started playing around with when I was at Kayako, basically in that horror story of a failed product launch.

We needed a way to link the features, to benefits, to the value that people were trying to gain from us. And so a value nugget is basically a way to package those bits up and provide a really clear hierarchy as well, so that you can use it in sales conversations or in marketing material. It makes a really good layout for a webpage, for example.

It’s comprised of those three bits in total. Firstly, what’s the value, the attribute or state that a buyer hopes to obtain?

The value is made up of one or more benefits: the advantage that a buyer gets when using a product. So it’s something that’s tangible that you can report on it, for example, usually, or it starts with a verb. And so an example might be, save time, increase customer satisfaction, increase, win rates, that kind of stuff. Those benefits gained by one or more features.

Again, you’re able to see this kind of hierarchy. Value is delivered by the benefit, which is delivered by a feature. And so that might be a specific piece of product functionality. It might be something less obvious, like an integration or a report, or it might be something that you wouldn’t think of, like a modern, clean UX, a design consideration, or, even service support, dedicated account managers, service features.

And then in the post you can find one of the things that I really like about it, is being able to move up and down that value nugget by asking why on the journey up and then how on the journey down. And this is good because it forces me to think about making it easy to navigate, but also ensuring that there’s real tight alignment between the features you’ve got and the value you say that you’re going to deliver.

And so it’s really key to building that cohesive narrative, and make sure that you’re not just selling your product, but then you can work backwards and start to build what you sell as well.

I used that at Kayako. I’ve used it everywhere since then, so it’s battle tested.

I did a blog post talking about Xerox and a story from the Challenger Customer book. If you’ve not read it, it’s where Xerox went from selling printers to K-12 school districts previously based just on their functionality — so printing color, that kind of stuff — to selling instead on how those printers led to increased student performance.

And so that’s quite a jump to say, “our printers are going to help you deliver better school results, increase your performance”, but is a really good story of using that research, discovering these kinds of unmet needs, being creative with messaging, and then, ultimately all holds up in this value nugget framework.

And so the example, one of their features is the ability to print full color workbooks. And so if we’re going to use the ‘why’ on the way up, why is that useful? That’s because it’s proven to encourage higher student performance.

Okay. So that’s great. And why is that important? Because it provides the best possible educational experience while managing budget pressures.

And so then we can ask how on the way back down, and one of the other benefits that is supporting that value. So the budget piece, how does it help support budget pressures? Because those educators can incorporate color without adding costs and how, because they have a on demand print feature.

And so when it’s laid out, you can go and find that on my newsletter, but you can see this transition really nicely all the way from those features to benefits, to value and all the way back down again, nicely packaged up.

And what I like about it as well is that it’s easy to train that narrative with sales teams. I found people pick it up really easily, especially you can give them a little cue cards for that kind of stuff.

And also for consistency, once you’ve got this real tight defined narrative that you’re using, you get everybody talking the same consistent story. And I think that’s always a good thing,

How do you track and think about lesser-known competitors?

So I think in some situations it’s helpful to think less about the terminology of competitors and more about, alternative solutions.

It’s broader. It gets us thinking about the companies we compete with day-to-day and gets us instead thinking about the solutions that people might be using to achieve those similar kinds of outcomes.

So some of them will be those direct competitors. They’re obvious, you’re familiar with them. You compete with them in most deals. You probably might also find these kinds of super niche solutions that might be set up just for one type of customer, or one really specific use case. I find that most companies will have them on that radar and individually they are not a big threat.

But when you look at them as a kind of lumped group, a single chunk on your market pie chart, that group is probably going to be bigger than you think. And I think most people should think about that a bit more.

How do you tackle a bigger number of smaller competitors?

It is tricky because of the volume of them. This is why, (again, caveating early-stage B2B) is that by focusing on the customer that you are best set up to win now, or in the near term is a shortcut to that kind of stuff.

So rather than focus on potentially all of the potential competitors, you’re much more focused in who your customer is. And that helps you build momentum through that.

I think it’s also interesting if you think not just about the software solutions as well, that compete with, so there are tons of other people-powered, but also other solutions that companies might have already that you also competing with that you just wouldn’t think about, homegrown solutions and, for example, there’s always a developer that thinks they can build whatever they need in a week.

There are going to be some businesses that have JIRA, for example, really big, heavy features that a marketing team might want to use a Asana, but they’re probably not going to get approval for that at all. If you’ve got a recruiting team willing to use Greenhouse and the company is paying for the Workday HRIS platform? Probably not going to happen.

So you’re competing with software already in house, these kind of existing vendors. Then you’ve got all the people: freelancers, consultants, agencies. Actual people, employees who can solve the same problem just through, data entry, for example or customer support, assigning tickets.

For example, in customer service, there are software solutions that can automatically assign conversations to the right people, depending on all of these factors. Most companies will just have one person or two people assigning tickets to individuals instead. It’s probably more expensive in the long run, but they just don’t know that another thing exists out there to solve that.

And so when we kind of position against these non-software competitors, we get an opportunity to be much more creative. The process is still the same: understand what unmet value that customer wants to have. And then in the actual execution you can get away from differentiation against products, because there’s not another product that you’re competing against.

It’s a trying to make sure that this person knows that you exist, that you can solve their problems. So you’re not trying to eke out the slightest element of feature differentiation. And instead, you’ve got this huge canvas to explore. And there’s so much opportunity within that to really speak to that core value that your customers really hoping to wants to needs to attain in their day-to-day.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

The post Podcast: What does it take to differentiate? appeared first on Building Momentum.

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P.S. In case you missed it last week – I’m launching a course with Alicia Carney to help upskill product marketers. Find out more and register interest at WTFGoToMarket.com.

P.P.S. Thank you for being part of the Building Momentum journey! We’ve just hit a milestone – if we were all in a room, we’d be a crowd this big!

I wrote about this in The Overview #24 – don’t overestimate your customer’s maturity. A lot of people reached out sharing their experiences, so I thought would be good to cover in a bit more detail.

All too often, we imagine our customers to be so experienced and advanced that unless we keep building new bells-and-whistles, they won’t come or stay. But even the tallest, shiniest skyscrapers are built on solid foundations.

Your customer vision is not their reality

I bet that right now your product managers, sales reps, your CEO has a vision in mind of your customer.

In their mind, your customer is a Steve Jobs/Olivia Pope superhuman: revered, with thin-frame glasses that frame steely grey eyes, within which swells a unique outlook on life, the universe, and everything.

They’re smart. Passionate. Powerful. Full of wisdom, a guru in your industry. A savant, brought to earth by the corporate gods to disrupt processes, obliterate workflows, and bring about the second coming. They’re constantly assessing their options, with the power to to smite your company into obscurity at the slightest displeasure, or instill you upon a gold pedestal and bow to your greatness.

In reality, your customer probably cares about your product for… maybe 10 minutes a month? Probably much less.

They’re struggling to summon the energy today, let alone go the extra mile for just a pat on the back. They’ve got a busy family life, working from home isn’t the best setup for them, and while they want to do the best job they can… well, you know how it is. They’ve got a ton of responsibilities, they’re understaffed, and there’s a hundred other problems that they need to solve (or at least, decide to tackle later on).

Overestimating your customers is a big mistake

It’s easy to let your imagination run away from you, and you’ll build, position, market, and sell in ways that just don’t match what your customer wants, needs, or expects.

Overestimating customers starts internally, innocently enough.

Your PMM team pick up on one customer who, admittedly, may be more mature than the rest in your market. A sudden swell of forward-thinking innovation sweeps your product team into envisioning the future. A sales rep thinks they can impress a customer by promising a snazzy feature that doesn’t actually exist yet.

You’re at the intersection of your customer’s problem space and the cutting edge of technology. It’s only natural that you’ll begin to elevate your base, unwillingly.

What damage can it do? A lot.

Building the wrong features, lost sales opportunities, and confusion on customers wants contributes to the enemy of momentum: inertia.

Increased resistance and lack of velocity means things feel harder, stickier, more difficult. Motivations wear down, and a spiral of despair sets in.

Build a solid foundation

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, we cannot rely on assumptions about our customers. There’s simply too much at stake – both lack of ROI on work invested, and missed opportunity costs.

We need accurately grok and iterate our understanding of:

• our customer’s jobs, pains, gains, and triggers
• their buyer journey
• their change environment

Your understanding of these should power product strategy, positioning, the sales pitch, and everything else that your business does.

The artifacts you develop should be documented, revisited, questioned, and socialized at every opportunity. And that’s where the challenge lies – getting adequate buy-in on the legitimacy of the research, and ensuring it’s used to provide direction to everyday decisions.

NIHITO

Nothing important happens in the office.

Get out there, understand who your customers are, and what they really need. Come up with clever ideas, but validate them with your market first. Don’t position your product based on assumptions – test as much as you need.

Remember the momentum equation: focus + confidence = momentum.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?

The post Don’t overestimate your customer appeared first on Building Momentum.

TL;DR: We’re launching a course, WTF is Go-To-Market, to help upskill marketers into the PMMs the world needs! Find out more and register interest here.

If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know how in-demand product marketers are right now.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen a huge increase in job postings. Product marketers are becoming CMOs. Everyone and their uncle is shouting at how important product marketing skills are in modern marketing teams.

That makes it harder than ever to hire good product marketers.

PMM is such a broad role. It’s different in almost every company. A lack of definition, roles, and responsibilities mean your PMMs are pulled from all different directions. The overlap between product, product ops, marketing, product marketing, sales, and sales enablement teams are blurred beyond disbelief.

If you hire a PMM from a large, established company, it’s likely they’re already specialized — and therefore might not have the right breadth of experience required.

But if you hire PMMs from startups, they may have super broad experience, but not the right level of depth needed to help take your business to the next stage.

And for the folks themselves, PMM career upskilling is hard.

Many marketers and PMMs of all levels want to become PMM experts, but the experience is hard to come by, and education opportunities are slim.

Most marketers don’t know what PMM is, so can’t support PMMs in their development. A lack of experienced Directors of PMM means there’s limited internal upskilling.

Most product marketing experience is learnt on the job.

Whilst there’s been a great increase in product marketing training from the Product Marketing Alliance, Pragmatic Marketing, and others… we think they’re all missing a crucial piece of the puzzle: actual experience meeting the product marketing needs of today’s fast-growth, high-ambition startups.

Answering the big question: WTF is Go-To-Market?

Whenever Alicia (my friend and product marketing life partner) and I talk to product marketers — both fresh and experienced — the number one question we get is ‘what is go-to-market?’.

Go-to-market strategy is critical for sustainable business growth, and a crucial part of the PMM skillset to grasp and put into action.

Many blog posts and courses will explain GTM and it’s components in theory… but theory means nothing if it’s not delivering value to your progression and your business.

The best way to grok GTM is to understand the foundations, learn by doing, and having a safe space to ask questions.

So… that’s what we’re doing.

Upskilling marketers into well-rounded product marketing experts

We’re launching WTF Is Go-To-Market: a unique, six-week short course for B2B startup marketers to build a go-to-market strategy, develop customer focus, and set the right foundations for an exciting Product Marketing career.

We’ll guide marketers through six, fully-formed modules from ground zero to a fully-formed strategy for your business:

1. Understand the functional GTM components
2. Learn how to really know your customer
3. What it means to define your value proposition
4. How to launch your product into the market
5. Why you need to communicate your GTM strategy
6. How to iterate your GTM strategy to success

Interested? Registrations close December 14th 2022, with the course set to run from February 7th to March 18th.

Have any questions? Drop us a note by email to wtfgotomarket@gmail.com

We’ll also be announcing a fully-paid scholarship program to help improve diversity, representation, and access to career progression amongst the PMM community.

This isn’t just another PMM course.

Alicia and I believe that product marketing changes the paths of individuals and businesses for the better. So let’s get started!

The post Building the next generation of product marketers 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.

I recently sat down with Ishara Naotunna, behind the Spill The Marketing Beans podcast.

In 28 minutes, we got through so much, including: my battle-tested positioning process, the types of customers you should talk to and who should be involved, how to test new messaging, how to activate messaging internally, how to know you need new positioning… and much more!

Watch the video below, or read the slightly-edited notes below!

Transcript

On the traditional positioning statement…

I think that the standard positioning format statement that everyone uses is probably the worst thing that could happen in, especially in SaaS, because it reduces our value of our product and what customers, one down to just a statement that gets repeated and parroted.

Nobody really believes in it. It just becomes meaningless words.

On my positioning process…

So my positioning process, I call it customer-led value positioning. Because it does what it says on the tin. It is focused on who our customers are. And we’re trying to understand the value that our product delivers them.

Get assumptions on paper first

So that process generally starts by trying to get all of the assumptions out that our core internal team have about who our customers are, what they want to achieve, and what the value is that our product delivers.

The reason we do this is because otherwise later in the process, you’re going to have all of these biased assumptions come up and you’re going to be finding reasons to include or exclude them later on, rather than having a really honest conversation upfront, and asking, “how confident are we about this specific thing?”. If a CMO or a product manager has this one belief, it’s a good opportunity in the research that we’re going to go do to test whether that is true, or whether it’s just a one-off that we’ve seen in one customer.

We really want to try and find patterns. Positioning is about patterns. And so that’s really cool, getting those assumptions out first of all, super important. The output of that is something called a customer empathy map. And we use that as a really rough basis to guide our customer research that we’re going to do.

Do customer research

I have a list of like 19 questions that I rely on and try and get a good enough spread across all of them from maybe 10, 15 interviews if we can.

Those interviews are with customers. They are with prospects, with people that we know in the market, analysts, other people that have some knowledge around the problem space that we’re solving. Those questions fall into four categories.

The first part is about segmentation. Who was the person that we were interested in? What do they do? What’s their job? Who do they report to? All of the kind of standard stuff that you might as.

The next piece we want to ask about are the general problems that they have, so problem discovery. We’re trying to get a really broad view of who our customers are, what they care about, what’s going on in their day to day, stuff like that.

The reason we do that, and start really broad, is because the literal definition of positioning is to find a space in our customers’ minds that we can occupy. How are we going to do that if we don’t know what is already in their head?

So we have to start super, super broad, and that might be specific software challenges, like they’re trying to do this specific thing with this category of software, or it might be professional goals. They want to get a promotion that’s on their mind at the minute, or they might have really personal goal, to make them more money, or save time so they can go home and do other stuff.

After we’ve done that, we have the opportunity to dig in a bit more on the problem that we think those customers have. And so we’re validating that problem to some extent. And so we’re trying to ask questions about how, does this affect you? What other impact does it have?

And then lastly. in this questioning process, we’re trying to understand, after giving a brief explanation of what our product does, how it would work for them. Would it save them time, how do they think it would change their life? What would the ultimate value and benefits be, from their perspective?

So those four sections give a ton of data. The next step is to just go through and find all of the patterns amongst those and try to understand where are the big things that we might want to rely on later? What are the top important themes that are coming out?

Create personas

So we’ve got all of our assumptions out, we’ve talked to customers. The next step for me in my process is creating personas. These aren’t personas in the kind of usual fluffy marketing sense.

We’re relying on evidence, not assumptions, and we’re focusing on four key elements: their jobs, so the responsibilities and their day-to-day activities, tasks. Their pains: things that frustrate them, annoy them, they want to get rid of. Elements that they want to gain, things that they would love to have, things that they’re trying to achieve.There’s not always necessarily an opposite pain to gain, but sometimes there is. And lastly, their triggers, or the motivations, what’s galvanizing someone to take action, to search, to switch or to buy something.

So we have a really nice tight understanding of what our persona is. And you might have two of them or three of them, depending on how many people are in your kind of core stakeholder group.

Extract customer value themes

From there we then get to the really important part, which is trying to extract the value the customer wants to achieve, wants to gain. That might be solving a pain. It might be reacting to a trigger. It might be achieving something, or doing a job better.

I have a quite tight definition for what the value should be. I think a value is something that is useful to the customer, it’s a priority for them – so there’s some urgency behind it – and it’s something that’s going to be worth the cost, the time, or the effort to make it happen.

Ultimately the value should meet all three of those. Otherwise it’s, fine, but it’s not going to be as strong as it could be. And so we run all of these values, all of these themes that we’re pulling out in personas and try to identify “does it meet all three” and get some level of prioritization in there as well.

So that’s a really simple way in this process of going from super raw, unstructured data to now, for this customer, we know these are the things that person really wants. These are the things that this person is really going to get use out of. They are really invested in solving it because there’s some urgency behind it. And it’s something that they are going to see a positive ROI from.

Get creative

Super simple. Then we can get a bit creative, which tries to tease out those values and we put them into sentences statements to try and understand how all of the benefits that our features deliver are all linked together.

I have something called a value nugget, which is the hierarchy between benefits features and proof points. So we try and package all of these up together and you’ll have multiple value nuggets.

But the interesting thing about them is that you can move up or move down really easily. So you can move up by asking “why” and moving down by asking “how”. Say you are starting with the value that we help you save time.

Why is that important? Because of this particular benefit, you’re going to be able to do something else that’s more valuable instead. Why is that? Because we’re going to help you do it through these particular features in our product.

And then you can move up in a similar way, by asking how, and it’s a really easy way to train out as well with sales teams, and really easy to give to marketers, to create website copy as well.

So all of that gets wrapped up in a tagline, a slogan, the typical things you might see on the top hero section of a website page. Just a really brief description of all these things for our customer. How do we summarize the ultimate value and benefits that our product delivers?

And we see how that goes.

Launch, test, iterate

We put the positioning out to test it. We message it according to the different channels, we try to prove out confidence in it. Is it successful in the ways that we want it to be? Whether that’s through the sales reps, through pitch decks, through outbound emails, through Google ads. Ultimately we just learn more, iterate and it just becomes a really nice self fulfilling prophecy. As we get smarter, we get more focused and we get more confident about what we’re doing.

Should you frame customer interviews with assumptions?

Often you’ll start the conversation with something in mind.

The last part of the interview is going to be validating your product. So you’re going to give them a really quick detailed description, and then ask them “what do you think of that? How do you think you would benefit?”

Often you’ll start these conversations and as you learn more about who they are, what’s going on in their life, you will often see a light bulb switch on in your mind, where you slightly twist the description that you’re going to give of your product in a way that opens it up, that is different from what you had originally. And that’s really interesting. We’re start to see how people doing the interview react slightly to what we’re hearing from customers.

And when that happens, it’s actually better than having a really strict and discrete description. Because again, we’re trying to learn, we’re trying to find the edges of what our positioning should be. And that’s really interesting to see happen.

What type of customers should you speak to in the positioning process?

I usually rely on best-fit customers. Again, this is an assumption and there are different ways to look at it.

Best fit for your business might be the ones that deliver the most revenue. Or it might be the customers that are the most evangelistic about what you’re doing, or the customers that have the best product/market fit with today.It really depends on the stage of your business, and what you think you need next — that can be difficult to determine.

But you don’t just want to speak with happy customers, because they’re only going to tell you what you wants hear. So you want to try and understand from customers from across the spectrum really.

But the most important thing I would recommend is to look outside of your customer base. To speak to people in the market. Purely because if you think about the average website conversion, you’re probably only getting 2% or 3% of visitors to your website that convert to leads. That means you’re missing out on 97% of people that came to your website who weren’t interested enough.

And so by really learning from those top of funnel, potential prospects and customers, that’s where you can start to understand where are the edges of my customer base or my ideal customers? Is there more we can do to expand that pool, or maybe we need to be more focused on excluding some potential customers as well?

Who should be involved in the positioning process?

I found that it works best with five or six people maximum. The reason we want more than just two or three is because some of the work we’re going to do is about looking for patterns. And so we want to split up groups so that they can do effectively half the work each, and then review what the other has done to check for mistakes.So there’s a logistics piece in there.

But also by involving people from the marketing team from sales, from customer success, usually someone from product… I also think is important for CEOs to be involved in this process as well, because ultimately positioning is a representation or even a driver of your business strategy. It’s really cool to get that in that kind of opinion into the room, but also make sure that executive level people are exposed to the insights that are coming from customers.

How do you test positioning?

So it really depends on what the company wants to achieve. Some companies will just be like, okay, we need new positioning: we need to get something out there because we know what we have today doesn’t work.

And that will be really quite simple because it’s just going to be shared among internal people. Do we feel confident that this positioning is better than what we have today? Yes or no? We build up from there, we start to iterate and then launch externally.

The other part is when we are maybe taking in a different angle, we’re trying to test it a bit more slowly. There’s a bit more risk involved. That’s when we need to try and break it down into “what are the things that we expect positioning to do for us?”. So it can’t just be a blanket catch-all, “let’s put it out there, see how it performs”. It can’t just be something that is done super discreetly.

It needs to be something where you’re going to get confidence that it’s doing the job it’s meant to do. You think about software development testing. They will have an alpha process where it’s done internally. They’ll have a beta process where they are testing it with a small number of customers.

So that could be I want a couple of people to pick this up entirely, use it in pitches and see how it works. We’ll give them a couple of weeks to see that process run through. Or with our marketing team, can we set up some campaigns, some Google ads or some social campaigns, for example, that rely on this new messaging to see how it performs.

One of the things I think is really interesting is when you can do all this cross functionally, So in my experience, what we’ve done is pulled together a tiger team: a really cross-functional group of five or six people from different teams, give them this messaging, this new positioning and say “hey, go and put this into action with this group of customers, and over five or six weeks, you will have much more information as to how it needs to improve, what works and what doesn’t work, and what you need to do to build more confidence in that.

Positioning isn’t going to be something that you set and forget, it’s something that needs to be visited over and over again. We’re never going to have a hundred percent confidence that positioning is good, or better, or works: it’s just something we’re putting out into the world, building our confidence in over time.

How do you activate positioning in your business?

So let’s imagine that you have done with the testing and you’re really happy with it. Now we’re going to present it to the rest of the business and say, “hey, get on with it”. The worst thing you can do is do an all-hands presentation and expect people to use it.It’s not going to happen, not going to work well at all.

The activation of positioning has a couple of different levels. The core piece should be about making your customer’s lives real in the minds of your sales reps and the rest of your team. So you really have to bring the customer to life.

Literally, if you can, do interviews, do all-hands interviews with customers, interview them, do podcasts, internal podcasts, anything you can do to help the rest of the team, understand who the customer is, what’s going on in their lives, what they care about. That’s really key because otherwise they’re not going to have anything to ground the value that you’re delivering on later, it’s just all a little bit too abstract for them.

So if we have actually done that piece, and that takes time, if we’re starting to make our customer’s experiences real for our team, then we can train out the positioning and messaging. We can do the decks and the templates and all of this kind of stuff. And it’s much stronger, because it’s connected to really core piece of empathy for our customers.

And that way people won’t just repeat it, it won’t just be parroted like the standard positioning statement is. But it’s something that people can connect to and it’s something that they will embody and have more confidence in themselves, and that’s going to help them tell the story better.

How should you position against a sea of alternatives?

Firstly, I think it’s more important to use the phrase alternative solutions than competitors, because if you ask your customers or potential customers how they are achieving a piece of value, they will tell you… If you asked 10 people, half of them will tell you they don’t do that at all. Or they’ve got somebody they pay to do that. They’ve got an agency or a freelancer. Maybe one or two people will tell you they using software to do that. There’s a whole world of other ways people are trying to achieve the same value.

So if we’re looking at that purely on a software-to-software comparative level, we’re not really going to understand, the real ultimate thing a customer is trying to achieve. Often there will be one or two, maybe three or four competitors that have really similar things. Yeah. The only thing I’ve seen successfully done is by focusing the customer segment deeper nicher become more narrow, because that way you’re not just going to have one small differentiator, you’re going to have the differentiator for this customer, and that is going to set you apart. April Dunford calls it being a big fish in a small pond.

That works really, well. And it also, again, gives you a bit more of a strategy. If you are struggling to compete against one competitor, try and niche away, angle away from the same market. And you will see that not only you’re going to win more deals, you’re going to see more momentum in this whole process as well, because they are seeing much more of their own jobs, pains, gains, and triggers represented in the way you’re going to market.

What are the telltale signs that show a repositioning is required?

The biggest signs I’ve seen are the ones that are qualitative, like feedback from sales reps. And it’s tricky, because sales reps act at very one-to-one level: everything is about this next deal or this deal.

So the role of product marketers in this is to actually try and understand from qualitative interviews, with sales reps, what’s not working and then try and look for the patterns that exist within those.

That, I think is probably the best way to find out there’s actually an issue with core positioning. And sometimes it’s going to be a small thing, it’s maybe not the right frame of reference for example.

Other times, you’ll just have a lot of things that you need to redo completely. You don’t know who you are, what you’re doing, why for some customers should choose you.

I do positioning consulting with other companies as well, and I think the number one reason people come to me is because they have 10 sales reps, and every sales rep tells a different story when they get on the phone to somebody. There’s no consistency in that messaging and that narrative and that’s going to make your product weaker. It’s not going to instill the same values in your customers. And that’s really important: the consistent narrative, consistent go-to market story is really really key.

What should product marketers know about positioning?

I think to get a really solid foundation of positioning, product marketers should really double down on the way they connect data and insights from customers to business challenges they are seeing.

We’re trying to get… almost like intuition when you’re talking to customers, like, oh, okay, yeah, I think this might be a thing. And sometimes we would just let it go.

But otherwise, a lot of times you say, actually, this might be impacting this metric over there.

Because positioning is part of the whole go-to-market system. Sometimes it’s a bit too fluffy and intangible, but again, to understand how positioning impacts business metrics I think is really, really core.

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My first real job in marketing began with a data entry gig as part of an internship: sorting out Excel lists of leads, importing and de-duplicating into a CRM. What was expected to take two weeks took two days instead. So I broadened out: writing some blog posts, tweeting, and playing around with the website. I was employee number four

Fast forward 10 months, and I’d been working with them throughout my last year of university, and fell nicely into a full-time position in the now-10 people startup. We were PredictiveIntent: a flexible recommendation platform, first developed for mobile network operator media portals (remember those?).

Our audience then? Anything, and anyone. The sales team (the CEO and one sales rep) were trying to nail down any opportunity, any pilot, any conversation they could. Funded with an initial $2m seed – in traction-based tranches – meant incentives were mismatched with the expected progress, and so the behavior was rewarded.

The most consistent interest we’d seen was from the eCommerce world. Retailers wanted to increase average order values, increase conversion rates, and deliver a more relevant experience (on the expectation it would grow loyalty and revenue).

In this post, I’m going to cover the three elements we used to focus our efforts to build traction, turn an API platform into something tangible, and join a mutually-rewarding ecosystem… and how these three steps took us to an acquisition within 13 months.

Niching down in action

We were trying to sell our technology: an ultra-configurable recommendation and personalization platform that used a number of different algorithms to determine the best content to put in front of a user, based on what they were doing, what they had done, and what was known about them.

The co-founders had come from the mobile world, developing and selling mobile internet technology to network operators. But timing – namely the rapid growth of internet-enabled 3G phones – meant their problems dissipated over night. Without a coordinated strategy, they’d succumbed to a common mistake – trying to sell something to anyone. This meant our messages were broad, and confusing. Marketing activity was disjointed. The engineering team had no focus.

A few months into my internship, whilst I was working part-time, I’d began a more coordinated marketing and sales approach for the eCommerce industry, and we’d scored our first customer – an online Christian bookstore from the Midwest.

This was enough validation for us to narrow and niche. We restructured our website to speak the customer’s language and began to focus solely on solving an online retailer’s central problems: growing revenue, and saving on costs.

With a narrower value proposition, we tried multiple ways to sell the product. At its core, it was an API that required developer integration and quite a lot of setup. At the time – early 10’s – most retailers would have a Head of eCommerce, a business buyer that wasn’t technical. Any technical slides were an instant put-off.

So we changed the way we described the product to a core and components, delivered in combination in plans. We offered PersonalMerchant (simple, structured, with as little integration as possible) and PersonalMerchant Pro (requiring heavy custom integration and setup). The top plan acted as an anchor, pushing most prospects towards the main plan.

By naming and defining the plans, we made an intangible API platform into a real thing, a package that a non-technical buyer could understand and purchase.

Making it tangible

Even with a slimmed down proposition, we were struggling to get real traction: a plethora of closed-wall eCommerce platforms available meant every customer was using something different – or worse, their own.

At the same time, we started talking to our first customer on the Magento platform. Back then it was an independent company, one of the first platforms to follow the commercial open-source model. They offered the core for free which anyone could use, and they charged extra for a Pro platform with extra features and support.

Magento had built the first app store for eCommerce platforms, Magento Connect. Anyone could create a plugin and market it via the marketplace with direct installation to a self-hosted Magento instance.

I remember checking Google Trends for the Magento search term, a steady upward trajectory. Within a few weeks, I’d suggested and fought for us to prioritise an integration, targeting a quicker time-to-close and improving our deal velocity with a more focused ideal customer profile.

And it worked. Being able to claim (and prove) installation in under 60 minutes was a godsend for proof-of-concept trials, whilst we worked on building a strong business case for our $50,000 annual contract value target.

Focusing on one platform and creating an integration that we could literally give away for free was driving deals, and traction was building.

At the same time, Magento were building out their partner network, with one person on the ground in Europe. So we jumped straight in. We signed up for their top-tier paid partner program, which gave us the opportunity to train their account managers, get better visibility on the marketplace, and take part in co-marketing activities.

Growing in an ecosystem

A rising tide lifts all boats: Magento was booming. Conferences in Las Vegas has grown from a few hundred people to 10,000. A community of developers, agencies, software providers, and retailers all connected, eager to learn and advance together. So we went all in.

We dug deeper into the Magento world, looking for tech agencies that had top-tier classes and building joint propositions together. We took control of usual partner relationship mechanics, and flipped it to work in our advantage.

During the sales process, a client would introduce us to their eCommerce agency to scope out the technical integration. At this point, we would also start partner conversations and invite them to become ‘certified’, allowing them to re-sell the integration they were going to build anyway, and profit from a partner margin.

We did this for every third-party we came into contact with, and created a certified partner program complete with sales training, collateral, co-marketing events, and of course, generous margins for them. We transformed traditionally intangible partner relationships into a tangible program.

We specialized in the pincer-sale – approaching the customer direct, and orchestrating partner activity to drive engagement and ultimately contracts.

We started saying no to non-Magento deals – one-off integrations weren’t worth our time anymore. We removed the other integration platforms from our website. We had truly found product-market fit with a targeted, growing market.

Marketing agencies would recommend us, and they would manage the process. The same with conversion rate optimization consultants, email providers, and more. We were relatively well-known in the industry, despite having less than 20 employees based in two rooms in a co-working space on the south-coast of England.

Bringing it all together

We were not alone – many other software providers were trying to do the same. One of those companies was Emailvision, a French email marketing platform that was growing fast.

Within 6 months of an introduction, Emailvision had acquired PredictiveIntent, using the technology to create a unified eCommerce marketing platform with personalization and recommendation technology at the core, using the partner network we had created as a core sales channel, and using the Magento integration as a core driver of sales and marketing.

In this post, I hope you can see how three important principles – niche focus, making the intangible tangible, and utilising ecosystems – lead us from unfocused with no traction, to high-growth and eventual acquisition.

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I read Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate by George Lakoff, a renowned linguist – and I think it’s a must-read for anyone who works on positioning and messaging for their business.

With decades of experience, Lakoff writes about the US GOP party and their messaging machine — or rather, the foundational cognitive functions they understand to help them build awareness, influence political discourse, and own the narrative.

In SaaS, we can apply many of the same concepts to how we think about our positioning and messaging to drive awareness and influence, define categories, and build narratives.

Without plagiarizing too much, here’s a summary that may help you take your positioning and messaging to the next level.

It’s all about the framing

Frames are “mental structures that shape the way we see the world”. These are built-in, default concepts that guide our psyche and our understanding of life and the universe.

Frames already exist in your customers mind — influenced by their peers, the media, education, and more.

A frame might be a customer’s view of their problem, and the solution they think they need. It might be their opinion of a particular piece of software or brand. It might even be their interpretation of their problem.

Frames are hard to build from scratch, although they can be broken down and rebuilt piece-by-piece.

Frames need to exist to be activated

One of the core concepts is that frames must pre-exist in order to be understood.

Many, many SaaS companies are currently contemplating whether to name a category, or align with another. Popularised by Play Bigger, to differentiate you need to distinguish your proposition away from the competitors by creating a new category.

However some folks have taken this to new, weird, and almost unrecognisable heights. Odd naming that doesn’t quite stick, tangential application of concepts from other industries, and too much verbatim HiPPO (the highest paid person’s opinion) language.

One of my favorite quotes on category creation is from Andy Raskin:

Unless the core concept of the category can resonate that well, it’s unlikely to hit the mark. (See the difference between Drift’s former ‘Conversational Marketing’ category and their new ‘Revenue Acceleration’ category, in my opinion at least!).

Similarly in sales, we want to pitch and have prospects nod their head and agree with everything we say – not scratch their head in confusion, overloaded with cognitive effort.

Repetition works

Lakoff says that repetition is key, broadcasting a message until it becomes an unconsciously held belief.

When done well, category creation builds upon existing concepts and then activates them, bringing them into everyday public discourse. Of course, this is easier to do in our niche stakeholder audiences rather at national-scale political messaging.

Everything you put out into the world should cite the same core concept over and over again. It should build the frame in the mind of your audience piece-by-piece, strengthening the neural networks and priming their subconscious for your approach.

Frame your features

Lakoff uses the ‘tax relief’ framing as an example of understanding a core belief (taxes should be lower) and building the surrounding frame (‘relief’ meaning to release burden).

And we can use the same concepts in the way we name product features. For example, ‘invoice generation’ is plain and straightforward; ‘invoice automation’ feels smart and helpful.

Build the messaging machine

One of the most interesting parts of the book that isn’t covered in detail is the huge messaging operation that sits behind the Republican party. It’s not just the politicians and the policywonks, but a coordinated army of researchers, theorists, intellectuals, training programs, media relations, pollsters, and more.

I think there’s a ton of opportunity to think about building a messaging machine in your business. It shouldn’t just be the product marketing or marketing team who own, test, and iterate on messaging; every team should be brought into the process with a common goal in mind.

• Every team should be trained on the messaging, from the theory to the execution
• There should be clear learning and validation goals to help iterate successfully
• Feedback loops should be obvious and well-managed, to quickly pass learnings from the frontline back to the intelligence center

The book is highly recommended for anyone in the messaging and positioning realm. Buy it, and let me know what you think!

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Positioning can be neglected for a whole number of reasons. Usually, speed of execution throws out any plans for a structured approach to positioning. Shortcuts become common.

New messages, new themes, new features and benefits, new narratives are lackadaisically attached to your messaging without coherent care and attention. “It does the job,” you think. “It won’t be there forever. We’ll revisit it soon.”

But that never happens. The chances of revisiting fades. The messaging just becomes baked in, part of the furniture. Everyone accepts it. Where did it come from? Nobody knows for certain – but everyone uses it, so it must be great.

The slippery slope

Just like a neglected property, everything might look fine on the outside… but inside it’s rotten.

And just like rot, neglected positioning starts to infect everything else too.

New upcoming features are treated the same: a bit of wordsmithing, run it past the boss – and click, it’s on the website.

“Wordsmithing” loses any creativity. It now means “look at a thesaurus and use a synonym”.

“Value” is forgotten. Faster, easier, simpler, time-saving, more efficient, more flexible, the first, the only, best-in-class, modern, all-in-one.

First-order thinking wins. Do this, get that: use our new feature to save time on process.

When was the last time anyone spoke to a customer or prospect that wasn’t on a sales call? Nobody knows.

When this kind of thing happens, it won’t be obvious. It will show up in many different ways. Death by a thousand cuts.

Slower sales cycles. Unmotivated prospects. Falling conversion rates. Tyre-kickers. Team attrition. A big push on sales comp plans and spiffs to grow the pipeline: “the top rep gets a Ferrari”.

Inertia sets in.

Test your confidence

Positioning is a really crucial step to consider thoughtfully in everything you do – whether that’s release a new product, change pricing, make platform updates, or even communicate failures.

Sometimes, you’ll want to run a full positioning project: segmentation, research, value messaging.

Sometimes, you don’t have the time or the need to run a full project. You can get by with a few casual conversations, or a quick email to a friendly customer. Maybe you have solid internal customer-representation from sales, customer success, and product marketing colleagues.

In these situations, measure your confidence.

Are you feeling comfortable and confident that the positioning you’re about to use will hit the mark? Is it resilient and based on evidence?

Or perhaps you’re not feeling sure: the positioning has been developed within your team without any other internal validation. Or it’s really important to get it right, so you need more eyes on it.

Whatever you do, don’t neglect positioning

Be mindful of the positioning messages that you’re creating and putting out into the world.

• Do they fit well, or does it feel discombobulated?

• Are they based on evidence, or are they assumptions?

• Were they developed with care and attention, or were they an afterthought?

Neglected positioning will pull you down and prevent you from making real progress. And as regular readers will know, momentum is the output of focus and confidence.

Can you improve focus (by reducing breadth and increasing clarity) and build confidence (through measurement, testing, and iteration) in your positioning?

Here’s hoping.

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As a product marketer, I think we have an innate skill that many other teams don’t.

It’s our ability to connect the dots between all of the different inputs we deal with, and predict outcomes in our GTM systems.

Every day, we’re exposed to customers and their feedback, competitors, market trends, product features, product vision, processes, executional issues, business directives, and much more.

We subconsciously use these inputs to make multiple decisions every day, from the language we use in messaging, to the pricing strategies we recommend. Even more subconsciously is our use of second-order thinking.

What is second-order thinking?

To explain second-order thinking, we need to understand first-order thinking.

First-order thinking is simplistic; it’s the immediate impact and consequences of a decision. A problem exists, and a resolution is made. Let’s imagine that prospect feedback suggests pricing is too expensive; first-order thinking would be to make this cheaper.

Second-order — and even third-order — thinking requires ‘and then what?’ consideration. Your actions have consequences and implications.

Are those implications positive, or negative? Do they cause net harm?

In our expensive pricing example, first-order thinking is to reduce the price. Second-order thinking would be to examine the impact that a lower price might have on the business and it’s operations. Those effects might include:

• A reduction in perceived brand quality, which in turn reduces new business sales and increases churn

• Acquiring the wrong type of customers, which changes product vision

• Building a low-margin business, which will have knock-on effects across every team

Second-order thinking in action

Positioning is a great example of how we use second-order thinking every day, unaware.

When we review customer insights, identify customer value, and build messaging maps, we consider what the impact the values and language we use mean to our customers and our business.

First-order thinking might position a business as ‘something for everyone’ to maximize sales – and if you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that’s a fallacy and something to avoid.

Second-order thinking would look at how messaging should disqualify certain types of customers, and only appeal to the target segment. This has positive impacts on sales and marketing efficiencies, brand perception, and focuses the business on a specific ideal customer profile.

Proactively communicate second-order impacts

Whilst PMMs may use strategic thinking like this every day, many other teams are so focused in their executional work that they don’t have the cognitive space to think forward.

That means that all good-intentioned, smart work can quickly become a point of contention because the tradeoffs and positive impacts aren’t communicated effectively.

In our expensive pricing example, it’s likely that sales teams will advocate for lower pricing in response to customer feedback. If the decision was made to stick with current pricing, or even increase, the backlash would be visceral. But communicating the impact that price reductions would have, and what the impact of same/higher pricing will be, will help assuage concerns and manage expectations.

It’s important to apply second-order thinking to the second-order work you’re doing. What is the implication of this work for our teams, how will they respond? How can we create enough mutual understanding of the ‘decisionscape’ and help people see why decisions were made a certain way?

Aside: ‘decisionscape’ feels like a cool concept that I’m surprised doesn’t exist yet.

The decisionscape is the landscape of the decision – the inputs used, the process followed, the implications that arise, and the outcomes that are actioned. Ideally teams should see the clear path that was followed, the forks in the road mapped out, and how the decision leads to an optimal destination.

We do this by communicating the implications, being transparent, acknowledging the inputs and gaps, being clear on the asks, and creating a plan with our teams to build confidence in the strategy and execution.

Because focus — clarity, on the decisions we are making and why — and confidence equals momentum.

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The post Applying second-order thinking in go-to-market strategy appeared first on Building Momentum.

“I’m sorry to tell you that this is not your average course. If you’re expecting to party first, socialise second, and study third, you can leave the room right now, walk down to the office, and change course right now.”

That was Elsbeth, a steely Canadian advertising-exec-turned-course-leader. Day one, first sentence of the introduction session for our Advertising and Marketing Communications course.

The next three years saw us thrown headfirst into the theory and application of the core concepts of advertising. We began the course, expecting to become strategists, planners, account directions and creative directors at Europe’s top ad agencies. Our lecturers included everyone from academic experts on consumer behavior and analysis, to award-winning creative directors, to sharp strategy planners like Elsbeth.

I started university with the goal of beginning a career in public sector advertising. After a second-year internship, I’d been won over by the opportunity in B2B tech marketing, and started applying what I’d learnt to what was a cliche, dull and dreary.

Now 10 years later, I’ve been reflecting on the key things that advertising school taught me about marketing – and thought I’d share them here with you.

1. Marketing/advertising should drive behavior change

Marketing isn’t just about improving the brand, supporting sales, or generating unengaged leads. We need to go further and encourage behaviour change.

That might be an awareness change, like becoming someone’s source of industry news – one-time website visitors are vanity, but repeat visitors are a sign of behavior change. Or, it might be a purchase change; someone buying your product instead of something else.

A focus on improving brand perception by itself is relatively worthless if it doesn’t translate to changed behavior.

2. Use unconventional wisdom

I’ve written before about unconventional wisdom in narratives. Some of the most memorable and timeless advertising campaigns are driven by unconventional insights into the product and it’s manufacturing process.

While these examples are from older FMCG ads, there are still plenty of modern examples.

In B2B positioning, for example, we see brands build upon their support and account management, or focused on their people and their passion behind the industry. What can you tell your audience about the way you build your product and your insight into their challenges?

3. Use customer insights

One of the stories I remember from Elsbeth, the Canadian advertising lecturer, was from a product she worked on. A type of lemon-flavored butter to be used on chicken and turkey was marketed as an ingredient. As time passed, the team realized sales were growing in the hot summer months – unexpected, as sales normally peaked in the holiday period winter season.

After carrying out customer interviews, the team found that customers were buying it not for food, but for scenting their refrigerators to remove bad smells. After a quick repackaging, the business now had a second product line in an entirely new category to grow completely new purchase opportunities from, without cannibalizing their existing product category sales.

One of the biggest things I learnt was that qualitative research should be carried out first in almost every situation to understand the parameters and thought processes involved – assessing the ‘breadth’ first. Only then should qualitative surveys be used to measure the ‘depth’ and understand where patterns did, or didn’t exist.

4. Creative only works if combined with effective strategy

In line with lesson number 1 above, it’s pointless having excellent creative if it isn’t planned with an aligned strategy.

The best ad that the target market never sees is the worst ad that exists. The best placement with the worst creative that everyone sees is the biggest failure.

No matter if you’ve developed excellent campaign concepts or positioning or narratives, you need the aligning actions and tactics to make it successful.

One of my ex-creative director lecturers once remarked that creative advertising awards exist solely because otherwise, those ideas would never see light of day. While there is unlimited creative opportunity, it’s very rare that that creative is aligned to an effective strategy. Don’t make that mistake.

5. Don’t forget placement and distribution

What’s the fourth P of marketing? Product, price, promotion, and… ?

Place. It’s even in the heading there.

In traditional advertising, this might refer to anything from product availability (i.e. being in stock and available to purchase) and product placement (being on the right shelf in the supermarket), to ad placement (ads being in the right location for the target audience).

In B2B, I usually think of placement as marketing and sales distribution. How visible is our marketing promotion and sales visibility in the market? Are we being seen in the right places, is our sales process up to scratch, and are we reaching the right people?