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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

That’s where the Positioning Loop comes in.

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

The Positioning Loop has three phases:

• Get clarity
• Build conviction
• Be consistent

Here’s how to actually do it.

Get clarity

This is where most get stuck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Build conviction

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

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

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

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

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

How to help conviction stick:

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

You earn conviction; it can’t be enforced. 

Be consistent

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

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

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

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

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

Psst… it’s a loop, remember?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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?

The post Weak screenshots undercut your story appeared first on Building Momentum.

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.

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.

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

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

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

The many faces of product marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understand the customer…

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

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

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

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

… then build collaborative loops internally…

Here’s an unfortunate hard truth.

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

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

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

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

…before bringing the product to market.

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

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

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

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

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

PMM is the chameleon of marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lack of structured feedback process

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

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

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

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

Here’s what I’d recommend:

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

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

Remember, PMF is iterative

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

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

Good luck!

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

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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.

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Do we all know what tech debt means?

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

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

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

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

Different types of positioning debt

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

Credit cards: Positioning to win a deal

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

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

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

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

Loans: Positioning for every campaign

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mortgages: Hasty repositioning projects

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

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

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

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

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

Avoiding positioning debt

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

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

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

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

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

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I’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.

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The post Why positioning projects fail appeared first on Building Momentum.

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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I’ve recently moved to a new house, and had to buy a ton of new furniture and home stuff.

New bed, new sofa, a vacuum cleaner, and so much more.

I’m also looking to buy a new clothes airer.

You might think it’s a pretty simple thing to buy. They’re all pretty much the same style, they do the same job, and besides, it’s only a small thing to use a few times a week.

But in my mind, when I was browsing around looking to buy, my criteria expanded.

Not only was I looking for a clothes airer that:

1. Had enough space for a load of washing
2. Was easy to fold down and pack away

but also

3. Is well-designed, and would look good when in use

This surprised me. I didn’t recognise this in advance: I thought I just wanted a basic dryer, like the other millions in use around the world.

But when I was in buying mode, my evaluation criteria changed.

And did you notice what was missing from that list? Price. Whilst an outrageously expensive item would have been an instant ‘no’, it wasn’t an important aspect of the search.

So what does an extremely middle-class search for a random house object mean?

I think there are a few takeaways.

Firstly, desk research and interviews need to be supplemented with observational research. We’re human: our brains lie to us without us knowing. What we say might not be what we mean, and what we say might not be what we do.

Secondly, there are potential customers for everything, everywhere. From low-cost cheap and cheerful, to high-end boutique offerings of every item, every service. The only question is timing the market right.

And then pricing. A pricing consultant I once worked with told me:

“It’s not the price that people have an issue with; it’s what they understand they are – or are not – getting for that price.”

Chris Hopf

If someone put me to the test and asked me how much I’d spend on a well-designed clothes airer, I’d probably say £70 would be a bargain, and that £130 would be expensive but I’d still consider.

But luckily for me (and unluckily for retailers), the kind of items I’m looking at are priced anywhere from £30-60.

If I had to bet, retailers looked at their costs and their margin and calculated a price that way. If they’d have done willingness-to-pay research instead, they’d be making up to 100% more on every sale.

So there you go. Some random takeaways from a rather mundane shopping search that might inspire you to reconsider how you carry out research, how you think about your customers and the market, and how you price.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Background: Why positioning needs more support

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download The Customer Value Positioning framework

Introducing my battle-tested positioning process

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

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

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

Let’s walk through the process.

Discover your buyer persona

Buyer personas are discovered, not created.

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

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

Then organize those themes into:

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

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

Describe the value your customers desire

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

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

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

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

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

Detail how your product helps

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

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

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

Define your positioning

Start at the bottom.

Frame of reference

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

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

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

Alternative solutions

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

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

Value statements

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

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

Website homepage hero

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

You’re going to write two things:

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

You can find some examples of good homepage messaging here.

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

Four steps to focused customer value positioning

In four stages, you’ve:

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

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

This process always results in successful positioning.

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

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

Frequently asked questions

Who should be involved in this process?

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

What customers should we talk to?

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

How long does this take?

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

Do we have to do research interviews?

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

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

Yes – book an intro call here.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Transcript

On the traditional positioning statement…

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

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

On my positioning process…

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

Get assumptions on paper first

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

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

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

Do customer research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Create personas

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

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

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

Extract customer value themes

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

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

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

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

Get creative

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we see how that goes.

Launch, test, iterate

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

Should you frame customer interviews with assumptions?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who should be involved in the positioning process?

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

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

How do you test positioning?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you activate positioning in your business?

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

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

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

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

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

How should you position against a sea of alternatives?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What should product marketers know about positioning?

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

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

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

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

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

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

My first real job in marketing began with a data entry gig as part of an internship: sorting out Excel lists of leads, importing and de-duplicating into a CRM. What was expected to take two weeks took two days instead. So I broadened out: writing some blog posts, tweeting, and playing around with the website. I was employee number four

Fast forward 10 months, and I’d been working with them throughout my last year of university, and fell nicely into a full-time position in the now-10 people startup. We were PredictiveIntent: a flexible recommendation platform, first developed for mobile network operator media portals (remember those?).

Our audience then? Anything, and anyone. The sales team (the CEO and one sales rep) were trying to nail down any opportunity, any pilot, any conversation they could. Funded with an initial $2m seed – in traction-based tranches – meant incentives were mismatched with the expected progress, and so the behavior was rewarded.

The most consistent interest we’d seen was from the eCommerce world. Retailers wanted to increase average order values, increase conversion rates, and deliver a more relevant experience (on the expectation it would grow loyalty and revenue).

In this post, I’m going to cover the three elements we used to focus our efforts to build traction, turn an API platform into something tangible, and join a mutually-rewarding ecosystem… and how these three steps took us to an acquisition within 13 months.

Niching down in action

We were trying to sell our technology: an ultra-configurable recommendation and personalization platform that used a number of different algorithms to determine the best content to put in front of a user, based on what they were doing, what they had done, and what was known about them.

The co-founders had come from the mobile world, developing and selling mobile internet technology to network operators. But timing – namely the rapid growth of internet-enabled 3G phones – meant their problems dissipated over night. Without a coordinated strategy, they’d succumbed to a common mistake – trying to sell something to anyone. This meant our messages were broad, and confusing. Marketing activity was disjointed. The engineering team had no focus.

A few months into my internship, whilst I was working part-time, I’d began a more coordinated marketing and sales approach for the eCommerce industry, and we’d scored our first customer – an online Christian bookstore from the Midwest.

This was enough validation for us to narrow and niche. We restructured our website to speak the customer’s language and began to focus solely on solving an online retailer’s central problems: growing revenue, and saving on costs.

With a narrower value proposition, we tried multiple ways to sell the product. At its core, it was an API that required developer integration and quite a lot of setup. At the time – early 10’s – most retailers would have a Head of eCommerce, a business buyer that wasn’t technical. Any technical slides were an instant put-off.

So we changed the way we described the product to a core and components, delivered in combination in plans. We offered PersonalMerchant (simple, structured, with as little integration as possible) and PersonalMerchant Pro (requiring heavy custom integration and setup). The top plan acted as an anchor, pushing most prospects towards the main plan.

By naming and defining the plans, we made an intangible API platform into a real thing, a package that a non-technical buyer could understand and purchase.

Making it tangible

Even with a slimmed down proposition, we were struggling to get real traction: a plethora of closed-wall eCommerce platforms available meant every customer was using something different – or worse, their own.

At the same time, we started talking to our first customer on the Magento platform. Back then it was an independent company, one of the first platforms to follow the commercial open-source model. They offered the core for free which anyone could use, and they charged extra for a Pro platform with extra features and support.

Magento had built the first app store for eCommerce platforms, Magento Connect. Anyone could create a plugin and market it via the marketplace with direct installation to a self-hosted Magento instance.

I remember checking Google Trends for the Magento search term, a steady upward trajectory. Within a few weeks, I’d suggested and fought for us to prioritise an integration, targeting a quicker time-to-close and improving our deal velocity with a more focused ideal customer profile.

And it worked. Being able to claim (and prove) installation in under 60 minutes was a godsend for proof-of-concept trials, whilst we worked on building a strong business case for our $50,000 annual contract value target.

Focusing on one platform and creating an integration that we could literally give away for free was driving deals, and traction was building.

At the same time, Magento were building out their partner network, with one person on the ground in Europe. So we jumped straight in. We signed up for their top-tier paid partner program, which gave us the opportunity to train their account managers, get better visibility on the marketplace, and take part in co-marketing activities.

Growing in an ecosystem

A rising tide lifts all boats: Magento was booming. Conferences in Las Vegas has grown from a few hundred people to 10,000. A community of developers, agencies, software providers, and retailers all connected, eager to learn and advance together. So we went all in.

We dug deeper into the Magento world, looking for tech agencies that had top-tier classes and building joint propositions together. We took control of usual partner relationship mechanics, and flipped it to work in our advantage.

During the sales process, a client would introduce us to their eCommerce agency to scope out the technical integration. At this point, we would also start partner conversations and invite them to become ‘certified’, allowing them to re-sell the integration they were going to build anyway, and profit from a partner margin.

We did this for every third-party we came into contact with, and created a certified partner program complete with sales training, collateral, co-marketing events, and of course, generous margins for them. We transformed traditionally intangible partner relationships into a tangible program.

We specialized in the pincer-sale – approaching the customer direct, and orchestrating partner activity to drive engagement and ultimately contracts.

We started saying no to non-Magento deals – one-off integrations weren’t worth our time anymore. We removed the other integration platforms from our website. We had truly found product-market fit with a targeted, growing market.

Marketing agencies would recommend us, and they would manage the process. The same with conversion rate optimization consultants, email providers, and more. We were relatively well-known in the industry, despite having less than 20 employees based in two rooms in a co-working space on the south-coast of England.

Bringing it all together

We were not alone – many other software providers were trying to do the same. One of those companies was Emailvision, a French email marketing platform that was growing fast.

Within 6 months of an introduction, Emailvision had acquired PredictiveIntent, using the technology to create a unified eCommerce marketing platform with personalization and recommendation technology at the core, using the partner network we had created as a core sales channel, and using the Magento integration as a core driver of sales and marketing.

In this post, I hope you can see how three important principles – niche focus, making the intangible tangible, and utilising ecosystems – lead us from unfocused with no traction, to high-growth and eventual acquisition.

The post Going to market via a platform ecosystem appeared first on Building Momentum.

One of my favorite Peloton instructors often talks about the concept of the shit shift.

It’s that moment when you’re in a run, or in a hard climb on the bike, or a testing yoga position, and you’re asking your body to do something it’s not used to.

For the first few minutes of it, it feels like torture. Your amygdala hijacks your inner voice. The fight-or-flight response is activated.

“I could just give up now… what if I slow down? Today’s not a race day…”.

And then something magical happens.

But of course, it’s not magical. It’s not supernatural, nor forced, nor a conscious decision. Your body just… happens.

It ‘does’. It acclimates. It’s still hard… but you can cope. You’re not in a state of flow, but your body knows to keep pushing. The fight-or-flight feeling dissipates.

There’s more space in your head for your consciousness to be heard. You realize that you are doing. You are doing something that you were going to give up on.

With each step, each push, each breath, you become more confident. More determined.

The determination comes from deep in your chest. It’s aching and heaving and moving you forward.

You have momentum, and you’re not stopping anytime soon.

I think the shit shift is an interesting analogy for the work we do in B2B SaaS, product marketing, sales… and why I talk about the need to build confidence in your positioning, messaging, go-to-market.

Without confidence – a belief you have faith in – it’s much easier to give up and give in. But there’s no ape brain sending fight-or-flight signals – it’s all conscious thought processing, which makes it feel 10x worse.

Confidence is not just sales or revenue. It’s positive reactions to marketing content. It’s the conversation where a prospect repeats your messaging back to you. It’s the CEO praising your team’s execution. It’s customer emails with happy quotes.

In early stage startups, confidence can be a hard thing to come across. The challenge of failing to find product/market fit, or a final ‘no’ to your biggest deal can kill confidence.

But… can you position the process as a shit shift?

Where the work is still hard and you may be teetering on the edge of success or failure, but the work is happening.

Where there is space for the conscience to be heard. This is the need for both definitions of focus: reduced priorities, maximum clarity.

Where each step, each push, builds confidence.

Focus plus confidence equals momentum.

Thanks for reading this slightly different post from me! 

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What makes you different compared to competitors?

You’ve probably been asked this question before, and answered with something similar to the below:

• Our product is our differentiator.

• No, actually, our people are our competitive differentiation.

• Our pricing: economies of scale make us cheaper whilst providing the same service.

• Customers love our design-led ethos, that makes us stand out.

But, is it really?

If you workshopped your competitive differentiator internally, relied on biased interpretations of competitor strengths and weaknesses from your team, then… honestly? I’d say you don’t know the real answer.

What is a differentiator?

Definition: something that enables a difference or distinction to be made.

In the context of B2B SaaS, a differentiator is an element of your product, service, worldview, or other method that positions you away from competitors in some aspect.

Often, marketers and founders early in the journey will rely on objective differentiation: the product, the service, the performance, the economic value – or my pet peeve, configurability.

Standout SaaS companies, especially those that grow faster, understand earlier on that what makes them distinct is not something that can be shown or demonstrated or modelled – but it’s something the customer can believe in… something they can buy into.

Think about category creation – it’s not about naming a new type of product, but about naming a new game people are playing.

The B2B Elements of Value Pyramid

This diagram, created by Bain, extends Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to order the motivations of B2B buyers. Read more about the pyramid here.

The base begins with table stake, basic requirements, and functional value like the product or the price.

As we go up the pyramid, elements of value become less tangible and more about the implication of using the product – first within the organization, then what matters to the individual buyer.

The pyramid tops out with purpose – hope, vision, and social responsibility. Here, differentiators aim to align the vendor with the buyer’s cultural and ethical worldview.

Think about some SaaS products you know. Take Drift:

• Yes, there is functional product value.

• The product delivers high impact implications to the organizations.

• It allows individual buyers to signal their innovation and become more marketable themselves in the job market.

• They build community and a category through their vision of transforming the way companies connect with their customers.

• They offer a bright spark of hope in an otherwise grey sea of same-same, from their tone of voice to their visual brand to their events to their product launches.

Discovering your differentiators

Notice I said discover your differentiators, not define them.

Many marketers I know don’t know about the different elements of value above and therefore struggle to determine what their competitive differentiators might be.

But they’re also usually looking inward to find the answers.

NIHITO: Nothing Important Happens In The Office – Pragmatic Marketing

The best way to understand why you are different in the market is to look to your customers and others in the market.

Follow the questions in my customer development framework, and ask them to your customers, friendly experts, and non-affiliated other buyers in the market. Ask your competitor’s customers too.

From here, you’ll be able to define your personas: their jobs, pains, gains, and triggers. This forms the basis of the value your customers desire. From there, discovering your differentiators is simple. What value are your customers wanting that they can’t get elsewhere?

Maybe they are super price sensitive, so price is a distinction – or your product is a 100% fit for their needs.

But it’s more likely that you’ll best differentiate when you can meet higher-level needs as well. Help an organization deliver on qualitative goals. Allow the buyer to become more marketable. Set a vision that buyers can literally buy into.

And there will be more than one differentiator, more than one element of value that you’re meeting. See the Drift example above. So make sure to prioritize them in a way that aligns with your persona’s triggers, their motivations for searching, switching, or buying.

As an example, at Headstart our personas were radically progressive, so we prioritized our ethos and vision. We still promoted the economic benefits and savings, but led with the heart, and followed with the brain.

What’s your competitive differentiator?

Next time, don’t just wing it. Look to your customers and prospects to understand why you matter to them.

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

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But I think those reasons are manifestations of misconceptions.

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

What’s value?

Value can be determined with three different questions:

1. Is it an important enough priority?

2. Is it worth the effort?

3. Will it be useful?

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

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

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

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

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

Overcoming objections in the buyer journey

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

Preparation is key

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

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

• What are their priorities?

• What are their options?

• How will we perform against our competitors?

• What is their competition doing?

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

• What is the cost of inaction?

• What is the cost of change?

• What are the upsides and benefits to be realized?

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

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

1. Feel, felt, found

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

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

Usage:

• I understand how you feel.

• I / others have also felt this way.

• However, I / others found that…

2. Priorities

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

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

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

Usage:

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

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

3. Clarify and question

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

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

Usage:

• Can you explain the features you feel are missing?

• How would you use this feature?

• How do you achieve this today?

• What’s the benefit of that?

• How do you achieve the same outcome today?

• What’s the driving force behind this requirement?

• Is this feature a deal breaker?

4. Justification

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

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

Usage:

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

5. Proactive

Goal: pre-empt objections and face them head on

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

Usage:

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

Moving beyond objections

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

1. What do you think of that?

2. How does that sound?

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

4. Is this a blocker?

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

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

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

Focus tightly, test your confidence, and build momentum.

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When was the last time you saw a sales product demo that not only informed you, but actually got you excited? Where you couldn’t wait to get your hands on it, explore it, and put it to good use?

Usually we join a 30 minute Zoom call with an AE. They talk passionately over some positioning slides before opening up the product demo. Cue: an explanation of every every button, every form field, and every screen.

But that’s pretty unhelpful. If we’re early in the process, the prospect is going to be overwhelmed. If we’re later in the process then a demo is too little, too late.

A good sales demonstration, early in the sales process, is not a walkthrough. It’s to demonstrate how your product solves the prospect’s problem, to substantiate your product’s value, and build momentum.

Four signs your product demo could be better… and how to counter them.

1. Most sentences start with ‘This button…’

You showcase your product by explaining every feature, button-by-button and click-by-click.

Is it necessary to explain “this button opens this form up in a new window”? Or that the user can “click here to see more details”?

You’re probably attempting to show configuration and optionality… but this is hedging your bets. You need to show the definitive solution your customers will use to solve their problem. Otherwise, you’ll overload prospects with minor details that have no bearing in their purchase decision.

You might be attempting to justify a high price point by demonstrating comprehensiveness. “We’re worth the price because you’re getting all this!” Instead, it devalues and commodifies your product down to a number of buttons

The more you explain your product, the less people will want to hear about it.

Instead…

Structure your demo around value nuggets to ladder each feature up to the value you provide. Make sure every feature you mentioned deserves precious airtime.

2. You show the administration area

Generally, I don’t believe that any sales demo should show the admin area. They’re often ugly, complex, and full of settings. Settings raise questions… and questions lead to objections.

This depends on a number of factors:

• Where the demo is in the process

• Whether your product is positioned with configuration as a core value

• Whether you’re demoing to an admin user rather than a buyer or champion.

Showing the admin area will prompt questions like “Can it do X? How do we do Y?”, which will slow your process down.

Instead…

Understand who the demo is for and where it fits into their buying journey. You’ll then be able to pre-empt questions that will arise and tackle them head on.

Try to avoid broadening the goalposts in the early stages of the sales process. Your product solves a discrete problem and it provides many benefits around that. Later on, you can tackle the broader applications and how to make it happen.

3. You’re talking in hypotheticals

The demo has to ground the product in your customer’s world. They have to understand what working in the product will be like.

But so many demos will talk through the product in hypotheticals.

• “So if you wanted to do X, you’ll click here and do that.”

• “You could do Y, if you wanted to.”

These are prime opportunities to build confidence and show you believe in how your product solves problems. Instead, you’re introducing optionality and choice into the prospect’s consideration.

Instead…

Throw away that broad catch-all sales pitch and focus on solving specific pain points. Use what you know from the discovery process, and use relevant examples from other customers.

Think less fairytale, more documentary.

4. You talk too much about the how, not the outcome

The sales demo is to get your prospect excited about using your product. The product experience is part of the puzzle, but don’t forget: they have an acute problem to solve. And most problems have many solutions, so you need to hit the mark and make sure yours wins.

Using a sales demo to only explain how your product works is a missed opportunity to understand how to galvanize the deal:

• How do they prioritize the solutions you’re showing?

• What’s the most powerful thing you’ve showed them?

• How do they think your product would change their life or results?

A poor sales demo will also have an unhealthy listening-to-talking ratio. The sales demo is not just a stage in your process: it’s a tool to help both sides make progress.

Instead…

Link as much as you can back to the ultimate value your product is delivering and the problems you’re solving.

Construct the conversation around SPIN. Through questioning, build a story with the prospect that identifies the clear positive outcomes they want to achieve.

The sales demo is a key tool

It’s likely that your sales process will need a more in-depth opportunity for a user or technical evaluator to see the product. They’ll want to play around, ask questions, and see exactly how it feels to use. But that can come later in many formats, like:

• Interactive product walkthrough tools

• Demo account access

• Guided walkthrough sessions with pre-sales

• A sandbox

• Detailed how-to videos

But the sales demo has a special role in your buyer journey. It can motivate the prospect, generate insight for your rep, and help you build momentum.

Don’t use complex walkthroughs, insignificant details, hypothetical situations, or product-centric presentations. Make the most of it by positioning your product around your unique value, their problem, and how you’ll solve it.

I’m trying something new: What questions do you have about sales demos? Leave a comment with your questions and I’ll answer.

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Everyone knows the saying: “people don’t buy a drill, they buy a hole in the wall.”

And yeah, that’s true, but is it the full story? While making a decision to buy a drill, they also had to evaluate whether:

• They wanted a drill could be used anywhere, or only near a power outlet

• They wanted to save time and money by buying an all-in-one set, or if they wanted to buy drill bits separately

• Whether they wanted the confidence that the Black & Decker brand name stands for, or not

And we also need to consider why they want the hole in the wall. Is it to showcase family photographs in their living room, or to hang their bike up in the garage?

Every purchase decision that a consumer or business makes is based on their perception of the value it will deliver them. That perception is made up of the benefits they will achieve, and the features that they are delivered through.

In B2B SaaS, it’s not quite as simple. More often than not we sell to buying groups, made up of different stakeholders who all have their own perception of the value to be gained. They disagree on which features are a must-have, and whether a benefit is relevant for them or not.

This makes it really hard across sales and marketing to craft product positioning and messaging that works.

Marketing teams often want to focus on the aspirational value as a way to differentiate from competitors. But doing this without building on a solid feature/benefit foundation means messaging can feel fragile, soft, and fluffy.

On the other hand, sales reps think it will be easier to sell just on features alone. But without tying features to the tangible benefits and overall aspirational value, the product is perceived to be a commodity whilst deals don’t gain urgency, traction, or importance.

So what really is a value? What’s a benefit? Where do features fit in? How do we enable sales/marketing to use these in their messaging to drive momentum?

Introducing the value nugget

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

A value nugget is comprised of:

• A value: an attribute or state that the buyer hopes to attain. Examples might be “hire future leaders, faster”, “deliver repeatable results”, “workforce flexibility”, or “visibility into their processes”.

• One or more benefits: the advantage a buyer gets when using your product. It’s tangible – something they can report on, and starts with a verb. Examples might be ‘save time’, ‘increase customer satisfaction’, or ‘maximize time-to-value’.

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

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

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

For example, moving down by asking ‘how’:

• We help our clients hire the right candidates, faster (value)

• How? Clients can ensure candidates are a good cultural fit and have the right skills and attitude required for the role (benefit)

• How? Through our psychometric interview and report process (feature)

• How? Our customers see a 50% increase in employee performance (proof point)

And moving up, asking ‘why’:

• Our customers see a 50% increase in employee performance with our product (proof point)

• Why? By using our psychometric interview and report process (feature)

• Why? To ensure candidates are a good cultural fit and have the right skills and attitude required for the role (benefit)

• Why? So our clients can hire the right candidates, faster (value)

Using value nuggets in messaging and positioning

Based on your customer research, you’ll have discovered the top value that each persona aspires to achieve. These might also cross over multiple personas, which makes life a lot easier!

For each value, build out the nugget:

• The value theme: as condensed as possible into a word or short phrase

• A value statement: the phrasing you want to use every time

• Value bullets: combine benefits and features into single sentences (like ‘[benefit] with [feature]’) – you’ll have multiple value bullets

• A list of associated features and proof points

At the end of the process, you’ll have a persona with the top three values they want to achieve. You can describe how your product helps them achieve that, how it links to features, and how you’ve proven it.

Using value nuggets in marketing

One of the things I learnt from a failed product launch was messaging your product at the right level in the hierarchy. We launched with aspirational, value-heavy messages that bombed with the champions in our sales process, who wanted to see more tangible benefits instead.

From your customer development and buyer journey research, you’ll hopefully understand what each persona wants to know and needs to understand at various points in the buying process. This should help decide the right way to execute your messaging.

Generally:

• Execs will want to focus on the value

• Champions will focus on the benefits

• Evaluators will focus on the features

Using value nuggets in sales

Again, depending on your buyer journey you’ll have a better understanding of the information that different stakeholders want to see along their experience.

Train reps on using SPIN (situation, problem, implication, value/need-payoff) to navigate the conversation. The goal is to:

• get enough information from the prospect, and agree on the value they want to achieve

• enable the rep to tailor the response using the value nugget, make it clear how it is achieved, and persuade with proof

How are you messaging your product value?

Communicating your product value, benefits, and features in a structured way allows marketing to drive better results and sales to drive more revenue, faster.

It is really important to ensure these values are built on customer research, and adapted to your buyer journey. And you’ll need to iterate and tweak as you learn. But messaging is sometimes an under-estimated lever to drive momentum – so make sure you take control and use it well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enter the Ideal Customer Profile.

What’s an Ideal Customer Profile?

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Ideal Customer Profile probably contains information like:

• Industry

• Number of employees

• Revenue

• Growth rate

• Geographies

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

• Attributes (e.g. tech stack)

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

• Business challenges

ICP fails

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

Balancing breadth

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

ICP as fantasy

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

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

Bringing structure to your ICP journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Validating the ICP

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

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

ICP is strategy

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

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

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

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

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

In the meantime, remember: niches for riches*.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is positioning-by-assumption?

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

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

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

The strongest positioning is when:

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

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

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

Drift is a great example of strong positioning in action:

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

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

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

• And the category is created

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

Assumptions have a wide impact

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The alternative isn’t difficult

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Assume, then test

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

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

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