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Sometimes, I hear about product marketing work that is entirely divorced from the reality of sales.

The narrative sounds good, the deck looks polished, and the enablement gets delivered…. but when you listen to real sales calls, you realize how little of it is helping sellers do the job in front of them.

That’s where frameworks like MEDDPICC become useful.

You don’t need to become a sales manager, but you do need to understand how sellers actually sell, what information matters, and what has to happen for a deal to close.

Your sales assets, campaigns, and positioning/narrative needs to be structured so that it helps your business (both through marketing, sales, and customer success touchpoints) to capture the right information, recognize buying intent, push on the right things, and move the deal forward

And a lot of product marketing assets leave sellers underprepared for real buying dynamics.

The problem is not just messaging quality

A lot of PMM work gets judged on whether the story is clear, but that’s too shallow and where your potential impact gets stunted.

The better test is whether the story helps a seller run a better deal.

• Can they use it to sharpen pain?
• Can they use it to understand what matters in the account?
• Can they use it to uncover process, urgency, timeline, stakeholders, paper process, and all the boring-but-critical things that actually make the close happen?

That’s where a lot of product marketing falls down. Too much of it is still built as if the job ends once the deck and one-pager and training is finalized.

It doesn’t.

If your positioning, narrative, and enablement aren’t helping sellers in a deal, then your work is unfinished.

Deals aren’t won on vibes: sales is a process

Out of all the potential frameworks out there, I think product marketers should care about MEDDPICC. It’s the one I have most experience with, but it’s also the most structured. There are many variations out there, and your business might be using a different methodology – but regardless, the principles are the same.

MEDDPICC forces you to think about how buying actually happens, and how selling actually happens too – not just the fluffy, ideal version, but the reality where:

• interest is fragile
• intent is easy to miss
• process and timeline matter
• legal and procurement can kill momentum
• a champion has to sell internally

These aren’t only sales problems – these are strategic product marketing territory too.

MEDDPICC is a way of understanding what sellers need to learn, capture, and push on if they want to drive a buying process forward.

Metrics

Can the seller help the buyer quantify the problem? Can they turn “this is annoying” into “this is costing us real money, time, risk, or opportunity”?

A lot of PMM work still lives in soft benefit language: save time, improve productivity, drive efficiency.

They’re easy to write… but weak in a deal, and don’t hold up to scrutiny.

Economic buyer

Does your story survive when it moves from user-level interest to budget-level scrutiny? A lot of messaging works with practitioners and gets thinner as seniority rises. That usually means you’ve built a local case, not a business case.

Decision criteria

Are you helping sellers shape what the buyer compares, or are you leaving that to competitors, procurement, and whatever assumptions already exist in the account? Because if the criteria harden around the wrong things, you are already behind.

Decision process

Do your sellers know how buying actually happens? Who signs off? What slows things down? What triggers legal? What needs to be true for the buyer to move this now, not later?

If PMM ignores that, it’s ignoring how deals close.

Paper process

Paper, pricing, security, procurement, legal friction … these things make or break close velocity. If your materials make these moments harder, you are contributing to the drag.

Identify pain

Interest is not enough. Pain has to be sharp enough to force action.

If the seller can’t build urgency and the buyer can’t justify change, the deal drifts. Again, not only a seller issue. A positioning issue too.

Champion

Can someone inside the account repeat the case when you aren’t there? If not, the message isn’t portable enough.

Champions need more than a nice tagline. They need language, proof, and a case they can take into internal conversations.

Competition

Yes, competitors matter. But in a lot of B2B deals, the bigger threat is inertia.

• Do nothing
• Push it to next quarter
• Patch around it internally
• Keep using the current process for another quarter

If your story cannot beat that, the rest of the differentiation work is not doing enough.

Compelling event

Some teams add an extra C, for compelling events.

Pain on its own rarely moves a deal. Most buyers can live with pain for months, leaving nothing to force a decision now.

A compelling event is the thing that turns a known problem into an active priority, like a renewal, a board mandate, a product launch, a budget cycle, or a compliance deadline. Ultimately, it’s something that creates a consequence against the status quo.

If the seller can’t uncover that event, or PMM hasn’t built messaging and a GTM motion that captures it, the deal drifts into “later”… which can quickly become “never”.

Where PMMs kid themselves

You might kid yourself that you’re “only a marketer”.

But if you want to really drive and shape go-to-market, you need to be sales strategist too. Not a quota carrier or pseudo-AE, but someone who understands how deals move, what sellers need to learn, which signals matter, where momentum is usually lost, and what gives both the seller and the buyer confidence.

If you don’t understand those things, you’ll keep producing work that sounds right and underperforms in the field. And then everyone will blame sales.

Sometimes that’s fair… but a lot of the time, it isn’t.

What can you do about it?

1. Sit in on real deals

Listen to real sales calls (a lot of them)

Watch where sellers get stuck and where buyers lean in… and you’ll quickly see where process questions appear, and where deals start to drift.

2. Learn the sales framework your business uses

MEDDPICC, MEDDIC, whatever: the acronym isn’t important.

What matters is understanding what your sellers are trying to learn through their conversations, and why it matters to progressing the deal.

If you don’t understand the operating model of the sales team, your enablement will always be a little too detached from their reality… and undoubtedly lead to poor adoption = poor impact.

3. Build enablement for the decision, not the narrative

Your job as a product marketer doesn’t stop at the positioning, messaging, and surface-level enablement.

Build tools and materials and training that help sellers quantify pain, clarify process, map stakeholders, test urgency, handle paper process, and move toward the close with more confidence.

Build buyer-facing assets or marketing/sales initiatives that help frame pain, influence their buying journey, set the scene for stakeholders, create urgency, minimize process, and drive their decision.

That is the work that has impact, rather than just building artifacts for their own sake.

If you want impact in PMM, learn how deals move

Product marketers should care about MEDDPICC because it’s one of the clearest reminders that while yes, sales is a skill, it’s also a process that has to be set, managed, supported, and executed.

Deals close when sellers know how to use a story that resonates to uncover intent, shape the buying process, and keep momentum alive. If you’re detached from that reality, you leave sellers underprepared.

If you’re a PMM, sit in on five real deals this month and inspect them through the lens of whatever sales framework your team uses. You’ll learn more about whether your work is helping deals close than you will from another internal messaging review.

What’s the worst buzzword-heavy hero you’ve seen recently? Reply with a screenshot – I’d love to feature the best (worst?) examples in a future post.

The post Why product marketers should care about MEDDPICC appeared first on Building Momentum.

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Most sales teams say they sell value, but in practice, they sell features wrapped in vague ROI claims, backed by hand-wavy maths and optimistic assumptions.

Buyers nod along… until they stall, ask for discounts, or say they need to “think about it”.

One of the biggest challenges I see PMMs, sales teams, and founders struggling with is how to create urgency with prospects; how to create an undeniable ‘pull’ motion, rather than trying to ‘push’ sales conversations like a heavy rock up a hill.

Early in my career I joined a company called Emailvision (later rebranded as SmartFocus), through the acqusition of PredictiveIntent – my first startup where I was employee number 4, the first marketer.

SmartFocus was sizable: thousands of customers, 650+ employees, and more than a dozen offices globally. My job was to roll this new product out to an existing sales organisation and help them sell it into the existing customer base.

It was a great success: we signed 40 customers to the new product within the first 6 months of rollout, getting to $1m ARR in record time.

Looking back, one sales tool + narrative helped lower barriers to entry, increase value perception, and make it a no-brainer to say yes. We built a tight process for generating customer-specific, evidence-led value cases.

This post breaks down the exact approach we used, why it worked, and how you can apply the same mechanics to your own product.

As a product marketer, your job is not to write broad ROI claims as part of your positioning and messaging. Your job is to help build the sales narrative that move a prospect along the buyer journey.

Designing a value case that reps can safely co-create with buyers, using the buyer’s numbers, assumptions, and constraints is a great way to deliver impact.

The real job: make value tangible

Smart Focus Advisor (the rebranded PredictiveIntent product) was a revenue-generating product. That should have made it easy.

Alas, it did not.

The PredictiveIntent technology was early AI and ‘big data’ number crunching designed to recommend ‘you might also like’ products on ecommerce stores by looking at thousands of similar customers like you.

With just a few lines of javascript, retailers could add recommendation blocks that would ‘be relevant and drive incremental revenue’.

But it sounds abstract… until you translate it into numbers that matter to a buyer: revenue, waste, targets, and trade-offs.

The turning point came from working closely with a sales rep who was unusually good at building business cases. We iterated together, systemized what worked, and taught it across the sales team.

The entire process had a few non-negotiable principles baked in:

• Build trust before you build maths

• Start with low stakes, then go deeper

• Use the customer’s numbers, not yours

• Anchor everything to monthly and annual impact

• Show the experience, not just the outcome

Step 1: Build trust before asking for numbers

I have never given deep company insights to a sales rep I don’t trust.

So the first move in any sales conversation was always to lower the stakes.

We framed the exercise as diagnostic, not transactional.

The language mattered:

“We want to understand where you are today so we can suggest a few ideas on how you can grow revenue with personalization. This is not a proposal, and your data won’t be shared or aggregated.”

That framing did three things:

• Signalled genuine intent to help

• Removed pressure to commit

• Made sharing data feel safe

Step 2: Start with a few pivotal inputs

We never asked for everything upfront.

We started with a small set of numbers that had an outsized impact on the model. Ballparks were fine.

For SmartFocus Advisor, that meant questions like:

• Average daily visitors

• Average daily page views

• Purchases per day

• Current average order value

If a prospect shared only these, we could already sketch a rough revenue baseline.

Once momentum built, we invited them to go deeper:

• Monthly SEO, PPC, and affiliate spend

• Bounce rate

• Cart abandonment rate

• Number of abandoned carts per day

• Number of products and categories

Step 3: Establish the revenue baseline

With a handful of inputs, we anchored the conversation in reality: to revenue.

Example logic:

• Purchases per day × average order value = average daily revenue

• Daily revenue × 28 = monthly revenue estimate

• Monthly revenue × 12 = annual revenue estimate

This was not presented as exact. It was presented as accurate enough to reason with, with an obvious margin for error and excluding seasonality.

Step 4: Expose waste without judgement

Next, we looked at traffic and spend.

• Average daily page views × 28 = monthly page views

• PPC/SEO/Affiliate spend × bounce rate = wasted spend

If a customer spent £20,000 per month on PPC with a 35 percent bounce rate, roughly £7,000 went to visitors who never engaged with the site.

We framed it as structural inefficiency that every large site has – an opportunity to present an upside in ‘lost’, but committed, spending.

Waste reframed the product from “new investment” to “better use of what you already spend” – even if the argument is hybrid.

Step 5: Make the solution visible

Buying a solution that has any impact on end-user UX can be risky enough – doubly so if you’re trying to combine it with an abstract, hard to trust uplift. So we made the experience real.

Because we had data across many customers, we could estimate page view distribution by page type:

• Homepage

• Category pages

• Product pages

• Checkout

We took screenshots of the prospect’s site and overlaid design examples showing how SmartFocus Advisor would appear in each context.

This did two things:

• Reduced fear of disruption

• Anchored uplift to specific surfaces

The buyer could see where value would be created.

Step 6: Apply credible uplift assumptions

Uplift is where most business cases collapsee, so we avoided aggressive promises. We used conservative ranges based on live customers.

Each uplift was calculated separately, then rolled up into monthly and annual potential revenue figures – because no only do bigger numbers sell better, but because buyers have monthly and annual targets in mind.

Step 7: Offer a low-effort wedge

While we pushed for a full rollout, the model made it easy to propose a pilot:

• One page type

• One clear success metric

This reframed the decision from a bet to a test – especially useful in selling to existing install bases who trust you for one product already, and to low-margin retailers with high-risk spend.

Step 8: Map value against cost

Only at the end did we introduce pricing.

• Setup fees

• Recurring fees

• Year one total cost

• Any discounts against ratecard

All against the estimated incremental revenue uplift.

Who wouldn’t spend £15k to make between £75k and £1m of incremental revenue?

How product marketers can build business case tools and ROI calculators

Value cases, ROI calculators etc are often treated as sales tools – but they’re actually product and narrative infrastructure.

In practice, PMMs should own:

• The input model: Which numbers matter, which are optional, and which unlock deeper insight

• The assumptions: What counts as a credible uplift, the proof, and defensible ranges that don’t spark lack of trust

• The artifacts: Worksheets, online tools, and the slides that guide the conversation without scripting it

Sales then take these tools to apply their unique sales skills to every prospect:

• The pacing of the conversation

• The judgement of when to go deeper

• The relationship and trust-building

When done well, ROI calculators reduce pressure, rather than adding it. It becomes easier to showcase potential, realistic value wihle reps don’t need to defend price: it becomes all about the upside.

Why I think this worked

In my opinion, we respected the buyer throughout, by:

1. Identifying the smallest set of inputs they would feel comfortable sharing

2. Approaching the conversation in a low-pressure, diagnostic frame

3. Translating numbers into the metrics they cared most about

4. Show where waste exists, not just where upside lives

5. Grounding the uplift in realistic mockups

6. Anchoring ROI in conservative, explainable assumptions

7. Offering a pilot as an initial wedge, as well as a full commitment to the complete solution

Value cases are powerful in nearly all sales-led conversations – from showing how teams can save time, to generate revenue, to reducing risk. How can you turn intangible potential into an honest business case?

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 Teardown: Building business cases that actually sell appeared first on Building Momentum.

Sometimes, there’s a moment the morning after a launch that almost every team recognises, even if they don’t talk about it.

Inside the company, people are still trying to extend the high from the previous day. Someone is checking traffic in one tab, posting on LinkedIn in another, replying to comments, sharing screenshots in Slack, trying to keep that sense of momentum alive for just a little longer.

It all feels warm and hopeful, the kind of explosion of pent-up energy you get when a team finally ships something that’s been hanging over them for months.

For a short while, it’s easy to convince yourself that the market has finally caught up with what you’ve been building.

But that feeling doesn’t last.

The dashboards level out, the replies quiet down, and prospect conversations don’t magically accelerate.

People outside the company move on so quickly it’s almost disorienting. You start to realise that the outside world absorbed far less than you expected.

What felt momentous internally has barely registered externally. And as frustrating as that is, it’s also the first honest signal about the story you tried to tell.

The weight you feel inside the building

Inside a company, the story of a launch becomes thick and dense and confusing and weighted long before anything goes live.

Teams carry months of accumulated context: early ideas, false starts, sudden CEO-inflicted pivots, painful naming decisions, internal debates over what the feature even is, trade-offs nobody wanted to make but had to, and the thousand tiny decisions that shaped the final result.

All that history sits under the surface. You can feel it when you talk about the product, even if you don’t say it out loud. So it’s no surprise that the launch becomes a symbolic release of that internal weight. It is significant… but only inside the building.

The outside world doesn’t care about your internal story

The problem is your layered context just doesn’t matter. I’m sorry to inform you, but:

• Your audience isn’t tracking your roadmap or checking whether the homepage copy has changed
• They’re not counting down the days until your release hits
• They’re not quietly waiting for your big reveal so they can change how they think about you
• They’re not refreshing your blog to see if the narrative evolved
• They’re not living with the emotional investment you’ve built up from months of being inside the problem

They see the launch with fresh eyes… which often means indifferent eyes.

This is the part that catches people off guard.

They’re projecting months of meaning outward, expecting the world to feel the same significance, but the outside world doesn’t have the mental model required to interpret it.

Inside the team, everything feels loaded. Outside the team, everything is a bit “meh” unless the story gives people a reason to care.

The mismatch is most clear when teams try to explain why a launch “matters.” Internally, the explanation is layered:

• this feature unlocks other features
• it resolves a painful problem the team has been wrestling with for months
• it aligns with a strategy shift people internally have felt happening
• it unblocks sales conversations that have been stuck for too long
• it’s been requested by a certain type of “important” customer

None of that helps anyone outside the team understand the story. Internal logic rarely survives external air.

The gap you’re really trying to measure

One of the harder things to accept is that the launch is rarely the moment the world finally “gets” you; it’s the moment you discover how far the gap really is between how you see the product and how everyone else interprets it. The silence you get after a launch is a signal, not a failure. It tells you the narrative hasn’t crossed the divide yet. You tried to export a story that still needed internal context to make sense.

You learn more in that silence than you do in the entire launch cycle. You learn:

• what didn’t translate at all
• which parts of the story depended on internal knowledge
• where your assumptions and research did or didn’t pay off
• which bits were actually relevant externally
• where the friction is, where things almost clicked

You also learn who genuinely felt resonance: not the people who liked the brand LinkedIn post, but the people who reach out because something clicked in their world, not yours.

The launch is the first honest milestone

It’s really painful when leaders treat a launch like a climax.

Actually, a launch is closer to a checkpoint.

It shouldn’t tell the world you’re ready; it should tell you whether the world is ready to hear what you tried to say.

It tells you whether your positioning is clear enough, whether the value is legible to someone without context, whether you’ve been solving the right pains and problems, and whether your homework has actually translated into something externally obvious.

It shows whether your momentum is visible beyond your own Slack channels, and whether the story has reached a point where it can hold itself up without internal scaffolding. It shows whether you’ve built something that intersects with a real shift happening out in the market, not just inside the team.

And yes, the outside world can be a little cruel… but mostly it’s just uninterested unless your narrative intersects with something already moving in their world.

The morning after a launch, that uncomfortable, anticlimactic, revealing moment, is where your real work begins.

How to close the gap

Prove the story before you promote it.

Don’t take a new narrative straight to the market. Run it through your sales team first. They are your fastest stress-test. If a rep can’t explain the story cleanly on a call, or feels the need to “pad” it, the narrative isn’t ready.

A good narrative should raise confidence in sales, not anxiety.

Test the positioning in real conversations.

It’s easy to fall for your own copy when the only people reading it are on your side.

Take it to prospects who don’t care about your backstory, or customers who will tell you the truth

Listen for:

• where they lean in
• where they hesitate
• where the phrasing feels thin
• where they restate it in better language

You’ll learn more in five real conversations than in five rounds of messaging reviews.

Treat the launch as the beginning of validation, not the conclusion of it.

Most leaders expect the launch to be a “moment”, but you need to reframe it as a checkpoint.

“We can absolutely create a strong moment, but we should treat it as directional rather than definitive. The real signal comes from post-launch conversations, which we’ll use to shape the story once we see how it behaves in the real world.”

Have follow-up plans too: how can you introduce v1.1 to continue building momentum?

Increase your reliance on evidence.

A story held together by optimism falls apart fast. A story held together by proof becomes self-sustaining.

Your evidence can be small — a customer quote, a strong beta, a repeated pattern in sales calls… The size doesn’t matter. Frequency does.

Borrow clarity from customers

Customers will always describe the value in language cleaner, simpler, and more grounded than whatever you wrote on a slide. Use it. Build around it.

If you find yourself writing something clever but no customer has said (or would every say) it, throw it away.

Make sure the momentum you’re claiming is visible from the outside.

Teams often claim internal movement like technical architecture work, new foundations, exciting prototypes… all things that the market cannot see yet.

Launch things the market can see and notice.

Strong stories come from reality

A good launch is the result of a story that has already been proven: in sales calls, in customer conversations, in the patterns you see across your pipeline.

When the story is grounded in evidence, the launch isn’t a dramatic climax. It simply makes the truth visible.

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

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

The post Why your launch didn’t land 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.

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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.

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

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

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

Product imagery isn’t decoration.

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

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

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

What product imagery is actually for

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

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

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

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

Design for first impressions, not power users

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

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

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

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

Stop showing the full UI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s an example from Kayako (RIP):

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

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

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

Show moments, not manuals

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t default to screenshots

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

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

Here’s a great example from Front:

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

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

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

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

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

Make people feel like it’s for them

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

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

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

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

Build a world, not a one-off

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

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

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

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

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

Show movement, not noise

Some ideas are better shown with motion.

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

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

Here’s an example from Kayako:

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

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

Avoid stock images, duh

If you sell software, show the software.

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

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

The real job of product imagery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feature launches vs. true product launches

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

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

What makes a product launch different?

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

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

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

Leading a product launch without authority

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

Define what success looks like

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

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

Clarify roles and responsibilities

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

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

Create urgency and sustained momentum

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

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

Proactively manage dependencies

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

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

Schedule pre-mortems and post-mortems

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

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

Sustaining momentum after launch

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

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

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

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

Bringing it all together

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sales is a game of incentives and priorities

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

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

Incentives shape prioritization

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

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

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

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

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

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

Confidence and credibility win deals

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

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

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

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

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

How to build for the sales mindset

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Build like a seller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then?

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

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

Make customer research essential by design

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

Tie every research project to a business decision

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

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

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

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

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

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

Create demand for your insights

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

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

Instead, make your research process collaborative from the start:

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

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

Validate assumptions, don’t just explore

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

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

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

Translate research into decisions, not just insights

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

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

Try structuring your research deliverables like this:

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

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

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

Keep insights relevant and embedded in every day use

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

To ensure research remains impactful:

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

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

Because the best research is the research that gets used.

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

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Outbound sales can seem like a dark art.

How does it work? You throw a few different ingredients – data, emails, phone calls, demos, collateral, pricing – into a pot, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Is it some obscure alchemy, or is there a science behind the sales process?

As a product marketer, you’ll likely be called into provide support for an outbound sales motion like:

• Air cover: Broader marketing activities to raise awareness and create high-level demand like blog posts and whitepapers, PR activity for brand recognition and credibility, social media for conversations, or webinars for soft call-to-action
• Ground cover: Tools the sales team can use instantly, like cheat sheets, battlecards, call scripts, and every PMMs nemesis, the one-pager.

But to actually help impact results from outbound sales at large, there are a few key areas that product marketers don’t get trained on and learn over time. Or, by reading the rest of this blog post.

Build the outbound muscle when you’re in a lead surplus

Most commonly, I’ve seen companies build outbound motions when their inbound starts to dry up. But that’s too late!

Outbound is a muscle that should be built alongside inbound at the same time. There will inevitably be peaks and troughs in your inbound lead flow. In good inbound times, you’ll be accelerating pipeline. In poor inbound times, you’ll have a pipeline and (relatively) proven funnel performance to support forecasting.

To drive this, a VP Sales I worked with implemented a requirement for AEs to hit quotas made of:

• 40% from marketing
• 30% from SDR qualified prospects
• 30% from self-generated pipeline

… as well as creating an outbound SDR team, rather than sharing inbound + outbound responsibility across existing SDRs.

Do outbound with purpose and focus

Outbound cannot be effective with a spray-and-pray model. Outbound must always be strategic.

It’s a relatively simple way to build traction and focus. Maybe you want to systematically approach entering a new market, build references in a particular industry, or learn what it means to move upmarket. A strong, strategic outbound operating motion gives you the ability to turn on a dime and react to market or business changes.

Having a clearly defined ideal customer profile is table stakes, but the hard part is driving sales adherence. You need to be super clear and unwavering with sellers on exactly what types of companies your product is a legitimate fit for – from both the firmographic criteria and actual use cases.

If you don’t hold that line, one of two things will happen. You’ll either get pulled into too many complex, hairy deals that take ages, or you’ll get inundated with SMB logos that will churn fast. Neither is ideal when you’re trying to build sustainable revenue streams.

Understand the outbound process

If you’ve received this newsletter for a while, you’ll remember my blog post on the importance of understanding your buyer journey.

The same matters for the outbound motion. You need to know the typical buying experience for your customers when they buy software in your category: how many calls, how many demos, what stakeholders, when do they bring in procurement and technical evaluators, do they do RFPs, and so on.

Then, link the buyer’s journey TO your sales process. So often companies will move prospects throughout their internal sales process, rather than adapting to the buyer’s journey.

This gives you more context for helping design the sales enablement and collateral that’s actually going to hit the mark.

All outbound relies on excellent, excellent discovery

Asking probing questions, truly listening, and peeling back layers to fully comprehend a prospect’s unique situation separates fruitful outbound from vapid spam calls.

Effective discovery unlocks the contextual nuances that allow you to reframe how prospects see their own world. To turn discovery into revenue, you need to vividly illustrate the pains, inefficiencies and risks they’ve missed or under-appreciated.

The best sellers I’ve seen go into discovery conversations with company-specific knowledge that allow them to get straight into the nitty-gritty. Things like industry trends are meaningless… knowing the pressures affecting a company (or buyer) as they grow, scale, and evolve is where you’ll be most effective.

Scalable outbound sells the problem, not the product

You’ve probably had situations like these. A sales rep has a great call with a prospect, excitedly runs to the product team… but says “They’re interested if we can help with [a loosely related feature that’s not the core product focus]!”.

Here’s why that happens. The seller had poor control of the call, and did a bad job of selling the problem you’re actually solving.

In every outbound conversation, the prospect’s actual problems are immutable, fixed realities. They either exist, or they don’t. During discovery, they’ll outline their challenges. The seller’s job is to find a problem that your product can fix.

A good seller will find a problem, dial up the importance, and reshape it until it fits your product like a glove. A poor seller will hear problems, but forget (or, not be skilled enough) to do the moulding. Inexplicably, that results in your product being almost good enough to buy, but not quite.

So a critical skill is being able to illustrate the unrecognized pains, inefficiencies, and risks they’re living with today – before you can ever pitch your product as the solution. You have to make them say “Wow, I never thought about it that way, but you’re absolutely right!”.

The rep becomes more than a seller. They become a trusted advisor and subject matter expert for that particular prospect’s situation. It’s about adding value first and foremost by thoroughly understanding their world before you ever configure a business case for your product.

Incentives matter

This one is crucial. At the end of the day, sales reps are – and this is said with the utmost respect – coin operated.

From a product marketer’s perspective, we’re likely just on a plain annual salary with maybe a small bonus. Sellers, on the other hand, need to hit hard numbers to make their OTE (on target earnings).

And so every seller will find the quickest, fastest route to meeting targets. But this can easily be at-odds with the intended behaviors the company want to encourage.

Here’s a common situation. SDRs are often incentivized on the number of meetings they book. So without strong guidelines, they might try to hit targets by prospecting to undeniably poor-fit prospect. This hits their target, but overwhelms AEs with bad conversations, so they won’t hit quota.

If SDRs are focused on handing over prospects that are then qualified by AEs, but the AE is targeted on hitting deals with a minimum contract value, they might reject more prospects in order to focus on larger deals from a smaller number of customers.

And if sales overall are focused on driving larger deals, you will see fewer new logos. If they’re focused on only revenue targets, they’ll sell your most expensive products instead of new products that are attractively priced.

You need to get creative with structuring comp plans, SPIFFs, accelerators and other monetary motivators to ensure sales work on the goals you desire – not just how much money, but where it comes from.

What goes in, comes out

Outbound is a science.

Don’t overlook the importance of optimizing all the tiny process pieces to build your outbound engine.

Your prospecting cadences and nurture flows should be reviewed, analyzed, and iterated. Use different channels, push calls more, try soft outreach and direct response touches, hire specialized cold email outreach copywriters – do anything to get improvements.

And that’s why you need to ensure quality inputs too. Good data. Refine your sellers book of business. Build the universe of potential good fits, acquire as many contact details as you can. Understand what’s working, double-down, and go easy on activities and segments that aren’t performing.

Of course, if you’re maturing fast you’ll be able to centralize and optimize faster. But if you’re just getting started, empower sellers with the context and skills, and help them run experiments on smaller scales before introducing to the wider team.

It’s difficult, but not impossible

Outbound can be incredibly effective, with many huge companies built on the success of a good email, strong call scripts, and solid sales processes.

As a product marketer, understanding the nuts, bolts, and unwritten rules of outbound sales can help you be more strategic, better support your sales team, and show strong impact. Hopefully, the tips above help you bring more alignment, cohesion, and effectiveness whether you’re scaling or starting your outbound motion.

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

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The post Decoding the dark art of outbound sales appeared first on Building Momentum.

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

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

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

The many faces of product marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understand the customer…

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

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

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

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

… then build collaborative loops internally…

Here’s an unfortunate hard truth.

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

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

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

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

…before bringing the product to market.

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

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

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

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

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

PMM is the chameleon of marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Working with assumptions (without validating or iterating)

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

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

How to get back on track

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

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

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

They say jump, you say ‘how high?’

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

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

How to get back on track

You have two options.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to get back on track

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This worked with an astonishingly high close rate.

Why did this work?

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

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

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

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

Can you build a business case tool?

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

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

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

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

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

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“Sales have asked for a competitor comparison battlecard that they can send to prospects.”

Dangerous for many reasons.

We never want to sling mud around or disrespect competitors. That’s not a good way to sell.

We want customers to focus on why they should use us – not why they shouldn’t use others.

Feature comparisons are even more dangerous. We will never 100% know whether a competitor has specific features or not. Not only does that open us up to legal claims, if our understanding is incorrect it can make us look slimy by not telling the truth.

Every competitor is, ultimately, a good choice in it’s own way for a specific type of customer. Their benefits and shortcomings will make perfect sense for a type of customer in a certain situation.

Your goal, as a product marketer or sales rep, is to focus on why your solution is the best solution for the prospect you’re engaging with. The best way to do this is to influence the prospect’s requirements and buying journey by getting ahead of the sale.

Create the ultimate buyer’s guide

If you don’t have this already, put it on your to-do list immediately.

Creating a clear, concise buyer’s guide is a must-have piece of content that you promote to pretty much every prospect, whether they came from inbound or outbound.

Our goal with the buyers guide is to remove the cognition that a buyer must do to decide what their requirements should be, and why.

It’s our opportunity to introduce and highlight a particular frame – a concept that already exists in the buyer’s mind. We get to influence their decision criteria, let them know what they should and shouldn’t be looking for, and help them understand exactly why your product is the one they should choose.

Your buyer guide outline might be something like this:

Category overview

This sets the scene for your readers on how they should interpret the market – positioning your business at the leading edge. You may want to call out specific sub-categories, which can be used to position competitors and alternative solutions as good… but for other contexts.

“When to buy or switch”

This section builds on what you know from the common triggers and motivations that encourage your ideal buyers to search, switch, or buy an alternative solution. This is your opportunity to pinpoint and dial up the pain that customers are likely experiencing.

Explore key features

This section might refer to features, but actually we’re exploring key areas of value that your customers desires. A prime opportunity to call out the must-have features your product has – and why they’re so important to delivering good outcomes.

How to evaluate and compare solutions

We’re now educating buyers on the process they should follow, what they should consider, and other things to watch out for in the purchase process. It’s an opportunity to suggest the standard things (like value and ROI, not just cost) as well as things that are unique to you.

Implementation considerations

Ease of implementation and quick time-to-value is a great differentiator. Educating buyers on what they should consider when evaluating other products is where you can go to town on your approach versus others, especially when you have fundamentally different implementation concepts.

Case study

Why would you not take the chance to shout about a successful customer experience? Use this an opportunity to talk about why the customer chose your solution, as well as how they use the product and the results they’ve seen. This helps build social proof and makes your product feel tangible.

Why choose us

Finish up your buyer’s guide with a persuasive message that really resonates with your ideal customers. Reinforce the framing you’ve set out at the start, why it’s the right product for them, and remind them of the valuable unique differentiators that set your product apart from the rest.

Inform, educate, and support buyers on their journey

Not only can you create a buyer’s guide as a full-funnel piece of content, but you can take it to the next level by creating an evaluation template that prospects can use throughout their consideration process. Handily, the template will include several features and capabilities that highlights your product’s benefits… whilst competitors don’t meet the standard.

With these two pieces of collateral in your toolkit, you’ll be driving faster sales cycles, justifying higher pricing, and create happier customers – without the inconvenience and potential downsides of creating shareable competitor comparisons.

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

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

The post Get ahead of the sale with this trick appeared first on Building Momentum.

We’re all guilty of indulging in a little bit of fluffy marketing copy. “Enable teams to excel”, “be your customer’s hero”, and “personalize all your touchpoints” are all things I’ve written before.

But looking back, what did they mean? They were empty attempts to say something smart. Contrite. A waste of bits and bytes, crowding the internet, taking up much-needed space for more cat gifs.

And we see this all around the internet.

Nearly every B2B website – including yours, sorry – has some version of the same old tired cliches:

• Work faster, not smarter
• Save time and effort
• Grow revenue
• Scale with ease
• Connect with your customers
• Build stronger relationships
• Deliver a better customer experience
• Enable teams to collaborate
• Turn X into a strategic advantage
• … and many more.

And what surprises me is that these garbled monstrosities don’t come from a thousand monkeys banging on keyboards, or from fresh interns souped up on Red Bull.

They come from experienced people who care so much about what they’re trying to say. People with so much passion, insight, experience, and genuine love for the product and technology.

The thought process in people like this – speaking from personal experience – goes like this. We feel the overwhelming to say everything. We know that we’re too close to the metal, so we try to ‘dumb down’ language for the normies out there. We rely on cliches because everyone knows what they mean – they’re cliches for a reason!

But these attempts to say something, actually say nothing at all. Confusing, unreadable, and create more questions than they answer.

Your copy should never lead to this outcome.

The goal of product marketing copy, whether on your website or sales collateral or a video script, should never make prospects think. Cognition is a barrier, not an accelerant. Your prospects should nod along, embracing your proposition and adjusting their view of the world.

Start with the customer

Go back to that thought process: we try to dumb down language because we want to make it easier for people to understand what we really do.

This is the wrong approach. Rather than mangle the product to fit the customer’s world, can we understand our customers and create something that fits perfectly?

This means understanding the value that customers desire. The jobs they undertake, the pains to avoid, gains they want to achieve, and triggers that motivate them to search/switch/buy.

It can be tricky to convince product-/technology-first stakeholders that this is the way, but it’s not an either/or situation. You need to do both: customer discovery with technology innovation.

The ‘so what?’ antidote

When you find yourself reaching for a comfortable cliche, stop. Take a breath, and ask yourself “so what?”. Then write that!

What exactly does ‘saving time’ enable? What do customers gain when they can collaborate better? What outcomes are improved when the business grows and is successful?

These are often the hardest questions for CEOs, founders, and technologists to answer.

But levelling up your copy and answering ‘so what’ doesn’t just help customers understand what you do better. It helps you justify higher prices. Build stronger brand positioning. Build word of mouth. Build loyalty. Reduce sales objections and improve sales efficiency. These all lead to one thing: easier revenue generation.

Sometimes these will be obvious: reducing specific metrics or achieving a new status. Sometimes they’ll be more opaque: being seen as a leader, achieving a higher valuation, or helping the company embrace a new direction.

And you might wonder… can you say those out loud? Is it not a bit gauche or transactional to say exactly what we enable?

Absolutely not. B2B is rational. See a problem, solve a problem.

Don’t make them think ‘so what?’. Tell them.

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

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As product marketers, we’re forever asking ‘why’.

• Why do customers struggle with this problem?
• Why did we build this feature?
• Why are we seeing more closed-won deals from a particular country?
• Why are we not getting traction with performance marketing on a particular channel?

We’re always trying to get to the core nugget of insight that has driven, or can drive, a specific action. (And remember: marketing is meant to drive behavior change).

But when we’re actually doing work ourselves, it’s easy to lose sight of that initial insight. Strategic work quickly becomes part of the everyday mundanity.

A one-pager is never just a one-pager

Whether it’s creating sales enablement one-pagers, updating the pitch deck, or crafting a new product launch rollout plan, it might seem super straightforward.

“Sales asked for this one-pager. We launched some new features, so we should update the pitch deck. This is our standard product rollout plan.”

But we’re never just updating a deck: we’re figuring out how to tell our story in a persuasive way that drives the conversation.

We’re not just creating a rollout plan: we’re looking to drive incremental revenue, better meet customer needs, and showcase our innovation.

And a one-pager is never just a one-pager. It might be intended to actually educate prospects on the problem, or persuade prospects of our differentiation, or support our prospect in championing our solution over others.

The two-bullet brief

Something I learnt (but, I raise my hand, haven’t practiced lately), is to add two bullet points to every document.

These two bulletpoints help me keep in mind what it is we’re actually trying to achieve. They help align work-in-progress reviewers and those giving feedback – and help us have higher value discussions.

At the top of every document or initiative you’re working on, make a quick note on the following:

• Audience and buying stage
• What success will look like

The first is obvious. How successful our work is depends on having a good, consistent understanding of the audience, so keeping in mind the specific type of customer – whether that’s a persona, an industry, or even an internal stakeholder – helps.

But we also need to consider where they are in their buyer journey. Are they early in their evaluation journey? Their needs – and your response – will change significantly.

The second bullet, you might call an outcome or the goal – but that can be too restrictive. We’re talking about success! In the best case scenario, what does this activity enable or achieve?

• Success of a product one-pager might look like an improvement in opportunity progression, with customers excited to learn more.
• Success of a website update might be prospects having an elevated understanding of our product differentiation with a positive impact on lead generation.

You might want to treat this as a hypothesis and approach it from an experimental perspective, but that can be overkill and confusing for people or organizations that don’t operate that way.

Think bigger

As product marketers, we’re experts in second-order thinking. Our actions have consequences and implications.

Let’s make sure that the work we do always has the right implications and work towards the best outcomes.

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

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The post Okay… but why? appeared first on Building Momentum.

I recently sat down with Josh and Nate from the Searching4SaaS podcast to talk about the role of product marketing in early-stage SaaS.

You can listen to the podcast above, or find it wherever you get your podcasts. You can also read the edited transcript below!

Big thanks to Josh and Nate for having me on!

What’s the biggest thing people get wrong about PMMs?

Product marketing is such a broad term, there is so much that you can do with it.

There are so many things that we can do or that we can be involved in. I think one of the biggest disservices that marketers or CEOs or founders give is not really giving product marketers the space to find their own way to help the business. I think often we get categorized as either one of two models.

Number one is just being an internal agency for sales enablement or content marketing teams. It’s just like, look, we need this one sheet. We need this data sheet. We need a deck. It’s horrible, I spent most of my first couple of jobs being a deck monkey. And it was horrible. It’s not a fulfilling job at all. We can be much more strategic than that.

The other model is that we can just be a conveyor belt for product teams. So whatever product teams ship, that’s it. We launch it out into the world, we write the release notes and maybe send an email to customers or whatever. Again, it’s really unfulfilling. It’s not it’s not a nice way to work.

And also misses out on the strategic value that product marketing can bring. And I think that’s because at it’s core, product marketing is a strategy role. We really have to understand who our customers are, what the business is doing, what’s happening in the market… and then try and draw those dots together.

It’s just that pace that people are yet to really twig them to at scale. There’s definitely companies and people out there who are advocating for this approach. But that’s the one message: product marketing is strategic. Don’t make that mistake, don’t try and force them into executional stuff all the time, make sure there’s that room for strategy as well.

JOSH: Does the fact that the word marketing is in the title kind of allude to that? All the things you described are things that traditionally marketers have looked at.

JDP: Exactly. You know product marketing is often seen as the fluffy people that make the deck after the fact, the ones that do execute on whatever strategy has already been decided, but we can step back from that and really understand what the landscape is saying, what we’re hearing from customers and have some input into the way that we move forward.

It’s just so much better for everyone involved. It works so much better.

How does research play in product marketing strategy?

You can go super deep into the research. But what I mean by strategy is all about understanding where you are today, where you want to be by a certain timeframe and the steps involved to make that happen. And then putting that into action. You don’t need to do super deep research all the time.

You can do really nice targeted pieces of customer research, competitive research, or just understanding more about your business goals and the way that the business system works.Some of those bits can really give you a lot of answers into how to really maximize the results that you’re going to get from a go-to market function, from a marketing perspective… there’s so many of these bits and pieces that’s impacted by what product marketers can do.

When do should a traditional PMM join a business?

I don’t think there’s anything really as a traditional product marketer, I think it we’re really versatile and that we can be thrown into a situation and just get what needs to be done,done. I think there is a time when you can say, “okay, we can benefit from some product marketing expertise and skills here”.

And I think that really does depend on the go-to market motion that set, the existing skillset of the team, and the biggest challenges that you’re facing over the next six to 12 months probably.

If we’re gonna think about, you know, a standard B2B SaaS startup, so imagine that the founder is a you know, a product person who’s taking on the sales ownership, and the go-to market is a traditional inside sales play. I think product marketing should be like the first or second marketer that you would hire now.

It used to be that the first person would be a demand generation, but that’s changed a lot because it’s significantly easier to access an audience now than it ever has been. You’ve got social media, you’ve got all of these outreach tools. You’ve got all of the advertising networks and things like that. It’s easier than ever to get in front of people.

But the challenge is, is to how do you make sure you get in front of the right people, the right audience, and then how do you pitch in the best way. How do you sell them on what your product is and how it can help them?

That’s one of the reasons we’ve seen such a big increase in demand for product marketers over the last 18 months to two years, is there is so much differentiation required now to kind of cut through the noise and product marketing is one of the best tools you can have to build that into the core of your go-to market.

Especially in teams where the majority skillset is kind of technical or there’s technical founding team. Product marketers are going to have a real big impact, the sooner the better.

I think that tech people are really great for thinking deep about the application of technology, but product marketers can really join the application of it to the use cases that a specific customer can get value from. And that’s where you’re going to connect the dots, and put the pedal to the metal, and really see things start to take off.

Do product marketers replace the things a startup CEO would do?

I think, you know, in the early in the journey, you have a CEO who is really close to the customer. They’ve got that past experience, they’ve been in that role before. And so they’ve got this really deep ingrained understanding, but as you scale the business, the CEO spends less time on sharing that viewpoint and advocating for them across product engineering, success, sales, marketing. It becomes less clear, and there’s more ambiguity.

Product marketing can come into these kinds of situations with a little bit of research, a little bit of thinking, and be able to bring everyone together around a single definition of who the customer is and how you best reach them advocate for the customer amongst all of those teams.

So yeah absolutely, that’s a really interesting way to look at it.

Where should a PMM sit in the reporting structure: product or marketing?

There’s a lot of conflict about it, a lot of strong opinions!

I’m biased. I’ve only ever worked in product marketing where we’re aligned to marketing teams. So we’re part of the marketing or broader growth team and we are primarily concerned with revenue, customer acquisition and adoption, retention, satisfaction kind of metrics.

I like that a lot because it’s really focused on the commercial aspect. And it’s very customer focused and there’s always a recognition of the channels that you’re using to communicate to the business, to the rest of the world.

But conversely, there are people that have only ever worked in product teams and love that really close connection with what’s on the roadmap, where things are, how they can, how product marketers can help product teams to influence the roadmap more around customer insights and help drive that part of the process as well.

I don’t think there’s any clear and cut answer. So around the best way to do it, I think experimentation is the best,best thing to see how it fits. I think some of those things are going to come out quite naturally during the first couple of years of having product marketing in the business anyway. But I think it’s very interesting.

I can’t imagine working for put a marketing team under product. I can’t, connect the dots yet in my head around how I would be most successful in that setup. But I guess it would just be a learning curve.

Where is the crossover between product marketing, and growth marketing or product growth?

JOSH: I could see someone coming from the Product side be doing marketing aspects, or a growth marketer type who’ll be writing onboarding emails, or a marketer ensuring the right features are highlighted. Those are where the lines start to bleed from me. Is that what you see too?

Yeah, I’ve done all of those bits and pieces whilst being in the marketing side and it’s worked pretty fine. I think even though we’re under marketing, it’s a super cross-functional role by default. You have to have connections and strong alignment with product, with success and with sales and the rest of the marketing team anyway.

I think it’s also interesting when you think about the goals of product marketing teams, what they want to or need to achieve your business over the next six months, 12 months, 18 months. Once you can be really clear on that, then it makes much more sense, and be like okay, well, product marketing is focused on this particular area so for now let’s align them onto this part of the team, or we’ll make sure they’ve got really strong connection with these people.

But again, one of the things that we don’t necessarily do so well is say, okay, this is, this is what product marketing is going to set out to achieve. We just kind of floats around a little bit.

It’s a really fluid role, a very fluid team. I think in terms of metrics the best situation I worked in was where we had two key metrics. One was net new ARR added each month, and the other was successful adoption of users to the product.

So the number of accounts that signed up the turn into paying customers, and those that hit whatever user goal was. That gave us two really distinct ways to think about it. The first part was about everything that happens before sign up or before the initial kind of payment point. So positioning, pricing, messaging, communicating features, the sales experience, stuff like that was something that we could improve ourselves or through our relationships with other teams.

And then the second part around successful adoption was about, is this the right product for this type of customer? Do we communicate better? Do we help them find out how to get started as quickly enough? Did they achieve that core goals early on enough and see the value in it?

Melding those two together was a really interesting a really interesting experience.

Should product marketing report directly to the CEO?

NATE: I wonder if it would make more sense for product marketing to report directly to the CEO, kind of an agency for the CEO?

Yeah. When you say that out loud, obviously it makes so much sense. All of every single role I’ve had, the product marketing plan has always been discussed with the CEO. It’s always: this is how we think of the positioning, this is what we’re learning, these are some problems we’ve seen in the sales funnel and this is how we’re thinking of fixing them.

You know, these are the broad goals of what we want to do from an adoption and activation perspective. So absolutely we should have that direct line in. The only reason that we don’t is… I’m not sure why we dont, I think that’d be really good experiment for somebody to run.

What’s the direction of product marketing?

It’s this is where I think product marketing is going to fragment in some ways over the next five or so years. I expect that we will see increase in strategy roles. So Strategy teams, Director of Strategy…we’ll probably still have product marketers under a strategy team who are responsible for kind of core market insights from customers, competitors, and general landscape kind of stuff.

And then I think we’ll see some of the more execution part of product marketing go to segment marketing teams that will focused on driving growth and adoption from particular customer groups.That’s where I think product marketing is probably going to be.

We are saying many more CMOs come from product marketing. I think another route for product marketing growth, as well is into chief of staff and COO roles. Anything that is about melding strategy with execution. I think we’re, we’re really strong in helping merge both of those worlds together.

What about fractional product marketers?

Yeah, it’s definitely something that’s grown, the concept has really come up over the last couple of months maybe. It’s really pretty new.

I think it’s really interesting. It’s probably something I’m going to be exploring over the next couple of years, but I think there’s probably two types of fractional PMMS that you might want.

One is one that can come in with a framework and experience: this is how we can do positioning, here’s the process, let’s work on it together, go through that, bring everyone around on why it’s the right direction, and there’s a lot of internal change management with things like positioning that we need to manage as well. And then sell it into the business and make sure it’s working and fitted nicely.

And then I think that is the strategic functional product marketer who can come in and be like, this is how we’ve done this before. Let’s go back to the basics. Let’s build the core artifacts that you need from personas all the way through to buyer journey, through to uderstanding of the broader customer journey, map out the sales enablement material that you need you know, the product announcement matrixes, and all this kind of stuff, which I think is really interesting as well.

But I think one of the, one of the downsides of this is that we miss the opportunity to focus on upskilling the product marketers and marketers that you already have.

That’s something that, one of my friends Alicia Carney and I are doing: a course to help upskill scrappy product marketers. But especially in Europe, there’s not a lot of career growth for product marketers, or an easy way to break into it. And so I think we need a bit more thinking there on how we manage the next generation as well.

What’s your WTF is Go-To-Market course about?

Alicia and I are both pretty involved in the product marketing community. And one of the questions we hear from almost everyone we speak to, whether they’re a new product marketer, someone who’s been in the role for a couple of years or even CEOs and CMOs is: I hear the words go-to-market all the time, but I don’t really understand what it is, how do all the bits connect together? I can read a definition of it, but what’s the connective tissue between all of these different building blocks?

And so that’s why we just called it WTF is Go-To-Market. People that have those questions are generally in their first three or four years, if not earlier for product marketing, we’re really focused on helping marketers in B2B technology companies.

That’s where our experience is mostly from. But also the frameworks and attitudes that we’ve developed as well best fit there. So there’s a lot of focus on understanding our customers, understanding the needs of the business, and connecting those bits together.

So thinking less about product marketing and go-to-market as just the checklist, and more about trying to understand what it is you’re really trying to achieve. Hopefully that’s what we’re going to help product marketers do. We’ve just invited our first cohort which is really cool.

We’ve been lucky enough to offer a scholarship as well, to improve diversity in the product marketing community sponsored by Crane VC, which is also an awesome thing that we can hopefully help to change..

The first first course is in February. It’s a six week course, and then we hope to do it every, probably every quarter. It’s really exciting. We’ve asked people to do video applications, if they feel comfortable, and we ask about the best product marketing projects they’ve worked on and the worst ones they’ve worked on.

And you can just see all of these lessons we’ve learnt, where we’ve had exactly the same experiences. So if we can help people manage those future ones a little bit better, then we’re not just going to see an impact on the results that product launches can drive the business, but also see that reflected in the career growth of people as well. And that’s, that’s the driving force behind it for us.

We’ve got people in the cohort from their first product marketing job all the way through to 40-something year old director level people, and we’ve got one CEO of a tech company in there as well. So it’s a real, really good mix of people.

What PMM characteristics should you look for in an up-and-coming potential PMM?

So I think the first part I’d say is empathy really about getting into the minds of our customers. We really need to see life from their perspective. If you take positioning, then the definition of positioning is about occupying a space in the mind of the customer. To do that effectively, you need to understand what is already going on in their head, what’s going on in their life for them.

And so unless we can do that really effectively, product marketing breaks down really quickly. So being able to do research, to be able to hypothesize and you know, validate or anything you need to do to really embody your customer, I think is really important. And that goes hand in hand with advocacy.

So representing that customer that you’ve built a solid understanding of, being able to understand the business goals and the business system as it were that you’re operating within and having the skills to navigate around that to drive the best outcomes I think is really important.

Product marketing breaks down if the work we’re doing is not used by the business. We can do all of the snazzy PDFs of personas and go-to-market strategy documents all we want, but unless it’s put into action and people are being consistent with it, it breaks down.

And then lastly, it’s having an understanding of what strategy is. It’s not solely the 10 year mission and vision. You need to understand that. But you need to understand what are the small steps that you can make today to push you forward between now and then, keeping in mind the intended outcomes that you want to achieve, and then being able to make choices that move you from A to B.

What one tip would you give?

I’ve been through three or four big pivots, changes in the way that businesses are operating, and one of the biggest tips I share with that your internal stakeholders are your customers as well.

So do the same thing. Understand what’s driving them, their jobs, pains, gains, and motivations, and then think backwards into how do you help them get to that desired state.

It’s just a customer, it’s exactly the same process, just a different outlook on it.

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

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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.

Here’s the truth: In B2B, nobody is going to buy your product randomly.

Unlike B2C, there’s no impulse purchase. There’s no buying on the off-chance it might be useful, something to keep in the back pocket.

Your product is only ever going to be bought when it provides value: that is, it delivers elements the buyer wants which are useful, a priority, and worth the effort (cost/time/energy).

But don’t be disappointed. This is an opportunity to focus – and as regular readers will know, focus + confidence = momentum.

We need to understand the contexts that decide when your buyers recognise their need exists and what propels them through the evaluation process.

We need understand the motivations and triggers that lead your best-fit customers to search for a solution, switch from their status quo, and buy your product.

What are motivations and triggers?

Triggers are stimuli that impact the motivations someone has. Often, these are events that take place that disrupt an equilibrium. In this context, triggers might be things like company funding announcements, career growth, or industry news.

Motivations are the guiding principles which affect the way someone behaves in response to the trigger. There are four types of motivations:

• Positive – positive accolades

• Negative – negative fear

• Intrinsic – internal self-driven

• Extrinsic – external forces

These combine in a really nice matrix that looks like this…

… which shows the four ultimate principles that affect how someone behaves:

• Desire

• Reward

• Threat

• Fear

These principles subconsciously guide your buyers and stakeholders through the purchase journey. And knowing how to use them will help you sell more, sell faster, and better convey the value you’re delivering.

Extracting motivations and triggers

To understand the motivations and triggers that affect your customers, we need to talk with them.

My 19 customer development questions are designed to pull these out through customer research by asking questions like their biggest personal/professional goals, what winning/losing looks like, and how your product would change their life.

We also need to supplement this insight with win/loss interview research, to dig into the exact scenarios that your prospects were walking through when they began the evaluation process.

I then use a simple framework like this, designed to think through the triggers and motivations that drive people to action.

First we consider the lenses that someone can operate through.

• Personal: me, myself and I

• Professional: me at work

• Organizational: work

And then we look at the different timeframes under consideration.

• Immediate pains: self-explanatory; ongoing frustrations

• Short-term: tangible problems that can be solved

• Mid-term: aspirational achievements

• Long-term: visionary undertakings

With each combination, we can think through both the triggers (events and other stimuli) and subsequent motivation (desires, threats, fears, rewards) that drive someone to action.

Using motivations and triggers in marketing/sales

Now, the fun part. We’ve got real evidenced insight from customers, we’ve mapped it to the different lenses/timeframes that our buyers operate in. How do we use this valuable information to help us win more?

Here are a few examples of how you can use triggers and motivations in marketing and sales.

1. Use content marketing to showcase the potential rewards available

2. Drive up the fear and threats at risk through content, using social proof for added evidence

3. Highlight triggers through paid ads and create more trigger opportunities

4. Use influencers and highlight their status to speak to the rewards that can be gained

5. Create an award process to promote intrinsic desires

6. Integrate desires into your positioning, using self-actualization as a value for competitive differentiation

7. Ensure threats and fears are highlighted in your sales pitch: make sure everyone knows what losing looks like

8. Through paid ads, content, and sales outreach, drive up the pain of same

Sell more faster with triggers and motivations

Whether through highlighting the potential rewards, promoting the achievements, or dialling up the fear of failure, it’s important to understand the contexts that your best-fit customers experience and the psychological factors that affect their thought process – and then use them in your marketing/sales.

By focusing on the specific triggers and motivations that cause your customer to take action and influence their behavior, you can take charge of those to sell more, faster.

How are you using triggers and motivations in your marketing and sales? Leave a comment and share your thoughts:

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The post Sell more, faster with triggers and motivations appeared first on Building Momentum.

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

Instead, your sales deck is a prop.

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

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

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

Recap: SPIN questioning

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

• Situation: how they are doing something today

• Problem: the challenge that arises

• Implication: the impact of their incumbent solution

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

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

Example: Kayako sales deck

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

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

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

Slide 1: Framing

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

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

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

Questions:

• Clear up anything not gained from the discovery call

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

Slide 2: Agenda

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

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

Goal: Set the scene for the call

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

Questions:

• Who do we have on the call today?

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

Slide 3: Challenges

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

Goal: Present our insight, gain alignment

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

Questions:

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

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

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

Slide 4: Go on the offensive

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

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

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

Questions:

• How are you finding [current platform]?

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

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

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

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

Slide 5: Present our value

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

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

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

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

Questions:

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

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

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

Slide 6: It’s demo time

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

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

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

Questions:

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

For example:

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

Slide 7: Social proof

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

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

Goal: Combat objections

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

Slide 8: Finish on a success story

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

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

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

Slide 9: Push it forward

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

Goal: Understand the prospect buying process and build momentum

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

Questions:

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

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

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

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

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

• Go light on text

• Challenge – offer some type of contentious, unconventional wisdom

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

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

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

Try as much as you like, some customers just aren’t going to buy.

You could have the best product, a high-ROI marketing strategy, a spectacular sales process… and they’ll either reject you straight up or you’ll get a ‘no’ at the end.

Why? Not for the reasons you might expect.

There’s one element that will decide whether your product is bought and adopted, or not.

Your customer’s internal change environment will determine your sales outcome

Whether your customer can or will buy your product will depend on their internal change environment.

This is not their attitude to change – more so the entire atmosphere within their business. Is change locked down and admonished, is it expected and encouraged, or does no change happen because everything is burning down?

“The internal environment of an organization refers to events, factors, people, systems, structure, and conditions that… influence organization activities, decisions, and employee behavior and attitudes.”

Source

Generally the more mature the business, the more difficult change is.

It’s not the same as when companies are highly risk-averse. They might be super galvanized and eager, but just can’t summon the energy to make it happen.

It’s extremely annoying to lose an opp because of this. You couldn’t have done anything more; it’s just the way the cookie crumbled. In hindsight, there may have been slight missteps – but it just wasn’t meant to be

What causes a poor change environment?

Organizations with poor change environments won’t often have issues just in one area – when they do, it’s much easier to overcome! It’s more likely that they’ll have a whole catalogue of issues that slow them down, cause them pain, and increases the likelihood of inertia – the enemy of momentum.

These issues are likely to include:

• Strict IT and security concerns that need to be appeased before any software can be piloted, let alone onboarded

• Internal team bandwidth and priorities that limit their scope for investigating new solutions to their problems, let alone the implementation and energy required to state their case

• Entrenched software systems that are owned by centralized teams with their own priorities and restrictions

• Incumbent contracts that are poorly negotiated for long-term ROI with no exit clauses

• Business diktats that ban unnecessary spending, hiring freezes, or limit projects/areas for investment

Some of these will be visible from the start. Some will only become blockers later in the process.

So how do you expect, account, and move forward with prospects with cumulative issues like these?

Build your process around the change environment

Some sales reps will battle through all of the issues as they arise one-by-one, to no result. It just leads to knockback after knockback, diminished motivation and a drop in confidence.

You can try to mitigate these challenges in the sales process with various tactics, but it’s more valuable to recognize the bigger issue and bake it into your GTM, sales, and marketing strategy. For example:

• Understand it within your ICP and personas

  • Especially at ICP level, is there another segment that is more willing and able to work with you than prospects with hard-change environments?

• Extract as much information as possible in discovery and create different sales paths for easy-vs-hard change environments

  • Ask questions to understand the procurement process, ask for examples on the last time they purchased software, make sure you’re extracting potential blockers in the discovery call

  • In early-stage sales, disqualification is much more important and valuable than qualification – be strict on the types of prospects you want

• Track progress made in hard change environments to look for patterns, see what approaches work well, and consciously iterate on your win path

  • Make sure you’re building a NoWL (no, win, loss) program

  • Use a sales framework to record information and plan your deal strategy

• Be realistic with your go-to-market strategy and: is it worth trying to win those customers at all?

  • Could the time you spend on one hard customer be better spent acquiring two easier customers?

The sooner you can recognize and understand the change environment that your buyer operates within, the better systems and processes you can build around it – but make sure you make a conscious decision to acknowledge the challenge and are prepared to overcome, work around, or avoid.

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

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

The post Understanding your prospect’s change environment appeared first on Building Momentum.

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

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

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

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

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

• win more deals

• drive higher average contract values

• shorten your sales cycle 

• improve your positioning and marketing

• improve your forecasting ability

• better understand and react to the market

What is a win/loss analysis program? 

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

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

• Why they chose you, or chose an alternative solution

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

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

• What their buying process was like

• How they think about the value your product is delivering

• What’s going on in their business

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

How do I set up a win/loss process?

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

1: Capture information in your CRM

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

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

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

Win/Loss reason code fields

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

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

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

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

2: Create a win/loss research interview program

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

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

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

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

Choose your audience

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

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

Set up your outreach

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

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

• Working with the product research team

• Not looking to sell

• Looking to learn from their expertise

• Able to speak at a time that suits them

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

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

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

Have the call

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

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

You’ll want to understand key areas like:

• Their perception of the product and company

• Their experience in the sales/marketing process

• Their interpretation of your products value and pricing

• Their thoughts on the competitor landscape

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

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

Create a summary for each call

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

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

• Their behavior – process details, actions they took

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

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

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

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

3: Collate, share, discuss, utilise

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

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

Democratize access

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

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

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

Proactively share

• Share interesting tidbits and new learnings in your team updates

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

Package up your insights

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

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

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

Utilize

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

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

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

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

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

Every opportunity is a learning opportunity

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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The post Overcoming sales objections appeared first on Building Momentum.

My first product marketing role could be politely described as a ‘PowerPoint monkey’.

In the office – wearing a suit and tie, until a new American CEO took us business casual – I sat down at my desk. My task? To churn out decks for sales reps and account managers to present to prospects and customers.

These decks often ran to 30 slides or more. We used the rule of six (no more than six bullets per slide, no more than six words per bullet). Sales reps would use the decks in good faith… only to go off piste, skip around, and cut most of it out. But sales leadership felt it was important for reps to have the material to hand, even if they didn’t use it.

Fast forward to today.

Has much really changed? Do we still build big bulky decks? Do sales reps still customize the deck? Do we dutifully update the deck every product launch, even though it doesn’t get used? Probably ?.

The sales deck is a tool for momentum

When built, trained, and used effectively, the sales deck is a powerful tool to:

• Introduce your prospect to your company and product

• Grab their interest and convert it to desire

• Persuade the prospect that your product solves their problem

• Stand out from (and drive away) alternative solutions

• Galvanize the prospect into taking next steps

Sales decks generally fall somewhere on a scale.

• Too much focus on features makes it hard to create differentiation and justify higher price-points

• Too much fluffy visionary value messaging makes it less tangible, less actionable, and you’ll fight harder to close the deal

The mid-point is best: enough explanation of tangible features that combine to deliver value the customer desires (find out more in my post on value nuggets).

Four tips to rethink your sales deck

Here are four tips I’ve discovered to help you create a sales deck that is strong, insightful, powerful, and effective.

There is not ‘one’ sales deck

We normally use ‘sales deck’ to refer to multiple documents across the buyer journey:

• Overview deck that we send before a call

• Slides we run through in a first call

• The deck that’s sent after an initial meeting to share internally

• A presentation we run through in a second call for context

• Slides used every quarter in customer success calls

• …etc

Using one deck or one set of slides for all of these is a mistake.

The deck has to meet the needs identified as part of the buyer journey. Early in the process, it may be about generating interest and showing value. Later, the deck may require technical architecture and security credentials.

The story and narrative should have the same consistent building blocks. But the messaging will differ based on the context, the stakeholders involved, and the needs to be satisfied at each stage.

Less text, more conversation

We’ve all sat through a 30 minute sales presentation, before being asked “Any questions?” at the end. Dull. Unengaging. A poor experience.

Especially in meeting 1, your sales deck is a conversation tool. It is a prop.

For the rep, the meeting should be 50% active listening, 20% talking, and 30% reframing what’s being said.

Every slide is a discussion point: present some information, pose a question, and have a conversation.

Train reps on using SPIN questioning and framing in conversations.

• Situation: “How are you doing this today?” / “So today, you’re doing…”

• Problem: “What’s difficult about this?” / “When you’re doing [x], you struggle to…”

• Implication: “What’s the impact of this?” / “And this means you can/can’t…”

• Need-Payoff/Value: “If you could fix [problem], what would that achieve?” / “When you can [overcome problem], that would allow you to [value].”

You can capture really powerful insights to tailor the following conversations.

More than that, it offers the rep the chance to reframe the prospects thought process. For example, by challenging conventional wisdom, broadening their mindset, or reprogramming default cause-and-effect reasoning.

Write a consistent story with your customer

I recommend framing strategic narratives using Andy Raskin’s methodology. There are others, and it doesn’t always fit – but is a good place to aim for.

Namely, four elements that help unlock everything a good sales deck needs:

• An undeniable world change that your prospect agrees is happening

• The enemies that prevent them from keeping up with the change

• A promised land, an end-state they want to achieve

• Your product value, framed as magic capabilities

Some sales decks will follow these four elements in precise order, which feels forced and unnatural.

It has to feel authentic – your prospect has to be thinking “Wow… What we are doing isn’t working anymore, and won’t… How are we going to make change happen?”. They need to nod yes, and they need to jump to the right conclusion before you’ve mentioned it.

For the story to work, it has to resonate. It must be based on your Ideal Customer Profile, your customer development research, and you need to test your positioning in the market.

It can’t be built on your internal product vision alone, or what the founders see in the market. There is simply too much bias at play for positioning-by-assumption to work in the real world.

Galvanize the opportunity

When the conversation is flowing and you’re actively listening to the prospect, you’ll pick up on super valuable things to shape the opportunity.

One of the most effective ways to drive momentum in a sales deck meeting is with the last slide. Don’t finish with questions or a credential slide. Instead, can you end with a question to discover information to galvanize the deal?

Here’s an example of a slide we used at Kayako as a conversation starter. This slide showed the basic steps involved, and we explained how customers could get up-and-running with the product, and what after-sales support would be like.

More importantly, it offered the chance to ask prospects about their process, with questions like:

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

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

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

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

You can imagine how powerful this was to supercharge opportunities – or to de-prioritize them if needed.

Rethinking your sales deck: where to start?

It’s difficult to build a sales deck within your current limitations and worldview. Trying to manipulate your existing story into a new framework is hard.

It’s much easier to let go of the past.

Do the research, have the internal and external discussions. Focus.

Craft a unique narrative, understand the buyer journey. Build confidence.

And then form the decks and tools that you’ll use to build momentum.

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

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The post The sales deck: a tool for momentum appeared first on Building Momentum.

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.

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

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Does any of this sound familiar?

• “We need to send a one-pager!”

• “The customer requested an overview deck before we meet.”

• “They asked us to send some information over to see if they’re interested… what do we have?”

A PDF is thrown together with a few days delay whilst it’s designed in the brand colors. Or a custom Frankenstein deck is created from the other relics that clog up the Google Drive shared folder.

Maybe somebody clicks, and it piques interest enough to get that meeting booked. But who really knows?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This whole rigamarole is inefficient and ineffective, yet it’s still expected by prospects and sales reps, and so duly delivered by whoever is responsible.

Unfortunately, it’s extremely likely that the sales collateral has been created just because somebody asked for something. The end result is disconnected from the buyer journey, confusing the prospect or muddying the waters even further.

Sales collateral is material specifically developed to engage a prospect with the information they need, in order to close the deal faster.

Most sales collateral ignores the buyer and what they need from their process and instead chooses to shout about the company or product. Whitebooks on proprietary technology and algorithms, case studies about the implementation process, or ROI calculators that are not at all one-sided.

Often, sales reps can use collateral as a crutch to hang their outreach and engagement on. I’ve seen too many reps send the overview deck in the first cold outreach email, or use a one-pager with a wasted call-to-action of “let me know if you’re interested in finding out more”.

What makes good sales collateral?

In an alternative world, sales collateral comes from a solid understanding of your buyer’s journey – which comes from a solid understanding of who your ICP is and what’s going on for all your personas.

A solid buyer journey

The buyer journey is well-documented, highlighting and prioritizing what they need the questions they ask at each stage in the process. This aligns with your internal sales process, mapped to stages in the funnel.

Each stage of the buyer’s journey has been analyzed to understand what the buyer wants to know and should know by the time they move onto the next stage. This is then aligned into key sales activities at each stage – your discovery call, meeting one, demo, and so on.

Purposefully crafted collateral

The sales collateral available at each stage has been created proactively, in preparation to both answer questions should they arise, and also carefully crafted content to push the deal forward. This might be through case studies to build trust, interactive demos for workflow exploration, or a short video that walks through key topics. Each sales rep has a playbook of collateral they can deploy to answer specific questions and achieve specific outcomes.

Collateral generates insight and actions

The usage of sales collateral is linked to each prospect, and provides further information to help the rep navigate through the opportunity. Did they open it, share it, engage with it?

This alternate universe sounds great… but is probably unattainable, right?

Not quite. Here are three steps to help you understand your buyer journey, identify opportunities for effective collateral, and create content that helps deals close, faster.

Step 1: Understand your buyer journey

This is really key to many parts of your Go-To-Market strategy, but is complex to develop.

Every single person you speak to – from buyers, champions, to sales reps, and subject matter experts – will describe their buying process both wildly differently and completely unhelpfully. They were (and are) so enveloped in the process, they’ll find it hard to step back and look at the big picture.

Map your internal understanding

1. Start with your sales process map, and interview your top sales reps to understand what buyer needs, questions, and sales needs exist at each stage.

2. Create a simple spreadsheet and sanity check with other reps. Ask them to highlight the insights they have experienced themselves, the insights they’ve experienced that are in the wrong stage, and to remove anything that they have not experienced. This filtering helps you identify patterns that exist, those which need to be better understood, and pieces which may not be common.

3. Use call recordings and email comms to try to provide some evidence behind the buyer questions and needs you’ve identified, and ask questions to adapt as required.

This will get you to something that looks roughly correct. But now we need to find a way to discover our unknown unknowns.

Use and validate with outside insight

1. Ask ~3 customers to describe a) how they purchased a similar product like yours, and b) how they purchased your product – and record all the notes.

2. Look for patterns and compare the key questions and needs they identified to those discovered in your internal research.

3. Select some friendly customers and prospects to take part in a card-sorting exercise. Here, you’ll randomize the buyer needs and questions into ‘cards’, and ask buyers to group them along a process, before naming each step of the process. You’ll get a few different versions, so you’ll need to use your own insights to finalise them, but you’ll end up with something that is much stronger than having a guess yourself.

Document your buyer journey

Make sure you document your buyer journey in an easy-to-understand format.

Step 2: identify sales collateral opportunities

Now that your buyer journey is documented, you’ll have a good idea of the buyer needs and questions that arise at each stage of the journey. So how do you use this to understand where your sales team need collateral support?

Map your current deals

The easiest way to start is by mapping your current pipeline to the buyer journey. Where is each prospect, what questions have not been answered yet, which needs have not been met at each stage?

This will help you understand where the most immediate gaps are. Work with sales to see how those can be best met, whether through meeting / email outreach, or if those questions/needs are best met through collateral.

Prioritize for the highest revenue impact

Quickly, every piece of collateral becomes a must-have, so start building a wishlist.

You can prioritize how you like, but I prefer to rate each wishlist item using an adjusted RICE method:

• Reach (or, revenue impact in $)

• Impact (or, the increase in probability expected in %)

• Confidence (score 1 for low, 3 for medium, 5 for high)

• Effort (score 1 for low, 3 for medium, 5 for high)

Then, use the formula (R x I x C) / E and you’ll end up with an adjusted dollar amount to suggest the revenue impact that could be gained by closing that gap.

This may not be best for your needs, so make sure to evaluate priority according to your situation.

Step 3: create content that closes deals faster

So you’ve identified your buyer journey, and you’ve prioritized the first few gaps that need filling in with collateral. How do you make sure it gets used by sales, lands with the customer, and actually contributes to the deal?

Co-create the first version

Sales collateral can’t be built in isolation. It has to be built in conjunction with sales, with an opportunity in mind. This might mean working on an urgent MVP to test the water, or predicting a gap that will need closing in advance. The sales rep will hopefully know enough about the angle that’s required, and have enough context to support in developing the right medium and message.

Ensure it educates the buyer above all else

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty good at spotting sales propaganda when I see it. Big claims, testimonials that seem too good to be true, and the promise that everything will work out.

We know that buyers are generally further along in their education and knowledge than we might expect – so don’t try to pull the wool over their eyes with dumbed-down takes. We want to prevent churn and post-sales dissatisfaction too, right?

The content must be relatable, truly insightful, and easy to repeat. In most buying circumstances, your champion has to cheerlead for your product internally, so make sure that helps them.

Remember – we already know what they need at each stage, and what questions they will have. It shouldn’t be difficult to answer them with creative, educational messages.

Optimize for sales insight

Please don’t just create a PDF unless it is the absolute best medium for your needs! It might be… but probably isn’t.

Sales collateral should help close the deal faster, and that means ensuring sales benefit from it too.

• Can you create an interactive calculator for the prospect to complete, that shares results with the rep?

• If a video case study, can you provide on a trackable link that monitors which areas piqued their interest, and where they switched off?

• If it has to be text + images, can you create a webpage that is tracked through your CRM, allowing the rep to see who has viewed the page?

• If it has to be a PDF, can you add a unique call-to-action that shows the intended reader has understood the message?

• Must it be a technical whitepaper? Can you offer a whitepaper PDF, and a 5 minute overview video from your CTO?

Plan to iterate

Just as your positioning evolves, so will the buyer journey, and so will the needs that collateral has to answer.

At a minimum, review the performance of collateral every 6 months. Ideally, every two months.

• Is it being used by sales? Why/why not?

• Is it judged to be successful? Why/why not?

• What segments is it successful with? Why/why not?

Use sales collateral strategically, not tactically

The opportunity to drive sales velocity – closing more deals, for more revenue, faster – through smart, strategic sales collateral is huge.

Don’t waste your prospect’s attention with a half-handed, cobbled-together deck that mocks their intelligence and tries to do the sales reps job for them.

Understand your buyer journey, prioritize intervention opportunities, and create content that works for everyone.

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After all, there’s so much more to be doing: you need more opportunities, you need more conversations, more networking, so you’re too busy to make notes. Right?

Not quite…

If anything, it’s even more crucial to make sure you’re recording the right information to help you gain control of your pipeline, assess performance, and extract useful insights to improve your sales results. But how?

Plan the sale and adapt as you learn

The best sales reps I’ve worked with use deal plans to formulate their strategy to each sale.

They know the product they’re selling, and it’s value, the market, and competitors.

They know more than you might expect about their customer, from the problem to be solved to their exact purchase procurement process.

They’ve also got a plan for their sales process.

• What levers will be most effective?

• How are they going to proactively manage objections?

• When to push with contention, when to open negotiation, when to make it personal.

And as they go through the process, they adapt their approach. They acknowledge what’s changed, think through the potential impacts, and adjust until they achieve the ideal outcome.

They weigh up a deal rationally to protect their time and effort, without being muddied by biases and the human condition.

But… where do you start?

Plan deals with STRONGMAN

STRONGMAN is a framework designed to help with solution selling – a problem-led (rather than product-led) approach to examine whether the customer could achieve desired improvements through a new product or process.

As a mnemonic device, STRONGMAN represents eight different areas to review an opportunity, plan your approach, and record changes.

• S – solution

• T – timeline

• R – review

• O – options

• N – need

• G – galvanization

• M – money

• A – authority

• N – negotiation

How to use STRONGMAN in sales

For discipline, I’d recommend adding each area as a separate field in your CRM and ensuring the fields are updated weekly. Every week, add new comments at the top and date the previous notes, so you have a running record of changes. Alternatively, start a Google Doc for each deal and review weekly.

These notes should be completed and shared a day before a weekly sales meeting where the team can ask questions, offer support, and ask for help.

“But sales reps need to be out selling, not filling in admin.”

The average win rate is 47% – in other words, more than half your sales effort goes to unsuccessful deals. Encouraging thoughtful introspective thinking will not only help you improve in the future, but unlock new ideas to correct course earlier.

Creating in-depth notes and plans like this also means sales reps have more leverage to argue for changes they’d like to see in product/marketing/sales, by creating referenceable ‘evidence’. Make sure you’re sharing these updates with your marketing, product marketing, sales enablement teams to help adjust customer understanding, market insight, and identify new enablement opportunities.

Examine STRONGMAN in more detail

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of interrogative questions for each area. Use these prompts to assess, control, and ultimately learn from your opportunities.

S – Solution

Assess:

• How would our solution be used by the customer, to solve their problem?

• What would the ideal solution look like?

Control:

• How do we position our solution in the best light?

• Who understands the solution, and who do we need to convince?

T – Timeline

Assess:

• What do we know about the prospect’s timeline?

• What’s our ideal timeline?

Control:

• How do we build momentum in the deal?

• When do we need key actions to happen?

R – Review

Assess:

• Is the prospect just researching, or is are they seriously considering our solution?

• Is the prospect going to gain value from our solution?

• What do you know about their assessment of our product?

Control:

• What does the prospect need to move into review stage?

• Is this a deal we should prioritize or de-prioritize?

O – Options

Assess:

• What’s the status quo, and what’s the business case against it?

• What other solutions are there, and how are they ranked by the prospect?

Control:

• How do we reframe the options available to them, and position ours in the best light?

• Can we introduce alternative options to help anchor our solution?

N – Need

Assess:

• How convinced is the prospect by the need for a new solution?

• Is everyone in the buying group convinced the need exists and needs to be solved?

Control:

• How do we increase the need by dialling up pain, fear, uncertainty, doubt, FOMO, etc?

• How do we access and convince stakeholders who are more detached from the pain?

G – Galvanization

Note: this is my favourite piece of the puzzle. There’s so much opportunity to build momentum by turning prospects into champions and building urgency to close.

Assess:

• Is the prospect serious? Are they motivated to solve the problem?

• Who is galvanized, and why?

Control:

• How can you utilize other buying stakeholders to improve motivation and drive urgency?

• What risks are there that would de-motivate or damage urgency?

M – Money

Assess:

• Where’s the budget coming from?

• What’s the purchase process?

Control:

• Can you pre-engage the procurement process?

• What risks exist in accessing their budget?

• How will we we proactively counter budget objections?

A – Authority

Assess:

• Does the champion have signing authority, or do they have social capital with the person who does?

• Do we understand the buyer stakeholder group well enough to understand how decisions are made?

Control:

• Who do we need to understand better in the buyer group, and how do we do that?

• How will we counter authority-based objections?

N – Negotiation

Assess:

• What signals have we seen that may impact negotiation?

• How does our solution compare to alternative options?

Control:

• What levers and insight do we have, and what negotiation tactics can we expect to use?

• Is this a deal to win at any cost, or are we sticking to our proposal? What concessions can we offer for procurement, if any?

Build a stronger go-to-market approach

STRONGMAN is not the only framework to use – so give it a try, find another one, or create your own deal strategy template.

Taking a product to market through sales is an exercise in building confidence in your ability to do so repeatedly. So train the team, capture the insight, and use it to get better.

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