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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.

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

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

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

They are two very different things.

Let’s get into it.

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

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

Book an intro call now

Product launches have become marketing theatre

Teams are optimizing for the splash on launch day:

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

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

The change is driven by vanity and shortcuts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

… No.

2. Product launches gloss over snake oil products

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

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

Product launches also rely on goodwill of the wider circle.

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

3. AI is pouring fuel on the fire

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

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

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

4. Breadth over focus

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

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

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

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

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

5. Ego

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

But this taints direction and limits potential.

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

This is a dangerous problem: how do we escape?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plan your next launch like this

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

Decide: what are you optimizing for?

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

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

Know your baseline:

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

Now build backwards.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Build for momentum, not theatre.

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

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

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

Have you ever sat in a presentation where someone puts up a slide titled “Our ICP” and it reads:

“B2B SaaS companies, $10M-$50M ARR, 50-200 employees, North America.”

And someone in the room asks: “So… that’s like 8,000 companies. Which ones should we actually call?”

Silence.

I see this pattern constantly. Companies with reasonable-sounding ICPs built entirely on firmographics: company size, industry, revenue range, location… nothing else.

That’s not an ICP.

Six months later, they’re still stuck in the same place.

• Marketing can’t deliver the right leads
• Sales teams spray and pray without focus
• Win rates stay flat
• Churn goes up
• The team burns out

The problem isn’t work ethic or the budget: it’s your ICP definition.

Most ICPs tell you what a company is, but they don’t tell you when that company is ready to buy.

Situation influences purchase more than firmographics

The thing about firmographics is, they’re static and tell you literally nothing. They describe a company’s characteristics, but not their context.

A “Series B SaaS company” could be crushing it or bleeding cash. They could have a world-class GTM engine… or a pipeline held together with hope and spreadsheets.

One is browsing, and the other is buying.

But a “Series B SaaS company that just missed their board forecast by 40% and realized their pipeline has no repeatable process” is in a completely different state. That’s a company in a situation… and situations create urgency.

Let me give you a real example.

At Headstart, before I joined, the ICP was purely firmographic. Consulting and professional services companies, specific revenue range, offices in certain locations. Standard stuff.

It wasn’t working. The messaging was generic. Sales cycles were long. There was no pattern to wins.

So we shifted the definition. We started targeting companies that had published in their annual reports that diversity, equity, and inclusion was a strategic priority.

That was the trigger.

Once a company published that commitment, we knew they were serious.

We could reference their own language back to them. We could connect with people inside those organizations who personally cared about this work. The motivation was already there.

Everything changed. The sales team knew exactly who to target and when. The messaging got sharper because it could speak to a specific moment: the moment leadership made a public commitment. Close rates improved noticeably.

Why?

We stopped fishing in the ocean, and started fishing where the fish were already biting.

This is what I mean by situational ICP. The question isn’t “who is our ideal customer?” The real question is “What happened the week before they started looking for us?”

Was it a failed product launch?

A new executive who exposed gaps in the GTM? A competitor win that blindsided them?

A board meeting that went sideways?

A public commitment they now need to deliver on?

That specific moment, that trigger, is your real ICP.

When you shift to situational thinking, three things happen

Your messaging gets sharper.

You’re not writing for “B2B SaaS companies.”

You’re writing for “B2B SaaS companies whose last product launch flopped and the CEO is demanding answers.”

That specificity cuts through the noise and validates the pain before you even pitch the solution. It makes your prospect feel seen.

Your targeting gets easier.

You can build content around the trigger event, not just the company size.

Target companies with new hires in key roles. Companies that just announced funding. Companies that published commitments in annual reports. Companies that failed a compliance audit.

This powers ABM, outbound, and your entire content strategy.

Your close rates improve.

Because you’re reaching companies when they’re actually ready to change.

Most of your market is stuck in inertia.

They know they have a problem, but the emotional cost of change feels too high.

But companies in a situation? They’ve already overcome that inertia.

Something broke. Someone’s mad. The status quo isn’t acceptable anymore.

You’re not convincing them they have a problem… you’re showing up exactly when they’re ready to solve it.

Quick diagnostic: is your ICP sharp enough?

Before we go further, let’s diagnose your current ICP. Score yourself honestly on these 5 questions:

1. Can you describe their “horrible day” in specific detail?

If you can’t describe the exact moment their day falls apart, you don’t understand their pain well enough to sell to it.

2. Can your sales team spot the difference between a good-fit and bad-fit lead in 5 minutes?

A sharp ICP gives your team conviction. They should confidently disqualify a bad fit early in the conversation.

3. Does your ICP exclude at least 70% of your total market?

Narrow focus isn’t limiting… the opposite! It’s liberating! It lets you build messaging that actually resonates.

4. Is there less than 2 steps between your feature and their revenue or cost outcome?

Every step is a chance for them to lose interest. “Close 30% more deals” is stronger than “better project management leading to faster shipping leading to more revenue.”

5. Are you seeing momentum with this segment?

If you’re not seeing faster cycles, higher win rates, and better retention, your ICP might be theoretically correct but practically wrong.

If you can’t confidently say yes to at least 4 of these, your ICP is probably costing you deals.

Fix 1: Listen to sales calls

Don’t skim – actually listen!

Your job is to find the moment of maximum frustration, the point where the prospect’s voice changes where they sound tired, or angry, or desperate.

That emotion is your trigger. Write down the exact situation they describe.

For example, you might hear: “The CFO presents a messy pipeline report to board. CEO asks pointed questions the VP Sales can’t answer. VP Sales gets told to ‘fix it in 30 days or we’ll find someone who can.’ They start Googling solutions that night.”

That’s a trigger. That’s the moment they became a strong, high-potential, motivated buyer.

Fix 2: Build your “Negative ICP”

Pull a list of your highest-churn customers. What do they have in common? Industry patterns? Size? Mindset? Buying motion?

Write down the 5 attributes that scream churn, and turn that into a one-pager for your sales and marketing team. Make it easy for them to disqualify bad fits early, avoid targeting them in paid marketing, etc.

This is critical: disqualification is more important than qualification.

Every hour your team spends on a bad-fit prospect is an hour they’re not spending on someone who’s actually ready to buy.

You’re not trying to build the perfect persona; you’re trying to get sharp enough that your messaging actually resonates.

And remember: your ICP isn’t static. It’s going to evolve every 6 months as you learn what’s working and what’s not. You might refine it to be even more niche, or broaden slightly as you find success in adjacent markets.

This is what I call the positioning loop:

• Clarity (define your ICP)

• Conviction (commit to it)

• Consistency (execute for 6 months)

… so you can actually learn fast and narrow, without spraying and praying.

The fear of narrowing down is real

Every time I’ve recommended narrowing an ICP, I’ve gotten pushback from founders and CEOs.

“If we go that narrow, we’ll leave 90% of the revenue on the table.”

“We need to keep it broad so we can see what sticks.”

“Our product works for everyone in this category.”

The fear is real. Nobody wants to miss being the next Salesforce because they niched too early.

But trying to be everything to everyone is the fastest way to become nothing to anyone.

You can’t build authority with a broad ICP.

Authority requires a point of view.

And a point of view requires choosing who you’re for… and who you’re not.

I worked with a seller who focused on an uncomfortably narrow ICP. They only sold to one specific customer type, in a specific region. Their pitch was three sentences. Their close rate was ridiculously high. Customers barely asked questions before signing.

When I asked if they worried about leaving money on the table, they said: “No. I worry about trying to serve everyone poorly instead of serving someone exceptionally well.”

That stuck with me.

Because narrowing your ICP doesn’t shrink your business. It expands your impact.

When you’re crystal clear on who you serve, three things happen:

1. Your messaging gets sharp enough to cut through the noise

2. Your sales team can spot good fits instantly

3. Your product roadmap has a clear direction

The hardest part of strategy is saying no. But it’s also the most important part.

Stop fishing in the ocean

In B2B, you don’t sell to company profiles. You sell to people in companies in specific situations that they desperately want to escape.

So here’s what I’d challenge you to do:

• Stop building ICPs on demographic filters

• Stop defining your market by company size and job titles alone

• Instead, ask: “What happened the week before they started looking for us?”

• Find that moment

• Build your messaging around it

• Target companies when they’re in that situation

Because that’s when they’re ready to buy, when you can actually help them move forward.

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

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

The post Stop selling to job titles, and start selling to situations instead 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.

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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.

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The post Sell the slope: How to make progress believable before it’s real. 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.

Me too.

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

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

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

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

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

Explaining TAM, SAM, and SOM

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

Illustrating with an example

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

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

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

How to go from TAM to SOM

Step 1: Find your universe (TAM)

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

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

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

How to Calculate TAM:

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

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

Example: Toward’s TAM

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

Step 2: Start to incorporate reality (SAM)

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

Product Fit:

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

Go-To-Market Fit:

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

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

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

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

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

Example: Toward’s SAM

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

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

Now it’s time to get real.

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

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

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

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

Example: Toward’s SOM

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

Working SOM into a revenue plan

Now for the fun part.

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

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

Step 4: Model the funnel

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

1. Estimate your win rate

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

2. Work back from revenue goals

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

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

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

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

4. Adjust for Reality

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

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

5. Extend even further

Even after adjusting, you can go a level deeper:

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

Recap: Toward’s funnel is not good

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

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

Tip: It’s not about the actual numbers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

So what do you do? You capitalize on it!

You decide to double down on your current strategy.

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

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

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

The brief is simple. Scale what’s working.

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

Sounds great.

Except… 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Just like your value proposition, you’re going to find most success when you tailor the differentiators you use to two things: the primary stakeholder, and the buyer journey stage.

I learnt the value proposition lesson the hard way, when we launched a new product but had messaged towards executive-level concerns on the homepage – without realising that the folks coming to our website were mostly managers. They didn’t care about the aspirational messaging, and instead needed more tangible content.

It’s exactly the same with the differentiators that you’ll want to call out.

Showcase the wrong differentiators to the wrong person at the wrong time, and you’ll be missing out on impact, momentum, and revenue.

But first, what’s a differentiator?

Your competitive differentiators are just that… what makes you different from your competitors. It’s not your pricing, your product features, or your branding.

I like using the Bain Elements of B2B Value Pyramid to illustrate value and differentiators.

The pyramid starts at the base with “table stakes,” which are the basic requirements and functional elements of value that customers expect from any product. As we move up the pyramid, the elements of value become less tangible and more about the implications of using the product – first within the organization, then what matters to the individual buyer.

The next level is “functional value,” which includes things like product performance and reliability. Above that is “ease of doing business value,” which includes things like responsive customer service and streamlined ordering processes.

Moving further up the pyramid, we come to “individual value,” which includes things like reputation assurance and reduced anxiety. At the top of the pyramid is “inspirational value,” which includes hope, vision, and social responsibility. Here, differentiators aim to align the vendor with the buyer’s cultural and ethical worldview.

The pyramid is a useful tool for understanding your competitive differentiators because it shows that not all differentiators are created equal. The most tangible and functional elements of value may be important, but they may not be what ultimately sets you apart from the competition. By understanding the different levels of value in the pyramid, you can more effectively communicate the unique benefits of your product to each stakeholder at each stage of the buyer journey.

You can read more about the pyramid here.

Take a minute to read through and understand the different groupings: tablestakes, functional value, ease of doing business value, individual value, and inspirational value.

You can’t really create differentiators, only discover them. What is it about your product that draws buyers to you, and not to others?

Aligning value differentiators

My experience suggests that there are two main ways to segment and combine differentiators: by the stakeholder, and the funnel stage. It looks something a bit like this:

Let’s take a look at the two axes.

Differentiators by stakeholder

Just like my failed product launch example above, the type of stakeholder you’re communicating to changes the starting point.

Generally:

• Users are concerned with the day-to-day. They want information features, they want to build a functional understanding of your product.
• Managers want functional information, but they’re looking for benefits too. They want to understand what the product is going to help them achieve over a medium timeframe.
• Execs are more interested in the aspirational direction that your product can support them to achieve in the long-term.

This will definitely vary, but generally I’ve seen these patterns repeated many times over the last ~12 years.

Differentiators by buyer journey

Your buyer journey is not the sales funnel. Hopefully you’ve got a good understanding of the expedition they go on to solve problems and buy solutions.

• At the awareness stage, your differentiators should focus on grabbing attention and building interest. You want to differentiate your product from the competition and highlight its unique value with what matters most to the stakeholder. You’re answering the ‘why’ at this stage.
• At the consideration stage, your differentiators should focus on providing more detailed information about how it addresses the buyer’s specific needs. You want to demonstrate how your product solves their problems better than the competition, and provide evidence of its effectiveness. You’re answering ‘how’ at this stage.
• At the purchase stage, you should focus on reinforcing the buyer’s decision to choose your product by highlighting differentiators that answer and reinforce the specific ‘what’ that each stakeholder is looking for.

Putting these both together

So if we combine both the primary stakeholder and the funnel stage, we get something like this:

At the awareness stage, you want to stand out and resonate with the differentiators that your stakeholder is going to engage with the most.

• For users, that’s things that will make their life easier – time savings, how much more organized they can be, the configurability.
• For managers, it’s about individual value – what do they stand to gain from working with you? Things like reputational assurance or the reduced anxiety they’ll feel using your product.
• For execs, you’ll engage best on inspirational value. Aspirational differentiators that get them pumped up about what they could achieve in the long-term.

During the consideration stage, you’re showcasing ‘how’ your product helps the stakeholder to achieve all the stuff you just said in the awareness stage.

• For users, show functional differentiators, the performance and economic impact of your product.
• For managers, make it real and show how your product differentiators make it easier to do business.
• For execs, it’s individual value differentiators that appeal most at this stage. You’ve said what the long-term vision is, but now the differentiators that matter will give them confidence.

Finally, at the purchase stage your differentiators are not high-level aspirational things – but rather, the extremely tangible components – because you’ve already sold the story and highlighted your unique values that separates you from the pack on the intangible.

• For users, tablestake differentiators will get them motivated. Price, specifications, and compliance.
• For managers, it’s that functional value that will help them – the performance and economic impact
• For execs, differentiators that matter here are about the ease of doing business with your product – configurability, responsiveness, fit, quality, and so on.

An example

Here’s how the matrix might look for a project management tool. See how the potential differentiators at each stage map back to the elements discussed in the B2B Elements of Value pyramid?

So what does this all mean?

Understanding your competitive differentiators is critical to your success – even more so, knowing where and when to use them.

Using the Bain Elements of B2B Value Pyramid and the framework above, you can align them to the needs and priorities of each stakeholder at each stage of the buyer journey. You can stand out from the competition, and provide the right mix of value to the right stakeholders at the right time.

Remember though: differentiators cannot be created; they can only be discovered. By focusing on what makes your product or service unique in the mind of your customer, you can provide value that truly resonates with your customers, build momentum, and find success.

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

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Positioning is what your company says about itself to the world, and can be the difference between being the hottest, must-have software, or the dullest product on earth.

Your positioning will adapt and evolve to remain relevant and effective – or at least, attempt to do so.

But it’s hard to see this in action. Positioning evolves pretty slowly at any company – in years, rather than months. So, in this example, I’ve taken a look at Zendesk – the customer support platform you all know (and if you’re a user, probably hate).

I’ve stepped back in time over 16 years of Internet Archive snapshots to look at how Zendesk positioned themselves, and see what insights we can glean about changes to their target customer, value proposition, frame of reference, and market trends.

But first, when should positioning evolve?

From my previous post on when you should consider repositioning, I called out the following:

• Product offering has legitimately changed – If you’ve made an acquisition, added a new product line, or developed new capabilities that vastly change the outcomes your customers can achieve, it’s time to refresh.
• New unique, unconventional wisdom unlocked – Unconventional wisdom is a great way to stand out from your competitors, re-educate your customers, and develop a strong sales and marketing narrative that drives urgency and demand.
• Customer patterns and feedback – As you win new customers, your ‘best-fit customer’ will change. As you continue to sell and market and support to them, you’ll learn much more about what’s going on in their minds – new hopes, dreams, and fears that can enable stronger positioning.
• Specific sales funnel challenges – Drops in MQLs or closed won rates can be really great indicators that you need to revisit the way you present your brand to the market.

And they still hold true. Building new product features, introducing new concepts or categories to the market, learning about your next ideal customers, and reacting to challenging sales environments cover nearly every reason you might need to change and adapt your positioning.

Zendesk’s positioning evolution

Zendesk is one of the longest-running ‘real’ SaaS businesses that we can look back almost two decades and see how their positioning, messaging, and value proposition has changed.

So… I’ve gone back over the last 16 years, and taken a screenshot of their website homepage hero section. This is the digital version of cutting a tree trunk and learning how old it is and how the conditions have changed each year.

Only in this case, we’re able to understand how Zendesk thought about:

• Their target customers
• Their value proposition
• The frame of reference they use
• Trends affecting the market

You can scroll down to the bottom of this post to see screenshots each year with a brief commentary. But first, let’s take a look at how it’s changed:

What we can learn from Zendesk

Zendesk have been unapologetic to evolve and experiment with positioning over the years, and while we’ll never know the full reasoning or context surrounding their decisions, we’re able to pass some judgement over what has changed – and potentially why.

Target customer: From IT to any company

Zendesk started by targeting agile IT organizations in 2007 but expanded to serve any company, large or small. Very quickly, Zendesk found product/market-fit quickly with a much broader audience, but still kept messaging to appeal to IT user needs throughout.

Value proposition: Reinventing the helpdesk, to the better choice

Straight out of the gate, Zendesk focused on how they were reimagining a boring software category for the new Web 2.0 age. Throughout the years, they’ve played around with several value props including those on speed, customer satisfaction, and – their most famous – “Beautiful customer support software”.

Today, Zendesk have landed on how they help businesses to meet customer needs, set teams up for success, and keep their business in sync.

Frame of reference: From helpdesk to multichannel and more

Unlike many tech darlings, Zendesk didn’t really try to own a frame of reference or create a category. Beginning as a helpdesk (common in the IT world) to ending with customer service software (a much broader framing), Zendesk has always been relatively consistent. Over the years, they’ve adjusted their frame of reference with clarifiers like multi-channel software, beautiful software, powerful platforms, etc.

Market trends: Web 2.0 to speed and scalability

Zendesk has ridden the general waves of B2B tech over the last 16 years. Firstly calling out the Web 2.0 trend of interconnectivity and fun user experiences, to then reiterating the benefits of on-demand (rather than on-premise) software, to gradually evolving as the market moved towards customer support as growth lever through better customer relationships. These can help build urgency and new consideration opportunities, as well as link your positioning to important trends.

Key takeaways

Over 16 years, Zendesk has remained the leader in the industry (not for our lack of trying!) by evolving to reflect changes in the market and customer needs.

Emphasising its core strengths, and staying true to its goal of reinventing the support software industry around the wholesome message of ‘tender loving customer care’ since 2008 is still visible in their tone of voice today. However, the 2013 repositioning as beautifully simple customer service software is probably their most resonant and successful, and still comes up when talking about Zendesk today.

So what can we learn?

• Evolving and broadening your target customer works – once you’re seeing positive shoots of product/market-fit
• Leaning into market trends can help influence your value proposition with the latest cool stuff – and drive new consideration opportunities too
• More than anything, your frame of reference must be from the perspective of your customers – adding clarifiers helps create differentiation here
• As you learn more, you can evolve the value proposition from focusing on features and benefits, to defining the valuable outcomes your customers seek – just don’t take it took far

Zendesk over the years

Below are screenshots from the Zendesk homepage each year according to the Internet Archive.

2007

It’s the summer of 2007, and Zendesk is still in pre-launch mode. Their homepage makes it clear their market: IT teams, looking for modern web 2.0 style software, and they’re bold enough to say they’re reinventing the help desk.

I also copied in their about page, adding more color to Zendesk’s IT team origins – but how they see an opportunity by connecting the features that IT teams care about, with the design and user experience they desire.

2008

Out of beta and using Flash – but see the language that Zendesk is using? Tender loving customer care – probably at stark odds with messaging from other IT help desk providers at the time.

Their hero section dials up the core benefits – elegant and simple, works for everyone, and no downloads or installs.

2009

Still using Flash Player, but we’ve now seen Zendesk jump from being for IT teams to being for any company, large and small. For context, 2009 was when Zendesk raised an undisclosed Series A in March, followed by a $6m Series B in August – undoubtedly this is the year that Zendesk knew they had product/market-fit.

Note their messaging still highlights ‘on-demand’ software, as companies were still getting used to SaaS delivery, but the value their customers are looking for is better customer care.

2010

In 2010 we see Zendesk dial back up the ‘reinvention’ angle, not seen since the first pre-launch homepage. Their header also calls out how it can help companies to engage their customers too, while their rotating callouts focus on core benefits like delivering ‘customer love’, being available ‘any time, any place’, and being ‘beyond SaaS’.

2011

In the December of 2010, Zendesk raise a $19m series C – and get to business. In 2011 they’re claiming 10k+ customers and also do a great job keyword-stuffing their homepage: help desk software, support ticket system, customer support platform.

And we see Zendesk’s messaging become more tangible. Gone is the lofty ‘reinventing’ message – and now it’s just the fastest way to great customer support. Supporting text highlights that Zendesk is agile, smart, and convenient.

2012

The fastest message continues into 2012 but we now see two new messages on their homepage:

• Powerful, yet simple: Positioning to appeal to their core IT team base, but wanting to reach a wider audience with a focus on simplicity.
• Multi-channel customer service software: Positioning to appeal to businesses pushing the boundaries – multi-channel across email, social, phone, chat, and more.

2013

We finally get to the phrase that everyone knows and remembers Zendesk for: beautifully simple customer service software.

We also see a ‘levelling up’ in terms of the overall value and outcome that customers are searching for. Fast customer support isn’t the endgame now – customer satisfaction is the holy grail.

2014

In 2014, Zendesk went public. And I think this homepage is probably an outcome of that, rather than an example of what actually worked well for them at the time.

It’s a good reminder that positioning doesn’t always have to serve your customers – sometimes, it can serve other purposes. In this case, we can speculate that it may have been to tell a story for the retail investor market.

Regardless, Zendesk have levelled up their messaging even higher still, probably to ineffective heights. There’s a lack of tangibility in this core message of ‘being better at customer service’.

2015

I think 2015 is another year where the brand marketers won the argument. Yes, bringing customers and their customers closer together is a good outcome, but it’s probably not the one that businesses are most motivated to achieve.

We do see an introduction of a frame of reference that makes senes: software for better customer service.

2016

The argument between the PMMs and the brand marketers is tipping ever more in the PMMs favour – but not quite. We see more information in the sub-hero section than we do above the fold.

Zendesk helps companies to provide a great overall customer experience. Aspirational enough? No. But clear.

Building customer relationships that are meaningful, personal, and productive. Tangible enough? No – feels like they’re skirting around the concept that “better customer support means customers spend more money”.

2017

The year of the big Zendesk rebrand, using geometric shapes to denote a whole suite of products. Building software for better relationships, great. Lending a hand? Not so sure.

2018

Deliver the best customer experience. Powerful, flexible, scalable customer service and engagement platform. Meeting the needs of any business. Clear, concise, and valuable.

2019

And it seems they found a winner – no changes over a whole year.

2020

We all know what happened in 2020, and this is a great example of reactive positioning. Scaling up faster than everything else is changing. Speaking to the core needs of getting to get up and running quickly, and flexibility to adapt to any need.

2021

Zendesk makes customer service better. Again, a return of ‘better’ – an ambiguous shapeshifter that can mean anything, to anyone – and probably why they use it. Better could mean more flexible to a support manager, more integrated to an IT person, or easier to use for a support agent.

We see Zendesk highlight the value their product delivers to businesses: meeting customer needs, setting team up for success, and keeping business in sync.

2022

Again, onto another winner? No changes for a whole other year.

2023

Even today, you’ll see the same hero header on the homepage.

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

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

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

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

A typical second product story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, it was different back then.

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

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

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

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

Building a second product (the right way)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or, could you acquire a product?

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

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

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

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

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

Regardless, look for focus + confidence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Principles

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

Price before product

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

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

See how much riskier that is?!

Instead, smart startups will:

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

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

Price problems are probably a positioning problem

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

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

All commerce is an exchange – value, for money.

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

Pricing goes hand-in-hand with positioning.

Margin matters

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

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

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

Process

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

Set pricing objectives

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

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

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

You can download my pricing objectives process and template here.

Define your pricing strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep on customer research

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

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

Carry out specific pricing research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Competitor research

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

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

Draft and first review

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

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

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

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

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

Margin review and iterations

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

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

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

Testing

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

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

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

Get approval

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

Implement

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

Bringing it all together

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

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

Good luck!

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

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

Revenue models can be really freaking confusing, especially for someone who’s never been exposed to that side of the business before.

But luckily, they’re not too complicated – once you understand what you’re looking at.

In this post I’m going to walk through how you can approach building a revenue model for your product.

Why should product marketers know the financial model?

As PMMs, we’re super close to how the product is marketed and sold. We should understand the total, addressable, and obtainable market opportunity over the short-to-long-term.

We want to work with sales, to accurately set expectations around product performance in the market. We want to work with growth and marketing teams to understand the funnel, set goals, and plan the campaigns required to meet targets.

But we also need a good understanding of P&L fundamentals like margins, COGS, etc. The decisions we make – around target customer, positioning, pricing, and product details – are all interconnected – and directly relate to the success and return on investment of our products.

Financial model template

For this post, we’ll use the early-stage SaaS financial model created by marker.io – you can copy the Google Sheet template here.

The template has four tabs:

1. Recap – this is your overview of the total revenue, costs, and profit by year
2. Growth Hypotheses – here you’ll adjust assumptions around growth rates, pricing, and churn
3. Costs Hypotheses – assumptions around spending, including any staff, marketing, and other expenses
4. Financial model – your month-by-month breakdown of how everything adds up, breaks down, and turns out

The template is built for startup founders, so isn’t exactly what you need, but has enough bones for you to customize for your own needs. You may want to remove references to staff costs, make marketing costs dollar amounts rather than a percentage of revenue, and reword or delete miscellaneous costs as necessary.

Using the revenue model template

Growth assumptions

On the growth tab, it’s time to input the following:

Average monthly price of subscriptions. How much monthly recurring revenue will your customers pay each? You may want to consider blending or adjusting the fields and formulas to account for discounts, average size of customers, pricing package uptake, etc

Monthly growth in number of new customers. How are you growing month-over-month? This is measured as a percentage of the existing customer base. Consider product/market-fit, the maturity of the market, sales cycle length, and seasonality.

Monthly revenue churn rate. Each month, what percentage of the customer base stop paying for your product? You’ll always have some level of churn whether it’s customers actively dissatisfied with your product, new customers that never get up-and-running, or customers going bust and no longer able to pay their bills.

If you’re launching a brand new product into the market, you’ll also need to think about:

• Number of new customers added last month (i.e. the number of customers you start with) – your beta customers, early adopters, etc.
• Starting MRR – the monthly recurring revenue you start with (from those initial customers!)

Cost assumptions

Click on to tab two to start playing around with your spend. You can either use this template as-is to capture operating expenses for a fuller picture, or remove items not involved with the creating/selling/providing the product.

Personnel. You can use this to track personnel costs to support the product, e.g. any operational team members required, or go broader to consider all of those who work on building, shipping, marketing, selling, and supporting your product.

Marketing spend. The template uses a percentage of MRR to estimate how much money you’ll put on marketing activity. Update these fields (or create new ones) to accurately estimate where you’ll be spending money on promotion.

Cost of goods sold. Every SaaS will have a cost to serve product to a customer. The template contains fields for payment processing and hosting/bandwidth costs – you may want to update or create new fields to capture additional costs involved in delivering product, like any third-party software license fees.

Miscellaneous. Pretty straightforward – use to capture any additional costs.

Check the numbers!

You’ve thought about your product’s growth potential and been rational about the costs you’ll experience.

Now you can review the financial model tab to see how things pan out.

Revenue. The top section looks at all the incoming customer growth, how many will churn, and the resulting revenue from their customership.

Costs. All those costs you entered now appear, month-by-month, so you can see total costs add up.

Profit and loss. Now we’re summarising the incomes, outgoings, and impact on the bottom line.

• Gross MRR – Monthly revenue before any deductions
• COGS – Any cost line items that are deducted from the gross MRR, involved with making, selling, and providing the product
• Gross Profit – Profit after deducting COGS
  • % – your gross profit margin shows how much more revenue you generate than spend.
• Operating expenses – If you’re going deeper than just the costs involved in delivering the product, you’ll track other costs here
• Operating margin – If you take the gross profit, minus all the operating expenses, how much profit is left at the end? The spreadsheet uses the phrase ‘Earnings before interest and tax’ (EBIT), also known as operating income.
  • % – your operating margin, expressed as a percentage of revenue

Analyze the revenue model

You’ve gone through the process and you’ve got all the numbers in place. The assumptions are pretty realistic – now it’s time to interrogate the output.

Switch back to the first tab and you’ll see your ARR, costs, EBIT outcomes by year – plus if there’s a shortfall, how much cash you’ll need to cover outgoings.

Updating any of the numbers for growth and costs will impact the outcomes – and don’t forget that everything compounds with SaaS.

You’ll want to think hard about the financial model and whether it really works for your business.

As a starting point, questions you’ll need to consider are:

• What happens if you increase the price and reduce growth… or vice versa?
• Where are there areas to reduce costs to improve margins?
• Does the gross profit margin work for your finance team?
• Is there seasonality in your sales or costs that you can adjust or avoid?

You can then work back with sales and marketing to identify the number of sales reps you need to hit revenue goals, and predict the number of opportunities and leads that marketing and sales need to generate.

Now, the hard part

Creating and analyzing your revenue model is actually surprisingly easy.

The hard part is to share, align, socialize, refine, monitor, track, learn, and iterate with your wider go-to-market team.

Good luck!

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

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Maybe we don’t feel confident about it. Or maybe we’re perfectionists. Or scared of the reaction.

But regardless, often as product marketers we’re much more comfortable sharing updates after something has happened.

The feature launched! The campaign is now live! The battlecard is now ready! The whitepaper is finished!

Which is a shame, really.

All of our good, hard work that goes into everything that our wider teams don’t see – the planning, strategizing, creating, editing, reviewing, testing, iterating, reporting – becomes invisible. And we’re judged only by the outputs (and hopefully results) that we’ve released.

Momentum is that feeling where things are happening. You’re winning deals, closing faster, results come easier. Momentum is not a lagging indicator; it’s a leading indicator. Momentum is excitement.

Share early

Nothing is as exciting as new. New projects, new experiments, new ideas. New fires people up, lights a fire in their belly, and sparks the brain into action.

When you’ve got the go-ahead on a new project, let people know. Announce it. It doesn’t have to be a big proclamation, but it does need to give people enough insight into:

• What you’re doing
• Who’s involved
• What happens next
• Where they can go for more information

It’s important to set expectations. Too high and everyone will be disappointed when it might not happen. Set expectations too low, and you miss an opportunity to get people bought in.

Share the wins (and the fails)

Momentum breeds momentum. If you’ve had a win, whatever the size, shout about it!

We usually reserve announcements for the big wins – the huge customer deal, the massive product feature.

But every small win should be celebrated. Had feedback that helped adjust direction for a campaign? Celebrate it! Completed a small task that gets your competitor intelligence hub up to scratch? Sing it loud!

Even if things aren’t going well, talk about it publicly.

Sharing failures doesn’t induce a lack of confidence – it creates trust. You never know what you might learn from the wider team, or who might be able to provide that crucial nugget to unblock everything else.

Share the learnings

Want to supercharge the momentum you’re building with your internal stakeholders? Actually monitor your results, and communicate how well your project performed against the goals set against it.

Hopefully they’re great, and you win accolades for setting and achieving results. Even if they’re not great, you’ll build confidence. People will know that you’re monitoring results, measuring success, and are actually honest about what’s happening.

New insights are wins. Getting to an outcome, one way or another, is a win.

Final tip: be consistent

Maybe it’s a weekly, or bi-weekly, or monthly update. But make it, every time. No update is an update that people will love to hear.

Building trust and momentum starts with transparency and consistency – good luck!

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

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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.

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

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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?

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

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

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

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

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

An internal comms framework to save

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

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

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

Action plan components

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

Let’s look at people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tips for maximum internal comms results

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

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

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

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

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

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Businesses are tightening their belts, spending less money on anything that isn’t a core requirement. We’ve seen some big layoffs over the last few months, with more probably to come. What does this mean for product marketers?

Whilst marketing teams are generally the first to go when businesses think about ‘rightsizing’ and cutting budgets, product marketing usually slips through relatively unscathed. Our strategic, cross-functional, multi-skilled approach means that we can shape-shift into the gaps filled by other cuts – unlike single-skilled, specialist roles.

But what should product marketing teams focus on when the business world is going through a downturn?

Customer retention and expansion

Churn kills SaaS business economics, especially in environments where new business wins are falling.

I’ll bet that most product marketings teams are rarely involved in supporting account management and customer success teams, but that’s a big miss.

If you know the initial buyer journey that your customers go through, you can also expand to cover the context and triggers that encourage expansion post-sale too. Identifying the needs, questions, and motivations that drive expansion means you can then develop the collateral, enablement, and campaigns that will have maximum impact.

And perhaps, working with product teams, there are quick wins that help you to take additional revenue off the table through expansion. For example, if your pricing is per-seat, then perhaps there’s an opportunity for chargeable “light user” roles for folks that don’t need a full seat but want access.

Positioning to evolving value

We’ve all heard that it’s better to be a painkiller than a vitamin. While it’s not always as clearcut as that, it rings true.

Yesterday, your customers were looking to power growth. Today, those same customers are looking to sustain revenue, or cut costs. Your message should adapt as required.

At a previous HR tech employer prior to the pandemic, we had positioned on solving the biggest problem our customers had: making diverse hires. When coronavirus hit, our customers couldn’t run in-person recruiting events, so our message shifted to solve the new problem: prioritising thousands of applications, and still trying to make diverse hires.

Our mission and reason for being didn’t change. Our product didn’t change. But we evolved our top-of-funnel positioning to capture the immediate pain our prospects were experiencing.

If you’re not sure what your customers are struggling with now, ask your sales team or listen to Gong recordings. Even better, set up a continual customer and market insights interview process.

Supporting pipeline generation

Revenue is going to be harder to come by, regardless of how skilled your sales team is and how big your brand is.

So do what you can to support marketing and sales.

Start backwards from closing. Perhaps there are opportunities where new collateral or targeted enablement can help close more. Maybe competitive messaging needs a boost to cut through or elevate conversations away from price.

Maybe you can help SDRs to explore new outbound hooks, or work with email marketers to improve nurture sequences to drive more urgency. Maybe there’s an unexplored audience or an unworked angle to help increase MQLs.

There are always new customer insights that can be understood, shared, and implemented.

Making efficiencies

As it happens, product marketers aren’t really a frivolous bunch. We don’t have big software budgets, agency retainers to pay, and usually our teams are pretty lean. So there’s not a lot for us to ‘make efficiencies’ from.

Instead, we can cut back on adjacent activities that cost us attention without delivering impact.

You’ll probably know where these are already, you just don’t want to admit them. Projects that were a good idea once, but no longer make sense. Processes that you’ve continued for so long… but can’t remember why.

One tip: step back and look holistically at the top business priority. Does all the work you’re doing still support that goal? If not, it’s time to rethink.

Diamonds are forever, but downturns are temporary

Don’t give up on your core messaging, core GTM motions just because it’s not working as well as expected today. Don’t throw away all the evidence of product/market fit you have.

Instead, evolve with your customers. Do they still plan to get back to business as usual – or is this going to be a permanent new normal?

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

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

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It can be difficult to understand how all the product marketing puzzle pieces fit together.

It’s a question that comes up often throughout our course, WTF is Go-To-Market?. What’s the difference between an ICP and a persona? Is an ICP the same as the target market? How about positioning, narrative, and messaging – do you need one for each persona?

I personally found it hard to grasp all of these intangible elements. They often appear disjointed, especially when used by those without deep experience.

Here’s my attempt to show how I think all the core pieces of the puzzle fit together:

Breaking it down

The target market is the overall serviceable group of potential customers. Think “APAC fintech companies”.

Your go-to-market strategy encapsulates all the elements required to launch, sell, and market your product to the target market. This includes the. components listed below, as well as how your customers will buy (e.g. inside sales, product-led growth, etc) plus pricing and so on.

Your GTM strategy is based on your ideal customer profile, a niched definition of what a perfect customer looks like. We’re usually looking at a company or segment level.

Next we bring in your positioning and narrative. Positioning is about defining the space your business occupies in the mind of the customer. Narrative is the story you tell to your customers: why you exist, how you help, how their lives will be different. If you have multiple products and ICPs, these still need to make sense together as they explain your focus and priorities.

The ICP is the defined group of customers that you’re solving problems for. These are the customers that your sales and marketing team will focus on attacking to build traction. Think “Fintech startups based in India or Singapore, under $10m in revenue, over $10m in funding, using Stripe.”

Within each ICP, you’ll identify key personas. These are the people and roles that you’ll cater to in marketing and sales.

You’ll want to understand the buyer journey to craft a marketing and sales experience that has the best hit rate for turning those personas within your ICP into customers.

Finally, you can create stage-specific messaging along the buyer journey to drive prospects from problem awareness to purchase, activation, and expansion.

Over time, you’ll either expand your ICP to include adjacent customers, add additional ICPs to cover new segments, or pivot completely to a new ICP as you learn about your product/market-fit. This might require new/additional buyer personas (and therefore buyer journeys and messaging), or different go-to-market motions (for example, adding a self-service GTM).

Where’s best to start?

If you’re attacking a brand new business from scratch, I think it’s best to start by defining your ideal customer profile. From here, you can move down to deep-dive into the specifics of who’s involved and how you can reach them, and move up to build positioning and align the business around a go-to-market strategy.

What would you change?

I think every product marketer probably has a slightly different approach to connecting the dots and I’m excited to hear how you think about how the product marketing puzzle fits together. Drop me a note or comment below!

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

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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post called Okay… but why? with a simple tip.

In it, I wrote that at the top of every document or initiative you’re working on, it’s worthwhile making a quick note on the following:

• Audience and buying stage
• What success will look like

This can help you to forge alignment on your product marketing work, and ensure that it’s built to meet the customer wherever they are in the buying journey.

But ‘how’ we do the work is just as important as the why. How do we gain alignment and clarity on ‘how’ work should be done?

Define principles for hot project

If you’ve read Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters (and if you haven’t, buy it now!) then you’ll know that good strategy is built on defining your principles, the values that will guide how you will move forward.

And it’s no different for the product marketing work we do, whether you’re working on strategic direction reports, market research, or customer comms for a product launch.

Principles can help you both:

• Guide the work you do, by keeping what really matters at the top of your mind
• Gain alignment by stating your perspective and generating productive, strategic discussions

From there, you can tactically create content and plan initiatives that’s in line with a strategic direction.

Examples of principles that you apply to projects might be related to:

• Any relevant company values, and an explanation of how they might be applied
• What the customer experience should feel like
• Your unique factors of market differentiation
• Anything else that defines the approach you’ll want to take

Explore Vision to Values

It took about five years of Alicia badgering me to give Vision to Values a try – and I can’t believe I didn’t get to grips with it earlier.

A framework from LinkedIn Exec Chairman Jeff Weiner, it’s a simple structure to help set out strategy and detail the connections between your mission, vision, values, objectives, and priorities.

I’ve used it to help guide GTM strategy, showcasing how decisions have been made in alignment with the company vision.

Principles matter

“If you stand for nothing, Burr, what’ll you fall for?” (said Alexander Hamilton in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton).

But they do matter. We build company cultures, define our brand, and become known for the way our businesses operate.

Bringing in principles in your project-planning work can level up your approach, keep you closer to strategic thinking, and help you achieve better outcomes.

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

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

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The product<>sales dynamic is often fragile. Time and time again, I’ve seen these three issues at play:

1. Sales feel unable to influence product roadmaps. This can happen especially in companies that are very engineering- or product-led. Sales reps are talking to specific types of customers all day long. When that feedback is ignored, goodwill is lost.
2. Product don’t trust sales’ judgement. We’ve all heard it before: “We just need this one feature to win this deal!”. Because sales teams operate with smaller patterns (1-10 customers), their patterns aren’t conclusive enough to feed into problem-discovery.
3. Product ‘ships too slow’. Sales feel that product teams are taking too long and not delivering product improvements at the right velocity, whilst product teams feel they’re operating at the right pace.

These don’t just create animosity, but can snarl up time and attention – eventually leading to inertia.

Introducing a ‘statement of direction’ document

Whilst tackling the challenges above requires long-term dedication to building trust and working on the relationship, a statement of direction is a great initial deliverable to align both teams and start the conversation.

A statement of direction serves two purposes:

1. An internal alignment document to communicate the problem areas that the business will be investigating – giving sales the ability to talk confidently about future direction
2. An external document and presentation that captures the main themes for future product direction, enabling customers and prospects to buy into the future vision

They’re updated every 3-6 months and evolve as you learn more about your customer, market, and innovation opportunities.

What is a statement of direction?

A statement of direction is not a roadmap: it doesn’t cover the specific features that are being planned, or give estimated timelines. Instead, it describes the problem areas and innovation themes that the business is strategically investing in.

A statement of direction usually contains:

1. Vision: the world that you’re trying to create for your customers and the outcomes they’ll be able to achieve, including the barriers that prevent them from getting there. This is not an internal product vision.
2. Product investment themes: an overview of the key surface areas that impact the customer experience. These might be based around problems or intended outcomes.
   • A summary of why it’s important and what it means to your customer base
   • A breakdown of any recently-released features to prove your progress in each area
   • An explanation of your product shipping cadence
   • A brief overview of the direction for this theme, usually organized by next/future timelines. This allows you to communicate ambiguity for further-out opportunities, and present clarity for things that are more shaped.

It takes conversations to create a statement of direction, engaging sales, product, marketing, customer success, and other teams. First, you need to identify the product areas that matter to your customers – external-in, not internal-out. Then, you can align existing priorities and opportunities already in play before validating with other teams.

It’s important to also train teams on the statement of direction, and how to use it. It’s not promising timelines, prioritization, or specific deliverables. Instead, it’s communicating the mandate has business is strategically chosen, and the direction that customers are buying into.

Is everyone onboard?

Whilst you might think the primary objective of a statement of direction is to communicate externally, I think it’s much more powerful when used as a tool to align your business – specifically, product and sales – on what you’ll b2e building and the problems you’ll be solving for customers.

This helps to build focus and confidence… and as regular readers will know, focus + confidence = momentum.

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

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

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Pivots usually come at the worst time: running out of money, struggling to find customers, and general confusion and dismay.

I’ve led, or been part of, five major pivots:

1. From software for mobile operators to e-commerce retailers
2. From email marketing software for anyone, to personalized marketing specific for retailers
3. From helpdesk software for IT teams, to customer service software for retailers
4. From payments software for desktop developers, to payment software for SaaS developers
5. From AI software for diversity and inclusion leads, to diversity software for recruiters

Each have been fantastic lessons in what to do, and what not to do. Here are three quick tips on ensuring successful strategy pivots in your SaaS business.

Pivot the customer, not the product

In each of the examples above, we used (mostly) the same product – but adjusted the positioning and go-to-market to appeal to a different type of customer.

I see many SaaS companies trying to pivot their product; completely rebuilding their idea from scratch. That wastes all the hard work, and puts you further back from where you need to be.

Pivoting your target market should mean understanding your new customer so well it becomes a competitive advantage. It’s not a small decision: it means re-architecting your entire company, so do it well based on evidence, not assumptions.

Make decisions, avoid inertia

You might think that you can pivot and expand your target market, without dropping your existing GTM.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t work in most cases. It’s likely that you’re unable to resource both successfully, let alone make strategic plays in both camps.

This quickly leads to inertia: the enemy of momentum. There are two ways this embeds in your business:

• Increased resistance happens when people lose trust in the direction of travel because it doesn’t generate the results they are experiencing or expecting.
• Lost velocity when people are confused about the direction they should be moving in.

Making tough but necessary decisions is absolutely required. This should feed down to your go-to-market activities. Your sales and marketing should actively discriminate against bad-fit customers.

Don’t expect the pivot to work

Honestly, keep your expectations low. You’re not just flicking a magic switch that aligns everything the right way and unlocks that ARR.

You’re still going to be learning what customers want and need, and building to that.

Your teams will still be understanding how best to reach, engage, sell, and support.

You’ll all need to figure out whether the new customer economics make sense over the long-term.

You’ll need to build confidence in your execution. And the best way to do that is by basing your expectations on reality, by validating and testing performance in the real world rather than jumping headfirst.

Working through a pivot is hard

Trying to make these big changes happen is difficult, scary, and tense.

In my experience, execs who haven’t been through pivots before stroll into them without accurately estimating the struggle they’re about to unleash.

Managing up, as a product marketer, is so important. Being transparent about the bandwidth, the work, the checkpoints, and ensuring there are good feedback loops will help.

But it’s a two-way street. Founders, CEOs, and department leads need to make psychologically-safe spaces for honest feedback. Celebrate the successes, embrace failures with open arms, and trust that everyone is doing their best job.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The explainer video

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ‘tell me more’ video

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

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

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

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

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

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

The walkthrough video

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Make every video you make work harder

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

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

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

Then get creative.

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

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

The post Nobody cares about your feature-heavy demo video appeared first on Building Momentum.

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

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

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

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

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

Background: Why positioning needs more support

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download The Customer Value Positioning framework

Introducing my battle-tested positioning process

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

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

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

Let’s walk through the process.

Discover your buyer persona

Buyer personas are discovered, not created.

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

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

Then organize those themes into:

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

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

Describe the value your customers desire

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

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

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

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

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

Detail how your product helps

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

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

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

Define your positioning

Start at the bottom.

Frame of reference

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

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

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

Alternative solutions

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

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

Value statements

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

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

Website homepage hero

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

You’re going to write two things:

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

You can find some examples of good homepage messaging here.

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

Four steps to focused customer value positioning

In four stages, you’ve:

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

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

This process always results in successful positioning.

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

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

Frequently asked questions

Who should be involved in this process?

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

What customers should we talk to?

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

How long does this take?

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

Do we have to do research interviews?

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

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

Yes – book an intro call here.

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

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I care a lot about defining the value that our customers gain from our products.

Not the immediate, tangible benefits they achieve – but the true, ultimate value they derive.

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

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

And ideally, all three things will be true. When we understand the true value our product enables customers to achieve, we are able to sell faster, charge more, fight commoditisation, and market more easily.

Value is deduced from the work we do to discover our personas. The patterns emerge in broad-to-narrow customer interviews as we understand more about their jobs (common activities), gains (personal/professional/organizational desires), pains (marks of failure and frustrations), and triggers (motivations to search/switch/buy).

This process can be messy. And sometimes it’s easy to miss the woods for the trees as value becomes less tangible, less related to how they use the product, and more about the tangentially-connected outcomes they’ll be able to achieve.

In my positioning process, I used to just extract value themes and then go straight into messaging, creating value nuggets that tie back to product features.

But as I rolled out more messaging to larger teams or in more complex arenas, I noticed that we had to go further, and give frontline sales and marketing teams the context of where our customers are today, the challenges they’re facing, and then showcase how fixing the problem enables value.

Introducing the value story

I use the SPIN selling framework as a foundation for telling a story about what our customers are doing, why that’s not great, and how much better life could be.

Here’s the framework:

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

Using the prompts for each section, it’s possible to craft a simple narrative that helps build empathy with customers.

It starts by detailing the situation our customers finds themselves in. Today, our customer is doing something – a painful process, achieving mediocre results, or struggling to make sense of something.

Then we learn the real problem they’re facing. The problem is not the situation; the problem is a blocker that prevents them from advancing.

Next we learn the implications of that – a core part that many gloss over. This is where we uncover the pain, the lost opportunity cost of what they could achieve.

Then we address the resolution. What steps would they take to fix the problem? This probably shouldn’t be anything to do with your product.

Lastly, we drill down on the value. By solving the problem, the customer will achieve a value.

Example

I’ll use the same example as I offer for value nuggets; that of Xerox, and how they moved from selling printers based on features, to instead sell the value of increased student education performance (read more on that here).

• Situation:
  • Today, our customer is… a school administrator, responsible for delivering quality student education experiences whilst managing slim budgets.
• Problem:
  • However, … students find it hard to retain information from their black-and-white workbooks, and there’s limited budget for alternative study methods
• Implication:
  • This means… students may not achieve good grades, reducing the school’s performance.
• Resolution:
  • By… printing workbooks in color, students will be more likely to focus and retain information, and
• Value:
  • … our customer will… provide the best possible educational experiences while managing year-over-year budget pressures

Using value stories

I find value stories an invaluable way at every stage of the positioning and messaging journey.

It helps sanity-check whether the ‘value’ is really important, or whether it’s missing an important point. It helps recenter messaging around the challenges and intended outcomes, providing structure. And it’s so useful for training sales reps on specific use cases, building a simple narrative to frame pitches, and for building website/marketing copy.

Ultimately, this is a simple way to help frame customer context for almost anyone who needs to get up-to-speed. We’re not using jargon or business-speak. We’re simply trying to detail what our customers are facing today, and how solving their problem will help.

Extract value, don’t make it up

It’s important to restate here that value stories shouldn’t be built on anything that sounds good. We can’t position based on assumptions, and we can’t just assume our customers think about.

We need to learn from our ideal customers through interviews and research.

Buyer personas must be discovered, not created.

Value stories must detail the challenges that our customers are facing.

This allows us to connect the dots and create messaging showing how our product supports customers in achieving those outcomes.

And only then can we position ourselves effectively in the minds of our customers.

Good luck!

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

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The post Telling ‘value stories’ to guide your positioning appeared first on Building Momentum.

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

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

Big thanks to Josh and Nate for having me on!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does research play in product marketing strategy?

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

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

When do should a traditional PMM join a business?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should product marketing report directly to the CEO?

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

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

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

What’s the direction of product marketing?

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

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

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

What about fractional product marketers?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What one tip would you give?

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

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

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

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

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Being the thing for someone is more important than being something for everyone.

Once you recognise this, you’ll see it everywhere. Successful businesses, products, value propositions, ads, sales pitches, and more all hinge on being able to convey that “This” is for “You”.

But making the decision to be the thing for someone is so difficult. You’ll spend hours deliberating if you should or shouldn’t, whether the opportunity is too small, how you should prioritize segments, and more.

Instead of thinking about this decision as a limiting function, think about it as a move of strength. You only have so many hours, so much brainpower: you can do so much more with so much less. Rather than diluting effort, you’ll concentrate energy.

To do this well, I think there are four key considerations.

How to define ‘someone’?

Having a tight understanding of your target customer is the most important, underpinning your business strategy.

Ultimately, you’re trying to identify a market group of customers: people linked by similar traits who have a similar problem that they’ll pay to solve.

This ‘market group’ should form your ideal customer profile – this linked post walks through an structured approach to help define yours.

How to know what ‘the thing’ is?

Your value proposition needs to be built on top of the customer you’ve defined. But value propositions aren’t created out of nothing – they need to be discovered through pattern-matching, both evidenced and intuition.

The inputs to your value proposition should be based on research (like my 19 customer development questions). From there, you’ll understand the customer’s:

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

Ultimately, you’ll need to understand the value your customer desires: an element that they want to attain that:

1. Is useful
2. Is worth the effort (cost, time, energy)
3. Is a priority for them

Say no, don’t prioritize

One of the reactions you’ll have to counter is other teams taking the safe route of prioritizing the direction you’ve began to set in addition to everything they were doing before.

Take it from me: this doesn’t work well. This doesn’t bring clarity: it dilutes energy and effort even more. It creates inertia.

To counteract this, you need to get buy-in. As product marketers we don’t do all the work, but we make sure the work happens. Aligning all of the teams we work with and ensuring they have the right context from the market and the business means they’re set up to have the most impact.

Meet your business goals

Ultimately, the proof is in the pudding. Your teams need to see results, recognition that change is paying off.

Implementing a strategy built on the steps above won’t happen overnight, but you’ll need to ensure every team is fully committed. Marketing and sales need to be targeting the customer, and selling the same thing. Product need to build the thing for the customer. Any dilution will muddy the waters.

You need to show momentum and communicate what you’ve learnt at every stage. That means being transparent. Didn’t meet goals? Say why. Changing strategy? Say why.

It’s a journey

Being the thing for someone is a journey. You’ll learn, adapt, and evolve often. Embrace it, and bring everyone along for the ride.

Hold strong on the principle, and help everyone understand why.

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

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Most startups happen when someone finds a problem that they’ve experienced themselves, or discovered that someone else has.

Now the challenge is to find people who are ready to pay to solve the problem… and that can be hard. Generally there are a number of reasons that startup marketing and sales is hard:

1. People don’t want to hear they have a problem
2. They don’t think they have a problem
3. They don’t believe their problem can be fixed
4. They might think they have a different problem to be solved
5. They think there’s a different way to solve the problem

These challenges manifest in many different ways: lack of TOFU engagement, poor sales funnel metrics, more rejection than you’d like in the sales process – ultimately, hitting the bottom line.

But because we’re human, we try to cure the symptom rather than address the cause. A misdiagnosis means you tackle the small problems individually, rather than seeing the bigger picture. You’ll end up wasting time, effort, energy, and money trying to overcome small rocks… and underestimating the mountain ahead of you.

Along with everything else we’ve covered here on Building Momentum – like niches for riches, using unconventional wisdom, understanding your customer and their buying journey – I wanted to offer another principle that helps to prevent the pain from the source.

Be contentious

Contention means having an opinion, an assertion, and maintaining it in argument. That isn’t the same as ‘strong opinions, weakly held’. An unwavering belief that you’re comfortable to shout about and be known for.

Contentious beliefs in marketing and SaaS can be almost anything, from beliefs about pricing or product architecture, to the application of technology or in response to accepted wisdom about a particular problem.

Good contentious beliefs are based on customer insight. Bad contentious beliefs are internal assumptions, applied broadly.

In my post looking at a book on the American Republican party messaging machine, Don’t Think of an Elephant by George Lakoff, one of the main concepts is that frames (“mental structures that shape the way we see the world”) need to already exist in our customer’s minds to be activated. We cannot create framing, promote them, and expect them to be transmitted with success.

Contention leads to disqualification

Think about a newspaper that you actively choose not to read, or a store you choose not to shop at. Is the primary reason for that something that the business knows and promotes about themselves?

That’s an example of proactive disqualification in action.

Being contentious acts as a filter. It can draw in the believers, those who recognize the frame — and ward off those that aren’t a good fit.

Disqualification is at least 10x more important in product/marketing/sales, but often not a focus. Founders/marketers/sales reps are so keen to try and target everyone they possibly could, leading to the issues described in the first half of this post.

When you can attract the right prospects, and prevent bad-fit customers from getting into your pipeline, you’ll lose less energy, be more focused, and build a better understanding of what really matters to the intended audience without irrelevant noise.

This isn’t to say that you should only every talk to the believers, and ignore those who aren’t, creating an echo chamber. There’s a balance between hearing what you want, and hearing what you need.

Look to your customers to find opportunities for contention

Again — and I want to iterate this as strongly as possible — you need to discover how to be contentious in the mind of your customer. The framing needs to pre-exist – it cannot be forced. Talk to your best-fit customers, find out what they think about life, the universe, and everything in it. There, you’ll find opportunities to offer alternative viewpoints that resonate, and find it easier to grow your business.

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

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

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

Earlier this year I was on the Competitive Enablement Show podcast with Klue! We covered a lot of ground, talking about some successes and failures, and how I think about competitive differentiation.

Below, you’ll find an edited transcript of our chat!

What was the inspiration for starting Building Momentum?

About five or six years ago, my boss told me that I needed to write more, to grow my personal brand but also to help others in that same situation. At the time, I was like, okay, yeah, sure….

But during that time I’ve needed to learn all of this stuff to help me. I’ve been looking for stuff online to help me get through the same kind of challenges that I’m writing about now, things like:

• How do you take a product from zero to one?
• How do you build positioning for the first time as a first time?
• How do you think about your sales process and start to map back to the collateral that you need?
• How do you think about competitors?
• How do you start to understand who could be against and how you message to that?

There are so many bits and pieces that people need on that journey. And I just decided to start writing. I actually started my Substack, I think in November or October last year. And it took me until February this year to actually publish a post.

But now I’ve been doing it since February religiously. It’s done so much. What makes it really good is that I get loads of people saying that it’s really helped them solve challenges and just learn more about what product marketing is and how to do it. So it’s really nice to see that, giving back to the community as well, and how I can help other people on that journey.

Where have you seen people fall short in terms of truly explaining how they’re different to the buyer?

I’ve seen it a lot. It’s when people are really close to the product and not necessarily in tune with what customers are thinking about. I think that one of the traps we fall into, is that we will think about how we differentiate through the lens of that product and the business, the features they’ve got, stuff like that.

But the question they should be asking is how are you different through the eyes of your customer instead of the buyer?

In most situations, your products are probably not going to be super different. You’re probably going to have, a couple of key differentiated features, but you’re probably targeting that same core group of customers as somebody else. And that means you have to work much harder to try and win them as a customer.

I think the next trap that I see a lot, is people go as far to describe the benefits their product delivers, like, how it will you save your time, do more with less, you can save money… and that’s cool, but it’s not necessarily useful.

People can still achieve those outcomes with a ton of different solutions: that might be competing products, might be people, it might be other solutions, and those benefits aren’t really going to galvanize your prospects.

They’re not really going to speed up that sales cycle, get them super excited to buy.

You’re comparing apples to apples: do you want a red one or do you want a green one?

In those kinds of situations we really have to go much further than benefits. And you’ve got to talk about the real value that someone’s going to gain when they use your product.

What’s an example of where you just were struggling to stand out?

My example is we were struggling to stand out to a customer, to the particular customer we wanted to win. I was at Kayako, which is a customer service SaaS company. I was hired there as the first product marketer.

We had big plans to reinvent the world of customer service, with a really strong vision to take it away from being a cost-center, and instead position customer service as a revenue generator.

We were building a whole new product from scratch and were really determined to fix those scenarios that we’ve all experienced: when you’re in touch with a company and, they pass you on from team to team, you have to repeat yourself all the time. You’re given a ticket number and then the customer service rep just forgets there’s an actual human behind the ticket… Those sort of experiences where you’re not treated as a real person.

So we planned our launch in advance and we followed all of the best practices that you would do to launch a product, to launch messaging and positioning. Wee did interviews, we developed messages, we tested it with our audience and so on. We launched feeling pretty good about it, super confident that we’d done all the groundwork and we’re really looking forward to just seeing everything, go up into the right.

And we landed on this really interesting messaging that spoke to the aspirations of leaders in our target companies. It was all about this new world of customer experience, and we were very excited about it. And so when we launched, we pressed, go on the platform… and everything just completely flopped.

It was awful. We’d gone from adding thousands of revenue a day with our previous product, the one we’d sunsetted, to adding zero in this new one. So two years of work down the drain, basically a total failure at launch – really bad.

We created a war room obviously, because that wasn’t good, we couldn’t sustain that started investigating what was happening.

And we found that in the interviews and research that we were doing, we found that the messaging we had developed just completely wasn’t resonating at all. So that meant people didn’t start a trial. They didn’t request demos. They didn’t buy from us.

So we looked into a bit more and started to analyze well, actually, who was that customer that we’re seeing on the website, and then the sales process, and who are the ones that we’d actually messaged to… and found they were completely different.

So we had messaged to those leaders and executives who cared about all this aspirational value, but the people coming to the website – the people that were discovering the product, taking it forward, championing it – just weren’t bothered at all. To them, our messaging, our website just looked like, meaningless marketing waffle.

There was no substance to it. It didn’t mean anything at all. They wanted tangible messaging, stuff that would speak to the pains, the problems they’re experiencing. They only need a bit of that long-term direction, but ultimately they just wanted to solve today’s pains, get those over and done with.

So we just hadn’t linked that real clear hierarchy from the features and the product that we had built, the benefits that we were delivering through those and the value they could gain.

So we’re in this war room, all sat around desks with dashboards up trying to pull together everything we had. And it was in the interviews we were running that we found our issues.

We were doing win-loss interviews anyway (if anyone’s not doing them, set them up, I’ve got a blog post on how to set that up). But they’re super, super valuable for just keeping tabs on people coming through your pipeline. What happened? Why didn’t they choose you? We literally spoke to probably a couple of hundred people in about a month or two. Just trying to find out, every lead, why did you, why didn’t you choose to go with us?

And it was in those conversations that we found, actually, yeah, like we’re not speaking to the right people. The people on the website, the people that are coming through the pipeline are, manager, titles. They’re not the executives, they’re not the directors. And it was a really quite humbling experience to have put so much energy into the process and feeling confident about it, only for it to be completely dashed at the last minute.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that whenever I do positioning now, the immediate next step is to work out what that buyer journey looks like. So mapping out all of those stakeholders that might be involved in that buying journey, and then figuring out where do you message the different levels along that journey? That’s super, super important.

What’s an example of where you had success in differentiation?

At Kayako, I was trying to learn everything as we were doing it. So I was going onto Google, talking to people and trying to figure out how to make these things happen. But at Headstart, I was able to put all of those lessons I’ve learned into practice and that was a really nice experience, comparatively.

So for context, Headstart is a diversity recruiting platform for campus recruiting teams. Big enterprise sales, hundreds of thousands of dollars in software to big 5,000 plus employee companies. And our champions at those companies we deemed as a socially conscious radical buyer.

So these were people that didn’t just care about the immediate benefits of solving those immediate problems, but they had a much longer-term strategic outlook on the overall value of our product and where it would take them as a business.

We found out through research, again, getting on the phone with people, interviewing, trying to find out, what they care about what’s going on in their lives.

And we messaged actually three different kind of frames of value in that process. Firstly was the business value: people needed their business is to be seen as innovative, to show that they were taking big public steps around diversity and inclusion in their market against their competitors.It was a big driver for their clients to be seen to be working with again, socially conscious companies.

The next frame was that kind of professional. So these people were quite savvy. They recognize that introducing those new initiatives would really help their professional standing. It would help them get the new promotion.

It would solve their team’s problems. They’d be responsible for those improved results. It would help them stand out in the job market. They could talk to something that had helped them improve the representation of their intakes and stuff like that.

And then lastly, we spoke to this kind of personal value. These people were like I said, socially conscious. They knew that diversity and inclusion is the right thing to do. They cared about all of these diversity issues. They’d experienced it. And they really wanted to do the right thing, make a real difference in the world.

And so we’re able to merge all of these bits together with a rational and a logical narrative or what I call the heart and brain narrative. The rational brain recognizes the cost savings, the ROI, the cold hard business impact. And then you’ve got this emotional heart story that, is all about the social impact and wanting to do good in the world.

And mashing both of those things was really successful from a positioning perspective and for the business results, our sales cycles and everything like that.

How do you understand the emotional side of your buyer?

The literal definition of positioning is to occupy a space in your customers.

And you’re not going to do that effectively unless you know what else is in there.

So that’s not stuff that’s just related to your product or the problem area that you’re trying to solve. What are they professional post personal goals? What do they believe in? What do they care about?

In this case, we found that these people were in this role because they wanted to make a difference to the talent. They wanted to give every graduate the best opportunities to improve their social standing. And that was one of the big levers for us that we were able to latch onto relatively early on in that process, and see that nobody else was talking about that in the market.

Everyone else was talking about the business impact. Nobody was connecting that back to “what can I, as an individual do to enact change?”. And if you think about this through the lens of 2020 with all of the racial equity protests around the world, it was super, super timely. So much of that opportunity was really heightened in the mind of the people that we were talking.

I think value is something that’s a priority for somebody, it’s something that they are motivated that to search, switch, or buy for something that they need to solve, there is a driving need behind that.

That might be something that comes from in the business. It might be a completely external factor, but there has to be that motivation in there. And if you can find that something that’s really altruistic.

Take HubSpot, for example, with their inbound marketing narrative. Of course, ads aren’t good. They’re expensive. But who wants to be pushing ads on people? You as a marketer would much rather people come to you. And that’s why I think that inbound narrative works so nicely is because it talks about what a marketer can do to improve. And enjoy and be happy at the way they’re doing marketing in a way.

How do you figure out what a buyer deem valuable to them?

It’s all about what the value is.

So a value is an element that your customer wants to gain. So it has to be useful to them. It’s got to be worth the efforts (i.e., worth the money, the time, or the energy), and it’s gotta be a priority for them. Ideally, that value that your customer is going to gain is going to pass all three of those tests.

And the way I’ve found best to discover them starts with super broad customer development, persona research. I think it’s disheartening to see how many companies will talk to customers to sell them or support them, but won’t necessarily talk to them just for learning opportunities, just to, find out what’s going on in life for them.

So I think a lot more people could do that.

What are two or three of the most important or valuable questions that you ask a customer to do like to learn from them?

I’ve got a blog post that lists out 19 different questions, so picking two is quite difficult for me. I think they’re all super, super valuable.

But if I absolutely had to, the first would probably be asking customers how they’ve attempted to solve their problems so far.

And the reason I love that is because you can then start to dig into, how did they solve it or how did they try to, why did it fail? What worked for them? What works you know what didn’t work? Why do they like it? Why didn’t they like it? And you’ll find out so much juicy stuff. You will start to understand, what competitors they’ve used, the processes they’ve trialed and failed at when you use it in sales conversations.

In discovery calls, for example, you also learn where the gaps were in that experience for you to lock up and seal the deal almost really valuable.

I think my second question would be “what’s changed in the last five years that makes our product so much more valuable?”. And that’s really nice for discovering this world change, if you read Andy Raskin’s narrative medium posts, but it’s really useful discovering all of these different trends that are on people’s minds and changes in their world that you might not have thought about at all. It provides a ton of insight into future opportunities for direction, for product, for marketing, for sales.

And you can also follow up with, “what’s going to change in the next five years?”. So you’re going to get ahead of the game. You’re going to be able to ask, from their current pains, their current context, the problems they’ve got right now, what is going to affect that’s going to prevent them, or maybe help them to be more successful and you can work all of that into your plans as well.

How do you merge customer value and the competitive landscape together?

My philosophy, for want of a better word, is that the dominant partner in the market equation is the demand side, is the customer.

And if we can accurately understand the market (which is a group of similar people that have similar pain points or problems that they’re willing to solve to pay to solve for), then that is much more stronger, and almost a shortcut (in context of early stage B2B companies) to momentum.

I think competitors come really into their own when you have that positioning and you’re looking for opportunities, what are the unmet needs? The unmet values that your customers just aren’t served by in the market.

Again, where are the gaps? There’s a really good book about blue ocean strategy: what are you, what could you do that your competitors aren’t doing? How do you fit that on its head?

And if you’ve got that and it’s backed up in evidence by your customers (what you’ve learned from them and what’s going on for them), that puts you in a really good position.

What’s a value nugget, and how have you used it successfully?

So this is something I started playing around with when I was at Kayako, basically in that horror story of a failed product launch.

We needed a way to link the features, to benefits, to the value that people were trying to gain from us. And so a value nugget is basically a way to package those bits up and provide a really clear hierarchy as well, so that you can use it in sales conversations or in marketing material. It makes a really good layout for a webpage, for example.

It’s comprised of those three bits in total. Firstly, what’s the value, the attribute or state that a buyer hopes to obtain?

The value is made up of one or more benefits: the advantage that a buyer gets when using a product. So it’s something that’s tangible that you can report on it, for example, usually, or it starts with a verb. And so an example might be, save time, increase customer satisfaction, increase, win rates, that kind of stuff. Those benefits gained by one or more features.

Again, you’re able to see this kind of hierarchy. Value is delivered by the benefit, which is delivered by a feature. And so that might be a specific piece of product functionality. It might be something less obvious, like an integration or a report, or it might be something that you wouldn’t think of, like a modern, clean UX, a design consideration, or, even service support, dedicated account managers, service features.

And then in the post you can find one of the things that I really like about it, is being able to move up and down that value nugget by asking why on the journey up and then how on the journey down. And this is good because it forces me to think about making it easy to navigate, but also ensuring that there’s real tight alignment between the features you’ve got and the value you say that you’re going to deliver.

And so it’s really key to building that cohesive narrative, and make sure that you’re not just selling your product, but then you can work backwards and start to build what you sell as well.

I used that at Kayako. I’ve used it everywhere since then, so it’s battle tested.

I did a blog post talking about Xerox and a story from the Challenger Customer book. If you’ve not read it, it’s where Xerox went from selling printers to K-12 school districts previously based just on their functionality — so printing color, that kind of stuff — to selling instead on how those printers led to increased student performance.

And so that’s quite a jump to say, “our printers are going to help you deliver better school results, increase your performance”, but is a really good story of using that research, discovering these kinds of unmet needs, being creative with messaging, and then, ultimately all holds up in this value nugget framework.

And so the example, one of their features is the ability to print full color workbooks. And so if we’re going to use the ‘why’ on the way up, why is that useful? That’s because it’s proven to encourage higher student performance.

Okay. So that’s great. And why is that important? Because it provides the best possible educational experience while managing budget pressures.

And so then we can ask how on the way back down, and one of the other benefits that is supporting that value. So the budget piece, how does it help support budget pressures? Because those educators can incorporate color without adding costs and how, because they have a on demand print feature.

And so when it’s laid out, you can go and find that on my newsletter, but you can see this transition really nicely all the way from those features to benefits, to value and all the way back down again, nicely packaged up.

And what I like about it as well is that it’s easy to train that narrative with sales teams. I found people pick it up really easily, especially you can give them a little cue cards for that kind of stuff.

And also for consistency, once you’ve got this real tight defined narrative that you’re using, you get everybody talking the same consistent story. And I think that’s always a good thing,

How do you track and think about lesser-known competitors?

So I think in some situations it’s helpful to think less about the terminology of competitors and more about, alternative solutions.

It’s broader. It gets us thinking about the companies we compete with day-to-day and gets us instead thinking about the solutions that people might be using to achieve those similar kinds of outcomes.

So some of them will be those direct competitors. They’re obvious, you’re familiar with them. You compete with them in most deals. You probably might also find these kinds of super niche solutions that might be set up just for one type of customer, or one really specific use case. I find that most companies will have them on that radar and individually they are not a big threat.

But when you look at them as a kind of lumped group, a single chunk on your market pie chart, that group is probably going to be bigger than you think. And I think most people should think about that a bit more.

How do you tackle a bigger number of smaller competitors?

It is tricky because of the volume of them. This is why, (again, caveating early-stage B2B) is that by focusing on the customer that you are best set up to win now, or in the near term is a shortcut to that kind of stuff.

So rather than focus on potentially all of the potential competitors, you’re much more focused in who your customer is. And that helps you build momentum through that.

I think it’s also interesting if you think not just about the software solutions as well, that compete with, so there are tons of other people-powered, but also other solutions that companies might have already that you also competing with that you just wouldn’t think about, homegrown solutions and, for example, there’s always a developer that thinks they can build whatever they need in a week.

There are going to be some businesses that have JIRA, for example, really big, heavy features that a marketing team might want to use a Asana, but they’re probably not going to get approval for that at all. If you’ve got a recruiting team willing to use Greenhouse and the company is paying for the Workday HRIS platform? Probably not going to happen.

So you’re competing with software already in house, these kind of existing vendors. Then you’ve got all the people: freelancers, consultants, agencies. Actual people, employees who can solve the same problem just through, data entry, for example or customer support, assigning tickets.

For example, in customer service, there are software solutions that can automatically assign conversations to the right people, depending on all of these factors. Most companies will just have one person or two people assigning tickets to individuals instead. It’s probably more expensive in the long run, but they just don’t know that another thing exists out there to solve that.

And so when we kind of position against these non-software competitors, we get an opportunity to be much more creative. The process is still the same: understand what unmet value that customer wants to have. And then in the actual execution you can get away from differentiation against products, because there’s not another product that you’re competing against.

It’s a trying to make sure that this person knows that you exist, that you can solve their problems. So you’re not trying to eke out the slightest element of feature differentiation. And instead, you’ve got this huge canvas to explore. And there’s so much opportunity within that to really speak to that core value that your customers really hoping to wants to needs to attain in their day-to-day.

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

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

The post Podcast: What does it take to differentiate? appeared first on Building Momentum.

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

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

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

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

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

Niching down in action

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making it tangible

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Growing in an ecosystem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bringing it all together

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is ‘jobs-to-be-done’?

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

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

Why use a job map?

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

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

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

Here’s a simple example of a Job Map.

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

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

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

JTBD map stages

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

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

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

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

Linking JTBD stages to your product offering

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

Communicating JTBD Maps

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

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

In the example, you’ll see:

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

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

Start your JTBD map journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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As a product marketer, I think we have an innate skill that many other teams don’t.

It’s our ability to connect the dots between all of the different inputs we deal with, and predict outcomes in our GTM systems.

Every day, we’re exposed to customers and their feedback, competitors, market trends, product features, product vision, processes, executional issues, business directives, and much more.

We subconsciously use these inputs to make multiple decisions every day, from the language we use in messaging, to the pricing strategies we recommend. Even more subconsciously is our use of second-order thinking.

What is second-order thinking?

To explain second-order thinking, we need to understand first-order thinking.

First-order thinking is simplistic; it’s the immediate impact and consequences of a decision. A problem exists, and a resolution is made. Let’s imagine that prospect feedback suggests pricing is too expensive; first-order thinking would be to make this cheaper.

Second-order — and even third-order — thinking requires ‘and then what?’ consideration. Your actions have consequences and implications.

Are those implications positive, or negative? Do they cause net harm?

In our expensive pricing example, first-order thinking is to reduce the price. Second-order thinking would be to examine the impact that a lower price might have on the business and it’s operations. Those effects might include:

• A reduction in perceived brand quality, which in turn reduces new business sales and increases churn

• Acquiring the wrong type of customers, which changes product vision

• Building a low-margin business, which will have knock-on effects across every team

Second-order thinking in action

Positioning is a great example of how we use second-order thinking every day, unaware.

When we review customer insights, identify customer value, and build messaging maps, we consider what the impact the values and language we use mean to our customers and our business.

First-order thinking might position a business as ‘something for everyone’ to maximize sales – and if you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that’s a fallacy and something to avoid.

Second-order thinking would look at how messaging should disqualify certain types of customers, and only appeal to the target segment. This has positive impacts on sales and marketing efficiencies, brand perception, and focuses the business on a specific ideal customer profile.

Proactively communicate second-order impacts

Whilst PMMs may use strategic thinking like this every day, many other teams are so focused in their executional work that they don’t have the cognitive space to think forward.

That means that all good-intentioned, smart work can quickly become a point of contention because the tradeoffs and positive impacts aren’t communicated effectively.

In our expensive pricing example, it’s likely that sales teams will advocate for lower pricing in response to customer feedback. If the decision was made to stick with current pricing, or even increase, the backlash would be visceral. But communicating the impact that price reductions would have, and what the impact of same/higher pricing will be, will help assuage concerns and manage expectations.

It’s important to apply second-order thinking to the second-order work you’re doing. What is the implication of this work for our teams, how will they respond? How can we create enough mutual understanding of the ‘decisionscape’ and help people see why decisions were made a certain way?

Aside: ‘decisionscape’ feels like a cool concept that I’m surprised doesn’t exist yet.

The decisionscape is the landscape of the decision – the inputs used, the process followed, the implications that arise, and the outcomes that are actioned. Ideally teams should see the clear path that was followed, the forks in the road mapped out, and how the decision leads to an optimal destination.

We do this by communicating the implications, being transparent, acknowledging the inputs and gaps, being clear on the asks, and creating a plan with our teams to build confidence in the strategy and execution.

Because focus — clarity, on the decisions we are making and why — and confidence equals momentum.

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

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

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

And then we’re surprised when they flop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t be a conveyor belt marketing team

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

First, start with strategy

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

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

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

Three steps to develop strategy:

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

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

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

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

Then, link tactics to goals to strategy

OKRs!

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

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

Don’t forget to validate

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

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

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

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

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

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

That might mean:

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

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

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

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

Lastly, review and communicate

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

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

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

Don’t be a conveyor belt marketing team

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What makes you different compared to competitors?

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

• Our product is our differentiator.

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

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

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

But, is it really?

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

What is a differentiator?

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

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

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

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

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

The B2B Elements of Value Pyramid

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

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

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

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

Think about some SaaS products you know. Take Drift:

• Yes, there is functional product value.

• The product delivers high impact implications to the organizations.

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

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

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

Discovering your differentiators

Notice I said discover your differentiators, not define them.

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

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

NIHITO: Nothing Important Happens In The Office – Pragmatic Marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s your competitive differentiator?

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

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90% of buyer personas are ignored.

Well, I made the number up… but I bet it’s not too far off.

Back in 2012, ‘Marketing Mary’ buyer personas were all the rage. Where did our customers go on holiday? What books do they read? What brand of car do they drive?

Full of creative information… but lacking anything useful.

And here we are, in 2021, and I think most startups are still stuck in the past.

Why does this happen? Why are personas fluffy pictograms of faux customers, when we have tons of data and insight at our fingertips? Why are buyer personas ‘built’ through internal workshops, rather than ‘discovered’ through qualitative interview and quantitative survey research?

Maybe we just don’t know what a good persona explainer should do, let alone what a good persona explainer should look like.

What is the goal of a buyer persona?

Buyer personas are designed to help your internal teams build an understanding of the types of people they will interact with in the market.

They need to do just three things.

1: Represent the stakeholders actually involved in the buying journey

The sales and marketing process is a science as much as it is an art. It’s a process. Every time someone recognizes a need and looks for a solution, they will be following a reasonably well-travelled path within a small number of variances. It’s not rocket science.

So your buyer personas need to cover the people who are actually involved, and understand what role they play.

2: Provide a shortcut to easily recognize and understand the person

Personas need to easily identifiable – ideally on face value or with some simple deduction. The people who will actually use buyer personas (like your sales reps or field marketers) will need to recognize the persona through quick pattern matching: job titles, functions, industries, budget sizes, etc. They won’t have time to address a flowchart just to determine which sub-persona a prospect belongs to.

And then they need information that helps them understand them. Not just enough to know them – like their job title and responsibilities – but to understand what makes them tick. Are they an innovator, power hungry for promotion? Maybe they’re more likely to be risk-averse and prefer stability to change? What scares them, worries them, excites them?

When reviewing buyer personas, I ask myself these three questions to sense check my understanding:

• Who are you?

• What do you do?

• Why do you do it?

If I can answer these and believe in the answers, then I feel close to understanding and empathizing with the customer.

3: Provide information that helps tailor the marketing and sales approach

This doesn’t mean list off all the resources a persona might be interested in. Someone using your persona docs is there for a reason: they want help to tailor their interactions with that persona.

So don’t just leave them high and dry. Give them what they want: how should they adapt the proposition to this persona? What should they call out and highlight… and what should they put to the back-burner?

Key elements of good buyer personas

With these goals in mind, what should a buyer persona that actually fulfills these goals look like?

• Demographics: Location, Title, Function, Reports to, Experience, Role in buying process, Other defining characteristics

• Firmographics: Number of employees, Revenue, Funding, Industry/Vertical, Other defining characteristics

• Psychographics: Adoption tendencies, Introvert/Extrovert, Personality traits (innovator, maintainer, etc)

• Jobs: common responsibilities and activities your customer does as part of their day-to-day

• Gains: their personal, professional, or business goals they want to achieve

• Pains: marks of failure and frustrations the customer must avoid

• Triggers: motivations that encourage them to solve their problem and switch away from their current solution

• Value messaging: using the value nugget framework, detail the features, benefits, and overall value of our product to this persona

How should you research buyer personas?

It’s possible to do buyer personas really quickly – but it’s also easy to spend tons of time and not have anything useful to show for it.

I’d recommend three stages to your persona research process. These steps take your internal knowledge and expertise, validate at a small scale, and then learn about bigger patterns that may exist.

Firstly, jot down your internal thinking. I use a customer empathy map exercise for this:

• Who are these people? What common attributes (job title, team, years of experience, for example), unite them?

• What do they think, hear, see/do, and feel about the world and your problem area?

• What are their goals, and what pains do they have?

If you’re following the process detailed in my post linked above, you’ll go through a round of review that highlights areas of agreement, disagreement, and things you still need to learn.

Next, hold your research interviews. Your internal work will have given you enough insight around the key problem areas you’re solving to frame the conversation.

Use my 19 customer development question template to interview customers across five categories:

1. Segmentation – who they are

2. Problem discovery – what broad challenges do they have?

3. Problem validation – what do they think of the problem we’re solving?

4. Product discovery – what do they think would solve their problems, and how?

5. Product validation – what do they think of our product and would it work for them?

Lastly (if you can) validate your research insights with a quantitative survey. This is useful if cost-effective and if you need to understand the variance of any variables within the persona.

You can do this through survey platforms that offer their own audience panels like Pollfish – just don’t forget to ask rigorous screening questions.

You’ll want to ask specific questions that give you insights into elements that may differ significantly, or are less clear on a small scale. Are your product marketer personas aligned under product orgs or marketing orgs? Is there a patterns that exists with that answer and their key metric goals? Who in their team makes the final buying decision, and are they responsible for the success of the buying function, or not?

Discover personas, don’t create them

I learnt these lessons the hard way.

I’ve written and talked about a product launch where we followed all the best practices, and the launch completely failed. Part of that was a huge oversight in our personas.

We thought there were just two – Sienna, a growth-minded customer experience leader, and Gary, a technical IT support desk manager. We built our experience around these – aspirational messaging that talked to their departmental visions, and pricing that aligned with their needs.

Of course we had done the research interviews and had lots of internal workshops to build them out. Our mistake was creating these personas from wishful thinking. They did exist in the market… but they were were rare unicorns.

After we emerged from the failed launch, we took a step back. We re-evaluated our customer and prospect base. Instead of two, we found five more discrete personas that we could serve in much more detail with the same effort.

We sense-checked with research interviews, making sure we understood what they were looking for and how they could gain value from our product. We ran a quantitative survey that not only let us know what their preferred features (and therefore pains/gains were), but their willingness to pay as well.

After implementing these new five personas across our marketing and sales journey, from content to pricing, we saw conversions rise, revenue increase, and more engagement as a whole.

All we did was discover the personas that already existed in the market, and we built our go-to-market strategy around them.

Simple enough, in hindsight.

Hopefully this post has given you some ideas on how to craft a persona that actually helps, based on research, and support your internal teams with the right information.

The more focus (clarity, as well as attention) you have on your prospects, the more confidence you’ll build. And focus + confidence = momentum.

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 Buyer personas are discovered, not created appeared first on Building Momentum.

If there’s one thing I tell everyone, it’s that it’s much more valuable to be ‘the thing for someone’. Niches for riches.

But look around many SaaS websites, and it’s obvious they haven’t learnt the lesson yet. They’re trying to be something for everyone.

This is often a goal for early-stage founders and sales leaders.

“We can sell to everyone!”

“Our market is everyone who’s ever had this problem!”

And yet… it never quite works out.

Spreading focus too thin, and trying to be something for everyone, has a slim chance of success. It also has a high probability of negative impact.

Your value proposition becomes muddied, as your external positioning confuses both ends of the market.

Marketing can’t quite deliver. Either there aren’t enough leads, they’re not the right type, or CAC is too high, or LTV is too low.

Sales resources become stretched and inertia sets in. In my experience, most sales reps want to sell bigger and bigger deals, so they neglect smaller prospects. But reps become dissatisfied with the lack of momentum from bigger prospects. And then they flip-flop back and forth, aimlessly without a sales plan.

Product teams fight: priorities compete, sales asks win, and customer advocacy takes a hit.

Pricing becomes a mess. You’re either priced too cheap and therefore leaving tons of cash on the table. Or, you’re too expensive, losing out on a big chunk of low-effort high-reward revenue.

Internal discussions go on for ages about whether to remove pricing on the website. When sales win the argument to remove prices, you see an increase in tweets and complaints that you’re losing out on business.

Culture flails between the inevitable struggle as hires from both scrappy self-service startups and the enterprise SaaS world butt heads with each other.

Good go-to-market should discriminate

If to discriminate is to “make a distinction in the treatment of different categories”, that’s what your go-to-market should do.

Disqualification is much more important than qualification.

The way you go-to-market should disquality bad-fit prospects out. They should – politely – be discouraged from moving forward from the moment they land on your website or engage with your sales reps.

Of course, you don’t want to scar them for life; they might be the next big market you move into. But today, say ‘thanks, but no thanks’.

Meanwhile, your ideal customers should be welcomed with an experience tailor made for them. Roll out the red carpet and make the whole experience effortless for them from the first click.

Make sure these components are aligned

Pay attention to these components, to sanity-check how focused your GTM is for today’s ideal customers:

Positioning and messaging

Know your customer. Extract their jobs, pains, gains, and triggers. Understand the value your product can deliver for them – and build your messaging around it.

Everything from the phrasing in your ads and headline on the homepage, to the illustrations on your website and the customer logos you choose to promote, matter.

Buyer journey

It’s not as simple as self-service vs inside sales. Buyers will have many different needs and questions based on their company stage, maturity, and change environment.

What should your meeting decks look like? Do they expect to receive send-over decks too? What about PDF one-pagers?

And onboarding: should it be a white-glove service, or should it be self-activation with lots of educational content?

Pricing

Do potential customers need to know the prices before they sign up or request a demo, or is price not the most important factor?

What’s the right value metric: number of seats, utilization, or a flat platform fee?

What’s the number that’s borderline expensive, but at which they would still consider?

Customer support expectations

In my experience, this is the biggest indicator of whether your GTM is working as expected (although, customer support is often neglected in GTM planning).

Is your customer success program set up and aligned with the types of customers you’re bringing onboard?

Are you focusing on self-service content and in-product chat, or are you providing 1 customer success manager for every 10 customers? Do you deliver personalized QBRs on how to maximize adoption and results, or do you just send new feature emails to your product admins?

GTM evolves, but be considerate about it

As you grow and learn more, it’s natural that your go-to-market will evolve along with your customers and the market opportunity. Some businesses will find themselves being pulled upmarket by bigger customers – others will try to force a change.

Especially if you have aggressive funding, you rightly have the space and opportunity to explore multiple GTM motions – just make sure that your choices are considered, and decisions made with aligned tactics and execution.

But at the early stage, trying to be something for everyone risks spreading your focus too thin.

And in this community, we know that a tight focus + increasing confidence = building momentum.

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

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

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Let’s say your business is really good at tracking who you compete against.

Each deal tracks an ‘incumbent solution’ field, a ‘competing against’ field, and when you lose to one of them, that’s captured in your win/loss accordingly. From this data, you have a pretty good idea of who your biggest competitors are.

Your battlecards are updated with the necessary information that help sales reps to guide competitive conversations (and win):

• Strengths

• Weaknesses

• Opportunities

• Threats

• Offensive attack

• Defensive attack

• Anecdotes

• Win stories

Altogether, you have a pretty good idea of how to beat your top three competitors.

Except… are they actually your biggest competition?

Look to the top of the funnel

The top of the funnel stage – attraction, awareness, or whatever funnel design you subscribe to – is often ignored as a source of competitive insight and focus.

It’s much easier to prevent losses later in the funnel than it is to widen the pool of potential wins, isn’t it? Not always.

There’s a pool of prospects and potential customers that engage with you at the top of the funnel. That pool is n big.

There’s also an ocean of prospects and potential customers that don’t engage with you. That ocean is potentially n¹⁰ big.

Your actual competitors…

That ocean of potential customers are all solving their problems with an existing alternative solution, or sourcing new ones.

Here are some examples of different alternative solutions that you may want to consider as key competitors.

Niche solutions

You might be a horizontal email marketing platform. But I bet there’s also a vertical email platform for DTC commerce brands between $5-10m revenue for teams focused on building community that integrates directly into their little-known ecommerce platform technology.

How are you going to get in front of them and convince them you’re the better partner?

Existing vendors

Not the same as any of the above – these might be existing software providers that currently solve problems for another department, team, or business unit. But with the land-and-expand tactic as one of the most prevalent ways to grow SaaS revenue, you can bet that existing vendors are trying to get in front of your buyer stakeholders.

And what’s more, they’re already approved, trusted, and have internal champions already in your business. How are you going to discover those opportunities exist, let alone beat procurement?

Agencies/outsourcing

Potential prospects might just be outsourcing everything to an agency. Agencies exist for everything, from total ownership of email marketing and project management, to recruiting, product engineering, and sales.

How are you going to convince a prospect to ditch and agency and bring the process something in-house?

Freelancers and contractors

Some businesses will bring in niche freelancers and contractors for executional expertise they don’t have in-house; for example, diversity recruiting, deployment processes, or ecommerce merchandising. It’s easier, less risk, and a faster time-to-ramp.

Can you compete against a playbook – or help those with the playbook work smarter instead?

Consultants

The 2020s will see huge growth in the ‘fractional CxO’ model.

When organizations have the executional resources but lack the strategic expertise, they look to consultants. These might be traditional large full-service organizations, or experts that have gone it alone to offer ‘fractional’ executive time.

How will you compete against consultants already in-situ, as well as those where consultants may be offering to run the show? And even further: can you convince consultants to bring you in to their clients?

People power

‘Hiring more people’ is always an option, and sometimes just expected for companies facing specific challenges around volume and throughput. When expertise is not required, only raw manhours and energy, some organizations won’t be used to solving solutions in any other way.

How do you a) get in front of those people, b) convince them there’s a different way, c) build trust and change their mindset?

In-house tech solutions

I bet every SaaS business has at least one example where a developer in a prospect’s business has said “We could build that in a week”. Obviously, they fail – but there are so many businesses out there with their own home-grown solutions that manage everything from small repetitive tasks to huge, critical parts of their business operations.

Can you overcome those objections and provide a solution that works for them and their needs?

Set yourself up to beat TOFU competitors

In terms of process, it’s exactly the same. Understand your customer, understand your competitive landscape, define your positioning, and execute with focus.

Positioning becomes even more important against TOFU competitors. How do you stand for something? How do you bring unconventional wisdom to the narrative? How do you promote your unique value?

When you can do this effectively, you’ll build a bigger top-of-funnel pool, win more clients, and build momentum.

The post Your biggest competitor is not who you think it is 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 biggest competitor is not another SaaS business. It’s not a spreadsheet. Not a person. Not an agency.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four ways to drive status-quo dissatisfaction

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

Promote the pain

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

• What’s the hardest part of their day?

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

• What are your biggest obstacles to winning?

• What does losing at this look like?

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

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

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

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

Intensify the risk

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

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

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

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

Highlight the missed opportunities

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

• What would winning at this look like?

• How would this product solve your problem?

• How has our product changed your life?

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

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

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

Make it personal

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

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

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

Tear their world apart to build it up

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

The post Four signs your sales demo is boring buyers appeared first on Building Momentum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introducing the value nugget

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

A value nugget is comprised of:

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

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

• Benefits are gained via features: a specific piece of functionality that’s used by your customer. These might be an obvious product capability like an integration, a less obvious consideration like a modern and clean UX, or even service elements like a dedicated account manager.

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

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

For example, moving down by asking ‘how’:

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

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

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

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

And moving up, asking ‘why’:

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

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

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

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

Using value nuggets in messaging and positioning

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

For each value, build out the nugget:

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

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

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

• A list of associated features and proof points

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

Using value nuggets in marketing

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

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

Generally:

• Execs will want to focus on the value

• Champions will focus on the benefits

• Evaluators will focus on the features

Using value nuggets in sales

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

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

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

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

How are you messaging your product value?

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

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

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

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

The post Craft strong messaging with value nuggets appeared first on Building Momentum.

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.

How did you find this post?

Let me know what you thought: leave a comment or find me on Twitter @jdomanpipe.

If you liked it, would you mind sharing with your network?

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

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

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

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

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

What causes inertia?

Inertia happens in two ways.

Increased resistance

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

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

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

Lack of velocity

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

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

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

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

Ambiguity and inertia

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

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

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

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

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

Taming inertia

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

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

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Probably the most overused, yet most misunderstood word in SaaS?

Go-to-market is often used to refer to everything that happens in a business outside of engineering and core functions like finance and HR.

Often this isn’t defined as a single strategy, but as an amalgamation of everything you’re already doing. Even to those in the know, GTM can feel really intangible – and extremely difficult to communicate internally.

And if it’s difficult to communicate amongst different teams, are you sure you’re all rowing in the same direction?

Ultimately, it needs to be a summary of:

• how you are literally taking (through marketing and sales)…

• …the product you have (and are) building…

• …to the market (who, and in which landscape)

Your go-to-market plan needs to convey target customer, your product and positioning, pricing, and distribution channels.

You probably have strategies for all of these pieces, but aligning these together under one GTM strategy can really help focus the message, refine rough edges, and bring everyone on the journey together.

One slide to rule them all

Get the template here

This is not a replacement for more in-depth documentation, but a way to reduce your core strategies and actions into one simple slide that can be shared internally.

The first column covers your customers:

• Summarise your target market – beginning with your ICP segment, the teams you sell to, and the job title personas in your core audience

• Pull out the unique value that your product delivers, which aligns with your customers expectations and needs. Reminder: these need to be based in reality, not fiction.

The second column covers your product and landscape:

• Category – what’s the frame of reference for your product?

• Key differentiators – what are they key features that your product delivers that others don’t?

• Competitors – who are your top immediate competitors, and how do you differ from them? Also describe any alternative solutions that customers use to achieve similar outcomes.

Lastly, communicate distribution channels (sales and marketing):

• Sales strategy – how do you sell and engage prospects, what are the key actions in the sales process?

• Pricing – what’s the pricing goal, how much does the product cost, and what is the target average revenue per account?

• Marketing strategy – how are you finding prospects in the market, what are the key channels you’re using, what’s your customer acquisition cost?

• Elevator pitch – how should everyone who reads the slide explain what your product delivers?

Communicate better, finetune strategy, and increase alignment

I’ve used slides like this before as a summary in presentations to give teams context and grounding on how their work connects to the go-to-market process.

Whether you already have a defined GTM strategy or not, it’s always an interesting process to review within these boundaries with some questions in mind:

• Can you spot misalignment in your GTM, rough edges across the components that create some friction?

• Are there still questions around who your customers are and their problems, your product differentiators, or how you compete?

• Does everyone understand why your price is what it is?

• Are people actually using the customer value / product differentiator points in conversations?

One of the most powerful pieces of this template is sharing drafts with people across your business. After reviewing the slide, would they fundamentally disagree with the points you’ve detailed?

If so, you may need to revisit your underlying strategies to unlock higher levels of alignment. Focusing your you go-to-market strategy creates confidence, which in turn builds momentum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enter the Ideal Customer Profile.

What’s an Ideal Customer Profile?

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Ideal Customer Profile probably contains information like:

• Industry

• Number of employees

• Revenue

• Growth rate

• Geographies

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

• Attributes (e.g. tech stack)

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

• Business challenges

ICP fails

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

Balancing breadth

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

ICP as fantasy

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

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

Bringing structure to your ICP journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Validating the ICP

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

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

ICP is strategy

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

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

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

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

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

In the meantime, remember: niches for riches*.

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

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

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

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It’s no secret that the most effective teams are the most aligned too.

Although I’d hazard a guess that – for most organizations – alignment is focused on internal business goals. Priorities, imperatives, strategic pillars, mission and vision. Ways of working, values, responsibilities.

But how many teams are fully aligned on the foundation of their business: the customer?

Take the empathy map challenge

I bet if you asked five people across your business to explain your archetypal customer, you’d end up with five completely different versions. So that’s what you should do.

Ask a few people to take one hour of their day, and complete an empathy map individually – and importantly, mark each note if it’s an assumption, or if it can be evidenced.

Get them back, and see how they differ. You’ll not only uncover what your team know about customers and can provide evidence to back up, but you’ll see the type of assumptions that people are making across your business. These might be strong and correct – but could be limiting and even damaging to your business.

With that insight, you’ll be empowered to make changes – and have evidence that there’s a need to focus on building knowledge.

What is an empathy map?

An empathy map is a concept borrowed from the UX world, with the aim of articulating what is known about a particular type of user, and creating a shared understanding.

There are different versions available, but this is the one I use:

The empathy map is made up of six sections: four in a grid, and two summaries underneath.

• Say & Do: What does your customer say about their business, challenges, and your product? What steps do they take?

• Hear: What do they hear from friends, colleagues, the media, passers-by? What is influencing them?

• See: When they look at the marketplace, what do they see? What do they see from your competitors? What are they reading or watching?

• Think & Feel: What emotions is your customer feeling? What’s their interpretation of their challenges, their options, and how they want to do business?

In the two sections underneath, apply some critical analysis and summarise the insights above through two opposite lenses:

• Pains: What are the challenges and frustrations your customer is facing? What does failure look like? What does your customer want to avoid?

• Gains: What does success look like? What does your customer stand to gain from solving their challenges?

Assess these at three levels to be super strong: business outcomes, professional outcomes, and personal outcomes.

Shared understanding is a foundational competitive advantage

In air navigation, the rule of 1 in 60 applies. For every one degree traveled off course for 60 miles, the plane will land 1 mile off the intended destination.

As an analogy, every person in your business is one plane. Teams are squadrons. A startup is an entire air force.

Without aligning teams on their core understanding of your customers – and course correcting where necessary – you’ll never end up in the same place.

But what would you achieve if you could get all teams focused on the same intended destination?

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Everybody has a reasoned and valid opinion on how pricing should be set, from experience with past companies, watching competitors, ‘best practices’ articles, or even individuals influenced by the ‘IKEA effect’ bias. Rarely is there any alignment on the pricing objectives: the goal that pricing should help you achieve.

Here are some fictional examples that you might recognize from real life:

• The CEO, who wants low prices to win more customers

• Your head of product, who wants to charge more to reflect the product quality

• A CMO who wants to use pricing to position for the mid-market

• The CFO whose team put much effort into calculating COGs and wants to ensure a healthy profit margin

As a product marketer or person in charge of coordinating pricing, you might be tempted to lock stakeholders in a room and wait with baited breath for them to walk out, smiles and handshakes all around as they celebrate their new-found alignment.

Except… that doesn’t happen! You may appear to have a grasp of loose objectives, only to discover everyone else still has a different understanding. You can still be dealing with fallout from decisions that didn’t have full buy-in months after implementing.

So what should you do to keep your pricing process on track, and gain the confidence you need to move forward?

Gain clarity and alignment

At Kayako – for our failed product launch – we were introduced to the concept of pricing objectives by Chris Hopf, a pricing consultant, and iterated to find a regular, repeatable process of setting and revisiting pricing objectives that works for us.

We find this process helpful to:

• get everyone on the same page

• set direction

• make decisions

• define success

• (occasionally) defend our approach against new, off-piste initiatives

Before any discussion, the leadership team receive individual spreadsheets, where each row is a pricing objective — you can find the list we use at the bottom of this article.

Each person is given 100 points and must divide this amongst the objectives they think are most important: the bigger the share, the higher priority. There’s just one other rule — no single objective can be allocated less than 20 points. With this approach, you’re forced to consider which objectives are truly the most important and make tradeoffs.

When evaluating the objectives, your leadership team need to consider how they will affect:

• strategic company objectives

• tactical objectives

• your customer’s perception of your brand and product

• your organization’s resources

When all the responses are in, we bring them together in one spreadsheet. If necessary to rid the sheet of “noise”, discard all 20-point awards: if the objective was given the minimum score, then it’s a minimum priority.

We share the results with the leadership team in a structured discussion. The goal? Leave the room with confidence on what pricing should achieve for your business.

Your agenda might look like something this:

• What is the top objective, and does that align with business goals?

• Are there any outliers or anomalies?

• Which objectives are most surprising?

• Can we agree that the two priorities with the highest scores are the most important moving forward?

• What impact will focusing on these two priorities have on the wider business?

Often, within 90 minutes we’ve got the alignment and direction necessary to continue along the pricing process with confidence and clarity at all levels.

Example pricing objectives

This is an incomplete list of pricing objectives you could use for your business. These are from a variety of sources, so make sure they are relevant before using them in your process.

• Target return on investment

• Target market share

• Increase or accelerate market share (e.g. number of customers)

• Maximize long-run profit (over a year or longer)

• Maximize short-run profit (over the next quarter)

• Grow sales revenue

• Maximize customer lifetime value (encourage upgrades and expansion)

• Maximize customer retention and reduce churn

• Reduce new business pricing objections or reduce sales cycle length

• Simplify for internal/operational reasons

• Stabilize the market / compete on non-price considerations

• Convey a particular image

• Desensitize customers to price

• Be the price leader

• Discourage entry by new competitors

• Match competitor pricing

• Avoid regulation

• Maintain distribution channel support and loyalty (e.g. partners)

• Be regarded as “fair” by customers

• Create interest and excitement

• Use price of one product to upsell other products

• Discourage others from lowering prices

• Quickly recover investment specifically in product development

• Generate volume in order to drive down costs

• Prepare for sale of the business (harvesting)

• Business survival

• Encourage the exit of marginal firms from the industry

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