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

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

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

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

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

That’s where the Positioning Loop comes in.

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

The Positioning Loop has three phases:

• Get clarity
• Build conviction
• Be consistent

Here’s how to actually do it.

Get clarity

This is where most get stuck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Build conviction

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

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

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

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

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

How to help conviction stick:

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

You earn conviction; it can’t be enforced. 

Be consistent

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

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

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

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

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

Psst… it’s a loop, remember?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s messaging distortion.

Messaging distortion is real

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to fix messaging distortion

Spoiler alert: it doesn’t fix itself.

1. Codify messaging like a system, not a sentence

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

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

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

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

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

2. Cascade the ‘why’ with intensity

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Build coaching and feedback loops

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

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

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

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

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

The goal isn’t better messaging, but alignment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get my new free positioning course

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

In just 7 days, you’ll learn how to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be more Fat Duck, less Cheesecake Factory

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

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

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

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

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

What this can teach us about B2B product marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simple, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positioning is strategy, and everything is your product

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Absolutely not.

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

So what do you do? You capitalize on it!

You decide to double down on your current strategy.

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

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

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

The brief is simple. Scale what’s working.

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

Sounds great.

Except… 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But product marketing is often a thankless role.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With all of these multiple conscious and unconscious worksteams, we’re always in a state of flux and generally under-resourced. The market changes. Sales need more. We need more leads. Product need more support. Who’s going to deal with all that? You! Can we hire more folks? Probably not. There’s no ‘off’ day; you’re always on. Even on days off, you can’t help but think about your todo list, the big rocks you’ve got to tackle, or how you need to approach a certain conversation.

But, at the same time, product marketing is probably the most rewarding role in the marketing space.

It’s a thrilling and fulfilling career path for people who thrive in dynamic environments. We work with tons of different people and gain exposure we never would have otherwise. We build diverse relationships that quickly become less ‘work’ and more ‘support’. We get to know our colleagues deeply and intimately. We become half-PMM, half-therapist.

We’re adaptable and versatile. We can do – and do do – anything and everything. We can learn faster, harder, deeper. We build a holistic understanding of the business, its mechanics, and all of its facets. Of the customer, the market, the variables at play. We develop core skills and mental models for thinking, not just processes for doing.

We recognise that success is a team sport. Our success is the businesses success, and vice versa. We enable others to meet their goals, exceed the targets, to feel confident. We thrive on building momentum – things getting faster, easier, growing, building. We feel pride and accomplishment in unique ways – when a customer repeats our positioning, when we win a great logo, when users love the product, when we learn new things that can help us build better.

Product marketing may be a thankless role, but the inherent challenges – and opposite opportunities for growth – make it an exciting, fulfilling career choice. While recognition may not always be immediate… and while the day-to-day may be stressful… we can enjoy the unique experiences that product marketing offers, and take pride in contributing to growth more than many people will understand.

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

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

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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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Something I’ve noticed – most marketing teams are nimble, scrappy, efficient, and effective in the early days. But as the marketing team matures, they become slower and bulkier.

I think this is because most marketing teams implement processes, rather than focus on building a marketing system.

What’s the difference?

It’s a huge difference, actually.

A process is simply the execution of a task. It’s a step-by-step approach to getting something done. Marketing teams, especially in the process of growing, set up processes to streamline the volume of work they’re working on. They think that having a process in place will make their life easier… but that’s not always the case.

Processes can become rigid and inflexible. They don’t always account for the nuances and changes that inevitably occur – and change is pretty much the only constant in startups.

Sure, but processes can change, right? Except once everyone is conditioned to working a certain type of way, it’s easy to optimize and even build more sub-processes… but difficult to rethink the whole thing.

A system, however, is the overall environment that enables outcomes to be achieved. It’s a more holistic approach that takes into account all the factors that contribute to success, including the tools, technologies, and people involved.

By creating a system that is designed to enable outcomes, marketing teams can be better equipped to respond to changing circumstances. The system flexes, as required – taking the inputs in, working it through, and achieving an outcome at the end.

Why teams build processes

Ultimately, processes are easier to define and measure. They can be divided into smaller, manageable steps, and rewards can be tied to specific tasks. Each person taking part in a process can be OKR’d and performance-managed.

They can also provide limitations – an excuse or a reason for doing or not doing something.

But systems require a different mindset. Creating a system means providing an environment for success. A system takes into account not just the specific tasks, but the principles, tools, technologies, people, motivations, objectives, relationships, interactions, and contexts in which they are performed.

They require interoperability and an understanding that everything is a bit give-and-take. There will be swings-and-roundabouts in every stage. But systems lead to a more comprehensive, flexible approach that can lead to greater outcomes in the long run.

Build a system instead, with these principles

If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that I’m all about principles – I think they’re a great way to set out how you want to work, and use that to guide the implementation and execution.

If I were building a cross-functional marketing team, here are the principles that I’d implement from the start.

Collaboration

One team, one dream. Teamwork is crucial. Open communication and sharing of ideas across the team, and with stakeholders. Zero ego. All working for the good of our customers.

Flexibility

A system-based approach requires an ability to adapt to changing circumstances. This means being open to new ideas and approaches, and being willing to pivot when necessary. Being able to operate with ambiguity.

Customer empathy

We are nothing without our customers. They have to be firmly in the center of our entire operation. We have to consider their needs, preferences, and feedback in all aspects of our team.

Continuous improvement

We’re always going to get better, but we’ve got to start somewhere. We need to set up the feedback loops that regularly monitor performance, gather feedback, and make adjustments as necessary to ensure that we’re delivering the best outcomes.

Innovation

Average planning generates average results. Thinking outside the box and borrowing inspiration from other industries will help us to innovate and be more creative. Good artists copy; great artists steal.

Integrated

We have to move as one. Our work is integrated and holistic. Success for one is success for all. This means considering the interconnections between different components and teams and handover points, and ensuring that they work together seamlessly.

Mindset matters

Shifting from a process-approach to a system-approach isn’t going to happen overnight.

But building more of the principles above into your day-to-day work, and by agreeing more ‘system’ ways of working with your collaborators, you might find less need for rigid processes, and more opportunities for closer work and true partnership. Good luck!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lack of structured feedback process

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

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

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

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

Here’s what I’d recommend:

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

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

Remember, PMF is iterative

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

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

Good luck!

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

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Over the last few years I’ve hired or have helped hire tons of product marketers, experimenting with different questions and formats.

What I find works well – for the companies I’ve worked with and roles I’ve hired – is asking three specific questions that:

• Help me understand how they approach product marketing (and work in general)
• Gives them a chance to shine
• Opens an opportunity for reflection and learning

These questions take place in a ~30 minute chat that – whilst casual and conversational – is focused on extracting the meaty, juicy bits as quickly as possible.

Tell me about a product marketing project you’re proud of

I love this question because it lets candidates to explain something they’ve done that they were really happy with, where they were excited about the work. I find it helps candidates to relax into a conversation too, and let their personality shine through too.

I’m looking to see if candidates answer using STAR (Situation, Tasks, Actions, Results), and I’ll ask more targeted questions if not.

I’ll dig in further to ask about tradeoffs, how they collaborated with different people and teams, and try to uncover the specific role they played: were they a supporting actor, or were they running the show?

I also use this question to uncover their passion. In most cases, I want to work with product marketers who are interested in both the application and the theory of our craft. What did they like about it, what skills did they learn, where did they go for support?

Tell me about a product marketing project that could have gone better

I think eager self-improvement and a growth mindset is a really powerful trait in good product marketers. So this question is targeted to identify opportunities that, with hindsight, could have been avoided.

Here I’m looking for their maturity, how they approach accountability, and their proactivity in raising/solving challenges. I’m still looking for a STAR response to show the role they played in the project.

This question isn’t about admitting blame, but I think self-reflection is important. What can we do better next time, what challenges should we avoid?

I usually ask followup questions like “What would you do differently next time?” and great responses will include a core learning, with a disclaimer of ‘it depends on the context’.

Tell me about a time when you had to learn something new, inside or outside of work

Product marketing is so broad. Nobody has all the answers. That’s why I think proactive learning and application is important to tease out in the interview process.

Firstly, I ask for a situation that’s work-related or personal, because not everyone has a chance to learn new stuff at work.

I want to see how a candidate approaches the challenge. Did they identify a knowledge/skills gap early in the planning, or did they only spot it when they were in execution-mode? How did they figure out ‘what’ to learn?

If it’s a work/product marketing example, it’s always interesting to see how aware they are of the big world out there. Do they rely only on a narrow set of internal resources, or are they explorers looking for how others have tackled similar issues?

I ask targeted questions to tease out their critical analysis thought process. How did they know the solution they learnt would work? How did they weigh up different options?

How do you interview?

Disclaimer: the above is based on my experience hiring PMMs for specific types of companies, cultures, and is biased towards the traits I think are important. Your mileage may vary.

The interview questions and format that gets the best results for your business will be different. The traits, skills, and experience you’re looking for will impact the questions you ask – so don’t blindly ask the questions above without considering what you’re looking for.

Let me know what interview questions you ask in the comments.

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

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The post Three insightful interview questions to ask product marketers appeared first on Building Momentum.

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“One area in my current role that I’m struggling with are the very short value props and elevator pitches for our new product releases. I’m strong at writing longer descriptions but when I really need to scale it down to one or two sentences I find it challenging. Do you have any good frameworks to help with this?”

I got this message from a Building Momentum subscriber on LinkedIn and thought it’d be worth sharing and expanding upon my answer.

As product marketers, we’re really comfortable writing long tomes of product copy. Give us a blank Google Doc and we can wax lyrical about the product, the value it delivers, how customers use it, and the future direction of the industry.

… But ask us to come up with headlines and short elevator pitches? It’s difficult!

There are so many things we want to say, so many angles to cover, and we need to get our key phrases and differentiators and category description in there too…

(And, even worse, we’re usually crafting copy for use by other teams, leading to copy by committee. Nothing good happens here).

There are a few short copy tricks and tips that I’ve picked up that can help you craft concise, captivating, creative statements. Keep these in mind when you’re drafting website copy, 25-word ‘about us’ descriptions, sales decks, digital ads, and more.

Remember, ABC

Something that’s stuck with me from journalism class: you should always write with accuracy, brevity, and clarity in mind.

• Accuracy: As well as accurate information, you need to accurately express what you’re writing through tone of voice, precision, and spelling/grammar.
• Brevity: You should get to the point in as few words as possible. Additional words often don’t make anything clearer, but add more cognitive effort for the reader to comprehend.
• Clarity: Avoid misunderstanding and ambiguity in your writing. Use simple language, avoid jargon, and be direct.

This blogpost has a ton of tips on how to make your writing accurate, brief, and clear: bookmark for future use.

Use rhetorical devices

As humans, we’re tuned to listen and engage more when we hear certain persuasive tactics. Rhetorical devices are techniques that you can steal to elevate your copy from drab to fab.

This post on ‘16 Rhetorical Devices That Will Make You Sound Like Steve Jobs‘ is one I’ve bookmarked and come back to time and time again. Here are my favorites:

• Aporia: A feigned statement of doubt by the speaker and a question to the audience.
  • “Now, how are we gonna communicate this? We don’t wanna carry around a mouse, right? What are we gonna do?”
• Antitheton: Two opposing facts of contrasting content.
  • “The kind of things you would find on a typical phone, but in a very untypical way now.”
• Climax: The increase from a weaker to a stronger expression. A word sequence is arranged in ascending order.
  • “First was the mouse. The second was the click wheel. And now, we’re gonna bring multi-touch to the market.”

Build an inspiration swipefile

Take notes of inspiring value propositions, engaging use of language, and creative copy execution.

Take a look at my post on good examples of messaging for some inspiration, and add your own.

Look outside your own industry and vertical too, from consumer products to heavy machinery manufacturers. You’re not so much interested in the words, but more how the statements are formed and crafted.

If you can, work with a copywriter

Product marketers are trained to become excellent at understanding customer needs. Copywriters are trained to become excellent at communicating in copy.

Working with a copywriter, whether in-house or freelance, will 100% help to level up your results.

Steal from your customers

If you’re talking to your customers regularly, carrying out market research, or even checking their profiles out on LinkedIn, then you’ve got a creative copy goldmine at your fingertips.

Sometimes, our customers can sum our product value up better than we ever could. You might be surprised at the gems you’ll discover.

Imagine customer conversations

Hopefully, you’ve been able to build significant empathy with your customers and feel in sync with who they are, their mindset, what their jobs/gains/pains/triggers are, and the value they desire.

If you can’t talk to customers, try imagining what they would say if you did ask them.

Some prompts that might be useful are things like:

• “So, what is [product] and why do you use it?”
• “What was life like before, and what’s life like now?”
• “Why do you recommend our product?”
• “Explain where our product compares to others in the market.”

Creative writing is an art

Hopefully some of these tips will help you find new inspiration or employ frameworks to improve the copy you’ve already created.

Creative writing is an art so again, think about working with an experienced copywriter to help you create copy that works for your business and customers.

Lastly, don’t be afraid to push the boundaries. Understand your brand voice, try different angles, and stick your neck out on the line: fortune favors the brave.

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

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Product marketing is in high demand. Companies of all shapes and sizes are finally realising that product marketers have a multiplier effect on product, marketing, and sales efforts.

And accordingly, there’s been a huge increase in the number of product marketers, although not enough supply to fulfil demand. Our ranks have also been boosted with talented colleagues from across the marketing, success, and sales spectrums making the move to product marketing roles and helping to fight the good fight.

I’ve hired or helped hire product marketers at all different levels (not to mention, having been through the hiring process multiple times myself).

Originally this post was going to be a rant, complaining about everything from the wilfully bad practices I’ve heard, to common misfires from people who should know better. But I decided to take the high road instead.

Here’s five brief tips to consider when you’re hiring a product marketer.

Be absolutely clear on what you’re looking for

While product marketers are like Swiss army knifes with skills applicable to everything from pricing to positioning to product launches, trying to blindly hire a PMM without a clear and pruned understanding of the main duties they’ll perform over the next 12-24 months is a recipe for disaster.

Think about what’s absolutely necessary: this will probably be product launch execution, customer/market insight, sales enablement.

Then what else is a nice-to-have? Think about the base skills you expect will make them successful: research, writing, collaboration, analysis. Maybe expertise within a specific industry, competitive intelligence, content strategy, product-led growth, strategy… whatever you expect to require from them over the next ~2 years.

Make sure these are clearly communicated in the job description as nice-to-haves, but not requirements. You’ll see fewer applications from minority groups, and miss out on the right talent for you.

Have a straightforward, unbiased recruitment process

What can you do in 30 minutes? Maybe relax in a long shower, or a hot bath. Get in a quick workout, or a few chapters of that book you just can’t put down.

What can’t you do in 30 minutes? Meet a product marketer, understand their background, identify and learn about relevant crossovers of experience, and make a decision about whether they’re worth putting through the process or not.

I’ve heard some really bad examples, particularly over the last few years with the move to remote hiring. Whilst nothing like this horrific example from Canonical, some companies are either wildly overcomplicating with multiple, superfluous steps, or badly over-indexing on biased gut-feel.

Here’s the process I’ve recommended before:

1. Application:
   • Require resume
   • No cover letters
   • Ask two questions in the application: ‘Why do you think you would be a good fit for this role?’ and ‘Tell us about a product marketing project you’re particularly proud of.’
2. CV screen:
   • Prioritise relevant resumes by experience and answers to the two questions
   • If applicant has significant professional experience, disregard education
   • If applicant has less professional experience, prioritize on skills demonstrated in other jobs
3. Recruiter screen:
   • 25 minute call to validate application
   • Understand what they’re looking for
   • Match with salary range
4. Hiring manager interview:
   • 45 minute video call
   • 10 minutes getting-to-know-you
   • 20 minutes interviewer-led discussion: dive into project experience, asking clear questions and expecting structured STAR (situation, tasks, action, results) answers
   • 15 minutes applicant-led discussion
   • Outcome: specific feedback on their suitability (strong yes, yes, no, hard no)
5. Meet the team interviews:
   • 30 minute video calls with 2/3 team members
   • 5 minutes getting-to-know-you
   • 15 mins interviewer-led discussion: relevant projects, learnings, culture-add questions, asking clear questions and expecting structured STAR answers
   • 10 minutes applicant-led discussion
   • Outcome: specific feedback on their suitability (strong yes, yes, no, hard no)
6. If tight call between 2-3 applicants, final calls with hiring manager focusing on working style
7. If questions on technical suitability, short (~1hr expected) take-home task detailing their approach to solving a problem with review call with hiring manager

Give clear feedback

If a hiring manager has spoken to an applicant, you owe them some feedback.

Great: “We really liked your approach to X. Unfortunately for this role, we’re looking for someone with more experience on Y.”

Bad: “You just don’t have the X-factor we’re looking for” For real. I know a recruiter and hiring manager has given this feedback before and they are 100% on my avoid list.

Sharing feedback is the payment-in-kind for the time the candidate has invested in your process. It’s a gift that helps them improve their search and understand their space in the market. Not giving constructive feedback is evil, no matter how busy you are.

And if you can’t qualify why you don’t think a candidate is suitable, then you will only find the answer by evaluating the process and your own biases. (And you might not like what you uncover.)

Take a bet on junior/mid-level product marketers

It’s common for mid-to-senior product marketers to get ~3-5 recruiter outreaches a week right now, if not in one day.

You can either stand out by offering higher salaries and innovative outreach to the cream of the crop, or you can take the more-rewarding path less travelled and take a bet on product marketers with less experience, but just as much smarts and motivation.

Whether you’re hiring someone into their first product marketing role from a customer success, content marketing, or even sales role, you need to evaluate for the skills that indicate product marketing thinking: customer empathy, product savviness, and collaborative working styles.

One of the most common misconceptions that I hear, as reasons why hiring more junior folks wouldn’t work, is that the hiring managers don’t have time to train them up.

I think this is an excuse. Firstly, if a manager can’t spend their time training and supporting a team-member, their priorities might not be aligned. Secondly, there’s a wealth of training and education programs available for product marketers, from the Product Marketing Alliance to my course, WTF is Go-To-Market?.

You can’t always hire the perfect PMM for your business, but trust me: you can build one.

What was your product marketing hiring process like?

I’m always interested in what hiring managers have set out, but what I find even more juicy is the candidate experience. Connect with me on LinkedIn, Twitter, or email and let me know what your best – and worst – hiring experience was like.

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

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If you’re in SaaS, you definitely know about Hubspot’s inbound marketing funnel…

… and you’ll also know it’s replaced by their flywheel:

If you’re in a billing or bizops role, you probably know about the Zuora 9 Keys to Subscription Success.

And if you’re in Customer Success, you probably know of Gainsight’s Periodic Table.

These are all examples of a custom methodology that these companies have developed to help guide not just their product strategy, but their product narrative.

Any company can develop a methodology. Those that do it well are able to stand out, sell higher value, and sell faster by educating their prospects, customers, and the market of a new way to operate.

Why create your own methodology?

There are a few different ways to differentiate from your competitors, but the most resilient option is to have an opinion.

This doesn’t necessarily mean have an opinionated product (but it could do).

It means to have a certain view of how the vertical, industry, and jobs you’re supporting can be done better – usually based on your own unique wisdom.

By presenting a new mental model (if it works!), you’re able to convince prospects that you have the upper-hand, experience, nous, and specialism. It gives you an opportunity to build a stronger product strategy that’s built around the process, cementing your ability to better meet those customer needs.

And, when converted to your sales narrative, you’re able to do one of my favorite types of sales experiences: the whiteboard map. This is where your sales rep can pull out your customer’s challenges and aspirations through discovery conversation, jotting them on the board in seemingly random positions – before going in for the kill and wrapping it all in your methodology. Suddenly, random points become part of an interconnected map on the path from chaos to success. I’ve only ever seen this work well.

Building a methodology: examples

Example 1

At Kayako, we looked to build a methodology for delivering something we called ‘unified customer service’. UCS was part of our manifesto, a new way of approaching customer service strategy.

We began with some principles.

Firstly, the model needed to be built on verbs, active elements that described the core tasks someone needed to master to unlock UCS.

The model also needed to work in a number of different contexts, with prompts like these to guide our thinking:

• The market – The customer service shift means it’s critical that I:
• Our customer’s business – To deliver an effortless customer experience, I must:
• Our customer themselves – To get better at customer service, I must improve my ability to:
• Our product – With Kayako, I can:
• Our marketing – Take a look at this blog post on how to:
• Our roadmap – These features help our customers to:

Lastly, we paraphrased context from Zuora’s 9 Keys guide to set the scene of how the blueprint should work:

• These seven steps serve as a foundational blueprint for building and scaling an effortless customer service experience.
• Some of these may seem more immediately relevant to your business, but eventually all of them have to be addressed.
• While individual keys may be prioritized at different times, a business must focus on the collective set as a whole.
• This introductory guide is intended to outline these concepts in very broad terms.
• This section sets out how these steps help businesses achieve UCS.

For each part of the framework, we added notes on:

• Why the step is necessary
• How it can be achieved
• What the specific requirements were
• Why it’s important
• What’s blocking people from doing it now
• The problem and implication that not doing so presents
• The approach that businesses should take to overcome

After a lot of research, back-and-forth, and experimenting, we developed this:

8 Steps to Unified Customer Service:

1. Capture – Gather the right data and learn about your customer and what they’re doing in real-time
2. Interact – Communicate with your customer on the right channel, at the right time
3. Understand – Apply what you know about your customer and their context to make every interaction as personal as possible
4. Resolve – Provide the perfect response that answers all of your customer’s questions, and head off the next issue too.
5. Measure – Measure the impact of your effortless customer service experience on your business goals
6. Improve – Test and experiment to discover processes that work for you and your customers
7. Scale – Ensure your team, tools and processes are ready for success

We used it in some conversations and validated with customers, but unfortunately never got a chance to use it!

Example 2

At another company, we really needed a framework to help distill our narrative into something that could be repeated over-and-over, turning our product feature set into a toolbox for achieving distinct outcomes.

We distilled what we knew about both the achievements our customers were making and internal thinking about what else the product could support to create a ‘five star framework’. This had real legs, although was relatively short-lived due to changing priorities!

How to build your own methodology

In both of my experiences, we used mostly our internal understanding of our customers and the industry to determine the stages and steps in our methodology. This was fine… but in hindsight, we over-thought it. Without external insight, we were left second-guessing the maturity of our customers and the market.

If I were to do it again, I’d focus solely on our customers jobs-to-be-done map, and use that research to form the basis of our framework.

It’s really important to extract, simplify, and reduce the knowledge you gain into core steps that can be followed and put into practice by your ideal customers. This means if your customer is an advanced thinker, go to the same level. Otherwise, always err on the side of caution and message for the lowest common denominator. Being unnecessarily smart won’t do you any favors.

Think about your visualization from the beginning and involve a designer if you can. Are you a building a cyclical process, a puzzle to be completed, or a maturity framework? This can have a big impact on the way you build and frame your methodology.

Lastly, validate with internal experts, customers, and other friendly folks in the market. Your framework — and the resulting product strategy and narrative you build from it — won’t be successful if it doesn’t resonate with the intended audience.

Show ‘how’ with your methodology

Getting your methodology right can set a solid foundation to break through the market, differentiate in the mind of your customers, and speed up sales by offering not just the product, but the methodology for success. Good luck!

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

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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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When I talk to startup founders, marketers, and commercial leads, they’re nearly always rushing around trying to do a hundred things at once. Everything is important, everything is a priority, and everything just requires work.

Their biggest challenges often arise from just two main causes:

• Lack of customer insight – who are they, why did they buy?

• Lack of market insight – what’s the landscape, who are the competitors, why do we lose to them?

To make progress and overcome these issues, the only answer is to spend more effort doing more work. Inescapable work that has no shortcuts. Work that enables more important high-value work, but requires time-consuming labour to carry out.

This work usually manifests in these ways:

• Reviewing their customers and prospects to find patterns

• Win/loss research to discover why a customer did or didn’t buy

• Evaluating competitors and building an over-complicated spreadsheet

Three product marketing systems to set up now

As in many other functions, I expect we’ll see the rise of ‘product marketing operations’ – a specific role designed to help PMM teams operate as efficiently as possible. The PMM Ops role will build scalable systems to take data and research, develop summaries, and provide usable outputs to PMMs and other teams with go-to-market, customer, competitor, and sales insights.

And just as product teams move away from project-based research to continual research, product marketing teams must do the same.

Here are three key product marketing operational systems that any startup marketer can set up and start making better decisions with reliable insight.

1. Reliable CRM prospect and customer data

Not enough sales/marketing/success teams work on data sanity in their CRM, missing out on the benefits from clean data. But when implemented and used, it becomes a really strong indicator of patterns and insight for tactical and strategic decisions.

In addition to the standard CRM data (like industry, company size, etc), you’re going to want to capture key fields at different object-levels that help you make better decisions. These will depend on your context, but generally look like this:

• Lead stage – capture information on ‘fit’ indicators like tech used or anything else that might indicate they are your ICP

• MQL stage – capture info that represents their challenges and motivations

• SQL stage – capture fields that tell you more about their buying process, key selection criteria, mindset

• Opportunity (early stage) – capture key decision-making criteria, their buying role, what they are trying to achieve, competitors in play

• Opportunity (later stage) – capture their reactions, must-haves, information on the project’s priority, product feedback

• Opportunity (closed) – capture their expectations of the partnership, as well as your CRM win/loss data

It’s key to make it really simple for sales to record data: there are Slack bots that can do this, or you can set up reminder emails using your CRM to remind reps to add the information required at each stage. You may need to add a data completeness spiff to your sales rep’s comp to ensure they add as much richness as possible.

This data serves as indicators of patterns, it won’t provide all the answers. But make sure you use it. Set up monthly or quarterly reports that go not just to your immediate team but also leadership. Create a Slack channel that posts each field in real-time to provide a pulse check into your deal flow.

2. Automated NoWL interviews

I’ve written before about win/loss processes and how valuable they can be, but most companies don’t know enough about top-of-funnel issues which can have a bigger impact on direction and strategy. It’s really valuable to include prospects who said ‘no’ at some point prior to opportunity in your research process.

I call this process NoWL, standing for No, Won, Lost. Check my previous post on win/loss for suggestions on how to set an automated system up, and how to make the most of the insight.

3. Competitor intelligence (CoIn)

Nearly every company I’ve worked at has tackled competitor intelligence in the same way: given the lowest paid person the job of creating a big spreadsheet that captures all their features, marketing, and pricing information.

This spreadsheet is summarily resigned to live in a Google Drive folder that’s never used.

Competitor intelligence should be usable and help with decision making by product, by sales, or by marketing. It should not be about creating a bible of information – it will never be socialized or used effectively.

Think about how different teams need competitor intelligence, and work backwards from there. For example:

• Sales teams need competitor landscape info for initial training, battlecards for regular updates, and real-time insight on how to beat them

• Product teams need general landscape knowledge, information on their market, and their unique claims; feature insight can be gleaned later on a project basis

• Marketing teams will need general landscape knowledge, how they differentiate, and their awareness in the market; marketing tactics can be evaluated later

This might lead to three pieces of work:

• One-page overviews of top competitors, their place in the landscape, who their market is, and how well known they are

• Summarised battlecards of key messaging and our defensive/offensive game plan against them

• Real-time insight to allow teams to react (or be proactive) to updates

With small teams who have a lot of shared domain experience, it’s often most effective to start in reverse order.

• Build the real-time feed using a Slack channel and space for discussion on sales insights, auto-post reviews for them from G2 or Capterra, send Google alerts straight into the channel

• Assign someone to spend a day on creating battlecards, and iterate monthly with direct feedback from sales

• Assign someone a week to create the first draft of a competitor overview before making it part of someone’s regular responsibilities

Build systems and processes as early as you can

Building a regular system of build, use, learn to iterate quickly is much more effective than revisiting behemoth documents twice a year.

You’ll have less manual work on your to-do list while using current, up-to-date insight to drive better decisions and react quickly to market changes.

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

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

Prospect: “Do you have [feature]?”

AE: “No, but it’s on our roadmap.”

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

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

And the opportunity disappears, never to be seen again.

Why does this happen?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overcoming feature objections

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

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

Educate your team on the problems to be solved

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Set expectations, question, move forward

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

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

Landing shortly

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

Set expectations:

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

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

Question them:

• How would you use that?

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

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

Move them forward:

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

Near-term

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

Set expectations:

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

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

Question them:

• How would you use this feature?

• How will that impact your business and workflow?

• What problem would it solve for you?

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

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

Move forward:

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

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

Planned

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

Set the expectation:

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

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

Question them:

• How would you use this feature?

• How will that impact your business and workflow?

• How do you do this today?

• What problem will it solve for you?

• How do you achieve the same outcome today?

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

• What’s the driving force behind this requirement?

Move forward:

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

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

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

Avoid saying no and ensure the feedback loop is closed

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

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

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

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

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

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