Hi, I’m James. Thanks for checking out Building Momentum: a newsletter to help startup founders and marketers accelerate SaaS growth through product marketing.

In this post:

Value prop in 5 words

AWS: "Get bankrupt scaling your infra"

Salesforce: "Ugly UX for sales team"

Intercom: "Support system with enigmatic billing"

Slack: "Reduce company productivity with GIFs"

Notion: "Knowledge-base with load times" https://t.co/F9PshdOh6i
— Pierre de Wulf (@PierreDeWulf) September 2, 2021

Notion: “Knowledge-base with load times” got me ?

I like this advice – every founder, marketer, sales rep should be able to communicate their value prop in 5 words or less.

Why? It doesn’t even matter if the words are different.

What matters is the concept: What are you and how do you help your customers?

If you have 10 people in your sales team, you can almost guarantee you’ll have 10 different value propositions.

If you have 5 product managers, you can almost guarantee that you have 5 value propositions.

That’s why focus is so important. And again, focus does not only mean ‘prioritization’ – it also means ‘clarity’.

Know who your customers are, what value is important to then, then build your product, marketing, and sales around them.

Customer research

Customer research is the critical piece that makes every ad, email, landing page, or product launch resonate and engage with your audience.

Yes, it’s *that* important.
— Samantha Leal (@samanthalcc) September 2, 2021

One of my first posts on Building Momentum was how positioning-by-assumption doesn’t work.

Well, guess what?

Marketing-by-assumption doesn’t work either.

Understanding your customer is a competitive advantage, because you can bet your competitors aren’t doing it well enough either.

Product marketing: positioning and pitch

The two big hard things B2B product marketers need to nail are positioning and the sales pitch. All the rest of it flows from those two things.
— April Dunford (@aprildunford) August 31, 2021

Amplifying this message in case you haven’t heard: product marketing need to help nail the pitch, not just the positioning.

Having the best positioning in the world won’t help unless it’s executed well. The goal is to find repeatable success in a pitch format. Product marketing helps founders and VP Sales to find that, instead of relying on improvisation.

Here are some of my tips:

Test different sales pitch formats to find what works best
Think outside the box – it doesn’t just have to be slides
Get inspiration from sales demos from products your company has bought
Run a certification program for your sales reps and marketers on the pitch
Repeat it – every sales training session, every all-hands, every meeting

That’s the Overview for this week

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Thanks for reading, and here’s to building momentum.

James