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The Overview #30

Hey there. This is The Overview, a weekly roundup of noteworthy B2B SaaS stuff. You’ll find interesting thoughts, articles, and more from around the internet.

Positioning needs a narrative

There’s a lot of competing approaches in the positioning world: April’s Obviously Awesome approach, Andy Raskin’s World Change approach, and more, and I thought this tweet from April was interesting.

Andy’s approach has definitely led a seachange in the tech industry – everyone is looking for their new world/old world opportunity to build a category. But I’d argue what Andy is doing is not building positioning, but building a narrative first. Positioning is retrofitted around the structure that the world change creates.

Every positioning needs a narrative – and I think every narrative needs unconventional wisdom, like:

  • A world change that changes the game
  • How the needs of a defined customer are not met or understood
  • Tech innovation can be applied in a new way

Think back to the basics of narrative (Todorov, for any fellow nerds watching):

  1. The narrative starts with an equilibrium
  2. An action or character disrupts the equilibrium
  3. A quest to restore the equilibrium begins
  4. The narrative continues to a climax
  5. Resolution occurs and equilibrium is restored

How well does your narrative fit into these stages? Are there opportunities to fill in the gaps and build a stronger story?

SMB GTM is ‘harder’

I agree with this so much. It’s much easier to throw people at enterprise GTM motions on both the vendor and customer sides.

But doing SMB successfully requires fewer people on both sides because of the economics involved. It requires 1:All and 1:Many thinking, which is hard to get right. And the product, marketing, sales experience needs to be on fleek: repeatable, accurate, brief, clear, and consistent.

6/10 times, you’re not the ideal customer

Every so often, someone on Twitter will complain about:

  1. No pricing on a company’s site
  2. Sales reps wanting discovery, when the prospect just wants a demo
  3. A lack of product information on the website

Until someone like Louis steps in. Bad experience? Great! The customer didn’t waste their time reviewing a product they’re not suited for, the vendor didn’t waste time/money selling to a prospect who wasn’t their target customer.

I’d posit that in any inbound sales interest, there’s a 50% chance that person is NOT in the target customer audience, and a 10% chance there’s an actual fail in the experience.

This is why having a really niche ideal customer profile is key. And a strategy. Because most of strategy is understanding what you are going to say ‘no’ to.

Don’t build businesses based on fiction

Sharing this (from Adrienne, Queen of Buyer Personas!)as a reminder: don’t build positioning based on assumptions, and don’t make up personas out of thin air. Buyer personas are discovered, not created.

Buyer personas are discovered, not created

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