The Overview #49
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.
In this post:
Reduce the gap between you and your users
When I work with businesses on positioning projects, I – unlike many other positioning advisors and agencies – don’t get carry out interviews on their behalf.
You should prioritise building empathy and internal customer assumptions, strengthening your gut feel, and getting closer to what customers are saying.
If you can, prioritise research. Hire user experience researchers. And build your user research skills.
Product marketing conflicts
A large amount of internal stress is caused by the disconnect between what we’re hearing from customers and seeing in the market, and what the rest of the business thinks the world is like.
And depending on the level of influence that product marketing has on the business, you can quickly see the PMM opinion overridden on the whims of a CEO or head of sales that doesn’t have the full context.
How do you combat this, and get ahead of the game?
- Be super transparent: share your learnings regularly, along with the evidence you’ve gathered. Don’t build siloes.
- Collect internal feedback and thoughts before looking externally. Ask them to rate their confidence, ask for evidence, and pose external research as validation rather than discovery.
Price is not something you want to win on
Competing on price is relatively pointless. Volume might help but unless you can upsell to improve margins, build loyalty to prevent churn, and cross-sell to increase share of wallet, you might find it hard to build a business on.
Take a look at the pyramid of B2B value elements. How can you meet and exceed tablestake value, and start adding value that your customer will pay more for?
Swipe File: Early-stage marketing compensation
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Until recently, SaaS was a candidate’s market. With the current economic climate and impending job cuts as businesses put themselves into survive mode, it’ll be interesting to see how salaries are impacted.
Regardless, this guide to early-stage marketing salary benchmarks is one for the bookmarks.
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