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:
Educate prospects on the landscape
Most inexperienced sales/marketers will have the ‘this is what we have and this is why it’s good’ conversation with prospects.
The more experienced will discuss ‘these are the problems we’re solving and this is how it works’.
The most experienced will also talk through what the market looks like, and why we are uniquely positioned to help.
In competitive discussions, most will outline their competitive value and trash talk others. Smart competitive discussions will acknowledge the competition’s strengths – and adjust the narrative. Here’s an example of how I’ve done that before.
If You MUST Use Buyer Personas, Here’s How, But You Probably Shouldn’t
After sharing my post on how Buyer Personas are Created, Not Discovered, Cody tweeted above, it got me thinking – are the colleagues we build personas for actually useful to begin with? Are they just ‘shelfware’?
They’re common artifacts that we just accept as a standard deliverable. We always advise to go further and make personas come alive through interviews, customer feedback and more, to help build empathy. Can we just skip that step? What would that look like?
Activation depends on product marketing
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. Even if you had a supreme product tour, your product marketing – positioning, messaging, pricing – is going to have the biggest impact on conversion rates.
We saw this at Kayako. Our failed product launch had three issues:
Positioning and messaging was too aspirational, targeted at decision makers – rather than the champions that would find + try us
Pricing was generic, based on our competition – and not adapted to our different customer segments
Onboarding was focused on getting users quickly set up – it didn’t educate them on why Kayako was different and better
As we adapted and iterated on each of these areas, we saw conversions and revenue increase. None of these areas can be considered in a bubble – go-to-market strategy is a tightly interconnected system of. Customer insight and iteration is the only answer.
Enterprise pricing
I’ll leave you with a joke tweet. How do you price your enterprise plan? Obviously, it depends on the signals they display on their website.
Actually, this is a really good way to add extra color to your ideal customer profile segments: something that’s immediately obvious in a quick review that suggests a relationship with a business challenge, opportunity, level of maturity, and ability to pay.
That’s the Overview for this week
Hope you found some interest in this edition.
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Thanks for reading, and happy building.
James