The Overview #80
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:
Champions are your internal sellers… but don’t forget to appeal to them too
Whether you’re selling via PLG tactics or inside sales, how well you understand your champion defines how effective you’re going to be.
Enabling champions with collateral and the narrative and the right information they can share within their business to gain buy-in is pretty standard – and you can do a lot here to further optimize and improve success.
But you’ve gotta remember, why are champions so engaged to begin with? What is it about your product that they believe in – what are the outcomes and the value they’re expecting to achieve that is motivating them?
Spoiler: it’s probably not the cool features you’ve just built. But it’s probably to do with a future promotion, authority, perception, their career, or their day-to-day life.
Keep that in mind as you develop positioning, messaging, and sales narratives. Can you show proof that champions using your product get promotions?
Shiny object syndrome
I’m not going to bash category creation, it’s a great strategy in the right situation. But it’s definitely become a crutch for CMOs, especially those brand new into a role or new into a company, in their 90 day plan.
Wishful thinking. Defining a category properly can’t be a quick 3-6 month project. It’s going to be defined across 18 months or more, of listening to the market, having passionate and broad discussions that combine market insights, product vision, and the future.
Meanwhile, competitors are out there solving unmet needs in existing categories, broadening the jobs-to-be-done landscape they can serve, becoming stickier and organically find themselves redefining an existing category… An easier path? Probably.
Thinking about bets, success metrics, and roadmaps
Bless John Cutler. His free ‘book’ walks you through pretty much everything you need to know about ‘good’ product management, from thinking about your product initiatives as experiments and bets, to finding the right success metrics, how to build your product roadmap, and his insights on cross-team collaboration.
A must-read.
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