Praise for Product Marketing, Simplified
“Srini does a great job demystifying the product marketing function. Product marketing, over the last
few years, has grown to become a pivotal general management function and the book excellently
breaks down all the different areas of product marketing ownership. Whether you’re interested in
starting out in the product marketing function or are a product marketing leader already, this book
will really help you understand all the levers you’ll have at your disposal to make an impact in your
product marketing org."
— Anuneet Kumar
VP of Product Marketing, Salesforce
“A comprehensive guide that shows a structured approach to Product Marketing. A must-read for
anybody that wants to learn about the art and science of this role.”
— Jeevan Patil
Head of Product Marketing, Cisco Meraki
"Srini lays out an excellent primer for product marketing, whether you're looking to enter the
discipline, wondering what your co-workers with that title actually do or want to sharpen your skills.
The concepts are clearly illuminated, the methodology is sound and the examples are spot on. Every
industry needs more skilled product marketers—this will help."
— Jon Rooney
SVP of Product Marketing, New Relic
“Srini has done a great job of capturing the role of a Product Marketer. One part science, one part art,
the PMM job is one of the hardest to do well. Srini exposes a toolkit that has evolved greatly over the
past 20 years. Every early-stage PMM should keep a well-dogeared copy of this book by their desk.”
— Nicolas Jacques
VP of Product Marketing, Barracuda Networks
For my family.
For all those who have gone out
of their way to open doors.
For those who aspire to stay unique,
keep learning, and make smiles.
Product Marketing, Simplified.
Copyright © 2020 Srini Sekaran.
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced
or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of
the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Printed in the United States of America.
First printing, 2020.
Contents
Chapter One
Defining Us: Product Marketing—an Introduction
|
10
|
19
Chapter Two
Being in their Shoes: The Customer Journey
Chapter Three
Putting a Face: Personas
|
28
Chapter Four
Storytime: Messaging and Positioning
|
44
|
72
Chapter Five
Defining the Target: Go-to-Market Strategy
Chapter Six
Capturing Value: Pricing and Packaging
Chapter Seven
Reaching the Target: Launching a Product
|
99
|
111
|
121
Chapter Eight
Spreading the Word: Analyst and Public Relations
Chapter Nine
Arming Troops: Enabling Sales and Driving Demand
|
131
Chapter Ten
Going Full Circle: Influencing the Product Roadmap
Closing Thoughts
Resources
References
|
160
Chapter One
Product Marketing—an
Introduction
On a rather uneventful December evening, I interrupted my usual reading
time, positioned the opened book on the desk, and hastily propped open my
laptop. It was the holiday season and I wrote the following note to a few
colleagues and mentors:
“If you asked me what I wanted to be when I was a kid, I would have said a writer. Or an astronaut.
Thank you for helping me realize the essence of those two dreams and enabling the opportunity to be
at the intersection of creativity and tech.
Continuously grateful for your lessons, mentorship, and most importantly, your sense of humor. After
all, the noblest art is that of making others happy. Wishing you a very happy holiday season with
your family!”
A bit much on the sentimental side? Perhaps. But I truly meant it. I believe
product marketing provides opportunities for—and expects—deep technical
curiosity. Simultaneously, there is a fundamentally creative aspect to the
role. Content creation of marketing assets is the obvious manifestation of
this. But it goes beyond that.
A need for creativity presents itself in virtually every feature of product
marketing, from crafting messaging to influencing the roadmap. According
to the Oxford English Dictionary, art, in the most literal sense, “is an
artifact that [expresses] the author's imaginative or technical skill, intended
to be appreciated [by one that consumes that art] for its beauty or emotional
power.” Therefore, art and creativity revolve around the ability to
effectively connect with others. Product marketing encompasses this
narrative as well. It’s at once many things, demanding many skills, and
sitting firmly at the intersection of several domains. It helps then to put
order to this disarray and see the core aspect that undergirds everything
else: a deep desire to truly understand the audience and connect with them.
This is more than a means to create a lofty comparison. As we’ll see in the
following chapters, a deep understanding of our audience—the customer—
is the foundational step for effectively every stage in taking a product to
market. This is what the book is about: a deeper dive into these different
stages with a strong customer focus serving as our North Star.
A Product Marketer’s Duty
Those outside of marketing and product management often ask: what
exactly do product marketers do? A seemingly straightforward question but
a challenge to answer. Product marketing encompasses several
responsibilities. At times, the role is centered around strategizing a go-tomarket model. At other times, it’s about content creation.
Let’s look at what product marketing is not. We’re not writers; if we wanted
to solely write, we would have been writers. Product marketing is also not a
varnished equivalent of a general marketer.
Product marketing is the process of taking the right product to the right
market, at the right time. The role involves communicating a product to
customers, yes, but that’s not the only job. A key aspect of the role is taking
the time to listen to and understand your customers . This helps not only
drive the product into the hands of customers, but keeps it there, driving
growth, retention, and advocacy.
Product marketing straddles several domains, including product
management, general marketing, sales, and support. The role is responsible
for:
●
Positioning the product in the right market, ensuring the product’s
value solves customer needs.
●
Growing product demand, adoption, and advocacy over time,
even as the market evolves.
●
Enabling sales, marketing, and support with knowledge of the
target customer and their pain points—and how the product helps.
●
Distilling technical details and communicating a value-oriented
and simplified message in a way that captures attention.
●
Representing the voice of the customer throughout a product’s
lifecycle.
The last point is important. Responsibility doesn’t kick in after a product is
developed; product marketing is much more than simply communicating
the product’s value proposition. The role shapes the entire lifecycle of a
product. Let’s look at different stages of a product, as seen from a product
marketer’s lens: before and after a launch.
Before Launch
Before taking a product to market—ideally, before developing a product—
it’s important to know who your ideal customer is, what their unique needs
are, and how to best solve them. This involves:
●
Customer development: Defining your target market and
identifying the potential customer that can most benefit from your
product.
●
Competitive intelligence: Identifying your competitors, their
product, and marketing strategies, and then setting the context for
effectively developing and marketing a product.
●
Positioning and messaging: Turning customer development,
product understanding, and market research information into an
actionable and tangible format. For whom is this product for?
What are the product’s benefits for the target customer? And why
is this product different from its peer group?
●
Defining a go-to-market (GTM) strategy: Specifying the
approach in reaching target customers and achieving competitive
advantage. In what channel and in what form is the product best
suited to reach a particular customer?
After Launch
The post-launch phase is about gauging the market’s reception to your
product, enabling your sales organization, and generating more awareness
and adoption.
This is where much of the writing comes into play. Content for this stage is
used to attract and convert prospects into paying customers. Content is also
used to empower your sales team to more effectively close deals.
Putting it Together
We’ll cover these various stages of launching a product:
●
Understanding how individuals typically purchase a product and
what their macro needs are (Chapter 2)
●
Actively determining your customer’s needs and pain points
(Chapter 3)
●
Positioning your product in the minds of your customer and
conveying its value (Chapter 4)
●
Creating a go-to-market strategy so you can target the right
market, and effectively create—and capture—the most value
(Chapter 5)
●
Determining the right price for your product in a way that
maximizes capturing value (Chapter 6)
●
Launching a product (Chapter 7)
●
Building relationships and working with the press and analysts
●
(Chapter 8)
Enabling your sales organization and increasing demand to grow
revenue (Chapter 9)
●
Influencing the product roadmap and strategy by being the voice
of the customer (Chapter 10)
This book is not meant to be a rigid manual for product marketing. My goal
is to help new product marketing managers or those aspiring to enter the
discipline to more effectively connect the dots between seemingly disparate
tasks within product marketing. I provide a primer into how customers
make purchase decisions and view products and use this as the context in
defining the many aspects of the domain.
Having worked in enterprise-serving companies, many of the examples are
in a business-to-business (B2B) context. However, the material in the book
is foundational and applicable whether you’re an enterprise or consumer
marketer.
Chapter Two
The Customer Journey
Your customer is your business. It’s that simple. Regardless of the company
you’re creating or a part of, you’re in the business of value delivery:
creating value by solving someone’s problems, communicating the value
you provide, and capturing some of it in the form of revenue. And since
individuals and companies are all looking to solve unique challenges, it’s
impossible to create value indiscriminately and effectively.
As a result, it’s important to define the specific type of customers you want
to serve and understand their thought process when they buy a solution for
their needs. Understanding how customers make purchase decisions—the
customer journey—can optimize marketing efforts and drive revenue.
The Journey: In English
Before talking about the marketing funnel, let’s look at the customer
journey in simple terms. There are six steps customers go through:
1. Recognizing a Need. Your trip to Mount Whitney is coming up.
You realize you need warmer equipment at night, so you don’t
suffer at 10℉.
2. Searching for Information. You begin scouring the Internet for
sleeping bags rated from 0 to 15 degrees. You also ask a few
friends.
3. Evaluating Products. You—consciously or subconsciously—
decide the specifications the bag must have, the quality, the price
you’re willing to shell out, and fine tune your search based on
these criteria.
4. Selecting a Product. You find a bag that meets your needs,
determine the right place to buy it, and make the purchase.
5. Using the Product. You go on the trip and evaluate if the sleeping
bag met your criteria and if it kept you warm.
6. Recommending and Reconsidering It. The bag keeps you warm
for many years and you love it. You tell your friends about this
particular bag and you buy another one for your partner. You may
even buy the upgraded version of the sleeping bag from this brand.
The customer journey roughly follows this pattern. A marketing funnel
provides a visual representation of how your business parallels and
influences their journey.
The Marketing Funnel
The marketing funnel is not a recent invention. In 1898, an advertising
agency executive by the name of Elias St. Elmo Lewis developed the
concept of a funnel to map out the customer journey.
Lewis conceptualized the marketing funnel by breaking down the customer
journey into four distinct stages, acronymized by AIDA :
●
●
●
●
Awareness
Interest
Desire
Action
Every successive stage in the funnel is a reflection of the customer’s
mindset as she inches closer to a purchase and is more cognizant of her
problem, and more importantly, your solution.
The funnel is a concept. A framework. To reduce human behavior to a twodimensional graphic and strictly adhering to it is myopic. However, the
funnel is a useful tool for understanding the way in which the majority of
your customers make a purchase. It can help your core marketing efforts by:
● Helping you better understand your customer’s needs and desires
● Accelerating customer purchase cycles
● Identifying conversion rate issues
● Optimizing campaign performance
● Facilitating sales and marketing automation initiatives
Chapter Nine talks about the five stages of the marketing funnel in greater
depth and provides details on influencing prospects to more effectively
navigate their journey in buying your product.
Plato’s Theory
Plato, the Athenian philosopher, made the case that the human psyche is our
true essence and drives our behavior. He argued that the soul is not a single
monolithic unit but rather divided into different components, each
concerned with a distinct aspect of reality. This Platonic soul is composed
of three elements:
1. Logos (the head): Seeking reason and logic.
2. Thymos (the heart): Concerned with emotion.
3. Eros (the gut): Dealing with desire and instinct.
When we buy products and services, we employ these three aspects of our
soul, often leaning towards a particular element for different categorical
purchases. The buyer’s journey is both logically and viscerally varied.
Customer reasoning differs for purchasing a car versus the subsequent
insurance policy enrollment. Experience different feelings when buying a
pack of chewing gum as opposed to buying that trendy fleece vest? That’s
the Platonic soul at work.
How Involved Are You?
Buying decisions vary based on the category of product and for many
categories, the decision is heavily centered around one aspect of the psyche.
For many industrial, enterprise, and commercial markets, where the risks
and costs are high, decisions are based more on technical details and
rational analysis. This is starkly different in the consumer context, in which
emotion and instinct play a larger role.
For low-cost products that are bought more frequently—toothpaste, eggs,
bread—the buying process is quick and virtually on autopilot. The stages of
need recognition, the search for information, and evaluating products are
curtailed and quickly take place on a less conscious level. Such product
purchases are low-involvement decisions: more repetitive and the
economical and psychological risks are minimal.
High-involvement decisions are in the opposite category, posing more risk
financially, socially, or psychologically—a wrong purchase can be
emotionally taxing. Buying a car is the quintessential high-involvement
decision. It’s an expensive decision and takes into account social concerns
heavily. Purchasing the wrong car can lead to post-purchase cognitive
dissonance if there’s a misalignment between lofty expectations and the
post-purchase reality. The customer journey manifests in its full form with
high-involvement decisions. Customers gather a substantial amount of
information from a variety of sources and spend considerable time
weighing between options.
The degree of involvement often is correlated with the price of a product
but that aphorism isn’t set in stone. Involvement, even for the same product
category, ultimately depends on the customer and the level of perceived risk
from the purchase. For instance, the cognitive energy and time spent in
deciding to purchase a windbreaker during a visit to the Golden Gate
Bridge on a chilly day is vastly different from the thought process when
purchasing a down jacket for a three-month mountain expedition
backpacking trip. With the latter purchase, the risks in buying an ineffective
jacket are far higher.
It’s helpful to understand the level of involvement a consumer has in
purchasing your product so your marketing strategy can be more effective
in converting prospects to customers. For a low-involvement customer,
your marketing goals can revolve around simplifying their buying process.
For high-involvement products, you should aim to provide the information
and evaluation methods collateral your customers want.
What Plato Can Teach Us
Plato’s tripartite soul can help us address the needs of both customers who
are buying high-involvement as well as low-involvement products by
appealing to the different decision-making centers of a person: the head, the
heart, and the gut. Plato’s lessons include the need to:
1. Appeal to logic. Provide tangible benefits. In introducing a
product in a market where the incumbents are frustratingly
complex, instead of incessantly touting the word “simplicity” as
the differentiator, go a bit deeper. Simplicity can be tangible;
mention the operational savings or the management time saved as a
result of simplicity. Numbers can fit within a story. If the numbers
are great, they should.
2. Appeal to emotion. As domains become increasingly founded on
data and metrics, it can be easy to dismiss the less concrete
elements. In appealing to logic, don’t disregard the importance of
appealing to emotion.
3. Appeal to instinct. For instinctual purchases, or purchases of the
gut, get out the way. Make it as easy as possible for customers to
play out their instinctual compulsion. You can help them pull their
cognitive trigger by lowering the friction in the purchase process.
Be visible in terms of both availability and boldness, make
payments flexible and simple, and make the ability to learn about
your product effortless.
Chapter Three
Personas
Intimately understanding customers is at the core of product marketing. The
marketing funnel helps track their journey—from being aware of your
product to making a purchase. As a product marketer, driving adoption
includes being able to influence customers at every stage of the funnel.
Influencing someone starts with understanding them.
Personas are detailed descriptions of your target customer; from
demographic information to their pain points, and from details on their role
to the media they consume. They’re composite images that make it simpler
to internalize the needs and nuances of your customers.
Movies and novels often employ a similar tactic. The stories they tell follow
the journey of a single character or family in the context of a broader event
such as the California Gold Rush or a post-apocalyptic event. This family
might share similar characteristics with the general population of the time,
but they most certainly share the same circumstances.
It’s a challenge to understand and empathize with the realities of a
particular situation when trying to digest the lives of many people. The
human details can often get glossed over or even forgotten when
considering “300,000 individuals poured into California in search of gold
but many faced misfortune, loneliness, and diseases such as cholera and
typhoid.” It’s easier to understand the plight of gold miners in the California
of 1850 by focusing on one person, James MacArthur, a (completely
fabricated) individual who left his wife and son behind in New York City to
better his family’s financial situation, longing for the occasional letter from
his wife. This is what personas do. Personas make it possible to internalize
and humanize a collection of individuals with shared characteristics, paving
the way for empathy.
The Importance of Personas
Creating personas helps you effectively articulate and understand the
nuances of your target customer: their needs, pain points, and other
attributes that are important to be aware of as you craft a go-to-market
strategy.
Talk to customers is the mantra in product management and product
marketing, and for good reason. Customer research identifies product gaps,
lays the foundation for crafting a marketing strategy, and ultimately,
increases the chance of product-market fit. It’s helpful for this research to
be digestible. Personas enable this. Personas help you distill and generalize
knowledge about your customers. They create a singular, generalized
snapshot of your ideal customer, personifying disparate feedback into a
human—albeit, concocted—form.
Personas make it simpler to tailor messaging, marketing content, and even
product development to the needs of a specific target buyer.
Doing this helps you gear messaging to different segments of your prospect
and customer base. Customer personas also help in identifying key
stakeholders in every stage of the buyer’s journey; knowledge of which
helps make the entire sales lifecycle more efficient. In this way, personas
help guide a significant portion of your marketing activities from defining
your target customer to identifying the appropriate channels of where to
sell.
A strong understanding of the dynamics of the market segment you’re
going after, the nuances of your prospect, and knowledge of the
stakeholders in the decision-making process boosts key performance
indicators (KPIs) across the board.
Targeted messaging and sales efforts reduce the cost to acquire new
customers, or the customer acquisition cost (CAC; the marginal spending
on marketing and sales per customer acquired). Eliminating indiscriminate
onboarding of customers also increases the likelihood that a customer is
here to stay, reducing churn. These are just two examples. Personas boost
the overall efficacy of your marketing efforts by painting a vivid image of
your target customer.
With personas and in a broader sense, product marketing, the goal is not
necessarily to identify a large range of buyers. It’s about identifying the
ideal customer.
The Roles in the Decision-Making Process
Often, and particularly in the B2B context, the decision-making process
involves multiple stakeholders.
Consider the act of choosing the first car for your newly minted driver. Your
daughter may have started the conversation, prompting you to search for a
car. Your nephew, a car enthusiast, helps point the family in the right
direction, weeding out unadvisable vehicles. Your partner has some clear
requirements: pick a car with safety features. And while you may sign the
check, the one putting miles on that car, the user, is your daughter.
Many buying journeys follow a similar paradigm: different categorical roles
with different needs, each affecting the final decision. These are five
common roles in a buying decision:
1. Initiator: The person who first suggests the idea of buying a
particular product or service.
2. Influencer: The individual whose advice can sway the decision of
other stakeholders.
3. Decision-Maker: The person who decides on pulling the trigger to
buy and the one who chooses the what, how, and where to buy.
4. Buyer: The person who holds the financial keys in the process and
the one who will ultimately write the check.
5. User: The individual who will use the product. They may not
necessarily have much influence on the actual purchase decision.
The buying journey is not monophasic and often taken by more than a
single buyer. It’s helpful to identify these categorical roles played out
empirically so it’s easier to understand the needs of different individuals in
making a purchase, the message that resonates with them, and be aware of
the people that can influence their decision.
Creating a Persona
Strong buyer personas are created through the amalgamation of different
sources, particularly from insights of your target audience.
Creating a persona involves:
●
Collecting preliminary data through market research
●
Interviewing the target audience.
●
Using this preliminary data to form the scaffolding—a hypothesis.
●
Interviewing the target audience (again), expanding the sample set
and validating the hypothesis.
●
Synthesizing research and noticing common patterns, paying
attention to outliers—they could be anomalies or idiosyncrasies of
●
a subset of your audience.
Personifying these data points into a digestible format and sharing
it with the broader team, defining where and how they will be
used.
●
Updating personas with adjustments.
Where to Find Answers
Data can and should come from a variety of sources. When collecting data,
ensure that the sample set is broad and varied. Constructing personas from
skewed data will inevitably create a skewed persona. Garbage in, garbage
out.
Candidates for interviewees can come from the following pools:
1. Existing customers. Your existing customer base—if one exists
already—is a great place to start. There’s bound to be data on
them, there’s less friction to reach out, and they likely will
resemble your ideal persona. After all, they voted for your product
with their money.
2. Prospects. Data, in conjunction with real interviews, can help
indicate what types of individuals are most receptive to your
product. You can also shadow sales calls and understand the
requirements of prospective customers. Great interviewees are
prospects you’ve lost. You can find out what are non-negotiable
requirements and why your product didn’t meet their buying
criteria.
3. Your network. Interviewees are all around you. In a B2C
(business-to-consumer) context, potential interviewees can be
friends, family, and others in your personal network. In a B2B
(business-to-business) context, look through your professional
contacts and around your workplace. If crafting a software
developer persona, for example, start at your company: reach out
to and interview peers in the engineering department at your job.
Collecting this data isn’t limited to solely constructing personas. You can
discover unmet needs in current product lines, new areas for product
expansion, and threats in the competitive landscape. This sets the stage for
product marketing’s true role in a company: incorporating the voice of the
customer in defining a product and going to market. Incorporating their
voices starts with listening.
Questions to Consider
Many of the following questions are intentionally broad. During this step,
the goal is to collect as much unfiltered data as possible. Unfiltered also
means unguarded. Clarify to your interviewee that this isn’t a sales call.
Doing so will encourage a more honest, open, and likely, a less brusque
conversation. The following questions are divided categorically and meant
to guide your conversation:
Role
1. What is your job title? What is your role?
2. How is your job measured?
3. What does a typical day look like?
4. What does a great day look like?
Background
1. Describe your personal demographics.
2. Describe your career path.
Knowledge
1. Where do you learn new skills for your job?
2. What websites or blogs do you read?
3. What associations and social networks are you engaged in?
Challenges
1. How do you know if you're succeeding in your role?
2. How do you prioritize your (typical) day?
3. What are your biggest challenges?
4. What really frustrates you in the process of how you develop/[do
x] now? What would you change about your day?
Desires
1. What's your favorite product [in this domain] and why? (Look for
attributes they appreciate in a peripheral domain.)
2. Describe a recent purchase. What problem were you trying to
solve, what was your purchase evaluation process, and how did
you decide to purchase that product or service?
These questions are starting points. Often, probing deeper into an answer
helps you discover underlying pain points and helps capture unarticulated
needs.
For example, when I interviewed developers, the general answer to “what
does a great day look like” was unhelpful and obvious. “When I can come
to my desk with things planned to do and you execute them all,” was the
response I got from developers. Stopping there would have rendered this
exercise ineffective. The answer is far too generic. By probing deeper and
asking why, I was able to notice tangible and specific pain points, including
the need for clear documentation, consideration for scalable design, and the
need for the availability of infrastructure resources. These guiding questions
help set the guardrails on what. It’s up to you to push for understanding
why.
Syndication and Personification
Once you’ve interviewed and surveyed your customers, prospects, and
churned customers, it’s time to distill the personas into a digestible format.
A slide deck that’s hosted on a central resource works well—the simpler the
tool the better. The focus should be on making it easy for your colleagues to
reference and incorporate your insights into decision making on product
strategy, marketing campaigns, and many other elements in taking a product
to market.
Personas should include:
●
A brief summary of who they are. Sum up their psychographics
and demographics in a few lines. What do they do and what drives
them? Example: Jack leads the DevOps team in an enterprise
business unit. His great days are when things are running
smoothly—no emergencies, no escalations, or one-off requests.
The mantra for Jack is to eliminate toil and automate processes in
a reusable, scalable way.
●
Common job titles. Who specifically are you targeting during
marketing campaigns? Example: DevOps Manager.
●
Demographics. Example: Male, 35-45 years old. Jack has a
technical background and dabbled with Python, PowerShell, and
Linux.
●
Roles and responsibilities. Example: In charge of designing,
building, and optimizing the business’s data infrastructure
operations.
●
How their success is measured. Example: Meeting internal
service level agreements (SLAs) for reliability, availability, and
performance.
●
Their role in the decision-making process. What is their
decision-making clout—how do they influence the purchase
decision? Are they the technical decision maker?
●
Their challenges, frustrations, and pain points. What are they
frustrated about in their situation or with their current solution?
What are their criteria for buying their next solution?
●
What motivates them to buy your product or a product like
yours. What are their purchase triggers?
●
Quotes from actual interviews. A defining quote from one of
your interviews that captures the essence of the persona.
●
What they love—or hate—about your product. If they’re an
existing or a churned customer, how does your product solve (or
fail to solve) their problem?
●
The content they consume and their influencers. What avenues
do they go to for information on solutions to their problems in this
domain? Who are the individuals that typically influence their
decisions? Example: The blogs they read.
●
A memorable name, title, and photo that captures the essence
of the persona. Example: “Jack, the efficiency master.”
Sol: An Example
Here’s a persona at work. To investigate the viability of a new product that
tracks the carbon footprint of everyday purchases, you frame a hypothesis
around the type of individual that may use it and decide to expand and
validate that assumption by interviewing a number of individuals. The
result might look like the following persona: Sol.
Sol Chang
The Green Hero
Sol is a young, passionate individual striving to reduce her
impact on the planet. She is conscious of her carbon
footprint and waste generated. She has a challenge in
tracking her actions and seeing if she needs to change
anything.
Her typical week’s climate-intensive activities typically
include taking a short round-trip flight for work, eating 6x
at a vegan restaurant, and buying a new article of clothing.
Personal Background
●
Field Marketing Manager
●
24 years old
●
An avid user of her smartphone (4+ hours per day)
Goals
●
Reduce her carbon footprint
●
Inspire her family and friends to reduce their
impact
Challenges
●
She travels and consumes quite a bit—there’s no
way to track all the activities in her life
●
There’s no way to connect with others and
benchmark her footprint with that of others
Chapter Four
Messaging and Positioning
Marketing is storytelling. Sure, but before getting there, it’s important to
first define and articulate the truths of your product. Positioning and
messaging are complementary activities that do just that.
Positioning is the act of describing the unique value your product provides
for a specific target persona. Positioning is about defining the category your
product belongs to. It could be a well-worn and known category that you
are aligning with or it could be a brand new category you are creating.
Messaging is predicated on—and a literal manifestation of—positioning.
It’s a set of key points an organization uses to communicate its product’s
unique value to its target audience. It’s statements of value and the
persuasive elements of a story. Both positioning and messaging are the
foundation on which your story stands.
Telling a Story
Telling a story about technology is no different from telling the stories you
already know. As with most compelling stories, your story should have a
plot that contains the subjects at hand—the antagonist and the protagonist—
and a conflict and resolution.
Plots follow a certain pattern: introducing the characters and their world,
describing the main problem in that world and the antagonist who caused it,
how the protagonist overcomes the antagonist and solves the problem, and
then, offering a glimpse of the world free from the problem.
Your product’s narrative should be no different. Your story needs to:
●
Set the stage. Define a specific world and introduce the problem
plaguing it. It helps to paint a vivid image by using metrics. For
example: Data breaches have risen by 54% in the last year and
affected companies are losing their reputation and customers, with
70% of individuals saying they avoid companies known to have
been breached.
●
Introduce the antagonist. Describe the problem(s) and the
underlying issue. For example, if your world is facing challenges
around the inability to meet data compliance laws, security
breaches as a result of a lack of data visibility, and rising data
storage costs, it makes sense to describe the core problem: data
sprawl due to a siloed IT infrastructure.
●
Bring out the protagonist. Introduce your solution in the context
of your problem and your world. How does your product directly
solve the most-pressing pain points? In our example, your
infrastructure solution may make it much simpler, cost-effective,
and faster for IT administrators to search for their data and
identify personally identifiable information.
●
Describe the post-antagonist world. This is where you describe
the broader implication of your product and how it improves your
customer’s life. This is also where the conversation is up-leveled,
from a technical discussion to a value discussion. Closing out our
example, your sensitive information detection software may solve
several specific problems for a healthcare organization that
oversees the data of thirteen hospitals. Your product could
decrease the probability of a data breach happening and its fallout,
reduce operational costs for its IT team, and make it easier to meet
compliance requirements such as HIPAA. Its overarching value
proposition, however, is around reducing risk for this healthcare
organization. Paint this picture. Stir up the vision for this
organization to be able to reduce risk dramatically and reduce the
amount of time and costs spent on meeting compliance. Now, they
can focus on patients and their families.
Positioning versus Messaging
Before contrasting the two, let’s look at how they’re alike. Both positioning
and messaging are about articulating the unique value you offer to your
target customer. However, positioning is an internal, strategic activity.
Popularized in Al Ries and Jack Trout’s book Positioning: The Battle for
Your Mind, positioning is about identifying and setting the context to own a
marketing niche for a product using various strategies including pricing,
promotion, distribution, and packaging.
Positioning is:
●
An indicator on a map of where your product fits in the
marketplace and how you want to be known.
●
A guide on which internal marketing activities, including
messaging, are predicated.
●
A North Star in defining the target customer, key value
propositions, and differentiation from the competition.
Therefore, positioning precedes messaging and serves as an internal
compass in expressing how a given product fulfills a particular customer
need in a way that competitors don’t.
Positioning: The Three-Way Intersection
Taking a product to market involves communicating its benefits and the
category in which it belongs to prospects and the marketplace. Failing to
communicate this is one of the top reasons why startups fail to achieve
product-market fit.
Bridging Connections
People intrinsically want to categorize. Whether explicitly or
unconsciously, we categorize different items into different buckets and rank
their position within those pools. Best, biggest, cheapest, most aesthetic.
Positioning is helping and influencing people in this process. In this vein,
it’s not about creating something new. It’s about influencing the prospect’s
mind by bridging connections that already exist. It shifts the old equation of
tooting one’s own horn or engaging in solely traditional forms of
advertising. Positioning helps communicate your product in a way that’s
outside-in or customer-centric. And it’s targeted. In contrast with
advertising, positioning is focused on a narrow, targeted audience. By not
broadcasting a general message indiscriminately, communicating value has
more influence in the minds of the prospects who are most relevant to you.
It’s hard to change the mind of someone. With human psychology, it’s
easier to go with the grain; that is, it’s much easier to reinforce their existing
worldview. In their book Positioning, Al Ries and Jack Trout illustrate the
best practices to occupy the minds of your prospective customer,
differentiate from others in the marketplace, and ultimately drive more
adoption of your product:
●
Narrow your market. Start by segmenting the market and
focusing on a narrow target market. It’s a tall order to launch a
new, generic product and expect leadership or even enough sales
in the broad category of data security, for example. If your
solution particularly helps data scientists in large enterprises well
with their security needs, then focus on this segment.
●
Focus on perception, not product. Positioning shouldn’t come
from what you think is the essence of your product. Positioning
theory says look outward. If your prospects and customers
perceive your data security product to be the least-complex
product to manage, it’s more conducive to reinforce that
perception than to focus on what you saw the product as.
●
Simplify messaging, then simplify it some more. It’s a noisy
world. According to Jay Walker-Smith, president of the marketing
firm Yankelovich, Americans are exposed to more than 5,000
advertisements a day. With hundreds of competing messages
vying attention from your prospects, it’s more important than ever
to have an unambiguous and simple message. To accomplish this,
start with a consistent message, remove ambiguities, and
extraneous words that don't contribute to your positioning
strategy. What you're left with is the essence.
●
Be first, even if it means creating your own race. Ries and
Trout emphasize the importance of being first in a given category.
Being first in the mind of a prospect is powerful, reinforcing an
image of your product in the minds of people. That said, if you’re
late to the game, it doesn't necessarily mean you've lost. You can
be first by creating a new category, one in which you can be
number one. This can involve finding a niche and dominating it. If
it’s untenable to achieve dominance in the anti-ransomware
product category, then be the number one product in a category
you created—the simplest ransomware defense solution for data
scientists.
The common thread between these lessons revolves around understanding
perceptions of your product and finding the right position in the minds of
your prospects. As a result, how your product is perceived happens in the
context of other elements in their worldview—including the products of
your competitors.
Competitive context is a key part of positioning and can help quickly
cement a position in the minds of prospects. Consider the human mind as a
hierarchical three-drawer chest or cabinet. It’s difficult for an individual to
determine which drawer to place your product if the products in other
drawers are not even referenced. By talking about your product relative to
alternatives and the competition, it becomes easier to position yourself in
the mind of the prospect and you can reap broader appeal from current users
of the alternatives. Positioning a new sugar-free energy drink as coffee
without the downsides establishes the drink as a coffee alternative to a broad
audience: anyone that currently drinks coffee.
Creating a Positioning Statement
Top-line positioning is at the intersection of three areas: your customer
needs, your product’s unique capabilities, and an unfilled gap in the market.
By taking this perspective in creating positioning, you simplify the process
of drilling deeper into the true value you provide.
A positioning statement is simple. It talks about who the product is for,
what it does and why that’s valuable for the customer, and why it’s different
from other products in the market.
In his book Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore offers the following
template for a positioning statement:
For (target customer) who (statement of the need or opportunity),
(product name) is a (product category) that (statement of key benefit—
that is, the compelling reason to buy). Unlike (primary competitive
alternative), our product (statement of primary differentiation).
Moore calls for the need to position within context, not in a vacuum.
Defining your position in the market is a key factor in ensuring greater
product-market fit. The goal: cementing the idea that your product is the
superior choice in your category. Rather than let your prospective customer
start from scratch in making that evaluation, Moore suggests giving your
prospect two reference points—the competition and the alternative. He calls
for defining the market alternative, the solution your customers have been
using for years, and the product alternative, a new solution that has
disrupted a niche similar to yours but not quite the best solution for the
specific problem you’re solving. With the market and product alternative
defined, you can make a claim that you’re the optimal choice by showing
that you are the most suited for solving the specific problem of this niche.
Here’s a simple framework for creating effective positioning statements:
Description Example
For
Who
Your target
For business analysts at
customer
enterprises
Your
Who must provide reports
customer’s
frequently to executives, but
problem
forced to wait long times to be
provisioned an organization’s
data
Provides The
[Our product] provides a self-
solution
service option for analysts to
your
search for and retrieve data
product
provides
Unlike
Only
Alternative
Unlike legacy business
or existing
intelligence tools that take XX%
solutions
longer to obtain data
Elements
[Our product is] the only solution
that make
that indexes metadata and can
your
provide data in real-time
product
unique
A large part of this exercise revolves around the notion of uniqueness. Once
a target customer has been identified, an important next step is positioning
the product in their mind that this product solves their needs in a more
compelling way compared to competitive offerings.
Positioning is especially critical when it comes to both your short-term and
long-term ability to sell. Consider the prototypical product launch today: the
smartphone. In the highly competitive smartphone market, manufacturers
often tier their offerings to address the desires of different consumer
segments. Not everyone thinks a $1000 phone is necessary. At the same
time, not everyone is willing to forgo the chance to have the latest
technology—or the most envy-inducing product—at their fingertips.
With this in mind, smartphone companies make sure to position their
offerings appropriately and categorize them in a particular area of a
consumer’s mindshare. Pricing and messaging are then derived from the
positioning statement or the statement of how a company wants to be
known for that offering.
Keep in mind, however, that the ability to position a product is not just a
simple decision around a choice of words. If a maker of a particular
smartphone wants their product to be known as the top smartphone for
listening to music but customers find the camera functionality to be the real
highlight of the device, the market will likely perceive the smartphone’s
position to be in the category of phenomenal smartphones for photography
—not music.
Messaging: Positioning Delivered
If positioning is the internal North Star in defining the target customer and
the unique value your product provides, messaging is how positioning
statements are manifested in the world. It’s the foundation for how you
communicate your product and positioning to the marketplace. Expressed
consistently to your target audience, it’s the actual content delivered to the
customer.
Messaging is about communicating the value of your company and product
to the customer. If done well, messaging can reduce the duration of sales
cycles, lead to higher prospect-to-customer conversions, and improve a
number of lagging indicators of success, including revenue.
Creating Messaging
In communicating value, start by getting clarity on the exact target customer
profile and the value they expect from your product. Creating messaging is
really about creating a value communication framework. Start by
understanding your customers and their needs, mapping value to the right
persona, and creating statements of value.
Understanding Customer Needs
Leverage the personas you’ve created. When looking for interviewees, nontraditional routes can reveal more about whether value expectations are
being met. Speak with sales representatives and shadow prospect calls,
absolutely, but also interview prospects who you lost in the sales cycle. Try
to identify the profile of the prospect, what problems they were looking to
solve, other stakeholders involved in their buying process, and their main
dealbreaker. What were they looking for in a solution and why didn’t they
choose you?
In addition to understanding scenarios where there were gaps between
expectation and product, identify and interview customers who are happy
with your product. Find 7-10 current customers. This includes those who
recently onboarded as well as those who have been fans for more than a
year (or a relatively long time). Try to discover why they chose you, how
they use the product, and what aspects of the product give them significant
value.
Mapping Value
In the process of defining value for your core target audience, don’t forget
about other stakeholders in the buying process and the value they expect.
Consider a feature flagging software product that allows companies to A/B
test individual features with their users. Though the economic buyer or
decision-maker in this example is the VP of Engineering, the influencer is
the VP of Product Management, and the users are software engineers.
While the VP of Engineering may see the principal value from the product
as the ability to reduce bug fixes and engineering costs, the VP of Product
Management may see the key value as the ability to get real-time metrics
when releasing individual features to unique customer segments. Since each
person evaluates the buying decision differently, the value must be clearly
communicated by taking into consideration every persona the product
affects.
This company has three buying personas:
1. VP of Engineering (The Economic Buyer)
2. VP of Product Management (The Influencer)
3. Software Engineer (The User)
Now that you’ve identified the buying personas or the key individuals who
influence or make the purchase decision, we need to map value elements to
each persona. From the feedback you collected from existing customers,
prospects, and your sales organization, assign 2-3 value elements to each
persona.
The VP of Engineering cares about software quality and wants a faster
software development cycle. Meanwhile, the VP of Product Management is
looking for the product to understand app usage better so they can retain
more users. She’s also looking to make product roadmap decisions and
increase customer satisfaction. The software engineer wants to be able to
release software quicker and more easily.
Creating Value Statements
For the economic buyer, the VP of Engineering, a rough outline of a
message map becomes clear:
Title: VP of Engineering
Role in the Decision: Economic Buyer
Value Elements: (1) Increase software quality (2) Speed up the
development cycle
Now that you’ve identified the persona and the value element that
corresponds to them, we need to expand on it. Create a value statement for
each element. In order to do that, make a claim and support it with product
information but don’t lose focus on the value element itself. A simple
question to ask yourself as you expand value elements and create
messaging: What is this individual’s desired outcome when using my
product?
Value Element: Increase software quality
Message: Get visibility into problematic features through real-time alerts
when user application sessions stall.
A Messaging Map
A messaging map serves as a framework to articulate and support the
overall positioning statement. Let’s look at a building access control
product that allows employees to enter their workplace without the need for
a physical badge. The following message map provides three statements of
values, or pillars, that support the overarching value proposition. Pillar 1—
Simple: Smile to Unlock—is about the idea that our product, FaceMap, is
simple to use and improves productivity. Pillar 3 describes how FaceMap
protects an entire workflow from end to end, reducing the chance of
unauthorized access and risk to the organization. The purpose of each pillar
is to support an attribute of the value proposition in an organized way.
Product Name
FaceMap
Category
Building Access Control
Value Proposition
Reduce breaches and improve
productivity by allowing employees
to badge in using just their smiles.
Target Audience
Facility teams in enterprises with
>1000 employees with multiple
physical offices.
Audience Pain
Points
1.
Large enterprises’ facility teams
struggle with physical security
breaches due to weak access
control (traditional RFID
badges).
2. Facility teams spend 10+ hours
a week to provision forgotten or
lost badges.
3. Traditional security solutions
are not capable of provisioning
access to remote and multiple
offices.
Positioning
For facility teams in large, distributed
Statement
enterprises who struggle with
frequent breaches and lost
productivity, FaceMap is the fastest
and most secure facial recognition
software that replaces traditional
RFID badges, reducing breaches by
>50% as the only facial recognition
access method on the market.
Pillars
Pillar #1
Pillar #2
Pillar #3
Simple:
Manage
Protect—
Smile to
Globally.
end-to-
Unlock.
Supporting
Messages
1. A
2. B
3. C
end.
1. D
2. E
3. F
1. G
2. H
3. I
Similar to how each pillar explores and supports a concept of the
overarching value proposition, each pillar is founded on three supporting
messages. For example, for Pillar 1, I might support the claim of
operational simplicity by stating that “FaceMap badges in employees in 0.6
seconds—faster than any other building access control method.” I’ll
provide eight additional supporting points, three for every pillar. The result:
a succinct and persuasive foundation for your product’s story.
A message map is a framework for articulating your core value proposition
and supporting your statements in an organized way. As a result, your
messages are in the context of conveying a larger story and are backed by
tangible claims. Saying your product here is simple is not unfounded.
You’re able to back that claim with differentiated product details that allow
you to be persuasive.
Attributes of Effective Messaging
Effective messaging is simple, crisp, and differentiated. When evaluating
your messages, see if they are:
●
Memorable. Not banal as to be forgotten soon after.
●
Attractive. Just as the message shouldn’t slip away, effective
messaging should pull in people and grab attention.
●
Differentiated. Say something that others aren’t. Be unique.
●
Tangible. There’s more noise than ever fighting for a finite
amount of attention. Convey a tangible and useful message.
●
Consistent. Align with the overall message and your brand
identity.
●
Actionable. Invoke a sense of urgency and have a specific goal in
mind.
●
Targeted. Reaffirming the notion that marketing does not equal
indiscriminate broadcasting, create messaging that is targeted to
the right audience: a specific persona, geography, and domain.
Validating a Message
Messaging plays a part in product-market fit. You can determine the
effectiveness of your messaging by comparing how value is perceived and
communicated.
Externally: Value Perception
Let’s look at how the market perceives your messaging. Data can definitely
be useful in understanding how messaging fares in reality. For example,
A/B testing a product webpage with two different sets of messaging can
provide a large sample set of data points. With that, you can quickly gauge
that Message B fared better in the marketplace. Data may show that
prospects who were exposed to Message B were 46% more likely to move
along the buyer’s journey compared to when exposed to Message A.
More data points can paint a vivid picture but that picture may sometimes
be misleading. As you uplevel information about customers and see data at
a glance, it’s important to remember that it's meant to be a gauge—not a
substitute for speaking with customers.
In its September 2016 issue, Harvard Business Review included the article
“Know Your Customers’ Jobs to Be Done”. The authors make the case that
today’s business decisions are made on metrics that are more based on
correlation, not causation. The article calls for understanding a customer’s
jobs-to-be-done motivation.
We all buy or subscribe to products to get a job done. We subscribe to
media streaming services to entertain us in our downtime. We buy an online
course on product management to advance our skills. We hire products to
get things done for us. By understanding the causal driver behind a
customer’s decision to buy your product, you can identify the real value of
your product—rather than just the elements at the edge.
To validate the core value you provide, identify customers to interview and
survey. Ask them to describe how they use your product:
●
Why did you buy this product? What problem(s) were you
looking to solve?
●
What old way of working has this product replaced?
●
What value do you receive from the product?
●
How do you use our product?
●
What gets impacted if we were to shut down the product?
These questions probe into the value they receive and how they perceive it.
The intention here is to understand the real job your product gets done for
your customer. You’re trying to understand the job description and the
specific terms they’re consistently using in describing what they want to get
done.
Internally: Value Communication
Now, let’s look at how your sales team understands and communicates the
value proposition of your company and product.
Similar to the survey exercise above, bring a number of individuals from
your sales organization together and ask them to quickly—without
consulting marketing content or a sales deck—write down:
●
The company pitch
●
The problem we’re solving
●
The competitive pitch—how we’re different
●
2-3 value propositions—the value we provide for our customers
Validating both externally and internally can help you track the efficacy of
your messaging. Stronger messaging has a compound effect across all your
activities. Not only are prospective customers more influenced by external
content, but the effectiveness of marketing activities such as generating
press and enabling the sales organization can be amplified.
Storytelling: Communicating Value
It’s a noisy world. Telling a story helps the market remember which
category we’re a part of, our positioning, our values, and our messaging.
Putting your product in the context of a narrative makes the communication
of your product more memorable and impactful. One approach is aligning a
product with values.
Think Different: What Apple Teaches Us
Prior to unveiling the legendary “Think Different” campaign, Steve Jobs
rationalized the initiative to a room of Apple employees. He stated that
marketing is about values and that in a noisy world, the goal is not to talk
about speeds and feeds, or bits and megahertz, but rather to help the market
understand who is Apple and what it stands for. Jobs, in front of the
audience, calls out the underlying question behind this branding exercise:
“Where do we fit in this world?” Keep in mind, they didn’t invent the idea
of being a contrarian or unabashedly passionate. Rather, through the
campaign, Apple helped associate their products and their brand with these
ideas.
Telling a story to the market is more than about creating awareness. One of
the key goals of positioning and messaging is to help people understand
who you are as a company and what your values are. This top-level theme
manifests itself in the stories of individual products. The question to ask
when communicating a product to the market is: Where do we fit in this
world—or less vaguely, this market—and how can we associate ourselves
with the values, categories, and emotions our target audience cares about?
A Worthy Mission: What NASA Teaches Us
Shortly after graduating from university, I had the opportunity to work for
NASA Ames at the Moffett Federal Airfield, a stone’s throw from Google’s
headquarters, or a short ride from the home I grew up in. The project I was
assigned was to help accelerate the process of understanding the
pathogenesis of diabetic retinopathy. It was a phenomenal opportunity—at
the time, and in hindsight.
Beyond the professional and personal highlights from Ames, I keenly
remember the typical reaction doled out by an acquaintance, a future
interviewer, or a distant relative in response to the revelation of where I
worked.
NASA is a phenomenal organization. What quickly became apparent is that
NASA is also a phenomenal brand—perhaps the foremost. From the
outskirts of Hakone, Japan to Bellevue, Washington, talking about NASA
was met universally with the same congratulatory grin. As of this writing,
NASA has over 54 million followers on Instagram, 35.5 million Twitter
followers, and clothes emblazoned with its logo are a stable part of youth
fashion.
The explanation for this level of following—and its resurgence—could
offer lessons in marketing. Is it because the agency unambiguously does
good for society? Perhaps, but many federal agencies do that as well. We
don’t see those t-shirts anywhere.
The answer likely lies within two components of NASA: emotion and
alignment.
NASA is an aspirational brand. Their mission is “[reaching] for new heights
and reveal[ing] the unknown for the benefit of humankind.” This message
is clear—both in the mission statement and in all its past and future celestial
missions. A young woman in Japan’s countryside need not have read the
mission statement or even stepped foot in a NASA-operated facility to
understand what NASA stands for.
Moreover, the agency’s message manifests itself as a decades-long story of
aspiration, adventure, and curiosity. This consistent and clear alignment
between all projects and an underlying story helps create a powerful brand.
Storytelling often can and does manifest itself as a series of missions, or
products, that are all aligned with a firm goal on which everything is
predicated on. Understanding the pathogenesis of diabetic retinopathy may
not, at first glance, seem aligned to the organization’s mission, but even this
project is deeply in alignment with NASA’s mission statement.
This is what NASA can teach us. Aligning all initiatives and their
messaging with core organizational and marketing strategies and having a
brand that engenders aspiration and emotion can help create broad appeal
that stands the test of time.
Chapter Five
Go-to-Market Strategy
A go-to-market (GTM) strategy answers a number of questions around how
you propose to deliver unique value to your target customer and how you
go from initial contact with a prospect to fulfilling their needs. GTM
strategies are just that: strategies. They can be applied to new products as
well as existing products and services.
An effective GTM strategy encompasses:
1. Defining a product’s target market and customer.
2. A marketing mix that defines the value of the product to that
customer and how to communicate, deliver, and capture some of it.
3. The methods in which the product will gain competitive advantage
in the market and build a moat around its position in the market.
A GTM strategy has definitive answers to the following questions:
1. What markets are we pursuing?
2. Who are we selling to? Who should we sell to—what is the ideal
customer profile?
3. Based on where our customers buy, where can we effectively
promote and sell?
4. Does our product uniquely solve our target customer’s needs?
5. How much will we charge for our products and how do we
determine that—is it by the value we provide or by some other
measure?
6. What differentiates us in the eyes of our target customer and the
market as a whole?
More succinctly, a go-to-market strategy is about delivery. It’s about
articulating how you plan to deliver unique value for your customers.
Diffusion of Innovation Theory
Products and technology don’t disseminate as a blanket phenomenon. They
happen in stages. Everett Rogers, a communications professor, explains this
theory in his book Diffusion of Innovations, stating that innovation is
adopted at a different rate by different groups of individuals who are more
or less inclined to innovativeness and novelty. What Rogers proposes is a
generalized framework for segmentation based on how individual groups
within a market approach risk.
Rogers goes further, providing a moniker for each of these groups, based on
their inclination to be receptive to a new innovation: innovators, early
adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards.
The Categories
The Early Market
●
Innovators (The Embracers of New): Those that are the
quickest to adopt new technology. They desire the newest
technology and are willing to live with the risks that come with it.
●
Early Adopters (Visionaries): This group is interested in new
technology but is keener on what the technology can accomplish
for them. Once benefits—benefits that can give them an edge over
their peers—are apparent, early adopters will jump in.
The Majority Market
●
Early Majority (Pragmatists): This group is guided more by
practical considerations than by ideals. They value market leaders
and want standardized, well-supported products.
●
Late Majority (Conservatives): The late majority shares some
common traits with the early majority but are more risk-averse
and cautious. They need more persuasion and hand-holding in
adopting new products.
●
Laggards (Skeptics): This group is the most conservative and the
slowest of all groups when it comes to technology adoption. They
may adopt technology only when they are forced to or because
everyone else has already.
Mind the Gap
According to Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm: Marketing
and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers, there’s a large
gap in the spectrum of adoption when transitioning from selling to the early
market to selling to the majority market. The simple reason: these two
overarching groups value different things.
Early Adopters are looking for a change agent. By adopting new technology
faster than their competitors, they’re hoping for a competitive edge. And
they’re comfortable if that agent isn’t perfect. Minor issues with technology
are permissible in that pursuit.
The Early Majority, on the other hand, is looking for a solution that can lead
to an improvement in productivity. They’re not looking to shake up
everything or have the need for a technological leap. The ideal product for
them should work smoothly and deliver enhanced results in an incremental
way.
This is the chasm. When transitioning from selling to the early market to
the majority, there’s a discrepancy between the expectations of particular
groups. To effectively make the transition of selling to a very different
audience, the marketing strategy needs to change accordingly.
Bridging the Gap
Moore offers a set of lessons on how to effectively cross this chasm and
allow your product to be more receptive to the majority market. Moore
suggests:
●
Creating a whole product experience and satisfying all the
buying needs and pain points of a particular problem. This
includes the ability to go beyond the guardrails of your core
competency and frame your duty as helping customers find a
solution—even if the solution is not directly from you.
Partnerships help bridge this gap.
●
Dominating a niche that suffers from pain. Moore suggests
winning a niche with the early majority and expanding to other
use cases once you establish your leadership. Finding a
worthwhile niche involves understanding where your target
customer faces the most pain. Without your product, does your
customer struggle for that particular use case?
Market Segmentation
Marketing involves understanding and meeting the desires and needs of
target customers. An important first step revolves around determining who
a target customer is in order to align with the broader company strategy,
maximize marketing efficacy, and increase revenue.
By separating the broader market into segments and evaluating them, it’s
easier to identify the right segment to target. Segmentation also helps you
design the right marketing mix for your target market so you can add more
value for your customers and gain the benefits that follow.
Types of Segmentation
The four overarching types of market segmentation are:
1. Demographic: Using characteristics such as age, education level,
gender, income, and household size to differentiate within the
broader market. To obtain this type of data, the United States
Census Bureau is a great resource.
Income level is a powerful influencer on customer wants and
purchasing capacity. Targeting a high-earning segment directly
influences your pricing, product, distribution, and promotion
strategies.
In a B2B context, demographic segmentation includes
segmentation by company size and the number of employees in a
firm. This categorization scenario is called firmographic
segmentation.
2. Geographic: Classifying customers based on their geographic
context—their physical location, the climate at that location, and
the urbanization level. Consider a manufacturer of state-of-the-art
tires with patents for optimal road grip in any condition. It makes
sense for this company to target customers in rainy or snowy areas.
3. Psychographic: Categorizing the market based on the
personalities, characteristics, and values of customers. For a
fledgling company that creates biodegradable soap with a process
that has minimal carbon impact, it’s clear they should target ecoconscious consumers.
4. Behavioral: Using information about how consumers act such as
what they purchase, how they spend their money, and how they
interact with your brand and that of others. In contrast with the
preceding three types of segmentation, behavioral segmentation
focuses less on who the customer is or where they are, and more
on how they act. A premium car dealership may target customers
who have previously purchased a luxury vehicle in the last five
years.
Market segmentation refines understanding of the target customer, their
needs, and how you can effectively meet those needs. Segmentation is a
foundational step before creating marketing strategies, informing you of the
most effective group to target.
As a result, you’re able to create more resonant messaging, promote more
effectively, attract quality prospects who are more likely to become
customers, and ultimately, build a differentiated brand.
Creating a Segmentation Strategy
Market segmentation involves defining a particular sub-market within a
broader market, determining segments and their profiles, and evaluating
their attractiveness. Market segmentation involves:
1. Defining the specific market of interest. If you are looking to
segment a market for a firm that owns a chain of ice cream shops
globally, the market shouldn’t be too broad—the entire foodservice
industry, for example. The appropriate market of interest could be
dine-in ice cream parlors in the APAC region.
2. Determine the segments of this market. To determine the
different types of customers in this market, recall 2-4 variables of
segmentation. For demographic segmentation, age group is a
segmentation variable. With regard to the ice cream parlor
scenario, we can employ two variables: family size (demographic)
and frequency of ice cream consumption (behavioral). As a result,
you’re able to divide the APAC dine-in ice cream parlor market
into the following segments:
●
Frequent (3+ ice cream parlor visits/week) consumers
who are single
●
Infrequent consumers who are single
●
Frequent consumers who are married
●
Infrequent consumers who are married
●
Frequent consumers who have children
●
Infrequent consumers who have children
With this example, it’s evident that there are numerous ways to
segment the same market. Segmentation is an exercise to enable a
greater understanding of the market, the needs of different
consumer groups, and this, in turn, can inform marketing strategy.
It’s not a one-size-fits-all analysis.
3. Evaluate the viability of these segments. To ensure the segments
you determined are useful and logical, it’s important to assess the
viability of these segments against a set of criteria. An ideal
market segment is measurable, substantial enough to be profitable,
stable, reachable, internally homogeneous (the same segment has
similar needs), externally heterogeneous (different segments have
different preferences), accessible, and responsive (more receptive
to a distinct and targeted marketing strategy).
If they fail to meet these requirements, you can reiterate the
process with different segmentation variables.
After determining segments and their viability, it’s valuable to assess a
segment’s attractiveness or potential in the context of your business.
Assessing a Segment’s Potential
There are numerous ways to determine a segment’s attractiveness. The
specific questions to ask are nuanced and unique to your business. The
following are factors to consider:
Cost of Customer Acquisition
●
How much does it cost to acquire a typical customer from this
segment?
●
Is customer acquisition for this segment scalable?
The Size of the Market
●
How large is the revenue potential from this segment?
●
What is the growth rate of this segment?
Competitive Forces
●
Is the competition embracing and prioritizing the targeting of
these segments?
●
Do competitors differ for each segment?
Product Strategy
●
Does your product strategy and vision support these segments?
One of the core goals of market segmentation is to determine the right
marketing mix, or set of actions to provide value to customers—and
capturing some of it.
The Marketing Mix: The Four Ps
At the heart of any marketing strategy is a set of decisions that revolve
around the marketing mix, or the four Ps: product, price, place, and
promotion. Each of these elements is about value—creating, capturing,
delivering, and communicating it. Marketing revolves around this notion of
value. And it makes sense. Customers purchase products or services based
on how much they gain compared to how much they give up.
Product: Creating Value
The marketing mix starts with the product or service for the target customer.
This seems obvious: deliver the right product to the right customer. But in
doing so, there are multiple factors to consider, and the context should be
broader. The product or service at hand should solve the customer’s needs
—all of it. Whole product strategy is one school of thought to address this.
According to Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm, the whole product is
“everything required to assure that the target customers can fulfill their
compelling reason to buy.”
The primary reason to buy a music player, as obvious as it sounds, is to be
able to listen to the songs a customer enjoys or may enjoy. With a cheap,
generic music player that doesn’t sell a whole product, the customer would
have to go to a third-party website, purchase music, double-check the
format, and sync their songs to the device. If the vendor surprises the buyer
by electing to not provide headphones, the customer would have to make
another visit to the store.
With a whole product, the company provides everything to fulfill customer
needs. A music player embodying a whole product strategy provides
everything—packaging, peripherals, services, integrations—to minimize
friction and to optimally address the user’s need: the ability to listen to their
favorite music.
Pricing: Capturing Value
Charging the right price for a product or service is a balancing act. Pricing
is predicated on a number of factors, including the competition landscape,
your brand, as well as your long-term vision and short-term goals. If pricing
is about capturing value, then the strategy should be heavily influenced by
the value your product or service provides for customers. Chapter Six
provides more information about some of the most common pricing
strategies.
Place: Delivering Value
Delivering value is concerned with how your product will be distributed.
How will customers find your product? Will it be sold exclusively in brickand-mortar stores or sold online as well? The goal of distribution strategy is
to make products available in the right place at the right time in the right
quantities. Distribution happens through different channels:
●
Retailers
●
Distributors or sales agents
●
Direct (online, as an example)
●
Wholesalers
Distribution is influenced heavily by where target customer segments are as
well as the needs of the business such as reducing CAC.
Promotion: Communicating Value
In order to convince prospective customers to buy your product, you need
to explain what the product is, what problems it solves, and why they
should buy your solution. Advertising, press coverage, social media
marketing, and email marketing are all manifestations of promotion.
Communicating value should happen with a message that is clear, targeted
to the right audience, informative, and differentiated.
In his book Purple Cow, Seth Godin uses the metaphor of a purple cow to
describe the power of being remarkable to attract attention. Juxtaposed with
an entire field of brown cows, a purple cow stands out and is memorable.
Being remarkable and conveying that to the market is an impactful way to
communicate value and attract the mindshare of your target audience. Being
remarkable requires being unique, offering something other competitors
cannot, or being dramatically better than everyone else. Incrementalism
won’t cut it.
Going to Market: Putting it Together
Taking your product to market involves the 4Ps and being aware of who the
customer is. To take your product to market, start with defining the markets
you’re going after and the target customer. Then understand where they are
and how you plan to reach them. Where do these target customers typically
buy a similar product or service and which channels do we promote in?
Next, it’s important to both create a product that uniquely solves a set of
pain points and position this idea in the minds of prospective customers.
And finally, a go-to-market strategy involves capturing the value you create
and deliver through a pricing strategy. Going to market is about delivering
value to the right customer—and then capturing some of it.
Define the Market
Start by defining the ideal market. This definition will guide everything
else. Where can your product most effectively solve the needs of
customers? Large businesses or enterprises? Small to mid-sized businesses?
Or consumers?
Identify the Buyer’s Center and Journey
As we saw in Chapter 3, purchase decisions are often undertaken as a
group, particularly in a B2B context. This group, the buying center, is a
collection of different individuals who influence the process of buying
something. There’s the initiator, the person that starts the buying process
and shows initial interest, the user, the influencer, the decision-maker, the
buyer, and the approver.
After determining the roles of the buying center for your product and their
needs, map value requirements to each persona as you did in Chapter 4:
Messaging and Positioning. Document each persona, their pain points, the
value they expect, and the right channel to reach them. If you’re trying to
influence Chief Information Officers with a value proposition of being able
to reduce risk, you need to reach them through the channels they participate
in: top IT publications, their favorite forums, and the analysts they consult.
With a clear understanding of the buying center’s personas and their
individual needs, understand the unique buyer’s journey for your product.
What are the stages from how your customer goes from hearing about you
for the first time to deciding to buy your solution? Mapping out this process
helps you understand what it takes to communicate value and influence
prospective customers.
Define the Distribution Strategy
A large part of defining a GTM strategy is determining the right
distribution. Distribution is the way you get your product to customers.
The appropriate distribution and sales strategy depends on, once again, the
customer. If you have a new polyester shirt you believe has potential, you
would reach more of your target customers by selling through popular
retailers. Here, retailers are the intermediary—allowing you to reach many
end customers in a more cost-effective manner than selling to each
individual customer directly. For this shirt, selling through this channel was
most effective, but the right one depends on your target customer. Some of
the most common distribution models include self-service, inside sales,
field sales, and channel.
Self-Service
The self-service model is when a customer makes a purchase on their own.
Its popularity among SaaS companies is indicative of the model’s
effectiveness. It’s profitable and allows the ability to scale. We interact with
self-service models when subscribing to Netflix or buying a product on
Amazon.
Self-service works well for low-complexity products that see a high volume
of sales. Depending on a web of factors, distribution is based on pricing,
cost of customer acquisition, the product, and target customer. If the
average selling price (ASP) for an entertainment streaming service is $5,
the cost of customer acquisition must mirror that, at $5 or less. It’s
impossible for a sales representative to directly sell the service to 18,000
users to cover the cost of acquisition. It would be impossible to just break
even.
While self-service means forgoing a traditional direct sales approach, the
laws of selling still apply. You will need to rely on marketing efforts to
drive revenue by creating awareness, educational content, and conversion
elements that shepherd the entire purchase process from awareness to close.
Inside Sales
For a product with a low amount of complexity and a mid-tier price point,
an inside sales model allows you to proactively guide customers in their
buying process. A higher ASP brings higher expectations for the customer,
such as signed contracts, premium SLAs, and the ability to get human
support when problems arise. This risk-driven need for more human
relationships in the purchase decision loop leverages many of the elements
of a self-service model: more content to allow customers to self-educate and
more automated mechanisms for easier onboarding and support.
Field Sales
The field sales model is a complete sales organization. A team of sales
managers, field reps, sales engineers, a sales development representative
(SDR) team, and sales operations. It involves significant investment since
you’re not only creating a comprehensive organization, but field reps are
also experienced, highly-compensated individuals. This model is suited for
selling complex products to large enterprise customers that need significant
hand-holding. Since significant value is being transacted between the
average customer and the company, there’s more emphasis on relationships.
A field sales model is simple to start with but is a challenge to scale. It’s
expensive and equipping a large, distributed organization to sell requires
you to train them so they can be productive.
Channel
In the channel model, a third-party—an outside agency or partner—sells
your product for you. The drawback of selling through a channel partner is
less control over the customer experience and sales process, as well as less
access to customer feedback. For example, selling a new smartphone to
users directly, rather than through a channel, gives you control over
providing a consistent experience for your customers. And with this level of
proximity, gaining feedback from customers can help improve your
product, especially if it’s at an earlier stage in its lifecycle.
The benefits of a channel approach include lower sales and marketing costs
and the ability to scale efficiently. In contrast to building and growing an inhouse sales team, the cost of overhead and training is lower with channel
partners. For a mature product (proven to solve a problem and has seen
product-market fit), using channel partners is a compelling long-term
distribution strategy.
The nuances depend on the nature of your product as well. Ben Horowitz,
co-founder and general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen
Horowitz, describes distribution as a function of the target customer and the
nature of your product. That is: channel = f(product, target customer). With
regard to the customer variable, is the buying decision a group or individual
decision? On the product side, does it have complexities? Do you need to
invest much in personalized customer education or implementation in their
environment? The nature of the product and the customer informs the
expected acquisition costs versus the expected revenue, given the context.
Knowing these two variables helps you meet your goals by choosing the
right distribution channel.
For example, if we’re selling a data security software product to a very
small business (VSB), direct sales would be an ineffective sales strategy.
Sales expenditure to acquire the customer would far exceed the revenue
generated per account.
Generate Interest: Content Strategy
With a deep understanding of your target prospective customer, their needs,
where they are, and their buying journey, you can now create a demand
funnel that sets a framework for how you plan to capture the attention of
prospects, hone their attention into convincing them to consider buying
your product and winning their business.
Outbound and inbound marketing are two strategies that can give your
funnel a gravitational pull and generate interest among your prospects.
An outbound strategy is a well-worn and well-known approach. It’s the
approach in which you send emails, call, or proactively get leads at a
conference. Getting leads through this strategy is expensive and has a low
conversion rate. It’s not easy to push prospects down a path. On the other
hand, an inbound strategy is a more effective and cheaper tactic. Rather
than directly reaching out, you’re delivering informational content such as
blogs, podcasts, white papers about your domain. With an inbound
approach, you’re delivering value to customers before they even buy your
product.
Most go-to-market strategies regarding interest generation are not binary.
Most companies have a healthy mix of both inbound and outbound tactics.
However, consumers are increasingly less receptive to outbound acquisition
methods such as paid email and telemarketing. The Direct Marketing
Association revealed that more than 93% of telemarketing calls end in
failure. By generating content and information, it not only decreases the
cost of acquisition for more of your customers but has a compounding
effect. For example, if you are a digital greeting card company, investing in
being the thought leader on the Internet about holidays and celebrations
brings in more leads and builds a strong brand.
Optimize
Both the funnel and your go-to-market strategy are not static. Understand
how they are performing in order to optimize them. For product marketers,
one of the key outcomes of strong strategy and execution is selling success.
Specifically, pipeline generation, or how many opportunities come into the
sales funnel.
With the sales funnel, the metrics you need to optimize are volume,
conversion rates, and time. While the overall win rate can show the
effectiveness of your GTM strategy, being able to dissect the funnel can
reveal opportunities to optimize conversion rates. If a significant portion of
prospects drops out of the funnel in the middle, that is an area to investigate
and focus on.
Chapter Six
Pricing and Packaging
Pricing
Determining a pricing strategy for your product is not an ancillary activity.
Pricing is marketing. A pricing strategy can help you determine the optimal
route to maximize profits while also being sensitive to the market and
cognizant of your long-term goals. Effective pricing helps:
●
Catalyze product-market fit and align with what people will pay
for your product
●
●
Support your brand
Allow you to reach your revenue goals and gain market share
Being customer-centric and vision-centric helps here. This mindset will
affect how you price your product and push conversations beyond being
centered around the cost of your products (COGS) or the price of your
competitors’ products. While these are important factors to consider in
creating your pricing strategy, they’re just that—factors. In determining a
price, consider your target market, target customer, your desired brand
connotation, short-term revenue goals, and long-term market share goals.
The Three Methods
The three different methods that can help determine pricing strategy are
cost-based, competitor-based, and value-based methods:
1. Cost-based: Basing price on the costs to make the product,
including fixed and variable costs.
2. Competitor-based: Determining the price based on the price and
value of the products of competitors. Increasing or decreasing the
price is done in the context of the competition. Setting the price
much higher than others is done to reflect the higher value or
quality provided by your product.
3. Value-based: Setting the price based on the value of the product in
the eyes of the customer. There’s less emphasis on the competition
or the costs to produce the product, predicating firmly on the
benefits delivered to a consumer and quantifying their impact.
Common Strategies
There’s a gamut of pricing strategies. Some of these are new, some are not.
The following strategies are common methods to determine a price:
Penetration Pricing
Offering a product at a very low introductory price to gain market share.
Penetration pricing is introducing your product to a market at a low price.
The intent is to gain market share quickly, build customer usage, and
loyalty, a common tactic to enter new markets. This is a core part of a
pricing strategy: understanding your current situation and using price as a
gambit to reach your goals.
IKEA implemented penetration pricing in its strategy to gain market share
in China. By pricing their products less than 30% than those of other
companies, the Swedish furniture retailer was able to rapidly gain market
share in the country.
As other strategies will indicate, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy. It’s
important to be aware of your customers and your unique situation.
For instance, penetration pricing is a low-price strategy, meaning that
demand must be highly price-sensitive (price elastic) and customers must
be readily willing to switch from a higher-priced product to one that is
lower-priced. As a corollary, dropping the price to that level may attract
bargain buyers, who may not necessarily be the right type of customer
you’re targeting. This can have consequences in other aspects of your
marketing efforts, such as affecting customer loyalty and retention if there
is a mismatch between your product’s value proposition and the (bargain)
customers who end up making a purchase.
Price Skimming
Charging a relatively high price during the launch of a new, innovative
product and then lowering the price over time to resonate with different
(more price-sensitive) customer segments on a demand curve.
Price skimming echoes adopter categories—defined as the degree to which
an individual adopts a new idea—and matches the price accordingly. Early
adopters, who are categorically the quickest to adopt new products, will pay
higher prices for a cutting-edge product.
Eventually, prices are lowered to follow the product demand curve and
attract more price-sensitive customers, segment by segment. As a result,
customer segments are skimmed off the demand curve, maximizing profits.
Skimming makes sense for new innovative products in a market with little
to no competition. Customers in this market also need to be price inelastic
—not as sensitive to changes in price.
Premium Pricing
Pricing a product to evoke a high-value connotation, focusing on perceived
value.
A frequent element of brand strategy, premium pricing is charging a
relatively high price for a product because it reflects the high value gained
from the product. Some of the top luxury brands use this strategy.
Premium pricing creates higher profit margins, tougher barriers to entry,
and increases your brand's value for all the company's products.
Customers assume a higher price must parlay into higher quality—
perceived high value. This perception is the fuel that increases brand value
and higher margins. It’s important to not let that perception corrode. Ensure
every aspect of both the product and buying experience upholds that
perception.
Value-Based Pricing
Pricing based on what the customer is willing to pay for the value they are
receiving from your product.
Value-based pricing is customer-centric. It’s not necessarily the only or best
pricing strategy for your needs, but it is more focused on understanding
your target customer persona and the value your product brings for them.
It’s charging the customer the exact price they’re willing to pay.
Value-based pricing requires you to be in tune with the needs of your
customer and the value they seek. It’s time-intensive but it can pay
dividends. Being in tune with customer needs and close to buyer decisions
can influence other aspects of your company, pushing you to ask yourself:
●
●
●
Are we building the right capabilities for our target customers?
Are we bundling the right capabilities?
How can we add more value?
If pricing conversations are the moments that spark these questions, so be it.
Asking these simple but profound questions shifts focus away from
competitors and COGS, and towards customers. When I was determining
pricing for my data center energy analysis software, I spent less time
looking at competitive offerings and instead looked at the amount of energy
and costs I could realistically save for the customer. If I could save 10% of
their energy bill each month per data center rack, that specific amount of
savings would be a useful barometer to help me price my product.
Packaging
Packaging—a Primer
A core element of marketing, packaging helps support and influence other
aspects of marketing such as positioning and pricing. In a literal sense,
packaging helps to store, transport, and display the product. Packaging also
involves bundling, which is packaging related products together, in an effort
to increase revenue—average order value (AOV)—and provide more value
for customers.
For many consumer goods, packaging can be literal: the type of nozzle, the
shape, and the size of a water bottle. On the other hand, for enterprise
software, packaging conversations can revolve around how licensing is
determined: is it based on the number of users, applications run, or data
consumed (GiB)?
The tactical specifics of packaging differs, depending on the industry and
market. It’s particularly manifested differently in B2B and B2C products.
However, the core tenets of packaging strategy remain true for most;
effective packaging strategy helps:
●
●
●
●
Align product with your brand
Enable product utilization
Help determine pricing
Offer competitive differentiation
In determining packaging for your product, pay attention to three rules:
1. Be aligned with market trends
2. Be in sync with other marketing components
3. Be customer-centric
Be Aligned with Market Trends
As with product development, pricing, and messaging, pay less attention to
what competitors are doing and more to initiatives that align with your
market, goals, and overall trends.
Take Netflix. At its inception, the media-services company was following a
similar model as its closest competitor, Blockbuster: pay-per-rent. In
September 1999, Netflix introduced a new consumption model—pay a
single monthly fee, get unlimited access to a vast amount of programming.
This shift provided the tailwinds for Netflix, allowing it to both increase its
user base in both the short-term and long-term, with the new model being
more favorable to shifts in technological and socio-economic trends: faster
data speeds, lower bandwidth costs, and more users on the Internet.
Be In Sync with other Marketing Components
Packaging should align with positioning. Packaging is often the first
touchpoint for many products, a key aspect of the buyer’s journey. As such,
it should convey the value and brand connotation of your product.
If your product’s value proposition is operable by anyone, your packaging
should reflect that, incorporating simplicity and making a frictionless
experience a priority.
Be Customer-Centric
Customer empathy doesn’t stop with product features. Every aspect of both
the product and buying experience must be customer-centric.
Great packaging can remove friction from both the buyer’s journey and the
product experience. Consider how prospects and customers approach the
problem they’re trying to solve—not solely how the solution is
implemented technically.
For instance, let’s propose you develop a premium navigation application
promising users the ability to go from point A to point B in the fastest way
possible (for a price). The key aspect of the implementation with regard to
engineering is the dynamic cadence of API calls to services that return
metrics on factors that influence traffic: weather and accident reports.
Perhaps, what matters to your engineering and finance stakeholders is the
number of API calls made.
This shouldn’t be how your product is packaged. Your premium navigation
application should be priced as a subscription model (unlimited trips a
month), pay-per-trip, or another variant that is based on the value you offer
from a customer point of view, not the technical implementation.
Chapter Seven
Launching a Product
Bringing a product to market is a process in which different elements and
stakeholders converge together: product, sales, and customers. For those
reasons, it’s a challenge. Having clarity can help.
Clarity in Launches
In launching products, the cardinal word is clarity. Clarity cannot be
overstated in defining goals, the precise customer to reach, and the
individual launch components—and their stakeholders—that support a
broader, consistent message.
It’s imperative that you’re clear in defining:
● The target market
● Your product’s unique value proposition
● Metrics to evaluate launch performance
This clarity will serve as an underpinning for every aspect of a launch: prelaunch, launch, and post-launch.
Listen
Understand your customers. Use data.
Generating coverage has never been easier: more channels, more viewers,
and more effective economics. Getting attention from the right audience,
however, is a challenge.
Understanding the market, your product, and the customer will help your
message—and product—reach a more targeted segment, and ultimately lead
to the conversion of more paying users.
Data helps. Data can help determine the most effective channels, identify if
and to what extent the product solves a customer pain point, and examine a
specific segment of a market in depth. Use surveys, speak with prospects
and customers, whiteboard with product managers and engineers.
If possible, see and use your product. Product requirement documents are
treasure troves of product knowledge, but not a substitute for experiencing
the product for yourself. If a key aspect of your role is to communicate the
product in a way that resonates with customers, using the product and
seeing it from their shoes is an important step. Experiencing a sunset
firsthand versus reading descriptions about it provides the necessary
perspective to drive effective marketing, including creating messaging that
sticks.
Taking a step back and listening to prospects and key stakeholders
contributes to the process of answering fundamental questions, ultimately
being conducive to greater product-market fit:
●
●
●
●
●
●
●
●
What’s the larger narrative in the market?
How do users already feel about the product?
What are the relevant channels and heuristics?
What elements of the product are differentiators?
What personas are likely to purchase?
What’s the Total Addressable Market (TAM)?
What is the appropriate price point?
What’s the real problem customers are facing?
Define
Define positioning and messaging.
Armed with knowledge and data about the right audience and differentiated
aspects of your product, you can build out messaging. Messaging is, in
essence, the foundation on which much of the launch is built upon. It’s
essential but it doesn’t mean it needs to be complex.
As we saw in Chapter Four, effective messaging is simple, targets a specific
persona, and crisply communicates a differentiated solution for a unique
problem. There are other elements that can help shape a message: the
competitive landscape as well as specific technical product details and
limitations. These elements are important but do not have to dilute the core
essence of this step’s purpose. It’s simple: define a unique solution to a
specific persona’s unmet needs, while being cognizant of your overall brand
messaging.
Share
Share positioning with your team.
Validate the messaging document with feedback from a gamut of
individuals. Listen, absorb, and capture feedback, without the need to
justify your message. It’s easy to provide justifications and supporting
commentary to a single objector. It’s impossible to do this at scale. Your
messaging will have to speak for itself at launch time. Observing unfiltered
reactions to your messaging will help in the iterative process of refining
your messaging document.
Great messaging doesn’t have to be a secret. Share your positioning and
messaging with your broader team, making sure to create internal
awareness, understanding, and excitement. This step cannot be overstated—
a launch is a team effort. Awareness and understanding of the sub-bullets of
a launch strategy will help your peers understand the purpose of a launch,
execute on their deliverables on an agreed timeline, and charter new goals
and metrics to track.
Execute
Support a consistent message with a plan.
In creating and carrying out a plan, two words should underlie this step:
clarity and priority.
● Clarity. Be unequivocally clear in the objectives of this launch:
quantitative results that define success post-launch. With the help
of your team, define concrete goals and what is needed to achieve
them. With a goal in mind, list out every channel, collateral, and
respective content stakeholder that can be leveraged to succeed.
● Priority. Quantifying the importance of a particular channel or
collateral helps in driving ROI and enables purpose-driven
launches. Priority can serve a dualistic purpose in its relationship
with clarity and curtail the extent and number of content items and
channels.
Before creating the various assets needed for a launch—FAQs,
sales training materials, web copy—be sure to make every item
trackable, measurable, and accountable, with prioritization driving
this process. Regardless of the methodology used to rank
collateral in order of importance, prioritizing what elements to
focus on will allow you to have the greatest impact.
Launch
With your team’s support, launch.
Once again, the importance of internal communication is understated.
Before launching, ensure your peers and the company are on the same page.
With stakeholders ready, content locked, and content delivery mechanisms
scheduled, it’s time to launch.
Launch day can feel like a singular, definitive apex of this process. After
all, weeks have led up to this day. However, to maintain momentum in
coverage, amplify awareness, and adjust dynamically, it makes sense to
release media content in waves.
At this point, coverage can lead to observable—measurable—results. By
remaining cognizant of feedback and metrics, you can have the tools to
benchmark this launch against pre-established goals and define what
success looks like for tomorrow.
A Glimpse Into a Launch Plan
A product launch is a cross-functional affair, bridging product teams and
enabling go-to-market teams such as sales and support. The following list
covers key areas to include:
Product
1. Feature requirements
2. UX/UI design research and specifications
3. Testing and operations plan
Go-to-Market
1. Positioning and messaging documents
2. Launch date so everyone is aligned
3. Pricing and packaging
4. Content and social media plan to generate awareness
5. External and internal communications plan
6. Press meetings to influence media coverage
7. Analyst briefings to inform them why the launch matters
8. Partner enablement to help them communicate the launch and the
value proposition
Operations
1. Infrastructure (i.e. internal analytics) changes
2. Billing changes to track and charge customers
3. Financial process changes to track new product
Sales and Support
1. Documentation including release notes and FAQs
2. Sales enablement and training updates
3. Customer success and support team enablement
This is a rough template. After every launch, gauge the effectiveness of
each element and tweak them based on their impact on your business. As a
product marketer, it’s not just about checking items off a list but
understanding the most effective way to have the most impact. Tracking
data and getting feedback on aspects of previous launches can shape
launches of the future. For example, if your customer success team is
deriving significant value from the sales enablement training, you can shift
focus away from creating dedicated customer success content towards
improving sales training.
You can inform the need for reallocating energy and shifting focus by
defining the priority of every task. A P0 reflects a must-execute activity. A
P2 reflects a nice-to-have. Here’s a piece of a launch plan that reflects a
priority-based approach:
Messaging
Task
Owner
Priority Status
Write
Paula
P0
100%
P0
100%
messaging
(PMM)
and
positioning
brief
Share with
the broader
team
Paula
PR
Complete
Paula
P0
50%
Finalize press Paula
P0
0%
Paula
P0
20%
Derek
P1
10%
P2
0%
press
questionnaire
release
Web
Update core
solution page
#1
Revamp
graphics on
(Design)
page #2
Adjacent
page update
Derek
(Design)
Chapter Eight
Analyst and Public Relations
Analyst Relations
For many purchase decisions, the ability to influence is a key skill. Analysts
embody this and are critical influencers, particularly for B2B customers and
organizations.
The Pundits
Analyst firms influence the press, purchasing decisions, investors, and
catalyze industry categorical trends. Gartner, Forrester, IDC, and 451 are all
such firms, providing research on particular vendors and consulting
services.
Analysts are in the business of information and help different groups with
decisions, answering questions such as:
●
As a potential customer of vendor A, how can we solve our
organizational IT infrastructure challenge? What requirements
should we look for in a vendor?
●
As a company, vendor A, in this domain, what aspects of my
product roadmap resonate with the pain points of our target
customers? What needs are unmet—what capabilities can we
prioritize for competitive advantage?
●
As a potential investor in vendor A, how are they positioned in
this space for the next 3 years? What are some competitive and
market barriers to their success?
Analysts have marginal influence over early adopters but their importance
grows significantly when targeting smaller and mid-sized companies. A
sound analyst relations strategy is a critical part of a go-to-market strategy,
with its benefits particularly conducive for mid-stage startups. The principal
benefits are:
1. Validating and influencing the product roadmap, being able to
prioritize and discover unmet needs
2. Providing competitive intelligence, buyer insights, and investor
validation
3. Helping define and create a new category
Analysts have influence over a number of decisions made by potential
customers, acquirers, and investors. They also are invaluable in validating
and providing feedback on decisions within your own company, from
messaging to pricing strategy. You can use analysts as a sounding board and
use their feedback when:
●
●
Developing and validating messaging
Determining product strategy, roadmap, and prioritization of
features—in the context of the competitive landscape and trends
●
Developing a go-to-market strategy, particularly with
understanding which partners to work with
●
Probing into the typical buying center in a particular market—the
decision-maker and influencers
●
Understanding the packaging structure customers are used to in a
domain
●
Evaluating pricing strategy within the context of the competitive
landscape
Influencing Analysts and Adding Value
The goals of analysts as well as the press, as you’ll soon discover, are
different. Analysts provide information to highly specific audiences. Your
goal is to help analysts by providing them information about your product
and why it offers differentiated value. Briefing an analyst doesn’t cost
anything and is an opportunity to develop a relationship. Your objective
should be to help analysts stay abreast of developments in your domain.
They’re not buying from you or giving you points for hyperbole. Rather
than giving a sales pitch, give them a concise understanding of what your
product does and its position in the market.
By offering value, you can influence analysts to perceive your product and
company positively. You can also understand your competitive position and
get feedback on what to improve.
Prior to your conversation, identify recent articles and content they’ve
written and become an expert in the subject under discussion. In order to
build a relationship and influence their perception of your product, aim to
be viewed as a technical and domain expert, not as a salesperson.
Public Relations
A product marketing individual’s interaction with the press and public
relations (PR) is centered around influence and relationships. In order to
influence, it helps to understand their incentives.
The press wants to share stories that have broad appeal and capture as much
attention as possible. To accomplish this, the stories they produce and share
must have relevance and be unique. They need to produce content at a
frequent cadence that captures and retains the attention of their audience.
It’s difficult but if you’re able to help PR professionals with this, you can
both build a symbiotic relationship. You’re helping share knowledge and
helping them create stories of relevance and interest. If done well, your
product and brand can receive some airtime that can generate significant
awareness.
Before understanding how to help PR individuals and influencing press
coverage, it makes sense to understand the gamut of roles a public relations
department covers, including:
●
Press relations: The ability to place positive information in the
news media to bring attention to a product or firm associated with
the organization
●
Product publicity: Publicizing and garnering attention for
products
●
Corporate communication: Developing internal and external
messages to communicate information about the company that is
favorable it
●
Public relations: Developing and strengthening relationships
with the local and national community
●
Crisis management: Effectively responding to and mitigating the
fallout of a negative event or publicity
Helping the Press and Influencing Coverage
The press, particularly in technology, want to know more about their
industry and trends. And they’re not afraid of digging deeper to understand
the nuances. They’re curious about the industry and they’re incentivized to
do so. Having deeper knowledge about the subject builds their expertise and
allows them to provide a deeper analysis of stories. These elements help
them contribute to a story that resonates more with readers and builds a
moat around that piece—that story is likely more exclusive and retains
reader attention more than one that simply doles out information at a
surface-level.
The implication: the press wants to genuinely understand the topic at hand
—its essence, its connection with trends, and its significance.
Telling a Story
You can help them with this. Think like a reporter and have a clear
understanding of the essence of the story you want to tell, the headline you
envision, and why this story matters. Before having a conversation with the
press, have clarity for the purpose of the call: help the reporter understand
the topic and the 1-3 points you want to get across.
Storytelling is a powerful method in accomplishing these goals. As with
any story, a cogent narrative and specificity helps. When conveying a story
about the implications of a product, mention specific use cases or when
possible, specific customers who benefited from your product. Specificity
and the use of examples makes the story real and memorable. Leveraging
information from your product positioning exercises provides clarity to the
story, defining:
●
●
The current challenges in the market today
The user who faces these pain points
●
The best methods to address these pain points and how your
product fits in this narrative
●
●
The tangible benefits users have received
How the solution provides unique value in the market and how
it’s different from that of competitors
It’s a challenge to tell stories that are general, and yet specific; neutral, but
intended to garner attention to your cause; deep enough to add value, but
not lengthy enough to lose the attention of the individual on the other end of
the conversation. It’s critical, then, to treat conversations with the press and
PR individuals as just that: conversations.
Provide enough context to the trends in the market, the target user, and then
pause. Make sure they understand. And don’t avoid or deflect their
questions but rather, find ways to connect the conversations to those points
you defined to get across.
Being Consistent for Amplification
Consistency matters. If messages are inconsistent between the story the
press tells, what your sales team shares, and what your collateral conveys,
the message is not just diluted, it’s lost. A strong alignment of messages has
the opposite effect. Imagine a prospect hearing the exact message from an
email you sent out at 10:00 p.m., solidified by an article they read the next
morning, and yet again, from an animated explainer video a few days later.
Telling a consistent story across initiatives solidifies the message to
prospects and for everyone else—employees, existing customers, and
supporters. As a result, the message is amplified in the market. If they’ve
listened to the same story multiple times, they’ll likely be able to tell it to
others.
Chapter Nine
Enabling Sales and Driving
Demand
A particularly interesting definition for product marketing came from a
colleague: “product marketing is the art of making customers.” Engineers
build features. Product managers help make products. Product marketing
managers help create customers. The latter statement doesn’t roll off the
tongue as easily as the former two, but it makes sense. If product marketers
define who the customer is and are responsible for the broad set of activities
that optimize reaching, selling to, and retaining them, then that claim is
valid. Product marketers help create customers.
Enabling Sales
By now, it’s clear that product marketing encompasses a wide set of
functions. And the role varies from organization to organization. However,
most organizations agree that a product marketer leads or is primarily
concerned with:
1. Messaging and positioning
2. Leading the go-to-market strategy
3. Enabling sales
In Chapter Two, we outlined the typical steps a customer takes in going
from being aware they have a problem to purchasing your product. This
process, the buyer’s journey, is not without obstacles.
As prospects consider making a purchase and move down the funnel, they
want more information. They want to know just how effectively your
product solves their problem. They want their objections answered and see
why your solution is uniquely able to solve their problem, as compared to
the other solutions in the market. In a business-to-business company, a sales
representative tells this story to address their objections on an individual
basis. They are trying to convince a prospect that the product is the right
solution for their problem.
Naturally, the story and objections may follow a similar pattern and there’s
much room to scale this selling process. When selling to many customers,
scaling this convincing process is necessary.
It makes sense then to have a mechanism that provides tools to sales
representatives to scale their selling efforts as well as put some of the stages
on autopilot. Sales enablement is this mechanism. Enablement is about
providing a consistent story and set of tools to sales to convince leads
Helping Sales Tell a Story
Consider the time when you were in grade school and the most anticipated
event of the year (for me, at least): the annual science fair. Building the
project and documenting your assumptions, trials, and findings were a part
of the exercise. But it became quickly apparent that the bulk of the project
involved building a story, not the commodified contraption itself. After all,
there were dozens of similar projects, virtually all involving a concoction of
baking soda and vinegar.
The judges and teachers who visited your booth were always respectful, as
to engender a love for science and learning within the students. But these
science fairs always had a winner. In order to win, it was critical to go
beyond a captivating demonstration and frame the need for such a project
and how effectively your project meets it. As more visitors stop by your
booth, your story evolved from simply a hasty introduction of the names of
you and your teacher to something more. You start painting an image of the
problem in today’s world, then perhaps, mention how you or a friend was
personally affected by the problem, how your project solves this problem,
and proactively answer objections you’ve heard in the past.
Marketing, in many ways, can be thought of as refining a story, then
capturing and scaling it. The fundamentals of pitching prospects of the
value of your product are not dramatically different from that of pitching
judges during your grade school days. Enabling your sales team involves a
keen understanding of the prospect, a focus on consistency, a proactive way
to address potential objections, and a clear goal cemented at the end of
every story. With the target audience in mind, the components of this story
involve:
1. Introducing your company and its mission.
2. Framing the context for introducing the problem within their
world.
3. Explaining why and how incumbent solutions and processes are
failing to solve or exacerbating the problem.
4. Articulating the requirements for a new world and how this
problem is holding them back.
5. Describing how your solution meets those requirements in a
unique way and demoing an impactful use case that resonates most
with this target prospect.
6. Showing social proof of how others—customers with similar
profiles as the prospect and well-respected organizations—have
benefited from your solution.
7. Proposing a clear call to action and the next steps.
The Sides of Sales Enablement
In Chapter Two, we outlined the buyer’s journey. Sales enablement is
providing the tools, content, and language to your sales organization to tell
a story to leads, or prospective customers. It’s about how to convince
prospects who are aware of their problem and your existence to take the
next step and move along the funnel.
Answering Prospect Questions
As prospects go through understanding what you do, how relevant it is to
their situation, and considering alternatives, content and tools help address
their questions. This content includes web copy, datasheets, high-level
FAQs, white papers, and product copy. As prospects seek out different areas
for answers, your message should be the same to reinforce your value
proposition.
Addressing Prospect Objections
Very rarely is a purchase a no-brainer decision. Whether a Director of IT is
debating with her broader team at a large organization on purchasing
security software or a teenager having an introspective dilemma of whether
to overspend the year’s allowance on a new pair of sneakers, objections to
making a purchase are common. You can address prospect objections
directly or equip your sales organization to address them by referring back
to one of the pillars of product marketing. What is the unique value you
provide?
After talking about value, demonstrate it. Case studies offer social proof,
providing a tangible demonstration of how you added unique value to a real
customer for a specific problem. Recorded demos of the product also
eliminate a hazy image of your product by allowing your prospect to see the
solution in a palpable way.
Sales enablement often draws parallels to the act of arming troops. Winning
customers is a battle but you’re not just winning a customer, you’re winning
them against others. A key question that you or your sales organization
needs to be able to answer: Why should a prospect choose you over the
many choices in the market? With a targeted approach tailored for a specific
market segment, winning competitively is possible. For your particular
segment, you may be a better fit than competitor B. Make that comparison.
Helping Sales Ramp Up
During the early days of your company, it may be possible to hire sales
individuals with much experience selling your type of product to the same
type of buyer. As you scale, finding field individuals ready to go from the
get-go is a challenge.
As product marketers, our job is to help individuals new to the company’s
sales organization ramp up. You need to create training content that
educates your sales organization about the market, the product, and the
buyer. At the minimum, sales training must cover the origin story of the
company, the ecosystem of the product, what the product is, who the
product is for, the value it provides, and why it’s different.
Your goal is to reduce the sales ramp-up time, or the time it takes a new
individual to onboard and become productive—or hit their quota. The exact
metric could be calculated by the time it takes someone to reach 100% of
their quota or training time + the length of the sales cycle + the years of
experience they have. However you calculate it, reducing ramp-up time can
stave off the strain on resources and allow you to hit your annual revenue
targets more effectively. Like with any type of coaching, your goal is not
just to provide training content, but to make sure it sticks.
Start by defining what enablement success looks like. Set a target to
complete training by a certain time and define the initial target quota. With
clear goals, new representatives have a sense of urgency to learn. Next,
show them what the top performers do and the story they pitch. Have a
library of the team’s strongest recorded calls. With goals defined and
resources at their disposal, let them learn on their own terms. Make learning
an on-demand option, with recordings of calls that are great examples of
prospecting, discovery, demos, objection handling, competitive positioning,
and ROI discussions.
Measuring Sales Success
The goals of sales enablement don’t have to get lost in the cacophony of
different terms, metrics, and values. Your goal is to simply help your sales
organization close more deals. Measuring sales success is unique to your
organization but you can gauge general effectiveness by understanding the
volume of opportunities, conversion rates, and productivity.
Volume of Opportunity
Cross-selling, renewals, and upselling are more effective ways of
generating revenue than acquiring a net new customer. According to
InsightSquared, the average cost of acquisition for a company to renew a
product is $0.13, and the average upsell costs a company $0.28. Both are
dramatically more cost-effective moves than acquiring a net new customer
—at $1.18 to earn $1.00.
These cost-effective sales motions require the ability to sell value and
solutions. You can gauge if your sales organization is selling solutions by
creating value-oriented messaging seeing if it’s used by them during
conversations. The lead-to-customer conversion rate is a gauge to see if
your message is being used and for the overall efficacy of your marketing
and sales funnel.
It’s not enough to create compelling content—you need to make sure your
sales representatives are using it. They are the ones using your tools in the
real world, during conversations with customers in order to convince them
and to address their objections. Through interviews with individuals, you
can get feedback on what content is particularly useful. Through tools, you
can understand the most effective content and the content leveraged by the
top performers in the organization as well as by prospects themselves.
Conversion Rates
It’s not enough to talk about value. Your content should help the sales
organization to talk about how your company delivers differentiated value.
Closely looking at win/loss rates against key competitors and the context
around these ratios can reveal gaps in sales, marketing, product, and
customer success strategies.
For example, if you have a low win-loss ratio for the cloud segment of your
business for prospective business customers with 500-1000 employees, that
may be indicative that you are not offering differentiated value for that
market segment relative to the competitor. Doing this exercise can inform
you of the need to create more targeted objection handling content, more
training collateral for that segment or vertical, or may highlight a larger
issue with product or GTM strategy.
Productivity
In order to scale your company, you need to reduce the time it takes for an
average sales individual—without the expectation of domain expertise—to
quickly ramp up without much hand-holding. For measuring the ramp-up
time for individual representatives, you can look at the time it takes for
them to close their first deal or meet their quota. On a macro level, reducing
the time it takes for individual representatives to get up to speed reduces the
average sales cycle itself.
The following table gives you a glimpse of common metrics to track to
gauge enablement effectiveness and what aspect of the sales motion to
improve:
Metric
What to Improve
Time to First
Onboarding and ramp-up time for a
Deal
sales representative
Time to Meet
Ramp-up time
Quota
Number of
Prospecting
Opportunities
Average Deal
Value selling and cross-selling
Size
Average
Funnel optimization
Conversion Rate
Average Sales
Sales and process efficiency
Cycle
Win/Loss Ratio
Content effectiveness and awareness
Sales
Sales organizational efficiency
Productivity
Channeling Demand
As you saw in Chapter Two, the marketing funnel, first conceptualized by
Elias St. Elmo Lewis, is an effective way of understanding your typical
customer’s mindset as she moves closer to a purchase.
Lewis’ general concept hasn’t changed much and the elements of the funnel
remain true for today’s industries. One new change, however, is the
increased focus on the stage after action: advocacy. Advocacy is a key part
of today’s marketing; a focus on loyalty improves customer retention,
increases revenue in what is perhaps the most efficient way, and underpins
any sustainable growth strategy. Therefore, appending an extra A to Lewis’
model—AIDAA—is more appropriate.
Awareness
The Stage
Content: Pay-per-Click Ads, Webinars, Emails, Thought Leadership Blogs,
Social Media
In the awareness stage, your customer is first aware of your product or
service and may be aware of their problem. This stage is about working to
capture your target prospect’s attention. Awareness doesn’t mean
broadcasting indiscriminately. Awareness is making sure your target
demographic is aware you exist. It’s everything that goes into making sure
your ideal customer segment is aware of your product and that it can solve,
or is, at the very least, associated with their problem.
Strive to make your target demographic aware of:
1. Your company’s existence
2. What your company does and sells
3. Their problem
Converting to the Next Step
Awareness → Interest
As the first touchpoint, awareness is a key stage. Your prospect has not
vested much time and can likely exit the funnel, not long after entering it.
Therefore, it’s important to generate awareness with the following in mind:
personalization and enabling comfort.
● Personalization. One of the primary goals at this stage—the top of
the funnel—is to pull in as many leads (potential buyers before
they are considered prospects) as possible. An effective way to
build gravity and pull in leads is to cater to prospects in a
personalized way. Personalized advertising is compelling
advertising.
● Enabling comfort. The customer journey can be cursory or
lengthy, particularly with business-to-business (B2B) purchases.
Irrespective of the time spent in the funnel, generating comfort
makes sense as this is the first touchpoint. This can be as literal as
making physical aspects of a brick-and-mortar store assuring or
making the web experience non-intrusive. It’s simple: the user
experience starts before the product is bought.
Interest
The Stage
Content: Blogs, FAQs, eBooks, Webinars, Brochures, Videos, Case Studies,
Endorsements, Copywriting
The second phase of the funnel revolves around reinforcing that the
prospect is at the right place. Prospects are not yet vetting your product but
they are starting to look for information on how to solve their problem and
if your solution is relevant.
Providing information in a targeted and crisp manner goes a long way.
Educate the prospect of what you have to offer, why it’s unique, and how it
can add value to their life.
Interest is just that: providing the kindling to fuel desire towards your
product.
Converting to the Next Step
Interest → Desire
Converting a prospect from interest to the desire stage effectively is about
anticipation and persuasion. Answer prospects’ objections preliminarily.
Often overstated in product management theory and underperformed
empirically, understanding your users helps anticipate the true concerns and
gear messaging towards alleviating them.
Again, the funnel isn’t rigid and leads do not necessarily have to follow a
set path. Prospects can enter your funnel directly in the interest stage,
perhaps from the awareness stage of another brand. As you consider leads
coming from these sources, you may want to tweak messaging specifically
geared towards these leads. Each lead is unique. How you welcome them
into your world should be too.
Desire
The Stage
Content: Customer Ratings and Testimonials, Third-Party Product Reviews,
Staff Members, Sales Representatives
The desire stage is about convincing the prospect to purchase. Often the
longest stage, it’s imperative to reinforce your relationship, give them the
information they need to take action, and retain them in your funnel.
This stage is particularly unique to your target demographic and your
product. A key element in convincing a purchase is breaking through the
noise. Your funnel and your prospect are not operating in a vacuum. With a
gamut of options for a prospect to solve their problem, it makes sense to
think about how to differentiate your solution from that of others. Rather
than incessantly touting features, think about what unique value you offer
that your competitors don’t.
Converting to the Next Step
Desire → Action
Customers are self-reliant. They’re more than capable of doing their
homework. What helps is not necessarily doling out information but rather,
removing roadblocks to accessing information. Even more so, strive to keep
prospects in your world: provide the information they’re seeking in your
ecosystem, so they don’t find answers elsewhere, like a competitor’s
website.
Action
The Stage
Content: In-Store Interactions, Your Website, Sales Staff, Point-of-Sale
Devices
This is the trigger. This is where—or rather, when—a prospect becomes a
customer.
If your message and marketing efforts have been targeted, crisp, and unique
in preceding steps, this stage is about removing roadblocks and making the
act of purchasing as effortless as possible. Think about this stage well
before your prospects get there. The exact actions you want your prospects
to perform here should drive the preceding stages and your efforts.
Advocacy
The Stage
Content: Word of Mouth, Post Purchase Surveys, Reward Initiatives,
Customer Support, Promotions, Social Media
Advocacy may seem like a hasty new appendage to Lewis’ model or some
21st-century invention to satisfy a marketing fad. It’s not. According to a
study from the Harvard Business Review, loyalty has tangible results: a 5%
increase in customer retention can increase profits by more than 25%.
Your customers (your prospects are rechristened by this point) are your
most effective advocates and revenue drivers. Not only will they spread the
word of your product and bring in new entrants to your pipeline, but
existing customers are more potent sources of new business, through upsell
and cross-sell opportunities.
The most successful brands of today seek to drive experiences that will
make their customers their ambassadors. Find unique ways to enable
advocacy.
Funnel in Action
For the following enterprise infrastructure purchase scenario, the funnel is
generalized into three overarching categories: top, middle, and bottom.
The following table reflects the different stakeholders of the purchase—
decision-makers and technical influencers—and the collateral needed to
influence each stakeholder, at every stage.
Top of
Middle of
Bottom of
the
the Funnel
the Funnel
Demo Deck
Funnel
General
Video #1
Sales Deck
Manager
Blog #1
#1
White Paper
IT
Sales
ROI
ROI
Director
Deck #2
Calculator
Calculator
Analyst
Case Study
Report
#1
Database Sales
Technical
Admin
Deck #2
Deck
eBook
Data Sheet
Demo Deck
From outside the role, it’s easy to conflate content marketing and product
marketing. While it’s true product marketing generates much tangible
output in the form of content, by now it’s apparent that product marketing is
really focused on customer and business outcomes. Content is simply a
means to help achieve some of these outcomes. Thinking strategically about
the target audience and their unique buyer’s journey is a key step in
defining a framework to achieve those outcomes.
Consider the previous table. Similar to how messages are not broadcasted
indiscriminately, strategic product marketers don’t just create content
randomly. They take a look at the personas they’re targeting, the stages of
their buyer’s journey—and the parallel sales stage on your end—and assess
gaps in the funnel. The ability to convince prospects requires a keen eye.
As you read in Chapter 3: Personas, targeting efforts based on stakeholders
helps define who we are trying to reach, shapes marketing strategy, and
ultimately, helps drive marketing efficacy.
A funnel is a visual representation of the customer journey. As such, it’s
often far from perfect, but luckily, there are a few methods to optimize
funnel performance—at every stage.
Optimizing Funnel Performance
The user experience starts before the product is bought. Any gaps in funnel
performance are gaps in which customer needs are not being met, and
therefore, they’re leaving.
Funnel leaks can be fixed with remarketing, leveraging messaging tailored
specifically for a particular user, at a specific point in the funnel. To
optimize funnel performance:
1. Identify funnel leaks
2. Increase gravity at the top of the funnel
3. Increase momentum in the middle of the funnel
4. Increase affinity at the bottom of the funnel
Identify Funnel Leaks
Your funnel will inevitably have gaps. It does make sense to be aware of the
biggest gaps and implement test strategies to alleviate the biggest
headwinds. These are some of the signs of funnel leaks:
● High ad expenditure in conjunction with a low ROI
● A high bounce rate
● Low conversion rates
● High churn rates
Increase Gravity at the Top of the Funnel
Since this is where your prospects enter the funnel, probe into the entry
point and find ways to increase the gravity of your funnel. That is, find
ways to have a strong brand and message so you can attract more of your
target demographic. To accelerate awareness:
1. Have brand appeal: a more visceral story, going beyond product
2. Have a strong value proposition: visible, clear, and meaningful
3. Have human-centric branding: being able to resonate with core
human values
Increase Momentum in the Middle of the Funnel
It’s important to emphasize this: consumers are smart. More often than not,
on the bookshelves or blogs of marketing theory, consumers are viewed as
static, simple entities that can be herded down a path at will. This is hardly
the reality and as such, everything described is a general framework, even
when it comes to product education.
Consumers are self-reliant and capable of finding information. In fact, they
want to find their own information. There’s no need to dole out information.
Cater to consumer self-reliance and make it easy for prospects to do their
own research. Just remember to leave ample room for curiosity.
Increase Affinity at the Bottom of the Funnel
Your customers are your allies. We’ve established this. To build a strong
base of allies, approach it with the mindset of delivery and being
relationship-oriented. To increase affinity at the bottom of the funnel and
strengthen brand advocacy:
1. Ensure you’ve met or exceeded expectations for the product and
brand.
2. Don’t forget about the customer after the sale: continue to have
touchpoints with the customer and build a relationship.
3. Provide post-purchase experiences to make your customer feel
unique and not as just another contributing element to a P&L
Statement.
A marketing funnel is an effective tool in understanding the journey from
product awareness to purchase. Since the inception of this concept, some of
its elements have changed and in some cases, new models have supplanted
the AIDA narrative. What has not changed is that the customer is at the core
of the purchase journey and optimizing any sales or marketing funnel
begins with just that: the customer.
Case Studies: Capturing and Sharing
Customer Happiness
In a noisy world, social proof is increasingly important for businesses. We
don’t want to hear just a monologue from the business itself on why it can
provide value for me. We want to hear others talk about the value they got
from the business—their experience. It’s why we read reviews before
dining out.
Authentic Social Proof
Case studies go deeper than reviews and testimonials. They highlight how
your company solved a specific problem for a customer and the aftermath.
Case studies are a microcosm of product marketing. They highlight a
customer’s specific challenge and how they overcame it with a product.
And since the product is differentiated, they are shown to be able to solve
their unique challenge that they otherwise could not have. Case studies are
manifested in a narrative-format and are used as tools of persuasion.
With case studies, you’re not just able to talk about value but demonstrate it
authentically with a real customer. For early-stage companies and
organizations with highly-technical products, case studies offer more than
social proof. They offer a roadmap for prospects and show how others are
deriving value from your product. If your product adds value to multiple
stakeholders such as heads of engineering, product management leads, and
QA engineers, talking about how a company in India reduced the number of
software defects in production by 60% distills multiple value propositions
into a tangible value statement.
Creating a Case Study
Start with the interviewee. For B2B companies, the ideal candidate is
someone high-level to understand the business value but technical enough
to know the specific context and quantifiable impact.
Questions to Ask
1. What is your company known for? What’s your role?
2. What did [process] look like at your company before? What were
the biggest pain points you experienced?
3. What was the point at which you decided to look for a solution?
4. What was the first moment where you realized that [our product]
was a unique solution to your problem?
5. What does [process] look like at your company now?
6. What other [software/tools] do you use as part of your [process]
workflow?
7. Can you share any quantifiable metrics that you use to measure the
impact of [our product]?
8. What has your team been doing with the [time/capital/operating
expenses] saved?
9. What’s one thing you’d want someone who is considering using
[our product] to know?
Writing the Story
For a B2B company, the following table provides a template for creating a
case study. This is a framework. Writing a compelling case study involves
surfacing idiosyncratic statements from your customer conversation and
having a compelling narrative. A case study is a story.
Section
At a
Content
●
Glance
Context on the customer: Bullet points on their industry, their
position within their domain (Fortune 100), and the use case under
discussion
●
1-2 sentence summary of how your customers use your product
and the results they’ve seen
●
A customer quote from the interview that supports the essence of
the case study
The
●
Metrics: 3 quantifiable bullet points on results
●
The problem and context, setting the technical context and
Challenge
business challenge
●
A quote describing the breaking point when they started looking for
a new solution
The
●
Solution
Your differentiated solution—how your product uniquely solves
the problem
●
The way your product fits into the larger workflow of the team
and its implementation
●
A quote on the immediate impact on the team—productivity and
process improvement
The
●
Results
High-level impact of your product, including time saved, money
saved, the opportunity opened—calling out other projects the team
can now work on
●
A quote describing the long-term impact on the team and business
Chapter Ten
Influencing the Product Roadmap
The customer is at the core of product marketing. We’ve seen this with
every go-to-market activity. Understanding who the customer is, what their
pain points are, and how they make purchase decisions influences every
aspect, from messaging and positioning to determining pricing and enabling
sales.
A product marketer’s role is not just about “spreading the word”. A good
product marketer is involved early on in the product life cycle—with
engineering and product management—and helps understand the market
context of the product and optimize the impact of releasing a product.
Optimizing impact may require you to influence the product roadmap and
the product managers who oversee it. You might have to make the case for
changing the timing of a certain product release or advocate for features
that more effectively solve customer problems. Even with product
marketing, or by extension, product management, in your job title, changing
the type of products and their timing your company releases to the market
isn’t a birthright. You’re not given the keys to roadmap influence by
default. If you want to affect the product roadmap and optimize business
impact, you need to do so through influence.
You can influence the direction of your product and company’s product
strategy with three dimensions of influence: influence through relationships
and data, influence through being the expert on the market, and influence
by being the voice of the customer.
Influence Through Relationships
The product marketing and product management dynamic is a partnership.
In a healthy organization, a product marketer and product manager work
together to deliver and communicate the right value to the right customer.
The product marketer covers much of the go-to-market strategy while the
product manager owns much of the product strategy.
Theoretically, product marketing is a strategic role. However, depending on
the culture of a company, a product marketer may lose strategic clout and
instead, be relegated to tactical, passive executors.
In order to be able to influence product managers, the executive team, and
broadly, other internal stakeholders of your product, you need to bring
expertise to the conversation. Be the expert on knowing your customers,
category, and competition better than anyone else. Rather than doling out
feature requests, bring insights backed by evidence. With data underpinning
your perspective on the market and customers, it becomes difficult to ignore
you. They might object to your feature or prioritization suggestions but they
will pay attention.
Aren’t product managers also aware of this trinity—customers, category,
and competition? Yes, product management isn’t running blind and waiting
for the product marketer to shepherd them with data. However, it’s likely
that they don’t have complete clarity on an aspect of customers or the
market. Over the last several years, product marketing has grown to fill
much of the strategic void left by product management. Try to tap into this
void and see where you can deliver outsized value. For example, you may
need to start by bringing comprehensive insights into direct and indirect
competition. If there’s no shortage of quantitative metrics in the hands of
other stakeholders, bring qualitative feedback to the table. Ultimately,
product management shares many of the goals of product marketing:
delivering value and focusing on the right initiatives. By providing clarity
on what to focus on, you’re able to help accomplish your core goal of
delivering the right value to customers as well as gaining more influence to
shape product strategy.
Influence Through Market Awareness
Particularly with high-growth companies, prioritization is an important
theme. With more jobs to be done than resources and people, it becomes
critical to be able to determine which projects to focus on and their timing.
As a product marketer, you can deliver outsized value in determining the
priority of projects by being the spokesperson for understanding
overarching trends, the competition, and market data.
Trends-Centric Intelligence
In line with the notion of delivering value to people, going beyond
requirements in the context of your product and keenly understanding
macro trends will make your business more competitive. Get the ability to
look ahead.
In 2015, a product leader took the reins of one of the largest tech companies
in history. Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, is one of the most profound
examples of strategic thinking and getting ahead of changing currents in the
market rather than being swept by them. Joining Google in 2004, Pichai
identified a weakness in Google’s strategy as well as an opportunity. At the
time, Microsoft Internet Explorer was the clear market share leader in web
browsers and without a browser of their own, Google and their search
traffic were at the mercy of incumbent web browsers. Google’s search
engine’s revenue was under threat
Despite initial executive opposition, Sundar insisted on developing products
to mitigate this problem and developing a browser of their own: Chrome.
As of 2020, the market share of Google Chrome is approximately 64%.
Google’s ad revenue, principally from Search is $40.98 billion. IE11 is the
last version of Internet Explorer, with the browser nearing its final days.
The initiatives taken more than a decade earlier with the development of
Chrome was more than a quarrel with Internet Explorer. Pichai was able to
foresee trends in user expectations of the web browser and identified the
need to own the entire browsing experience—not just the website
experience. As a result, Google was able to leverage its own browser to
more effectively succeed with Google Suite and other products that enabled
Google’s dominance in the categories they participate in.
Bringing a similar approach to your products involves thinking
strategically, identifying gaps today, and having a long-term mindset to
deliver value. It’s equally important to be qualitatively and analytically
aware of the industry, socioeconomic trends, and technological changes that
can affect the needs and expectations of the customers of tomorrow.
Competitive Intelligence
Foreseeing trends is not about an innate superpower. Being constantly
aware of the competitive landscape and analyzing their potential direction
gives you an image of macro trends in your industry. It may also signal an
urgent need to shift product or go-to-market strategy. In order to influence
the product roadmap, you need to be the undeniable expert on several
categories, particularly the competitive landscape. Specifically, aim to be
the first to know of competition announcements and the most
knowledgeable on gaps in your product relative to the competition.
Being Aware of Competitive Developments
Voluntarily become a lead in your competitors’ funnels. Sign up for their
newsletter and opt to receive announcements. Set up Google alerts for when
their names are trending in the search results. These are low-effort methods
to be the first one in your company to hear about new product launches,
blunders, their messaging, and the general direction of their company.
And it’s not only about awareness and keeping tabs on your competitors. To
be the expert on the competition, you need to understand developments
within a strategic and long-term context. If your closest competitor has
recently launched a product that sells to the same specific target segment as
you, even if you think they’re not offering a compelling solution, they could
become a significant threat to your business. Being your company’s most
knowledgeable person about the technical context behind your competitor’s
latest move and their larger motive automatically gives you more weight to
influence both product and go-to-market strategy.
Knowing Where the Gaps Are
Interviews aren’t the only way to get customer insights and competitive
intelligence. Integrate intelligence into your product and processes. If
you’re already prompting unhappy customers with an exit survey of why
they’re leaving, have a checkbox to select in case they’re leaving for a
competitor. Track net promoter score (NPS) comments and reviews that
mention other products. Understanding customer happiness and
unhappiness relative to other options highlights both strengths and
weaknesses in your product and customer success strategy. Discovering
them can take minimal overhead by integrating with your current
workflows.
This integrated intelligence serves as a general gauge to help you keep your
strategy in check. Further insights can be gained by rigorously looking at
win/loss reports to understand why prospects opted for you or chose your
competitor. Surveying churned customers can be a strong indicator if you’re
continuing to deliver value and satisfy needs, especially as the market
evolves. A company that previously seemed to be a distant, indirect
competitor could now be well equipped to solve your customer’s problems
better than you can. Finally, feedback from your sales organization can
reveal gaps, strengths, and opportunities. What are the typical objections
that they hear from prospects with regard to the competition? What are the
capabilities and subjects that are becoming increasingly prevalent in
conversations? Understanding this can help you have weight in influencing
what aspects of the roadmap to prioritize, especially if you bring qualitative
feedback from these discussions in addition to metrics. Is there a growing
competitive threat that makes delivering on the product enhancement more
important? Is there an increasingly clear opportunity in our market—with a
small window—in which we can see significant gains?
Market Intelligence
There are few things that are more powerful than concrete metrics behind
statements. If you’re able to give the financial or user base impact of
prioritizing a certain enhancement or solution, your colleagues will listen.
Your input suddenly gains clout.
To begin, aggregate the data you’ve collected from customer surveys,
churned user interviews, secondary research on market trends, competitive
information, support tickets, and feedback from sales. Make a special note
of product gaps that resulted in lost prospects or churned customers.
Customer expectations and needs may not necessarily be a net new feature.
It could be a strong want for a streamlined user experience. They might
want greater platform stability, not necessarily new capabilities every
month.
After extracting the essence of customer wants, rank them: urgent, tablestakes, differentiators, and nice-to-have. This hierarchy should be informed
by outcomes that they can engender such revenue opened or retained. What
would the impact be if those product enhancements were delivered? Could
prioritizing A versus B pay off in a stronger way by expanding your total
addressable market (TAM) or retaining a significant portion of your
customer base?
Influence Through Customer Empathy
As product marketers, we can move from tactical roadmap executors to
strategic roadmap influencers by carrying out the most important role we
have: acting as the voice of the customer. Understanding what customers
need, how our existing solution can meet those needs, and where there are
gaps can inform changes in pricing, positioning, messaging, and the
product.
The answer: talk to customers. You don’t have to spend too long in product
management and product marketing to see that the phrase is firmly
embedded in tech lexicon. The father of lean startup strategy, Steve Blank,
said that “the first thing an entrepreneur should do is get outside the
building and start talking to prospective customers. There are no facts
inside the building.” Speaking with customers illuminates the real market
motivators behind purchasing a product—not your assumptions of what
people want.
The actual task of talking to customers, however, can be nebulous. Done
incorrectly, it can become a deceptive validator for your own assumptions
about the value you deliver. You can quickly fall into the trap of asking
questions and cherry-picking fragments from a conversation that justify a
hypothesis about your product, the value it provides, and the needs of your
audience. To understand their real needs, ask open-ended questions and
listen empathically. Ask questions that matter.
When I was in the product management team at an enterprise infrastructure
startup that offered disaster recovery solutions, the product team made the
assumption that my customers care about reducing costs—in every
instance. We bridged connections between a few aphorisms that floated
internally, such as “CIOs in our segment care about reducing their total cost
of ownership, nothing else.” After scheduling in-person visits and
interviews, it was clear that our prospective customers were more than
willing to pay for a solution if it can reduce management time and
downtime. Cost wasn’t their biggest challenge. Free time and data
availability were.
Often, their core needs are simple: the need for more free time, the need to
reduce costs, the need to reduce risk. Revealing these underlying needs are
more difficult. Discover underlying needs by understanding what success
looks like. Ask them: “How do you know if your team has succeeded and
you’ve succeeded in your role?”
The more you can understand the core underlying needs of a customer, the
more you deliver and market a core benefit, not a list of features. Benefits,
not features, tap into the emotional and underlying aspect of a purchase,
rather than the one at the surface. You're likely not buying a pair of sneakers
just for their specifications: a nylon-based neon exterior and 99% wool
insoles. You're buying them to make a fashion statement and feel
comfortable. You're buying them to look and feel good. Having genuine
empathy can bring these motivators to the surface.
At the beginning of the 2008 historical film, Jodhaa Akbar, a prolific
Mughal emperor marries a strong-willed Jodhaa to ensure a peaceful
alliance between the larger Mughal empire and the Rajput kingdom. The
rest of the story, however, is the process in which the Mughal emperor
learns to truly love both Jodhaa and the kingdom he oversees. Jodhaa makes
it clear to her husband, the emperor, that while he may have conquered both
her and the land, he is not a true ruler.
“You are far removed from reality. You do not know how to win hearts”,
Jodhaa explains. “To do that, you need to look into their minds, discover
their little pleasures and sorrows. And win their trust. Be one with their
heartbeat. And the day you will succeed in doing that, you will rule my
heart [and this nation].” Jodhaa’s dialogue offers key lessons in empathy
and truly delivering value to customers. Delivering value is not about
contractual agreements or checking off a list of requirements without
understanding the more intrinsic motivators of people. Serving as the voice
of the customer is not about being a static conduit that relays requirements
from outside the company’s walls to internal teams. Serving as the voice of
the customer is about having genuine empathy for the customer. It’s
understanding the contextual circumstances behind the problems they want
to solve. It’s discovering the nuanced emotional drivers and the annoyances
they would love to get rid of. It’s not just about listening, but also an
exercise in poking through assumptions as well as long-held market and
technological traditions.
Satya Nadella is a profound advocate for having genuine empathy for
customers. As the CEO of Microsoft, his emphasis on customer empathy is
at the core of the company’s current renaissance and market dominance
since 2014. In a conversation with David Rubenstein for Bloomberg, Satya
alludes to treating customer focus as more than a PR or brand statement.
From the interview, it’s clear that this theme is central to his product and
corporate charter. Satya states that “if innovation is about meeting unmet
and unarticulated needs of customers,” then the ability to innovate is about
truly understanding customer needs and being able to extrapolate insights
from their challenges and desires.
In his book, Hit Refresh, Satya provides a tangible example of empathy at
work. On a trip to the Bay Area to understand cloud computing
requirements from startups, Satya and the Microsoft cloud computing team
—the Azure team—placed customer needs above long-held Microsoft
traditions. “On one trip to the Bay Area, we met with several startups. It
became clear that we needed to support the Linux operating system, and we
had already taken some rudimentary steps toward that with Azure. But as
[our team] walked out of those meetings that day, it was certain that we
needed to make first-class support for Linux in Azure. We made that
decision by the time we got to the parking lot.” Using feedback from
current and prospective Azure customers, prioritizing Linux support in their
cloud computing platform was one of a series of moves Microsoft took
under the helm of Nadella of embracing open-source technology,
particularly Linux. This is in stark contrast to the historical Microsoft
narrative of denouncing and combatting Linux. In a 2001 interview with the
Chicago Sun-Times, Steve Ballmer, Satya’s predecessor, decreed that
"Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to
everything it touches”.
Going from attacks on Linux to a complete embrace of it was a profound
move. Here, customer feedback was not an add-on activity intended to
validate long-held assumptions, but rather the basis for all governing
strategies. Shifting the focus to customers and predicating strategy on
empathy has paid off for Microsoft. In April 2019, the company passed $1
trillion in valuation. That’s a growth of more than 230 percent since Satya’s
oversight since 2014.
Satya proved that customer empathy has very real implications for business
goals. For a behemoth like Microsoft, empathizing with their users allowed
them to prioritize where they could deliver significant value. For startups
and companies, understanding customer needs and the context behind them
is the difference between a company succeeding or failing. Keeping the
customer as the keystone in building a company from the ground up can not
only ensure you deliver the right value but also allows you to deliver
outsized value in the face of constraints.
During one summer, I had a real itch to create a solution for a problem I
encountered while working at a biomedical lab at the NASA Ames
Research Center. During visits to the adjacent computing center, the
operators explained that power usage was a significant and growing portion
of expenses in operating a data center. Those conversations made an
impression on me. That summer, I set out to solve the problem. With the
odds stacked against me at the very start (building software at the
intersection of energy and infrastructure is a technical challenge), I wanted
a clear goal. I decided on a specific objective: reduce the data center power
consumption and subsequently, the energy expenditure, of at least two
customers in less than eighteen months. Evidently, the challenge of
accomplishing this goal was amplified by several constraints, largely selfimposed. I wanted to build and launch at this velocity to refine both the
product and my assumptions quickly. My hypothesis that a particular
solution can solve this apparent problem was just that—a hypothesis. To
validate that IT operators truly have a need for more keenly understanding
and reducing data center power consumption, I wanted to build and receive
feedback quickly. With regard to the constraint of reducing costs, although I
was able to raise seed capital for my company, I wanted to prolong my
runway, respect my investors, and be disciplined in innovating with
constraints. This was the challenge: building a new product to solve an
unvalidated problem coupled with time and financial constraints.
I approached this challenge by spending the first two months on gaining
absolute clarity on who the ideal customer is, what pain points I should
solve, and where in the market I can add unique value. Reminiscent of a
positioning statement, this exercise's intention was to reduce development
time and increase the chance of successfully acquiring customers. After all,
it is more effective to solve an unambiguous problem.
My initial hypothesis described the target customer as an IT operator, which
in reality doesn’t exist—it was an umbrella term for a broad spectrum of
roles. Since everything from product development to positioning was
predicated on the specific target customer, I wanted to be absolutely clear
about my target customer and their needs. I researched other trends in
enterprise infrastructure at the time and discovered the hyper-converged
infrastructure (HCI) category. I researched the websites of startups building
HCI solutions, and more specifically, looked for case studies of customers
who purchased from them. I wanted to discover companies who were early
adopters of new enterprise products or those who are most likely to be
receptive to my product. Through these efforts, I compiled a list of these
early adopters and interviewed more than 50 contacts I gleaned from these
case studies. With these interviews, I was able to segment the enterprise
market, determine the right business decision-maker—the IT director—and
understand their needs with regard to data center power consumption
monitoring.
This process of discovering early adopters of similar technology and their
true pain points took more than 6 weeks but was profoundly valuable. Much
like the ambiguous IT operator role in my hypothesis, the notion of a power
consumption analytics product was nebulous and broad. After asking broad
questions to IT directors from several different industries, I was able to
uncover motivators. During these interviews, it was tempting to cherry-pick
statements to support my hypothesis. However, in the long-term, this would
have been a disservice to both the customer and my business. Instead, I
tried to understand what their real problems are in this domain, how they
were currently approaching them, and what success looks like to them.
Through a relentless pursuit of identifying the true, most-pressing
challenges of IT directors with regard to data center power consumption, I
was able to identify two narrow but incisive problems they wanted to solve:
quickly determining power capacity utilization on their x86 servers and
receiving actionable consumption reports at a weekly cadence.
As a direct result of persistent customer development, I was able to define a
specific solution for my target persona and reduce the scope of
development. Initially projected at 22 weeks, building a minimum viable
product took me only 12 weeks. Customer focus trimmed my development
time by 45%, nearly half the time. Within twelve months, I was able to
accomplish my goals and reduce the power-related operating expenditure of
a couple of organizations by approximately 8% for the fiscal quarter.
Being the sole person behind taking an idea and turning it into a solution
was full of rewards and challenges. In contrast to teams operating at a larger
scale, my initiative was constrained by both time and capital. However, by
investing significant upfront energy and time on empathizing with my ideal
customer and understanding their pain points, I was able to accomplish my
goals—in a fraction of the time.
Closing Thoughts
Jugaad Thinking for Product
Marketing
Jugaad is a colloquial Hindi word that roughly revolves around the idea of
creative improvisation or frugal innovation. Commonplace in many
countries where resources are not abundant, jugaad thinking manifests as
the fruit vendor breathing new life into a broken bicycle and miscellaneous
scraps and concocting a makeshift mango cargo carrier. It’s about doing
more with less and innovating in the face of constraints. It’s a unique spirit
and mindset when it comes to solving problems.
Jugaad offers tangible lessons for the product marketer, including on how
to operate with constraints, think with first principles, and deliver greater
value through empathy.
Operating with Constraints
Remember the sleeping bag purchase example for the Mt.Whitney trip in
Chapter Two? On a personal trip to the mountain with two friends, jugaad
was also a companion. Shopping was no exception. For our group of young
individuals, sleeping pads were notoriously expensive and a burden on our
budget. And yet, they were a necessity for heat insulation and a bit of
cushioning. Employing jugaad thinking broke down the challenge to
purchase a sleeping pad into three concrete requirements: must provide
insulation, must add some cushioning, must be far below commercial
sleeping pads’ price points.
We were laser-focused on solving these three pain points. Reviews on the
Internet about sleeping pads or the opinions of peers were not considered
because the only criteria under scrutiny were these three pain points.
Everything else was in the periphery. Our solution: an inflatable pool raft
from a dollar store, with some minor modifications to the inflation valve
and the base. It was a scrappy solution, but it worked. We got two nights of
perfect, warm sleep for a dollar and nine cents.
Thinking with First Principles
This approach not only worked for our small-scale recreational trip but is
also applicable to companies operating at a much larger scale with more
stakes on the line. According to Wido Menhardt, CEO of the Philips
Innovation Center in Bangalore, "[jugaad thinking] is always out-of-thebox, and it is typically very focused.” Philips uses this approach to develop
an edge, particularly in competitive markets with price-elastic consumers.
Menhardt states that this mindset “helps [them] focus on the essence of the
need, the real [customer] requirements, and often leads to taking the mental
leap that is required for a disruptive new design or product.”
This bold leap is about identifying the essence of the problem and the
solution needed. It’s about operating with first principles thinking.
First principles thinking is about reasoning from fundamental truths versus
reasoning by analogy. Reasoning by analogy is about relying much on the
knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions of others. Jugaad thinking parallels
and advocates for first principles thinking. During an afternoon plucking
and collecting oranges, I was bothered by the high-dwelling oranges
escaping my grasp, falling a great distance, and rupturing upon impact. If I
reasoned by analogy, I would have made a trip to the store, bought a ladder
and a basket, and attempted my backyard harvest. I would have done all this
without much thought since I’ve seen this before. The idea is ingrained in
us from advertisements, movies, and television: to harvest fruit trees, you
need a ladder and the other assortment of tools. The popular image in my
mind of how orange pickers function was to elevate myself and get closer to
the canopy of oranges.
Reasoning by first principles, however, forces me to pause and identify the
core problem. It forces me to define what my desired result is. In this case, I
just wanted the oranges I picked off to be intact. It doesn’t matter how I
accomplish this. I don’t necessarily have to prevent oranges from falling at
all—I just need to prevent them from breaking on impact. Intending to
soften the landing of oranges dislodged from the tree, I found a wooden
board, sliced out a few shards, and positioned it against the tree at an angle.
In simple jugaad fashion, I made a ramp that could shepherd oranges as
they fell and soften the blow of gravity. With a scrap of wood, I was able to
harvest twice as many oranges in half the time.
Defining the desired outcome and reasoning from fundamental truths is a
key aspect of product marketing. The role is not just about content creation
or indiscriminate awareness generation. As you engage in authoring a blog,
developing a webinar, or building content, adopting an outcome-centric
over an output-centric mindset is critical to meeting goals, whether that’s
increased revenue generation or getting more users.
In an output-centric mindset, the metrics are often leading indicators of
success. 25 blogs, 3 webinars this quarter, 10 case studies for a use case.
Moreover, the playbook for generating this content can quickly transform to
referring to that of competitors. With this mindset, the product marketing
process can become bound to quantity and the industry’s dogma. The
closest competitor’s typical solution brief has a top section devoted to show
company accolades, analyst statements, and metrics on how much they’ve
saved their clients? Dogmatic thinking would say copy it.
With an outcome-oriented approach, every campaign, asset, and effort has a
clear purpose. Creating an asset should start with the desired outcome. For a
communication and messaging platform startup trying to win more
healthcare customers, the goal would be to address concerns around the
security of the platform and healthcare data transmitted and stored. Since
healthcare providers may be cautious in adopting newer platforms, they
likely want to see other organizations in their industry show success with
the messaging platform. In addition to content that can help them make a
decision, they want social proof. By considering the goal—win more
healthcare customers—and how to accomplish it, the projects to embark on
become clear. It may make sense to focus on creating web and white paper
assets on healthcare security and create case studies on existing healthcare
customers. For this startup, they might want to include quotes from
executives of healthcare organizations who have benefitted from their
product. By considering the goal, the focus shifts from gaining asset parity
with the competition towards creating key outcomes.
Jugaad thinking helps you think less about going through an organizational
checklist and more on customer needs. During a product launch, there may
be moments when deviating from the team’s traditionally held launch bill of
materials is necessary. Rather than delivering a solution brief, a sales deck,
and a FAQ for the sake of checking off the mandated list of assets to create,
take a step back during your next launch planning hour and define the
following:
1. What is the purpose of this launch? What corporate and companylevel objectives am I trying to move forward?
2. What is the real value of this product I’m trying to launch and how
does it benefit my target audience?
3. What does my sales organization need to effectively sell to this
persona, and how can I reach my audience?
By forcing yourself to answer these questions, content takes a step back and
the customer and your company take center stage. Now, the questions don’t
revolve around the number of pieces of content to create but around the best
way to address the needs of your customer and company. The questions
shift from revolving around the number of sales enablement content to
churn out to understanding the optimal steps to ensure that revenue grows
by 70% year-over-year.
Delivering Value Through Empathy
Imagine heading to a café for your usual cup of coffee, but today, the barista
offers to roast the beans and grind them but informs you that due to budget
constraints, customers—you—are responsible for everything else: brewing,
frothing the milk, and pouring it in a cup. You would probably walk out as
quickly as you walked in. If you had to make two-thirds of your cup of
coffee, you would have done it at home, right? You went to the café so you
could unwind with an e-reader in one hand and a warm mocha in the other.
You didn’t make a visit to use the shop’s espresso machine to brew a cup
for yourself.
Although the café might believe they’re in the business of providing tools
and coffee mix to make a cup of coffee, customers want the complete
package. They want to be able to quickly choose a cup of coffee, pay for it,
and quickly be able to savor it in their hand.
This seems simple enough. A business solves customer problems. However,
the intricacies of your product or domain can get in the way of this
fundamental truth. Regardless of the nature of your product—whether it’s a
pair of sneakers or cybersecurity software for large enterprises—your
business should solve real customer problems. Understanding your
customers is the core step in being able to identify both articulable and
inarticulable needs.
That’s why I believe a jugaad approach offers lessons in understanding and
solving real problems. For some, jugaad implies the circumvention of a
problem or a makeshift, temporary hack. It’s much more than that. Jugaad
is about identifying the essence of a challenge and the core problems at
hand, and then solving it. According to Professor Jaideep Prabhu, author of
Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough
Growth, over the years, a rift between product development teams and
marketing has grown, with more value and emphasis attributed chiefly to
the technological development of products. Prabhu states however that in a
hyper-competitive market like today, jugaad offers a solution to maintain an
edge: put customer needs at the forefront of every decision, from
development to pricing. After all, companies are in the business of meeting
customer needs.
This isn’t a radical concept. Understanding customers and their needs more
closely can help us innovate in a way that delivers real value and allows us
to communicate value in a way that resonates. And being able to deliver
greater value enables us to capture more value—helping both our customers
and our business succeed.
According to Jaideep Prabhu, “marketers are central to driving the jugaad
innovation process in the organization.” In other words, customer focus for
product marketers is not a suggestion, it’s part of the job.
Resources
The following resources can help serve as a reference when creating
personas, defining positioning and messaging, and authoring case studies.
Persona Checklist
●
●
●
A brief summary of who they are
Common job titles
Demographics
●
●
●
●
●
●
●
●
Roles and responsibilities
How is their success measured?
Their role in the decision-making process
Their challenges, frustrations, and pain points
What motivates them to buy your product or a product like yours?
Quotes from actual interviews
The content they consume and their influencers
A memorable name, title, and photo that captures the essence of
the persona
Persona Example
The following persona, Sol Chang, is an example for a potential user of a
carbon emissions tracking app:
Sol Chang
The Green Hero
Sol is a young, passionate individual striving to reduce her
impact on the planet. She is conscious of her carbon
footprint and waste generated. She has a challenge in
tracking her actions and seeing if she needs to change
anything.
Her typical week’s climate-intensive activities could
consist of taking a short round-trip flight for work, eating
6x at a vegan restaurant, and buying a new article of
clothing.
Personal Background
●
Field Marketing Manager
●
24 years old
●
An avid user of her smartphone (4+ hours per day)
Goals
●
Reduce her carbon footprint
●
Inspire her family and friends to reduce their
impact
Challenges
●
She travels and consumes much—there’s no way to
track all the activities in her life
●
There’s no way to connect with others and
benchmark her footprint with that of others
Positioning Statement
For (target customer) who (statement of the need or opportunity),
(product name) is a (product category) that (statement of key benefit—
that is, the compelling reason to buy). Unlike (primary competitive
alternative), our product (statement of primary differentiation).
Positioning Statement Example
Description Example
For
Who
Your target
For business analysts at
customer
enterprises
Your
Who must provide reports
customer’s
frequently to executives, but
problem
forced to wait long times to be
provisioned an organization’s
data
Provides The
Provides a self-service option for
solution
analysts to search for and retrieve
your
data
product
provides
Unlike
Only
Alternative
Unlike legacy business
or existing
intelligence tools that take XX%
solutions
longer to obtain data
Elements
The only solution that indexes
that make
and can provide data in real-time
your
product
unique
Messaging Map Example
Product Name
FaceMap
Category
Building Access Control
Value Proposition
Reduce
breaches
and
improve
productivity by allowing employees
to badge using just their smiles.
Target Audience
Facility teams in enterprises with
>1000
employees
with
multiple
physical offices.
Audience Pain
Points
1.
Large enterprises’ facility teams
struggle with physical security
breaches due to weak access
control
(traditional
RFID
badges).
2. Facility teams spend 10+ hours
a week to provision forgotten or
lost badges.
3. Traditional security solutions
are not capable of provisioning
access to remote and multiple
offices.
Positioning
For facility teams in large, distributed
Statement
enterprises
frequent
who
breaches
struggle
with
and
lost
productivity, FaceMap is the fastest
and most secure facial recognition
software that replaces traditional
RFID badges, reducing breaches by
>50% as the only facial recognition
access method on the market.
Pillars
Pillar #1
Pillar #2
Pillar #3
Smile
Manage
Protect—
to
Globally.
end-to-
Unlock.
Supporting
Messages
1. A
2. B
3. C
end.
4. D
5. E
6. F
7. G
8. H
9. I
Case Study Interview Questions
1. What is your company known for? What’s your role?
2. What did [process] look like at your company before? What were
the biggest pain points you experienced?
3. What was the point at which you decided to look for a solution?
4. What was the first moment where you realized that [our product]
was a unique solution to your problem?
5. What does [process] look like at your company now?
6. What other [software/tools] do you use as part of your [process]
workflow?
7. Can you share any quantifiable metrics that you use to measure the
impact of [our product]?
8. What has your team been doing with the [time/capital/operating
expenses] saved?
9. What’s one thing you’d want someone who is considering using
[our product] to know?
B2B Case Study Template
Section
At a
Content
●
Glance
Context on the customer: Bullet points on their industry, their
position within their domain (Fortune 100), and the use case
under discussion
●
1-2 sentence summary of how your customers use your
product and the results they’ve seen
●
A customer quote from the interview that supports the essence
of the case study
●
The
●
Challenge
Metrics: 3 quantifiable bullet points on results
The problem and context, setting the technical context and
business challenge
●
A quote describing the breaking point when they started
looking for a new solution
The
●
Solution
Your differentiated solution—how your product uniquely
solves the problem
●
The way your product fits into the larger workflow of the
team and its implementation
●
A quote on the immediate impact on the team—productivity
and process improvement
The
●
Results
High-level impact of your product, including time saved,
money saved, opportunity opened—calling out other projects
the team can now work on
●
A quote describing the long-term impact on the team and
business
References
Chapter One
“Art: Meaning of Art by Lexico.” Lexico Dictionaries | English, Lexico Dictionaries,
www.lexico.com/definition/art.
Chapter Two
George, Babu & Edward, Manoj. (2009). Cognitive Dissonance and Purchase Involvement in the
Consumer Behavior Context.
Lorenz, Hendrik, "Ancient Theories of Soul", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer
2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/ancientsoul/
Middleton, Daina. Marketing in the Participation Age: a Guide to Motivating People to Join, Share,
Take Part, Connect, and Engage. John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2013.
Chapter Four
Christensen, Clayton M., et al. “Know Your Customers' ‘Jobs to Be Done.’” Harvard Business
Review, Harvard Business Review, 24 Jan. 2020, hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-bedone.
Heath, Chip, and Dan Heath. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Take Hold and Others Come Unstuck.
Random House Books, 2009.
Chapter Five
Brookins, Miranda. “Success Rate of Cold Calling.” Small Business - Chron.com, Chron.com, 21
Nov. 2017, smallbusiness.chron.com/success-rate-cold-calling-10031.html.
Godin, Seth. Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable. Portfolio, 2009.
Chapter Six
Harapiak, Clayton (2013): IKEA's International Expansion. Published in: International Journal of
Business Knowledge and Innovation in Practice, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1 December 2013): pp. 21-42.
Osur, Laura, "Netflix and the Development of the Internet Television Network" (2016). Dissertations
- ALL. 448. https://surface.syr.edu/etd/448
Chapter Seven
Viardot, E. (2004). Successful Marketing Strategy for High-Tech Firms. Boston: Artech House.
Chapter Nine
Reichheld, F. & Schefter, P.. (2000). E-Loyalty: Your Secret Weapon on the Web. Harvard Business
Review. 78.
Squared, Insight. “The Economics of the Upsell.” InsightSquared, InsightSquared, 8 June 2016,
www.insightsquared.com/2016/05/the-economics-of-the-upsell/.
Chapter Ten
Clement, J. “Google: Quarterly Revenue 2019.” Statista, 29 Apr. 2020,
www.statista.com/statistics/267606/quarterly-revenue-of-google/.
“Lifecycle FAQ - Internet Explorer and Edge - Microsoft Lifecycle.” Microsoft Lifecycle | Microsoft
Docs, docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/faq/internet-explorer-microsoft-edge.
Nadella, Satya. Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future
for Everyone. Harper Business, an Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2019.
Closing Thoughts
Radjou, Navi, et al. Jugaad Innovation Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth.
Penguin Random House India Pvt. Ltd, 2017.
Wylie, Ian. “Jugaad Innovation: How to Disrupt-It-Yourself.” Google, Google, Dec. 2012,
www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/jugaad-innovation/.
Thank you Sara Hunter, Jeevan Patil, Nicolas Jacques, and Ramya B.T. for
your invaluable feedback.
About Me
Srini Sekaran
I love being at the intersection of creativity and technology. I’ve led several
product launches at high-growth companies in Silicon Valley, leading
product marketing for key revenue-driving products and leveraging
customer empathy to shape product strategy.
I previously worked in product management and engineering roles at
organizations such as NASA and Cisco. I also founded an enterprise startup
backed by Georgia Tech.
In my free time, I write about product, marketing, and technology.
Inspiration permitting, I sometimes write poetry.
Follow me on Twitter @srinisekaran. Always happy to learn and help. Send
me your feedback and questions.