Hey there. This is The Overview, a weekly roundup of noteworthy B2B SaaS stuff. You’ll find interesting thoughts, articles, and more from around the internet.
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The only thing
One of the core things I took away from advertising school is that marketing is all about creating behavior change.
It’s not enough to just get someone to engage with a single campaign. You have to have enough resonance, engagement, and repetition so that someone thinks something new: you’re the best brand for X, the solution we need to buy, the product I’m going to use.
“Why should I choose you?” is the one question that us product marketers need to know inside out. This means:
- Having a focused definition of your customer
- Understanding who they really are
- Knowing what value your product delivers them
- Knowing how you differentiate
Do you do this often enough?
Sometimes I get stuck. Maybe I’m confused about what customers are looking for, or how to solve a go-to-market problem, or maybe I’m wordsmithing and can’t think of the right phrasing.
Listening to sales calls always help. Watching demos gives me inspiration. Reading customer service tickets sparks new ideas.
The more we can build empathy for our customers, the better we can represent them in our work and in our business. This doesn’t have to be a fully-fledged Voice of Customer program with all the bells-and-whistles. It can be as simple as keeping tabs on what customers are saying through the channels and mechanisms they’re already engaging with.
The more empathy we can build, the better our first-order and second-order decisions will be.
The real levers
First, what a burn. This is why I don’t do ‘takedowns’ of other people’s positioning – we simply don’t know enough about their context.
Secondly, this is a great example of where focusing on the wrong levers for growth won’t give you the results you need.
In early-stage startups without product/market-fit, partnerships is one area where you can sink a lot of time without much reward.
In growing startups, it might be PR or events that sound like a good idea, but don’t actually have any real impact on the bottom line.
When you figure out a) what the right levers are, and b) what the wrong levers are, tell everyone!
Swipe File: Sales cadence
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If you work closely with sales teams – as I guess you do! – then we need to have a good understanding of how they work.
Sales strategy is closely aligned with GTM: the customer, the product, the pricing, the motion. But sales can have the best strategy in the world and still fail if execution is not there.
This recent article from Notion (the VC, not the software company) breaks it down and includes this really interesting quote on the importance of sales cadence – and how product marketers can tap into it as a source of insight.
“In today’s data/metric driven world, sales cadence is probably more important than ever. When done well it provides the mechanisms to understand not only the quantitative information you need but also the qualitative information as well: the ‘feel’ of how things are going. What’s the market perception of a new proposition? What could be improved? How is everyone feeling about the year and how to achieve their numbers? Who are the competitors and how are they evolving? Todays’ world of technology is morphing faster than ever so measuring data is only useful when seen in conjunction with the real-world experiences”.
Roger Walton, CRO, Resistant AI
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