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Mastering the Art of Positioning: Robert Kaminski's Guide for B2B SaaS Success
209 Plays11 months ago
In the latest episode of Marketing Spark, we talked to Robert Kaminski, an expert in product marketing and co-founder of Fletch PMM.
Kaminski shared his journey into the world of product marketing, emphasizing the non-linear path that led him to co-found Fletch PMM. He provided a rich context for understanding the evolving landscape of product marketing, particularly in the realm of B2B SaaS startups. His insights offered a valuable perspective on how companies can navigate the challenges of establishing a strong market presence amidst fierce competition.
The core discussion of the podcast revolved around the critical role of specificity in positioning and messaging for startups. Kaminski highlighted the common pitfalls that early-stage companies encounter, such as a lack of clarity and a tendency to overgeneralize their value propositions. He explained how Fletch PMM helps these companies refine their messaging by developing a clear, specific framework that aligns with their product development and market strategy.
An engaging part of the conversation was his emphasis on the homepage as a crucial marketing asset, arguing that it should reflect the company’s unique value proposition and serve as the first chapter in their brand story.
, Kaminski shared a compelling case study of Levity.ai, demonstrating how a focused positioning strategy can transform a startup’s market approach. He also delved into the importance of understanding buyer personas and the ‘jobs to be done’ framework, which are essential for developing effective messaging that resonates with the target audience.
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Transcript
The Role of Brand Positioning in Competitive Markets
00:00:09
Speaker
If you read my LinkedIn posts or blog, you'll know that I have a fascination, maybe even an obsession with brand positioning and messaging. In my humble opinion, they're a powerful one-two punch that underpins a company's marketing, sales, product development, HR, fundraising, and more.
00:00:32
Speaker
And in today's competitive market, where demand is soft and standing out as crucial, positioning and messaging are even more important.
00:00:41
Speaker
But honestly, it sometimes feels like I'm Don Quixote tilting at windmills. As much as brand positioning and messaging matter, they're not the biggest priorities for companies laser focused on sales and leads. CEOs and marketing leaders see positioning and messaging as nice to haves rather than need to haves. And that's a mistake strategically and tactically.
Introducing Robert Kaminski from Fletch PMM
00:01:02
Speaker
On today's podcast, I'm thrilled to have Robert Kaminski with Fletch PMM, which develops positioning and website messaging for early stage startups. And you can see that Fletch drinks the Kool-Aid with its homepage message, which declares that SaaS messaging is garbage. Make yours not suck. Robert, welcome to marketing spark. Thanks so much for having me, Mark. Good to be here.
00:01:27
Speaker
After that, a mini diatribe. Before we start by looking at how did you get into product marketing and what led you to co-found Fletch PMN?
Robert Kaminski's Unique Career Path
00:01:35
Speaker
My career has taken, I think as many product folks, a non-linear path. And I've been fortunate enough to take, I call them tours of duty across engineering and product, and then pivoted over to the sales side of the house before officially getting into product marketing. For me,
00:01:51
Speaker
without even really realizing it being around early stage startups, as I was always doing product marketing before was product marketing. What do we build? Who are we actually building for? How do we take this thing to market? Like all those things used to just fall under the umbrella of you're either building something or you're selling something. And so getting exposure to those different areas, it was just a no brainer that connecting those is the way I was doing work anyway.
00:02:13
Speaker
And it wasn't until I officially recognized that, and this was maybe five, six years ago now, I'm doing product marketing and spent some time at Oracle and doing product marketing with them, which was very different for me. I'd been at startups prior to that. Product marketing really is a different beast for early stage companies than it is for late stage.
00:02:33
Speaker
left Oracle after doing that for about a year. And I joined a digital product studio where I met my now co-founder, Anthony Pieri. And at the product studio, we were working specifically with early stage companies on all things product, all things go to market in a pure agency model where it's all custom, really expensive. One of the things we were collaborating on was how do you sell strategy and
00:02:56
Speaker
product work to early stage companies. We tried a bunch of different stuff, different outbound campaigns. You do it inbound. And one of the things we started tinkering with was LinkedIn. And when we started doing that, what we realized is you have to get really specific in order to sell a service to an early stage company.
Developing a Value Proposition Framework
00:03:13
Speaker
And so we took all this knowledge we had around product and go to market. And we just kept asking ourselves, like, what's the thing they're really struggling with?
00:03:19
Speaker
And all of it really boils down to value propositions. And so we started asking ourselves, what's in a value proposition? We've been doing this work for years, but no one really has a, no one really knows what's in them, which is like the hilarious thing to us. We were looking around, like asking all these people that we'd worked with, what do you think of value prop is? And no one knew. And so we set out to develop a framework for defining what a value proposition is in relation to.
00:03:45
Speaker
how you build what you build and how you go to market. After throwing a bunch of stuff at a wall and doing it on LinkedIn, it really helped us hone in and narrow our thinking.
Challenges for Early-Stage Companies in Strategy Focus
00:03:53
Speaker
And so flash forward doing that for two years, starting from the hypothesis of, Oh, we're product marketers for early stage companies all the way down to this very specific, where we now just do product marketing for early stage B2B SaaS, usually horizontal companies that are trying to rewrite their homepage.
00:04:12
Speaker
And they're having a hell of a time because their positioning's a little bit all over the place. And so we founded Fletch technically inside of another agency. We were doing the work for them, but we were probably for the past six or seven months, so we decided to spin out and go on our own as we really built our business around our audience on LinkedIn. And here we are today. A lot of different directions we could go there. One of them I would suggest is that strategy for early stage companies is a very hard sell because they're focused on
00:04:42
Speaker
making marketing happen, driving brand awareness, leads and sales. When you say to them, you got to take a step back and do strategy, most of them say, many of them say, I don't have time for that because we need to move the business forward. The other thing when it comes to early stage SaaS companies is that you could argue that the barriers to entry are dramatically lower than what they used to be, especially when you get into situations where you're low code or no code. So going from an idea to
00:05:12
Speaker
a product can happen a lot more quickly. But what I find in my experience is that companies are very product driven, very sales driven, and they fall down when it comes to marketing. And even at a basic level, when it comes to having a narrative that is clear and doesn't even have to be compelling, but just has to be clear and makes people curious or inspired or motivated.
00:05:40
Speaker
I'm interested in your perspective on the common mistakes that early stage SaaS companies make with their positioning and messaging. You and I know it's important. Yeah.
Common Positioning and Messaging Mistakes
00:05:50
Speaker
But a lot of entrepreneurs see it as something that's a supporting actor as opposed to being one of the stars of the show. So, you know, where do they go wrong? Is it ignorance? Is it just not appreciating the value of positioning and messaging? Our take is like startups are hard. Like by definition,
00:06:07
Speaker
There's so many, not only known unknowns, but there's unknown unknowns everywhere. Like they're partially built things that haven't been done, haven't been tested. I don't think it's as much ignorance as it is from the get-go, really figuring out how to create that new value for folks in, especially emerging markets where a lot of startups play, just challenging right off the bat.
00:06:28
Speaker
there's a lot of mistakes. We built our whole business essentially on the mistakes that people run into. And I'll list off a few. The biggest one that often is the tip of the spear that cascades into all these other challenges really is just a lack of specificity. And it's a lack of specificity on what problem are you actually solving? Who are you actually solving for? And then going to your comment of clarity is like, what are you building to do that? When you have
00:06:51
Speaker
No, I would say more broad sense. And so a lack of specificity of what you're actually doing that you start to overbuild your product. You're like building stuff, throwing it against the wall, which, and here's like the rub, like in the beginning, you have to be broad, like your early stage positioning.
00:07:07
Speaker
is going to be broad, even thinking back to what we did with Fletch, product marketing for early stage companies. It's the whole world. It's the universe. And you have to start there, but really the ones that do the best job with their positioning recognize that they need to get specific pretty quickly and start to narrow because that's where you can get more control and actually shape the narrative and shape the messaging around it. The other things we see beyond just being specific in the positioning and messaging is probably the big ones leading with benefits.
00:07:37
Speaker
And we fundamentally believe that's a mistake for early stage companies. There's a lot of great marketing stuff out there. That's don't talk about your product, talk about all the value and the benefits it provides. And it's not bad advice. If you're in an established business and everyone knows what you do, but that scenario is not startups. It's anti startups. No one knows what the hell you do. No one knows who you are. If by leading with benefits, you're like playing the big boy grownup game.
00:08:06
Speaker
In an arena where it just makes no sense. And so we firmly believe that to counter that you should be speaking to your capabilities, effectively what someone would do with your product and use that as a foundation point to then get to the different benefits they have. That's the biggest thing.
Branding Strategy for Startups: When and How?
00:08:23
Speaker
The other one that comes to mind is these companies have a tendency to want to do branding upfront and
00:08:30
Speaker
Some folks have called us the anti-brand marketing group, which is partially true. I think when we look at startups, there's very few that actually compete on brand in the early days. Our point of view on brands is actually this
00:08:44
Speaker
collection of everything you do and say over a long period of time. And what brand marketing is at later stage companies is like the tagline and this higher valued story. And there's nothing wrong with that. But in the beginning, you just have no clue what that is. And if you just say, look, we're branded now or this bigger picture thing, it goes back to leading with benefits. And we think that's just fundamentally broken. And so it's ironic that even with us building Fletch,
00:09:11
Speaker
We've never thought about building a brand. We've always just been very tactical of who we're helping, how we're serving them, and what we do. And now we have people bump into us. They're like, your brand's so strong. How did you build it? And we're like, we just, we weren't thinking about building a brand. We were just thinking of like, how do we deliver the most value? And when you do that repetitively for years, you're going to develop a reputation.
00:09:31
Speaker
ultimately is the same thing as the brand. It's all positive. It was the big ones. I want to talk a little more about the balancing act between specificity, or did I say that word? About being specific in your positioning and messaging and the need to be broad. Your hypothesis is that
00:09:53
Speaker
release age companies need to be broad so that they can capture the attention of lots of different kinds of people as they figure out who they really serve and how they can differentiate themselves from the competitors. When you look at the CRM space, for example, there's 5,000 different CRMs.
00:10:13
Speaker
being specific is very important, but as a product marketer, it must be really hard to say, listen, we've got to go down this specific path because this is the way that we're going to establish ourselves as being the obvious choice for these types of customers.
00:10:31
Speaker
but not feel like you're backing yourself into a corner. But you're also saying at the same time, for these specific types of customers, we're not really for all those other types of customers. And that's a challenge that takes some courage to say, this is where we're at. And this is how we're going to operate, provide some thoughts on how a company and how product marketers can balance these two different threads that pull at them. I got a lot of thoughts on this, because it's fundamentally what we solve with every company that comes to us who
00:11:00
Speaker
They're trying to be broad to appeal to that large audience. From a go to market standpoint, incredibly flawed. When we say starting broad, it's more being open to the opportunities, assuming you don't know the opportunity. And so we're talking very early stage. The moment you start to get signal on an opportunity is the moment you need to capture that and get specific.
00:11:22
Speaker
So the analogy that we bump into is assuming you have the opportunity to give a presentation to a hundred people where there's going to be a mixture of folks in the room, product leaders, engineers, marketers, and you can even see this. I don't know. We'll just take Saster as a random example. Uh, but somehow your company is going to be able to talk and speak about something. And this is what meant to be an analogy of like those hundred people represent the market, all the different segments you could potentially serve. What most founders do is they say, there's going to be all these different people in the room.
00:11:51
Speaker
let me put together a talk track that kind of touches on these broader things that everyone will relate to, but what they're trading off is that specific piece, and so they go give the presentation. What's really happening from a resonance level is that when you deliver that pitch where 100 people only partially get, because you're not getting into the weeds, there's no insights, you leave where zero people are really
The Importance of Specificity in Positioning
00:12:15
Speaker
on your side. You've rallied no one.
00:12:17
Speaker
versus if you went into that presentation and you said, there's going to be three people in your target market. Like these are the people that like, I have something so specific and unique that I think they'd be interested in. And you give the pitch and you tell that to founders and they're like, but wait, 97% of the people aren't going to resonate at all. Wait, no, stop. The alternative is 0%.
00:12:39
Speaker
But we don't think that way. We think in terms of this generic piece. And so there's this issue for early stage, and that's why we say it's all about speed is you can approach things broadly, but when you get into specific go-to-market motions, you have to execute those specifically. Case in point for us is when we were in the broad realm, we were still writing and trying to write about very specific things.
00:13:02
Speaker
We would talk about positioning for a specific type of company. We talked about pricing. We talked about road mapping. And we're going very deep on these subjects and then listening for signal. That's the only way to really get those voltage connections where it's like, oh, something's here. And the way this really fleshed out is as we talked about a bunch of stuff very specifically from the meta view, we're very broad.
00:13:26
Speaker
but we were doing it so specific that we'd get all these founders to reach out to us. And so there was a period of time for about six months where we had no clue what our positioning was, but we were having meetings like this 20 minute, 30 minute meetings where founders would reach out and be like, Hey, I saw this post. I think you can help me.
00:13:42
Speaker
and we'd get in the room and we'd pitch them almost anything. One day we were positioned as a pricing expert for PLG SaaS. The next day we're like an enterprise sales tech company and we're all under the realm of product marketing, but we're testing the messaging so specifically what we were looking for were patterns.
00:14:00
Speaker
where on any one of those things, were we getting repeat visits? Was a message really triggering? Where our messaging was literally changing by the hour. And myself and Anthony would like, we get through the day, we both had 10 calls with founders. How did yours go? What happened? That's our story. And so what it comes back to is the balance is, and for early stage, is being able to move out of big picture strategy mode, opportunity seeking,
00:14:24
Speaker
an actual opportunity testing where you're going super narrow in the market, recognizing that when you go to market, we assume that once we put a message out there, that's what we're positioned as, and so far from the truth. No one cares, no one's going to see it, what you say in one room, even what you put in the public. What you put into one LinkedIn post,
00:14:46
Speaker
It's going to be forgotten the next day. That's another thing. People think, oh, I positioned. I declared my positioning. No, the way you actually position over time is go say that 10 times a day for a year. Then you'll start to see your position and get shaped.
Creating Effective Homepage Messaging
00:15:01
Speaker
I don't know if I directly answered your question, but that's how we think about the difference between theoretical broadness and tactical specificity in relation to actually solving for what your positioning should be.
00:15:14
Speaker
I find that journey from broadness to being specific really interesting. And in our world, April Dunford is the queen of positioning. She's really established herself as the voice. If you go to one of her presentations, she always talks about her experience at Siebel Systems, which was a CRM that she worked for. One of the things she talks about is they were trying to compete with some of the big CRM companies and they discovered along the way, probably by simply listening
00:15:41
Speaker
to their target audiences that the product resonated with it.
00:15:46
Speaker
investors, financial companies. I think that's the target audience. Then suddenly they shifted their positioning to, we are the CRM for this specific types of user. It does reflect the fact that you may position yourself in a certain way and name yourself a specific customers, but the market will tell you how you may need to think about yourself. It does demonstrate the position is very fluid. Sometimes it's as much art as science. And sometimes you find your way because people tell you where to go.
00:16:13
Speaker
I want to get tactically here and ask about the framework that you use to create a compelling homepage message. How do you take that message and that framework and how do companies use it to drive go-to-market success?
00:16:31
Speaker
It all comes back to like really defining a core value proposition. And there's a couple of key parts to it. If I zoom way out, our process when we work with these early stage companies is effectively to uncover who they're actually trying to help. And so we spend a lot of time upfront, just asking them like, who's your ideal customer? Like what are they struggling with? And we have these elements that sort of piece mail out the market view, the market side and their company type.
00:17:00
Speaker
just usually starts to get into like different models and industries. There's an element called persona. We refer to it as champion of who actually needs to be receiving the message upfront. And that's another thing specific to B2B is we know that there's so much nuance where when you change the persona, everything about the way you talk about yourself needs to shift. And so we spend a lot of time figuring out who's the main person, who's the tip of the spear, where we're going to spend the majority of our time to really solve for the core positioning.
00:17:29
Speaker
We then have this box that we've called it a bunch of things, the situation, the job to be done. Effectively, what we ask is that person who's in that specific company, what are they trying to do even before your product's in the picture? And it's usually one of two things. We try and get it down to an activity level. Like what things are they doing? But sometimes it's an outcome, you know, trying to make an impact on some goal.
00:17:52
Speaker
And then we have what's called current way, which is basically ask the question of like, how are they carrying out those activities today? And what problems are they bumping into? And so we spend a lot of time figuring out like, who's this target audience? And what surfaces very quickly, because almost everyone we work with has multiple audiences in mind.
00:18:09
Speaker
we start to highlight the implications of, hey, when you change the who, and also what they're doing, everything about your positioning is going to shift. We start to then factor in, and this is probably the missing piece, I think with most positioning exercises, is what are your current resources?
00:18:26
Speaker
It's like founders get into these positioning exercises and they think they can do anything they want. They look at companies like Slack and Stripe. You're not Slack and Stripe. You're not worth $50 billion. You have yourself, you hired one marketer and you have a sales guy. Your positioning work's going to look a little bit different. The advantage goes back to specificity. And so we always ask like, where's your growth going to come from in the short term?
00:18:48
Speaker
And so that's step one, who's the audience for this? We then really develop an approach of how are we going to explain your product? Fundamentally, there's two pieces there. Do we explain you in a competitive differentiated way or a contextual differentiated way? And the reason we do this is like good positioning really is really all about reference points.
00:19:08
Speaker
Because when you're building something new, you're really just trying to connect. How does a customer place you in their mind? And they have to do that based on where they're starting today. What's really common to do one of the two and competitive would be something like Slack saying, we're going to replace email. Don't send an email. Use Slack. I know what email does. You already get a sense of what Slack does.
00:19:26
Speaker
The alternative is Slack said, Hey, I want to do contextual. They would speak more to the workflow. You know how when you're trying to send messages to your team and no one reads all the messages and everything gets lost. You Slack, we have this thing with threads that kind of solves that. It's where you're speaking to the specific like activities that they're carrying out.
00:19:43
Speaker
And so we do that, and then it's about developing what are the arguments that support that. Let's uncover who it's for, uncover how we're going to approach positioning, and then what are the leading value propositions? What things would you say to that group if you were in front of them to get them interested in your product?
00:19:59
Speaker
And the way we work that is really two ways. Like one's top down, one's bottom up. The bottom up one is usually the most effective where we basically map out essentially all their activities. And we go through a similar exercise. How do they do that specific thing? And what sucks about it? And that's okay. What did you build? Did you build anything that addresses that? And what's left over is this complete set of all the features you've built and all the steps they're doing. We give it the scoring where we start to pull out the pieces that are the most compelling.
00:20:28
Speaker
And so by the time we get through all of that, we've uncovered core positioning via target audience, an approach to the market, and then the three things that we should say to them. And then the last thing that we do is we give them a marketing asset. We write their homepage for them. We turn that into copy. And so a bit long-winded, but fundamentally it's three steps is like tune and figure out the positioning, figure out what to say, and then turn that into something they might actually use in their go to market.
00:20:54
Speaker
A quick question about buyer personas related to your comment about the champion in the last six months, and this was predicated by a conversation I had with Jim Krause from the Buyer Persona Institute.
00:21:08
Speaker
the value of buyer personas and traditional buyer personas are like, this is the demographics, how much money they make and what they do when they're not working. It's very high level, very nonspecific. And I've changed my view on buyer personas because I think they need to be aligned with the jobs to be done approach, really getting into how people think, feel,
00:21:30
Speaker
the different ways that they do their jobs right now, some of the options, some of the tools that they use, really getting very granular into understanding how your target audiences do their job and what would trigger them to change course. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of creating buyer personas and how it helps you shape your messaging and positioning strategies? You nailed it on the head. We're not big believers in the demographic piece and describing a day in the life type stuff necessarily. For us, it really comes back to
00:22:00
Speaker
You said the job. It's like, what are they doing? What's their situation? So context does matter. I don't really care how they have that. It makes me think of the personas. I think it's Ozzy Osbourne and Bill Gates or someone, and they both are the same persona in some degree and some breakdown.
00:22:16
Speaker
This goes back to the contextual piece. What activities are they doing and how are they doing it today? Being really fundamental in a B2B context. The other piece to this related to where personas really impacts that is the person's gonna change the view on their situation and their job. This is really misunderstood. A lot of folks in B2B come in and they're like, yeah, we're gonna sell to these companies and these companies have a job. And it's like, no, not really.
00:22:44
Speaker
People have jobs associated to that. We narrow the focus to the tip of the spear because at the end of the day, we're just trying to articulate your value upfront to get people into a buying process.
00:22:56
Speaker
And this gets us into the second flavor of a personas, so to speak, even though we don't really build them out this way, is like, where in the journey is that persona? You asked earlier on about where some of the mistakes made. There's this tendency of companies to try and over message everything. And I think it's because they're combining all these personas into one.
00:23:17
Speaker
and they're combining where everyone's mindset is of whether they haven't used us, are they aware of us? Are they in a different problem? Are they an existing customer? They message all of them the same way. One of the things we encourage is make sure that the actual individual role is considered related to the activity that they're doing. Otherwise, you'll end up with just mixed, mismatched messaging that doesn't work.
00:23:40
Speaker
And then you also need to consider what marketing asset is this going to go into? This gets into a really big topic. It's what do you say top of funnel? What do you say middle funnel? What do you say bottom? What do you say in the buying process? The question we'll get from a lot of founders when we're trying to work on positioning.
00:23:55
Speaker
It's like, yeah, we're trying to compete with all these people. And like, how do we say we're better than them? We started asking about how people actually buy their product. Those competitors don't come up until they're about to close. There's this tendency to them because they're thinking about their pipeline. Oh, we need a message upfront. We're better than Salesforce. We're better than this. When it's, wait a minute, that's only a message for people who are in your pipeline.
00:24:20
Speaker
So it's a very narrow group versus, and we're working on website messaging. The people on your website, they're not thinking about Salesforce yet. They're thinking about, Hey, I'm in this situation. I'm trying to do something. So they need a different message. And so it gets into a really complex set of things. And so if I were to summarize super important to us, the attribute piece doesn't matter nearly as much as the context and what they're trying to do. That's like foundationally how we even build out our ideal customer profiles.
Measuring ROI for Positioning and Messaging
00:24:49
Speaker
One of the challenges that I run into when I'm doing positioning and messaging work with companies is that they ask about the deliverables. We go through all this research. We look at buyer personas. We do competitive analysis. There's a lot of work that needs to happen. And at the end of the day,
00:25:11
Speaker
The question is also, what do I get? What are you going to give me? One question that I want to ask you. The other side of the coin is, what's my ROI from all this positioning and messaging strategy? How can I measure whether the work that you've done actually worked? In the case of Fletch, maybe you could use maybe testing on homepage messaging pre and now, but
00:25:34
Speaker
There's so much subjectivity when it comes to positioning and messaging in a data-driven world. So two-prong question here. One is what are the deliverables and how do companies measure ROI so they can look at someone like you and I and go, yes, the work you did was awesome and it really worked.
00:25:51
Speaker
The first one, Deliverables, is really funny. We've taken our process or we've worked on a process with about 110 startups so far. The first 20 or 30 or so, we were just delivering what we call this messaging house. It's basically like the strategic canvas of here's our positioning and our supporting messaging.
00:26:10
Speaker
And we still do that. That's like a key part. It's like that second step before we move into copywriting. But when we put that in front of folks, they're like, this is so great. I'm like looking at my positioning. I'm looking at what I should say. And they had the exact question, now what do I do? We're like, go build your product to do this. Go say this. Go work on like your website. Put this into a sales pit. Go do the work that is selling your product. And they all were like, they don't know where to begin.
00:26:37
Speaker
we realized really quickly that we had to anchor around an asset. And we probably could have picked any asset from content marketing things that they could have been doing. We decided to choose the homepage, and we did that strategically because we believe that the homepage is this mirror image of your positioning, or it's this litmus test of, can you communicate your value in a short period of time? And there's some art to that.
00:26:58
Speaker
So that's one, those are the assets that we think about because they do struggle, especially these early stage folks. The second question is a big one of measurement. How do you measure positioning and messaging? Honestly, if someone solves that, they'll be making a bunch of money. The way we combat that, because we get the question from folks.
00:27:16
Speaker
When you get into assets, what are you trying to actually do? And some folks come to us and they're trying to increase conversions, conversions to what? Because without context, that means nothing. A specific example is we worked with a company who came to us and we have pretty good conversions on our homepage message. We get 80 meetings a month. We go, okay, that's great. But we thought their messaging was not so great. And they're like, when we go through this, are we going to get a hundred?
00:27:41
Speaker
We're like, is the goal 100 or is the goal the actual amount that fit your product that are going to be good customers at the end? There's a very real outcome that's extremely positive where instead of 80 leads, we get you 50 leads, but they're much more vetted into what you actually do. By the time they get into the demo and the sales process, they're more likely to buy. For them, it clicked. For others, they look at that and they're like, they don't understand the connection of what position investing is this big picture piece.
00:28:08
Speaker
The way we combat it ultimately is we don't promise anything other than clarity around your positioning and clarity around your message. Anything else would be BS. And we think a lot of agencies out there that are like, hey, well, fix your positioning and improve your growth and all that. We think it's bullshit. They can't promise that. There's too many variables. We have no control over what they've built. We have no control over their talent and the channels they're using, all the stuff that they're bringing to the site.
00:28:37
Speaker
You're effectively asking, how do you measure product market fit when you're making changes? And really product market fit, it's like really difficult to measure. And it's usually something you measure retroactively. Oh, look at all that. That's our views on that. It's obviously pretty squishy in terms of a topic, but we just tell them we don't measure it. We want to give you competence and clarity to know what you're saying. And you got to go test this and it's going to change your early stage. It's going to be wrong.
00:29:05
Speaker
But that's how we approach it. Yeah. Two thoughts on that. In part, messaging and positioning fit into the marketing mix. And that marketing mix can involve a number of different levers. If you're looking in isolation at positioning and messaging as a game changer, then you're ignoring all the other elements that come into play. The other thought, and you mentioned it at the end of your answer, and this is the KPI that I think should be focused on is confidence.
00:29:34
Speaker
when it comes to positioning and messaging. And this is squishy too. What you want is people to look at the new narrative, the new story, the new thing that you're telling the world about your product and why it matters. And you want people to feel, yeah, this feels right to me. This feels good to me.
00:29:51
Speaker
The entire organization rallies around it because it's something that they can believe in. It's something fundamentally they see as being true and authentic. It's not marketing speak. It's not something that you crafted because you wanted to simply stand up from everybody else, but it reflects
00:30:08
Speaker
your company's purpose, if I can use that word, and your reason for being and it establishes what you do and why you matter to the people who matter to you. So that's my view of the world, which aligns with yours. We've talked a lot about positioning and messaging at a conceptual level. So theoretically, we both find that the fact that
00:30:28
Speaker
It's a game changer. It makes a difference. You should do it, blah, blah, blah. But it would be great if you could do a walkthrough through a successful positioning and messaging engagement. I'm interested in getting your insider's view on a client that came to you with a
00:30:48
Speaker
a challenge or a problem or an opportunity and the journey to take them from their current state to the promised land, a phrase that Donald Miller uses a lot. Can you give me an example of a company that reflects the approach that you're taking and give people some sense of how you change their positioning and messaging?
00:31:11
Speaker
Absolutely.
Case Study: Levity.ai's Positioning Strategy
00:31:12
Speaker
A company we worked with recently, super slick product, they're called levity.ai. They've raised some seed money and they've effectively built a tool that lets you use AI for workflows that you can't really automate today with Zapier or if this, then that. And when they came to us, actually, let me back up. The companies that come to us
00:31:37
Speaker
Fundamentally, we think they come in three varieties in relation to their positioning. Number one, vertical companies, which honestly are the most, I'll say easy to work with, but they're the ones who have already declared, we're going to help this group. We're going to help these people in healthcare, vertically oriented.
00:31:56
Speaker
They already have such a leg up because they're differentiations built in their specificity. We think we're big believers in vertical SaaS. Usually when folks come to us in those scenarios, they just have a messaging problem, not so much a positioning problem. It's more sorting through. What do we say? We know who we're for and we're just having, we're struggling to figure out what we actually introduce about the product. The second type of company that comes to us is horizontal. These folks are like, we saw a bunch of different people, but they all have the same problem, the same use case, that same job to be done.
00:32:25
Speaker
And for them, the exercise is really like, how do we pinpoint that job to be done? And is it actually in language where everyone would say, that's my situation. So Calendly is probably one of the most perfect, perfect horizontal examples.
00:32:37
Speaker
the way they phrase it is, hey, if you're trying to schedule meetings over email, you would need Calendly. And whether you're a salesperson, whether you're a school teacher, like if you're doing that, you go, I might be able to use this. And that's purely horizontal. Now this third type and the type that levity falls into is what we call a platform product. And they're basically a collection of horizontal companies. So the crux of the issue is a product like levity,
00:33:04
Speaker
It's a builder of other things. It's very similar to the air tables and the notions of the world. I can use air table to build a CRM. I can use it to build a content calendar. Shit, that creates a marketing challenge. Like those people are, those are different people in different situations trying to do different things with these types of companies. They came to us and they had this challenge. Hey, we built this thing that lets people build cool things with AI. It's like a no-code tool.
00:33:30
Speaker
What do we do? And our exercise, the first thing is, and they have some traction right now, was really an audit of who's using the product now. Who are the early adopters that saw this thing and took the first step to enter into those use cases. We threw all this stuff on the board. It was a bunch of stuff. And I actually, I have it up in front of me. It's like.
00:33:46
Speaker
founders, customer support teams, human resources, ops roles, sales teams. And they're doing all these different things. They're managing inbound tickets, they're surveying customer feedback, they're synthesizing call notes, they're triaging company emails, they're conducting voice to the customer research, they're doing all this stuff. And we just look at them and we're like, okay, that's great. What the exercise began with is just, where do you think your growth's going to come from in the short term? And I think all platform companies, and even all horizontal, but especially these platform companies have to make a decision early on. When you think of someone like Airtable,
00:34:16
Speaker
And I've heard their founders speak of this on other podcasts as well. They had the broad thing where they just let early adopters pick up all these use cases. But at some point they had to rally around that early signal and start creating things like templates. And templates are this asset that we believe should mimic your go to market assets, getting people to like, Oh, you're doing this. We do that. Here's how we do it. Here's how you get started. We're almost like connecting marketing into the product journey.
00:34:41
Speaker
And so for them, and it was, it's a painful exercise. We think you should pick one of those use cases. They were at first pretty uncomfortable with that, but when, when you start to draw out the connections of, Hey, when you pick managing a company inbox versus synthesizing customer interviews,
00:34:59
Speaker
The people change, the way you explain your product changes, we would walk that out. And we did get them to pick to go through the exercise with us because with these platform companies, they're going to have to do this on repeat. Zapier is an extreme example. Zapiers go to market, they have 10,000 use cases. I'm trying to connect LinkedIn to this thing. I'm trying to connect Notion to this other thing.
00:35:23
Speaker
And the way that they built this out is they actually built 10,000 unique messages. They built 10,000 unique landing pages. And they then put them out in the world and use SEO that whenever anyone was searching for that specific piece, and they used long tail to get into this platform, where then later they could say, oh yeah, we're this integrator of stuff.
00:35:45
Speaker
it's long story short with levity and i'd be curious any questions that you have come up but we picked this use case and we ended up picking managing company inboxes so those that are managing a high volume of emails in a shared company inbox and what this allowed them to do is craft these really great arguments of hey when you're managing a company inbox you've probably tried putting things into different folders you probably tried using rules but they don't quite work
00:36:07
Speaker
You're doing a lot of copy and pasting after the fact. You're trying to use email templates, but they don't work. And we use those kinds of market situations as a way to introduce their product is, Hey, you can let AI automatically categorize things. Let AI automatically add those things to your systems. Let AI draft the email responses based on what you're doing. The product value props got really specific and we built the page.
00:36:27
Speaker
And it just resonates, you come to it, you know exactly what it's for, when you would use it, and that's gonna be a pillar for them. And the last thing that we did is, and this is for a lot of platform companies are gonna wanna do this, the homepage for these types of companies, they're not really product marketing messages, they're product explainer messages. We did create a homepage, and it was really just a how-to of, hey, here's what you would do with levity.
00:36:53
Speaker
And I believe that's what they have on their patient. We recently worked with them. I'm not sure if they've made these updates just yet.
00:36:59
Speaker
That's the question that I have when it comes to levity and it comes to clients in general because a lot of the work that we do they have super excited you're thinking I did an amazing job and then you go to their home page a month from now or two months from now it's the same messaging because they just Can't take the final step and with levity. It's probably a case of them taking some time to implement it is up to date here's the question though for you is you've got specificity here and they're
00:37:24
Speaker
messaging on their homepage is build AI workflows without code. Okay, that's pretty high level, pretty general. They have a reference here below the fold. If people visit the site levity.ai, new email classifier, and then they show the path, and then you have to go down the page
00:37:39
Speaker
below the company logos and it says, manage your emails with an AI driven inbox. The question to you as the messaging guy is, why are they leading with build AI workflows versus manage your emails with an AI driven inbox? I don't want to put you on the spot. It's a beautiful question. It comes back to go to market. We actually said you have two options.
00:38:03
Speaker
based on the resources and what they do, take that specific one, which you highlighted. And it's funny that they brought AI back into it, but the one we crafted for them was get control over your company's inbox as the main use case. We said, you could put that on the homepage as the tip of the spear and we recommend that. If you're going to be putting your marketing efforts into bringing people to the page and they're going to hit there, that's likely the place they'll go. But they were confident.
00:38:26
Speaker
that in their go to market motions with all the stuff they're doing in the marketing, they're actually going to drive people to the sub page. And that's maybe the page that they haven't deployed yet. No, I don't think they've deployed it yet. So that's the one they're working on right now. So they're going to get people to the inbox page and leave the homepage as the front door, but in reverse. We just told them to be really mindful of that because the risk, as you just pointed out, as someone comes to the page,
00:38:51
Speaker
They're not at a level of fidelity where they're going to use it that way. And so if you did something in your funnel of, Hey, struggling to manage an inbox or like pounding the pavement on all the issues and you brought them to the homepage, it's probably not going to work versus if you connect them directly.
00:39:04
Speaker
And so I love that question when we talk about positioning and messaging changes and gets very tactical in relation to go to market. And we lose sight of this sometimes. And yeah, they are going to address it in that way where we consider it like a, it's very zappier, but it's a bottoms up motion with the website. They're actually not trying to drive traffic to the homepage. They want people to come to the sub page and then maybe discover other use cases when they eventually click back to the homepage of like, how else would I use this?
00:39:32
Speaker
Without going into the weeds, it's an interesting strategic approach because they found a use case and you've helped them find that use case that resonates and they'll leverage marketing to send people to that use case, to that specific landing page. But at the same time, it's almost like they're hedging their bets a little bit by saying, you can use this for lots of other things if people visit the homepage and there's obviously going to be self discovery.
00:39:58
Speaker
It is very interesting because as much as you do all the work and do all the research, it's almost like they say, yes, but, and then you just got to deal with that reality. It's 100% reality. We even tell them, we're not SaaS whispers. We know the implications of good and bad positioning and what it's going to do to your messaging and what it means for your go to market.
00:40:17
Speaker
The decisions are all theirs. Take levity. Someone may hit their homepage and then find the use case. Someone might do that and they might be able to even track it. I'm like, look, somebody did that. And it isn't an outlier. That's the part for us is what's the, and it's not always 80 20, but what's the primary path, the happy path, the logical path that makes sense. And that's the part that the founders just own. And so we always say, Hey, go specific to a level you're comfortable with.
00:40:44
Speaker
We always are going to try and push you to the most specific level, but we do get a lot of resistance and there's a ton of things driving that. I think one of the things is venture backed. I would say of the hundred plus companies we worked with, probably 90% of them are venture backed.
00:40:59
Speaker
And they've been successful with this broad message. AI no code. Wow. Everyone's going to use AI. Non-technical people are going to use AI. What a great opportunity space, which it is. That's a message that gets you money. It's not a message that gets you customers. We try and influence that.
00:41:18
Speaker
But a lot of times these founders, they think they can sell the vision. And I'm not saying that's what's happening here, but they are still listening for signal back to our early conversations. Can we keep the broadness up so that maybe someone looks to the second or third use case and maybe we were wrong. Maybe it's not manage a company in box and it's this other one. It's a fair and valid argument. The reality is that as third party marketing specialists,
00:41:45
Speaker
We're providing perspective. We're providing ideas and our view of the world based on research and input from key stakeholders and our deliverables are
00:41:57
Speaker
Here's an idea, here's something that we believe will work, but at the end of the day, they have to strategically and tactically embrace it. There are lots of things beyond our control, lots of key stakeholders who have their own views of the world. Sometimes our work doesn't see the light of day, but it doesn't mean it doesn't have any impact on the organization. So I think that's just a reality of what we work in. Final question.
00:42:19
Speaker
I know that you and Anthony spend a lot of time on LinkedIn writing posts that offer great insight into positioning and messaging and people should definitely connect with you and follow you. For people interested in enhancing their knowledge about these two topics, do you have any suggestions about people to follow, books to read, podcasts to listen to?
00:42:42
Speaker
There's a bunch of people out there. I guess I'll start with podcasts. We'll go piece by piece of what we look for influence. Obviously April, she's extremely knowledgeable on this topic, a little bit more so for later stage companies, but her new podcast, I think is great. She just released a book, which is terrific. The podcast we listened to as well. We love Lenny's podcast. We listened to first round capital quite a bit. Dave Gerhard over at exit fives got some great stuff for B2B marketing. And it was kind of enough to have, I have Anthony on recently.
00:43:09
Speaker
Let me see if I miss any podcasts. Books, it's interesting. There's not a whole lot of books out there. The ones that I find myself even going back to, and when folks reach out to me saying, Hey, I'm trying to get into product marketing, trying to understand positioning and messaging, crossing the chasm, absolute must read April's book for sure. I also think the stuff that Sangram Vajray, he's got a couple of books up here. He's got a couple of books, one called move. He's really into the ABM side. I think it really provides a really good framework and starting point for go to market and the importance of segmentation.
00:43:38
Speaker
Folks to follow on LinkedIn, besides Anthony and myself. I actually think Chris Walker's stuff is really great related to attribution. He's a little bit further along, so maybe not so much messaging, but he's got some really insightful things related to go to market. And I'm blanking on all that. Yeah. I would say that the classic positioning book is our recent Jack Trout positioning the battle for your mind.
Recommended Resources for Positioning and Messaging
00:44:02
Speaker
If you want a primer on positioning, that's probably the place to start. Anthony and I were just talking about that book. What's so fascinating about it, and it's maybe why it's so brilliant, is he never really defines positioning. He talks about it through an advertising lens, so it's incredibly tactical.
00:44:19
Speaker
And it surfaces this idea, that difference that we talked about earlier, of there's a difference between strategic positioning, your intention's a position, and the perception in the market and how it unfolds. Definitely a great one. And he's got some great case studies in there that highlights that as well. It's a good catch there, Mark.
00:44:36
Speaker
Great conversation, tons of amazing insight into positioning messaging. For anybody interested in knowing why positioning and messaging matter and what you should do with it, I think they've got an excellent primer here. One final question, if people want to learn more about you and Fletch and Anthony, where do they go?
00:44:55
Speaker
Yeah, LinkedIn is the easiest place to find us, shoot us a DM. We're really active there. We try and message everyone individually. We haven't handed that off to bots or any assistants yet, so you'll be speaking to us. You can also just go right to our website, FletchPMM.com, get a sense of our services, but prefer LinkedIn, the open dialogue, contribute. That's how we learn, always sharing stuff regularly, asking questions, learning in public. We're big believers in that.
00:45:18
Speaker
Thanks, Robert, and thanks for everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, rate it and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app and share via social media.
00:45:30
Speaker
If you're a B2B or a SaaS company looking for more sales and leads but struggling to do marketing, it makes an impact, we should talk. And one more thing, I recently published the second edition of my book, Marketing Spark. It's more of a guide than a book. It features tools, templates, and worksheets to jumpstart your marketing. It's perfect for entrepreneurs. And of course, you can find it on Amazon. If you want to connect with me, you can do so via LinkedIn or old-school email, mark at markevans.ca. I'll talk to you soon.