The Marketing Expert: How to Get More Sales, Loyal Customers, and Bigger Promotions

so you can't tell just by using you know what I would call the grandma test, you know, would your grandma understand this right unless you're selling a grandma? It doesn't matter if I'm selling something specialized to specialized buyers, she simply needs to resonate with them, it's okay if she doesn't resonate with her grandpa. The most common way that technology companies position themselves successfully is that they find an underserved Subs segment of the market and then try to dominate that Subs segment and then get out of there. What are the most interesting mistakes you've seen people make when it comes to positioning?

Oh, so many things. The first mistake is that I want to start with the basics. What is positioning? It's interesting. I am a positioning

expert

and when I started. As a consultant, being a positioning

expert

, the worst thing about that is that no one really knows what positioning they think they do, so people will say that positioning is like messaging, right? I say not really, it's not exactly that or they will do it. Let's say positioning is like a tagline, we're creating a tagline and I'm like, oh God, no, there's a lot of things we do that aren't related to the tagline.

What bothers me the most is when people talk about brand positioning that motivates me. Crazy, there's positioning and there's branding, those two things are actually really separate, so most of the things we confuse with position positioning are actually things we do with positioning once we're done, but positioning is a entry, so if you think about it this way, if all we do in

marketing

and

sales

is the house, positioning is the foundation on which the house is built, then my definition of positioning is like this: this positioning defines how your product is the best in the world at offering something with a value that well -A defined set of

customers

cares a lot now, that's a bit complicated.

A lot of the people I work with aren't

marketing

people, they're CEOs of tech companies, so they don't have experience in this stuff, so I think. the best way to think of it is like the context for products, it's the context in which I position my product so that

customers

have an idea of ​​what this is, what it's about, why I should care, it's a starting point for a conversation. With a client, can you give me an example of one of the things that really stood out to me? I always tried to explain it to CEOs of technology companies with an example of a technology company, and every time I did it, the CEOs of technology companies said, well, that's a database. that you know and we're not like a database so I thought I needed some examples that had nothing to do with technology they're really simple so I was trying to find examples and I was on my way to work and I went to the Tim Horton's cafe in Canada, so I'm standing in line and the guy in front of me is ordering breakfast, it's 8:00 am. m. and he orders this which is a double chocolate and salted caramel muffin and I thought that was some cool marketing stuff right there, so I have a piece of cake, it's a double chocolate caramel cake, but if I put it in format of muffin and I call it muffin, all that is different, the whole context that surrounds it is different, it is social.

It's acceptable to order double chocolate caramel, whatever if you say it's a muffin because now I'm comparing it differently so if I say it's cake, what is a cake? Cake competes with other things that are like dessert, competes with ice cream and tasu and other things. Would you order for dessert, how much does the cake cost? If at a restaurant it costs $10 $15 um, where do I get it? Maybe I go to a bakery, but I also buy it in a restaurant when I talk about a muffin, well, the muffin is totally different. muffin breakfast competes with a bagel and a donut what do I charge for a muffin?

I charge a dollar $2 for a muffin the whole context around it is different the product however it is the same as what you are eating is a piece of cake, whether it is in the form of a cake or a muffin, so I can choose to position it as a muffin , it's the same product, but the competitors' assumptions about it are different, its value is different, the assumptions that customers have about that product are different because I've placed it in a different context. What are the most common misperceptions that companies have about positioning? I would say that most companies simply don't think about positioning at all;

In the vast majority of cases, the companies I work with consider positioning to be obvious. It feels like you can't position it like anything else, so it started like this: The founder woke up one morning and said, you know what sucks, email sucks, let's make email better, it'll be great, and it'll be fixed. all these things that I hate about email and then they release it and customers say I like this part, I don't like this part, they change it, it evolves over time, maybe the whole market will evolve if we fast forward two years from now, the founder and everyone. within the company it still says email, we're creating this email, but maybe that product is actually

more

like a chat because it's also like an email, so we'll start to have this disconnect when the customer sees it and the company says "good." this is an email, look at our awesome email and the customer says, I don't know, that feels like a chat.

You are calling an email. I feel like maybe it's a chat and now I'm confused and I don't really know what it is. It's not like that any

more

when the company realizes they have a problem like, oh, maybe this is an email, maybe we should reposition it, no one knows what to do at that point because they never deliberately positioned it or did anything to decide it was an email at first. First of all, it was obvious, of course, that email was our idea, that's what we're going to do. Product positioning is basically shaping the environment in the consumer's mind by which they make comparisons and know what to expect.

That's a good way to describe it. It's a bit like the opening scene of a movie, so you walk into the movie, let's say you go to the movie theater, you walk into the movie theater, you know a little bit about it, you bought a ticket, but the job of the opening scene in the movie is to establish the context of the film because you have these big questions: where are we? what time period is this who are these characters what is the vibe of this whole movie you need to get answers to these big questions before you can settle in and pay attention to the details of the story um so if we take normally I use Apocalypse Now is the example of a great opening scene.

The opening scene of Apocalypse Now begins with a shot of the beach, its palm trees, everything is pretty, it's charming, you walk into it. you might think, oh, you know, I know it's called apocalypse now, but maybe it's not apocalypse right now, maybe it's apocalypse in 30 minutes, so you walk in, but suddenly this changes and the music becomes a little bit more intense, we see what it looks like. you smoke dust and you say, oh, it's actually smoke, the helicopters go by and boom, the beach is on fire and all of a sudden we're in the middle of the Vietnam War and then the scene changes and it's Martin Sheen, he's in his hotel . room he's drinking smoking he's clearly distraught he walks by the window he peeks out the blinds and we get the first line of dialogue which is actually his thoughts about the movie he looks and says Saigon I'm still alone in Saigon every time I think I'm going to wake up in the jungle, so here we are, we are 3 minutes into a three and a half hour movie and we very much know where we are, we are in the middle of the Vietnam War, specifically We are in Saigon, our main character was there before.

He didn't do very well. He has post-traumatic stress disorder. This movie won't be fun, it will be kind of intense. Now I can settle in and pay attention to the details of the story. Positioning works the same way if I went on Shark Tank or I forgot what we call it here in Canada, what it's called Dragon's Den, so let's say we have the weird Dragon's Den and I can't give you my whole speech about something I'm just going to talk about. about the market category, the category that the product is positioned in, so I come out and say I have something amazing, it's a revolutionary Next Generation thing, but it's CR M customer relationship management if you're technical. people and you know what a CRM is, you're going to make a lot of assumptions about that product just because I called it a CRM, so you're going to say, well, you've got to compete with Salesforce, they're the absolute leader in that market, the gorilla in that one. market, so I'll assume you compete there.

I will make assumptions about what that product does. I'll assume you track deals through a channel. I will assume who the buyer is. I'll assume he's the senior vice president of

sales

. of sales, I'll even make an assumption about the price, although I didn't say anything about what that is or who the expected customers of that are, but if you assume that Salesforce is my big competitor because they are the absolute leader in that. space I'm not charging more for my CRM than Salesforce, that's how this works, what it does is position that product in a market category, that market category has triggered a set of assumptions in the customer's mind about that product yes Yes I do this right, it triggers a series of assumptions about that product that are true and that's great now that I've saved a lot of time, energy and effort in marketing and sales.

I don't have to tell you exactly who my competitors are, I'm not supposed to list each and every feature, a lot of those things are considered stakes in the category, but it works the same way if I do a terrible job, so if I do a terrible job, I position my product in such a market category that it triggers a set of assumptions about my product that are not true now that marketing and sales have a lot of work ahead of them to do this damage that their positioning is already done where they say no, no, no, we don't do it.

Don't do that, no, no, I know you think no, no, it's not like it's just something else, so if I'm trying to compete with Salesforce, should I do it in a way where I have a product? It's probably lower because I'm a startup, right, and so we can't go head to head on every aspect, how do we position that in a way for a consumer, which in this case would be a company, a company that is a buyer, the most common way? What technology companies successfully position is that they find an underserved Subs segment of the market and then they try to dominate that Subs segment and then get out of there, so I can give you an example.

I worked at a company called Jan Systems and at the time this was quite a while ago, so Seil or Salesforce was a small company at the time and only selling at the lower end of the market, but the gorilla in that space at the time was a great company in Silicon Valley called Seil and that's why they were fantastic company with two billion revenues the fastest company to reach one billion revenues in the history of Silicon Valley incredible success story they positioned themselves as Enterprise CRM they were the absolute kings of Enterprise CRM we had a product that was also Enterprise CRM so we would position it as Enterprise CRM and therefore it is not surprising that we had a meeting with a client and the client said okay, then its Enterprise CRM its Enterprise CRM how are you?

Better? and the answer to that question was that we were simply no better than them. If you knew we had 2 million revenues they had two billion revenues they had 400 clients we had six they had thousands of employees I had 26 employees or something like that, I mean we were just no comparison whatsoever, however we had one characteristic that they couldn't copy that was really interesting and we thought it would be really valuable to customers. We didn't really understand its value to customers, but we always showed it in meetings, so we'd go and show the thing and it was this cool feature and we'd say, hey, here's the feature, it's really cool and the customers would look at us and say, hey , that looks great, what do we do with that?, and we would say whatever you want and then the client would say, well, that's confusing, what else do you have? and then we would say, well, you know, really cheap if you want us to be really cheap because we're desperate to close deals, how do we get out of that mess and finally get to a positioning that was really good for us, if we sold.

We struck a deal with an investment bank and it was kind of an accident that we hired a sales rep who had a relationship with someone high-ranking at the investment bank. We did a good presentation there, showed them our magical feature and what that client taught us. It's just that that feature was actually very valuable to investment banks and the way they wanted to manage relationships within the bank. Once we realized that, then it wasWell, we actually have a feature that is really valuable to a sub-segment of this large market. and we knew at the time that Cel couldn't copy us on that feature, so we narrowed the positioning and instead of saying we were enterprise CRM, we were CRM for investment banks and the best thing about that is that we never really got in our heads. -Facing those guys again, so we went in and said, "Hey, we're CRM for investment banks," and the client was like, "Oh, well, wait, no, do that, don't they compete with Seel?" and we We say, ah.

Look, we love those big guys, so smart, so many people, they're like the best general purpose CRM in the world for call centers and manufacturing plants and I don't know what, but not you, the Wolf of Wall Street, you need something special, let me show you. This thing and we would show them the thing and talk about it, so our plan was to absolutely dominate that space and then once we had mastered it, we would build the product and make it more mature and our domain and Investment Banking would allow us to enter into retail banking, so we were going to expand the market from there. and then if we were successful in retail banking that would allow us to enter the insurance sector at that time we would reposition ourselves as CRM for financial services, if we were successful there then we would be big and successful enough to challenge the market leader and take control and being Enterprise CRM, which was still the long-term goal, so is this the bo that reduces your target market or your ecosystem in a way where you will compete with one where you have an advantage or advantage over someone further? and then expand from there often in technology companies, that's exactly what we're doing, that seems, yeah, it seems very intuitive, why not intuitive, um, there are many reasons, so the most important one is that people it cares a lot about what we call the addressable. market, so if you were trying to raise funds and you went to an investor and said, look, I want to build something and it's just CRM for investment banks, the investor would say, well, how many investment banks are there in the world?

I need you to be a billion dollar business, that's not a billion dollar business, I don't know how you're going to do that, so for an investor, you need to talk about the long-term story, where we want to be in 10 years, where you know how to do it. We know what our path is to become a billion dollar company and if I look at the example that I just gave you, we had that long-term vision that eventually we were going to be a billion dollar company, but for the Most companies, when you start, I'm I'm not trying to make a billion dollars this year I'm trying to make a million I'm trying to close five deals I'm trying to close 10 deals and to close any deal you have to be the best at something the client is not going to come in and say they know there are these three options and I will choose this one that is fine.

No, the client says that he wants the best for his particular things, so excellent positioning is about defining where you win. For example, where are the best in the world? Even if that market is very small at the beginning, you need to have a path to get to this

bigger

market, so I'll win here, then I'll win here, then I'll win here. and the market will expand, so the vast majority of companies we know did exactly that, like Salesforce, which is actually a great example when they started, the enterprise side of CRM was absolutely dominated by one big competitor, so It didn't make sense to them. they entered that market there, instead they entered the market from the bottom up, so they sold to small and medium-sized businesses and Secret Sauce, so what they were able to do better than anyone else is they were one of the first SAS companies in the world, so it was hosted in the cloud, the value to the customer was that you could get CRM just like big companies had it, even if you didn't have an IT department to look after it, so their big slogan of not having software meant they were selling to small businesses that I didn't have a department that could never touch CRM and there was no competition there so it was very easy for them to get in and I was working at Seil at the time and when they started from the bottom , we thought we didn't care. about that market, we're not going to chase them there, we sell big multi-million dollar business deals, we never read.

The Inator Dilemma I guess we had no interest in that our goal was to just sit on the rare Air at the very top of the pile and just sell all of that and that was it, so of course what they did was start from down and then slowly moving forward, that's fascinating, basically, competing from a staffing standpoint from a venture capital funding. From your point of view, you say that our total market is huge, but from a practical point of view, to properly develop a product, you have to start small in one loan and expand somewhat overall, if you look at the vast majority of successful companies.

They started by dominating a market that was too small for the market leader to care about. Mhm, they dominated that market and then what they did was push the boundaries of that market and get closer and closer to whoever the market was. leader is what is the difference between B2B and b2c positioning, like business to business positioning versus business to consumer positioning, there are many things that are different, if we think about the core of good positioning, the core of good positioning is thinking in what is its differentiated value. It means the value you can offer a customer that no one else can, and then great positioning puts you in a context where a customer can understand you.

If we think about value in B2B, it's very different than value in consumer products. Value can be of all kinds. of things in consumer products. You know, I might buy shoes because I just like the color green, or I'm buying consumer things because I think it makes me look rich or I'm going on a date or there are a lot of different things that are valuable to the consumer, business to business. , it's very different from business to business, there's usually not just one person buying, there's usually a group of people, the average B2B deal there are 5 to 11 parties interested in the deal, so if I buy accounting software, my The boss comes to me and says: Hey, I don't like the accounting software we have now.

Go buy one from us. That terrifies Ying. My neck is at stake. If I make a bad decision here, I'll look bad in front of my boss. users don't like it, maybe the software breaks. I get passed over for promotion. I could even get fired, so the stakes are high in a B2B purchasing decision. The way we think about value is also very different. I can't go to my boss and say I just like the vibe of this software. You know I have to present a business case to my boss about why we should buy it and in businesses I mean we only have two things: either we are helping you make money or we are.

We're helping you save money and that's it MH so you know I can make a very irrational decision about a product and we often make very irrational decisions even in B2B about a product but I can't tell that to my boss , TRUE? I have to go to my boss and say: Here's why we chose you. Here is the list of reasons why there must be some justification. That's exactly it. It can be explained to another person exactly. That's why we think a lot about what you know in the consumer sector. emotion that invokes emotion in B2B the grandfather of emotions is fear fear of making a bad decision fear of looking bad in front of my boss fear of being fired as fear of making a mistake drives many decisions in B that's why headlines like it Whoever is the market leader has a huge advantage in B2B technology because it's the safe decision, no one is going to get fired for choosing Salesforce at this point, they have twice the market share of their closest competitor.

You can go to your boss and say look, look. all the other options, but I chose Salesforce because everyone uses Salesforce, they have a great ecosystem, they have the best, this, the best, they are the biggest, it's the safe choice if you're trying to compete against Salesforce, that's really hard to beat by gravity. pull against it, it's very risky to choose it if the choice is you versus Salesforce or an established market leader when you think about consumer positioning, I'm really interested and I know this is not your area of ​​expertise, but when a Louis Vuitton or Herz, how do you plan to position yourself in such a way that they can get paid?

I don't know 30 $40,000 times a34 $40,000 is the point. I'm not going to buy that bag because I think it's $30,000 better than a bag that costs $20. Even though it's probably finely crafted and all that kind of stuff, a lot of times I think luxury items are actually a signal to the market, it's like I'm a rich, successful person, who's made enough money to be able to wear a Louis Vuon. . bag or wearing a Rolex watch or anything luxury is out of my wheelhouse, but you know, when we look at consumer things, value comes in all kinds of forms, like we buy things in very rational ways in consumer products, um, it's us.

There is also rational IR in B2B, but most of that irrationality has to do with fear, it's like I just don't want to make a bad decision here and look bad in front of my boss or do something that all the companies will get angry about with me later. that we have in B2B, that's actually a real problem: it's so scary to buy something in B2B that 50 to 70% of the time a deal that starts actually ends without a decision and the non-decision is not that they voted to keep it. current product they have, it's usually not a decision because everything looked the same.

I couldn't make a decision with confidence and I was sure I wasn't going to get in trouble, so it's easier to go back to your boss and say you know. Which now is not a good time, let's buy the accounting package next year. You know we don't want to, we don't need to get into this right now and the person who has been tasked with making that decision is just crossing their fingers that they don't do it. They have to be on the hook to make the decision next year, when the decision comes up again like, well, let's go and look again, they just don't want to be the person who has to go out on a limb to defend something that's totally different. for how we buy a pack of gum or buy sparkling water at the corner store or buy a purse the downside is really small and at work the Downs side is huge and the UPS is no good at all so if you you advocate for a different product that is outside of Standard Best Practices or Standard Industry Standard then if you succeed everyone will forget that you advocated for it but if you fail it means cases exactly in rare cases you will see top executives in companies where its function is to change things, so its function is transformation.

In some way, innovation transformation or digital transformation, you see a lot of companies right now that the CEO has tasked with the task, where there are teams that the CEO has tasked with solving this AI thing and making sure that let's stay behind. Yeah, in those cases, the person driving that program, if they're successful, they're going to get a promotion, they're going to get a raise, you know it's going to look great for them if they can do it successfully, if it's not a success, then. They are lazy, would you say that the biggest mistake we see, especially with software products, is competing and positioning ourselves in too large a market?

That is one of the things that I think about many times if we look at the positioning that the company has. The biggest mistake is not deliberately positioning yourself. I think many companies start to look at their products in isolation, almost as if there were no competitors. You see it a lot in the way companies do their sales pitches, like they come in and give this. sales pitch, they'll talk about the product, we have this great feature, that great feature, this great feature, it's amazing, you should buy from us, but the buyer on the other end of that conversation is terrified of making a bad decision and we're sitting there, everything That's great, but I just had three other sales calls with your competitors, some of those things sound the same, so we go into these situations as suppliers ultimately thinking that the answer is the question we're trying to answer. is why choose us, but the real question we have to answer is why choose us and not others and I think most companies don't really struggle with that, they don't sit down, they put themselves in the shoes of a buyer, they recognize how difficult it is.

It is making a purchasing decision and thinking about how we position ourselves compared to everyone else. It's very easy to pick the biggest incumbent and then you basically have to get people out of that default. Something exactly that is fascinating. Can you tell me about a time when a product repositioning failed and what happened, yeah, so I worked ona company where we were building something. The original conception of this was that it was a database, but it was a really sophisticated database that could perform a certain type of query. really, really, really fast, it was originally developed for the bank and there was a set of queries that the bank made that were so difficult to process that they ran them on Friday and the query took all weekend to get the answer, so you are asking. the DAT of this question and it took three days to get the answer, so this couple of people from Super Genius Database came up with this database to solve that problem and was able to run that query in seconds, so it's Incredible, fantastic technology, they got patents on it. no one had seen a database like this before at Innovative, so the original conception of this was that it was a database.

I joined as head of marketing and we were having a terrible time. Selling positioning was terrible, like no one wanted a new database. there is an absolute giant in that market, it's called Oracle, the standard for everyone in Oracle, everyone is certified in Oracle, we don't want to have multiple database solutions to do something, so we would come and say we have this new database witty and the customers would say, well you know we're an Oracle store as if we weren't married to Oracle. We don't think Oracle is the best, but we can't incorporate another platform.

Finally we repositioned it as a data warehouse, which is a specific type of database designed specifically to do analytics, which is exactly what we're doing when we do this big query, so we did that repositioning and it was much, much better, much better, better, the first call was better, much better than we were doing before, the problem was that when we looked, we assumed that if you had these queries that took three days, you would want to be able to do them in 10 seconds instead of 3 days and it turned out that that assumption was incorrect, so when we went to the other banks and said, "Hey, you're doing this and it's going to take three days and you could use this and it would take 3 seconds" and they said, "Okay, nothing, no one's really going to do anything during the end." of week". we don't need the answer right away, so we had this question: who needs the answer right away?

We had never asked ourselves that question, since our entire value proposition is speed. By asking this query quickly, they turned out to be the only customers who needed the answer. Right away there were customers who were asking customer service, so your customer calls, they're on the phone, and they're like, "Hey, I need to know this right. I don't want to wait 3 days to get the answer." they want to do it in seconds and then we looked at the universe of companies that had data at a scale where ours was appropriate and they needed an answer to this query to do customer service and there were literally 10 companies on the planet and that was it.

The addressable market was so small that it wasn't a viable business, so we had basically created a product that no one wanted. It was great, it was really innovative, it was really cool, but there was no market for it. It didn't solve a problem that no one really had, so if you're a startup you have limited resources and how do you identify those pain points to better position your product? I mean the idea behind the famous book about this is Eric Reese Lean Startup and the way Lean Startup describes this: you should be doing something called customer discovery, so before you write anything you should interview customers or potential customers. and validate the assumptions you have about this market.

Is this something people would pay for? How much would you pay for it? There is a large enough group of people who have this pain to solve it and in a perfect world that's what we would all be doing, but often products just don't happen that way, as often happens with the products you know. this this particular company they had built it to order they had made the deal with the bank in such a way that they owned the intellectual property seemed like a good idea they had a lot of assumptions built in they never tested those assumptions until later, but it was enough well like to raise money they just went and raised some money and well okay now we're going to do something so I don't think a lot of startups do enough customer discovery in the beginning to make sure that they have one thing that people really want to, the second thing is that even if you do customer discovery, it's very difficult, it's very difficult, customers will sometimes tell you things that are not true or they will say yeah, yeah, we would buy that. and we would buy it for this amount, but when you've actually built it and you have a prototype, you'll have it in the hands of customers and there's actually a different way to do this and we decided to do it this way. differently or you know customers have a lot of options, so startups are very difficult because we're dealing with uncertainty, we're dealing with a certain amount of assumptions, our assumptions may turn out to be wrong and we have to be able to move and pivot and look. other things and sometimes our first solution isn't going to work, so we'll have to go back to the drawing board and invent something else and see if it works.

How do you position your product on a page? A lot of B2B starts with a sales rep or someone searching for a product on a page. How do you position that product? I probably don't know, 10 seconds to get someone's attention, yeah, 10. seconds to get someone's attention, so the way I think about positioning is this: I like to position. I like to break down positioning into a set of components so that the positioning components are competitive. Alternatives, so if it didn't exist, what would it be? what the customer does and then we need to understand what makes us different, what our differentiated capabilities are, like what we have and what we don't have in the alternatives.

What we really need to understand is why those features are important, so what value can those features have? deliver for a company and you mean the features that you have that no one else has, so that's our differentiated value, it says look, we can do this for your business and no one else can do it and then the next thing we have to do I understand well , who cares much about that? Because just because we have that, if only three people on the planet care about that, it's not a viable business, so we need to understand that, so what is it, what are the characteristics of a Target company? make them really care a lot about what only we can do once we have all that, then we need to create messages around that, so if we think about the typical landing page of a product, we need to communicate what the value is that we can deliver that no one else can and it's this for me, me as the browser, the person that's there, so I need to communicate who it is, why it's different, why it's better and that's really hard to do on one page, You don't have a there's a lot of copy to do, there's not a lot of ways to do it, but that's what we really have to focus on.

The biggest mistake I see tech companies make is that they are so sure that their features are valuable and people will do them. I just understand what is the value of those features, they are talking about the features, but they are not talking about why they are important, so they are talking about you, they are not exactly talking about the benefit, so if I use the company example Of CRM that I talked about before, we had a feature and we just assumed that customers would see that feature and know what its value was, but they didn't, so all we did was talk about the feature.

We thought, look, you can model relationships this way and they said, but why do I really want to do that and what is that? What is it for? We're like what's good for anything you want to do with it how you imagine it. and I think in technology companies we are very technical people, we know a lot about technology, we get so close to it that we just assume that the customer can make the translation from feature to value, but many times they can't. and particularly with something that's really innovative, really new, they've never seen it before, we're going to have to help them understand why those features are important if we think about a lot of consumer technology, we've been trained to do this. like if I told you that I have a phone with a 2000 megapixel camera, you know that 2000 megapixels is much better than 100 megapixels, you have been trained, we know that, but the first time someone told you about megapixels, you had no idea what it was one megapixel, companies had to teach you why it was important, it's interesting because that's already gone at this point, like no one asked how many megapixels are in their phone camera at one point, it was like a big differentiator, but that's Well. kind of a nice segue into my next question, which is how digital transformation over the last 25 or 30 years has changed positioning.

I think the fundamentals of positioning have not changed at all. My opinion is that if you read the original book on positioning, These guys called positioning the battle for your mind, Reas and Trout, they came up with the concept, they published a book in 1982 and if you read that book, the first chapter talks about why we have to worry about positioning, why positioning is important and they I talked about how important it is because before that, in any given market category, there were only a handful of products, so consumers would simply choose between the two or three options they had, but it wasn't that important for companies to really differentiate between them. those options, but in 1982, oh my God, we have so many options.

Now positioning is really important because the customer has thousands of options, hundreds of options now, if we look at the difference between 1982 and now, that just exploded, I think it's much more important. Now, to really establish that position, it's much harder to stand out in a world where we're exposed to millions of advertising messages a day, like thinking about digital things. I am constantly bombarded with messages from companies. I can't help it. That's millions a day in comparison. until 1982, so for customers to really stand out, sorry, for companies to really stand out in a market that is so crowded and overwhelmed with brand messaging, we're going to have to really get YOUR Syn on what this is.

What is the value of this? For whom? How is it different from the other things on the market? We're going to have to be very clear about this to break through the noise and why you should trust us because yes We're a small company, we have like five employees and we compete with Salesforce, but we have a particular feature that they don't have and we have our kind of positioning on our market niche right now, there is still a branding problem. Because it's like no one has ever heard of you, a lot of this stuff, so we thought about it.

If I go back to the example of that CRM company, the best thing was that we managed to establish ourselves in this little bubble of investment banking. and once we had two clients in investment banking, we were the kings of investment banking with only two clients because we could walk in and say, well, you know Goldman Sachs and Marl Lynch, what do they have? They have a bunch of call centers and a manufacturing group like, so we could put a circle around it and make the rest of the market not care about you, investment banker, like you don't want the best purpose CRM general in the world, wants the best CRM in the world for people like you that's how we win at this if I come in and say we're just CRM, we're CRM for everyone and we're the best CRM that no one wants, it's like you're changing the framework.

Almost taking a photograph like there's a great quote about "You know what makes a great photograph" like knowing where to stand and it's like you're basically almost picking someone up and you're saying "look this way" yeah this is the Quote from Warren Buffett, you know how you can beat Bobby Fisher. You play them in any game except chess. How is product positioning evaluated? This is an interesting question. People want me to visit their website and tell me if its ranking is good or not. and in B2B that is almost impossible, almost impossible, so you have this thing that serves a market.

I'm not the buyer of that, so I might look at your website and say: I have no idea what this is all about, but what you sell is for aircraft mechanics. It's okay if I have no idea that it needs to resonate with aircraft mechanics, so you can't tell just by using it. You know what I would call the grandma test. Do you know if your grandmother would understand this? Well, unless you're selling to a grandmother, it doesn't matter if the grandmother understands it, so some people will say, well, we have to simplify this and we have to have it so that everyone understands it.

I strongly disagree with that in B2B if I am selling something specialized tospecialized buyers. You just need to resonate with them. It's okay if it doesn't resonate with your grandmother. What it does mean is that if we're trying to evaluate positioning, what really matters is when we are, when we are. We have a new prospect coming in who doesn't really know much about us, how long does it take us before they click? and they say: oh, I get it, oh, I get why you're different, oh, I get why that's good. Oh, I understand why in my career, I used to be an internal VP of marketing, and in the latter part of my career, I was very focused on positioning, so if the CEO hired me, he hired me because I could talk intelligently about how to do it.

We were going to fix this positioning. I would join and what everyone would want me to do is just run campaigns in April, grow revenue to the right and I was always worried about running campaigns in weak positioning because it's a bit like pouring water into the leaky bucket. So what I would do to evaluate the positioning, whether it was good or not, is you would walk into sales and there would be people doing sales, making the first calls with customers and you would hear it on a first call and it sounds like your sales rep you're doing a great job, they have a presentation for customers there and the sales rep has a presentation that maybe has a dozen slides and they say, "Okay, this is who we are, this is what we do, we do this ".

They're walking onto the pitch and you'll see the customer, if it's a video call you'll see the customer and they'll make this confused face and what will happen is they don't say much and a good rep will stop and say, are there any questions? are you still with me? and the client will say: yes, yes, yes, just make a backup. Can you go back to the beginning, make a backup and go back to the beginning, as if you launched it. to me again and there's this fundamental disconnect like I don't even know which bucket to put this in.

Is it a database? Is it a business intelligence tool? Is it something like you didn't frame it? We know that and there's something about that positioning that just confuses the client to no end, that's the most common sign that you see is the client looks at it and says, I just can't understand what this is. The second common sign you'll see with weak positioning is that the client thinks they've got it figured out, but they're actually comparing you. to something that you don't really compete with, so you'll be able to go to slide three or four and the customer will say yeah, I get it, you're like Salesforce and you're nothing like Salesforce, you don't compete in that market. you're not that and then the rep says no, no, no, no, let me go back.

I'll go back to the beginning. We will do this again. Then you'll hear it a lot. You will hear the other thing. and this is almost the scariest thing: in these first conversations with a prospect the prospect will say I get it I understand what you are I understand who you are competing with I just don't understand why we would pay money for that I just do that with a spreadsheet. Can I do it with my accounting package? Could you hire an intern to do it? Why would you pay money to do it? So they understand the product but, again, they don't understand the value of why would I give you money for that?

Who is in charge of positioning in a company? Good question, this has traditionally been seen as a marketing function, and even more specifically in technology companies, we often say it's a product marketing function, but I don't think I think that's not the right way to do it. Think about it, if we really think about what we're doing in positioning, we're getting very strict about who our competitor is, how are we different, what's the value we can offer? to them, to the customer and who exactly those customers are, if we made a change in that, it would be a big change in the business.

If I think back to my CRM example, if we go from being a general purpose enterprise CRM to a CRM for investment banks, that is. That's a completely different company, yeah, so I don't think marketing did it, first of all, they don't talk to customers every day like sales does. They don't necessarily understand the differentiation between competitors like the product and insurance team would. Heck, the CEO will have a say in where we are selling and how we win in the market, so in the work I do with companies with positioning we do it with a cross-functional team, so we bring together product marketing sales. support for customer success and we bring everyone together and everyone comes with what they understand about customers and how we win and we work together on positioning as a group exercise now someone needs to be the manager or the police of that positioning once we have established it's to make sure that we're consistent in that and how we use it in marketing and in sales and that's typically marketing that does that.

I also think it's good to have someone who is the person who puts their hand up and says, you know what things are changing in the market, maybe we need to get back together and check that positioning, but I don't think marketing should be able to change the market. positioning or analyze positioning or do it in They could try it on their own, but it won't work because Sales won't believe in it. The CEO won't believe it. What we really need is a cross-functional team to get together and look at it. Make some decisions. Let everyone agree. align it and then we can all execute it and in our respective departments and then marketing can be the manager of here is the positioning this is how we define it this is the message that comes out of that positioning and then marketing be the person who Raise your hand and say: You know what this big acquisition just happened in our market and we may have to take a step back and look at positioning again.

It's interesting that you say that when you're talking about a salesperson and the first call. I was thinking, oh, if things don't go as planned, the salesperson points to marketing, marketing points to the salesperson, everyone points to the product and, but you even expanded this to have a cross-functional sales, marketing, support team for success. of the product customer and then you also have the CEO's involvement at some point and when things are going well, everyone is a winner and everyone is responsible for the success, but the moment you have a problem, everyone starts pointing fingers at the rest, how do you determine when it is a positioning? problem versus a

bigger

problem, it's interesting because you know I do this as a consultant and sometimes companies call me and think they have a positioning problem and then I have a conversation with them and I tell them I actually don't.

I think it's a positioning problem because there are many reasons why companies don't succeed and positioning is just one of them, so sometimes companies come to me and say: you know what all companies with Those of us who speak love us if we can. get them in a meeting we close all those deals that tell me positioning is good you're just not having enough meetings you're just doing a terrible job at lean generation you should fix that you just need to get more at bats uh Sometimes what you have is a sales execution problem, like there's something about the way you're executing sales that's not working, so my test is often like this, first of all, do you have good happy customers that stay with you and love you and are referenceable and whatever the majority of companies come to me and say yes, we have that, okay?

Do you have confusion when at the beginning of your sales process they come in and they just don't understand that gap between what a customer is? knows and what a potential client knows, we can close that gap with good positioning. What role does storytelling play in all this storytelling? It's one of those things that marketers think a lot about storytelling and get very obsessed with storytelling, especially on the consumer side, business-to-business marketers like to think about storytelling, I don't think Many B2B companies are doing an incredible job of telling stories. What's really funny about that, if you go to sales, sales doesn't care about storytelling, they never talk about storytelling, and yet it's the ones who are actually face to face with a customer and if someone should tell a story, maybe it's your sales team, most of the narrative stuff you see or at least what I learned as a marketer if you go to marketing school and learn how to tell stories, a lot of what you'll see is the structure of the journey of this hero to tell stories, which is very common in entertainment, it is the way most movies are written, many stories are written with this hero's journey, so in B2B storytelling we think about the hero. as client C, then the client has a problem, they embark on this mission, they meet a guide which is us, we are the guide and we give them a plan and we help them to succeed and avoid defeat, since we have the journey of this hero as the problem. that narrative arc is that there is no competitor there and if we think about what a buyer is really trying to figure out is why to choose you over others, a hero's journey doesn't really give us an arc to do that at work .

What I do with C clients, we start with positioning to be very clear about what is the value that we can offer that no one else can, who are the clients that really care about that and then we want to build a story around that story. We are trying to say that we must answer this question: why choose us over others? So in that storytelling framework, we need to have a place in that framework to paint a picture of the entire market and then show where we fit and where. everyone fits, so we shouldn't just talk about ourselves, we should talk about alternative approaches to the problem, which means we're going to talk about competitors or at least the approach that competitors take to the work that I do.

We translate the position into a sales pitch. That sales pitch has a narrative structure that begins with a conversation about the market, so we will talk about looking, we look at this market in a different way than our competitors and why we look at it in a different way. different, we have built the product in a different way and you are a customer, you have many options, there are other products you can buy, there are other approaches you can take to this problem, let's talk about that. think about this all day we have opinions about it we want to hear what you have to say about it too so this is the way we see it you can do it this way or this way and here are the advantages and disadvantages of these different ways to solve this problem and this is a conversation with the customer more than telling the customer things, but at the same time I teach them what we believe is important in a purchasing decision that most customers do not know from the beginning.

In their purchasing process they are trying to buy accounting software. Half of the people who make a B2B purchase have never bought a product like yours before, so they are doing so for the first time. They are overwhelmed with the information on the Internet that each provider says. we are the best no, we are the best no, we are the best what we should do in good sales storytelling and B2B is help customers understand how to make a decision with confidence so they can do it. I have to paint a picture of the entire market so that they feel good and understand ah, if I choose this, I choose to go high on this and low on this, if I choose this, here are the trade-offs for this, if I choose this here , the compensations for this or you could choose us and here are the pros and cons for us, whether we are a good fit for you or not, that is what we should do in a good sales narrative in my opinion and in your opinion, who does it really do well?

I have a lot of clients that I've worked with one that I think is doing an amazing job for a really technically complicated product: a company I worked with in San Francisco called Postman Postman essentially makes a platform for developing API. This is a new concept that no one had. this idea of ​​a platform for apis before it occurred to the postmen, they do an incredible job. I think about talking about why APIs are important, so important that you don't really want a set of disjointed tools throughout your organization to work on them, why that is.

It's important that they coined a concept called First World API and then did an incredible job of telling stories around that, so if you go to their website on their home page and scroll down halfway, They have a graphic novel called API First. world and is a Divi graphic novel designed for techies to understand this story of what an API is, why it is important, why we really want to have high quality APIs, why it is so important for your business and why we need a platform that allows it. I think thatThey do an incredible job at that and they do it in a thousand different ways, like if you see the CEO giving a talk at a conference, he's not really talking about the product so much as he's talking about the market and this concept and why I need to think about APIs in a way. different, but if you are aligned with their point of view on the market, you will buy their product, but they have really done a good job.

I think about developing a point of view on the market that helps clients understand. the context around your product and the things you need to understand to understand why your product is valuable and why you might choose it, how important that is, from the CEO's perspective, in conferences, talks and media, basically, put yourself out there and say I see the world this way, which is slightly different than how most people see it. I think it's very important. I think this concept of having a point of view on the market is actually very important to most of the Founders that I've worked with, if you talk about how.

The original idea for the product came up and they'll say, "You know," I was really frustrated. I looked at all the databases and decided that all the databases were doing it wrong. If you were smart and knew what I knew, I had a better way. To do this, yes, you would create a database like this. Part of what we need to communicate to customers is that we need to take them on that journey and say, look, we have a different perspective on this, like we look at this problem differently. It's not the problem, it's that we see a problem within the problem, we have a perspective on the problem that if you understood it the way we understand it, you would choose our things correctly, so I think that point of view is really very important and if you can specify which is the key to selling many things and how important it is to you mentioned the term, such as how important it is to define the vocabulary by which customers ultimately use to make a decision or own a term so that, if it becomes The most important thing for them is that no one else has that term, it's really important if you're doing something that's truly innovative, like something emerging, so earlier we talked about market categories and, most of the time, if you look at the way the most successful companies do this.

They're entering an existing market category and they're serving an underserved corner of that and they're expanding from that about 10% of the time, that's not true. 10% of the time we have something that is emerging, it is a market that is emerging there is no leader in that market right now because that market doesn't even exist right now this is something completely new you could never do this before because the Technology wasn't there to do it and that's why it's emerging when it's emerging, there's not a good vocabulary to talk about it because we've never talked about it before and often in those cases what we're doing is defining or trying to define what they are.

The boundaries of that Emerging Market category are what is important and what is not important in that Emerging Market category and in those cases we often want to put some names to things that we might want to specifically name the market category of a way that benefits us. key concepts inside in a way that helps customers understand why this is an important key element that you need to understand and so if you see companies that have really created categories, they have often done a very good job helping to the clients. understand the key things that they needed to understand to understand ah, this is a totally different problem.

I didn't even know I had this problem, you know, because if the customer knew there was a problem and they had it, there would be categories. of solutions to solve it already in emerging markets we often address a problem that the customer doesn't even define as a problem, they don't even know that this is a problem, it's just that this is how the word world works, there is no way to solve this problem if we can help them become aware of the problem, then you know it's one more step towards that, well, now you know you have a problem, we are what we need to solve, how do you think about independent bodies that play a role?

And I'm thinking in cybersecurity there's the gardener's quadrant and if you're not there, people won't even consider your product, but that limits your ability to know absolutely how. Do you think I spend a lot of time working with Gardner in my previous roles as VP of Marketing? Not every market segment has an analyst or an expert body or someone whose opinion matters a lot, but in some segments we do. a lot of time on the database The market is not a large company buys a database without talking to the Gardner group first, so in that case we spent a lot of time helping the Gardner group understand what our work was about, why it was important, why they should include us in the database. quadrant because we literally needed to be properly positioned for the clients who called them and asked for advice.

I've had other markets that I've been to where buyers just don't call the Gardener group because they don't care what Gardener group has to say about it because the Gardener group doesn't cover that space and the Gardener groups do a very good job at Enterprise, outside of Enterprise, they are slightly less influential. I think it's important that if we are providers, we understand where our clients are looking for advice and where we need to educate those people or entities because they are giving advice to our clients, sometimes they are industry analysts like Gartner, sometimes they are service providers or system integrators like deoe and van deoy and Tell me, what do you think about this?

You know that we are undergoing a great digital transformation. You are our trusted advisor in digital transformation. What do you think about these products? In which case maybe you need a partnership with deoy because they are not going to work. recommend my stuff if they don't make some kind of money from it, yeah, so it's important to understand who influences your buyer as we go down. The market is interesting, there will be people like you, who like podcasters that people listen to, um. People who are experts on things ask me for marketing technology advice all the time, so in a small way, I'm an influencer.

In the work I do, companies often ask me. Well, you know, now we have to do all this. things in sales, who knows who is really good at sales? Is there a particular technology you should recommend in sales? The important part as suppliers, I think we need to understand who has influence over our buyers and whether we should invest some energy and attention into making sure those influencers understand what we do and position us well what are the most interesting mistakes you've seen the company make. people when it comes to positioning oh so many things the first mistake is not thinking about it at all and just assuming that there is only one position where we could possibly take the most products, we could position them in a dozen different markets and if really If we take a step back and forget about history and where we come from and look at it with fresh eyes, we might see something really different, so we need to think about this the way the customer thinks about it, so don't think about it. positioning at all is the first mistake.

The second mistake is like we talked about before treating it as a little marketing exercise, we're just going to put some new words on the home page and that's it, we're done, but sales has no idea how to present it the product doesn't really understand it it doesn't actually represent the truth of our product at all it's just nice pretty words this is not a repositioning this is not I'm going to move the dial on anything and lately what I've seen is that companies that love the idea of ​​creation of categories are trying to create a category when they obviously fit into an existing market category and it's kind of an illusion that this is a new category, so they say no, no, no, we don't have competition, this is something completely new, nobody work like this and the result is that the client says, but wait, aren't you just a CRM?

Why are you using all of these? In other words, I'm confused, so I've seen a lot of companies come to me and try to create categories or pretend that they're doing this new category of thing and then it's been a disaster, customers are very confused. They don't understand why this is different from the existing things they are doing. They don't know which bucket to put it in because they're trying to create a new bucket and it's been a disaster and then they come to me. and they are like H. Now we have to fix this and how do we do it when there is an obvious place where they could easily position themselves in a very large sub-segment of an existing market category and that would be much easier to sell. telling the story is a lot easier to make deals, so I see a lot of that right now, what's the difference or maybe what schools get wrong about B2B marketing?

When you are in the academic environment it sounds good, but in the real world it fails, oh my. Oh my gosh, so many things, most of the research that's been done in marketing, like when I went to marketing school, was so disappointing. All the research is done on consumer packaged products, all of it, and often what you'll get is a professor within a marketing department. department of a university taking these things that we've learned about consumer packaged goods and then extending them and saying well, obviously this works B to be exactly the same way and it's like wait a second to see things like I can "I should have this conversation about once a week where people will talk about what this liquid death of water is.

You know, I don't drink. Marketers are obsessed with this thing called liquid death and all it is is gas. in a can made to look cool and they sell it in bars, so you don't want to, so you don't want to consume alcohol, you don't like alcohol, you go to the bar, you still want to look cool, you can order this. liquid death has skulls and stuff they do all this really creative advertising and all this stuff and B2B marketers look at that and say why can't we do that right, like why can't it just be marketing, why do we have worry about the product at all and often these marketers will say, look, can we really differentiate ourselves on the product because people can just copy our product?

Eventually everyone will continue to catch up to us and all products will be exactly the same and if you're in tech, that's nonsense, that's nonsense, that would be like saying you don't think any of the innovations that Apple has made matter that they can have, just It's just marketing, do you really think that? So there's sort of a belief that we can take these consumer things and apply them to a very considered purchase in a B2B situation where there are risks involved where the person making the decision could be rightfully fired and say oh yeah, that's like buying sparkling water oh at the end of the day these people are all people and they are driven by emotions we have to connect with their emotions I agree with that but the emotion is fear it doesn't look good it doesn't look good I like the one with the skulls I can't go to my boss and say I bought the datab with this with the skulls, man, come on, I just can't get away with it, so I heard a lot of things in marketing classes where I sat back and said, "okay, man , if we do it".

I'm selling toothpaste, okay, but if I'm selling a million dollars worth of middleware, it's not okay, these rules don't apply, so I think in schools we don't teach enough about B2B, we don't teach enough about the difference between a highly considered purchase. versus a cold shoulder purchase I don't think we talk enough about purchasing committees I don't think we look at the research enough on how difficult it is to overcome indecision in a B2B buying process and what that means for our positioning in the journey we make sales pitches for a lot of the things we do, so I don't see that being covered enough in schools.

Every great B2B marketer I know has learned this on the ground doing it at companies where everyone is starting from scratch. You know about B2B decision making and I would say that most people get it wrong. The biggest one is the idea of ​​customer hesitancy that people don't understand how difficult it is to make a purchase if they understood the research that it's surprising that they'll buy anything. All there is is a great book written by this guy Matt Dixon, it's called The Shakedown Effect and the research on it is incredible, so when we went into lockdown and co, I took this opportunity to study sales calls because all of a sudden, all sales.

The calls were done virtually, so everyone was doing them on Zoom, so they took some AI and analyzed two and a half million sales calls and they did it in partnership with these companies so they could see whatWhat happened on the sales call and then what finally happened? Did we get the deal? Did we not get the deal? What works and what doesn't work and that research is terrifying when you look at it, that's where this number comes from. From 40 to 60% of B2B purchasing processes end in no decision, this is the most fearsome competitor we have in B2B, by far, without decision, and this no decision is not because we have made the decision to keep what that we have because we think it is better, but because we analyze our options.

We can't figure out how to do it in a way that we're sure won't get us in trouble, so we just don't do anything if we really understood that. I think we would operate very differently in B2B. Seeing the difference between people who understand that and those who don't is fascinating. I think it's really interesting to think about sales cycles. I like the concept of fear. My friend, who runs a cybersecurity company, I thought, "Put me in charge." sales, he says: what would you do? I was like, I'd show up with a folder of newspaper clippings from companies that were hacked and say my job is to keep you out of this book and that would be all my s like no They don't care about the technical feature, they're not buying. characteristics, but they are buying the benefit and when you sell something negative that you know does not directly contribute to income, you are basically selling the prevention of something negative.

It's happening right, how do you do that? I thought: why wouldn't it be effective? I don't know, right, this has been a fascinating conversation. We always end with the same question: what does success mean to you in life? Oh, so I feel like I spent my entire career being VP of Marketing. I did it for 25 or 30 years and being a vice president of marketing is a very difficult job, you have to know a lot about many things that marketers talk about. about being T-shaped, you have to know that you have to be so deep in so many things and then you usually have one thing that you are very deep in for most of my career.

I was a T-shaped marketer and I was really deep in positioning, now I'm a consultant and I get to do what I love and it's been a very satisfying job. It's been very satisfying working with companies, struggling with this thing that's really thorny, really hard and when you click it feels like magic it feels like magic like good positioning when you look at it afterwards people will say of course that's what they are, of course, that's what they do and you think it was actually very difficult for us to get there and If you had to ask us two years ago, we had no idea what that is and now it's this and it seems obvious, but it wasn't, it's very satisfying work, so I feel like it's a success for me when we get to the end of these projects and everyone in the room says this is much easier to sell, this is much easier for clients to understand.

A client came to see me two weeks ago and they were doing the first pitch. these new sales pitches that they're doing and so the first pitch that they did and they were very afraid to do it because it was a brand new pitch and it was a very high profile client, really a big business that they went into and it's a competitive deal, so they know the prospect has talked to their two competitors and then they come talk to them and the CEO emailed me and said that after he made the presentation, the potential CEO took him to a side and told him that he had never seen a sales pitch.

How cool is that in my entire life and we've seen a lot of sales pitches like that was really cool, it's amazing and that's the most satisfying thing and he's happy, I'm happy. Everyone's happy. You also found something in that answer that I think is underrated in life, which is avoiding your weaknesses, so doing what you're really good at and structuring your life in a way that you're not. Doing a lot of things you don't want to do or aren't that good at is so amazing. I wish I had done it earlier in my career, although I don't know if I would have.

I'd be good at this if I wasn't 25 or 30 years old as a hands-on VP of marketing, but this feels like the reward phase of my career where I can just work in my little zone of excellence doing this thing that has a really big impact on companies. . I love it. They love it. I'm happy. They are happy. Everybody is happy. This is all I will do for the rest of my life. Perfect.