Insights from Product Marketing Lecture

All right. Well, let's kick it off. I'm really excited. We got Anthony Pieri in the house. He's a partner at Fletch PMM, where he helps early stage startups redo and improve their positioning and website messaging. I took a look at your LinkedIn before. You've worn many hats. You've been a music director, founded a full-service production company that you ran for more than seven years. You built and scaled an online community of hundreds of people. You've gone deep in content, launching a podcast. a podcast that got to 11,000 downloads per episode and wrote and edit a newsletter that hit over 350,000 subscribers. And then you got into product marketing where you ran product marketing at an agency called Headway. And now you're a top product marketing voice on LinkedIn and running PMM at Fletch PMM. So a really interesting background. And I've really been enjoying your content on product marketing on LinkedIn. And I'm excited to talk through some things from a little bit more of a demand marketing lens. I think a lot of demand marketers don't have the privilege of working with a product marketer or they just don't work with a really good one. And so it's one of the highest leverage things we can do is to take the time to up our product marketing skills. And there's no better way to do that than to learn from people like you, Anthony. Yeah, thanks for having me. That was the nicest introduction I've ever gotten on any podcast up to this point. That can't be true. That's great. So we got... A couple people here and a lot of people like to consume these in the recorded fashion, but because we have a group, I want to make sure this is collaborative. Let's just go around the room quickly. If you all want to introduce yourselves, Andy, I'll call on you first. Sure. Yes. Andy Binkley, founder, CMO at Toriel. We're an interactive demo company. And yeah, that's me. Good to see you, buddy. Yes. I've chatted with Anthony before. I follow him closely. Amazing. Vanessa. Vanessa Bright, Demand Generation Manager at Horse Hospitality Software Solutions. Awesome. And then Jordan. Hey there, Jordan Tucker. I'm the Senior Demand Generation Manager at Parcel Lab. We're a post-purchase experience software provider. Sweet. Anything in specific y'all wanted to kind of learn about today or take out of today's conversation? Features over benefits. I love that. They matter. That is what we say. That's all I care about. How do we position AI? Because all the products now have AI. How much are we talking about that the product has AI? Yeah. Yeah, I love that. Eric, how do you usually run these? Do we just take it? I got some questions. And then... We'll kick it off. And then, yeah, I mean, we have a small group. So if anyone wants to jut in with follow-up questions, anything we're talking about, please do. But yeah, I mean, let's start off. I think where I want to start is, you know, our community has a lot of demand marketers and sometimes we have a tendency to jump straight into executing campaigns, driving results right away without doing as much of the important kind of product marketing strategy work on the front end. as we should to help us move faster down the line. So, and you know, you're in this position all the time when you're talking to executives or leaders, and you're trying to educate them about the importance of product marketing and the strategy level work. So if you're in the shoes of like a demand marketer, you know, you're trying to get buy-in from the rest of your team, or just convince yourself even to focus on this product marketing kind of strategy level work, like how would you go about? making the case for spending time on these type of things? And why is this type of work really important? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, at a foundational level, different segments of people are going to care about very, very different things. And so if you're building demand, demand from whom, right? Like me and Robert with our service, we had a lot of different ideas of segments that we wanted to go after in the early days. And we've slowly over time tried to continue to tighten our focus niche further and further until we found a group that really, really has a big problem and we can solve it really well. And so for us, that ended up being founders of B2B, early stage, usually SaaS, and then usually like horizontal where the product could be used by a lot of different companies, sometimes in similar ways, sometimes in multiple different ways. And so that piece of being like, that's the situation they're in. And then they're trying to write a website. or a homepage that is going to explain and speak to all those different groups in a clear way. Like there's just so much pain and struggle in that process. Who do I talk to? How do I speak to multiple groups at once? Which features do I talk about? Which ones do I de-emphasize? Should I be talking more about benefits and outcomes? You know, should we have our own product category? Like just to write that page takes so many different, really strategic decisions that are fraught with like, if we go this path, what's going to happen? If we go this path, is it too narrow? Is it too broad? All that stuff. So we focus there and then... All of our demand gen content is with that audience in mind. Because the way that we talk about the problem is very different than we had targeted, let's say, product marketers and big Series C, Series D companies. Very different problem set. And even if we have the underlying the same product as a deliverable, the way that we talk about it is going to be so different depending on those different audiences. The way we generate demand is going to be so different. Like take Figma. If you're explaining Figma to a designer, you're going to highlight a whole different set of features than you would if you're talking to a developer who's getting brought in to use it, or like a product manager who's going to do more workshopping and maybe cares about FigJam more or something like that. So when you're thinking about building the demand, if you don't do the foundational positioning work and the foundational sometimes messaging work also, you can generate demand from the wrong people. And when we would at first, when we were really wishy-washy with our positioning. we would get bad fit clients left and right. People would come in and, hey, well, can you write our pitch decks? Hey, can you help us with content? Well, I know you do this, but... And now we don't really get that anymore. The only people who get on sales calls are usually ready to buy and know exactly what we do and are stoked about it. And they're like, this is exact... You're the only people on the planet who do this exact thing. And we knew that when we ran into this problem, you were the people to call. And so... Whether it's a service company or software, like that's how we think, especially in the early stage startup, like that's what you want. You want, you're the exact solution for this specific person when they're in this situation. You're the only name that comes up. Oh, that's what you're trying to do? Oh, you've got to look at this company. Their product is the exact thing that you need versus, you know, something really broad that like, well, you know, maybe we could use it for, you could use it for this. And maybe you guys want it for that, right? Like the specificity. of the positioning and the messaging drives how you even generate the demand. Yeah, that's amazing. And so if you're a demand marketer, whether you're building marketing strategies or running campaigns, are there any kind of data points or leading indicators that you might look at to say, oh, based on this, this makes me think that the root cause of this is our positioning or our messaging being off? It sounds like from what you just said, a lot of that is lead quality and... leads and the wrong ICP coming in, but anything else that you would maybe look at as a leading indicator to make you think that this is the right lever to start pulling? Yeah. I mean, I think it's the same type of things, right? Who gets the most excited? Who has the pain the biggest? I was on a webinar with this company called Voris, V-O-U-R-I-S. Kyle Van Voris is the guy. He's a pretty big sales leader. But they talked about it like- where's the leverage going to be the biggest? So if you help someone this much versus someone else, you're going to help them go from here to here. Where's the biggest value change as being an indicator of where you can really help? So for us, when we were trying to figure it out, we went broad at first to collect a bunch of different types of people. And then we were like, where's the best fit? Where's the most people excited about it? The most people leave the projects being so happy and thankful and like, oh my gosh, this was such a win. And we found that it was mostly in that early stage because that group is very underrepresented, right? Like even the April Dunford's of the world who did positioning, she even says like, yeah, positioning is in the early stages. It doesn't really, you can't really do it very well. And it's just gonna be bad. And so she targets like post-product market fit companies. And so we're like, there's a huge hole in the market for early stage because you have to position somehow. And so trying to find where the pain is the biggest, where are you gonna be able to add the most value? That's usually like a general, that's a very, you know. general rule of thumb. Awesome. I'm sure you talked to a lot of people who get this stuff wrong a lot too. What are the most common mistakes that you're seeing from a positioning and messaging perspective? The biggest one happens before they get on the call with us, which is they overbuild. It's a rule of nature. And maybe it was because VC dollars were so cheap for a little while, and it was overabundant. Every startup founder we talked to has overbuilt 5X because it's, we say it's just so much easier to spend money on engineering than it is on anything else because you can just keep funneling it in. You can feel like, Oh, I'm getting so much done. I'm adding all these features and you're like still just pushing off the, it's like the build it and they will come idea. Like we thought that like in the early 2000s with lean startup, like everyone learned how to do this right. And then everyone was like, no, lean startup stupid. Like that's so dumb. Like let's make it as big as possible again. And we moved away from that. And then they just pour money in. And so people come in and I'm like, you have a, you have a, you have the platform of a company 20 times the size of you. And you have 120 of the customers that you should based on how many things you've built. So that's usually the problem that causes the most problems coming in. But then the problem is because they've built so much, they have like the sunk cost fallacy. And we're like, you can't sell all 20 of these things together because they don't fit in any packageable way. Like it would be like if you're trying to sell, hey, we sell houses, but you also have to buy the car from us and you have to buy, you know, like... I don't know, airline flights with us. Like those things don't go to, you can't package that into something anyone wants to buy. So we would be like, well, you should probably try to sell the house first or maybe try to sell cars first or maybe try to sell airline tickets first. Don't try to package them all together. So like artificially shrinking the product so it's easier to sell, to find fit with like one of those subproducts. That's like usually the advice that we give them. But the sunk cost fallacy is like, I spent so much money on this thing. I got to show everyone that we can do everything. It's all in one. It's end to end. And then they have these giant Frankenstein products that are impossible to buy because they forget they haven't been on the buying side in so long that when someone comes at you and they're like, hey, I'm an end to end platform and I'm going to replace your accounting software and your project management software and the monday.com approach. When startups do that and you're not monday.com. the amount of friction it puts on the end user to be like, what if I like my accounting platform? What if I like my task manager? I'm not ready to give up all of my solutions for your end-to-end platform. And they think like, they always overestimate how annoying it is. When we ask them, what problem do you solve? Nine times out of 10, they're like, well, people have to jump from tool to tool. And it's like, in some cases, that's a problem. But also if you're on your phone, you swipe through apps all day. It's not that problem. I'm on Instagram. Swipe over, now I'm on LinkedIn. Like, was that so annoying? And so it's like overestimating the problem of switching between apps and overvaluing, putting them all in one giant Frankenstein platform and thinking that's going to be so compelling when it's like, you don't realize like when you say you're an all-in-one platform that does task management and calendars and finance and all this stuff that like the believability just goes down. Like, will you really be better than QuickBooks and... you know, Asana and Miro and Figma, like in your 10 developers and a designer and like two salespeople, like you're really going to out compete every giant across your giant all in one platforms, you know, set of competitors. I don't know. That's like a long winded answer, but those are the ones we, we, we, we can't, we usually could tell with the first session, will we be able to make any progress convincing this founder or not? And a lot of times the answer is no, we're not gonna. yeah i mean i love your i loved your linkedin your linkedin posts on that which you know it's ways to spend five million dollars on developers building out all your pet features which is an important piece that is to make hard positioning decisions and like you know in demand we see the same thing which is it's way easier to dump a bunch of money into paid search you know leads or paid social than it is to make hard you know budget allocation decisions are similar so it happens a lot We have a couple members in our group who are just starting new roles as heads of marketing or standing up demand functions at newer, earlier stage startups. And I'm not 100% sure, but my gut is that they're encountering similar situations where maybe the company's overbuilt or they're just not specific enough on positioning. Do you have any thoughts on, if you were in their shoes, how you would go about? helping the position become more specific? Because I know it has to come from the top. But as a person, if you want your market to succeed, you want the positioning and messaging to work. So it might be a hard question, but any ways that you can think of that would be really helpful in getting the leadership team on board or whoever needs to be on board to focus in. Yeah. I think the easy win you could do would be to be like, hey, let's do a dedicated effort to try to get 10 new customers in this one segment. Let's spend the next quarter just on one of the segments and make everything really targeted, right? The email sequences we write, we'll write it for them. We'll make a landing page just for them. We'll make videos just for them. We'll make case studies talking about companies of their type. We'll do a dedicated, maybe we're going to run ads, maybe we're going to make content, but we're going to do a focused effort just for one segment for three months. And let's just see if we can get some traction and not make it feel like you're forcing the founders to niche or to pick. But you're like, hey, I know you want to become this unicorn. And I know you want to dominate all 10 of these markets. That's great. Let's try just one of them first. See what we can do when we get our three members of our go-to-market team all pushing in the same direction. We were on a call with a founder and he was like, I really can't decide if we want to target financial services or telecommunications. And he was like, if I pick one, I feel like I'm losing so much of the broader TAM that's out there. And I'm like, you can always do one and then do the other one. Once you win in the one, you can expand. And I was like, how many go-to-market people do you have right now? He's like, well, I have two AEs. And I was like, that's like each of those industries is so large. It's like saying, all right, we're going to send one AE to the top half of the world and the other AE to the bottom half of the world. You know, like, let's go. But it's like, when you point them in the same direction, you're going to get so much more traction than if you have everyone pulling in different. Because people underestimate how much it takes to win one segment. It's like, why did Amazon start with books? Why didn't they try to sell everything possible in the world at first? Because it's really hard. So once you win a one market, you can use that point of strength to go after the next two, then to go after the next five, then the next 10. And it can be exponential in that way. But you need to win in those initial ones, which are going to be much smaller. It's like Facebook started at Harvard. Then they were elite schools. Then they were all colleges. Then they brought in high schoolers. Then there was anyone in America. And then it was anyone in the world. So it's like slowly expanding, right? Uber did the same thing. They started in... specific cities and they expanded on tinder started like on specific college campuses and then they expanded on so some of these some of the b2b companies they like can't they can't wrap their head around that so you can you can work with the ceos and the executives to not feel like you're forcing them to ditch big parts of their tam by just saying like why don't we just try a focused effort like let's let's just take a quarter you know and make it seem like it's a less intense decision Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Anthony, when you, when you do that, is it more so like going like website, everything all in on that individual niche category, vertical, and like almost ignoring, like take the telecom versus finance example. It's like, all right, I'm going telecom and I'm, I'm not, we're not doing finance. That means website messaging, everything collateral, all your ads. every single thing you possibly imagine under the sun, all your AEs are dedicated, focused on just telecom. And you're not giving any thought to finance unless they come to you, then sure, like maybe you will service them, but your efforts are dedicated towards that one niche. And then once you have, you know, gone all in and succeeded in that niche, then you start to branch out into another vertical, but it's not like some of your. It's not like you just update your ads to focus on it. Your website still speaks to both. And usually it's like... So a couple of things. Those are great points. I think the more things that are pointed in the same direction, the more traction you're going to get, right? We get people coming who are nonprofits. We get service businesses. And they usually will say, I know we're not quite the right fit based on what you guys publicly position on, but could you still help us? And we're like, yeah, we probably can. depending on what it is. I just had a conversation with a B2C company today. That's not our public positioning, but people are still going to use you even if you publicly position for one. And then there's the other pieces. The one piece where you can maybe leave it a little more open-ended is the homepage. You don't always have to have that in case you're collecting people who are coming. And you can do landing pages, sub for industries. You can put industries in the tab. But I would say, if you're going to run ads, push them to the landing page. If you're going to run content, push them to the landing page. Try to as much as you can funnel them to the specific messaging for them. But the other piece that we always talk about is niching doesn't always have to be industry-based or persona-based. Like you can niche down on a use case, right? Like we worked with a company that was doing like it was sort of like a Google Drive competitor. And they were niching down to the use case of like talking about the problem of how hard it is. for teams to find like creative assets like buried deep into google drive so like they've like creative teams that have all the stuff in google drive with all these files it's like it's really hard to manage like where was that one the photograph we took so they were like going into this niche of like making it the easiest way to find files and so they were like a google drive competitor that had all these different features that made it easy to find things so they had niched down like in more of a horizontal slice Because they could have also talked about like their product did all these other really cool things around like databases like Google Drive or Dropbox. Like there was a whole piece around permissions like for different teams and stuff. And there was all these different angles of the use case. But they're like, we're just going to focus in on that use case. So when we talk about like picking an initial segment to go after, it's more of like it doesn't always have to be like, okay, we're going to be a retail niche or it's a we're only doing e-commerce. It can also be these horizontal slices and you're just lopping off some of the other functionality and just talking about the functionality related to one, if that makes sense. Yeah, that's super helpful. I think two things that stood out to me from that, this whole kind of piece of the conversation is one, so-called for companies to focus on other big companies and copy what they're doing, as opposed to focusing on what they did when they were small, if you're small, which happens all the time. And then I forgot the second takeaway. but that was the main one. Andy, you've been with Toriel, obviously, you know, from the beginning. I would love to, like, have you gone through this kind of process before where, you know, y'all have gone too broad and then had to focus in? Have you been too focused and had to go broad and like any key learnings from that? Yeah, I would say that too broad and too many use cases has been really struggling, has been a real struggle for us. And you probably thought it was too specific, right? Well, I mean, as founders, I'm like, oh, I want to freaking serve everybody, baby. Like I want, I got, because our product can be used by marketing, sales, customer success, product, like people gravitate towards it. And it was so new that we were like, oh, like whoever comes to us, let's see if this works. Let's sell it to them. And then, you know, we're like, you know, 80% marketing. We've got a lot of sales use cases. A lot of people use it. But the biggest challenge for us was like, and this is why I was asking about like, you know, talking about features over benefits, because the benefits with this type of thing is so broad, right? It's like you drive more revenue, you increase your conversion rates, you accelerate sales cycles, the shit that everybody says out there. And I'm like, well, it's got to be a little bit more detailed than that. And then once you start to get in the weeds, you're like, well, why don't. we just talk about the features. Cause then once you talk about the features, they'll make that connection to the benefit that they're really trying to solve for. And so that's been a struggle. And we've got, like I said, so many different use cases that trying to figure out, like we've like really accelerated in the website use case and less so on the sales side of things. And now we're kind of like, well, we have to really decide on how we're going to make that website use case better and better and better. Or. do we start to branch out into a little bit more of the account executive use case where they're sending leave behinds, where they're, you know, running better live demos and things like that. So yeah, it's definitely been challenging from just all the different, you know, getting distracted by all the different targeting and positioning that we can do. So yeah. And Andy, your point, right? Like we... We've talked about the example of Loom a bunch, but like Loom's initial use case was Loom as a meeting replacement. So like, yeah, you're going to have a meeting to update people. Skip like I think their H1 and H2 for a while was skip the meeting, send a Loom or something like that. Like Loom can be used for an infinite number of use cases. Right. They were like, but if we can own that space in customers minds of like, this is why I would use it. And that's I think in my I would credit that as one of the. the key reasons why they grew so big and become successful because everyone thought of them that way of like, and they even their benefits that they talked about were like reduce time spent in meetings by like 31%. They had like percentage numbers. They built it into the product that they were like, you saved five hours that would have been meetings by sending these looms. Like they do all around that same benefit one use case. And like there were other screen recorders out there, you know, like they weren't doing something. fundamentally new, but they claimed the use case. And they were like, we are. And it was such a pain point for people. Everyone hates being in those terrible update meetings where it's like, this could have been an email. They basically built a whole business around this could have been an email and became super successful that way. But what you were talking about, the features too, I've shared this other places. So stop me if this is too redundant, but my older brother was an account executive at this med tech startup. And basically what they were selling was these hospital beds in a hospital. They plug into the wall and it's like a smart bed, like they do all sorts of stuff, but they plug it in the wall. Beds get moved all the time in hospitals. So nurses, when things are going wrong, they rip the cable out of the wall. They just push the bed and the cable pops out. So they constantly have to replace the cables. So the product of the startup that he worked for was a magnetic cable. So when you pull, it would be like a mag safe on your laptop and the cable would just detach without breaking. And so he would literally, back to your question, features over benefits, because they had picked such a specific use case, specific problem, and even specific product, he would literally walk in. to these sales meetings and he would just take out the cable and he would be like, you know how the cables always break because they get yanked out of the wall? He'd be like, look at this. He would just show the feature, just pop it off. And immediately their eyes would light up. Oh my God, that's it. You got to meet this person. We got to bring in. And they would buy a cable for 500 beds and it'd be these giant six, seven figure deals. But the point was that the translation from feature to benefit to value was so obvious. Because they had gone so specific on this one use case that like just showing the feature was like enough to make people excited versus if he had walked in and was like, listen, you know, I bet you're struggling with, you know, X amount of dollars on breakage. And what if I could what if I told you I could increase the amount that you would save by 12 X? And like at that point, they're like, OK, what is this? Like, what are you trying to do? No one even knows what they're talking about versus just being like, look at this, you know, and being like, oh, my gosh, that's what we need. So finding those use cases where you can just show the product and instantly the people's eyes light up. And that was, in my opinion, that was Loom when it was like, I can have my face in the corner as I'm narrating what's on the screen. This is amazing. And it was so clear. What about when you niche into a use case? And again, speaking from experience, the reason that we were very broad is because, and I'll be honest, is because of price. We're a little bit more or a lot bit at one point more expensive. than a lot of the other players in the space like there's other tools like the vatic story lane arcade they've done really well with their like niche use case but they're they're more i mean they're cheaper they're more affordable and we've had to come down in price but we've tried to play the well you can use it for this this this and this and that's why we're 15 000 or 20 000 right and then it just creates that whole dynamic where it's like the reason we want to have a bunch of use cases is because we want to be seen as more premium and expensive because we can't afford to sell for $3,000 a year on a single use case. Yeah. I mean, you're starting to reach the edge of my expertise. Like the pricing strategy is its own world, you know? And I think I would ask like, you know, how did you land on that pricing strategy? Is it a broad, there's probably things in there that are broader than where I could help in that regard. Right. But usually if you can find like, As every startup in the beginning is trying to do, you're trying to find mass adoption. You're trying to find it at a price point that makes sense. So yeah, I think the price point question is an interesting one to think through. And it's like people buy software, not companies. So you're not selling to companies, you're selling to people. So if you're selling multiple use cases, you would have to have someone who actively cares about all of the use cases, which becomes... It becomes... What ends up happening, the trade-off is the closer you get to the ground level with a use case, the more resonance you'll have because people will understand the problem. When you start layering on multiple use cases, you just have to go higher up in the org. And the further you go up in the org, the less motivated they are to buy software. Like a lot of people are like, well, really, at the end of the day, my champion is the CEO. You know, if the CEO is not bought in, we're not getting the deal moved. So that's my buying champion. And they're targeting like... large mid-market or smaller enterprise. I'm like, dude, if the CEO of an enterprise company is actively meeting with AEs to buy software, the board should be a little concerned. They should be like, what are you doing? Are you not doing your job? Why did you meet with this AE three times? Don't you have VPs and directors to do this stuff? But they're like, well, the CEO would be the only one high enough to oversee all these five departments that we're trying to sell to. Yeah, but they're also going to be so far removed from any of the problems that they're not going to be very motivated to meet with procurement and talk to legal and meet with the AE and bring in the technical people to make sure it works. And so it's like it's a mix, right? Of like, I think usually if you're going to do the pricing like where you want to get a lot of use cases, it's almost always better to come in with one specific wedge, lower price point, and then upsell, cross sell to the other ones. Like just as a general rule of thumb, or at least what we've seen has been better. versus selling the end-to-end platform because you're just... Unless they're all like sales use cases, right? And you're selling to the head of sales, but everything is sales related. Once you start going cross department... It becomes infinitely harder to sell because who can oversee a purchase for the marketing, sales, and customer success all at the same time? It's going to have to be someone so senior. They're going to be so removed from the day-to-day. And they're not going to have any motivation to push the deal through. And you just talked about that too, didn't you? On Market Tech, where you're talking about message to the champion. Yes. All this message to the champion. Yes. So it was funny. My dad was a senior PR manager at this company. for a while and there was an AE who was trying to sell like he was he was actively trying to buy this this software for their company my dad was and so this AE was working with them and you guys know b2b sales cycles they're 6 to 12 months so my dad had to meet with all these different stakeholders to get this push through right he had to meet with this VP and this director and legal and and he kept going back with his AE and like to have someone in the trenches with your salesperson for that long If they're super senior, they're just not going to do it. You know, they're just so much less likely. Or if you can get someone a little bit lower, they'll have way more, you know, like gusto to keep it going. And you can help give them the ammunition to convince the higher ups, right? Like you could say, we need to get in a meeting with this. Like that's what the good account executives do. All the multi-threading stuff and targeting multiple different decision makers. The Reforge example. Yes, yes. The Reforge example. I love that one. Yeah. And you had another post recently that I thought was really interesting where you're talking about when you have calls with champions, you just ask them what brought you on the call today. And they'll never say the benefits. They'll say something in between the features and the benefits or maybe the features, but they'll say something like, I'm trying to get, you know, dial in my website positioning. I'm trying to solve this very specific problem. And then it's obviously a salesperson's job to pull back the onion and find the pain and ROI and everything. But that Data point sounds like that can be the features or like many benefits that you speak to with the champion. You just mimic their language back to them. No, because if you're talking to people who are actively buying software, they care about the features. You know what I mean? Like, unless you're going to someone who's not actively buying software and trying to convince them to do it, which is a lot of cold outbound. Right. If I could just get this VP in the room with me, I can convince them. But like. for the people who are looking to buy software, they're like, oh, everyone on our team keeps struggling with this really annoying thing. Oh, there's software that fixes that. Like, oh, that's great. We should meet with them. And then they get on the call and they're like, yeah, everyone on our team, they keep uploading these files and they get lost or whatever. And we heard you guys maybe do something about that. They're not coming in being like, here's my KPI. Can you help? Can I buy an increase in my retention? Like nobody shops like that. Yeah. Have you ever done any like, psychology research around why people literally don't care about benefits, because I feel like it's the idea that it's like overly repeated over and over again. So nobody believes it. Right. It's like, if you're going to tell me that you're going to increase my revenue, like, I don't believe you. Right. I just straight up believe you. But you've shown me the features, then I can make that connection because I can physically see it. I can touch it. I'm like, oh, actually, I do believe you can increase my revenue. But like the way to bring that. from a messaging perspective is feature first, because otherwise they're not going to believe you and you're going to lose them right away. I think it's a question. Yeah. Believability. Like we, I first noticed this, I was trying to convince my siblings to start a company with me. And I was like, we could make so much money. And then I was, I was talking to my one sibling and they were like, they were not interested. They were like, nah, well, we have to, you know, they were super uninterested, unenthusiastic. And then I asked, well, I was talking to my one sister and I was like. why do they not want to make money? And she said, no, of course they want to make money. They just don't believe that you're going to be the one to help them make the money. And I was like, oh yeah. And it's like the believability, especially if you're in startup world, the believability is just so small. You're not Salesforce. You're not Apple. You're not Microsoft. And so it's like talking about these outcomes. It's like when you get a cold email from someone who says, my favorite one I got was some guy said, how would you like to have 400 sales meetings a week? And I was like, I would probably die, first of all, if I had that many calls in a week, just from, you know, the horrible being on Zoom all day. But like, I'm like, I don't even know who you are or what this is. Like, you're just telling me you're going to get me for it. That doesn't even like you just don't believe it. So when you lead with the ROI, when you lead with the benefits, you yeah, you just don't you're not believable. And the other one example I've used is like the ice bath for a while. I spent everyone saying, should you do an ice bath? Do an ice bath. And that's like, you know, the product. And then. We say, why? And they're like, you're going to get way better sleep. And I'm like thinking about it. And I'm like, why would laying in a bed of ice make me sleep better? Like 12 hours late? How do those even? So I just don't believe it. But then you see that neuroscientist guy. I can't remember his name, but he goes on the podcast and he explains like exactly how it like does all the stuff in your bloodstream. And it like he basically explains that we would call them the capabilities, like the features and the capabilities of how it gets you that benefit. And by the end, I'm like, that might actually help my sleep. And then, you know, you'd be more likely to try it. So the how in the early stage. proves like makes the benefits more believable yeah 100 there's a really good book called breakthrough advertising by eugene sports and he talks about this specific thing i forget exactly the phraseology he used but it was like you have to have a compelling benefit but then also you have to talk about the way your solution is different than other solutions and the way that it gets you that benefit which increases i love that a couple minutes left uh do you have any Any people you go to, Anthony, whether it's resources, April Dunford type, leaders on product marketing that you got to learn from, or other companies who you admire who are doing it really well, that you could just dump on us or people here can go to learn more? Yeah, I think companies-wise, I like how Notion does product marketing. They're bigger, but they're still very much doing product marketing. Rippling is a good example. They do product marketing, I think, really well. Stripe, for the most part, I think it does a good job. They're very capabilities oriented. Here's what you do with these different things and not just all this vague outcome language. My partner, Robert, he's probably my biggest source of inspiration. We talk about this stuff every day and he's a super sharp guy. So I'd say follow him on LinkedIn if you're not. And then there's just a handful of other product marketers that are all just good followers. I could send probably a list that you could share too if this goes out. Yeah. Matthew Reeves. He's a, he's a good friend of mine on, on LinkedIn. He's a, he's a really good product marketer and he, he posts great stuff, great stuff. Do you have any earlier stage companies who you think are doing it really well? Yes, but you probably would have never heard of them because they're all, they're all much smaller. They're all much smaller. So like, I don't have to think about it of a good early stage one, but even if you look at those ones, I said, If you go in the Wayback Machine, you can look at what their website looked like at the beginning, and they all were doing a great job, even from the early days. Cool. Well, we're basically out of time, Anthony. This was amazing. I loved having Andy on too and talking through some of the kind of more strategic pieces of how we make these decisions to focus in and your direct experience with that. We got a couple more minutes for... four more minutes i know oh haley just popped off um i think but yeah anyone else had any of the questions you wanted to talk about with anthony or get thoughts on but we're not hearing you andy i don't know if you're saying something or oh no i was reading from the thing i've i've been talking the whole time so i'm gonna keep quiet well anthony where Plug yourself quickly. Where can people go to learn more about Fletch or yourself? Yeah. My LinkedIn is a great starting point. If you send me a connect request, I basically accept everyone. Usually I'll send you a DM, say, Hey, or Fletch PMM is our website. And probably if I was going to plug a product, we have a Notion database of all of our best practices. Everything we've ever posted on LinkedIn and all the Figma templates that are editable for any of our canvases and things like that, we charge like 50 bucks for it. That's on my LinkedIn and the featured section. And yeah, that's probably a good way to get a deep dive into what we think about this type of stuff. Amazing. That is, just taking notes. That's awesome. Well, Anthony, thank you so much. This was fantastic. We'll be sending this recording out to our community and then hopefully we can chop some good insights up and post it on social and stuff too. But thanks so much. This is great. Have a great rest of your day. And thank you everyone else for hopping on. Thanks for having me. Good to see you all. Thank you. See you, man. See you guys.

All right. Well, let's kick it off. I'm really excited.

We got Anthony Pieri in the house. He's a partner at Fletch PMM, where he helps early stage startups redo and improve their positioning and website messaging. I took a look at your LinkedIn before.

You've worn many hats. You've been a music director, founded a full-service production company that you ran for more than seven years. You built and scaled an online community of hundreds of people.

You've gone deep in content, launching a podcast. a podcast that got to 11,000 downloads per episode and wrote and edit a newsletter that hit over 350,000 subscribers. And then you got into product marketing where you ran product marketing at an agency called Headway. And now you're a top product marketing voice on LinkedIn and running PMM at Fletch PMM.

So a really interesting background. And I've really been enjoying your content on product marketing on LinkedIn. And I'm excited to talk through some things from a little bit more of a demand marketing lens. I think a lot of demand marketers don't have the privilege of working with a product marketer or they just don't work with a really good one. And so it's one of the highest leverage things we can do is to take the time to up our product marketing skills.

And there's no better way to do that than to learn from people like you, Anthony. Yeah, thanks for having me. That was the nicest introduction I've ever gotten on any podcast up to this point.

That can't be true. That's great. So we got... A couple people here and a lot of people like to consume these in the recorded fashion, but because we have a group, I want to make sure this is collaborative. Let's just go around the room quickly.

If you all want to introduce yourselves, Andy, I'll call on you first. Sure. Yes.

Andy Binkley, founder, CMO at Toriel. We're an interactive demo company. And yeah, that's me. Good to see you, buddy. Yes.

I've chatted with Anthony before. I follow him closely. Amazing.

Vanessa. Vanessa Bright, Demand Generation Manager at Horse Hospitality Software Solutions. Awesome.

And then Jordan. Hey there, Jordan Tucker. I'm the Senior Demand Generation Manager at Parcel Lab. We're a post-purchase experience software provider.

Sweet. Anything in specific y'all wanted to kind of learn about today or take out of today's conversation? Features over benefits.

I love that. They matter. That is what we say.

That's all I care about. How do we position AI? Because all the products now have AI.

How much are we talking about that the product has AI? Yeah. Yeah, I love that. Eric, how do you usually run these? Do we just take it?

I got some questions. And then... We'll kick it off.

And then, yeah, I mean, we have a small group. So if anyone wants to jut in with follow-up questions, anything we're talking about, please do. But yeah, I mean, let's start off. I think where I want to start is, you know, our community has a lot of demand marketers and sometimes we have a tendency to jump straight into executing campaigns, driving results right away without doing as much of the important kind of product marketing strategy work on the front end.

as we should to help us move faster down the line. So, and you know, you're in this position all the time when you're talking to executives or leaders, and you're trying to educate them about the importance of product marketing and the strategy level work. So if you're in the shoes of like a demand marketer, you know, you're trying to get buy-in from the rest of your team, or just convince yourself even to focus on this product marketing kind of strategy level work, like how would you go about?

making the case for spending time on these type of things? And why is this type of work really important? Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, at a foundational level, different segments of people are going to care about very, very different things. And so if you're building demand, demand from whom, right?

Like me and Robert with our service, we had a lot of different ideas of segments that we wanted to go after in the early days. And we've slowly over time tried to continue to tighten our focus niche further and further until we found a group that really, really has a big problem and we can solve it really well. And so for us, that ended up being founders of B2B, early stage, usually SaaS, and then usually like horizontal where the product could be used by a lot of different companies, sometimes in similar ways, sometimes in multiple different ways. And so that piece of being like, that's the situation they're in. And then they're trying to write a website.

or a homepage that is going to explain and speak to all those different groups in a clear way. Like there's just so much pain and struggle in that process. Who do I talk to? How do I speak to multiple groups at once? Which features do I talk about?

Which ones do I de-emphasize? Should I be talking more about benefits and outcomes? You know, should we have our own product category?

Like just to write that page takes so many different, really strategic decisions that are fraught with like, if we go this path, what's going to happen? If we go this path, is it too narrow? Is it too broad?

All that stuff. So we focus there and then... All of our demand gen content is with that audience in mind.

Because the way that we talk about the problem is very different than we had targeted, let's say, product marketers and big Series C, Series D companies. Very different problem set. And even if we have the underlying the same product as a deliverable, the way that we talk about it is going to be so different depending on those different audiences. The way we generate demand is going to be so different. Like take Figma.

If you're explaining Figma to a designer, you're going to highlight a whole different set of features than you would if you're talking to a developer who's getting brought in to use it, or like a product manager who's going to do more workshopping and maybe cares about FigJam more or something like that. So when you're thinking about building the demand, if you don't do the foundational positioning work and the foundational sometimes messaging work also, you can generate demand from the wrong people. And when we would at first, when we were really wishy-washy with our positioning.

we would get bad fit clients left and right. People would come in and, hey, well, can you write our pitch decks? Hey, can you help us with content?

Well, I know you do this, but... And now we don't really get that anymore. The only people who get on sales calls are usually ready to buy and know exactly what we do and are stoked about it.

And they're like, this is exact... You're the only people on the planet who do this exact thing. And we knew that when we ran into this problem, you were the people to call. And so... Whether it's a service company or software, like that's how we think, especially in the early stage startup, like that's what you want.

You want, you're the exact solution for this specific person when they're in this situation. You're the only name that comes up. Oh, that's what you're trying to do? Oh, you've got to look at this company.

Their product is the exact thing that you need versus, you know, something really broad that like, well, you know, maybe we could use it for, you could use it for this. And maybe you guys want it for that, right? Like the specificity. of the positioning and the messaging drives how you even generate the demand. Yeah, that's amazing.

And so if you're a demand marketer, whether you're building marketing strategies or running campaigns, are there any kind of data points or leading indicators that you might look at to say, oh, based on this, this makes me think that the root cause of this is our positioning or our messaging being off? It sounds like from what you just said, a lot of that is lead quality and... leads and the wrong ICP coming in, but anything else that you would maybe look at as a leading indicator to make you think that this is the right lever to start pulling? Yeah.

I mean, I think it's the same type of things, right? Who gets the most excited? Who has the pain the biggest? I was on a webinar with this company called Voris, V-O-U-R-I-S. Kyle Van Voris is the guy.

He's a pretty big sales leader. But they talked about it like- where's the leverage going to be the biggest? So if you help someone this much versus someone else, you're going to help them go from here to here. Where's the biggest value change as being an indicator of where you can really help? So for us, when we were trying to figure it out, we went broad at first to collect a bunch of different types of people.

And then we were like, where's the best fit? Where's the most people excited about it? The most people leave the projects being so happy and thankful and like, oh my gosh, this was such a win.

And we found that it was mostly in that early stage because that group is very underrepresented, right? Like even the April Dunford's of the world who did positioning, she even says like, yeah, positioning is in the early stages. It doesn't really, you can't really do it very well. And it's just gonna be bad.

And so she targets like post-product market fit companies. And so we're like, there's a huge hole in the market for early stage because you have to position somehow. And so trying to find where the pain is the biggest, where are you gonna be able to add the most value?

That's usually like a general, that's a very, you know. general rule of thumb. Awesome. I'm sure you talked to a lot of people who get this stuff wrong a lot too. What are the most common mistakes that you're seeing from a positioning and messaging perspective?

The biggest one happens before they get on the call with us, which is they overbuild. It's a rule of nature. And maybe it was because VC dollars were so cheap for a little while, and it was overabundant. Every startup founder we talked to has overbuilt 5X because it's, we say it's just so much easier to spend money on engineering than it is on anything else because you can just keep funneling it in. You can feel like, Oh, I'm getting so much done.

I'm adding all these features and you're like still just pushing off the, it's like the build it and they will come idea. Like we thought that like in the early 2000s with lean startup, like everyone learned how to do this right. And then everyone was like, no, lean startup stupid.

Like that's so dumb. Like let's make it as big as possible again. And we moved away from that. And then they just pour money in.

And so people come in and I'm like, you have a, you have a, you have the platform of a company 20 times the size of you. And you have 120 of the customers that you should based on how many things you've built. So that's usually the problem that causes the most problems coming in. But then the problem is because they've built so much, they have like the sunk cost fallacy.

And we're like, you can't sell all 20 of these things together because they don't fit in any packageable way. Like it would be like if you're trying to sell, hey, we sell houses, but you also have to buy the car from us and you have to buy, you know, like... I don't know, airline flights with us. Like those things don't go to, you can't package that into something anyone wants to buy. So we would be like, well, you should probably try to sell the house first or maybe try to sell cars first or maybe try to sell airline tickets first.

Don't try to package them all together. So like artificially shrinking the product so it's easier to sell, to find fit with like one of those subproducts. That's like usually the advice that we give them. But the sunk cost fallacy is like, I spent so much money on this thing.

I got to show everyone that we can do everything. It's all in one. It's end to end.

And then they have these giant Frankenstein products that are impossible to buy because they forget they haven't been on the buying side in so long that when someone comes at you and they're like, hey, I'm an end to end platform and I'm going to replace your accounting software and your project management software and the monday.com approach. When startups do that and you're not monday.com. the amount of friction it puts on the end user to be like, what if I like my accounting platform? What if I like my task manager?

I'm not ready to give up all of my solutions for your end-to-end platform. And they think like, they always overestimate how annoying it is. When we ask them, what problem do you solve?

Nine times out of 10, they're like, well, people have to jump from tool to tool. And it's like, in some cases, that's a problem. But also if you're on your phone, you swipe through apps all day.

It's not that problem. I'm on Instagram. Swipe over, now I'm on LinkedIn.

Like, was that so annoying? And so it's like overestimating the problem of switching between apps and overvaluing, putting them all in one giant Frankenstein platform and thinking that's going to be so compelling when it's like, you don't realize like when you say you're an all-in-one platform that does task management and calendars and finance and all this stuff that like the believability just goes down. Like, will you really be better than QuickBooks and... you know, Asana and Miro and Figma, like in your 10 developers and a designer and like two salespeople, like you're really going to out compete every giant across your giant all in one platforms, you know, set of competitors. I don't know.

That's like a long winded answer, but those are the ones we, we, we, we can't, we usually could tell with the first session, will we be able to make any progress convincing this founder or not? And a lot of times the answer is no, we're not gonna. yeah i mean i love your i loved your linkedin your linkedin posts on that which you know it's ways to spend five million dollars on developers building out all your pet features which is an important piece that is to make hard positioning decisions and like you know in demand we see the same thing which is it's way easier to dump a bunch of money into paid search you know leads or paid social than it is to make hard you know budget allocation decisions are similar so it happens a lot We have a couple members in our group who are just starting new roles as heads of marketing or standing up demand functions at newer, earlier stage startups.

And I'm not 100% sure, but my gut is that they're encountering similar situations where maybe the company's overbuilt or they're just not specific enough on positioning. Do you have any thoughts on, if you were in their shoes, how you would go about? helping the position become more specific? Because I know it has to come from the top.

But as a person, if you want your market to succeed, you want the positioning and messaging to work. So it might be a hard question, but any ways that you can think of that would be really helpful in getting the leadership team on board or whoever needs to be on board to focus in. Yeah.

I think the easy win you could do would be to be like, hey, let's do a dedicated effort to try to get 10 new customers in this one segment. Let's spend the next quarter just on one of the segments and make everything really targeted, right? The email sequences we write, we'll write it for them.

We'll make a landing page just for them. We'll make videos just for them. We'll make case studies talking about companies of their type.

We'll do a dedicated, maybe we're going to run ads, maybe we're going to make content, but we're going to do a focused effort just for one segment for three months. And let's just see if we can get some traction and not make it feel like you're forcing the founders to niche or to pick. But you're like, hey, I know you want to become this unicorn. And I know you want to dominate all 10 of these markets.

That's great. Let's try just one of them first. See what we can do when we get our three members of our go-to-market team all pushing in the same direction.

We were on a call with a founder and he was like, I really can't decide if we want to target financial services or telecommunications. And he was like, if I pick one, I feel like I'm losing so much of the broader TAM that's out there. And I'm like, you can always do one and then do the other one. Once you win in the one, you can expand.

And I was like, how many go-to-market people do you have right now? He's like, well, I have two AEs. And I was like, that's like each of those industries is so large. It's like saying, all right, we're going to send one AE to the top half of the world and the other AE to the bottom half of the world.

You know, like, let's go. But it's like, when you point them in the same direction, you're going to get so much more traction than if you have everyone pulling in different. Because people underestimate how much it takes to win one segment. It's like, why did Amazon start with books? Why didn't they try to sell everything possible in the world at first?

Because it's really hard. So once you win a one market, you can use that point of strength to go after the next two, then to go after the next five, then the next 10. And it can be exponential in that way. But you need to win in those initial ones, which are going to be much smaller. It's like Facebook started at Harvard. Then they were elite schools.

Then they were all colleges. Then they brought in high schoolers. Then there was anyone in America. And then it was anyone in the world.

So it's like slowly expanding, right? Uber did the same thing. They started in...

specific cities and they expanded on tinder started like on specific college campuses and then they expanded on so some of these some of the b2b companies they like can't they can't wrap their head around that so you can you can work with the ceos and the executives to not feel like you're forcing them to ditch big parts of their tam by just saying like why don't we just try a focused effort like let's let's just take a quarter you know and make it seem like it's a less intense decision Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Anthony, when you, when you do that, is it more so like going like website, everything all in on that individual niche category, vertical, and like almost ignoring, like take the telecom versus finance example. It's like, all right, I'm going telecom and I'm, I'm not, we're not doing finance.

That means website messaging, everything collateral, all your ads. every single thing you possibly imagine under the sun, all your AEs are dedicated, focused on just telecom. And you're not giving any thought to finance unless they come to you, then sure, like maybe you will service them, but your efforts are dedicated towards that one niche.

And then once you have, you know, gone all in and succeeded in that niche, then you start to branch out into another vertical, but it's not like some of your. It's not like you just update your ads to focus on it. Your website still speaks to both.

And usually it's like... So a couple of things. Those are great points. I think the more things that are pointed in the same direction, the more traction you're going to get, right?

We get people coming who are nonprofits. We get service businesses. And they usually will say, I know we're not quite the right fit based on what you guys publicly position on, but could you still help us?

And we're like, yeah, we probably can. depending on what it is. I just had a conversation with a B2C company today. That's not our public positioning, but people are still going to use you even if you publicly position for one. And then there's the other pieces.

The one piece where you can maybe leave it a little more open-ended is the homepage. You don't always have to have that in case you're collecting people who are coming. And you can do landing pages, sub for industries.

You can put industries in the tab. But I would say, if you're going to run ads, push them to the landing page. If you're going to run content, push them to the landing page.

Try to as much as you can funnel them to the specific messaging for them. But the other piece that we always talk about is niching doesn't always have to be industry-based or persona-based. Like you can niche down on a use case, right?

Like we worked with a company that was doing like it was sort of like a Google Drive competitor. And they were niching down to the use case of like talking about the problem of how hard it is. for teams to find like creative assets like buried deep into google drive so like they've like creative teams that have all the stuff in google drive with all these files it's like it's really hard to manage like where was that one the photograph we took so they were like going into this niche of like making it the easiest way to find files and so they were like a google drive competitor that had all these different features that made it easy to find things so they had niched down like in more of a horizontal slice Because they could have also talked about like their product did all these other really cool things around like databases like Google Drive or Dropbox. Like there was a whole piece around permissions like for different teams and stuff.

And there was all these different angles of the use case. But they're like, we're just going to focus in on that use case. So when we talk about like picking an initial segment to go after, it's more of like it doesn't always have to be like, okay, we're going to be a retail niche or it's a we're only doing e-commerce. It can also be these horizontal slices and you're just lopping off some of the other functionality and just talking about the functionality related to one, if that makes sense. Yeah, that's super helpful.

I think two things that stood out to me from that, this whole kind of piece of the conversation is one, so-called for companies to focus on other big companies and copy what they're doing, as opposed to focusing on what they did when they were small, if you're small, which happens all the time. And then I forgot the second takeaway. but that was the main one.

Andy, you've been with Toriel, obviously, you know, from the beginning. I would love to, like, have you gone through this kind of process before where, you know, y'all have gone too broad and then had to focus in? Have you been too focused and had to go broad and like any key learnings from that?

Yeah, I would say that too broad and too many use cases has been really struggling, has been a real struggle for us. And you probably thought it was too specific, right? Well, I mean, as founders, I'm like, oh, I want to freaking serve everybody, baby.

Like I want, I got, because our product can be used by marketing, sales, customer success, product, like people gravitate towards it. And it was so new that we were like, oh, like whoever comes to us, let's see if this works. Let's sell it to them.

And then, you know, we're like, you know, 80% marketing. We've got a lot of sales use cases. A lot of people use it.

But the biggest challenge for us was like, and this is why I was asking about like, you know, talking about features over benefits, because the benefits with this type of thing is so broad, right? It's like you drive more revenue, you increase your conversion rates, you accelerate sales cycles, the shit that everybody says out there. And I'm like, well, it's got to be a little bit more detailed than that.

And then once you start to get in the weeds, you're like, well, why don't. we just talk about the features. Cause then once you talk about the features, they'll make that connection to the benefit that they're really trying to solve for. And so that's been a struggle.

And we've got, like I said, so many different use cases that trying to figure out, like we've like really accelerated in the website use case and less so on the sales side of things. And now we're kind of like, well, we have to really decide on how we're going to make that website use case better and better and better. Or. do we start to branch out into a little bit more of the account executive use case where they're sending leave behinds, where they're, you know, running better live demos and things like that.

So yeah, it's definitely been challenging from just all the different, you know, getting distracted by all the different targeting and positioning that we can do. So yeah. And Andy, your point, right? Like we...

We've talked about the example of Loom a bunch, but like Loom's initial use case was Loom as a meeting replacement. So like, yeah, you're going to have a meeting to update people. Skip like I think their H1 and H2 for a while was skip the meeting, send a Loom or something like that. Like Loom can be used for an infinite number of use cases. Right.

They were like, but if we can own that space in customers minds of like, this is why I would use it. And that's I think in my I would credit that as one of the. the key reasons why they grew so big and become successful because everyone thought of them that way of like, and they even their benefits that they talked about were like reduce time spent in meetings by like 31%. They had like percentage numbers. They built it into the product that they were like, you saved five hours that would have been meetings by sending these looms.

Like they do all around that same benefit one use case. And like there were other screen recorders out there, you know, like they weren't doing something. fundamentally new, but they claimed the use case. And they were like, we are.

And it was such a pain point for people. Everyone hates being in those terrible update meetings where it's like, this could have been an email. They basically built a whole business around this could have been an email and became super successful that way. But what you were talking about, the features too, I've shared this other places.

So stop me if this is too redundant, but my older brother was an account executive at this med tech startup. And basically what they were selling was these hospital beds in a hospital. They plug into the wall and it's like a smart bed, like they do all sorts of stuff, but they plug it in the wall. Beds get moved all the time in hospitals. So nurses, when things are going wrong, they rip the cable out of the wall.

They just push the bed and the cable pops out. So they constantly have to replace the cables. So the product of the startup that he worked for was a magnetic cable. So when you pull, it would be like a mag safe on your laptop and the cable would just detach without breaking. And so he would literally, back to your question, features over benefits, because they had picked such a specific use case, specific problem, and even specific product, he would literally walk in.

to these sales meetings and he would just take out the cable and he would be like, you know how the cables always break because they get yanked out of the wall? He'd be like, look at this. He would just show the feature, just pop it off. And immediately their eyes would light up. Oh my God, that's it.

You got to meet this person. We got to bring in. And they would buy a cable for 500 beds and it'd be these giant six, seven figure deals. But the point was that the translation from feature to benefit to value was so obvious. Because they had gone so specific on this one use case that like just showing the feature was like enough to make people excited versus if he had walked in and was like, listen, you know, I bet you're struggling with, you know, X amount of dollars on breakage.

And what if I could what if I told you I could increase the amount that you would save by 12 X? And like at that point, they're like, OK, what is this? Like, what are you trying to do? No one even knows what they're talking about versus just being like, look at this, you know, and being like, oh, my gosh, that's what we need.

So finding those use cases where you can just show the product and instantly the people's eyes light up. And that was, in my opinion, that was Loom when it was like, I can have my face in the corner as I'm narrating what's on the screen. This is amazing.

And it was so clear. What about when you niche into a use case? And again, speaking from experience, the reason that we were very broad is because, and I'll be honest, is because of price. We're a little bit more or a lot bit at one point more expensive. than a lot of the other players in the space like there's other tools like the vatic story lane arcade they've done really well with their like niche use case but they're they're more i mean they're cheaper they're more affordable and we've had to come down in price but we've tried to play the well you can use it for this this this and this and that's why we're 15 000 or 20 000 right and then it just creates that whole dynamic where it's like the reason we want to have a bunch of use cases is because we want to be seen as more premium and expensive because we can't afford to sell for $3,000 a year on a single use case.

Yeah. I mean, you're starting to reach the edge of my expertise. Like the pricing strategy is its own world, you know? And I think I would ask like, you know, how did you land on that pricing strategy?

Is it a broad, there's probably things in there that are broader than where I could help in that regard. Right. But usually if you can find like, As every startup in the beginning is trying to do, you're trying to find mass adoption. You're trying to find it at a price point that makes sense. So yeah, I think the price point question is an interesting one to think through.

And it's like people buy software, not companies. So you're not selling to companies, you're selling to people. So if you're selling multiple use cases, you would have to have someone who actively cares about all of the use cases, which becomes...

It becomes... What ends up happening, the trade-off is the closer you get to the ground level with a use case, the more resonance you'll have because people will understand the problem. When you start layering on multiple use cases, you just have to go higher up in the org. And the further you go up in the org, the less motivated they are to buy software.

Like a lot of people are like, well, really, at the end of the day, my champion is the CEO. You know, if the CEO is not bought in, we're not getting the deal moved. So that's my buying champion.

And they're targeting like... large mid-market or smaller enterprise. I'm like, dude, if the CEO of an enterprise company is actively meeting with AEs to buy software, the board should be a little concerned. They should be like, what are you doing? Are you not doing your job?

Why did you meet with this AE three times? Don't you have VPs and directors to do this stuff? But they're like, well, the CEO would be the only one high enough to oversee all these five departments that we're trying to sell to. Yeah, but they're also going to be so far removed from any of the problems that they're not going to be very motivated to meet with procurement and talk to legal and meet with the AE and bring in the technical people to make sure it works. And so it's like it's a mix, right?

Of like, I think usually if you're going to do the pricing like where you want to get a lot of use cases, it's almost always better to come in with one specific wedge, lower price point, and then upsell, cross sell to the other ones. Like just as a general rule of thumb, or at least what we've seen has been better. versus selling the end-to-end platform because you're just...

Unless they're all like sales use cases, right? And you're selling to the head of sales, but everything is sales related. Once you start going cross department...

It becomes infinitely harder to sell because who can oversee a purchase for the marketing, sales, and customer success all at the same time? It's going to have to be someone so senior. They're going to be so removed from the day-to-day. And they're not going to have any motivation to push the deal through. And you just talked about that too, didn't you?

On Market Tech, where you're talking about message to the champion. Yes. All this message to the champion. Yes.

So it was funny. My dad was a senior PR manager at this company. for a while and there was an AE who was trying to sell like he was he was actively trying to buy this this software for their company my dad was and so this AE was working with them and you guys know b2b sales cycles they're 6 to 12 months so my dad had to meet with all these different stakeholders to get this push through right he had to meet with this VP and this director and legal and and he kept going back with his AE and like to have someone in the trenches with your salesperson for that long If they're super senior, they're just not going to do it. You know, they're just so much less likely. Or if you can get someone a little bit lower, they'll have way more, you know, like gusto to keep it going.

And you can help give them the ammunition to convince the higher ups, right? Like you could say, we need to get in a meeting with this. Like that's what the good account executives do.

All the multi-threading stuff and targeting multiple different decision makers. The Reforge example. Yes, yes.

The Reforge example. I love that one. Yeah.

And you had another post recently that I thought was really interesting where you're talking about when you have calls with champions, you just ask them what brought you on the call today. And they'll never say the benefits. They'll say something in between the features and the benefits or maybe the features, but they'll say something like, I'm trying to get, you know, dial in my website positioning. I'm trying to solve this very specific problem. And then it's obviously a salesperson's job to pull back the onion and find the pain and ROI and everything.

But that Data point sounds like that can be the features or like many benefits that you speak to with the champion. You just mimic their language back to them. No, because if you're talking to people who are actively buying software, they care about the features. You know what I mean?

Like, unless you're going to someone who's not actively buying software and trying to convince them to do it, which is a lot of cold outbound. Right. If I could just get this VP in the room with me, I can convince them. But like.

for the people who are looking to buy software, they're like, oh, everyone on our team keeps struggling with this really annoying thing. Oh, there's software that fixes that. Like, oh, that's great.

We should meet with them. And then they get on the call and they're like, yeah, everyone on our team, they keep uploading these files and they get lost or whatever. And we heard you guys maybe do something about that.

They're not coming in being like, here's my KPI. Can you help? Can I buy an increase in my retention? Like nobody shops like that.

Yeah. Have you ever done any like, psychology research around why people literally don't care about benefits, because I feel like it's the idea that it's like overly repeated over and over again. So nobody believes it.

Right. It's like, if you're going to tell me that you're going to increase my revenue, like, I don't believe you. Right.

I just straight up believe you. But you've shown me the features, then I can make that connection because I can physically see it. I can touch it. I'm like, oh, actually, I do believe you can increase my revenue.

But like the way to bring that. from a messaging perspective is feature first, because otherwise they're not going to believe you and you're going to lose them right away. I think it's a question. Yeah. Believability.

Like we, I first noticed this, I was trying to convince my siblings to start a company with me. And I was like, we could make so much money. And then I was, I was talking to my one sibling and they were like, they were not interested.

They were like, nah, well, we have to, you know, they were super uninterested, unenthusiastic. And then I asked, well, I was talking to my one sister and I was like. why do they not want to make money? And she said, no, of course they want to make money.

They just don't believe that you're going to be the one to help them make the money. And I was like, oh yeah. And it's like the believability, especially if you're in startup world, the believability is just so small.

You're not Salesforce. You're not Apple. You're not Microsoft.

And so it's like talking about these outcomes. It's like when you get a cold email from someone who says, my favorite one I got was some guy said, how would you like to have 400 sales meetings a week? And I was like, I would probably die, first of all, if I had that many calls in a week, just from, you know, the horrible being on Zoom all day.

But like, I'm like, I don't even know who you are or what this is. Like, you're just telling me you're going to get me for it. That doesn't even like you just don't believe it.

So when you lead with the ROI, when you lead with the benefits, you yeah, you just don't you're not believable. And the other one example I've used is like the ice bath for a while. I spent everyone saying, should you do an ice bath? Do an ice bath. And that's like, you know, the product.

And then. We say, why? And they're like, you're going to get way better sleep. And I'm like thinking about it. And I'm like, why would laying in a bed of ice make me sleep better?

Like 12 hours late? How do those even? So I just don't believe it.

But then you see that neuroscientist guy. I can't remember his name, but he goes on the podcast and he explains like exactly how it like does all the stuff in your bloodstream. And it like he basically explains that we would call them the capabilities, like the features and the capabilities of how it gets you that benefit.

And by the end, I'm like, that might actually help my sleep. And then, you know, you'd be more likely to try it. So the how in the early stage. proves like makes the benefits more believable yeah 100 there's a really good book called breakthrough advertising by eugene sports and he talks about this specific thing i forget exactly the phraseology he used but it was like you have to have a compelling benefit but then also you have to talk about the way your solution is different than other solutions and the way that it gets you that benefit which increases i love that a couple minutes left uh do you have any Any people you go to, Anthony, whether it's resources, April Dunford type, leaders on product marketing that you got to learn from, or other companies who you admire who are doing it really well, that you could just dump on us or people here can go to learn more? Yeah, I think companies-wise, I like how Notion does product marketing.

They're bigger, but they're still very much doing product marketing. Rippling is a good example. They do product marketing, I think, really well.

Stripe, for the most part, I think it does a good job. They're very capabilities oriented. Here's what you do with these different things and not just all this vague outcome language. My partner, Robert, he's probably my biggest source of inspiration. We talk about this stuff every day and he's a super sharp guy.

So I'd say follow him on LinkedIn if you're not. And then there's just a handful of other product marketers that are all just good followers. I could send probably a list that you could share too if this goes out. Yeah. Matthew Reeves.

He's a, he's a good friend of mine on, on LinkedIn. He's a, he's a really good product marketer and he, he posts great stuff, great stuff. Do you have any earlier stage companies who you think are doing it really well? Yes, but you probably would have never heard of them because they're all, they're all much smaller.

They're all much smaller. So like, I don't have to think about it of a good early stage one, but even if you look at those ones, I said, If you go in the Wayback Machine, you can look at what their website looked like at the beginning, and they all were doing a great job, even from the early days. Cool.

Well, we're basically out of time, Anthony. This was amazing. I loved having Andy on too and talking through some of the kind of more strategic pieces of how we make these decisions to focus in and your direct experience with that. We got a couple more minutes for... four more minutes i know oh haley just popped off um i think but yeah anyone else had any of the questions you wanted to talk about with anthony or get thoughts on but we're not hearing you andy i don't know if you're saying something or oh no i was reading from the thing i've i've been talking the whole time so i'm gonna keep quiet well anthony where Plug yourself quickly.

Where can people go to learn more about Fletch or yourself? Yeah. My LinkedIn is a great starting point.

If you send me a connect request, I basically accept everyone. Usually I'll send you a DM, say, Hey, or Fletch PMM is our website. And probably if I was going to plug a product, we have a Notion database of all of our best practices.

Everything we've ever posted on LinkedIn and all the Figma templates that are editable for any of our canvases and things like that, we charge like 50 bucks for it. That's on my LinkedIn and the featured section. And yeah, that's probably a good way to get a deep dive into what we think about this type of stuff.

Amazing. That is, just taking notes. That's awesome. Well, Anthony, thank you so much. This was fantastic.

We'll be sending this recording out to our community and then hopefully we can chop some good insights up and post it on social and stuff too. But thanks so much. This is great. Have a great rest of your day.

And thank you everyone else for hopping on. Thanks for having me. Good to see you all. Thank you. See you, man.

See you guys.

Transcript for:Insights from Product Marketing Lecture

Transcript for:
Insights from Product Marketing Lecture