2-min Product Marketing Insights: October 2023 Releases
Part 1 Release Date: Oct 12, 2023 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Create separate landing pages for each persona (or intent) you appeal to and improve organic SEO while increasing sales from new logos.
LinkedIn's pitch, for the most part to any business, is to use their platform to advertise a job, source candidates, and train employees. To appeal to each of these use cases, LinkedIn has a dedicated landing page with custom copy and imagery to offer the most relevant experience.
[2] Consider the option of a launch week to set an arbitrary deadline in the future and speed up the shipping of major features.
Supabase borrowed from its Y Combinator experience to pick an artificial deadline to motivate different internal initiatives stretching from fundraising to product. Instead of just a launch day, the company opts for a launch week set with a predefined timeline, like 3 months, to force cross-functional teams to ask - "What are the MOST ambitious things we can hope to ship 3 months from now?"
[3] Create urgency in your sale by timing your offer to account for the seasonal business fluctuations of your prospects.
Proof (an advertising services firm) suggests learning when your product will be most relevant during the prospecting phase. For example, an accounting software website is likelier to try out your live chat software before the tax season traffic spike.
[4] Choose one of these two compensation structures to incentivize AEs (Sales) to work closely with channel partners on new deals.
The go-to-market (GTM) leader at Glean proposes two options to compensate AEs in deals sold through or by a channel partner - (i) As the channel program gets off the ground, you can allow the AE to 'retire their quota at 100% list price' even if the revenue is slightly lower for the company due to the partner margin or (ii) You comp the AE on net revenue (i.e. subtracting partner margin) but ensure a % of AE's sales (ex: 25%) goes through partners as a requirement to ensure partner program success.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
“Sales Pitch: How to Craft a Story to Stand Out and Win” by April Dunford
[1] Break your sales pitch into 2 distinct phases - (i) SETUP: offer insights about the market, competitive alternatives, and discovery. (ii) FOLLOW-THROUGH: focus on your solution for the customer by highlighting your product's value, include a demo if needed, and end with a call to action.
[2] Make it easy for your prospects to understand the market by not comparing the individual products of your competitors. A good sales pitch, instead, should show the competition as different approaches to the problem.
[3] Test and refine the first version of your sales pitch by convening your team after every call to ask these 3 questions - "Where was the prospect getting lost? Where was the prospect getting excited? Were there questions asked that indicate something confusing in the pitch?"
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] The Tyranny of the Marginal User: Why consumer software gets worse, not better, over time
[2] Scientists Build Better Startups
[3] The perfect pricing model doesn’t exist
[4] Who Should Do Strategy? It’s Your Team, Stupid!
[5] Is What I Want Now What I Want Later?
Part 2 Release Date: Oct 27, 2023 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Rely on your unique insight about the market to communicate your point of view (PoV) and highlight your differentiator.
Your unique market insight should cover what you understand "about the market that others don't." Sampler's market insight that traditional CPG sampling programs do nothing to foster relationships with customers led them to the PoV that targeted digital sampling would turn customers into "raving fans."
[2] Ask these 4 questions and answer each one in the 'first person' to develop effective pain messaging for your product.
Get in your customer's shoes to answer these questions - (i) What do they need to do? (ii) How do they feel doing it? (iii) How does your product address this need? (iv) How does your product make them feel? Peloton's answers led them to messages such as Live Studio Cycling Comes to You, Transform Your Life From The Place You Live, showing how customers would feel using their product.
[3] Analyze 'willingness to pay' for features per market segment to modify your pricing as your product moves upstream or downstream.
Understand 'willingness to pay' by getting a handle on what customers want, need, and will pay for, especially since all three can differ. Brex's Chief Strategy Officer advises you to test the 'elasticity curve' of specific features by placing those 'features on trial' to discover what customers will pay for depending on who they are - ex: SMB, mid-market, enterprise.
[4] Update every plan description on your pricing page to align with a specific buyer persona to reduce purchase time.
Every plan on a pricing page should be explicit about the intended buyer. Canva assigns a plan name, curated description highlighting the persona(s), and relevant pricing metrics for every available option.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
[1] Product Momentum Gap - It's the difference between the high growth curve and average growth. It usually pops up due to a misunderstanding of the target customer. This misunderstanding gradually leads to sales approaching the wrong prospects, subsequently showing a drop in conversion rates and churning customers who convert.
[2] A different way to think about value - Look at value as the 'moment a customer finds a repeatable behavior' that brings a positive impact. Therefore, we must build features focusing on user behaviors that modify or create better user habits. Growth for a company comes from these habits.
[3] Use a 'Product Value Pyramid' to communicate your value outside your company. The pyramid answers the following questions - "(i) Whose life are we improving? (ii) What problem do we solve? (iii) Why is this important to our users? (iv) What experience do we want to provide? (v) What behaviors do we want to influence?"
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] The Techno-Optimist Manifesto (by Marc Andreessen)
[2] The rise and fall of rent-a-celebrity platform Cameo
[3] How Shazam IDs Over 23,000 Songs Each Minute
[4] 15 Metaphors for Waste In Product Development
[5] Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill
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