Welcome everyone to another edition of stacking growth live really appreciate all of you joining us. I'm Cassidy shield your host and chief Growth officer refine labs today I'm excited to have Victoria Seikle and Tony Flores here with us in this conversation And I'll have to then introduce themselves here in a second So the topic today so you can all get warmed up and think about the questions you want to ask as we go through this Is one that's really close to our hearts It's something I'm passionate about as well as Victoria and Tony and the rest of our company That is the idea that to be really great at creating demand for your company or your category or product You have to be really good at how you position and message your company You have to be excellent at how you derive customer insights and obviously you need to know how you position yourselves vis-a-vis that market We're the competition and so what we often find is this topic is not discussed that much and what it is discussed It's discussed in terms of generalities And we also notice that a lot of our customers and those in the market struggle with this So what we thought we'd try to do today is have a conversation on this topic to get more depth in it and hopefully Provide some ability for all of you to walk away with some tips and tricks for how you go back to your company and continue to hone and kind of improve these dimensions from generating customer insights to competitive intelligence to how you position a message yourself so without one of your ass now is a Victorian introduce herself and how to give some context about why she's passionate on this topic and I'll then do the same with Tony So Victoria over to you. Thanks Cassidy I think I speak about three of us and I'm kind of trying to keep it concise here because this is a topic I should go on about I guess I've been going on about it for about seven years. So here we go.
I'm Victoria Stakel I joined the Refine Labs team a couple months ago Leading efforts around the vault so you may have heard about this if you haven't keep an eye out for More announcements to come but it's our what we're calling our intellectual property warehouse So as the team has done such incredible work and with clients over time We've collected playbooks best practices lots of data basically done all the work and testing and experimentation around what works and what doesn't so you don't have to And so as we think about how do we bring that to life make it high impact and high value for this industry? That's kind of what it was on my mind day in and day out so Digging into this topic specifically my background was in brand strategy and market research And so we'll be talking through the theory and the practice today I'll speak probably more on the theory side tying in a practice from actually the B2C side But the problem still holding there and so no matter what category you're in no matter whether you're focusing on Businesses or consumers or consumers through businesses These are fundamentals and the problem is always there in a sense that you are always changing But the criticality of these poor principles that we'll talk through today are also just not undeniable So that's a little bit of context in myself to you Kathy. Thanks Victoria and Tony. I'll allow you to introduce yourself Thank you Cassidy.
My name is Tony Flores senior director of demand gen here at Refine Labs I've been here for about a year, but I've been doing marketing growth and various roles across tons of different SAS categories for about a decade now Which is crazy? I think that might be the first time I'm actually saying that out loud So that's crazy to think about but for the last couple years I've been much more aligned with strategy and as a result I really started rocking to processes and systems for deriving customer insights from competitive research from customer research and translating those into Strategies that we can use to differentiate from competitors at new value to the market and extract some of that mark Now you back in the form of higher prices more market share different things like that So definitely stuff to be here today and join the conversation awesome What I thought particularly interesting about both Victoria and Tony and they talked a little bit about that in their introductions is Victoria has a lot of Experience in the space in terms of like the frameworks the foundations as you mentioned being able to apply that to be to see which we'd all kind of agree I think it's kind of a few years ahead of where we are and be to be and what I like about Tony's background is he's doing this day in And day out with our customers He's done some fabulous work and really helping our customers kind of reshape how they position and message what they're doing in the market And when they do that well, obviously it makes what we do for those customers even better So I look forward to kind of getting into kind of both dimensions of this around this Victoria said some of the theory But also some of the practice and what we're seeing day in the day out so without let's open it up I'm gonna ask Victoria to kind of lay out a foundation or a framework for how we should think about Not just go to market but in particular the topics that we're talking around here brand messaging positioning and so forth So let's start with that and we'll go and we'll go off of that and kind of take it forward So Victoria over to you for things so you'll hear many of the refine lab team members talking about this day in the day out But it all starts with the customer So as you think about any of your strategies any of your tactics any of your activations where we always start is first You're most your customer who you're trying to win with you're trying to resonate with we're trying to solve a problem for ultimately We'll come back to that but then your second bucket becomes and in what context in what environment so we'll talk about this I'm sure different points here at today's conversation, but there's your direct category how you think about yourself But then building on what you just learned from your deep dive into your audience What else are they thinking about because again my example that comes top of mind is from the B2C side But when I'm looking for a snack I could be looking for chocolate or I could be looking for peanut butter Or I could be looking for an apple and so those three things are not in the same category And if you're thinking about yourself as you know a data management software and the job that somebody else from the customer side Is looking to solve things of you in the context of other categories You need to be aware of how you talk about yourself which then leads to this third point Which is your positioning your messaging your value prop rooted of course in the thing that you do anything that your business is built around And in a perfect world you might design the business by going through these three steps But in our current reality we are working for brands We all have a product that we're trying to sell and so it becomes how do we take that consumer context dig into the needs and the pain points and the decision-making Processes and the personal and professional realities for that audience put it in the context of the market What's happening? You know who you're competing against from a direct competitor in a category context or otherwise perspective and then thirdly you sort of Calibrate your positioning against any of those white spaces the most powerful or provocative needs that are not being met sufficiently And from there you can take it to tactical messaging and engaging on the right channels to bring it all to life actually reach and resume with the people who care about you Who you can help in a different way? So let's recap that a little bit so we talked about this idea of knowing the customer We're talking about the context of how you fit within the market and the landscape and then you're unique kind of positioning and messaging One of the things I often feel when we say something like this we as in marketers It feels daunting and it kind of feels like that seems like a lot of work And so maybe I'll turn this over to Tony and say how do you kind of get started doing this?
And you've probably done this with a few of our clients and it wasn't a big six-month research project It was something different. So what's the quick and dirty way of like hacking this framework to kind of get going? Yeah, so that's a good question So customer research and market research can always seem a little bit inaccessible Right, especially when you think about it like in terms of like these big consulting firms that do these six 12-month projects that are A quarter million have all these different insights that they want to apply across different segments of your business all this kind of stuff But especially have refined labs we need to get to actionable insights quickly for our clients insights that will result in new value New ideas in a meaningful way quickly. So the best starting point I always say something's better than nothing if you're not talking to your customers on a regular basis You need to be talking to your customers on a regular basis There are especially in SAS right in these high growth industries these high growth categories Especially those that are piggybacking on the wave of demand and urgency from you know back in March of 2020 right whenever all the Stay-at-home orders took place right being able to really understand how or why your customers are working with you Whether buying from you what their core functional need is that's probably the most important thing you can extract from any sort of market research You're doing in terms of identifying insights to generate demand from in my experience I'm speaking specifically with SAS because that's what we primarily work with that refine labs I find that all too often the reason why a buyer buys is not being well articulated on the website And most of the time even if somebody is buying with you even if you are getting period over period growth in your key metrics You know pipeline revenue It's difficult to continue innovating and growing and breaking into new segments of your marketing sort of meaningful Predictive way if you're unclear what the core functional reason is why someone's buying from you So there's definitely a immediate need to hop on with a customer and make sure that you're understanding What it is that they're actually trying to accomplish by working with you nine times out of ten You probably don't fully understand it unless you're talking to them So that's that's the immediate and this is ongoing need right because even if you do understand what the core functional reason is why a segment of your audience is Buying from you right the criteria by which they're measuring your effectiveness is likely to be changing over time I'm so the ongoing need is not necessarily identifying these new reasons why people are buying from you But it's really to stay on the cutting edge of how your customers are measuring the efficacy of tools and solutions that are designed to address those needs That they have so again going back to the original question Get started start having customer conversations your first goal should be to extract those core functional those core functional needs that customers are coming to you with And then to really understand how they're measuring the effectiveness of tools and solutions meant to address those needs and that comes through again ongoing customer conversations a little bit of surveying but at the end of the day It's a pretty straightforward process when you really get down to the meat and bones of what's going on How do you do that and so maybe in kind of a practical way?
So I think a lot of times we say like let's talk to the customer get the insights Well the people who are talking to the customers today are typically your sales team and and somebody and kind of customer support customer success They're not always thinking in terms of like I'm trying to understand that like they're trying to get the jobs done that aren't necessarily like Research oriented so as a CMO or marketing team or somebody who's not naturally on the front lines What do they do and like how much of what they do how much do they need to do like is this I need to survey? Hundreds of customers is like I need to talk to handful So I would say again as a starting point assuming a lean operation where you're just trying to prove concept and get something going You really only need to talk to a handful the number that you need to talk to is really based on how many segments you're trying to understand Right if you have a core product and it's kind of universally accessible Maybe talk to three or four customers if you're trying to sell to different industries or different use cases You need to talk to customers that are sort of aligned with those industries or use cases because again most of the time from industry to use case Whatever it might be those those jobs may be consistent as we said those needs may be consistent But the way they measure the effectiveness of those tools may differ from industry or segment to segment So I would definitely say in terms of the way I have these conversations just trying to get something tangible here I typically start by saying okay, you bought from us What is it that you're trying to accomplish? How are you trying to accomplish it? What are the key metrics that you're trying to report on really trying to understand that core functional need typically the need and I would Say this typically the need is much much broader than the category So you're probably your tool your solution your service is probably one of several different things that that customer is is working with or engaging with To accomplish their broader need and understanding what that broader landscape is is something that I have found is only accessible through customer conversations So that's the starting point figuring out why they purchased from you right just going down that conversation Then once you understand that core functional need really start breaking down the steps associated with executing that need right How do you determine what resources you're going to need to execute that that job?
How do you measure the effectiveness of tools and solutions that are meant to affect that job? What does execution look like what does modification look like? How do you close the job? How do you know it successfully accomplished starting with curiosity?
That's probably how it's on this up. Curiosity is the most important thing here, right? It's a known issue with customer research that you know people don't have a universal language by which they articulate their needs well So just going in and saying what are you trying to do and how can we make better products and services? What likely leads you down the wrong path?
So starting with just a genuine curiosity of what they're trying to do outside of your tool to accomplish their broader job That would mean you way way better and I think more Utilizable insights than traditional focus groups and different things like that And then the second part of that is you really want to get statistically significant surveys, right? You have a couple of these conversations you extract those needs those outcome statements And then you begin surveying the goal of those surveys is to prioritize those findings based on how important they are to the customer And help underserved or over-survey are by existing solutions meant to address those needs And then if you do that Well, the output of that is this prioritize list of innovation strategies that have a higher than random likelihood of adding that value to the market And that outcome I think is what pretty much any growth oriented company that would be you know bold, right? So that's what we try to get to in a really lean meaningful way over fine labs A couple of additional pieces that I would maybe again take additional ideas or anyone looking to activate what we're talking about The first thing is exactly to Tony's point There's a balance between curiosity and then having hypotheses So I would encourage you as you go in to conversations There are certain things that you're looking to explore and test and just to keep the conversation You want to keep the conversation open but you want to get the answers that will inform the strategy that you're ultimately trying to design So in some sense that could look like who is my target audience or how the right target audience as you think about who to talk to it Could be exactly any of your customers. It could be seconding a little bit more deeply into who are your longest standing customers Or who are your best customers that you wish every customer, you know What's your like so that they might not be long as standing but they spend time with you and they don't bother you at all That's what success looks like you want to dig deeper into you know what's working there There's value of course and talking to maybe last customers who you've lost and still have a you know connection with And to understand why what would change in the value profit exactly to 20 point and then there's an element of course The prospect is you think about segmenting you think about hypotheses and the things that you want to test that helps you pick certain people strategically Again, what underscore 20's point that a couple of conversations is really you'll start to hear themes that will echo each other I mean you'll know you kind of hit your critical mass and the other piece is around sources So if you can't get in front of customers for whatever reason Think of your own hypothesis You're learning objectives and listen to gong calls or talk with a couple of people on your sales team or anyone on the front lines Especially maybe in cases where your audience or your offering is really really technical and you might not totally be processing Whether coming back to you with you to bring someone along or talk to somebody who's good at doing that translating So you can get those insights and then the last piece is look at your dig into this Tools to make this happen listening in the conversations is really as simple as hypotheses on Google Doc You add notes you collect I mean I have notes on hand written pieces of paper with things that I'm hearing from customer conversations that I kind of draw visual maps You just need like a pen of the paper as far as that step when we think about the surveys piece There are going to that point of it can feel very complex and slow and expensive There are very lean tools you can leverage to get your couple of questions and your hypothesis or the outcomes you've sourced on You know survey form you can send it out once you've got a tight list It doesn't have to be out again So just want to reiterate what's been mentioned on that from as well Yeah, one of the things I would love for your thoughts on Victoria is is this actually a project or is this just a habit?
And so what I mean by that is it should we be striving as a as marketers to try to have one conversation a week? Or maybe listen to five calls if we have gone or something like that Whether your thoughts on like making this more systematic versus maybe the classical way is you know You're creating buy-in that you need to do this research project And then you're gonna identify a formal list of folks you want to talk to and you're gonna have your customer service person Like way in all whether we should contact them or not or bother them You know you're gonna do this for four to six weeks and you're gonna take the assessment Put in a deck and you report it, you know, everything with your executive management group or whatever I mean when do we do that versus when do we just make it a habit of just being on going really curious and then You know how do we make that systematic and track it? That makes any sense it makes total sounds I think the project piece comes in when you've collected enough critical mass from the habitual listening that you see that a Pivot or an evolution of your strategy is necessary to otherwise It should be a habit and even to that point even if a customer conversation feels like it's tough to do on a weekly or monthly basis I've said I go from myself to have X number of hours and customer conversations literally one on one on a weekly basis You that may not be feasible. You may not want to do that But we've we're in a world where you come on in to LinkedIn or be a part of a slack community and watch just here What people are asking?
Oh my gosh, this you know, I'm done with this platform. It's XYZ reason That's all qualitative insights that is you know We read on lives talks about a lot so we just mentioned as well you take that qualitative insight You see where their critical masses and where ideas are gaining momentum And then you can you know take it into more formal projects around research sizing validating prioritizing and incorporating into shifts Whether it's messaging or product or whatever, but it should be a habit it should be a muscle that you're always scanning or always thinking about what you do You're thinking about how needs might be shifting so that you can detect when they were just crippled, you know balls of math or 30 Just sort of and may change around them. I appreciate that So that's kind of the customer side like Tony let me pivot a little bit and say how do you take that and then think about it in terms of like market Landscape and competitive intelligence is it I assume part of what you're trying to discover in your customer conversations is who else they consider what other Products and services they use and kind of the larger problem of trying to solve Yeah, what else do you kind of advise to do or look at when you're kind of going through this process with our with our customers? I guess the first part is those customer conversations right understanding what those opportunities are for innovation for adding net value To the market right figuring out what those important needs and outcomes are in terms of the competitive research right the goal of competitive research is obviously once you have These customer insights you want to update your message your position your top tracks all that but you want to do so in a meaningful way Right one that is likely to land you some sort of competitive advantage if you extract There's a very important like let's say outcome or need in the market from your customer research And you go and you implement that but it wasn't difficult for you to implement or difficult for you to message on the second that Catches as something that's important or relevant or useful to your target market your competitors are gonna jump on it Especially in SAS where people move very very very very agile and all of a sudden that opportunity to differentiate becomes a table Say and all that value that you're adding to the market is now back in in the hand of the customer And it goes away for anybody in the space competitor in space So when I think about applying customer research or customer research findings in a meaningful way I think how can I address this need in a way that's difficult for my competitors to replicate it But turns out to be very valuable and that simply for me again The lean way of doing this is just going to your specific starting with let's say your category competitors and saying how are they messaging right?
What are the content programs the ancillary supportive programs that they're running? What did how does it look like they're positioning themselves around this particular need an outcome and is there a way I can do it better with my resources my scale my programs right so that if I can come out and say hey if you are in this space But you're trying to accomplish XYZ in this way I'm the tool you should go through go with right and finding that source of competitive advantage in your messaging is important because Customer needs are constantly changing right their preferences their expectations new technologies trends all that kind of stuff is constantly changing Right? So you need to look for sources of differentiation that you can build around this and be difficult for competitors just come in and say I'm gonna do the same thing now Right and that's what we typically see in a lot of sass especially sass categories that have seen a lot of growth since the beginning of the COVID shutdowns a lot of people come in with platitude no messaging a lot of people come in saying the exact same things and now that's sort of that Growth in those industries has kind of fallen off and tapered and companies are looking for new sources of urgency new sources of demand that aren't based on some kind of macroeconomic catastrophe They're struggling to do so right? They've gotten all this growth They've gotten all this scale and it's because they're messaging the way they think they're generating demand is no longer differentiated In a meaningful way and one thing we can assume especially in B2B is that we have informed buyers that are aware of alternatives that are priced aware that are solution aware and They're making informed purchase decisions and if that's the starting point of your assumption when going into this process you can start saying okay I understand what is important to my customer.
How do I go add value in that regard in a way that competitors won't be able to do right? And typically you start by looking at what resources do I have what ongoing programs and specialties do I have as an organization that those category competitors do not and how do I Worry at those around that need or outcome and that's typically how we develop our messaging strategy that we don't mind team ever fine Yeah, I love that Tony. There's something you know that was you're talking I was thinking that is what I've often found is We get very good at doing competitive intelligence feature by feature We sell them look at like how does the competition position themselves and message themselves vis-a-vis others and vis-a-vis yourself And I think that's one of the things that you talked about here is maybe start with that first Which is you know you can kind of assume there's always gonna be features and functions that you have that they don't Advice first, but it's really like what is the story? They're telling the market and how are they telling it and how do you want to counter that?
Which I thought is very interesting. Yeah, absolutely And just to piggyback on that typically what I find is that companies are trying to continue to push the limit on the same Set of metrics that have been around since the beginning of that category is take off Right? So if you have 95% accuracy on some AI software people are trying to say my tool was 96% my tool has 97% that eventually it's a hundred percent Right in all these different ways that people try and message or innovate typically is just adding that value along those sustaining technologies those sustaining innovations and like you said It's mostly featured a feature based one thing that I would encourage everybody on this call to do is say okay I have a set of features for my tool and those are meant to address a specific outcome But start really digging into your answer layer programs your onboarding your customer success Right these other things that you're doing to support the outcomes right even those functional outcomes That may not necessarily have anything to do with what the person is trying to do right? How do you help them get better at implementing the idea getting smarter and more intelligent about what they're doing right?
How can you refine your content program so that you're giving them the information they need to execute you don't just differentiate off features anymore? You differentiate on the way your features your content and your supported programs all work together to support the customer and their effort to accomplish the job right so if you're looking for low-hanging fruit ways to differentiate go talk to your content teams go talk to your Different supportive department leaders right like onboarding like customer success ask what they're doing that's uniquely different and surface that in your messaging Excellent. By the way audience feel free to start dropping questions in the chat I'm seeing a few pop-up when you hit on one of those as I turn this over to Victoria and that is Victoria who owns this? And David asked is it something where you start with product marketing?
I would ask this product marketing on this is this decentralized in terms of maybe product marketing There's an aspect of it and demand or brand is an aspect of it How do you how do you think of like who should raise your hand and kind of take ownership of this? And has that changed on type of company size of company etc I love thinking about product marketing owning this because especially as I've spent a lot of time watching the evolution of product marketing over time It can position you as really critical to the business again We talked we have a strong point of view and have no deniability around marketing is poor to driving any business's growth But product marketing in many ways should be the core of that So what is the thing we offer? How do we do it and why does it matter? So you are the expert on the customer and you are the expert on how your product or solution is the best thing or can show up in a better Different powerful way to solve that need a position for product marketing really well from a personal and kind of professional development perspective So just want to address that point I will also acknowledge that product marketing doesn't exist in every organization or it's part of certain roles So I would always encourage don't feel like it You need to get too hung up on if your job description doesn't necessarily include this first of all at your point earlier Happity this hunger and foot on the ground of your audience and this curiosity around what's happening out there is every employee every Who cares responsibility in order to keep themselves smart and you know on the front of their game for whatever their role is But as far as who accountable for bringing this back into the organization I again Thank you for some powerful for marketing or product marketing to own make sure that whether it's a good product or it needs to go to Go to who was running paid social because for some reason we're hearing Reddit mentioned a million more times in our conversations And so we should probably be there, you know be that past native information and sort of make sure to get out to the business And other people a won't sort of tap stuff on your toes and be your position yourself as really forward to this as companies grow They're often you know customer insights functions meaning entire research engines and teams.
There's kind of ways of customer programs I would think more about these three core pieces and how that listening and feedback loop is always living and then identify what makes sense for your size Your budget your case of your organization. Do you go down into those verticals? Do you have one person looking across specific to a given product? Whatever your structure is but I always you know and say that they would drill different everywhere job descriptions kind of shift from even the same Title everywhere as long as someone is owning it and it's clear who that is and it's being shared and castated to the right people That's more than end goals.
So hopefully that's helpful. Yeah That is I would say one one kind of tip I have for the company's kind of an early stage where you may not have product marketing I've done this before and that is still when you're Identifying the types of things that you need to do just bucket it by the function you would expect on a larger marketing organization I find this an effective way to communicate to senior leaders and folks who may not understand the marketing function So I would put there's a product marketing function Here are the things we're doing within that function even if it's done by the person also doing the management So like you can you're starting to train the organization to think about these things and kind of functional buckets and like an owner of Responsibility even if you're the one that has to own both these functions So just kind of a tip I've found out an easier way to kind of communicate what different functions doing marketing and also sets you up Well for scaling your team when you have that opportunity, okay, so we talked about customer insights We talked about the market and talk about competitiveness and kind of positioning vis-a-vis that Tony what how's this translated into like actual positioning and messaging? Like walk us through like that Process we go through with you know our customers in terms of taking this insight and kind of this understanding and then turning that into something that a customer Would actually use in the market just a quick refresher on what we typically do here at Refine Labs like our job right as a demand team Is to help our clients increase the perceived and actual value of their products right in our hypothesis is that by running our social campaigns The way that we do with these key messages the key differentiators by doing so consistently and well over time We're gonna see a lift in high-end site conversions pipeline and revenue from organic and direct sources Right with shorter sales cycles better functional conversion rates different things like that So sort of what we have the ability to affect here at Refine Labs really we advise on things like sales strategies, battle cards You know feature product road map prioritization different things like that But what we really affect is the creative right that we put out there on social right on search right the copy that we write different things like that So the tangible outcome of this exercise is then going back to our clients and saying hey based on what we've discovered through our customer research These are the opportunities that we have to really stand out in meaningful way based on a review of you and your competitors We think that you can stand out in meaningful way that's gonna be difficult for competitors to replicate meaning that we can do this for an extended amount of time without fear of some other You know competitor coming in and muddying the waters by making the same type of claim once we get to that point We just go and build beautiful creative We build a compelling short punch of coffee on our social ads and we just run it and we make sure that we're balancing our budgets our audience sizes And our impressions and frequency based on how quickly we can turn over those creatives But it really is just taking these findings from our customer research and saying now that we understand how we're best positioned to generate value within a market Again, really it's about the perceived value right? It's about how do we take our existing mix of product of services of supportive programs and package that all up in a very meaningful way, right?
So we translate we basically just go through our typical process from there We prepare some campaign strategy recommendations for our internal creative team We have in my opinion the best creative team in the world and they go and always create something beautiful and compelling right? But it starts with a meaningful understanding of what the strategy needs to be so all this stuff that we're talking about Ultimately, it looks like Facebook posts and Facebook ads and LinkedIn and different things like that. Was that what you were asking Cassidy? Yeah, so I love the practical aspect of that so does I want to kind of maybe ask a question that's on my mind and maybe on the minds of folks here And that is what is the the mechanism for capturing this and what I mean by that is the number of times I've googled best positioning framework document And you know I find myself or my teams in the past like always figuring out how to make a perfect messaging and positioning document And then you kind of get this thing filled out so even though you're very dynamic in hearing customer inputs day in and day out We then revert back to some document that everywhere needs to be perfect that as soon as you've written it nobody uses And then you know you go create this creative or you'll update your website Yeah, actually write something else is there good tips or tricks out there for like what does this actually look like when I'm capturing Messaging and positioning in a way that feels dynamic I know the outputs gonna be creative or website or sales collateral or pitch check and I know I've done the research well What's the in between and I don't know if there is a good answer I'm gonna ask Victoria.
She has one I don't have like the go-to tools recommend But I'll talk through it you're playing around documents that are created and just sit there I mean I'm going through a lot of this process that we're voicing over today for the fall There are documents that were created before I joined that have just sat there and there's documents are created since I've joined that You know we've worked out on the foundation of website language or whatever, but it's a real pain I guess to think through a couple of ways. I've approached it that have been helpful First I probably gonna like book the channel now that but I in every company I join I set up a private channel that I called landscape intelligence and I as I'm reading I send articles to myself I send notes and you know, this is an interest from an audience perspective I send images or frameworks to think about and I send it stream Johnson competitor language or ads And if nothing else part of that is because I I'm one of those people at 150 tabs I don't like losing things amount of times I necessarily go back through the very top of that That channel is either here or there but what that allows you to do is then search for certain words take your kind of most Divergent thinking and then I typically move into the most complex tool There is in a Google Doc or an excel and I have a tab for audience insights and again the themes and the things I'm hearing or the trends I'm seeing happen just talking about themes you could use Google Slides you could use an ocean page You know, the tool is less the issue here and then you're the same thing for the competitor piece So as I hear of new competitors, I've got like sticky notes on my desk that I spend time when I'm like working out or whatever I kind of everybody does this I'm sure instead of using you stock competitor websites But you know, just if we've been into whatever singular source is helpful and then it's you know You've seen some of these documents Cassidy when we when we work through these one page or whatever You can go back and say well, here's a language competitor user Here's the reason that we think this is our white space and my language might not be right But let's figure out the better language so I would encourage collect all the thinking be watching this habit of always keeping your killers out there And then from there we could codify it into a couple of key buckets But you can break it down however is most helpful capture your sources the things you're listening to capture your links This is helpful But really just after the finding or the things to think about or the trends you're seeing and then from there as you bring it All together it's all in one place for you But if you need to share with stakeholders you can buy in around all the work you did to get to wherever your output is That can be helpful too. So that's just my framework may not be just anyone But hopefully that helps is my guess Helpful it's you know one thing I've struggled with this as I mentioned in the teams I've been a part of and really one way we've thought about this in the past is the output is actually what? Becomes the document per se and I would think about this in a few ways that this is helpful for folks out there And that is your website becomes much more dynamic in terms of what you say because you want it to be really reflective of kind of your positioning And what I like about it website is you can do it at a very high level in terms of the hero of the site But then as you dig through the pages you have to be very close crisp and clean on how you're positioning at a much more detail level I often find that websites aren't representative of how a company really talks to in positions with themselves as well as a portfolio The second thing that I would spend a lot of time doing going back to like getting insights is What's what is being said in the sales process and how does that differ between what you've written down for positioning and messaging?
And maybe what you said externally if your sales team is using your messaging And they're effective then you're on to something if the sales team is using their own messaging then you got a problem And this is the beauty of things like gong and a Vomon so forth and so on You can go listen and do this yourself And I think the last one I love that Tony you mentioned that is when you're doing creative That is where the rubber hits the road in the fewest amount of words And that matters right because that's also going to be how the sales team thinks about it in terms of a hook That's also going to be the hook on your website So kind of the essence of this is can you get anybody to really engage and understand what problems you solve and who you are Through your creative process and when you think of these things as the output maybe don't even need a messaging doc I don't know I'm still battling that within my head But you definitely find that these things that are in market end up becoming kind of your your real time guide into Are you effective or not in this in kind of your positioning messaging? One question that we've gotten that I want to ask and that is when we think about positioning and messaging or trying to make it just better Are we trying to make it different like what are we striving for when we go through this process is it like Maybe till you mention this I'm trying to get better version of the competition or I'm trying to be a different version And how do I decide that better is a word that we should all remove from our our vocabulary right? It's a bit sorry not in your head right because better is so subjective right like anything can be better It can be faster stronger chocolate here whatever it is right? So what I always try for and this is the term that I always share with my clients is we're trying to create messaging That is useful right immediately useful to the problems that they're trying to solve right now that is relevant to their current situation their current preferences their current ideas and In my experience right if someone's trying to do something that is better right if we can articulate how we do something In a more relevant and useful way than a competitor right that would be the way that I most closely aligned with something that is better right Especially be to be sass right whenever usefulness and relevance is is pretty easy to understand relative like something in like a B2C space in terms of differentiating from a competitor I think you should always strive for both right become real make update your messaging so it's more relevant updated So it's more useful But if your competitors are saying the exact same thing again the assumption that we have here is that your buyers right are informed They're smart they're rational they they have the company that they're buying on behalf of best interest in mind right?
They're probably doing some research no matter how compelling and relevant your research suggests your messaging is if your cuss Or if your competitor is saying the same thing in the exact same way you're just noise right? So that's why I always come back and say okay You can articulate something that you do in a meaningful way But you have to orient it around features products or programs that are ongoing at your company right that will be difficult for your competitors to replicate Because if you come out and say I do I hope you accomplish xyz because of one two and three and that seems to be an attraction The opposite your competitors are tearing that pop up and seeing it during closed-loss notes and different things like that Then someone's someone's gonna surface that up to their advertising team and say hey You should run the same message because we're losing a lot of sales because they're saying this so you should say the same thing right? And if you're doing something that's very not based on any sort of key differentiation in your products or your content They can just run that right and then you just wind up being noise again Right so strive for usefulness strive for relevance But ultimately you want to strive for messaging that in a way that's gonna be difficult for rep competitors to ethically replicate in their messaging One question as a follow up to that I've had the past and that is how do we think about brand level message versus kind of product level message These tend to have like there's different groups Like you may have a brand organization and they're coming up with tag lines and high level messaging and then you may have a product organization It's like I need to position my products this way or to be most effective and How should we be thinking of this as marketers? Is there a spectrum?
Is there are these two different things do we not need to think about that way? There's another way to think about it But how do we kind of level out or messaging and how do we set kind of priorities around around that? I don't think Tori can take a shot at that. Yeah, I mean, so maybe building off of Tony's point there The words you just referenced in sit-in and form are actually a common framework that my first company and many people in this All they have heard of can tar has spent lots of lots of decades actually validating to their credit actually So meaningfully different and then stallions so as you think about those three points Salient meaning that you come to mind around to give a need we charge a lot about jobs here So, you know someone mentions I need to search online for something and Google comes to mind of course It's highly salient and then you know Meaningful does the difference that you think around actually matter and then are you different or distinctive?
I see the comment there those can be you know Can be great line on how different those two works even are but when you think to your point pass me around those as sort of like the Rose and then we have a column for the brand side of things and the bigger problem that's being solved and upper level of the Funnel around you know What is what is the broader level conversation? We're taking part of here and then you have a column for the product and the way we're solving features and the functional elements And why we're doing it better is sort of the reasons to believe you can sort of pull it out your perspectives and your stance Isn't each of those what would be six buckets? So when you talk about brand and how you're showing up in just brand campaigns or on social and the way you're engaging is it In a distinctive way you think you can there you can think about tone of voice and how your personality is showing up and it translates to the way The meaningful way that you want to be different for your consumers So is it intellect is it thought leadership is a situation in your tone and that's distinct which translates to a confidence and on parallel level of expertise that is Meaningful so I would think about it as you know Go through those different layers and then think about the higher level benefit the higher level solution that you're solving and then the kind of concrete Reason to believe the functional elements the features that you're thinking out now become the product and a performance piece to anchor You and then Tony when we when you think about like how victory outline that Any tips or tricks on what we advise our clients to kind of put into the market is there a mix I'm I running kind of the higher level brand like messaging 30% of time and I'm running more product level features and benefits or problem statements? 60% of time is there rule of thumb or is it just depend it depends it really a situation and you know being in the role that We're at as a demand team at refine oftentimes We don't have the ability to affect the broader brand and message in a timely manner the product roadmap the content program the other supported programs Typically what we're trying to do is we're trying to work with what is already existing within our clients infrastructure and just repackage all of that up in a Meaningful way and helping our customers identify the sources of meaningful differentiation They already have their fingertips.
They just didn't really know how to package all that up So in terms of how you go about and taking that newfound differentiation ability and messaging thing out We do it like basically to fold the percentages very right depending on resources and you know Just a myriad of different factors But essentially we go we do run we run two kinds of campaigns on a consistent basis we run Campaigns that speak to those functional outcomes those differentiators right and basically articulate how our clients mix of features Content supported programs address those important underserved needs in a meaningful way We don't necessarily go out and say we do this differently than competitors So you can come to us but the fact that we have that uninterrupted voice for an extended period of time That is not beneficial to us and we get that more often than not because our competitors struggle to replicate those messages simply because they can't Because we've taken the time and effort to package everything up in a unique way in terms of the mix right We'll run those and then in parallel with those we also run those can't or those ads those those those ideas that serve to increase Authority and trust right in a specific category those are gonna be things like your webinars your case studies Your content that address those things that are being messaged heavily in your primary campaigns Those that's typically the mix that we run and we want to run those over time So it's functional messages right around those differentiators And then those things that help build trust and authority within those ideas right and in an ideal world Not only are we building features around specific outcomes but the content supported program leaders are also aware of what those outcomes are and they're developing Their content their programs in support of those outcomes as well We run both of those types of functional campaigns and those authority and trust building campaigns in parallel again We can typically do it in an interrupted way for longer than clients have previously because we package things up in it in the right way And if we do that well over an extended period of time That's typically when we start to see our left and high-end second versions better funnel conversion ratio or cell cycles that type of thing Okay, I'm gonna ask you to ask each of you to kind of help summarize what we discussed here today for the audience But I have one last question that Daniel asked and that is it's really interesting that he asked this idea of like the is differentiation always possible And you think about the BBs ass world which we're kind of used as an example I mean there are 20 different CRMs. There's 30 different email platforms like How do you approach this we approach this obviously with our clients where they're not necessarily the only one in a category How should you think about that are we always driving for differentiation? I'll kick us off here because actually in my past role I conducted the laughing because I of course have thoughts on this one And my last I like to do a bit of research around drivers of choice across different categories just to get to like a macro level framework And what this question asks or hits on is the commoditization is around the functional elements of what the thing does There's a few other elements that time and time again are part of decision making whether you're a consumer or a business By where a business decision maker I should say and there's the emotional component to think about there's the experiential component and then actually There's a social component which frankly I think be to be is still very far behind on B2C is only getting this social component in the mix here But when you think about yes, you can be a functional commodity you can have the exact same thing as the next side But if how you're showing up the value you're delivering again even you know Just talking about content or thought leadership or webinars how your people do how they people do their jobs better that creates an emotional Thin me that's very distinct think about Apple versus Microsoft you feel very different ways towards those two brands although functionally You could argue that their laptops are strong pains on that one But we won't go there argue that their laptops are you know arguably interchangeable? So I would think about and then you know that element of how you make your user feel and how you engage with them as much as the Experience that you deliver and that could be additional support It could be the moment they engage with you on the sales perspective because that's actually in some sense your wedge if you can really nail Those different elements beyond just the functional You know, that's the most that's gonna be really hard to replicate people copying you it becomes obvious They're copying you versus just leveling up on their skills that other functions I really like that that mental framework of like not focusing on the functional and at some higher level kind of whether it's you know Emotional or social in what goes through my mind is like we should probably always just do that right?
I mean, is there a time you blast the other way is there a time when when would you actually position on the functional because oftentimes that can get commoditized Away and fairly quickly just needs a couple engineers a building feature Maybe that's the mistake I'll kind of leave it with the audience to press to think about that or we can hit in the wrap But maybe that's the mistake a lot of us make in B2B as we think it's a a game of functional positioning when it's not a game of functional positioning It's all about emotion and social just like it is in the B2C space Interesting I like that a lot. All right Victoria wrap this up like how freework wise can you summarize this for us and then Tony? I'm gonna ask you like practically what should what should they call the action to this group tomorrow as they go back and You know, we listen to this conversation kind of side with the next so Victoria you first sure I would always be thinking about who you're trying to win with whether that's current state who you're rocking the socks off With right now who you want to be winning with but who they are again jobs They're trying to accomplish pain points that could be improved upon think about where you're operating and don't let yourself Adjust your defined category or what people might search in G2 to compare you to think about again Alternative solutions if your category disappeared What would people use if you asked, you know your brain disappeared? What would people use and you get some interesting insights and then thirdly from there think about exactly what we're just talking about around Distinction and differentiation and meaningful or relevant anchor points and then science how do you keep yourself top of mind in a way that?
What you're able to uniquely bring to the conversation is something that your consumers will care about because you know your consumers are and you know What else is out there? Thanks Victoria and so Tony then we talked about What is like one thing somebody should do tomorrow to kind of get started in improving what they're already doing or get started in actually doing What we talked about if they're not doing it today get excited to talk to customers starts cultivating internally your own curiosity around what they're trying to do as it As it expands beyond your category of software tool or service Don't forget to talk to close loss because you're gonna get a lot of really useful insight talking to close loss as much as you talk to close one Take an inventory of your category competitors features and the way they're packaging those up along with their supportive programs and content right really figure out What it is that you can be doing and offering your your market right in a meaningful way That's gonna be difficult for your competitors do given their mix of assets That's in my opinion the starting point for any sort of meaningful differentiation strategy and then do it consistently because the day you do one research project The day after that it's a little bit less relevant and the day after that it becomes even more even less relevant right because consumer Prefer this and tendencies are constantly changing. There's constantly new tools constantly new disruptive innovation That's being introduced to them on a regular basis especially to be sass so make it a habit and try to have fun with it Because it can be daunting if you're feeling like you're trying to get something specific out of it But if you're genuinely curious about how people are trying to go about accomplishing what they're trying to accomplish and are really interesting Developing features content supportive programs to address those needs it becomes kind of like treasure content And that's the way I think about it right when you're looking at it more from a fun perspective rather than obligatory perspective It becomes easier to make a habit out of it right and the thing here as you said earlier Victoria is making this habitual is going to be very important to this program success I like that. I'll add one more thing to that Challenge yourself and your team to have one conversation a week Can you do that one thing from one customer prospect or somebody in your market one time a week as these person on your team to do the same thing?
And you know once you can do it once a week try it twice a week and go from there. All right Tony Victoria This was great. Thank you for your time. Thank you everybody for hanging in there and being a wonderful audience We'll be back in two weeks on our next episode of second growth live in the meantime You can get a recording of this episode in the next few days as we put it out in the market.
Thanks everyone. Take care