Welcome back to the second growth podcast. I'm Cass Dichy, Chief Growth Officer at Refilling Labs. In this episode, I sit down with Victoria Seykul, Senior Director of Research Spear Heading Revolt Product Initiative. Victoria and I talk to you the why, what, and how to building the Strong Good Market Foundation.
Our conversation includes our best, the great customer insights, creating strong positioning and messaging, how you steer back loops to iterate, improve and scale and everything in between. There's a lot in this episode, so grab your notebook and enjoy. Victoria, welcome to the second growth podcast. How are you doing?
Doing well, excited to be here. Yeah, I'm looking forward to this conversation. So we've been working together for maybe the last four or five weeks since I joined and you joined recently, Refine Labs, and we'll get into that. And I bet we've had 10 conversations about Go to Market Strategy and Go to Market Philosophy.
And so what I want to do on this podcast today is just let's delve into this topic. This is an expertise of yours. It's a passion of mine. And frankly, it's a topic that I think most companies don't understand.
And so I look forward to getting into that with you. But before we start, I'd love to hear a little bit about you and what we haven't talked about over the last four or five weeks is how did you end up at Refine Labs and how did your journey to get here and I'd love to hear a little bit more about that. Yeah, sure thing. What's really fascinating about my current role at Refine Labs is the more that I think about it.
It really is a convergence of every prior role since. And I've always been a big believer of, I don't have a five, 10 year plan, but there's certainly guardrails and your journey how to take you where you're meant to go. So I started at Cantar as a brand strategy consultant out of school. I love the intersection of data and numbers and research about the strategy and the why and the storytelling that came along with it.
And as I think about my time at Cantar and then at Morning Console, and now here, it's interesting how where Refine Labs has it taken the ground around Go to Market because I think of two different circles where one is brand strategy and advising clients and the theory and all the best practices. And then there's this whole business bucket around how does that translate to business value and how do you run a business and how do you set commercial strategy and how do you position your offering? Whether it's Cantar's offering or Morning Console's offering or Refine Labs offering, and more and more of those circles have started to converge. So in kind of advising clients across B2C and B2B, my first role publishing a lot of content and thought leadership and really understanding what our target audience or our existing customers needed to know to navigate the pandemic because I started at Morning Console in March 2020 at Morning Console.
And now here we're thinking through what is Go to Market? Where do you start along this journey? How do you evolve it over time? One of the best practices to engage at every single step of that journey who you leverage from a talent perspective, all of these worlds collide now as you think about Refine Labs and then specifically the vault the world that I live in.
Yeah, I was gonna ask you about this. So specifically here, the vault, why don't you give the audience just a little bit of taste of that? I know it's starting to come out more and more with the vault is this is the thing that you're leading at Refine Labs. I'd love to hear a little bit more about it.
So we all know Refine Labs is an extensive experience with dozens and dozens of B2B S companies on the advisory side of the business. So as we've continued to grow over the years, I've been here longer than a month, but as a team has done an amazing job working with clients and really experimenting, testing, collecting data, learning what works, all of that IP is very clearly valuable to more than just our client base. So thinking with the vault is let's really tighten our best practices, collect the data, get the benchmarks, all of these types of strategies and guidance would be useful to collect and make available for those who are not necessarily our clients for one reason or another, marrying that with research. So there's a research we're doing with our clients, the experiments we're testing around what lovers to pull, what messaging to use, what are best practices across different channels, but then there's sort of a landscape view around what is going on in B2B buying, how does the buyer make decisions, what, who's on the buying committee and how does that change over time?
So there's research that we need to be kind of keeping on the post-doc to understand this landscape that we're operating in as well as the vault. Brings all of that together, our exclusive access to the best thinking from refine labs as well as ongoing research into what's happening in the world. So I'll be exciting early momentum and the content is only growing and growing stronger over time. Yeah, I'm looking forward to this.
I think it's gonna be a game changer for the industry. I'm happier here. Let's delve into a few of the things that you're working on and kind of how it ties into this kind of go-to-market strategy and foundation in that, you know, when I've used the term of the past, being in a company, go-to-market as a kind of shorthand, you know, the CEO, the board, the senior leadership team, we inherently kind of understand like what that means, like a commercial strategy, et cetera, but everybody kind of has a different definition of what it is. And what I've noticed is like nobody explicitly defines it, even everybody kind of assumes we know what we're talking about.
So two-part question, one, is that your experience? Is that true or maybe I'm just crazy? And then second is how should we think about a go-to-market strategy or foundation? What are the elements that go into this in more of a systematic way of thinking about it?
Your first point is such an interesting one because the theme is true for marketing, how people think about marketing, is it just paid ads and performance marketing that you're just managing the ins and outs of really tactical campaigns? Is it creating markets? Is it the very macro level of product marketing, which is something I just spent a lot of time thinking about researching in my past roles? So this go-to-market piece is definitely an important question.
And I think about it as more than just the launch, which many companies tend to use as the starting point for go-to-market. Here's the thing we're looking to send out into the world and how do we promote it? How do we get it out there? But actually there's all these foundations that perceive that.
So you need to know who the market is. The two-part is how are you actually going to the market? And then, you know, there's an element of what are you going to market with, which obviously lots of conversation around product market fit and solution market fit. I'm sort of thinking about content market fit with a vault.
But the thing that you're sending out into the world has to resonate as well. So to just start at that launch point, which many companies especially startups tend to think about is in some way slot because there's a strong foundation that needs to kind of underpin that. So to your second half of the question, when I think about the foundations, and again, it's been interesting over the years that I started almost academic thinking about the theory of you want to do brand research, you want to do segmentations, you want to understand your audience, but more and more, there's really the fundamentals of growing a strong business through the tactical elements that you'll execute on down the road. So first, it starts with a consumer.
You can certainly have conversations with a consumer in the context of the category or ideally more and so the jobs that you're looking to solve by the product you're offering. I flag that point because first of all, there's this whole conversation around category design. Secondly, there's this reality that consumers don't think about. However, you've designed to find the category, they think about what they're trying to solve but the problem that they need to address is.
So sometimes your solutions are competing with X category of solutions. From the consumer point of view, you then get a sense of their needs, their wants, their jobs, how they go through the buying process, things that matter to them. So if they are the ultimate decision maker, the things that matter to them might vary relative to a user of the product in the case of B2B services or products. Once you've got this landscape of who the consumer is and how, you know, what their needs are and how to kind of resonate with them, even the channels are active on, you then probably want to widen your aperture market.
You've got to have gotten a sense of who are they going to as competitive alternative, how are those competitors talking about the solutions that they're offering, what are they saying makes them different and how you've gotten your mind, what actually matters to consumers or what they're saying are saying makes them different even is that level of into the consumers and how they're making their choices. And then from there, you've got this foundation of who you're trying to win with, where to play and what the environment looks like holistically. And then you can inform your positioning and your messaging, again, ideally with a strong product that fits with those needs. Otherwise that's a whole other kind of top of the shoots and ladders that you've got to address before you go through the whole process again.
But get starts with the consumer, you've got to get that context around the market and the reality you're playing in. And then you can tie in why you're the best solution for any of those given needs with clear messaging. I really like this framework. Let me ask you a question in the context of like how I've seen it actually happen.
And that is it feels like you started a company, you have a product and you started a company and a lot of times you're going to look for a market. And what I've seen is like the jobs framework being kind of bastardized to prove that there's jobs out there for the product that I've built versus what I think to the point you're saying, he's like, what you really want to understand is it's less about how customers perceive your idea and more about what they need done. How do you think about separating these two things in kind of reality? Meaning, yes, I want people to love my product and my idea, but at the same time, I really need to understand what does the consumer need in order to get their job done.
It's a little bit messier than my pure research. How do you think about those things coming together and kind of practice? The interesting thing about a lot of these, when we think about the startups that have come into the world, whether it be the B2C side or the B2B side, there actually is a lot of anchoring in a pain point that was perceived. And so when you say the product exists, but how do you reconcile that with the need?
The good thing is that even if the end size is the founder who experienced a pain point and created a product around it, there's some rooting there of, here's roughly what the problem area is, here's how we're thinking of solving it. To your point though, I think reality is most businesses are not started by grand consumer research, you identify a need and then you create your product. So there is a definite sort of continuous feedback loop in both of these directions. And I think we talked a lot about why B2B companies in particular don't have a strong foundation of knowing their consumer.
I think this hold up of needing to do research and needing to be segmenting on a quarterly basis and updating your data points, you can talk to your customers, you can understand as you're iterating on your product, is this check out, how we're talking about it? Does that check out? One of those two things might be off, maybe both of them are off or maybe they're beautifully on point and you're just continuing to collect momentum. But I think marketers and especially B2B marketers can get too held up on, they don't have this great base of research.
So I don't know how to move forward or I've totally got confidence in my product and I don't even need to talk to the audience. So there is a happy medium, I think it's just that balance that's where the value sits. You know what that is, I think the issue, I agree with you that tends to be how it starts. A founder has this idea, there is a pain point, that's gonna be a certain size of market.
And then obviously the company needs to continue with all this does its portfolio. What's interesting and I'm not your thoughts on this, it's like who's kind of accountable for this making sure this feedback loop is running? And the reason I ask that question is, I frankly don't see a lot of B2B marketers talking to the market, which is to me a fundamental issue. So one of the enemies is easy to say, well that's marketing's job because it feels like that's marketing's job when we think of product price, promotion, placement, et cetera.
But they're also not in the market, somebody else in the company is. How do you reconcile that? What are your thoughts on that? Interesting piece about, it kind of goes back to how we define going to market and marketing that to me, it's been, you can have conversations and debates around the title or the department that owns it.
It's probably gonna look pretty different across companies. It's not to say product marketing needs to own it or sales, who's literally the front line, that hearing things all day long from who you're trying to sell to around why it's not selling or why it is, whether it's marketing who again, if we define marketing as a business of creating markets, they probably should be the expert on the consumer. That to me is sort of neither here nor there, it becomes who is actually going to be accountable. How are those different functions I just mentioned, intersecting and creating this feedback mechanism.
To give a live example as I'm thinking about the vault, there's product strategy that needs to be set based on what we're learning about users. There's potentially gonna be a selling motion that we need to be collecting, what's working, what's messaging well, what's falling flat. We need to be understanding what people get into the product and they're experiencing what we've talked about, how did that connect with what we've promised. So there's all these different stakeholders, and to me the important part that sometimes businesses can lose sight of is not the function or the team or the single person who's going to be responsible for it.
It just got to get done. We've got to figure out a way to collect those insights, be sort of tracking them, maybe just listening back to gong calls. I spent a lot of time doing that in my last role because we didn't have a formal function. But if you're interacting with sales, who's interacting with a customer or you're making conversation and figuring out ways to get out there, that's efficient enough.
I think again, we can talk about research and this big clunky effort being a big bottleneck for research at B2B companies. This idea of who's the owner of the feedback can also be a hold up when it's really the feedback is the whole point. I really like the mental model that I have in my head around product strategy, sales on the front line, getting feedback every day literally. And then your customer's using your product and what is the reality?
Just the reality of what you promised at the beginning and oftentimes it's not and you got to fix that. I agree a lot of this is sometimes best effort in a company but how should it work? So it is kind of like one system. If I were to think of go to market as kind of a system versus a bunch of disparate functions, any thought like how you actually run that efficiently?
If I were to think about this as starting from scratch, there's obviously a whole conversation to be had around going back in and calibrating existing organizations. But if we're starting from scratch, I mentioned before, we'll start with the consumer, we'll get some insights probably simultaneously. We've got the product strategy, we have a sense of what our solution is going to be. And then you intersect that and maybe product marketing is running that first piece, but you intersect that with product marketing.
So that's sort of what's the storytelling given? We know who we're trying to win with. We know the market we're operating in, the competitive landscape or call it the solution alternatives, even if it's not in the category. And then we know what our core competencies are, what's meaningfully different, what's useful about it, why are we credible as the person able or the business able to deliver on that pain point?
Wrapping the product marketing around it from a storytelling perspective and then you start to set up what we would typically refer to as the activation phase. We talk a lot about this at Refine Labs, but there's a combination of marketing. So that's generally focused on creating demand, but then it transitions into the capture demand and the spectrum where that could be your sales motion, it could be your product length, rose motion, that's pretty self-serve. But again, they're feedback coming from both of those pieces, you're understanding, my creative is not performing, my messaging isn't translating to a farther down the funnel or sales, again, having those conversations and saying, this slide or whatever, totally fell flat or this one really rocketed in this is kind of the only slide we need to use moving forward.
And then you take all that feedback from what's happening outside four walls of your business, whether it's marketing campaigns, whether it's organic or paid or any other kind of mechanism. And then your sales conversation is again, leveraging all these sources of feedback and feeding it back into, do we need to learn more about our consumers? Do we need to reassess our understanding of the market? Do we need to just reframe how we're talking about it, the messaging perspective?
But it goes back to this kind of virtuous loop around what's happening inside the four walls or under the water of iceberg versus what's happening outside. All right, so I'm gonna put you on the font. I like this. Where do you think an auto marketer or a sales person or CEO listening to this?
From your experience, where do you feel this falls down first? Is it, I don't actually understand the consumer, is it, I'm not listening to the sales team, or I'm disconnected in the sales team, and my messaging and putting in market is not the reality of what's happening in the field? Or is it, I have a kind of post-sale issue where I made this fabulous promise to the market, and then the reality is I can't deliver on it and my customers are unhappy. Where do you think it goes wrong first?
I'm biased because I go to research as a solution for a lot of these different pieces. And I've been fascinated. Again, I went from a really big, expensive, sometimes received a slower, kind of dated company that the sticker shop of research was just too much, and we didn't take it through the implementation. I went to the other end of the spectrum where it's really cheap and affordable and efficient to do research.
And yet there's also the translating into practice piece, which is now we spend a lot of time at Refine Labs in that middle stage, the activation stage, but maybe we are in a research house. So I think a lot about how do you get to a right manageable, efficient balance of, I mean, it comes down to a feedback loop, whether it's coming from research or it's coming from data you're collecting, any of those stages. So I guess I'm diagnosing the solution here more than answered your question. But the breakage point comes in oftentimes just assessing, again, if you know who the person that you're trying to reach is, you have a good enough understanding, could be just purely qualitative, but ideally backed up by quant to say, this is how they make decisions.
This is what matters to them. You translate that, not in verbatim, but you draft your beautiful messages around it and you get that out into the world. You have to assess, is this how it's being perceived? And use the evolve as an example.
We have messaging, we know what works, but if their experience or lived experience doesn't connect with that, either we've got to fix our messaging or we've got to fix the fundamental product, whether I go to research in some form, there's a feedback loop that has to happen. And then again, with the sales side of things, if you're understanding what language you're using, you're understanding what matters, and then you're understanding the decision and the process and the stakeholders that are being involved in that decision and something disconnecting, there's sort of all these breakage points, which in some ways is helpful because it's not like you automatically have to go to the top and start with the consumer all over again. You sort of have to work your way either backwards, or maybe you do need to start the foundation and build your way back to a meaningful and fully developed strategy. But I don't know, I'm curious to hear your thoughts there.
Does that feel too theoretical and important? Is it useful? It's a great framework, it's very useful. What's going through my head is, how do I apply that if I'm in a smaller company?
So I've been in a larger company where yet we're at a team and there's a research organization, and we had a lot of primary, secondary research and we did this really well. You know, like a world where we have a lot of the, you know, startup customers, how do we do that? Because what I tend to find is, you have marketing organizations who have either never done it or and or don't have the skills to do it, let alone be masked to do it, which they really aren't either. So what I'm thinking through now is like, how do we actually just get this off the ground?
I mean, there's like a beautiful end state. How do we start small in an early stage company in order to be able to just, you probably don't even need a lot to get started in terms of customer insight. Thoughts on that? I'll go back to my example with the vault.
And you know, we started, I think the same day. So we're just about a month and change in here. I of course had my like, you know, consultant mindset on the first day. But the three sides of the triangle that I quickly tried to connect were first the business, the background, the what we do, what we stand for, how we're different, how we're uniquely able to execute on the thing that we think is gonna be valuable.
The next leg was the market. So, thorough competitive stand. I mean, to your point, simple, you can take a day. And I think it was a matter of like probably 48 hours of work time that I stand in Google, different permutations of the words and the language and we were using.
I understood the different sets of starting with the sort of jobs and thinking about the different ways people saw those jobs and then sort of including a little bit of a halo to understand the full landscape and compiled that just to get a sense of different solutions, pricing points even, but messaging that was being used. And then the third piece is of course the consumer, which I wouldn't necessarily follow my order, but that's the way it went for me was, you know, the notes that we had on conversations with audiences. We have some people on our team who had been exposed to the product in their prior goals, you're so polluted before joining Refund Labs. So understanding what was a pain point that, you know, it was we think about this problem that the vault is aiming to solve.
What we know, tell me more about that pain and the challenge you're experiencing, how was your initial experience with our alpha version of this in reality? Did it translate to solving a need? Did it translate to the promises we made to you and explaining what it did? But those three pieces, you know, I'm a month and change engineer, you could kind of dedicate different weeks even to your deep dive on those three pieces.
And if you've got one person, I think there's a certain type of skill set or curiosity or just research backgrounds. And I use research for the lowercase R here, it's just finding information in different sources. I think those are foundations that we tend to overcomplicate as an industry, but you know, keeping that pulse check and then it'll grow as we think about staffing this team and product marketing probably keeping a healthy pulse on what competitors are doing. It's not gonna stay fixed from how it was.
In late March when I happened to do that analysis, but there is breaking it down into just kind of where your key source is, what can you scan? And then whether it's one person who kind of leans in and owns it or is dedicated to that, I think we can keep it simpler than it sometimes turns out to be. That's very good, I like that. I, as you're thinking, it got me thinking.
So here's, I'm kind of giving my sort of that based on experience as well. If someone were what you did here, what I've noticed in the past, when I think about how do I tackle this, I think it fits very well through framework is I would be first, the marketing team who's in the market is called the demand gen team or a brand team or whatever. To your point, it's like, how are we positioning ourselves versus the competition toward the market? And I think you outline that beautifully like that.
You may not know completely in that role, the job to be done framework, but you can certainly look at, are we saying the same thing as everybody else? Or are we saying something different? Do we like what other people are doing? And their tactics and their strategy?
Are they going after different audiences than we are? And so forth and so on. Then I think your point, take the product marketing team and say, you need to go sit with sales. And in fact, when I found most of the time when I started a new company, I go right to the sales team.
And I listen to calls and I talk to them because they have a pretty good understanding and idea that however we're positioning ourselves in the market, is it resonating and helping them through the sales process? Or is sales just redoing at all? And you can kind of see early indicators of that. If their pitch is different than the pitch you're putting in the market or their deck, if they're using a deck, it's completely different than the deck that the marketing team gave them, then you got a problem.
And then I think your point, like, what is the reality? And you can go to your product team or your customer success team and maybe even interview a few customers using the product. And this is where I think you can build your own thesis on the jobs to be done by asking them, the folks using the product, like how are they using it? What job are they trying to solve for?
What do they find valuable? What do they not find valuable? And my guess is not as a researcher that you probably only need 10 conversations to be able to get a view of what this looks like. You don't need 100.
So that's how I've tackled it in the past. I've tried to get my team to tackle it. What I find is like there's a lot of hesitancy to do that in those organizations culturally. And not the hesitancy from the sales team doesn't want to talk to marketing, usually they do.
We'll talk to anybody who will listen. It's usually the marketing team who doesn't want to go off and kind of do those things. Or maybe the C&R or the CEO doesn't expect them to, or it's kind of like stay more in your lane. How do you think we overcome that?
The culture piece is such a big one. And that's for me, it was a huge draw to come to a refined lot. It's because the appetite is here. If you get out and talk to, figure out a way to be connected with our users, whether it's posting on LinkedIn or engaging in a demand-on-line conversation or connecting with the sales team or whatever it is, that healthy appetite exists.
So to me, the culture and coming, whatever it sets that, obviously, typically the leadership team, but there's not, I mean, you can sort of hack your way, as I said, I've found myself listening to a lot of gone conversations. I built, as you said, like sales, I always have said, I, in product marketing, we are in service of sales and helping them sell better. And if our messaging feels disconnected or academic or totally unrelated to the value that our clients and customers are deriving for the product, we're not adding value. But it comes down to a culture and either having to really push, just get those conversations and make them happen, stay connected with your audience, or if you can somehow influence the culture or, join an organization like Refine Labs to do a healthy plug, that believes in this fundamentally, I think that's where some of it comes down to, because as we sort of talked about here, there's easy ways to start getting those insights.
It's not that you need to engage $100,000 consultancy to do research or do a total overhaul of your messaging or positioning for you. There's ways that you can do it, but it's a matter of if that's being supported and you can get access to the market and to what's working into what's not in order to build that. Yeah, I'm not asking about the most impactful thing I did as an individual, other than leading the team and the sales organization, is I was a person who like ran our podcasts and so you think about, I'm a marketer who uses analytics and we're an analytics company, I'm not in the analytics function. So your point, what a better way to talk to people who are in the analytics function than interview them and ask them a ton of questions.
And the amount of insight I would get from the spokes to bring back to the rest of our organization, who by the way aren't, also in analytics functions, we're trying to figure out what the job is to be done and the point of view and how we solve their pain, was immensely valuable, like regardless we solve those folks are not. So to your point, like the barrier to do this is pretty well. You can go on LinkedIn and start posting and connecting and join conversations, but most folks don't do it. How do you see that changing going forward?
Does this become like a prerequisite? Like is the modern marketer or the modern commercial leader or go to market leader going to be someone who is just in the market all the time? And that ends up being the thing that we want within our organization, or is it just like a function you outsource and you bring somebody in to do? How do you see this kind of changing the persona of the person that you want in your organization if you're a senior leader?
I certainly hope that it continues down this route in so far as customers' interest is something we've talked about for decades now, right? I mean, probably in Mad Men, that's what they talked about as well because your product is not gonna land if it doesn't resonate with the audience. Where my head is going, that's actually interesting with a couple of big themes that we spend a lot of time talking about. The first being your team, become advocates for what you practice, if they're engaging outside your four walls.
So we talk a lot about community, we think about, you know, you can kind of test your messaging through a LinkedIn post or just a conversation. And again, you get those signals of like, that's nice, but it doesn't matter to me. Okay, that's not gonna be a drive for choice. So we need to move away from that messaging.
And that could be one conversation that you just validate over five more and then you've got your answer. The other piece is this idea of driving leads. So you can talk to as many people as you want, but if you're actually trying to resonate with the people who matter and who align with what you're thinking, you've got to be out there and not just throwing messaging out to people, but you need to have the two way street to understand what's resonating, what are the needs, how do we drive a solution to your needs that's aligned with how you think about solving the problem that you have at hand. So yeah, this idea of, I think more and more, especially if you take those trends and you marry it with a type of leader and person who is probably digital first, who's engaging in communities, posting on social, who is learning from communities and really enjoying being a part of it.
That's only gonna grow as a skill set, but also a table stake as we think about business growth because if you're just sitting there in your ivory tower, not talking to anyone and kind of throwing out your commentary and hoping it lands, at some point someone's gonna do it better than you because they're actually in touch with your audiences. Well, Sam, there's been this discussion you and I've had and I was thinking about it as kind of the B2B paradox. And that is most companies struggle to hit road targets. Most sales teams don't hit quota.
Most marketing teams don't hit their demand goals. Yet at the same time, I think every company feels like they're correctly positioned and their messaging is strong. And I'm high of a hard time reconciling these two things. In fact, I'll go the other way and say, I would say the number one issue most companies have is their inability to position themselves correctly to the right audience and develop a messaging strategy that's unique versus a competition.
My overly harsh on most of the B2B industry or is this just the reality? I would argue with actually probably relative on the B2B side as well, especially if we've had conversations around startups, we've got increasingly more businesses out there. They've identified a need, they think they've got the best way to solve it. The reality is not all of them are the best way to solve it.
You can think about healthy cereals. You can think about shoes, I don't know. But at some point, the opportunity on the B2B side that B2B is starting on the B2B side, that I'm probably mixing up on my letters now, that the business or business environment is slowly catching on to you is that if you're in touch with your consumer and it's easier to think about yourself as a buyer of cereal than probably a buyer of software because you do it a lot more. You're in touch with how to message in a way that feels interesting and fun and compelling, but you're pointing on the B2B side where we think about adding a little bit of personality.
We think about this idea of emotion. It's not to say that we're not taking a B2B decision seriously, but it's that there's a human behind the decision who probably has personal and professional motivations just as much as they're writing a big check for a piece of software from their provider. I think as we go down this route that we're starting to blend these two, the best practices from both of these different directions to say there's a way you can resonate with and identify that we can go back to needs and the jobs, but there's a way that'll cut through. That's not just a smattering of bullet points and facts and really functional flat bullets that your next competitor has to deliver on as well if they're functionally servicing another business, but they're adding another layer to it.
That's a bit of a personality and then I think it'll be interesting in the next couple of years, especially as we see this landscape shakeout where you've got a lot of players right now, got a lot of early startups, mid-stage, scale-ups, and at a certain point, if they don't have really buttoned out foundations, capitalism, I guess, will come into play and we'll see who is differentiated enough and has never been connected with their audience to continue that build on that. Yeah, I mean, 9,000 Martec companies is ridiculous. I mean, we don't need that much technology. We don't need 50 different CRMs, 30 different email systems as well.
So maybe there's no real positioning for some of these companies, they just should go away. And I guess your point, we'll find out. Okay, so let's take a case study. Say we have a client, they come to us.
They are Series B company. How would you think about advising them to take this framework and kind of put it into action? So I'm listening to this, we've followed this conversation to this point. I got a hundred people in my company in Series B, what do I do?
How do I put this in action? Maybe this is a capstone for what we discussed. To this, to walk me through, not to put you on the spot, I'm going to talk to you about it. I'm putting you on the screen.
I'm going to have to get a payment agreement in place here because it's free, I'm bringing something. No, I really think it comes down to you. So we talked about those three colors. There's an element of maybe even before you get into that exploratory kind of validation of your strategy, you just take a look at your numbers and see things are working really well or probably more likely they're, okay, we're not pointing our numbers, but they're okay or it's something really off.
And then it's hard to say, is one of those first three pieces that we talked about the best place to start or not. So I think about it again, you start with consumer, then you wrap around the context and the market and the landscape, and then that informs your positioning. So there's one argument to me, start with the end of the spectrum and your positioning and do the scan of what messaging is and see if it's something to do with your positioning being off. And if it isn't, then you go back a step because that's probably not the issue.
And then we go back and we do a little bit more digging on the competitive solutions and maybe this category that we're calling our self a member of has different needs or different kind of competitor services and kind of reasons to believe that we're able to deliver against. There's another argument to say, go right to the source, start with your consumers again, 10, that could be less than 10 hours of conversation. It could be five hours, 10, 30 minute conversations with your audience. Now we can get a little tricky if you've got five different personas or ICPs that you're resonating with or that you think you're resonating with.
But the point holds, have the conversations, explore things like not just what you need from high category, but contextualizing your questions in the solution that you're offering more than a category to say, how do you think about learning today? How do you think about equipping and upstealing your team? What are the best points about the experiences that you've had, one of the worst points? What do you consult when you're making decisions?
What type of budget do you even have available? And get a sense of just again, those needs and what's informing choices where the pain points might exist or maybe they don't exist. And then using that to again, I think we got the consumer piece down, we've got five or 10 hours of conversation, we do spend a day or two really scanning the competitive environment. I really underscore this competitive piece.
I've felt this in a lot of my clients and past rules. It's not just the type of company that you define yourself as, because either you're trying to design a category, and so beautifully nobody else is in your category. Well, I'll tell you what, your consumers have probably an alternative, even if it's not whatever category you've made up, or again, they're thinking of a generic category, and there's peripherals. There's other ways that people are solving this problem.
That's not just this big behemoth of the category or there's subsections of the category that certain ICPs might use versus others based on their budget or their state of growth or whatever the case is. So you dig into your whole landscape, you think about it again, and then you're not going to be recruited in a problem being solved in the way it's being solved, and then again, it comes back to your positioning. And I anchor that and clue you are what you've done, what your unique capabilities are, what makes you better, what makes you relevant, what makes you unique, why does this matter? What's the soundiest point?
What's the relevance point to this audience? Isn't you that hard here? Hopefully that helps and doesn't feel theoretical. No, that's great.
That's very comprehensive. I'm a person that happens to be passionate about the idea of category design, but I think we hit on a misnomer. And that is this idea that I'm creating a category therefore I have no competition. What you're doing when you create a category is you're repositioning a whole another category.
So you still have like positioning has never been more important. So you're either repositioning entire category to a new way or you're in the category where you need to reposition yourself versus the 10 other competitors. Either way, you need to be very, very good at this. Unless your business is going to get nowhere.
How do you see the relationship between, like my first reaction would be to take a step back is what you do if your series be? You're going to get a good product marketer who's going to own this and do this really well, and then you're going to demand gen manager, you're going to put that in the market and make sure that you're running the activation efficiently, and these two need to work together and your business. The metrics are your revenue increases and your acquisition costs decrease. That's how you know it's working.
However, there's also the product manager and the product team. And one of the things that I've observed is just kind of the relationship between what do they own as the product manager and kind of what does the product marketer own and kind of how they work together. And as a senior leader, who do you ultimately hold accountable for this understanding of the consumer or the market? It's awesome how to pull this apart.
I mean, you're looking for a product manager now. So like maybe you can use a real world case of just how do you think about the role of the product manager versus the product marketer in kind of a B2B company? Yeah, I'd love to all share some thoughts. I'd love to sort of workshop this if I'm thinking about it, it's kind of niecy because I actually wouldn't call them three circles here.
We've got product strategy, which this is something we're sort of testing out the theory on but product strategy looks across everything. And it might be unique to the goal in the sense that we've got this content and is a research arm. And that is the thing that's ultimately going to drive value for anyone who's paying. Then we've got the product manager piece because there's a way we get the thing, the IP, the value to the audience.
And the way that experience comes through, we talked about expectation versus reality. The product marketer talks about and handles all the expectation piece. The reality is coming from the product marketer or the product manager. And then the product strategy is kind of again what the actual meat of the solution is.
So when we think about, for example, the metrics that each of these different functions is worrying about, they're a bit more diagnostic when you're thinking about product marketing. So what matters again, how are drivers of choice being informed? What is a buyer experience? And are there different messages we want to drive at certain points of the journey for product management?
It becomes how is the engagement happening throughout the platform? Or how is the product originating into we see renewals? Do we see advocacy instead of getting into a whole tangent about NPS versus advocacy? But do we actually see people going out of their way to talk about and speak favorably towards this?
There's also an element and this is where sales kind of intersects all of these pieces as well. Are we hearing that the messaging resonates from a sales conversation? Are we onboarding our clients in a way that again, we're helping them understand the value of the product and we're hearing their questions or hearing their pain points. But we're thinking about this as part of the product management function.
So it's the thing you're getting and how you're experiencing it aligned with how you're expected to. And then you know, kind of wrapping all these pieces together. So it's what is the thing? How do we see how the thing is resonating?
And then how do we translate our messaging to communicating the value in line with how that experience is actually coming to bear? I agree with you. I think of, I've always been kind of biased that a product manager should have a comprehensive view. But the reality when you're in that function, that your job is making trade-offs every day based on customer reality, engineering reality, prospect prioritization.
So you're getting hit with a lot of things. And like your ultimate job is to be accountable for making the prioritization calls that drive the business forward. And what tends to happen is you're an expert on your product but you're not necessarily expert on the needs of the market though you would love to be. And so I think that's the role of product marketing is to really understand the experts on the needs of the market and in how you are positioning your product or your solution to meet those needs while also being very observant of what the gaps are, what are the white spaces and kind of where you need to go and filter that back into the decision-making of the product manager.
And that's I guess how I've seen it work the best in my experience. From how you've seen that come to bear when you think about product marketing and to your earlier questions, what's the cadence of the product marketing function in your experience as far as keeping an eye on and refreshing or feeding back things like the competitive environment or the pulse check around how our attitudes among our users is you're not gonna be doing your competitive research every single day, you're also probably not gonna wait a year to refresh it. So what the cadence that you've seen work really well in that front? I've tried to strive to do it quarterly on a systematic level, but what I found is there's a lot of frequent feedback and discussion.
So the more active the conversation is, and the conversation may stick with the marketing of the commercial function and then maybe more formally with the product team just so they're not like recency bias. I think what the challenge is, and finding a good product marketer though, is this works really well when somebody's a domain expert or just has this massive curiosity about the domain of which your company is in. You know, this is something I've just been struggling with as just a leader and a commercial leader. And that is what is the role of your curiosity about the business you're in, in the relationship to your performance?
And some people are like, no, I'm a functional leader. It doesn't really matter what we sell or what we do. I'm a great product marketer. I'm not so clear, like you can be great at product marketing or marketing in general, if you're not passionate about the thing that your company's doing.
And so especially in a technical field. And so this is a thing that I've kind of, one of the things I've seen really differentiate good from great product marketers is not only are they great at product marketing, but they're passionate in their understanding about the consumer in their space, the technology, and kind of just their genuine curiosity and interest in the domain that company resides in. Thoughts on that? It actually reminds me of the question you asked before, around is B2B eternally doomed with their positioning.
Because what the product marketer I've always thought about that role is being the translator from, the analogy I've always referenced is under the iceberg. There's the thing that you offer, there's a functional bullet, there's a spec of the technology, there's a tool that plugs into, there's all the bullets. Why people need to care is what the product marketer really translates as you look to the top of that iceberg that's above the water, it's outside of your four walls. Because product marketing, a cereal box will list, your nutritional facts, it'll list some degree of information, but that's not the only reason people buy on the consumer side and that's whole truth on the B2B side.
So the product marketer being able to think about, and that's where I've seen product marketing fall short, you talked about sales totally re-up, the messaging or the deck or whatever when they get it in their hands because they're not getting why people are buying or what they're actually solving for, they're just listening to specs and then expecting their buyer to do that translation on their own. So when you think about that empathy for the problem and the energy for the solution and why it's really exciting and why it actually matters and it will change your professional trajectory or it will make you or business that much more successful, that's the translation that happens from the specs under the water to the world and the problems it's solving for the buyers. Yeah, you mentioned this a few times, I've found no difference between a consumer buying, me as a consumer buying, something for myself and I as the enterprise buyer buying something for my company other than maybe the price. But in both cases, you buy based on emotion.
I mean, we bought on at our last company and didn't even look at another solution. I've done the same thing with Drift and refine labs even when I was a customer, right? Like it wasn't like we went off and looked at 10 different solutions in a getting category or space. No, it was the brain that I associated and resonated with and have emotional feeling for that we buy.
This is how people buy and the idea that that's not how people buying the enterprise is crazy and that there's actually, even though there's 10 people that are buying a committee that make a decision in a very traditional and kind of non-emotional way as total bullshit. It's not really how it works. My perspective of both as someone who's bought a lot and someone who's marketed and sold to others in by a lot. I'm living as right now with the one hand, doing a very thorough overview of any sort of view of research vendor out there on the B2B side and looking for apartments across the country.
So I can't physically go and see or feel the apartment but in looking through websites in quote unquote, demo requests and trying to get a human on the phone in both cases. And it's very problematic for me to be in the business I'm in and be like a researcher and be analyzing UX and analyzing the visual of the website. But this also gets into the element of like dark social and reviews and what other people have to say nicks about half of my apartment list. I go onto the website and I see certain facts about a researcher vendor but if I know 10 people who've said service is a great quality of their respondents isn't great, boom they're out.
So I'm totally with you that. And I know this is an intersection that people stand on both sides of the fence. I look with two both sides of the fence because I think there's value in the connective tissue but there's also learnings and the same time the human is a human and how they're thinking about the weighting of the variables might change across either side of that fence but it's still gonna be functional, it's gonna be emotional and of course you discern goals. Yeah and I think I'm gonna back to the example of my last company not to be labor at this point but we were trying to create a new category and we needed to reposition the old one which happened to be business intelligence tools.
And one can argue there's a bunch of rational reasons of features a mile long and why our product is different than other products and this is kind of how most people go to market. We activated a simple message that was no more than the dashboards and the emotional toll that took, I mean the emotion that people would come inbound to us talking about how they felt about what they were using and the fact that like I didn't really matter what you had but if you didn't have that I'm willing to talk to you. And it was like a game changer for how we build our brand, for how we drove our revenue, et cetera, et cetera. And to your point it was all based on emotion.
Nobody really knows what the hell that means but people could feel that maybe that leads to a better world and a better life and a better working environment. And I think we need more of that in B2B. I mean, it's already maybe it's even more important than B2C in terms of being able to differentiate yourself that position that's profoundly based on a unique position and message to the right audience obviously over an activated on the right channel. I digress.
Well, it's not to say that you can niche down and find an audience that will work for you but it goes back to our conversation before. There's so much funding in this space that if you've got 30 or 300 or 3000 or tech providers at a certain point, they're not able to survive. So I hear you if nothing but for survival of the fittest, the positioning piece has got to come in at some point. Absolutely.
So what have we missed? What have we not talked about? That we should hit on in this topic at least today? I think there's an element of perfect as being the kind of antagonist to progress here.
So when you think about understanding your consumer, when you think about quality diversity, to think about who the role is that needs to own something, just the connectivity with what's going on in your consumers mind or their reality and their day to day, there's a market piece. So perfection just being the enemy of getting started and getting those conversations. And you'll learn along the way. I mean, you might take, we said 10 conversations, you might take learnings from that and something falls flat and maybe another 10.
But it's better than zero that it wasn't helping you because you weren't making progress to begin with. The other whole piece of this, that is probably a whole separate conversation is about metrics. How do you understand what's resonating? And again, I've lived in the brand side of things when you think about the quote unquote funnel or the purchase path and there's the emotional and the experiential side of things.
There's lots of debates around, we've talked about consideration versus intent versus preference, three different points on the spectrum and in matters, which I'm gonna talk to you and go on. And then there's the metrics as we've talked about what do you think about the activation phase? How do you signal what's working in your creative? How do you understand whether your channel strategy is actually the right strategy?
How do you understand yourselves is actually performing well. And there's an element is we think about the environment we're operating in right now. How do you have the right metrics at all the stages of your business strategy? So that if insanity is going on from a market perspective or a buyer perspective on a monthly basis or an annual basis outside your walls, you're not whiplashing your entire team internally because you think it's something you're doing or you need to your customer base or your strategy, but you know the metrics that are mattering or contributing to your business objectives so that we're talking about this more and more.
It's not about a monthly rolling basis. It's overall how your performance is doing within the ecosystem that you're operating in. So the metrics piece is obviously a lot of room for debate there, but I'm sure we can put that up another time. Yeah, we'll definitely do that.
There's a bit in your story then, you'd mentioned earlier that I really like and that's the solution of the feedback loop. So I think of all else fail, instead of thinking about how to set this up in a very structured, kind of overwhelming way, it's just like how do you keep moving forward and iterating in the market as fast as you can? In the faster that feedback loop, the more you're gonna learn. So take the 10 conversations, apply something, see if it works, go back, have more conversations or readjust, try it again.
And if you're doubting where to start, I guess one way to start is like just get started and take a little bit of insight, put it into action, see if it works and try it again. And the faster you can move that loop in theory, the faster you learn, you know, from time you can build up more standard processes to kind of do this at scale. Yeah, with you there, yeah. And the two realities we both acknowledge is the culture piece being a key part of that.
And then, you know, I think about product heavy companies, it's not necessarily easy to hear feedback and then activate on it in the next month. But again, we go back to this product manager type role where you're understanding we're hearing things, how important of an issue is it, how much benefit is it gonna drive to the business and then being able to be agile and build in and just live through the feedback loop in your products so that it's not just while we set our product roadmap in January and so thanks for the feedback, but we'll take it into account when we're planning for next year. So we're gonna be able to do a whole cultural element of being open to it and figuring out how to activate on it. Especially in the world where we're moving more and more to self-serve product led, like you need to be able to be agile on the product side as much as on the positioning side of your point because no customer's gonna tolerate, oh, I get that feature in next year's release.
It's just not the way that we're working moving forward. That's not really how you build software. So I'd agree with that. Any last words in for the audience?
Anything that folks should stop doing, start doing as they hear this conversation? Maybe like one call to action. Like if you think about, there's a lot here we talk about, we have somebody listening to this. What's like one thing you advise them to do tomorrow when they go back to the office like the one step to get started?
I think it goes back to assessing your foundation. You might have a gut instinct or your sales team might be a good proxy for that gut instinct around understanding things are working great. You might not need to do this. If they're not, it's probably something to do with your customer or how you're showing up in the market or how you're talking about how you're showing up in the market.
So we talked about a lot of simple ways to get started if anybody wants to talk through ideas around a partner to engage for quick research on messaging or otherwise, either of us are very happy to be a resource and happy to talk with anyone about that. But get a sense that if your business isn't the flywheel that you're thinking and hoping it will be, there's probably something in the foundation that's a little shaky to figure out where that is. To patch that gap and get your momentum going. Yeah, I'd like that.
I'd have to put a point on that more finely as if if you're not selling your product, you likely have a positioning problem and a messaging problem or an audience problem. It's less so probably an activation problem than it is a positioning go-to-market issue. Last question. When we get to use the vault?
When's the vault in the market? I would again encourage anybody who's interested in learning more can either reach out to me or join our waitlist or link it in the show now. It's because we've got a great timeline ahead of us. We've got a lot of content for the team and our research partners aren't dating with us to get in the vault.
So I'm not going to lock anybody into a specific date, but I will say summer 2022, we've got our beta version and the waitlist will start to be tapped into in the months thereafter. So it's a matter of months, but I'm not going to give you a specific date, but if you're interested again, they love talking to our customers and those who are interested in so reach out anytime. That's awesome. What's the best place to reach out to you?
You can find me on LinkedIn. I believe my email will be on the website or you can find me via LinkedIn and email that way as well. Victoria welcomes all vault comers. So reach out to her if you're interested.
Put your name on the waitlist. You'll be one of 2,000 people and we look forward to bringing this to all of you hopefully soon. Victoria, thanks for the time. Enjoy talking to you.
I know this will be one of many conversations we'll have both privately and on the podcast. Absolutely. I can grow. There we come.
Exactly.