When it comes to driving revenue we obsess over tactics. When so often the root cause is actuallypositioning, which is a company problem not just a marketing problem. When sales and marketing efforts are stuck or slowing down, it's rarely because you need to unlock a new channel, or because you are not using the latest martech tool. It is most often a positioning problem. But it is much easier to toss the blame on sales + marketing efforts and ask those teams to do more - because positioning is a whole company issue. Changing the product roadmap, ideal customer profile, pricing/packaging, and how you talk about what you do -- well shoot that is a ton of work, and there's a lot of feelings and opinions, and there's this team who we already committed to doing X for, and investing Y in this, and it goes on for ever. But it's most often positioning that needs to be changed because the context for your market/customers has changed. And the solution is not buying intent data from a new vendor, doing new field events, or hammering on outbound. Those things wont work without the right company story + positioning. With the reality of budget cuts, less headcount, and mounting pressure to hit targets right now there is no better time to take a hard look at positioning. Strong positioning is knowing the value you deliver that no other product on the market can for your ideal customer. Best of all, you can make these improvements without additional budget or new hires (there's something that will make the CFO happy). Some resources I've used over the years to get smarter on positioning:
- Obviously Awesome - book by April Dunford
- Story Brand - book by Donald Miller
- Positioning - book by Al Reis & Jack Trout
- 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing - book by those same guys
- Google Andy Raskin "Drift greatest sales deck ever"
- Keep it simple to start if you need and focus on answering:
- Who is our product for?
- What does our product do?
- Why is it better than the alternatives?
But most importantly don't obsess over one framework. Make it your own. Take some nuggets from each of those books. Spend $40 to get some books, read them in a week (they short business books and easy to read even for slow readers like myself). Then take some lessons and begin to apply them to your business. When I was at Privy and we did a re-positioning exercise, we read both Obviously Awesome and Story Brand and used both together to make our own way of doing positioning. Make it yours. But go and flip through. some of these resources and 10 days from now you can be that much smarter about positioning I promise you that. And remember that positioning is a COMPANY problem - marketing can be the one to identify and lead the team that is going to tackle this, but if you don't have product, sales, CS, and the executives bought in, all you're really going to end up with is new website messaging... - Dave |
