set the channel description: Stuff about positioning, narrative, and story

Hi folks, would love to see some best positioning examples from b2b SaaS companies you come across recently.

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Positioning 101 • Context Matters ◦ A great product put in a wrong context can make people not understand it so people won't pay. ◦ Shift the context to heighten the perceived value. ◦ "Positioning defines how your product is the best in the world at providing some value that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about" ◦ What do well-positioned products have in common? ▪︎ Easy to understand what the product is. ▪︎ Clarity about the product's value. ▪︎ Clear who this product is for. ◦ Good positioning makes the product stand out for people who'd really want it. It conveys clarity of purpose and leaves no place for ambiguity, doubt. ◦ According to a research, differentiated positioning works better than no positioning. Conclusion? Make your product stand out and convey that message properly. ◦ What's the path to positioning? ▪︎ Competitive alternatives: Look at how others are selling themselves. What's common in them? ▪︎ Unique attributes: Clarity on what's unique about your product ▪︎ Differentiated value: Just being unique won't help. Convey how the uniqueness will help the potential customers) ▪︎ Best-Fit Customers: Finding the ideal customer type. Who is it for? ▪︎ Market Category: Have clarity on the category you fit in (e.g. email client applications, texting applications, content delivery network providers, firewalls) ◦ Key Learnings ▪︎ Positioning is like context-setting; even a great product can fail in the wrong context. ▪︎ Positioning is fundamental to sucessful marketing and sales: bad input equals bad output. ▪︎ Positioning is a deliberate step-by-step process.

Janna Systems Case Study on Positioning ◦ Janna Systems was an enterprise CRM in the late 90s. Back at that time, Siebel dominated the enterprise CRM market with hundreds of millions in revenue. Janna Systems couldn't really compete with them and during sales pitches, everyone asked them how Janna was better than Siebel (it wasn't). ◦ They once identified that their software had a unique feature that could model relationships based on people regardless of their companies they worked at and no other CRMs at that time offered this feature (identifying the uniqueness) People at Janna didn't understand the value of this particular feature and it was often perceived less valuable. ◦ They once pitched it to Goldman Sachs and this feature particularly stood out. They recognized that bankers dig this feature (identifying best-fit customers) and Janna proceeded to re-position themselves as "Enterprise CRM for investment bankers", their long-term plan was to target the entire banking market and sell their product to them. ◦ They grew from $2M in revenue to more than $80M. Janna ended up getting acquired by Siebel Systems for $1.2bn. ◦ Key Takeaways ▪︎ It's easier to start with a narrow marke focus and expand from there. ▪︎ You need good positioning to do good marketing and sales. ▪︎ Strong positioning gives you the ability to position your competitors (you could have the power to change the perceived value of competitor products in the eyes of potential customers)

• Overcoming Misalignment ◦ It's common that different departments of a company are misaligned on the value the product brings. ◦ Different people can have different understanding of what the product is, the ideal customer. It leads to customer confusion. ◦ How to overcome misalignment? ▪︎ Make it a team sport. • No single team should be responsible for positioning a product. • Have representatives available from different departments during discussion. From product management to marketing, sales, and even the top-level executives if possible. ▪︎ Have a shared language. • Start with the basics. Make sure everyone's on the same page about the definitions of the terms you're using. ▪︎ Let go of the past • People who've positioned and worked on the product till now may have a hard time letting go of their idea of what the product is. • Make sure people are ready to think of the product in a newer way. ▪︎ Gain access of customer data • We need sales people in the room who can speak about how a customer makes a purchase decision. The data should be available ahead of time. • What data to look for? ◦ Who are the customers? ◦ What other products do they consider before they buy yours? ◦ Why do they buy your product? ◦ Key Learnings ▪︎ Alignment is a hard won prize. ▪︎ What you feed into the process determines what you get out of it. ▪︎ Necessary knowledge may be available within your organization - the right process can extract it from different teams. • Your Uniqueness ◦ Strong positioning is centered and makes your product unique. ◦ Mapping out uniqueness ▪︎ Competitive Alternatives • We think of competitor alternatives as products customers can choose if not ours. A better way to think of this is by questioning what exactly the customer would do if our product didn't exist. This is a broader way of thinking about competitive alternatives. • To discover the uniqueness of your product, you need to understand what you're positioning yourself against. • You'll discover that there are more competitors than what the media displays. Example: A person could replace a CRM software with an Excel sheet or WhatsApp to take notes, save links. ▪︎ Unique Attributes • List your unique attributes. • What have you got that the competitors don't? • It can include features such as different pricing model, patent on some technology. • Start by listing the characteristics of your product and then compare to competitive alternatives. • Focus on differences more than how they're value. Just the features you individually have.

• [[ScreenCloud Case Study on Uniqueness]] ◦ Digital signage has been used since the early 2000s to display promotions, ads, information. ScreenCloud, launched in 2015. It provides software-first approach to distribute and manage content on any screen without specialized hardware. To position itself in the market, the company mapped out the list of competitors. Not just the direct competitors but also things companies would do in absence of ScreenCloud. They grouped the competitors based on their approach to solve the problem. Then they proceeded in mapping out the features, the attributes of their own product to get clarity on the differentiated value they provided in comparison to the competitor alternatives. It led them to understanding how different their product is (they were software-first, cheaper than other solutions and provided low-cost hardware to the ones needing it. To target enterprises, they also had enterprise-grade security) and after collecting all of this data, it was easier for them to position themselves in the market as the unique ones. ◦ Key Learnings ▪︎ Organize competitive alternatives by groups rather than individually. ▪︎ List every differentiated feature, no matter how useful or valuable it is. ▪︎ Differentiated features will lead to differentiated value themes. Use the value themes to position the product to best-fit customers.

• Differentiated Value ◦ After mapping out the capabilities of a product, it's essential to know the actual value it provides to best-fit customers. ◦ Value is the hardest step. ◦ There's only some amount of attention from customers and the challenge is to use that to convey the differentiated value. ◦ "My product can run SQL!" "So what? How does it help me?" ▪︎ It conveys a feature without conveying the value it provides and hence it's important to gain clarity on what exactly the feature helps the customers with. ▪︎ Translate features to value. ◦ "Our product helps you easily manage and store customer data" "Great" ▪︎ This conveys value derived from a feature (In this example, the capability of using SQL) ◦ Question what the product enables for your customer. ◦ For consumer-end businesses, products based on social status and money thrive. ◦ For B2B products, it's good if you can save or make them more money. ◦ How to find differentiated value? (A 4 step guide) ▪︎ Identify a big-deal feature. ▪︎ Translate that feature to value. • You could continuosly question "So what?" to each of the propositions. ▪︎ Map features and capabilities to create value theme. • Link and group relevant features and market them to strengthen your perceived value instead of the 10 other features that are for other different things. ▪︎ Cluster groups of value-themes. ◦ Make sure to convey differentiation while conveying value. Don't dilute the purpose of the product to a point where it sounds like it's just another product. ◦ Don't get too hung up on words and copywriting. Begin with conceptual clarity. ◦ Don't use the features that are important and necessary but don't qualify as value differentiators (e.g. security, speed) ▪︎ Don't make it the sole differentiator, use it as a nice-thing-to-have. ◦ Key Learnings ▪︎ Make people feel safe and give them the ability to speak up. ▪︎ Differentiated value is a combination of value themes. ▪︎ Differentiated value is rooted in unique attributes.

• Best-fit Customers ◦ Demographics or firmographics don't go far enough to narrow down the types of customers fit for us. ◦ In B2B, different companies with similar firmographics can have different demands. ◦ A better actionable way to go is to segment potential customers by list of characteristics. What is it that they specifically care about? ◦ The clearer your differentiated value, the easier it is to identify characteristics of customers who'd care about the value you can provide. ◦ "Our product is for companies who've just raised series B or C funding" "Our product is for companies who've X amount of sales turnover" "Our product is for people with multiple day jobs" ◦ Common mistakes ▪︎ Segmenting based on unmeasurable characteristics. • Example: "Our best-fit customers are the ones who want to become healthy" • A better way to approach this would be "Our best-fit customers are the ones who've subscribed to these few fitness-based email newsletters, YouTube channels" ▪︎ Creating personas of people who don't drive the decision-making process. ◦ The segmentation needs to be practical and specific enough that you know who to contact for selling the product. • Market Category ◦ Some companies try to sell products by categorizing them into a space that's really competitive whereas they'd be better off positioning it as a sub-segment of a larger space. ◦ You could have a product with a differentiator that's super valuable to people but without other features that the other products in the same category have, in that case, it's hard to convince a customer why they should buy your solution. Instead, position it such that the customers know exactly what and what not to expect from it. ◦ Find a right market category. You can use the following strategies. ▪︎ Big fish, small pond - There's a large enough market but you don't aim to win all of it but rather just a piece of it and then gradually expand. You start with a niche problem solver that the large competitors aren't solving very well. ▪︎ Head to head - It's when you directly go head to head with other companies offering similar solutions. Difficult to achieve without substantial amount of capital. It's advised when there's no clear market leader. It becomes a capture-the-flag where the flag is still up for grabs and you have other competitors trying to get that flag before you. ▪︎ New game - You establish a new category but it requires a lot of teaching and awareness to build upon. • A new market category starts by recognizing that the existing market categories can't provide your product the context that it needs. • Creating a new category requires deep commitment. • Creating a new category isn't just about slapping a new name.

• Sales Story ◦ We need to convert our positioning into a sales story. ◦ A sales story provides us with a narrative and the marketing tools we need to communicate the idea and the values of our products to prospects. ◦ Two phases of creating a sales story ▪︎ The Setup • Frame the problem ◦ Take the differentiated value and communicate the problem using that. Invert the value to come up with problem. • Evaluate alternative approaches ◦ Highlight the gap between the current solutions in the market and what your product brings on the table. • Visualize a perfect world ◦ Make prospects realize how it'd be like to have the value you're providing. ▪︎ Follow through • Who We Are ◦ Introduce your product, the market category. • Value We Deliver ◦ You could communicate the unique attributes and differentiated value you've thought of in the entire positioning exercise. • Proof ◦ Case-studies, third-party validation, etc. • The Ask ◦ Have a real ask. Something that takes things forward. ◦ Let the sales team validate the sales story you've provided them, you can re-iterate and improve based on their response. ◦ Key Learnings ▪︎ The story that really matters for positioning is your sales story. ▪︎ Test your positioning in a real sales situation before involving marketing. ▪︎ Test your positioning with qualified prospects instead of existing customers.

What are some examples of good B2B SaaS positioning ?