AMA: Gainsight Former Chief Marketing Officer, Anthony Kennada on Category Creation

I don’t see a difference actually, at least for technology companies. At the end of the day, customers don’t want your product, they want outcomes that your product (and company) help them derive.Few examples:• Uber/Lyft sell the ability to get from point A to point B without a car. The app is just a vehicle (pun intended).• AirBnB sells the ability to belong / feel at home anywhere in the world.• Etc.Start by deeply understanding your persona and work backwards from there. Understand the jobs t ...Read More

Is it clear that the competitor is currently the market leader? Are they a large incumbent (thinking what Salesforce is to CRM, for example) or a few years ahead of you? If so, it may be the case that you are indeed in a challenger position for an already defined market in which the disruption playbook is a better strategy. Alternatively, can you change the conversation and create a tangential category that is completely different? Consider Hubspot. Would consensus peg them as a CRM/MA competito ...Read More

A lot of effort. I think you need to be comfortable playing the long game.Think about it this way, if we took a “typical” marketing approach and started outbound prospecting into manufacturing companies on the iron belt asking them to be routed to the person who runs Customer Success, we would get a lot of confusion on the other end of the phone. Forget about a cold pitch on technology to operationalize and scale Customer Success!You need to spend a lot of time educating the market (building the ...Read More

Great question, and one that I’ve done some writing on (see link below).http://www.categorydev.com/category-branding/There are SEO, branding, PR/AR and many other implications to selecting a category name – so it’s important to get this right. I believe new categories and markets are created when a person / job title exists that is not being served in a meaningful way by an existing vendor. Categories that speak to that person, rather than the product, tend to better resonate. Analysts will sugg ...Read More

I definitely don’t think you need to earn the right – or at least, no one gave us the right to do so with Customer Success. At the end of the day, category creation has more to do with the people within the job function that you’re serving than the actual product that you sell. I don’t find that morally dubious, I believe that eventually all products become somewhat commoditized. Pepsi or Coke? At the end of the day, what people buy into is the brand that you’ve developed and the trust that you’ ...Read More

It has to start at the top. Creating a category is very expensive, so you’ll need the board and CEO to be bought in. Frankly, it impacts everything from fundraising strategy to a lot of decision making on deploying marketing spend.  The question comes back to the strategic value you’re hoping to create for the company – and maybe your first step is framing that conversation with your CEO. Are you trying to build a large business (IPO+) that is addressing a massive gap in the market and an unders ...Read More

I would orchestrate it as a compelling event to re-invent yourself. You can choose to which extent you would take that – rebranding the company, new logo, etc. – but ultimately you need to let the world know that something new is happening.At Gainsight (or Jbara Software as we were called at the time), we did the following:• Rebranded the company• Brand new website• Press release / media outreach under embargo• Email to our entire database• Announced our Series A financing (compelling event), in ...Read More