AMA: Narvar Head Of Product Marketing, Jeffrey Vocell on Competitive Positioning
August 4 @ 10:00AM PT
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Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing | Formerly Narvar, Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • 3y
Great question. First of all, make sure you set expectations up-front that results will take a while to see. Overall count the incremental wins, and show the milestones ...
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Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing | Formerly Narvar, Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • 3y
There's so many tools out in the market today, so here are a few recommendations of categories: Surveys - SurveyMonkey, TypeForm, Qualtrics Dashboards - Looker, Sisense,...
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How does one create a "positioning document?"
Our organization is focusing on a new customer segment and channel. My CMO has asked me to create a "positioning document" that we can share with senior leadership that articulates how we're going to market to this segment. Does anyone have a template or (and NDA-compliant) example document I could use as a model? Just trying to understand what type of information to include and how best to organize it. Thanks!
Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing | Formerly Narvar, Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • 3y
There are ton's of different templates available, a quick Google search will turn up dozens of positioning templates. This is a pretty good one I've used as a foundation ...
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Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing | Formerly Narvar, Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • 3y
Oftentimes the day-to-day of changes can be "noisy", so try to not get too caught-up in the everyday changes. If a competitor is having a major product launch, or doing a...
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What metric, goal or KPI can you put on providing competitive intelligence to the company or product teams?
I work in a company that measures the impact of all projects, but admittedly this is a difficult area to track. Would love to any suggestions/thoughts.
Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing | Formerly Narvar, Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • 3y
Love this question! I'd think about it in terms of outcomes, and effectiveness. So I'd look at metrics like: Competitive Win Rates Usage - To be clear, I like to look...
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Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing | Formerly Narvar, Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • 3y
Good question. As with everything, a lot of the answer is it depends. If you have a customer marketing team, I hope they're doing some level of "air traffic control" and...
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How does product and launch positioning and messaging differ?
This for companies with multiple feature-rich products that are being managed by a very small (i.e. 1-3) PMMs.
Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing | Formerly Narvar, Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • 3y
I think there's a few different aspects of this: 1. Alignment -- There needs to be alignment between your feature and overall product positioning and messaging. If you a...
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Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing | Formerly Narvar, Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • 3y
First of all, it needs to be rooted in the day-to-day realities of sales and the conversations their having. If Product Marketing is coming up with competitive intel in a...
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What's your approach to competitive differentiation?
How does this inform your core messaging, how do you enable sales to understand what makes you different/better, how do you know if it's working with your target buyers?
Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing | Formerly Narvar, Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • 3y
Great question! I'll start with saying Klue has a phenomenal blog post on this topic I'd encourage you to read. But to your question, most will try to differentiate off ...
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Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing | Formerly Narvar, Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • 3y
Put in a place that's easy for them to find, and be consistent. While that's oversimplified, it really comes down to that. Sales will look for competitive positioning as...
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What do you use or do to get people to buy into your positioning plans and consistently using them?
The product marketers job typically revolves around positioning a product. Sometimes, it can be difficult to align sales, marketing, and product teams around your positioning.
Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing | Formerly Narvar, Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • 3y
This is arguably the hardest part of positioning. In my experience, it has to start before you really start drafting positioning and as you're doing research. First, ta...
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How do you get to creative, consistent and differentiated messaging?
Do you believe in brand positioning/purpose as a north star for messaging?
Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing | Formerly Narvar, Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • 3y
Yes, I believe in tieing positioning up to overall company positioning. The way I've described it before to other team members is it's a scaffold -- the foundation is the...
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Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing | Formerly Narvar, Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • 3y
I think competitive is one aspect of overall pricing and packaging, but it shouldn't solely dictate how you price or package your product. There are exceptions of course,...
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Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing | Formerly Narvar, Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • 3y
A few key documents that you should have: Research Document - For me, this has always been internal and been a way for me to store insights, data, or any resources on a ...
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Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing | Formerly Narvar, Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • 3y
There's a lot to look at, but here's an overview: Company & Product Insight: Company Stage/Size/Growth - This speaks for itself, but where is the company, what size...
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Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing | Formerly Narvar, Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • 3y
It's incredibly important! Not just the individual win/loss/churn reports, but aggregate data as well can be a foundation or validation for decision making. In past rol...
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