AMA: Narvar Head Of Product Marketing, Jeffrey Vocell on Competitive Positioning
August 4 @ 10:00AM PST
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Narvar Head Of Product Marketing, Jeffrey Vocell on Competitive Positioning
Top Questions
Jeffrey Vocell
Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing • August 4
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 complete rebrand -- then absolutely spend time digging in and processing the news and how it impacts your company/position. ......Read More
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Jeffrey Vocell
Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing • August 4
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 vacuum without input from Sales, then it will naturally fall flat. As you should do with positioning, make Sales a key par......Read More
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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!
Jeffrey Vocell
Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing • August 3
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 previously. What's most important though is adapting any template to the needs of your organization. The example I linked ab......Read More
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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.
Jeffrey Vocell
Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing • August 4
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 at this through the lens of whether the usage of a particular piece of competitive content is impacting the sales......Read More
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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?
Jeffrey Vocell
Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing • August 4
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 company positioning and messaging, and stemming from that is platform positioning and messaging, and then product positioning ......Read More
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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.
Jeffrey Vocell
Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing • August 3
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, talk with a few folks from your sales and CS teams and get a sense of any pain points they're hearing in the market. Gaining ea......Read More
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Jeffrey Vocell
Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing • August 4
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 have a sense of which customers are being reached out to with specific asks (i.e. beta requests, market research, company sp......Read More
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Jeffrey Vocell
Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing • August 4
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, and if your competitor is the defacto market standard then aligning it more closely to competitors is likely necessary. Ov......Read More
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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?
Jeffrey Vocell
Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing • August 3
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 features. In most cases this will lead to a conversation about value -- and in a crowded market is really difficult to truly ......Read More
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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.
Jeffrey Vocell
Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing • August 4
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 are sprinting towards a major launch of a notable feature then it should focus on how that capability naturally solves key cha......Read More
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Jeffrey Vocell
Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing • August 3
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, Etc * Market Data - Statista, MarketingCharts * Analysts/Review Sites - Gartner, Forrester, IDC, G2, Trust Radius The......Read More
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Jeffrey Vocell
Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing • August 4
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 they need it, so having the materials in a place they can easily access and consistently get updates is the central part of ......Read More
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Jeffrey Vocell
Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing • August 4
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 your crossing as a way to share that progress. Have a great conversation with an analyst where they told you a key piece of i......Read More
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Jeffrey Vocell
Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing • August 4
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 competitor -- or aggregate set of competitors. This doc is never shared broadly and is just used as a starting poin......Read More
1176 Views
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Jeffrey Vocell
Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing • August 4
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, and how quickly are they growing. Ideally you should have a sense of the company size you prefer so you know where you......Read More
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Jeffrey Vocell
Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing • August 4
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 roles I've used this data to focus programs around: * Competitive Intelligence - This one is obvious, but one key output has b......Read More
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