AMA: Okta Former VP of Product Marketing, Scott Schwarzhoff on Messaging

Lots of ways to do this, but there are 'tactical' and 'strategic' ways to measure success. Tactically, setting up metrics-based feedback loops in the go-to-market is key. We used Outreach in our SDR efforts that offers a great, low-risk way to quickly test messaging, we measured content performance in the field via analytics on our Box fileshare, and, obviously, demand gen performance reviews are important.   Win/loss reviews are also great. I like to get about 20-25 reps to provide feedback eve ...Read More

Posted this on another similar question, but on the competitive positioning point specifically, I think there's a 'turn' in the narrative toward the end of the story where existing solutions can't solve the problem completely and it's good to have specifics on how your solution is better. But you never want to lead with the competitive view because that tends to cause a lot of friction between yourself and the customer. The goal is that the customer realizes you're a better approach to where the ...Read More

A couple to try out. Here’s a combined messaging source doc that I use every time I start working with one of our portfolio companies. Inherited from Citrix days and then adapted over time. Hope it’s helpful! The second one is one I've been working on for a year and am sharing with the Sharebird community before publishing for feedback. The core idea is that I've that that a lot of messaging focuses too much on product/benefit and not enough on fitting the narrative into a broader context of how ...Read More

I've always been in the product team, so that's the most natural interaction for me. For PM, we'd collaborate on how to position new products. We built a spreadsheet that had product pillars>concepts>key features>'feature rank'>feature flags, price. You may be asking, 'what's a feature rank' and that's where I LOVED using this handy three-point rating scale that was drilled into me at Citrix:* Table-stakes: required capabilities that everyone and where there’s no clear uniqueness. * ...Read More

Ah, a tricky one! There are a few things that you can do, starting with a core team that you trust to participate in the fluidity that is message development. Typically, this is a small group that can speak to all the core concepts that you need to discuss in detail. At Okta, this was our product management and product marketing team plus a couple of ‘super AE/SEs’ to provide field input.Once a baseline message has been developed, then it’s best to iterate quickly via testing. For example, we us ...Read More

There’s basically one big one and that’s focusing too much on product/benefit and not enough on fitting the narrative into how a customer views their world, their priorities, and setting the table for the new world. There are all kinds of tools for salespeople to essentially become a consultative partner to their customer - Command of the Message, Challenger Selling, etc. As marketers, we don’t really have a single framework to help us build a narrative in the way that these sales frameworks do. ...Read More

First thing, how are you segmenting the market and determining evolving customer needs/priorities? Great news - no product category stays fixed for very long. There’s always some new ’shift’ that the incumbent product category leaders don’t see coming that provides your company with a new business opportunity. Therefore, you want to determine, in a data-rich, customer-obsessed way, what the current requirements are for success are in the evolving category. Easiest way to do this is to build a si ...Read More

One of the biggest challenges we had in the early days was competing against Microsoft. They are the grand-daddy of identity in that they created Active Directory, which has been the authoritative directory for every enterprise for decades. As you can imagine, they wanted to hold on to this critical IT control point for as long as possible as the world moved to the cloud, so they came out with something called Azure Active Directory, which is a directly competitive product to Okta’s. The reason ...Read More

When I was at Okta, PMM was under the Chief Product Officer, so my peer was our head of product management. We had a ‘triad’ model of one PMM, one PM, and one TMM (tech marketing manager) per product for the first 8 years. That worked pretty well as the PM/PMM lead essentially owned the business plan and go-to-market plan for their product. Shared foxhole, so to speak. Tech Marketing was really focused on compete (especially Microsoft compete), technical content and SE enablement.After we got to ...Read More

There is a classic fit in / stand out paradox that all companies have. On the one hand, most companies are improving on an existing way of solving a problem, there’s budget for that category, and therefore opportunity to pursue. It’s really, really expensive to create a completely new category as a new company, with a few exceptions. Salesforce create the category for SaaS software, for example. But they had to spend a lot of time and $$ on the whole ‘no software’ mantra. On the other hand, you ...Read More

Ah, a tricky one! There are a few things that you can do, starting with a core team that you trust to participate in the fluidity that is message development. Typically, this is a small group that can speak to all the core concepts that you need to discuss in detail. At Okta, this was our product management and product marketing team plus a couple of ‘super AE/SEs’ to provide field input.Once a baseline message has been developed, then it’s best to iterate quickly via testing. For example, we us ...Read More

I don’t think there are a lot of completely new categories created these days. In enterprise software, most new companies are improving on existing ways of solving the same problems we’ve had for a couple decades. So, the real question, I think, is how to align on a shared view of what the ‘new world’ requirements are to winning a market that has evolved. At Okta, we had a strong POV on the beliefs customers should have when considering a new approach to identity. For us, ‘cloud-first, enable be ...Read More