AMA: Qualia VP of Marketing, Matt Kaufman on Vertical Product Marketing

In short, neither. I wouldn't look at this as "harder to work with" as much as I'd suggest investigating how you set up your goals and expectations. Both product and sales are invaluable partners. Both generate compelling user insights. Product happens to generally generate them earlier during the development cycles while sales (especially in B2B) can get them to you rapidly once a product is in market. That being said, one needs to be careful not to use insights from product or sales too much as a crutch since each team has it's own natural bias that could influence how they interpret your users and prospects reactions. Do your indepedent insights research as well as work with product and sales directly. Both have their own timing & cycles to be mindful of. Sales is generally operating to hit monthly/quarterly/annual targets that have material impacts on their personal income. If your team isn't highly attuned to that or aligned to that financially it can make understanding where they're coming from very challenging. Similarly, product is typically working off of their own release cycles. It's pivotal to undersand their workflows to be able to time when and how to market new products you're bringing to market. Both have a different degrees of agency. A passionate product and engineering team is deeply invested in what they've built - rightfully so. As such, they'll likely be very interested in how what they've built is positioned and sold, however, they don't control that. They are an influencer. Conversely, a passionate sales team positions how products are sold and wants new and enhanced products they can sell. But do not actually control what products are built. As a marketer, one needs to recognize this as well and create an environment where these natural tensions help bring the best ideas to the surface rather than create an 'us' v 'them' culture. Long story longer, gone are the days of thinking that marketing was mostly about Sales/Marketing Alignment. Today's teams especially in Vertical SaaS need to be thinking about Marketing/Product Alignment just as much.

When constructing your brand and messaging hierarchy it's valuable to have a 50 thousand foot view of the position for what your company represents, that helps anchor all of your audiences to what you do and what you represent. It also helps align the unique value prop for each audience to a central set of company values. For instance, does your brand represent innovation, vertical expertise, ease of use, etc. But when you dig in a layer deeper it's important to consider how that messaging will be used in your demand gen and sales plays. It's extremely challenging to be all things to all people when it comes to specific objectives you're trying to hit. I would advise against trying to have one message for all of your products that is evergreen for each audience and all campaigns. We generally take a product development type approach to building our messaging for our various products and audiences. That is, we build it iteratively around a specific audience need using a Feature Positioning framework that starts by us asking "Who is the audience" we're creating this for. It's okay to have more than one version of that Feature Positioning document for the product if it's consumed by two different audiences. It's much easier and more efficient to build that way when you're not trying to stress test how that message would resonate for other audiences too. Keep it simple. In your instance (some form of marketplace that sells some sort of widget presumably) it may be a vertical based marketplace that is highly specialized, easiest to use, broadest selection, etc. However, the benefits of your marketplace will likely be wildly different depending on your audiences role in it (buyer, seller). As you go deeper into targeted campaigns that have specific goals (i.e., increase buyers in the marketplace, increase attach rate to certain categories, attract more sellers, etc) make sure your highly unique value props are aligned to those goals. 

This is largely industry specific. Definitely research your market and listen to the data. An extremely important data point that should come your way is from your sales motions and how your plays work with each audience. It's important though to resist the tempation to over segment - that's a rabbit hole that is hard to get out of. In a vertical marketing strategy the most basic of segmentation comes from which audience in the ecosystem you're speaking to. The most basic example would be if you're marketing a Marketplace you'd segment based on Buyers and Sellers. However, segmentation gets a bit more complex once you're focused on a specific audience. In B2B vertical marketing there could be several factors that come into play including but not limited to size of account (SMB v. Enterprise), regionalization (often relevant in highly regulated industries), and account maturity (new v established business). It's important to keep in mind your goal around segmentation: accelerate sales. I've found the most valuable information to base segmentation strategies on are looking at your time to close and win/loss rates based on a prescribed set of segmentations you believe may be influencing your deal cycle. This data will also only be as valuable as the inputs you have on the accounts that you've worked with. In other words, make sure your enrichment and data hygiene are done consistently and are top notch to get the most actionable insights. Once you've been in market for a sufficient round of deal cycles you should be able to identify patterns for how your current marketing and sales plays resonate with a specific groups based on the data you've gathered, and where it's failing (the anecdotal information from your sales partners will support this as well but may be highly influenced by reps who can make compelling cases). I recommend taking both those quantiative and qualitiative inputs to determine tests on where you could increase w/l rates and deal velocity and start experimenting. In the end, your segmentation will likely not only modify your marketing but could also drive how your various teams are organized.

There are a variety of low touch and high touch research methods we've used over time. Most recently what's been on my mind has been the value of Closed Won/Lost interviews for earlier stage products. As companies scale they're likely to have existing products that have been in the market for a while (I think of these as graduate students or grown ups depending on how mature they are) and others that are new kids on the block (I think of these as toddlers or preschool children). Each of these requires a different degree and type of attention to make it successful. We've recently launched a few products to a new audience and have started our early Closed Won/Lost interviews with these "Preschoolers". These include an analysis of how our marketing programs influenced a deal, an interview with the sales team that closed the deal for their insights, as well as an interview with the account itself (depending on comfort level of course). Our goal through these interviews is to better understand the qualitative aspects of our audiences buying journey beyond just what our data tells us (i.e., what was clicked, time to close, etc.). Once we've gathered and documented this information we share through a variety of systematic means so there's not a huge heavy lift. Those include real time/ad hoc updates to teams via our slack channels, regularly scheduled syncs with the product organization discussing the product roadmap, and evergreen storage in our internal reseach library. When everything goes well, we also find these learnings making their way into our feature positioning documentation for that audience as well as our persona cards (both used by other internal teams) to the extent they've helped us learn something new about our audiences needs. PS: Typically the Closed Lost interviews will often be more valuable and very compelling in uncovering features that should be built in the future to help turn those loss's into wins. PPS: We also implemented an automated Closed Won/Closed Lost notification email that gets circulated in real time when an opportunity closes. It's a very basic notification, but it includes account details and a very brief write up on why a deal closed written by the sales rep. We find this short update helpful and gives members of the team an opportunity to follow up in real time when insights are fresh.

Simply put, it's marketing to a niche audience centered around a specific set of needs. Examples include developing a deep focus in industries such as Real Estate, Education, Healthcare, or others. By comparison, a horizontally focused product marketing strategy aims to find how a given product can be used across these industries and how they may value that product differently. That being said, a vertical strategy doesn't mean there's one marketing playbook. Within these verticals you're more likely than not to have a diverse set of groups that interact with the ecosystem differently and understanding those relationships is the key to success. Let's take real estate as a vertical for instance. While it may be considered 1 vertical, there are a variety of groups involved in any given home purchase. These include lenders, real estate agents, title & escrow companies, homebuyers and sellers, and a host of other vendors. Marketing to something like the "real estate vertical" then isn't just having one industry to market to, it's about understanding each participants role in the ecosystem. It's about understanding how to best solve their unique challenges within that ecosystem, how to best get each of their attentions, and how they each work together towards their common goals.