AMA: Square Head Of Product Marketing, Ecommerce, Christina Lhi on Competitive Positioning

It is always a good idea to factor in some time for research pre-launch to make sure your messaging is resonating with your target customer. In the past, I've done this both via quant surveys (Pros: more data driven confidence levels but Cons: Finding the right prospect audience can be expensive) and qual (Pros: can learn more of the why and insights, Cons: lower levels of confidence). Another useful tactic is to loop in your GTM teams early on to get their thoughts on concepts/messaging. But ul ...Read More

I like to think about positioning as the internal facing framework of how you want your sellers to perceive, understand and feel about your product. Positioning informs your messaging. It can reflect the vision for your product, key differentiators, and defines what your product is. Messaging is external facing - how your positioning comes to life with the actual messaging in the market. The key value props that are compelling to your customers can be thematic while the messaging itself is how t ...Read More

Some key documents that my teams have implemented for competitive positioning are starting with data gathering on points such as: key value props, feature set, target customers, pricing, strengths, customer perception. Partnering with brand and demand gen teams on creative campaign insights and media spend are also helpful to coordinate on. These inputs can then be inputs into frameworks like SWOT matrixes and battlecards for Sales/AM teams or internal one sheeters that can be good alignment col ...Read More

This is a great question. Overall, product differentiation is key and one of the roles I really enjoy within PMM is having such a pulse and influence on what differentiates your product in the market - but it's not enough to just be different, it needs to matter to your customer and it needs to come to life in your marketing. This makes me think about my time at Old Navy where denim was our largest product category year over year. (Stick with me, this will translate to tech too, I promise). Ther ...Read More

All the time! It is so critical for PMM teams to talk to customers to understand their pain points, their jobs to be done, their delighters, motivations, etc. It's also important for GTM teams to have a pulse on customer feedback via customer success, sales and account management in order to understand potential barriers or blind spots that you may have from a PMM perspective. But it's not just enough to have a consistent flow of insights and information - it's really important to synthesize all ...Read More

Like any good marketer, it's about knowing your end customer and how they would like to consume information. All sales teams are different and finding the right communication methods (format, frequency) is important to align on up front so that you can focus your energy on being efficient and effective. Here are some tips: 1. More is not always more - sometimes we might over correct for a lack of data/deliverables by creating information overload. Sometimes teams like sales might not "actually r ...Read More