AMA: Vanta Director of Product Marketing, Joe Goldberg on Tactics for Successful B2B Software Product Marketing

When selling a technical enterprise software product, what is the best advice you have for a product marketer? This seems obvious, but master the product! Become an SME, learn how to configure and demo it yourself, and do booth duty to demo/pitch it. This all helps you craft messaging/content for the product which is deeper and will resonate better with your target audience. Also you gain credibility internally with others like product management, the field, enablement, and more. And to become an SM, lean on internal technical resources heavily incl seeing how they demo it. In the past I’ve seen some product marketers for technical products not know how to use/or demo it, so they are limited to presenting ultra-high level messaging around the basic “increase rev/reduce costs” story. To get deeper content, they need to lean on SMEs/others which slows things down greatly and limits the Product Marketer. Which brings up a sub-point. Which is that buyers of technical enterprise software of course are technical themselves…they are allergic to high-level, fluffy marketing. You need to get into the details and speeds/feeds with them. Not just the basic “increase revenue, saves time/cost” story. Yes, things like ROI calculators and BVAs are great and key in large enterprise deals..but they come later in the sales process.

Keep it short :) Start with TL;DR, then flush out the key info and link to other docs with detail. Also, I have found it rare as of late to email the field....Slack is where it is at

Not backing up their roadmap thoughts with industry info or customer'/prospect data...instead just relying on "gut feel". Also not knowing when to back off and let things go, even if you do not agree with it.

One is too much focus on high-level messaging/positioning. While messaging and positioning are key, do not overthink the messaging/positioning. Should be simple. Who is the product aimed at, what it is, what is does/benefit, how different/better, why it is needed now. Remember the audience is a newbie who wants the basic info…so make this easy on them. I’ve seen it countless times where many teams and people work on messaging for many weeks and at the end, the message ends up straying from plain English and is full of buzzwords and focus on differentiators. The audience ends up still unclear on what the product is and what it does. #marketingfail

Absolutely lean on recruiting/HR as your partner as they’re extremely helpful. But my big tip is you also need to co-own this hiring process and personally plan to spend a few hours every single day on it, especially given how important it is. Things you can do to help: Send job post to your LinkedIn network and have colleagues do the same with their networks. Also ask colleagues to target great people they worked with in prior roles. networks. Post the JD in marketing communities such as Sharebird or Product Marketing Alliance. Her is the big one: Get direct access to LinkedIn Recruiter and you do your own targeted searches and outreach..get good with LinkedIn search filters. And when pinging candidates, include a direct link for candidates to book on your calendar to speed things up substantially (no need for a manual scheduler to be involved). And then stay very close to good candidates during the hiring process to answer questions they have and show them your dedication/prioritization to the role.

In a typical enterprise SaaS startup, new features come fast and furious so scale is key for building content around them. Start with internal enablement (slides) on tier 1-2 features at Alpha, and all features at public beta or GA. Update as features move through stages. This internal material on slides forces pithy, succinct messaging/ICP/GTM plan which you can re-use later. By the way, an added benefit of early enablement is (1) the field can tactically roadmap sell and (2) the field can recruit beta customers/references needed for launch. This succinct internal enablement material can be reused for dedicated public material when the feature goes GA. This material includes monthly “what’s new” blogs/emails/webinars, dedicated blogs, press releases, social media copy and more. It’s like a train of content that gets re-used as a feature moves through stages. Scalable content re-use for the win!

It is not either/or. It is both. If “Product Led Growth” is using the product so a customer can self-evaluate, buy, implement, expand/renew, that is clearly a good thing as it accelerates the sales cycle, and frankly demanded by customers these days - most do not want to talk to sales early. And there is still plenty of room for sales to reach out to these quality, Product-Qualified Leads, drive upsells, and more. And at some point the self-serve trialer will want to engage with sales for a full trial, purchase the software, and more. Win-win. For pre-sales PLG, for sure on your web site add screenshots, interactive demos, and a self-serve trial that offers both (1) an “empty” option + (2) option where it is easy for the trialer to load demo data into your product and follow a lab guide to configure the product and get to aha within 60 minutes. Lab guide should not just be loaded up with your value, but also plenty of traps for the competition. And do not forget self-serve documentation! Fun fact: Even as far back as the late 1990s, enterprise software vendors had free trial downloads (partial PLG) + huge sales teams. So they co-existed back then. PLG is not new..it just got a lot better with SaaS.

Do not over-rotate to very precise sales plays (if you hear x, do y) for the field. Focus more on teaching reps how to do good discovery and then adjust the play/message/demo on the fly (aka "audible ready"). This is because every opportunity/sales meeting is unique and the possible “plays” run in the dozens or hundreds. Reps cannot/will not memorize all these, nor should they. Get reps to where they can ask several questions around enterprise size/maturity/industry, buyer role/responsibility, needs, use cases, pain, budget, timeline, etc. And then the rep can work out the right products to pitch and when. This includes the rep in real-time adjusting the talk track, pitch deck slides, and demo. Lots and lots of internal role playing can help reps learn this. Basically a safe “flight simulator” to learn and “crash”. I’ve seen too many reps never learn how to do good discovery and then translate that into the right pitch/demo,play….of course this hampers the success of that rep.

* When building it, of course lean heavily on sales feedback, including how the best sellers pitch. Ask to see any custom decks they use. * Do not forget the goal of FM deck is mostly do discovery/qualification + generate enough interest to get to second meeting (not close a deal!). So easy on the slide count and heavy on conversation and demo. Load up the appendix with slides, but not the main body. * For a 30 min first meeting, 5 slides max is good.Make sure prospect talks at least a third of the time. Do not forget time for intros and next steps/mutual action plan. * Each slide notes has talk track and disc/qual Qs to ask * Hot take, but avoid too much 101 industry info. Prospect usually knows this already and wants to get to the “what problems do you solve & how do you do it better than others or the status quo”. In terms of specific slides, decent flow is: * First slide should capture discovery findings (current situation, challenges, desired end state, timing, competitors, etc). * Next slide is on customer/analyst validation/logos. * Next is challenges your customers faced. Use to drive discovery. Your solution should be the opposite of these challenges and talk to this! * Next is a slide on your products / use cases / users aired at (if done well a rep can use this to talk to differentiators). * Depending on how technical the product is, next slide could be architecture. Or a "how we work" slide that shows chronological flow. Can layer in metrics around ROI. * Last is a diagram on next steps to help land a mutual action plan.

I have seen this where an inferior company copies you and plays unethical. They copy your web site messaging, they have similar-sounding case studies, they have fake/good G2 reviews, they have fake LinkedIn followers, etc. And they undercut you on price. Problem is buyers at first glance see no differentiation between you and them. A solution I have seen work well is reliant on you having the better product. Which is you force the evaluator into a hands-on trial where they see first-hand your UI and your capabilities that competitors cannot touch. This exposes differentiation that competitors cannot match. Related to this, for some data products, highlighting superior speeds/feeds using huge demo data sets can expose inferior competitors very well.