How do you make your message stand out in an increasingly competitive SaaS / Tech industry where many Businesses increasingly have identical or highly similar offerings?

When your product or solution isn't sufficiently differentiated, focus on the other key aspect of your positioning: the audience. Who is your product disproportionately better for? While many products in a given category may be highly similar, is there a user persona for whom your product is better, e.g. a specific vertical, geography, company size, or role? Don't be afraid to take a strong POV and use your messaging to lean in to a specific persona until you have deep penetration within that segment.

An example I love here is Klaviyo, which sits in the crowded marketing automation platform market, really positioning itself for retail and e-commerce brands, and that positioning reflecting as a through line from their website messaging to their case studies to their content marketing.

This is a good question and a very hard problem to solve in a saturated SaaS/Tech industry. Here are a couple of principles I typically try to follow when solving for this problem: 

• Develop a unique value proposition: Identify what makes your product different from the competition. It could be a unique feature, better pricing, superior customer service, or a focus on a specific niche. Your value proposition should be clear and compelling.

• Tell a compelling story: Craft a compelling product narrative that resonates with your target audience and the challenges they are facing with real-life examples. Keep the language simple and relatable to make it more memorable.

• Highlight benefits, not just features: This goes back to make it more relatable. Instead of listing features, emphasize the benefits of using your product. Explain how it will make customers' lives easier, save them time or money, or help them achieve their goals.

• Have a customer-first approach: Put your customers at the center of everything you do. Gather feedback, provide excellent customer support, and showcase customer success stories. Potential customers are often swayed by the experiences of others.

Owning the narrative in your market is critical but also challenging to do when there are lots of competitors, your market category may be evolving or you're creating one, or you see others start to copy your messaging.

Here are several ways to stand out:

• Identify your unique differentiation and angle (hint: it's more than just current features): First evaluate this from a product standpoint. What sets your product apart? Talk to customers and understand why they chose you, and then align with leadership on these differentiating product factors. Second, in competitive markets, it's not just current product feature set which leads to the win. It's your speed and delivery of innovation, product vision, value and ROI, pricing and packaging, brand, company values, culture, sales process, customer success, onboarding, services and support, partner ecosystem, and more. You should be highlighting these strengths and differentiating factors in your messaging and marketing and enabling sales on what to hone in on. Then it's all about repetition.

• Get personal and specific: The more specific and relevant your message is to your target audience, the more it will increase trust, drive demand, and speed up the sale. Tailor your messaging to the core persona, message based on their use cases/"jobs to be done"/pain points, use the language of their industry, take into account regional factors and company size.

• Be intentional and prioritize: Don't try to do everything all that once. If you're a small company and have limited resources, focus on an ideal customer profile and get specific -- which role, what industry, what region, what size, what supporting tech stack, etc and then go and capture that group though set channels. Understand which channels and tactics have the most influence on your target audience. Is it organic social media, is it via influencers, is it third party events or publications? Then go big and go bold on those, measure and learn, and then either revise or expand.