Greg Gsell

Competitive positioning and messaging have to be one and the same. When you look at your decks and positioning, you need to do the gut check of "can my competitors say this" and if yes, change your messaging. You need to build competitive differentiation from the first impression through the entire sales cycle and at renewal. 

The key to build messaging that scales is to spend extra time on the core messaging hierarchy at the beginning. Spend the extra time debating and socializing key concepts like: * Who is it for * What situation are they in? * Pain Points * Top level message * Supporting Messaging points * Customer Examples Once you have these nailed down, it becomes much easier to stick to a common narrative across all marketing assets and GTM training, deck, etc. However, sometimes launches come fast and you don't have enough time to build the full hierarchy out. In this case, it is critical to pick ONE asset that is the "main" asset everyone is following. I find the press release is generally best suited for this purpose due to its brief and direct nature.

I have worked at two different companies and we approached it entirely differently. At the first company, we were far and away the market leader and defined the space. Here, we almost entirely focused on new logo acquisition for competition. If we won up front, we had the better product and were very sticky, plus the cost of switching vendors was very high, so the risk of churn was much lower. At my current company, we are in a highly competitive space. We are really good at new logo acquisition because we have a great trial experience and an awesome implementation team. We definitely focus on churn as much as new logo acquisition from a competitive lense. When your cost to switch is lower, businesses will often look to switch at contract renewal. It is key to make sure you are focusing on (and delivering) differentiated value and your CSMs are keeping in mind why you are better when they are speaking to their customers.

I try to use the Pyramid approach to all content. Start with just absolute essential information, then expand. This way sales reps are able to capture the exact right amount of information in the most efficient way possible. For example, say we are an apple company and our competition is those pesky orange growers from across town. I would structure my competitive teardown content like: * Main message Your time is valuable, don't waste it peeling an orange. Apples are ready to eat at a moment's notice * The main message has a single point of differentiation that is the most important. Repeat this message across all of your content and training so every rep knows that oranges are harder to peel. * Supporting messages The average orange takes 4 minutes to peel, that is an average of 3 hours a year for most fruit-eating adults! What could you be doing with 3 hours? Additionally, peeling oranges results in 2.7x higher finger injury rates than other fruit. * The supporting message is starting to get into detail to back up the main message with facts. We are bringing in stats (4 minutes to peel) and impact (3 hours wasted peeling). Additionally, I started with another line of differentiation with the peeling-related injuries. * The details Now go deep to back up your points, examine different use cases, etc. This is where someone can go to find what they need for a specific deal (ie "how do we differ from oranges picked by left-handed pickers", and more corner case questions. )

Overall, you should at least look at it annually. Based on the progress we have made, the market shifts, etc, is this still the best way to articulate the value? Is it still working with field? Sometimes you need to adjust messaging to get sellers excited to go pitch it again. You also need to evolve your messaging on a mature product as you go into new markets. A mature product probably started in a few key verticals but hopefully you figure out how to evolve into new verts. You will need to evolve the messaging to enter those markets.

I will answer this question the total opposite way that you asked it based on something I saw this morning. I was making my son a bagel with cream cheese. The cream cheese had a logo saying "Our cows saw NOOOOO to ABCDE hormone". I am not here to comment on anything to do with farming. What struck me is right next to the logo, in LARGER FONT, was a warning saying "there is no evidence ABCDE hormone has any negative impact". I was kind of taken aback. What is the point of anchoring on this differentiation if it is totally made up and you have to state it is totally made up? As marketers you sometimes hear "don't let the truth get in the way of a good story" but in this case, they were so desperate for competitive differentiation that they fudged the truth and told you they were fudging the truth in a larger font. Don't do that. 

Talk to your sales and CS people. The folks in your organization who are repeating the messaging to prospects/customers will have a lot of feedback right away. You can also use tools like Gong for this. We are setting up a Revenue Advisory Board who will help give feedback while we are developing the messaging then give feedback after using it in the wild

An old boss used to say "don't let the product get in the way of a good story". In order to stay head of your competitors, you will likely need to future sell. It is important to be aligned with the product team on WHY they are building the product, jobs to be done, etc and articulate that north star in your marketing. The amount of detail revealed is generally correlated to the confidence in delivering the product as described. For example, for an alpha product (we aren't sure this is going to work as it exists today), you should tell a higher level story about the market shifting and how you will solve that problem. For a beta problem (we will ship it but still ironing out some kinks), you can be much more specific about the differentiators and customer testimonials.

'I think a competitor is anyone who is in or adjacent to your space. Said another way, a competitor is a vendor that can cause confusion or slow down your sales cycle for some reason. There are a few different types of competitors: * Main competitors - the ones who you are competing with head on and can materially impact your revenue if you dont win. Spend most of your time on these. * Ankle biters - these are competitors that only impact part of your TAM. Ie a vendor who only goes after SMB. These are the ones you need to pay attention to because if you don't, all of a sudden you will be losing in that market and playing from behind. In that SMB example, plenty of competitors went after Salesforce down market in SMB then slowly crept their way up market (looking at you Hubspot). * Adjacent competitors - these are vendors who overlap part of your product functionality. They won't kill your revenue but will be annoying and slow down deals. They can also reduce the overall value of your solution if they take functionality away. * Frienemies - these are partners who you also compete with. Sometimes you have multiple products and partner on some, and compete on others. These are the trickiest relationships. Don't let down your guard, especially with your internal playbooks. Always make sure you are ready for a competitive throwdown if needed. 

It is a balance. At the core, you need to be bold and describe something new. You are doing something differently than the "old way" and you need to be assertive on why your way is best. You can allude to product they are familiar with as the "old way" to anchor the story. For example: Here is big problem Here is how people were solving it for a long time Here is how the problem evolved or how the old solution was bad Here is my new awesome solution.