Meghan Keaney Anderson

Walk me through a product launch of yours that went really well and one that may not have done as well. What were the differences in retrospect? Now that you've had a chance to review our website and other marketing materials, what's something you think we could be doing better or an opportunity we may have missed that you'd love to dive into in this role?

Competitive posititioning is a core element of product positioning. The primary architecture of brand and product-level positioning comes down to this: * Audience: Who are you primarily building for and marketing to? * Pain/Enemy: What is their biggest pain point or problem? * Solution: How do you address this problem? * Differentiation: What makes your approach to solving this problem different and better? * Urgency: Why is now an important right time to address this issue? Competitive positioning lives under that differentiation bullet and it's the why behind your whole brand. The sharper and more defensible that is the better. You should not tackle specific competitors in the positioning doc, but you can broadly categorize them. For example, "Unlike clunky enterprise platforms, our platform is built for the way people work today."

I try to create competitive intel at a couple of different levels of abstraction: * High-level: Usually in the form of a 2X2 which demonstrates the biggest difference between us and the rest of our field. The point of this is to give sales teams a highly memorable soundbite at a categorical level, e.g. "Unlike point solutions, we are comprehensive." "Unlike clunky enterprise platforms, we are easy to use." * Detailed: For the most frequently encountered competitors (we're talking 2-3 here not 8-10) we do more detailed one-pagers for training and to be pulled up when reps encounter questions from buyers. * Breaking news: As our top competitors or new entrants with high-overlap announce major updates, we send summaries to the sales teams and update positioning.

Here are my go-tos for competitive positioning: * A competitive overview deck that speaks simply and directly to our positioning in the field and our most defensible differences between categories of competitors. * More detailed internal wiki pages for our most frequently seen competitors. * Closed-lost analysis and theme summaries to inform objection documents * Public comparison pages on the website to help buyers decide. These should be fair, objective, and serve as guidance not defense.

I'm a fan of tracking closed-won rates against a top competitor. It's a good long-term trend to tell if your positioning is working and your product is growing stronger in the areas where it had been weak. I don't track that monthly, but rather quarter over quarter or even year over year as a health barometer.

Conflicts become entrenched when what was a simple, solvable problem, starts sweeping up other issues to become a messy amorphous thing. So many times with team members have come to me with an issue that is really a half dozen issues tracing back months. Conflict resolution in those cases really comes down to untangling all the bad feelings back to tangible conflicts. So that's where I start. Doing this requires tabling some parts of the conflict temporarily to work on one thing at a time. Most work conflicts come down to one of a few different sources: Situational causes (two people accidentally given the same job, or with goals that are opposing), Communication causes (someone not respecting how or when the other person wants to be talked with), performace causes (someone not delivering what they said they would). The trick is to unpack which it is and then find a way that everyone can adjust to address it. 

Much like with target audiences, you have to choose a heirarchy of competitors. This should be informed by the alternatives you come across most often in sales calls. This can be tough when alternative companies are getting a lot of media attention, but my rule generally is, until we start seeing a competitor on calls, we don't build a profile. This is partially for focus and partially because without hearing directly from your buyers why they are considering another provider you are putting a lot of weight on your competitors marketing materials. For updates - we do so on a rolling basis as we learn updates and whenever we review and update our positioning.

This is a great question and I'd say the answer varies based on where your company is in its development. When you've first gone international, you may not have the demand or customer-base yet to validate a full hire per region, so you'll want to hire 1-3 international champions, their job is a mix of market and competitive research, project management, and product marketing. They act as an overlay on your existing product marketing team. Pre-launch developing the research for how your positioning will need to be adapted by region, during launch working with demand marketers to execute on the in-region launch elements and post-launch ensuring that the region is adopting the product and the funnel is growing. That is really a stop-gap role, overtime that role should evolve into regional specialists within a solutions marketing team that develop full persona-based marketing strategies for their regions.

 I think there are loads of ways you can differentiate outside of product features. * Features: You offer something valuable that others don't within your product (e.g., automation) * Customer experience: You have invested in UX and UI or for non-tech products the in-store or customer policy experiences deeply so that you provide a more frictionless user and customer experience. * Audience: There are alternative options on the market, but none that were built specifically for your audience (e.g. "designers", "small businesses", "The real estate industry" "diverse body types"). * Community and Brand: Perhaps your product is similar to alternatives, but you've built a better community around your product or a more engaging brand. 

Qualitative data: There is little than qualitative research - customer interviews, listening to sales call recordings, beta group message testing - to understand the trends of what motivates and matters to your target audience. Often times qualitative data takes a back seat to quantitative, but for storytelling this is where the story really comes together in the specific words, observed emotions and examples of real people. A few examples from my past: * In preparing for the launch of Ops Hub - a suite of tools for revops professionals at HubSpot, we listened and read through hours of transcribed interviews with ops professionals on what bothered them and a pattern emerged. Underneath all of the specific features they needed and "jobs to be done" there was a clear sense that this was a cohort of people who have immense responsibility in the organization but often don't have a seat at the table. So many of the conversations came with a sense of feeling unheard and unsung. That became a big ethos in our messaging. * We recently had a peer discussion with a particular group of people responsible for sustainability reporting. Some of the most telling hints on messaging came not from what this group told us directly, but from how the spoke with each other. Where did the group become most passionate or animated when speaking with their peers about the work. AI has made synthesizing customer calls like these and interviews into themes a lot more efficient at scale. In addition though, never underestimate the power of being in the room if you can to hear what matters. Quantitative data: I like using test balloons to try out different messages online and get quick quantifiable data as to their resonance. A few examples: * A linkedin or other social post from someone who has a good portion of your target audience in their followers. Try a few different angles and see which ones attract the best interactions from that audience. * Search or social ads: If you can distill your messaging down to a few lines, a one-off testing series of ads are a good way to get in front of a targeted audience at scale prior to rolling out in a big way. * A/B testing of web copy: This is a classic, but worth mentioning. Which phrasing of your positioning drives action? I hope that's helpful!