Molly Friederich

We have been experimenting with a monthly recorded demo presented as a webinar. Our teams can then share out that latest recording with customers and they're never more than a month out from the latest product greatness. By nature of being a webinar, it saves us from the curse of perfection—we record it live, it does a great job of conveying the value, and we don't obsess over every phrasing. 

Storytelling provides helpful guardrails to against falling into the trap of rattling off features. In telling a story, you're thinking about the hero (your target persona), the pain they're facing or mountain they need to overcome (and why), and how your solution will help them. As you write content, think about the emotional drivers of your target persona that lie beneath the surface of the tactical; for instance, what happens if they do a given task well? How are they personally rewarded (time saved, outcome achieved, etc.)? In the end, storytelling is a way to achieve more resonant, value-based messaging that resonates the human decision makers you're writing for. 

I've used a few different panel providers for large-scale segmentation studies, messaging feedback, and more. I won't call them out by name here, but I'll suggest things to look for as you evaluate options: 1. How well can they recruit against your unique market, and how will they make sure to meet their targets? What will it cost to meet your goals? 2. When responses come back, how do they filter out bad responses, and what visilibity will you have to the data coming in (before you're out of field). 3. What support do they offer for survey design to make sure you get the most value from their breadth of experience? In terms of insights guiding the product roadmap for PMs, I've found segmentation studies to be an incredibly powerful tool to align the organization on strategy. It sizes the market, identifies what personas to prioritize, provides rationale for what pain points to solve for first, and creates a lock-step experience from product development to messaging and launch planning to sales enablement. For smaller-scale, more acute decisions, working with PMs to identify specific questions they need to answer at a regular cadence (say, top questions for a given program increment) to drive product strategy is also a great way to bring value to the table. 

First clarify your goals in terms of "getting info" for yourself so you can better frame for your PMs. For example, are you looking to be pulled into early validation of problem areas? Convey the value this provides them, such as allowing you to create more resonant messaging thanks to early and direct exposure. Do you want detail on committed ships? Show them the initial scaffolding of your GTM plan and gaps you need to fill in. After taking time to clarify your needs, and after getting to know your PM partners and their charters, understand their existing cadences for planning and development. As much as possible, be proactive and consume info from existing forums and meetings, they'll appreciate you doing your homework! 

Authenticity is key. Start by gathering verbatims from your existing users that capture why they chose your product, and double down on the impact that it has made for them. Critically, positioning is about customer value, so resist the trap of feature comparisons, especially in mature markets where features can translate to bloat. 

This is a passion area for me! I work to carve out time for learning and exposure. It's always tough when you have pressing timelines for deliverables, but that work will be far more efficient and strategic when you invest in time for the fundamentals. Here are a few things I invest in doing: Know the team. Be of value to them. * Go where your sales team is, be a fly on the wall in the places they discuss their goals and strategies (live or async). Have Gong? Download the app. It's a treasure trove. * Build off of your familiarity from these team settings to reach out to a diverse sampling of your Sales teammates. Ask them for 30 minutes 1:1 to talk through a deal they're working, and brainstorm how you can help support them. Listen for where they've discovered great strategies and where they're strugling. Know the customer. Be present with them. * Create channels for yourself and your team to get regular insight to your prospects and customers. The more direct, the better. * Set up a win-loss program (start by doing a call or two informally!) to get feedback from prospects about their path to purchase, goals, etc while it's fress. Capture this information, make it visible internally, and take action. You have 2 periphery jobs here: 1) build a relationship with the champions among new customers to plant customer story seeds and 2) be a markedly positive "last touch" among lost deals to keep doors open for the future. * Identify and lurk among the forums, medium digests, etc. where your audience lives. Steep yourself in what they're soaking up. Get inspired. 

Congrats, scrappy startup phase is exciting, lots of opportunity to make a big impact! I suggest starting by getting a baseline understanding of their sales cycle today. What has their approach been? Where are they seeing success, and where are they bottlenecked? Your focus should be different if they're not able to get in the door (help them with ICP insights and positioning for outbound targeting!) vs. struggle to get from first call to pitch (work on discovery questions!). As you go through the sales cycle with the team, "feed two birds with one scone" by mining for customer stories among the wins they've landed. Package those up into callouts for outbound emails! Given you asked about process, I'd focus on a regular cadence of connection between you and the sales team to build a relationship and shared understanding of priorities in an ongoing manner. Use that time to learn what the latest experiments have been, and how you can build on what they're seeing works. 

Love what you have already! Do you have budget for qual research incentives? This is a huge gift if you can offer $100 to target personas to provide feedback on messaging, or to prospects for win/loss interviews, etc. Also consider a recruiting tool like Respondent.io if you are running out of low-hanging fruit from networking / site pop-ups / LinkedIn recruiting.

If the playbooks are insightful and get used... I'm not frustrated! ;) Creating sales playbooks is frustrating when we're in a loop of perfection over progress. Oftentimes we forget how powerful a small amount of clear, digestible insight can be over an incredibly robust, in-depth asset. I picked up a mantra from a consultant that I love: "consumable over comprehensive." Adding depth over time is both more sustainable for you as a PMM and more digestible and actionable for your stakeholders. Get the most important concepts landed, then expand.

Cross-posting and building on a similar answer! Borrowing from April Dunford, positioning is "context setting for prospects." Once you've established your positioning (which takes time, especially if you're pre-product market fit!), you need to be consistent over a relatively long timeframe, think 3+ years. Positioning answers the value you deliver to your ideal customer, through what differentiated capabilities, and in contrast to what competitors within a particular category. Messaging operates on a nearer term horizon, and is how you convey your value (whether as a holistic brand or as a product line) to the market; it's the storytelling strategy. Any given campaign or piece of content needs to be laser-focused on a single persona, main point, and genuine proof points or reasons to believe the main point. To sum up, core product or platform positioning (context setting) is going to be a long-term true-north that informs your messaging (storytelling) for feature launches; if the feature launch messaging isn't rooted in your positioning, it'll undermine the market's ability to understand where you fit in their context. That's not to say you can't be creative with feature launch messaging, of course—often with launch messaging you're able to be more specific/nuanced in terms of your target persona, their jobs to be done, and the competitive alternatives they have to choose from. Just consider closely if you find your messaging feels significantly disjointed from your positioning.