Product Marketing Strategy
Value led messaging
Good product marketing needs both a product that solves a problem paying customers are craving, and the right positioning and messaging so that it resonates and connects with its audience.
It was around year three that our sales growth really took off. I put that down to a shift in the way we presented ourselves in the market, moving away from promoting the features we provided. Creating the right product marketing messaging allowed an entirely different narrative with our prospects than before. It hinged on understanding the situation of our ideal customer.
Value led messaging meant building a story for them about moving from the status quo into the future. One that created a narrative starting with the pain felt today, the limiting beliefs as to why the problem had not been solved already, through to the vision of a brighter future and the value we would deliver. This narrative was to become essential to make our business grow much more over the next five years.
These value-based product stories were explained in two steps, like a journey in a story, with the “before” scenario including the current impact to the business and individual of their identified pain, and then the “after” scenario describing the future business gains from it. The after scenario showed how our capabilities would give them great results, brought to life by evidencing real customer testimonials and the results they achieved.
Having a strong consistent message, that we repeated, again and again led to our target market knowing where we could take them.
Marketing the future
It wasn’t long after we started that our early customers began asking us about the direction of our product. They liked what they saw but wondered what we were going to do next. They had natural curiosity in something new that could change the way they worked. Often, they’d seen mature software companies telling them what the future looked like, and as we grew, we were asked this more and more.
However, my team and I were much more interested in explaining what we did and our current value, so we were a little dismissive of these vague questions about our ambitions. That changed when a major deal I was working on went wrong. We’d succeeded in showing the superior capability versus the competition to a major prospect when the customer gave me the following feedback,
“We think the other vendor is taking their software in a direction that meets our needs better. They have an exciting program of releases over the next three years, and that’s why we are proceeding with them.”
I spent weeks trying to reopen the discussion and prove we had ambition too, but it was too late. That one big deal was worth a year of other opportunities in our pipeline!
Besides what customers were going to buy today, we needed to take time to educate them about where our business was going. This was the expensive lesson I learned that day. Growing markets are starved of complete products to choose from, and no SaaS vendor ever has a complete offering. I learned that we had to educate our customers on the “roadmap” for our product, and it needed to explain what we dreamed of achieving and what we’d seen and expected to change in their marketplace that would be shaping our future product investments and expansion.
So, we started to be clearer about the journey our product might go on. We explained our aims and future commitments to our prospects in a way that encouraged them to partner with us on an ongoing basis. We learned how to bring people along on a journey, while building trust and mutual interest in our ideas through our roadmap.
Competitive Dynamics
As we grew and deal sizes got bigger, it became clear that roadmaps were being used more assertively than this by our competitors. They were doing more than promoting their future vision. They were used by many software companies not only to round out their product message and story but also to appear more competitive in areas they lacked strength compared to us. They used discussions about their future aims to neutralise our product advantages in a fast-moving landscape.
In a couple of ways this roadmap strategy seemed unscrupulous, unlikely to build long term trust with customers, and to distort sales processes and discussions. This happened when competitors used unfounded statements to overcome objections to their incomplete products and gaps. For example, they might say, “This is something our R&D team is planning to do, and it’s likely to be available next year,” so that the customer would make a buying decision.
Not surprisingly, a year later, their product failed to address the gap.
There are many examples of using the roadmap to create unfounded fear, uncertainty, and disruption (FUD) in the mind of the buyer over competitive solutions. Competitors have said:
“Our product conforms to such and such a standard, which others do not, which means their product just won’t work for you,” even if they have no knowledge of your adherence to a standard or whether that standard is important to success.
Where we lost deals over the years, from looking at the data and knowing each competitor, I believed that as many as one third of those prospects did not select us because these tactics were deployed against us. What I’ve describe in this section is sadly common, and if a new business is not experiencing it yet it is probably because they are smaller and below a competitor’s radar.
In response, we designed a systematic response that was successful at addressing phoney discussions.
We began working hard to get into opportunities earlier in the buying cycle, earn the right to more senior relationships, be transparent and build trust around what we provided and what we did not, and stay above what another author called the “bare knuckle fist fight” of selling enterprise software. We concentrated on continually pointing to proven customer results elsewhere and proactively busting the myths by using leading questions in pre-sales that brought the topic around to specific areas of common competitor fear FUD.
Final Thoughts:
In this note, I delve into the evolution of our product marketing strategy at CloudSense, emphasising the shift from feature-focused messaging to value-led narratives and the importance of articulating a clear product roadmap to engage customers effectively.
Key Takeaways:
Embrace Value-Led Messaging: Transition from highlighting product features to crafting narratives that address the current pains of your ideal customers, guiding them from their present challenges to a future where your solution delivers tangible value.
Structure Compelling Product Stories: Develop "before" and "after" scenarios that vividly depict the transformation your product enables, supported by real customer testimonials and measurable results.
Maintain Consistent Messaging: Reinforce your value proposition through repetition, ensuring your target market clearly understands the benefits and future direction your product offers.
Articulate a Clear Product Roadmap: Share your product's future vision and development plans with prospects, demonstrating your commitment to evolving in ways that meet their emerging needs and fostering long-term partnerships.
Understand Competitive Dynamics: Recognize that competitors may use their product roadmaps to neutralize your current advantages; proactively communicate your future plans to maintain a competitive edge.
By adopting value-led messaging and transparently sharing your product's future direction, you can build stronger connections with customers, differentiate from competitors, and drive sustained growth.