Product Marketing Playbook: How to Stand Out from a Sea of Competitors with Aiven
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Amy Krishnamohan, VP Product Marketing @ Aiven Product marketing is a critical function for any high growth SaaS business. Translating customer insight into messaging that resonates with customers is key to any products’ commercial success. Aiven provides fully managed database and streaming services on the cloud. In this session, Aiven’s VP of Product Marketing Amy Krishnamohan will share her experience positioning products in multiple stages of growth from 100-person startups to multi-billion dollar enterprises. Amy will share real world examples, from her time at Aiven, Google, SAP, and elsewhere, on pinpointing clear product differentiators so your product can truly shine in the market.
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Product Marketing Playbook: How to Stand Out from a Sea of Competitors with Aiven
- 1. Product Marketing Playbook: How to Stand Out from a Sea of Competitors? Amy Krishnamohan VP Product Marketing Aiven @AmyKrishnamohan
- 2. Examples of similar products Uber vs Lyft Windows vs Mac MariaDB vs MySQL Snowflake vs Redshift 2
- 4. What does Product Marketing do?
- 5. What does it look like in practice?
- 7. Many products = many competitors
- 8. Focus on a value that your company can cherish
- 9. I am stuck Ask Customers!
- 10. Easy
- 11. Experience
- 13. The Art of War
- 14. Party time
- 16. Key takeaway ● Craft messaging ● Validate messaging ● Execute messaging 16
- 17. Thank you! Amy Krishnamohan VP Product Marketing Aiven @AmyKrishnamohan
Editor's Notes
- As you all know that there are “similar” products in the market. There is nothing wrong with being a fast follower. We have seen many successful fast followers that overtook the market like Google and Facebook. However, when you are a start up and trying to increase your user base or to get funding, simply saying “we are the better XYZ” is not enough.
- When you are struggling to create that pitch, that’s when you need to hire your first PMM.
- So, what does product marketing do? There are 3 major things that PMM delivers 1) Craft core messaging about your product 2) Validate that messaging with internal stakeholders and customers 3) Execute the messaging
- Let’s take an example of Aiven. We will walk you through our journey of crafting our platform messaging
- First crafting the message. When I joined Aiven, my first task was to create a platform message.
- Similar to other SaaS platforms, Aiven also has many products!!! That means we have many competitors. Not just direct competitors that provide the same open source services like Confluent or Elastic but also big cloud vendors. However, are they really competitors? This was the very important point when we craft our messaging.
- When you build a messaging, it is very important to look at the value that your company cherish. Don’t just focus on the product portfolio. What does your founders believe in? What is company’s culture? In our case, it was open source commitment. I am sure some of you have culture like transparency, or being bold or challenge status quo. When you apply those values, your messaging will become clearer. For example, our value commitment to the open source community. So on one hand, we might compete for customers, but our engineers work with them side by side to build better open source technology.
- The most important thing that you need to do as PMM is talking to customers. I’ve been in the database industry for over 20 years. I might know industry trends, competitor landscape, product features and capabilities, BUT why customers choose Aiven has to come from customers. So, I went through all our customer case studies, met customers at the event floor like this one, and also met with sales reps/ customer success teams to understand why customer choose Aiven
- Based on my research, the clear winner was ease of use. You will be able to find this type of trends from your product easily. First place I usually look is G2 review and customer case study. When you read more than 100 reviews, you should be able to find the common topic coming up over and over again.
- But there is a danger to this story. Every SaaS vendor says that they are easy to use. Even Salesforce! Again, we have to differentiate how “ease to use” can be of value to our core ICP. (and also sounds cooler than easy) So I came up with the word Experience.
- Ok, so I am done with the messaging? No.. far from it. You can see Oskari staring at me right there? Now, the fun part begins. The 2nd step of the messaging 1) Craft core messaging about your product 2) Validate that messaging with internal stakeholders and customers 3) Execute the messaging As you know, founders and tech CEOs often have very strong opinions about messaging. Why? Because they built it! I’ve seen lots of PMMs where you made a mistake in this step. They come up with really good messaging, but they feel like this is some sort of competition between the founder and themselves. Attitudes like “You may have built the company, but I am the expert in messaging” That is a HUGE mistake. Founders and executive teams should be your biggest supporters of the messaging. Without them, product marketing cannot deliver the messaging to the rest of orgs.
- The best strategy is any war, is not to have a war. It wastes emotions, resources and time. Same for the messaging. As PMM, you need to drive the consensus around your messaging. Do not start a war. Not with the product team, not with the sales team, NOT with executive teams. For that, you need kick ass messaging but also need emotional intelligence to understand their pain points and concerns.
- If you passed that hard stage of getting an agreement on your messaging, it is party time. Now, sales and marketing team will be your best friend. Find a place, and insert your message literally everywhere. Dashboard, Google ads, Linkedin, Pitch Deck etc. You need to put life into your message. Some PMMs often think that their work is done when they deliver the messaging doc. However, it is important for PMM to be the guardian of the messaging. Marketing team might have other priorities to run or the sales team might be working on other sales plays. If you want your messaging to be the top priority. You need to influence them so that they can put your messaging at the top of the priority list.
- Messaging is evolving. As your product grows, or new competitors emerge from the market, or total market change (remember COVID?) It is important to revisit the messaging, so that you can always stay relevant. It is a job that never ends