This document discusses product marketing strategies. It defines key concepts like markets, customer segments, positioning, and packaging. Positioning is described as where a brand stands in the minds of customers in relation to alternatives. Good positioning attracts the right customer segments and determines pricing leverage and profits. The document advocates identifying an "enemy" to position against and owning the narrative to portray the solution as the future. It provides examples of how companies like Tesla and Indigo have effectively positioned themselves through strong narratives around their value propositions.

1. Product Marketing – A deep-dive
Your holy grail to bigger deals, repositioning competition and getting a seat at the table

2. What is a market?
A market is composed of:
a) Customers
(Yours and Your Competitors’)
b) Evaluators
c) Passives
All motivated by a common intent
i.e. a Job to be Done
Customers
(Yours &
Competitors’)
Evaluators
Passives

3. Segments
Different motivations result in
independent groups i.e. Segments
A segment can be extremely
crowded or open to opportunity.
Crowded
Opportunity

4. Product marketing is
Pricing
Packaging
Messaging
Positioning

5. What is Positioning?
Positioning is where your brand stands
**in the minds of your customers**
**in relation to other brands**
**that they consider as alternatives**

6. Positioning for a segment
Identifying your ideal customer profile
right is the step zero
● Avoid Demographic ICPs
● Design around JTBD
● Imagine a Job Role

7. Why should you take positioning seriously?
If you don’t think about how you’d like to be positioned, your customers – or
even worse, your competitors – will do that job for you.
You may be slotted in a category or as a certain kind of company/product
and may attract the wrong customers, low prices, wrong employees and
eventually a slowing growth prospect.

8. Your Positioning attracts a segment. It
determines your pricing leverage and your
profits

9. Then came Tesla and made itself the messiah
from the future. Their CEO got on stage and
named the enemy, visually.

10. I’m selling a commodity, not Tesla. Is there
hope?
There are no dull products; only dull writers – David Ogilvy
Commodity?
Adjacent
Segments
Soap
Shampoo
Bar
Hand Washing Bathing Regular Anti-Dandruff
Shower Gel

11. American marketing is about staking a claim.
Indians love ahimsa.
In the west, culture is shaped by marketing.
Pick an enemy. Own the narrative. Stand for a new
future. Make it about them.

12. Value Prop Canvas

13. VPC in Action
Customer Jobs
1. I want to teach new sales reps
about the product and market
2. I want a robust and repeatable
onboarding process
3. I want to quickly & effectively
ramp my new sales reps
Customer Pains
1. I don't have time /will /skills to create
and maintain onboarding materials -
best teacher is your repository
2. shadowing takes too long to onboard
my sales reps
3. Finding learning/coachable moments is
like finding a needle in a haystack
Customer Gains
1. Reduce ramp time for new reps
2. Sales team becomes self-learning
and self-correcting
3. Scaling the sales team faster
4. Help achieve Sales Actualization —>
retaining & motivating top talent
Product Features
1. Call Library
2. Game Tapes
3. Battlecards
Pain Reliever
1. All calls in 1 place
2. Feedback repository
3. Reduce onboarding time with better
prepared reps (make your reps battle-
ready sooner)
Gain Creator
1. Learn from peers
2. Improves scalability & repeatability
3. Better conversations —> more
consistent message —> keep
messages up-to-date through a
central repository (more confident)

14. Your narrative is
Your primary statement
The words you use in headlines
Your pricing plan names
Your feature names
The language in every customer interaction

15. Need/Pain
Aware Unaware
Solution
None
Many
Sell the future
(Electric car is the
future.)
Point at the
problem.
Manufacture
consensus
(Dandruff kills dates)
Think Different
(Buy things vs. Earth’s most
customer-centric. Co., Indigo
6E)
X
Framing your narrative

16. Positioning is NOT a statement
It is how you design your entire narrative.

17. The 6E tree - Designing your narrative
6E

18. There is another great example

19. But SaaS is B2B and every category is
crowded. Right?
No. Homegrown Positioning Stories →

20. Vague Positioning vs. Authoritative Positioning
Positioned ourselves as the eCommerce encyclopedia and others as non-Commerce databases

21. Vague Positioning vs. Authoritative Positioning
Positioned ourselves as Revenue Accelerator versus generic Conversation Intelligence player
Also tried to leverage the brand name ‘Wingman’ with a theme around movement

22. Best Largest Accurate Reliable Leader
Authority Directory Source Trustworthy
Who’s Who Comprehensive Purpose-built
The eCommerce & D2C brand
encyclopedia
Beware of weak claims

23. Self Onboarding
Provoke emotions & visuals
DIY Onboarding
Improve your sales
forecast accuracy
Facts, not opinions.
Create a sales process
that teams love
Win. Rinse. Repeat.

24. Messaging - Adjectives to position superiority
Domino example – ZoomInfo vs. PipeCandy, Wingman vs. gong

25. Messaging – Use the words customers relate to

26. Naming your features increases magnetism
& breaks comparison
Autopilot
Bioweapon Defence Mode
Caroake
Sentry mode
Supercharger

27. Once you know it, you will see it everywhere

28. Name your features in your Customer’s words
Battle Cards
Deal Central
Playlists Game Tapes
Call Library
Cue Cards
Sales Pipeline
Team Call Log

29. Your features are part of the Positioning
Narrative
Showcase them with prominence.

30. Messaging – Use the words customers relate to

31. Junk data
Look for the words your prospects and
customers use. Enhance them with metaphors.
Invoke strong emotions
Reliable Data Zero Junk
Not granular Granular Ground Truth
Inaccurate Accurate Holy Grail

32. Repositioning Competition

33. Repositioning Competition

34. Repetition is Queen
Single Attribute Everywhere

35. About Them > About Us

36. Packaging - Trust Rub-off
Financial Times has this
sepia background, bold lines,
subtle colors for data
visualization.
We simply borrowed them all
and added Google Finance’s
best data visualization
elements

37. Pricing - The art of engineering self-
selection

38. Method - What should you tell your
marketing team on Monday
Email, Call logs, Conferences etc.
Words of pain/aspirations, trust
words, Aphorisms/Metaphors

39. Extra Slides

40. PipeCandy – Before & After
Average Annual Contract Value
Jan to Aug Sep to Dec
$6,41
1
$12,85
7
100.51
%
We moved from being a single product company to multi-
product company with different packaging for different user
personas and use-cases)
SQL to Closure Rate 8.0
%
14.8
%
85.00%
We redid our positioning, messaging, design, sales decks and
trained our team on selling the promised land of predictable
demand generation
MQL to SQL Rate 15.4
%
19.4
%
26.00
%
We redid our positioning, messaging, design, sales decks
and trained our team on selling the promised land of
predictable demand generation
Growth %

41. 2021 - 22
Two strategic acquisition offers
One of them from a publicly listed competitor of ours who pulled the plug on our data partnership
fearing competition. Another, a unicorn in the omnichannel eCommerce tech stack space. Our
vision, tech and customer logos attracted them
Two of the three credit bureau partnerships
Deal sizes worth several million dollars over 3 years. Business credit scoring in the US for
Amazon/independent sellers powered with our data. Inbound interest.
Inbound from Amazon
Considered us a credible, better alternative to SimilarWeb and BuiltWith

42. Top lessons learnt
Take a stand. Pick an enemy. Show the promised land.
Execution discipline. Perfection, in time.
Copy > Design. Build trust.
Sell the promised land. Gain trust. Help users sell to buyers.
Price based on the buyer’s sense of value (Right ICPs and Right Packaging) and not
numbers that are familiar to you
Enterprises gravitate towards the highest priced plan. Enable it for them.
Know your ICP and the value prop they buy for. Package & Price for the ICPs

44. Too dull to remember
Too dull to penetrate the walls that customers erect
Too dull to sell. You can’t bore our customers to buy
“It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers
and get them to buy your product. Unless your
advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship
in the night. I doubt if more than one campaign in a
hundred contains a big idea.”

45. We put out bland arguments to our customers because we don’t think about
them deeply. If we do, marketing treats customers as segments and ICPs.
We don’t name our personas and treat them as humans.
We don’t recognize that they have seen other products and heard other pitches.
We don’t make an effort to tell why we are different from all of them
We don’t deliberately position ourselves in their minds
Selling is dating. But we shy away from standing out.

46. Positioning
How are you different from the rest?
Messaging
How does every communication you put out reinforce that difference?
Packaging
How do you convey confident authority and inspire trust?
Product & Pricing
How do you align the product to value prop for customer segments? How do
you capture the value with right pricing?

47. Short copy or Long copy?
Most SaaS categories are crowded. You are not the first one to pitch to the
prospect. So brevity usually does not help. That does not mean you can add
a dozen lines and bore the prospect. Establish why you are better and give
evidences and arguments to support (On-point testimonials, Hard-hitting
case studies, etc.)
1. Concept of market
2. Dominos – Scoreboard example
3. Single attribute concept – Across all key mounting points – Messaging tree. (PipeCandy, Wingman,
Indigo)