← Positioning with April Dunford
Positioning with April Dunford
From Michelin Stars to Marketing Stars: Product Marketing Lessons from Tamara Grominsky
00:37:17
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the Positioning show, where we discuss topics related to the practical application of positioning for marketing, sales, and product teams. I'm April Dunford, a consultant, author, and the world's leading expert on positioning for B2B technology companies. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another edition of the Positioning show with me, April Dunford. How are you doing? So glad you're here. So good to see you. Most of you know that I started my career in product marketing, and even today, I still kind of think of myself as a product marketer. As a result, I get asked a lot about product marketing. I get asked a lot, like, how do I hire a good product marketer? How should we measure product marketing? What are the key skills that a product marketer should have? And I thought it would be really great to bring somebody on the show who's an expert on all that stuff that we could have a good conversation about all things product marketing. So I'm really excited to have Tamara Graminski come on the show. Uh, she's a very, very experienced product marketer. She's been a product marketing executive several times. She was recently the vice president of product marketing at Kajabi. She was also the vice president of product marketing at Unbounce, where later she got promoted to be the chief strategy officer. Today, she's a consultant and an advisor, but she also runs a really great community for product marketers. So I thought she would be a perfect person to bring on to have this conversation. I feel really lucky to have her on. Like, in fact, we recorded this podcast once, and then we had an issue with the audio and I had to bring her back and record it again. And she was nice enough to do this show twice, even though you're going to only hear the result of it once. But we had such a great conversation. It was really fun. And she's just a great person, too. So I think you folks are really going to like this one. Let's get right into it. Hey. So here we are. Hey, how are you? So good to have you on the podcast.
- [01:54]
B
I feel absolutely honored to be here. This is a pinch me moment, so thanks for having me.
- [01:59]
A
Oh, my gosh. Like, and it's. Let me tell you, it's been a journey to get here. Like, Like, I almost said, hey, thanks for coming on the podcast again because we recorded this once and we had a technical issue and now we're recording it again. But it's good. I think the second time's the charm here.
- [02:15]
B
We have even more things to talk about now, so we got more things.
- [02:18]
A
To Talk about it's going to be way better. Oh my gosh. So one of the reasons I was so excited to have you on the podcast is, you know, positioning is kind of a product marketing thing. And so people ask me a lot of questions about product marketing. And I started my career in product marketing. You know, I actually consider myself a product marketer. Like, if you had to ask me, like, you know, what kind of marketer am I? I'd say I'm a product marketer. But, you know, I think you're way more of a product marketing expert than I am, to be honest. And so what I would like to have, I'd like to have a bit of a conversation about product marketing stuff with you because I think my listeners would think that's fun and they're always asking me questions and maybe I'll just ask them to you and then just point them at this, at this episode and say, listen to Tamara. She's got way better things to say about product marketing than I do. So do you have a definition for product marketing? Like, what do you think the key and like, sort of related to that is, you know, what do you think the key responsibilities of a good product marketer are?
- [03:17]
B
Yeah, I've played with this concept a lot over the years and I remember someone on my team a couple years ago gave me a definition that I've basically used ever since, which is product marketing is the voice of the product to the market and the voice of the market back to the product. And it's kind of that simple, but also way more complex because a thousand things lie under that. But I just love that definition because I was like, yeah, that's what we do. It is a two way street. We need to be kind of traffic controlling, both sides of the street. And I think what the responsibilities are and like, what that actually means at any given moment of time is going to depend on a ton of different factors, like the size of the company, the, the growth stage of the company, the go to market motion of the company. And so that's where I've kind of anchored on this being a definition that I think is all encompassing and then digging deeper into what it means for you has to be a customized conversation. There isn't one. This is exactly what everyone does. And here's one job description we can all use.
- [04:19]
A
Yeah, I think I, I believe that too. Like, and I, I do think it really changes depending on the maturity of the company. Like, a lot of early stage companies don't have a separate product marketing function, but they're doing product marketing. Totally have a person with that title. Are there a handful of things that you think product marketing should always be doing? Like if that, like if that role exists, like, is there a handful of things they're always doing?
- [04:46]
B
Yeah, I think that they should always be the expert on the customer, whatever that means to you. And so it's understanding, like who is our best customer right now? Who are the customers we should be thinking about next and then getting a deep understanding of those customers, what motivates them, what drives them to purchase who they are. So that's one thing. The next thing would be of expert on the market. So what market are you playing in? Who else is playing in that market? How do you stand out? What are your competencies? Or where are you falling behind? And then an expert in the product as well. I always say to be an effective product marketer, you need to know the product better than your product manager does. And so that's something to aspire to. And so I think all three of those things are true regardless of go to market motion. And then I guess I would add messaging and positioning too. But I think that's a little bit more complex because there's so many players in that. And I think if you do that, those first three things, well, messaging and positioning is an outcome of that as opposed to an input.
- [05:50]
A
Like I think companies that have product marketing as a separate function do a lot better job on positioning. You still can't, like people have this idea, well, we'll hire this senior product marketer and they'll just do positioning. And I don't believe in that because I think you need input from other parts of the organization. Like you can never just do that thing on your own. Like if only it was that easy and it never is. Do you think there's things that are different in product marketing? You know, if, if there's different go to market motions. Like I get asked a lot about how does product marketing work? If it's product like growth versus more of a sales LED thing? Like do you, do you think about that? Do you think it matters?
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B
I think a lot about that because my career actually started in more, I would call a hybrid. And then I very quickly decided I actually probably skew more to the product side of product marketing. And so I ended up building a career in PLG product marketing. I would say so most of the companies I've worked for have a self serve go to market motion. It doesn't mean we don't have a sales team, but that's not our primary way that we go to market. But I've spoken to so many product marketers over the years and so I've really thought about all the different versions of this. I think there's a few key ones. The first one is if you're in sales led go to market, then sales enablement is going to be a thing that you need to deal with. Right. So thinking about.
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A
A big thing.
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B
Yeah, yeah. And like the buying journey is going to be completely different. You're going to have to, I don't want to say be more knowledgeable, but you're going to have to map out every stage of the buying journey, make sure you have the right message. You're equipping the sales team or whoever is kind of owning that part of the buying journey. You're basically embedded with sales in many ways versus in more plg. You're really more embedded with the product team. Right. And so you're still mapping the buying journey, you're still mapping the messages, but you're communicating the messages in a different way. So you're going to need to be much more proficient with tools like AppCues or Pendo. You're probably going to spend more time on the website journey or the onboarding journey of your customer. And it like I generally find that those folks are more embedded in the product teams. So those are the main differences.
- [08:06]
A
Yeah, for sure, for sure. And then like just to make it extra spicy, then you've got all these situations where you've got, you know, a big product like growth motion and then you've got this sales thing that happens in over top at the enterprise level and then you're actually doing both. Great.
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B
Exactly. And that's hard. And that's where you really do need to start having a scaling product marketing team because it's almost impossible for one person to be good at all of those things. Things. Right.
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A
How could you?
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B
You can't. And it's different skill sets as well. Like if you asked me to go build a sales enablement strategy right now, like I would know where to start but I wouldn't do an exceptional job. And like I'm honest about that. But if you ask me to go build a plg go to market strategy, like I would nail it.
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A
Yeah. That's awesome. Okay, so what are the most common questions I get? I don't know if you have a good answer for this or not, but I'm going to ask it anyways because people ask me all the time. So everybody is trying to hire A product marketer. And so people come to me, they're like, you're a product marketer. How do we hire a good product marketer? Just tell me the secret. Where do I go? How do I find them? How do I recognize whether I've got one or not? Got any tips? As someone who's ran a product marketing team and had to do this, yeah.
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B
I would say probably 75% of all of my hiring has always been through my network. So I would say tap into someone who, who has a good network. That's the first step.
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A
That's why they're calling me, unfortunately.
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B
Exactly. And then you send them my way. April, I got them. But no, actually I think the first step to hiring a good product marketer is some self reflection. Because I see the number one place where people go wrong is they don't know what they're looking for. They just think I need a product marketer. And so I always say, tell me not just a job description because you're going to start to like Google things or have AI put it together, but list out for me the problems that you want this product marketer to work on and then I'll tell you the shape of PMM that you need. Because if you need a product marketer who's going to help you understand your best customers, understand why they buy drive customer behavior, that's going to be a completely different profile of a PMM than someone who's going to help you win against competitors and enable sales teams, for example, starting with the problems you want to solve and then starting to break out, what competencies does that person need in order to solve those problems and then kind of backing your way out that way. That's gonna help you understand the level of PMM you need, the style of PMM you need, and then you're ready to go into your network. And I think, I mean the hiring market's pretty interesting right now. So I think even doing a LinkedIn post and sharing exactly what you're looking for, that's gonna get people helping you on your search. But then send that JD over to some folks who are product marketers, you know, who've been leaders or have a pretty good network and you're going to get some pretty good candidates, I think.
- [10:57]
A
Yeah, yeah. And it comes back to that thing you were saying before. Like, you know, like, like the kind of product marketer that's working at these more sales LED companies are going to look very different from these product marketers that have been really looking at trying to optimize PLG stuff. Like, that's just such a different skill set. It's the same thing with marketing in general. Like, it's no different than marketing in general. Like, you know, the marketers come in all different flavors. And I think founders in particular are often disappointed to hear that. I think so, and I don't know why.
- [11:29]
B
No, it's true. And the other thing that I hear a lot is so go to market motion, obviously important, but also size of business. So I hear a lot from folks who are founders or, you know, senior execs at, let's say, a series A or even maybe a seed stage. And they're saying, I want to have a product marketer from Apple or from Facebook or whatever it might be. And it's like, the reality is that's not going to be good for your business most of the time. That's a completely different style of product marketing than a startup product marketer. So also, being realistic about who can do the job and what skills do I actually need is going to help set you up for success. So you might be able to hire that person who used to work at Apple, but they might not be successful in the first few months. And so it's really. You don't just want the cachet of a big brand on the resume. You want someone who actually has done the job, like, show me what you did. You want someone who has the reps in and they can come and do it for you too.
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A
Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, it's funny too, because the founders will come and they have this idea that the big company people know this different thing. And it's true, they do know a different thing. But they're used to having so much support.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Like, you know, these great teams all around them doing all the little bitty things, you know, and then you come to a smaller company and that support structure just doesn't exist. And some of these big company folks don't make the transition very well at all. Others do. Like, the thing is, like, some folks come in and they just take to it like a duck and water. But other folks come in and they're like, why is everything so hard? It shouldn't be this hard.
- [13:01]
B
Or vice versa, too. It's like I always tell product marketers, I know this wasn't your question, but I always tell product marketers, pretty early on in your career, I think you need to make a decision about the scale of business you want to be at. Because if you've worked in startups for 10 years, it's going to be pretty hard for you to go get a job at Meta tomorrow because the same thing applies, you know, a different skill set than what they're looking for. And so it's not that one is better than the other, it's just that what your competencies are and what your strengths are going to be completely different. And it is. Some of it is transferable, but a lot of it is going to be challenging.
- [13:34]
A
Yeah. Yeah. You know, I did a lot of flipping back and forth between little companies and big companies because the little companies I was working with kept getting acquired. And so it wasn't my choice. I was like. I was like, okay, you're an IBM now. All right, guess I'm gonna have to deal with that. But. But it was good because, you know, you could really see the contrast between the two. And what I liked about, you know, the big company, I found very frustrating working there. But what I liked about the big company is you could see what the perfect thing looked like. You know, if you had all the money and all the resources and all the time, like, this is what perfect would look like. And then often, you know, in the smaller company, we were cutting corners. We didn't even know we were cutting. Yeah, you go back to the small company and be like, ah, I actually see what we're trying to do here and I know what this would look like if it's perfect. So let's just start up ify this little thing, but do it properly. Like, yeah, it was. I found it really good in the early part of my career to go back and forth, but then at one point I was just like, oh, me and big companies, man. Not really my thing. But anyway, I want to switch gears a little bit because we were talking before we hit record on this about product launches.
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B
Yes.
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A
And. And you were talking about how, you know, a you guys will launch a new podcast talking about product launches. So I'd like you to talk about that, but I also want to hear, like, product launches, man. Let's talk about it. What's so hard about product launches? What do you want to talk about? Product launches?
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B
Yeah. I mean, I think product launches are hard. There's. There's so much pressure on the idea of a product launch and artificial pressure. I think in some ways I'm going.
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A
To say that, like, why is it. Why is there so much pressure? Like, why is that?
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B
Yeah, does it come from the top?
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A
Is it to founders giving us pressure? Like, where's this pressure coming from?
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B
Definitely.
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A
I think it's like the New thing, you're rolling it out and you don't want to mess it up.
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B
I think so. But I think what most people get wrong is it's not how you launch the product that really makes the difference. It's how involved you were ahead of the launch. Right. And so for me, launch is not a moment in time. It's not a day. And this was really where the whole spirit of our show came from. So Jason, Andy, and I, we have this show, it's called Ready for Launch. And what happened was the three of us are friends, and we would just be hanging out and talking about product launches like we're kind of nerds. And we would. We would be studying launches and just say, wow, I love what they did there, or, wow, did you see? They used that tactic or that technique that seemed really effective. And we actually started before the podcast. We launched a course because we were like, people don't know how to do product launches. People are planning for a campaign moment in time, but they're not getting the input. So they're not understanding the market, they're not understanding who their customer is. They're not pricing it. And all of those components are going to make or break the launch. Right? And so we started a course, and then the course quickly evolved into the podcast, where on the show, we actually break down three product launches per episode, all with a theme. So we've been studying product launches for over a year now. And, yeah, I've become more compelled than ever that you do not need to be a big brand to nail launches. You do not need to be a big. Like, have a large budget to nail a product launch, but you do need to be intentional about who that launch is for. And I have a theory that who your product is for is not necessarily who your launch campaign should be for.
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A
That's so interesting. So talk about that. How are they different? Why are they different?
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B
Okay, so when you're building a product, oftentimes you're building it for a large audience, right? It could be that your whole customer base might use the product, or maybe several segments within your customer base might use the product. But that doesn't mean that they're all going to need it immediately or that that might be the first product they would buy from you, for example. So a campaign, if we just think about what a marketing campaign is, a marketing campaign is a targeted advertisement, right? Whether you're actually using paid ads or not, it's a targeted campaign. Like a movie trailer is not designed for anyone on earth who could watch A movie. It's designed for the person who they think is going to go buy the movie tickets to go get the movie. And so I think of the product launch campaign as the same way, like, who is this trailer for? If I try to speak to everyone, no one's going to like it. And so for me, one of the most important parts is really identifying who will be, you know, the early adopters of this product and who are we actually building this for. And so sometimes this creates a bit of friction between the product marketer and the product manager. Because the product manager wants.
- [18:06]
A
Bet it does.
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B
Exactly. Because the product manager wants as many people as possible to use it. Right. Which we do, too. But we know that if we get the right customers to use it first, that's going to lead to positive customer advocacy, testimonials, word of mouth. We're going to be able to create sharper copy, sharper messaging, all the things that you already know. Right. We're going to know where to insert it in the buying flow. We're not going to have sales reps pitch it to everyone because that's going to be a waste of time and it might be a missed opportunity to pitch something else. And so I spend a lot of time, and in the course, I teach folks on how to really identify who their best customer segment is. And once you understand who that is for launch, what is the metric you're actually trying to move the needle on? So I'll give you an example of that. So you might find that there's a customer segment and you're like, actually, this segment is the best segment for launch. Not to say the rest of the customers won't use it.
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A
But this is the early adopters by right at launch.
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B
Okay, yeah, they have the strongest pain right now that we can solve immediately. Or maybe we're launching a product and even though we're launching it into general availability, we still know there's work to be done. And so we know we can service this customer right now and they'll be happy. And the other customers, we don't want to waste that opportunity. We're going to wait a little bit better. It doesn't mean we're not going to let them use it. We're just not going to target all of our efforts there. So now once you understand, you can start to understand, well, what's the actual opportunity with this customer segment? Like, for example, are we losing customers because we don't have this product feature? If so, really, the focus of launch is yes, to get them to Adopt, but it's actually to improve retention and decrease Churn. So that's a completely different campaign than say, oh, wow, with this customer segment, we're actually losing deals top of funnel. And so we think with this feature we're going to be able to capture more market share, we're going to be able to increase our win rate. Again, a completely different launch campaign. The only way that we could decide that is if we know who that customer is. And what's the business metric we're trying to move the needle on for that customer. Not just adoption, but the actual business metric.
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A
Oh yeah, I love this. And so you got an example. You're saying you guys are looking at launch examples. Give us an example of somebody you think is doing a great job on this stuff.
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B
Yeah, so. Oh, gosh. Of launches in general or of a segmented kind of campaign?
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A
I don't know. Launches in general. Like who's doing a good launch? Who should we be looking at that did a good launch?
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B
Tons of people. So I'll say one of my favorites was a company, it's actually a Canadian company, so it's called the Leap. It's actually owned by Thinkific, which is kind of their parent company. And so the Leap, the Thinkific is a platform for creators. You can create courses, things like that. The Leap is Thinkific.
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A
We love you guys.
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B
Exactly. The Leap is basically a free tool for kind of earlier stage creators. But here's what I loved about it and I covered this on one of our early podcast episodes. What they did is they thought ahead. So they started by building the Leap as a media company. And so we know that when you launch a product, if you launch a product and you don't already have activated channels, like it's going to fall flat. And so they built their audience and their channels before they were ready to build the product. So they started a media company. It was essentially like a newsletter and some content on social, all for creators. And so they weren't talking about any product. People didn't even know it was connected to thinkific. Then what they do is they start to engage with their readers. Right. People love the content. I think they, I forget about. Dozens of thousands of people are reading their content. So they're starting to understand what are the challenges that these customers or these readers are experiencing. What's top of mind for them? What are the opportunities for us to fill and solve those problems. They decide on a problem that they think they can solve, which is kind of like this early start problem, like all of the Tools that are out there today are all super expensive and require a heavy investment. What if you could get started in like 30 minutes and with a mobile first format, which is kind of a more modern take on how some creator platforms exist. So then they start building kind of quietly and once they have their beta ready, they're able to launch to this massive audience that they've already built. And they had crazy results. They got like over 10,000 users within three months after launch, which was incredible. So I think they did an awesome job. That was one of my favorite launches probably that we've covered on the show so far.
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A
You know, it's interesting. It sounds a lot like the old Mint Playbook. Do you remember the. Like, you got to be older. No, I don't know. You got to be old. So. So when Mint first launched, they did exactly the same Playbook. Exactly the same Playbook. They had a lot. They had a blog, it was super popular. They had this huge community of people. You know, they were taking inspiration from what was going on in the community. But then they were all, you know, they were also building their own thing and seeding the fact that they're building their own thing. So by the time they actually launched this thing, it was like hugely successful, but they had this like built in audience already developed. I love that Playbook.
- [23:13]
B
Yeah, another launch we talk about. So we don't just talk about software launches. I know that's mostly your audience, but I'll throw another fun launch in because again, I think one of the things I've learned is by studying launches of all types, not just B2B, not just software, you can really get inspiration. It doesn't mean it's replicable, but you get inspiration. So one of them was the Michelin Guide. So the Michelin Guide is owned by the Michelin Tire company, which many people don't know. And the story behind that was they needed to find a way to sell tires. And so they were trying to understand, like, how could we get people to use more tires? Well, we need them to drive more often. And so they literally created a guide that would tell you where to drive to. And the whole concept behind the stars originally was if it was like one star, you could take a short drive to get there. If it was two stars, you could go off the beaten path. And if it was three stars, you should like plan a trip just to go there. And so again, it has a really interesting. When you think about, like, what business problems are we trying to solve with this product? And some pretty creative ways of launching.
- [24:25]
A
So interesting. And so coming back to this idea of segmentation, like who the launch is for, how should people be thinking about segmentation? Because I find segmentation is so misunderstood. I feel like segmentation is one of these things that a lot of what people know about marketing in general is based on consumer marketing and consumer marketing. I believe that the way you do segmentation is a lot. It's different from how we end up doing it in B2B. But I'm curious, you know, what do you think about segmentation? Like, how do we know we got the right segmentation? Like how do we do it?
- [25:11]
B
Yeah, I think it depends on if we're a brand new startup and we have absolutely no data versus if we are at least, you know, have a handful of customers. So I'm going to assume we have a handful of customers or we have many customers, which most businesses do that we talk to. And I think one of the mistakes that I often see people make is they look outward first. They say, wow, that's a large market. I want to own a piece of that market. But who you want to go after is not always who you're actually attracting or who you may be a good fit for. And I find this to be particularly true with founders or people who've worked at a company for a while. They get a bit stuck in this vision that they had originally. Right. So what I love to do is I love to build a data set and I want to look internally before I look externally. So I want to say who are the customers that we have today, who's coming to us, who's staying with us and who's actually using the product, which sometimes people forget as well. So I build the data set of all the data you have. If it's a subscription business, let's assume for this case it's like start date, how long they've been with you, what the MRR is, the ltv. Then I'll add on product usage. So what products are they using or features, how deep are they using those features? And then any like firmographic or demographic information you have as well. So maybe vertical company size, company revenue, it really depends on your business. But what I want to look at is I want to look at any customer you've ever touched. So whether they were a prospect or whether they've churned, they all go into the same data set because that's going to give you a good sign of, well, our value proposition is appealing to this segment, but we're actually not meeting their needs right now, because we're not closing the deals or they're churning. And what I'm looking for is your best customer right now with the state that your product is in. And usually this is a customer that you have a lot of or at least a meaningful amount of. It's a customer that is basically good for business, meaning they have an affordable customer acquisition cost. They are generally sticking around, and then they're using your product. They're not just paying and forgetting about you. And typically, what happens is, out of this process, I'll have maybe two or three good segments that emerge. And that's when I look externally and I say, okay, could the market for this segment actually sustain my growth ambitions? Because what I have seen before is we find a really lucrative segment, but actually, we're already 50% penetrated of the market. And because the market's so small. So what I'm looking for is what's the size of the market, what percent of that market hasn't been captured yet, and how fast is the market growing? And then you can start to make some strategic decisions. And I'd say one of the biggest pushbacks I get is, well, you know, but we're building for someone else, or we have this bigger vision. And so I always use the analogy of, like, the game of Risk. And so in the game of risk, obviously, we want world domination. But if you've played and won the game of risk, you know that, like, you're not going to go after random different countries across the board. The best players know that you have to start by owning all of Australia, because when you own Australia, you get more play. No, it's true. It's true. April, listen to me. Stick with me, okay? So when you own Australia, everybody in.
- [28:31]
A
Australia listening to this is like, wait a minute.
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B
This is the board game of Risk, okay? So when you own Australia, you get the bonus for owning a continent, and it's the smallest, easiest continent to own. So think of your target segment in this example as Australia.
- [28:46]
A
That's exactly it.
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B
Exactly. And then you're gonna go out to the next adjacent territory, and then the next. I'm not gonna go from Australia to North America. Right. And so that's basically the exercise to be done here. But this is great.
- [29:02]
A
Geoffrey Moore bowling pin strategy. Like, the amount of times I talk about this recently, like, it's like, you know, Jeffrey Morris's old guy in his book has been around forever, and, you know, nobody's. Nobody remembers because nobody's read Crossing the chasm in, like, 10 years or something. But I'm always drawing the bowling pins on the whiteboard and saying we gotta knock over the first pin and then we get to the two adjacent and then we get to the ones behind that and eventually we get to strike.
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B
Yeah, exactly.
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A
And B2B. It's critical. It's critical, like totally. Because you can't just go for the great big market. You'll never build enough traction in any one piece of it to make it meaningful.
- [29:41]
B
Yeah. And certainly not in today's market where we have lower, smaller budgets than ever before. Fewer resources. I think the companies that are doing well are the companies that can apply radical focus. And I mean, at the end of the day, that is what the product marketer's role is. It's to help them focus on the right customer segment, build the right message and build the right go to market strategy.
- [30:04]
A
Yeah. So the other thing that you know that goes with segmentation, whenever I'm talking about segmentation is Personas. And so I think people waste a lot of time on Personas. And I know we had this conversation before, but what do you think, what do you, what do you think about. How do you think people get Personas wrong? Like, what do you think people get wrong about Personas?
- [30:28]
B
Yeah, I really don't like Personas. I feel like I have an allergic reaction to them. And what I'll say is I think it's the fictional element of it that I don't like. It's just like, how could this fake person be so applicable? And then people become overly fixated on it. So here's what I do like about Personas. I believe that we need to all be speaking the same language internally. And so we need shared language. We need a shared point, like frame of reference. But I think the Persona gets it wrong. And so what I actually build, and I recommend that the companies I work at build or my clients build, are segment profiles is basically what I call them.
- [31:07]
A
Sure.
- [31:08]
B
And they're. They're not fictional at all. They're basically like quantitative versions of the Persona. So I want to know, okay, here's the segment, here's how we're going to find the segment. Like, here's the targeting criteria. It has to actually be actionable. Like if I was going to go out and like buy some ads for them or I'm gonna go choose the events that they're at, like, here's how I know. Right. Exactly. Here's their preferred features. Right. I'm gonna list those. Here's the price point that they're willing to Pay. Here's the leading value proposition and benefits that resonate with them, and here's the business metrics that matter for them. Right. I think this is where someone gets it wrong too. It's like you might have multiple Personas or segments in a business, but again, going back to that first exercise we did, if you can't actually map the business met metrics back to each Persona, you could be wasting a lot of time and energy getting someone who might be easy to get but is bad for business. And so I've seen folks, like, build segment profiles and then say, wow, I didn't realize that person that segment had such bad churn. Or I didn't realize that CAC was so expensive for that segment. And so when we actually take like, the quantitative view rather than, you know, I don't even know the fictional name and like, where they go to go get their groceries and like, what podcasts they listen to, Cat people or dog.
- [32:29]
A
People, like, all this stuff. And I'm like, dude, we're trying to sell software here. I don't care.
- [32:34]
B
Exactly, Exactly. So. And then I trust the marketing and sales teams to be able to execute on that data. You know, we can. We still need to know other things about the segments, but it doesn't need to live in a fictional Persona.
- [32:49]
A
Yeah, yeah, Persona stuff. I, you know, I don't know where we got so off the rails on that stuff, because I think some Persona stuff is really useful. But. But other things, I just think, like, how did we get here where we're literally talking about cats versus dogs, and I'm like, who cares? I've seen so many companies, they spend all this time and they're just lovingly creating these Personas, and they sit in a deck somewhere and nobody ever goes back to them because there's nothing we can do with this information.
- [33:13]
B
Well, that's the other thing. It's like, it's a point in time versus one of the things I love about segment profiles. And these business metrics is usually I'll build a corresponding segmentation dashboard Dashboard. And the segmentation dashboard is a living, breathing thing, or it's something that I'm extracting the numbers from and putting in every month if I can't actually get it built in like our BI tool. But what I do is I actually take my product marketing team metrics and I anchor them back to the segment metrics. So I say, okay, what's our goal right now? Let's imagine we're in a PLG business and we're getting 5,000 trialers a month. Okay. What percentage of those trialers are actually coming from the segments we want? Now, let's set a goal against that. Is it 40% today? Great. Let's increase that by 10%. Let's increase that by 20%. Maybe you see that you actually have a really great segment. Like, they're valuable, but for some reason Churn has increased for that segment. So maybe for the quarter you have some Churn initiatives against that segment, not against the whole base against that segment. Well, now we track the impact to that every quarter or every month in that quarter. And all of a sudden you're constantly going back to the segment profile. It's not this thing that's collecting dust in a drive folder somewhere.
- [34:21]
A
Yeah, ye. Yeah, exactly. You know, it's interesting because like, like in, like I find in these, like, I'm working with a lot of enterprise software companies, and so they've got these. They've got these Personas of like, you know, These are the 10 people involved in getting a deal done. And. And again, there'll be all of this stress and focus and energy on. Here's the 10 Personas. But then you actually get into a deal and there's only two that matter. Right. Like, there's. There's a Persona that's champion the deal. And then sometimes what you have is this Persona, which is the time waster and this person that loves talking to your sales rep. And your sales rep will come back and go, oh, I got a deal cooking at bank of Montreal. I talked to this guy for like two hours today. It's gonna be amazing. And then you find out that person has, you know, no budget, no ability to drive a deal forward, no cloud in the organization, no nothing. And there's this other Persona. Anyways, I could go on and on. I don't know how we got. So I don't know.
- [35:18]
B
I don't know either. Yeah, but I think we can. We can push it.
- [35:22]
A
Yeah, right, Right.
- [35:23]
B
We'll start the movement right here.
- [35:25]
A
We start the movement here. No more crappy Personas. This has been great. Thank you so much for coming. Hey, where can people find out more about you and. And the stuff you're doing?
- [35:38]
B
Yeah. So I started a company. It's called PMM Camp. And basically my goal is to help build strategic product marketers. So I have a newsletter that goes out every Sunday. That's a great place to start. Pmmcamp.com People can subscribe or otherwise find me on LinkedIn. I'm always there. I love having convers about these types of topics and you can just send me a dm.
- [36:02]
A
We'll try to throw some links for that into the show notes of this podcast too. Thank you so much for joining. This was great. And I'm sorry I made you do it twice, but I loved it. Do it again. It was fun.
- [36:13]
B
Two times the fun. Thanks for having me.
- [36:17]
A
Let's do it again. We'll do the third one. Why not? We're getting better at this.
- [36:22]
B
Exactly.
- [36:23]
A
Anyways, thanks a lot.
- [36:24]
B
Lot. Thank you.
- [36:27]
A
Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you're listening to this podcast and you're thinking to yourself, hey, my company could use some help with positioning, maybe we should talk. So as a consultant, I work with tech companies, but very specifically B2B tech companies that have a sales team. I don't really have a size requirement. I work with very, very large businesses, but I also work with growth stage companies. There are small, small as 10, 20, 30 million revenue. The work I do with companies is focused on getting a very tight definition of how you win in the market and then taking that and translating it into a really compelling story that clearly answers the question, why pick you over the other guys? If you're interested in learning about how we might work together, you can visit aprildunford.com consulting thanks again for listening.