← The Marketing Millennials
The Marketing Millennials
What’s Wrong with Your Homepage? With Anthony Pierri, Co-founder at FletchPMM | Ep. 337
00:38:50
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- [00:01]
Tamara Graminski
Welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials. I'm Tamara Graminski and I'm stepping in as your guest host while Daniel's out on paternity leave. I'm a career product marketing leader and the former VP of PMM at high growth startups like Kajabi and Unbounce. I'm also a longtime friend of the pod. And while Daniel is off doing dad things, I'll be here bringing you fun convos with some of the smartest marketers I know. Today's episode is all about one of the most misunderstood pages in marketing, the homepage. I sat down with Anthony Pieri, the Go to expert on homepage messaging, to talk about why homepages still matter in 2025. He had to convince me of this and how to actually make yours work. Anthony is a longtime friend of mine. He was previously the Director of Product Marketing at Headway and is now the co founder of Fletch, a product marketing consultancy that has helped 400 B2B software companies find their ideal positioning strategy and bring it to life on a newly crafted homepage. We got into how to find the right recipe for your homepage, the real meaning behind an ideal customer profile, and whether you should aim to summarize or prioritize your message. Plus, Anthony shares his go to test for knowing if your homepage messaging is actually landing. If you've ever stared at your homepage and thought, this isn't working, but I don't know why, this one's for you.
- [01:20]
Daniel Murray
Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS Market Marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the off.
- [01:46]
Tamara Graminski
Anthony, welcome to the show.
- [01:48]
Anthony Pieri
Thanks so much for having me. Super excited to be here.
- [01:52]
Tamara Graminski
Amazing. Well, it's been an absolute delight watching you grow your brand on LinkedIn the past two years, and I know you're going to have so many spicy hot takes for our marketing besties today. But I want to start with a question I've been noodling on for a while, which is why did you decide to focus exclusively on homepages? And maybe more importantly, do homepages even matter in 2025?
- [02:17]
Anthony Pieri
Well, I'll try to tackle those two questions one at a time. Why homepages? When we started the business, me and my co founder, we wanted to help people with their positioning and so we thought, how can we evaluate their positioning in the first place. And so some of our earliest posts on LinkedIn that got any amount of traction, what we would do is we would look at someone's homepage and we would take the traditional positioning mad libs, which for people who aren't familiar, that's like we are X type of company in X category for X industry and we solve X problem. I probably should be using different letters now that I'm realizing, you know, A, B, C or something, but you get the point.
- [02:51]
Tamara Graminski
I understand.
- [02:52]
Anthony Pieri
And so what we would, what we would do is we would look at people's homepages and we would color code each of those different parts of a positioning statement and see, can we find answers to all the questions on someone's website? And nine times out of ten we couldn't find any answers. No mention of the types of companies they work with, no mention of what problems they solve, no mention of how they're different, anything. And so we would post these mini audits to basically say, hey, you guys need to work in your positioning. And then people would come back to us and say, can you help me rewrite my homepage? And so we were like, oh, maybe these things belong together. And so over time it's formed into this whole service that we offer now, where we're specifically helping people figure out their positioning, answering those core questions, who is our product for, what does it do, how does it help all that type of stuff, and then giving it a home where it can live in a publicly accessible way. Most of the time when people do positioning exercises, they're as part of like a brand project or some sort of messaging audit or something from an internal product marketing person and it lives in a Google Doc and never gets seen again. And so for us, we're like, put it on the homepage. That way everyone can see it, the customers can see it, your team can see it, investors can see it. And all of a sudden positioning, which is normally this nebulous strategy thing, is now a very customer facing asset for your whole company. And so that's why those two things ended up coming together. To answer your second question, do homepages even matter? We debated a long time because a lot of our initial customers were early, early stage startups and a lot of them were selling to their network. And the people they were selling to might not even have looked at the homepage in the first place. And so the question was, well, is this even going to move the needle if we put this on the homepage, spend all this time on the homepage and not Even going to see it again. We see the homepage just as a place for the strategy to live that is very easily accessible. But ideally, whatever narrative you land on should get repeated across all of your assets. It should be in your sales narratives, in your sales slide decks. It should be in the product onboarding. When people are logging into the product, they should be seeing those same elements. A company called Loom, who probably a lot of people are familiar with who are listening to this, records your screen, record yourself. At the same time, they positioned it as a way to do quick updates for your team, and they positioned it against meetings. And so they were like, skip the meeting and send a loom. And in the product, they have that same narrative that was on their homepage where you would get in there, you'd run a bunch of Loom recordings and then they would send you, like, summaries of like, hey, you saved 15 hours that would have been spent in meetings this week by sending these looms. So for us, we're like, if the homepage, say, in the age of AI, becomes irrelevant and no one cares, it's like, okay, we'll probably pivot to another asset that where these things can live. But I don't think it's going to go away or become not important because the AI has to read something. Where are they going to find your information? You know, are they going to attach right to your database and go right to your source? Like, this stuff needs to get fleshed out somewhere. And for us, we were like, what better place than your most accessible marketing asset?
- [06:00]
Tamara Graminski
I love that. Well, first of all, I love hearing the story of how Fletch kind of came to be in terms of the product that you're offering today. And like a true product marketer, you listen to your customers, you were evolving and testing while you're getting product market fit. So that's fun. I actually haven't heard that story from you before. And then I like what you're saying about the homepage, because in the back of my mind, this whole time I'm going to. I was thinking, do they think the homepage is that important? Like the most important part of the website? What I'm hearing from you is it's not necessarily that. It's that, hey, better than storing a Google Doc in a drive that no one's even going to look at that may never reach a customer. What if the homepage was that, like, most updated version of the messaging and positioning? And at least from there, you're like, being held accountable to make it Public. Right. You're testing iterating and then that's permeating all of the other channels and customer experiences you have.
- [06:48]
Anthony Pieri
Exactly. And to give you a real world example, there's a company that probably most people will know called Klaviyo. Maybe it's Klaviyo, who knows? But I never know. Yeah, okay, same somewhere. Not in the United States. I think it was somewhere in Europe maybe. So there's probably someone who can correct the pronunciation, but Klaviyo. I'll use it that way. Klaviyo was positioning themselves originally as like an email marketing platform for E commerce businesses. And then they repositioned as a CRM for B2C companies. So they did two major changes. They went to a larger product category. Email marketing's just a subset and CRM's bigger. So they brought in the product category and then they brought in the customer base from just E Commerce to all B2C. Lots of B2C is not E commerce. So this went live on the homepage and I was talking to someone at one of their competitors and she was saying, I bet the conversion rate dropped when they did that. Because if you were coming for email marketing and you had heard something about Klaviyo, you didn't know exactly what they did. You land on there. You're like, I heard they do great email marketing stuff and you see CRM for B2C, you're like, like, oh, I don't need a CRM, I have a CRM. And maybe you bounce. So potentially the conversion rates drop. But the trade off, in my opinion, that was probably going on. I was, I don't have any intel of what's going on in the executive sets publicly traded company. Maybe you could listen to the board meetings or something. Someone can do that, but not me. I'm going to keep extrapolating, but I'm imagining that the executives in this boardroom said, do we just launch with it or not? And the reason that they said yes was because they were fundamentally changing the company's positioning. And every company, the bigger you get, wants to default to the way it's always been. And so if you said in a strategy session, you made the PowerPoint, you disseminated it and you said, this is the new positioning. When that sales rep gets on a call and they say, we're really excited about your email marketing platform, can you tell us, is that sales rep going to go? Well, actually we're a CRM now and I know you thought we were that, but let me tell you about our new positioning or are they just gonna default to the story they've always been telling? And so my guess is they traded off potentially a drop in short term conversions for company alignment. Because now it's on the homepage, people coming into the sales calls are gonna say, so I saw you guys are like a CRM. Can you tell me more about that? And now every sales rep is forced to say, the messaging that a lot of times, especially product marketers write the message it never gets used to. And it's like, you know, if I can put that messaging on the most important, most visible asset, it's much more powerful to align the teams. And then the bet would be that in the long term conversions do go up and all of a sudden you've opened up a whole new market. The message you're putting out there, and I've seen their ads and stuff, it's like, it's all mirroring that. Like it's in the headline and the taglines and the stuff they're running. And so this whole campaign, Ideally in a 6 to 12 month time span, maybe all the people coming in are looking for CRM and they're looking to spend more money. There's more of them because it's B2C, not just E commerce. And this bet will have played off and side note, right? You know, as we're even talking about this, this is why we always are very cautious when people say we really want to work on our positioning because we want our conversion rate to go up. And I'm like, you might just need a conversion rate optimization person. If you fundamentally change the positioning, your conversion rate will likely go down at first, but then it will go up after you've adjusted everything and the new people are coming through the door.
- [10:15]
Tamara Graminski
Well, and I've heard you say too, it's like, well, your conversion rate overall might drop, but your conversion rate with your best customer who you're trying to position to will go up. And then it's just about getting more of that best customer into the front door. Which I think we're saying with the Klaviyo example. Okay, there's a bunch of things I want to get into today, like the nitty gritty of how you actually think about building homepages. But one question, just to kind of zoom out a bit, is you guys have worked on more than 400 homepages in the last two years, which is probably more than anyone else on the planet. What's something you've changed your mind about that two years ago, you felt strongly about when you think about homepages and homepage messaging, that maybe now you're like, oh, I was wrong or I've really evolved my thinking on this.
- [10:57]
Anthony Pieri
Oh, there's so many things that we've evolved the thinking on. I think for a while I was obsessed with finding the one perfect homepage wireframe. And every wireframe must follow this exact format. Like everyone. You know, it's like physicists, they're trying to get the unified theory of everything. And so there's this amazingly elegant concept of like there really, truly exists one specific wireframe that will work for everyone. But as we've seen, it's just not true. And so much of what people call expect to see on the homepage is dependent on where they're coming from. So we recently changed our homepage and did something wild and crazy. And I posted about it and got very heated feedback on it. We took our description of our service, which includes the pricing, and we put it in the main HERO of the website. And so in the world of consultants and freelancers and service providers, this is unheard of. You'd be hard pressed to find a consultant who lists their pricing anywhere, let alone in the hero. And we actually are doing a version of that value based pricing where we say, if you are bigger, we're going to charge you more money, even though we're doing the identical service, which also is something that you normally hide, you never want anyone to know. And we're like, nope, we have four tiers, it's the same thing. I'm just making you pay more money because you're a massive enterprise. So we put that in the hero and a lot of people were like, this is horrible, it's a horrible idea. You're not explaining the story, you're not leading with value, you're not, you're just telling me what it is and what it does. But for us, we're thinking about our overall journey and 99.9% of our clients come from LinkedIn and they've spent 12 months reading our content, our thought leadership stuff and which is such a cringy word in itself, but you know, like the point of view, what we think about marketing principles and stuff. And ideally we've convinced them that positioning is really, really important and may be the thing that helps get them unstuck in their business, but. And then they land on the website, they say I should really finally, you know, I think maybe I'm ready. They land on the website and they are thinking in that moment, so how does this actually work. I know Anthony and Rob, they do something in positioning, but what does it actually look like? So they're looking for answers to what? And they say, how much does it cost? Because like, maybe they're way too expensive for me. So they're thinking about price. And so for them it's like that flow makes a lot of sense. And we've seen it really help. Like, people would get on sales calls before and say, well, you know, I'm just curious how much you charge. I know people are a little. And I'm like, it's on the website. But we added at the bottom and nobody was scrolling down that far. So we're like, you know, they didn't believe that it was going to be out there. So then we've moved it up and now people are asking that question less. So I think now when we work with clients, a lot of time we will spend of like, who's coming to the website, where are they coming from, what are they expecting, what's their level of understanding of the category, of the maturity of the market, all that type of stuff and then feeding it into what's the best way to lay out these sections, in what order, what do we highlight, where, and all that type of stuff.
- [13:53]
Tamara Graminski
I love that. So you've evolved the recipe and I think I've observed that as well. Even in your, your thought leadership content that you've been posting. You know, previously you guys would have more of a recipe or a wireframe. And now it feels like not only is there not a recipe, but there's more of maybe different paths, which is like, oh, are you PLG or sales Ed, do you have multiple use cases or one use. So maybe talk to us a little bit about, like for, you know, a listener who's listening to this at home and they're working at a. Maybe a software company or maybe even an E comm company. Like, how do they even think about what are the components that go into the recipe, what are the ingredients, and how do they know which ingredient they should be playing with?
- [14:34]
Anthony Pieri
Yeah. So this really comes down to segmentation. So companies will have multiple segments that they could market to and that they likely are marketing to. And these segments will either have a prioritized list of who's the most important or they won't. And this is a company strategy question. So we believe the phrase ICP ideal client profile means ideal as in one. One most important segment. Right. Which is not to say, yeah, I know a lot of people say, well, we've got you know like five or six ICPs. And I'm like, wait a minute, I don't think you know what that word means. Ideal, right? It sounds like there's just be one. But either way, if you think about it and there's multiple different audiences buying different things from you, you have a decision to make. You have to decide. And we actually split it up into three different approaches. The first one we would say, should you try to summarize the value across all of your segments? And usually you'll see this in like really big enterprise custom solution like IBM or SAP or any of these types of one. You'll see their page is essentially a big summary tagline. And it'll be something like solving business challenges. And they'll be like, people use SAP to handle their complex organization. And you're like, that doesn't tell me anything. Because what's happening is they're summarizing across every single segment. Then one step better than that is if you, if you. We would say not summarize, but itemize where it will say like Rippling was a classic example of this for a while. Rippling was doing this for a while. And then they stopped and now they're back. They had these three columns and basically the hero of Rippling's page was like something like simplifying work for hr, IT and finance teams. So they were just saying, we have this platform that helps those three groups. And then immediately in the first scroll it would say explore rippling by product. And it was a column that said hr, a column that said it, and a column that said finance. And that each of those had a couple bullet points underneath them. And so this itemize approach is basically saying, we think it's equally likely that someone would be coming to our page looking for finance, that they would be coming looking for it, that they'll be coming looking for. And I already forgot the third one, whatever. The third one that I said was hr. There it is.
- [16:55]
Tamara Graminski
Yes.
- [16:55]
Anthony Pieri
It's been a long day. So for them, they're like, why try to tell some big global overarching story, like a summarized story that's going to really obscure what the heck we do and leave people like, I don't even understand it. Let's just build these doorways like we called it the channel changer approach. Let's just build doorways to subpages where we can tell the deep positioning story. Here's how we specifically help IT teams or specifically finance teams, and they break it up even into sub products. So it's like this Big menu. And now it's definitely way clearer than the summarize approach because I can look at a glance and say, wow, there's all these things. But on the flip side, it's a little complicated for the viewer. They have to navigate your big Cheesecake Factory menu of all the different stuff that you do. And it really only makes sense if you really are getting like in that example, those three big segments, is it really 33? 33, 33 in terms of the revenue split. And a lot of times it's not, but maybe it's 33, 33, 33 in terms of the executives who want their department to be represented. And so a lot of times we see this because of the committee is like, well, if I can't have the whole story, then neither can Susie. And I'm fine if we just each get our column and our list. And that's how you end up with this middle one. The coolest one, and we think is usually the most effective, is in anytime there's a business where there is an actual ICP who's not, you know, who's bringing in the bulk of the money or something like that to treat them as such. And so not to summarize, not to prioritize, sorry, not to itemize, but to actually prioritize one of the segments. So you have summarize, itemize and prioritize in the prioritized version, you say, here's my argument for the main segment, you really nail it. And then underneath that you say, and I also support this other segment and this other segment and you start to whittle it down. Prime example of this. Not a B2B SaaS example, but everyone will be familiar. Apple. When you go on Apple's homepage, the HERO does not try to summarize the value of all their products. It's not like game changing hardware, transformational, you know, ecosystem experience. If you go on their page, it's not like, here's the menu of all of our different products. The page is literally like, here's the iPad, it just came out. You should buy it. Because in their cyclical release cycle, there is a different product with an ICP that is the most important for that little two month period or one month period. And they're constantly changing the HERO always to, to reflect it. But you will see this also with other big companies like Adobe, for example, I don't know, $300 billion market cap, unbelievably big, they're usually leading with Creative Cloud. It's like, there it is this is the main thing that we want people to buy. We have a bunch of other offerings, but those can all get sub priority. Stripe does the same thing. They position the payment suite first and then underneath it they start talking about like all sorts of other crazy things that they do incorporate. Your start with your startup in Delaware, you know, here's our carbon removal product, here's how you can add Bitcoin to your, your suite or whatever. But they will talk about pay. There's a fun activity if you take any B2B company, really any company, you can say to ChatGPT or Gemini, what is this company known for in one to two words? And it will be that thing. And it's, it's, it will. With Stripe it will say payments. With Salesforce, it will say CRM. With Oracle, it will say databases. With Apple, it says the iPhone. And so everyone has a prioritized positioning that we think should be reflected in how you go to market and even in how you divide up a homepage. But you know, it takes guts. It takes people having executives who are upset, especially in a bigger company. And usually someone has to be a C level title to be able to make that decision.
- [20:35]
Tamara Graminski
No, I love that and I believe in that. Like obviously big segmentation fan, I love telling one story for your best customer to make it abundantly clear. I always want that homepage to give them like a sense of belonging. That's kind of the words I use. So let's assume for someone listening, they've gotten, that they've gotten, you know, the exec team to be on board. Yes, we're going to prioritize this segment, going to go with that prioritization method that you've talked about. Now what is the next step? Because I think if you read a lot of marketing material you would, you know, probably the next step would be to draft out a list of features and then identify the benefits and then talk about the benefits in the hero. But I know you think a little differently, so I'd love to hear how that approach maybe isn't the best approach and what you would recommend instead.
- [21:20]
Anthony Pieri
Yeah, so it really comes to, when you're thinking about this icp, you have to factor in what is the competitive alternative. And this is not normally something people list in their ICPs. So when they, when someone just takes a normal, here's my ideal customer, what they should be like. They will list out like the size of the revenue, the head count, the tech stack, the industry, maybe what department they list all these things. The one thing they don't list is is what's the competitive alternative that they would choose other than us? And that will actually tell a lot about what the page should say or not say. And so take any technology, there's always a group of people that you are trying to convince to use a product that is unfamiliar with the category or unfamiliar with the functionality and you're trying to get them off of like manual spreadsheets or something like that and use the software. As product categories mature, all of a sudden there's all these new players. And now the question now becomes, well, why should I switch off my old manual workflow to your dedicated software? It becomes, why you over the other 10 different types of products in the same space? And this is again, this is based on who your ICP is. And so like, if you think of something like CRM like we've been talking about, if you go to CRM, you could say, who do I want to sell CRMs to? And if my target customer is, let's say, brand new businesses that have never even heard the phrase CRM, maybe tiny little mom and pop shops, I am going to talk about the value of my product in relation to the way that they accomplish these workflows without the CRM. So let's say I take a workflow like keeping track of my sales leads or something, and I'm a mom and pop business. If I was going to talk about the value, I would frame it against that and I would basically saying, listen, in the old days you would have to write these things all down on pen and paper, maybe in Excel or something. But that leads to all these issues. Now in this CRM, we can actually help you organize all your customer conversations in these, you know, dedicated screens. We can show you them in these pipeline views, all sorts of stuff. Makes it 10 times easier for you to keep track of all this stuff and then that becomes the messaging. But let's say my target customer is a cool tech company, a B2B SaaS company. They all have CRMs, they're all familiar with CRMs. And so the question I have to ask if I'm the cool new CRM player is how am I different than Salesforce or HubSpot? Because that's what they're going to be considering. And so in that case, I'm not saying, listen, you should use us to keep track of your deals and give you a single source of truth. They're like, I know that's what a.
- [23:56]
Tamara Graminski
CRM is, that's why I want to buy one.
- [23:58]
Anthony Pieri
Exactly like that's why I have one right now, or that's why I'm thinking about buying one. Like what makes you different? And so in that sense the things that you highlight are differentiation, functionality capabilities, things like that related to what they're used to. So for example, if you've ever used any of the building aspects of HubSpot, you might want to blow your brains out because it's horrible. And I posted once, I said is there any company with worse UX than HubSpot? And then I got a thousand comments, people saying, have you tried Salesforce? So obviously both of these companies are, have a long way to go. But a lot of these modern new Salesforce, HubSpot competitors like Foak and Adio and all those people are differentiating against that. And so like putting all that stuff front and center, they realize they don't have to do the explanation of like this is why you need a CRM. So it's grounding all of the differentiation in the real world experience of what those people were coming from or what they're considering. And I think also where you were going too is like usually what people do, especially in the world of B2B, people from the sales team or executives who say, we had this really big deal, let's keep the CRM example, we were going to sell this company in our CRM. It was a seven figure deal. The CFO didn't see ROI and so the deal died. We need to make sure we're telling the revenue story on the homepage. And they imagine in this world that if the Hero, if the H1 had just said increase your revenue with the CRM, that, that CFO who never saw the website, who would never even look at it, that's what would have convinced them. And so what ends up happening is everybody's websites starts leading with the business level outcome, which does not speak to any of the things that I had mentioned before. Why are you different than competitors? Because every competitor is going to promise the good business outcomes. It does not say, well, why you shouldn't use, you know, the old methods and things like that. Because they're obviously getting revenue the way that they're doing it. And so probably to your original point, like that is what we see happen most frequently and is very, very different than what we suggest.
- [26:03]
Tamara Graminski
Yeah, no, I feel that. I know I've even done this exercise myself because it's even hard internally to get other executives to recognize that what is on your homepage or what they want to put on the homepage isn't differentiated. They're like, well, we're the only ones that can say that. And they spend very little time looking at the market. Right. In marketing, that's our job, so we do that. So I remember one of the exercises I did when I first got to Kajabi was I took all of the, I just screen grabs of all of the different heroes in all of the different creator tools that were out there. I put it all in one slide and I said, now tell me which one's ours and tell me which one belongs to every other competitor. And you couldn't. It literally just looked like it was one brainstorm session. And so that's a fun little trick. Also, if you're trying to like combat the exec who wants you to do that and you can really quickly show that it's not differentiated at all.
- [26:52]
Anthony Pieri
Yeah, and that's the key thing right there. You hit the nail on the head. Every executive wants you in marketing to do the business outcome stuff, but in reality it hides your differentiation. And we have this concept of like multi order benefits or like causal benefits. That sounds like nerdy and stuff. But effectively, if I say, if I use a CRM, what's the immediate benefit of using it? Maybe it's that I'm a little bit more organized than I was before. Then it's like, well, if I'm more organized, then what does that mean? Well, if I'm organized, I probably can respond to prospects faster. Well, if I can respond to prospects faster, maybe I can speed up the sales cycle. If I can speed up the sales cycle, maybe I can get them to sign quicker. If I can get them to sign quicker, maybe I can close more deals and maybe I can increase revenue. So we're like 10 steps away from the product. So we'd say it's like a 9th or 10th order benefit. And then we say, let's put it on the website. Now the problem is I could start at any software tool that's not a CRM and do the same exercise and end at the same place. I could say, well, we're a project management software, right. And this helps us do our projects better. If we can do a project, we can launch more features. If we can launch more features, customers will like us more, they'll tell more people. If they like it, tell more people, then maybe we'll get more people who want to buy us. And then they'll buy us. And then our revenue goes up and we've walked it all the way to the exact same thing. And so you can get 10 websites like you did it with just creator platforms. But in a lot of times you can do it across all software and it will all say the same thing because they're all just saying increase your revenue, grow your business. And it's like that's actually not where the battle is won in the marketing world. It is now to be fair to the executives, most executives live in sales land. They get brought in to the biggest deals, they're not involved in marketing for the most part. And so they get brought in these sales deals and they understand what's happening when they are trying to convince another C level executive at the company that they're trying to sell. And so it's like the band Radiohead has the song, it's called Everything in its right place and we're like, that's how you need to adopt this. Don't make the homepage do what your salespeople who you pay half a million dollars a year, don't make them try to do the same thing. You pay this person $500,000 a year because they are going to be able to take calendly and convince an executive that it's going to boost the company's top line revenue. Like that's. That is myth making creative storytelling in its most amazing form. Like you should pay someone an unbelievable amount if they can convince them that the calendar tool will make the top line revenue of a business go up. Like how many jumps we have to make to make people follow you on that journey. So when you're on a homepage, they're not going to follow you along. They'll see that and they'll be like, what? The scheduling tool is going to give me more money? I don't remember that part of the feature set where I can click get more money and they wire me, you know, a big sum.
- [29:39]
Tamara Graminski
I mean I do connect my stripe account sometimes, but.
- [29:44]
Anthony Pieri
Even that though, right? Someone's gotta pay, right?
- [29:47]
Tamara Graminski
That's true. That is true.
- [29:48]
Anthony Pieri
Send you it.
- [29:49]
Tamara Graminski
I like what you're saying about this multi order benefit and it reminds me of also what I read in Emma Stratton's book, the make it punchy one where she talks about altitudes of the conversation. And I think that's what I'm hearing you say here, which is it's actually okay to have different benefits depending on who you're talking to. So it's almost like do the multi order benefit exercise and then plot the key benefits that you want to focus on vertically. So at the very top, the highest altitude that Is that sales combo, right. That's when you are maybe talking to another executive. But for the average buyer who's coming to a website and like booking a demo or signing up for a trial, you probably need to be lower down in altitude, something a bit more concrete and tangible from a benefit perspective for sure.
- [30:32]
Anthony Pieri
And there's a guy that I follow on LinkedIn, his name is Nate Nasrallah. N A S R A L L A. He wrote like the book on enterprise sales. And his whole argument is the strongest business case that you could make is one that you co create with the champion who has already decided to enter into this 6 month, 12 month long sales process with you. And so even right there, if you say we want to form this relationship and then you and I are going to build this business case together, we're going to gather stakeholder requirements, we're going to figure out what everyone wants and build this thing together, all of us. You realize we have stepped out of marketing because marketing is one to many. And so if every business case with every champion is going to be different, how can marketing do that? And so even just in the fundamental thing of what you're trying to do, it's not going to work in your marketing because you don't have that champion to help you build it with for the company's specific needs. Because even just saying we're going to grow your revenue doesn't actually appeal to every business because some businesses are like, that's actually not our problem. Like we have a different high level business outcome that we're interested in. Maybe it's, you know, efficiency or headcount or risk or something like that. Like they may be more interested if you can say, well actually this software is going to increase the efficiency of your team by 50% or whatever, some other business outcome.
- [31:48]
Tamara Graminski
I love it. Okay, we're coming up to the end of our chat today, so I have two more questions that I want us to make sure we hit. The first, first one is if someone hasn't already taken away something they can use. What's like that? One tip for marketers who are going to go and work on their homepage. Where's maybe the best place for them to start or your one piece of advice that you need them to hear.
- [32:08]
Anthony Pieri
Yeah, the quickest win you can make is look at each section that has a headline and a body and I want you to imagine that the body section was covered up and you could even take screenshots of the page. You can black it out or you know, gray it out or something like that. And I want you to just read the headlines and then ask yourself, would this answer what and how questions? If someone said, what does this product do and how does it work? Would you get the answers that only by reading the headlines? And I will bet you the answer is no. Because everyone leads with the fuzzy benefit outcome statement and then they support it with the concrete stuff underneath. But the problem is when people read homepages, they scan, they jump from one headline to the next headline to the next headline and they are going to be increasingly frustrated as they are not seeing a single line of information. They are not going to want to give you the benefit of the doubt to go in and read through your specific paragraphs to really figure out what this thing does. And they will bounce. And so oftentimes a quick win is you can just take the part of the body that answers the what and the how and just flip the order. So put it in the headline and be like, this is the specific thing. And then you can add that little nice benefit into the sub. Because if we don't have this common understanding of what it is we're talking about how it works, we actually can't care about the outcome it presents. And this comes from B2C land taking principles of B2C and applying them to B2B, especially in software. And it doesn't translate because with B2C you can do this because we're looking at a shoe. You don't need to tell me what a shoe is. I can see the shoe. So if you want to lead with all the cool, like you're going to be the coolest person around because of the shoe. And it's going to make you so confident. Like, you can do that because I can see the shoe. But if I'm talking about, you know, enterprise B2B software, I have no idea what it is. And your weird, you know, abstracted away interface of like, you know, in like the lines with the things going. And I'm like, I don't know what any of this means. It will not help you.
- [34:09]
Tamara Graminski
All right, good tip, good tip. And then I promised Daniel that I would ask every guest our very famous marketing millennials question, which is what's one marketing hill that you would die on?
- [34:23]
Anthony Pieri
I will die on the hill that the more honest you are about what the product actually does, the more business you will actually close. And it is counterintuitive because people think our job is to sell the dream and generate demand and all this stuff like that. I actually think if you could truly model the whole system, how it all works together, if marketers stuck to the things that they could actually promise, things that they could put into the contract that everyone would be happier, they would close more deals, things would be better, more people would take sales calls and I will die on that hill. And it's not like from a moral standpoint, but you could make a moral argument that you are lying to your customers when you promise them increased revenue from your to do list app or something. You could make a moral argument that that's wrong to do. But I'm not even making a moral argument. I'm making an effectiveness argument. I think that we have been inundated with so much marketing fluff over promising underdelivering that if companies actually just tone it down and be like it's an amazing to do list app, like it's so cool how we can organize the to DOS people. Like, wow, I want to try it more than if you tried to tell them that it was going to grow their business or something along those lines.
- [35:47]
Tamara Graminski
I love it and I agree with that hot take for sure. And I think it's like clear is always better than clever, right?
- [35:53]
Anthony Pieri
Yeah. Amazing.
- [35:54]
Tamara Graminski
Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing so much information about how we can improve our homepage. And if folks want to learn more about you, hear more of your hot takes, where can they do that?
- [36:05]
Anthony Pieri
Probably start with my LinkedIn. I post there almost every day. We do lots of diagrams, we give away a lot of stuff for free. And if you're interested at all in what we do, more at a professional level. Right. I mean it's all we're sharing the same type of stuff. But you know, if you're interested in our consultancy, it's fletchpmm.com PMM short for product Marketing.
- [36:25]
Tamara Graminski
Amazing. We will make sure we put all of that in the show notes. And thank you so much for joining me today.
- [36:30]
Anthony Pieri
Thanks so much for having me.
- [36:33]
Daniel Murray
Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.