Part 1 Release Date: Aug 3, 2023 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Leverage 'credible, validated, third-party' ROI studies across the customer journey to improve win rates, NRR, and sales cycles.
GTM Partners suggests exploring 5 different types of ROI - attributable, transformational, efficiency, necessity, and indirect - as part of an independent study. Once you complete your ROI study, it's wise to promote the results everywhere - from pre-sales and sales to onboarding to QBRs and even during your renewal discussion.
[2] For early-stage businesses - Hire new people (specialists) into your revenue organization by linking them to the metric you want to change.
Transitioning from founder-led sales to a sales team can take too long if metrics are not part of the ride. The VP of Sales at Capchase advises founders to consider the metric they want to impact before bringing on a specialist. For example - "What's your deal to logo conversation rate? And how do you want the specialist to change it?"
[3] Continuously test small nudges across different parts of your product to reach product use milestones.
Threads by Meta ties itself to Instagram and reduces the time (i.e., number of clicks) to start using the app vs. Twitter. To further amplify this initial burst of signups, Threads actively relies on A/B tests - for example, small written prompts to encourage users to leave a series of posts, visual optimization to make following accounts easier (a metric they care about), and more.
[4] For Open Source Sales - Start with a clear framework on what's open source vs. proprietary before considering the difference in feature sets.
The folks at dbt Labs identify their open source as a "language that people can use to author a data pipeline" vs. their proprietary version as a "platform to productionize those pipelines." This distinction allows the company to avoid arguments with the open-source community on the features while refraining from confusing customers.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
“Outcompete: How startups and billion-dollar companies outsmart the competition” by Mayur Palta
[1] Build a competitive intelligence community within your company by bringing diverse functions into the mix. A general suggestion would be to rely on - Product for gaps in product capabilities. GTM for top sales campaigns. Sales enablement to analyze competitors' assets. Field Engineering to understand customer decisions. Sellers to assist with win/loss analysis. Marketing with competitive messaging.
[2] Amazon's take on Coopetition per Jeff Bezos - "We, as Amazon, offer products and services which sometimes collaborate and sometimes compete with the same entities. How should Amazon think about coopetition? ...Just imagine our situation at Amazon where on one hand AWS is working super hard to make Netflix successful while on another hand Amazon operates its own movie streaming service, Amazon Prime Video. We must learn how to do both, in parallel, effectively because customers love choice. "
[3] Be smart about the feedback you get from customer advisory boards to avoid the risk of selecting a product direction that addresses the needs of a select few customers instead of most customers.
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] AI Leapfrogging: How AI Will Transform “Lagging” Industries
[2] How user research impacts the AARRR metrics
[3] Lean Product Design: A Playbook
[4] The six Ps of lean product and how to implement them effectively
[5] What Comes After SaaS?
Part 2 Release Date: Aug 24, 2023 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Optimize your SaaS sign-up page to highlight your credibility, offer more product clarity, and emphasize your core value proposition.
Your sign-up page can rely on testimonials, product previews, plan details, among many elements, to move the needle on "trust, motivation, and education." Webflow, for example, offers a sneak side preview of their product to excite the user on what they can create with one click.
[2] Create an engagement loop between your social channels to newsletters (and vice versa) to distribute your content better.
VeryGoodCopy uses the LinkedIn post to drive people to subscribe to its newsletter for exclusive content. Similarly, the newsletter readers also receive a CTA to get on their social channels and promote - for ex: a newsletter CTA would be "Show the love by liking or sharing this post for me!"
[3] Connect with your customers across multiple channels by offering incentives to improve their engagement and reinforce your value.
Cordial believes you can reduce churn by coordinating your messages across different customer channels. And it starts by offering your customers incentives to connect with you across channels - for ex: providing discounts to email subscribers to opt-in for SMS alerts, a coupon code for loyalty members when they enable push notifications, etc.
[4] Tell a customer success story from multiple perspectives mirroring the different stakeholders in the buying process.
Case Study Buddy recommends building separate narratives for the same success story to cover different stakeholders. As a benefit, you get stories that appeal to unique roles and multiple pieces of collateral to cover the complex B2B buying process.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
[1] The author has 3 significant epiphanies on software development. Stated simply, he believes (i) waste increases (and productivity declines) when software scales due to the disconnect between architecture and value stream, (ii) disconnected software value streams are the bottleneck to software productivity, and (iii) the software value stream is different from a linear manufacturing process.
[2] The customer must exchange some 'economic unit' if they see some value in your product. It's as simple as revenue for an external product. The unit is 'adoption' if it's an internal product or a digital offering from a government/non-profit. Engagement time will be the unit for any product that relies on indirect monetization (ex: social media tools).
[3] You see a pattern over the last 3 centuries, starting with the industrial revolution. Every 50 years, a technological wave transforms the world economy after it combines with innovation and financing ecosystems. A lot of new businesses explode while many older ones go extinct. Each new wave gets triggered by some critical production factor becoming cheap.
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] What to do when product growth stalls
[2] AI and the automation of work
[3] Running up that hill: Creativity, AI, and the human pursuit of uphill thinking
[4] When to Dig a Moat: Uncertainty, Success, and Defensibility
[5] The 7 disciplines of a mature B2B Product organization
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