AMA: Okta Former VP of Product Marketing, Scott Schwarzhoff on Messaging

One of the biggest challenges we had in the early days was competing against Microsoft. They are the grand-daddy of identity in that they created Active Directory, which has been the authoritative directory for every enterprise for decades. As you can imagine, they wanted to hold on to this critical IT control point for as long as possible as the world moved to the cloud, so they came out with something called Azure Active Directory, which is a directly competitive product to Okta’s. The reason why this was a huge challenge early on was the integration that Microsoft identity has with Office365, their flagship product. So, if the world is moving to SaaS software, well, the number one initiative for every company out there is to get Office365 deployed. How do you do that? Using Azure Active Directory. So, we had to compete not only against the 800lb gorilla’s directly competitive product, but we ALSO had to deal with positioning ourselves as best for deploying the #1 killer app - Office365. So, early on, we tried the head-to-head route. But, as you can imagine, the results were mixed as we basically played into Microsoft's hands ("we can deploy Office365 too, but we can do it faster than Microsoft" ... yeah, that didn't win the deal). So, we evolved the playbook. Over the last few years, we’ve had an 80% win rate. Since everyone has asked me at some point, ‘how did you beat Microsoft’, I thought I’d write down our playbook in a nutshell. Below are 10 steps we took to win vs. the market incumbent and 800lb gorilla. Attached is a more detailed walkthrough of each step: 1. Start with a strong founder insight 2. Address a big market with lots of room to expand and/or pivot 3. Build a compelling, simple-to-use ‘core’ product that people love 4. Make IT the transformative hero 5. Sell on customer value 6. Invest in customers first with a maniacal focus on their success 7. Tell your story through the lens of your customers 8. Rewrite the rules to go beyond your competitor’s capabilities 9. Build an ecosystem moat 10. Expand into disruptive market adjacencies

First thing, how are you segmenting the market and determining evolving customer needs/priorities? Great news - no product category stays fixed for very long. There’s always some new ’shift’ that the incumbent product category leaders don’t see coming that provides your company with a new business opportunity. Therefore, you want to determine, in a data-rich, customer-obsessed way, what the current requirements are for success are in the evolving category. Easiest way to do this is to build a simple 2x2 market segmentation chart. Use customer-interview data on their evolving needs and challenges to help determine what the X and Y axis are going to be and what the customer requirements are for each of the 4 quadrants. I’ll use Okta’s entry into the multi-factor authentication market as an example. Obviously, RSA has been the leader in this space for years. But plotting out a present-day 2x2 view of the market shows a lot of opportunity. On the x-axis, we had deployment model - on-premises on the left, cloud on the right. On the y-axis, we had sophistication - simple on the bottom and intelligent on the top. Then we’d bucket our customers into those different quadrants. So, security-conscious, regulated customers tended to be more on the lower-left. The broader market of companies worried about the next big data breach were on the lower-right (think Target and Equifax breaches). They’re looking for something lightweight, simple but effective to protect against pfishing attacks (eg: passwords suck). Then, in the upper-right, that’s the more progressive CISO looking at a whole new set of capabilities roughly called Zero Trust. And there’s really no-one in the upper left quadrant. Once you have the customer needs segmented, you can put the top 1-2 vendors into each bucket. Lower-left, that’s RSA. Lower-right, that’s Duo. Upper-right is also Duo but increasingly Microsoft. Stepping back and looking at both a customer and competitor view of the market shows the opportunity. The near-term goal was to build a product that took on Duo head-to-head and add that capability to our core SSO product. In the field, we ran a ‘would you like fries with that’ go-to-market motion. You already bought the hamburger (SSO) from us, so why not add two-factor authentication (MFA) to the order? Beyond that, there’s a question - go after the legacy RSA market, which requires a bunch of old-school connectors. Or move into the Intelligent/advanced side of the market. We focused on where the puck is going, not where it is today. And that’s the upper-right (Cloud/Intelligent) quadrant where the whole Zero Trust market is heading. So, a lot of time and energy spent getting into what we called ‘contextual access management’ - basically, putting a big brain on top of our MFA product that used our core understanding of identity context to know if someone is a malicious actor or not. This is a ‘play chess not checkers’ approach. Forget the old legacy incumbent, the real goal is plotting out the evolving customer priorities, connecting your company’s current product portfolio against those priorities and planning ahead for where the market is ultimately going to go.

I don’t think there are a lot of completely new categories created these days. In enterprise software, most new companies are improving on existing ways of solving the same problems we’ve had for a couple decades. So, the real question, I think, is how to align on a shared view of what the ‘new world’ requirements are to winning a market that has evolved. At Okta, we had a strong POV on the beliefs customers should have when considering a new approach to identity. For us, ‘cloud-first, enable best-in-breed, simplicity, and secure-by-design’ have been core tenets for how we view the world since day 1. We would shape RFPs, analyst submissions, and early customer development around these core beliefs. With a shared view of how a customer should solve a problem in hand, then it’s much easier to gain buy-in to pursue a category creation or evolution strategy. Here’s the Citrix Mobility pitch we used, same thing. At Citrix, every capability is rated on a 3-point scale: * Table-stakes: required capabilities that everyone and where there’s no clear uniqueness. * Competitive differentiators: everyone has the capability, but your company does it better * Purple cows: your company provides this capability and no one else has it So in practice, here’s how that netted out for our entry into the mobility market: * Mobile Device Management: table stakes. Everyone has it, no one had a big advantage * Mobile App Management: differentiated. We put a security ‘wrapper’ around applications that protected them from security breaches. Not unique to us but the easy wrapping capabilities were novel. * Mobile Data Management: purple cow. No mobility vendor offered a secure Dropbox-like capability. We generated 70% of our mobility sales based on this unique capability. We didn’t create the MDM market - AirWatch did. But we did create a new ‘super market’ called EMM or Enterprise Mobility Management, which we defined as Device, App, and Data Management. PMM and PM collaborated on its construction and presented this to executive management, but only after vetting with early customer adopters, analysts, and influencers. So, we came to the discussion with data in hand vs. an opinion.

I've always been in the product team, so that's the most natural interaction for me. For PM, we'd collaborate on how to position new products. We built a spreadsheet that had product pillars>concepts>key features>'feature rank'>feature flags, price. You may be asking, 'what's a feature rank' and that's where I LOVED using this handy three-point rating scale that was drilled into me at Citrix: * Table-stakes: required capabilities that everyone and where there’s no clear uniqueness. * Competitive differentiators: everyone has the capability, but your company does it better * Purple cows: your company provides this capability and no one else has it So in practice, here’s how that netted out for our entry into the mobility market: * Mobile Device Management: table stakes. Everyone has it, no one had a big advantage * Mobile App Management: differentiated. We put a security ‘wrapper’ around applications that protected them from security breaches. Not unique to us but the easy wrapping capabilities were novel. * Mobile Data Management: purple cow. No mobility vendor offered a secure Dropbox-like capability. We generated 70% of our mobility sales based on this unique capability. Ok, enough geeking out over product-level messaging. Here's a messaging doc template that nets out all the core messaging that a marketing/demand-gen team will need. Beyond product and marketing, I don't think sharing messaging frameworks is very helpful. The other teams are more interested in outputs / deliverables from using the core messaging framework. Hope this helps!

Certainly when a new product has been defined, you want to get out and get a regular drumbeat of messaging feedback. When there are big new releases on features (eg: around the time of your annual keynote), it’s helpful to do a refresh. Or if a competitor has made a big move and you need to assess the new state of your product’s competitive differentiation.

Lots of ways to do this, but there are 'tactical' and 'strategic' ways to measure success. Tactically, setting up metrics-based feedback loops in the go-to-market is key. We used Outreach in our SDR efforts that offers a great, low-risk way to quickly test messaging, we measured content performance in the field via analytics on our Box fileshare, and, obviously, demand gen performance reviews are important. Win/loss reviews are also great. I like to get about 20-25 reps to provide feedback every quarter. And win/loss feedback is the quickest path to getting meaningful feedback on messaging (and go-to-market strategy). Shout-out to the PulseQA folks as well. You can get feedback from 100 IT, security, or CTOs on your messaging, positioning, etc. Takes a couple weeks. If you do that, be sure to have a few open-ended questions. That's where all the gold nuggets come from. I did one on Zero Trust a couple months ago and asked 'what is the biggest concern you have on security in the public cloud'. Feedback was amazing!! And, then there are 'strategic' ways to measure success. Performance in a Gartner MQ or Forrester Wave is certainly important as that's an annual report card on messaging at a high-level.

When I was at Okta, PMM was under the Chief Product Officer, so my peer was our head of product management. We had a ‘triad’ model of one PMM, one PM, and one TMM (tech marketing manager) per product for the first 8 years. That worked pretty well as the PM/PMM lead essentially owned the business plan and go-to-market plan for their product. Shared foxhole, so to speak. Tech Marketing was really focused on compete (especially Microsoft compete), technical content and SE enablement. After we got to about $100M in ARR, we had to shift to more of a solutions marketing approach. This happens naturally and typically when the product portfolio gets to 3-4 products. It becomes confusing for customers if there’s all of this content organized around products vs. problems customers have. So, we started having dual responsibility for a product and solution. You can see the solutions on the Okta site, all centered around our the top 80% of customer problems (prevent data breaches, collaborate with partners, increase M&A agility, etc). Post IPO, PMM moved under the CMO. Again, natural. Early days, it was more important to be aligned to the rapid evolution of the product. But, over time, the needs of the large field started becoming more and more urgent to align to.

There’s basically one big one and that’s focusing too much on product/benefit and not enough on fitting the narrative into how a customer views their world, their priorities, and setting the table for the new world. There are all kinds of tools for salespeople to essentially become a consultative partner to their customer - Command of the Message, Challenger Selling, etc. As marketers, we don’t really have a single framework to help us build a narrative in the way that these sales frameworks do. The net of the issue is that we don’t stay focused on answering the 3 big ‘why' questions that a rep needs to answer to close a sale: 1) why buy anything, 2) why buy now, and 3) why buy you. The idea is that if your messaging/story can answer these three questions better than your competition, customers will buy from you. Over the past couple years, I’ve been working with a couple dozen startups here at Unusual Ventures and see the same problem at play with our founders. So, I wrote a new messaging guide that we’re going to be publishing (for free) called “Three Why Storytelling ”. It’s a simple storytelling framework that nets out 6 steps to crafting a story that wins customers: Why Buy Anything 1. Start with an authentic founder insight 2. Align on shared view of impact Why Buy Now 3. Connect problem to business urgency 4. Show current solutions to be ineffective Why Buy You 6. Frame new approach to solve the problem 7. Prove unique offering and value Is this rocket science? No. You’ve probably seen each of these concepts in various forms all over. But this framework strives to simplify and codify the building blocks of a story that, when laid out together, form an airtight, irrefutable narrative that is purpose-built to lead customers to your solution as the best choice. By the way, if I had to pick one ‘Why’ that is most underrepresented in messaging, it is most definitely Why Buy Now. We are conditioned to think in problem/solution terms. But the reality is that there are two types of problems - big problems (we’re moving from on-premises software to SaaS) and urgent problems (my business units are going around my IT team and signing up for SaaS apps like Dropbox and Concur, cutting us out of our core function!). Big problems are market-focused while urgent problems are customer-focused. Companies that obsess on Why Buy Now typically have a solutions marketing mentality that starts with the customer initiative and works back to product vs. the other way around. Here’s the draft .pdf of 3 Why Storytelling. Would love any feedback! 

There is a classic fit in / stand out paradox that all companies have. On the one hand, most companies are improving on an existing way of solving a problem, there’s budget for that category, and therefore opportunity to pursue. It’s really, really expensive to create a completely new category as a new company, with a few exceptions. Salesforce create the category for SaaS software, for example. But they had to spend a lot of time and $$ on the whole ‘no software’ mantra. On the other hand, you want to obviously stand out from the crowd with differentiators and unique capabilities clearly articulated. So there’s a balance needed to fit in to a problem that people have but set the table in such a way where your solution is the best choice. A couple of examples, Okta and Citrix. At Okta, we pushed early on with analysts and influencers to create a sub-category of Identity and Access Management (“IAM”) called Identity-as-a-Service (“IDaaS”). Took a few years, but we got Gartner to do an MQ just on cloud-based identity. The requirements for IDaaS were similar in function but very different in execution from classic IAM. IDaaS solutions had to excel at connecting to cloud apps like Box and Office365, have a seamless mobile/desktop UI, have a meta-directory that could sync profile data back and forth from other identity sources, etc. These were requirements pushed by Okta and other cloud-first players like OneLogin and Microsoft to the analyst/early influencer community. Over time, market maturity led Gartner to merge the two together into one “Access Management” MQ and now cloud-first players sit next to (and run circles around!) traditional on-premises players like Oracle, Tivoli, and CA. So, early days, it was important to ‘fit in’ to the identity market, but ‘stand out’ with a strong POV on how the world is changing and that change necessitates new capabilities that legacy providers don’t have. On Citrix, we were late to the mobile device management market (“MDM”), so the approach there was to deposition vanilla MDM by adding Application Management (app wrapping/security) and Data Management (secure Dropbox) on top of MDM and working with a 3rd tier analyst to coin the term “EMM” or Enterprise Mobility Management. Then, we went around telling early customers that they needed to ‘go beyond’ MDM to a EMM solution… Citrix… for ‘complete’ app, data, AND device management (everyone loves ‘complete’ - just be sure you’re the one defining what it is!) Something Citrix did really well on competitive positioning, btw, was ranking key features on a 3-point scale: * Table-stakes: required capabilities that everyone and where there’s no clear uniqueness. * Competitive differentiators: everyone has the capability, but your company does it better * Purple cows: your company provides this capability and no one else has it So in practice, here’s how that netted out for our entry into the mobility market: * Mobile Device Management: table stakes. Everyone has it, no one had a big advantage * Mobile App Management: differentiated. We put a security ‘wrapper’ around applications that protected them from security breaches. Not unique to us but the easy wrapping capabilities were novel. * Mobile Data Management: purple cow. No mobility vendor offered a secure Dropbox-like capability. We generated 70% of our mobility sales based on this unique capability. This is a practical way of designing in the fit-in/stand-out paradox into message development.

Posted this on another similar question, but on the competitive positioning point specifically, I think there's a 'turn' in the narrative toward the end of the story where existing solutions can't solve the problem completely and it's good to have specifics on how your solution is better. But you never want to lead with the competitive view because that tends to cause a lot of friction between yourself and the customer. The goal is that the customer realizes you're a better approach to where the world is going and through that lens, the discussion narrative is all around jointly figuring out the best way to solve the problem. ---- As for messaging frameworks, a couple to try out. Here’s a combined messaging source doc that I use every time I start working with one of our portfolio companies. Inherited from Citrix days and then adapted over time. Hope it’s helpful! The second one is one I've been working on for a year and am sharing with the Sharebird community before publishing for feedback. The core idea is that I've that that a lot of messaging focuses too much on product/benefit and not enough on fitting the narrative into a broader context of how a customer views their world, their priorities, and setting the table for the new world. Interestingly, there are all kinds of tools for salespeople to essentially become a consultative partner to their customer - Command of the Message, Challenger Selling, etc. As marketers, we don’t really have a single framework to help us build a narrative in the way that these sales frameworks do. The net of the issue is that we don’t stay focused on answering the 3 big ‘why' questions that a rep needs to answer to close a sale: 1) why buy anything, 2) why buy now, and 3) why buy you. The idea is that if your messaging/story can answer these three questions better than your competition, customers will buy from you. Over the past couple years, I’ve been working with a couple dozen startups here at Unusual Ventures and see the same problem at play with our founders. So, I wrote a new messaging guide that we’re going to be publishing (for free) called “Three Why Storytelling”. It’s a simple storytelling framework that nets out 6 steps to crafting a story that wins customers: Why Buy Anything 1. Start with an authentic founder insight 2. Align on shared view of impact Why Buy Now 3. Connect problem to business urgency 4. Show current solutions to be ineffective Why Buy You 6. Frame new approach to solve the problem 7. Prove unique offering and value Is this rocket science? No. You’ve probably seen each of these concepts in various forms all over. But this framework strives to simplify and codify the building blocks of a story that, when laid out together, form an airtight, irrefutable narrative that is purpose-built to lead customers to your solution as the best choice. By the way, if I had to pick one ‘Why’ that is most underrepresented in messaging, it is most definitely Why Buy Now. We are conditioned to think in problem/solution terms. But the reality is that there are two types of problems - big problems (we’re moving from on-premises software to SaaS) and urgent problems (my business units are going around my IT team and signing up for SaaS apps like Dropbox and Concur, cutting us out of our core function!). Big problems are market-focused while urgent problems are customer-focused. Companies that obsess on Why Buy Now typically have a solutions marketing mentality that starts with the customer initiative and works back to product vs. the other way around. Here’s the draft .pdf of 3 Why Storytelling. Would love any feedback! 

Ah, a tricky one! There are a few things that you can do, starting with a core team that you trust to participate in the fluidity that is message development. Typically, this is a small group that can speak to all the core concepts that you need to discuss in detail. At Okta, this was our product management and product marketing team plus a couple of ‘super AE/SEs’ to provide field input. Once a baseline message has been developed, then it’s best to iterate quickly via testing. For example, we use PulseQA quite a bit to get IT/security feedback on our messaging. Or 1:1 interviews of key reps and customers. You need a couple dozen data points to ensure you’re identifying all the core themes of feedback. THEN, you’re ready to socialize with the other stakeholders. But you’re coming armed to that conversation with customer/field infused data vs. your opinion.

A couple to try out. Here’s a combined messaging source doc that I use every time I start working with one of our portfolio companies. Inherited from Citrix days and then adapted over time. Hope it’s helpful! The second one is one I've been working on for a year and am sharing with the Sharebird community before publishing for feedback. The core idea is that I've that that a lot of messaging focuses too much on product/benefit and not enough on fitting the narrative into a broader context of how a customer views their world, their priorities, and setting the table for the new world. Interestingly, there are all kinds of tools for salespeople to essentially become a consultative partner to their customer - Command of the Message, Challenger Selling, etc. As marketers, we don’t really have a single framework to help us build a narrative in the way that these sales frameworks do. The net of the issue is that we don’t stay focused on answering the 3 big ‘why' questions that a rep needs to answer to close a sale: 1) why buy anything, 2) why buy now, and 3) why buy you. The idea is that if your messaging/story can answer these three questions better than your competition, customers will buy from you. Over the past couple years, I’ve been working with a couple dozen startups here at Unusual Ventures and see the same problem at play with our founders. So, I wrote a new messaging guide that we’re going to be publishing (for free) called “Three Why Storytelling”. It’s a simple storytelling framework that nets out 6 steps to crafting a story that wins customers: Why Buy Anything 1. Start with an authentic founder insight 2. Align on shared view of impact Why Buy Now 3. Connect problem to business urgency 4. Show current solutions to be ineffective Why Buy You 6. Frame new approach to solve the problem 7. Prove unique offering and value Is this rocket science? No. You’ve probably seen each of these concepts in various forms all over. But this framework strives to simplify and codify the building blocks of a story that, when laid out together, form an airtight, irrefutable narrative that is purpose-built to lead customers to your solution as the best choice. By the way, if I had to pick one ‘Why’ that is most underrepresented in messaging, it is most definitely Why Buy Now. We are conditioned to think in problem/solution terms. But the reality is that there are two types of problems - big problems (we’re moving from on-premises software to SaaS) and urgent problems (my business units are going around my IT team and signing up for SaaS apps like Dropbox and Concur, cutting us out of our core function!). Big problems are market-focused while urgent problems are customer-focused. Companies that obsess on Why Buy Now typically have a solutions marketing mentality that starts with the customer initiative and works back to product vs. the other way around. Here’s the draft .pdf of 3 Why Storytelling. Would love any feedback! 

Ah, a tricky one! There are a few things that you can do, starting with a core team that you trust to participate in the fluidity that is message development. Typically, this is a small group that can speak to all the core concepts that you need to discuss in detail. At Okta, this was our product management and product marketing team plus a couple of ‘super AE/SEs’ to provide field input. Once a baseline message has been developed, then it’s best to iterate quickly via testing. For example, we use PulseQA quite a bit to get IT/security feedback on our messaging. Or 1:1 interviews of key reps and customers. You need a couple dozen data points to ensure you’re identifying all the core themes of feedback. THEN, you’re ready to socialize with the other stakeholders. But you’re coming armed to that conversation with customer/field infused data vs. your opinion.