Christina Lhi

It is always a good idea to factor in some time for research pre-launch to make sure your messaging is resonating with your target customer. In the past, I've done this both via quant surveys (Pros: more data driven confidence levels but Cons: Finding the right prospect audience can be expensive) and qual (Pros: can learn more of the why and insights, Cons: lower levels of confidence). Another useful tactic is to loop in your GTM teams early on to get their thoughts on concepts/messaging. But ultimately, you shouldn't use these as a crutch, you should invest more energy and time up front to build the right strategy and make sure execution is able to ladder back to that strategy. 

Some key documents that my teams have implemented for competitive positioning are starting with data gathering on points such as: key value props, feature set, target customers, pricing, strengths, customer perception. Partnering with brand and demand gen teams on creative campaign insights and media spend are also helpful to coordinate on. These inputs can then be inputs into frameworks like SWOT matrixes and battlecards for Sales/AM teams or internal one sheeters that can be good alignment collateral across product and marketing.

This is a great question. Overall, product differentiation is key and one of the roles I really enjoy within PMM is having such a pulse and influence on what differentiates your product in the market - but it's not enough to just be different, it needs to matter to your customer and it needs to come to life in your marketing. This makes me think about my time at Old Navy where denim was our largest product category year over year. (Stick with me, this will translate to tech too, I promise). There are countless options for jeans and within the value fashion category, a few key competitors we had our eyes on. On factors like quality, fashion, value, preference on washes - we were head to head with our competitors. This is why our campaign work was critical to help break through. But in our latest focus groups as part of ad campaigns, we captured insights from customers that they really loved how newer cropped styles made them feel confident "showing off their ankles" as a transition to Fall. We were able to take this insight as key input into our creative brief and overall helped reinforce our positioning as the accessble fashion destination for denim. My point is, you might find that within your competitve set your product might have a large hurdle to differentiate in the category - you should always push 100% to build the best differntiated product for your customers - but equally important, it comes back to your customers and finding the greatest value to them and reinforcing it in your GTM strategy/approach.

I like to think about positioning as the internal facing framework of how you want your sellers to perceive, understand and feel about your product. Positioning informs your messaging. It can reflect the vision for your product, key differentiators, and defines what your product is. Messaging is external facing - how your positioning comes to life with the actual messaging in the market. The key value props that are compelling to your customers can be thematic while the messaging itself is how the value prop is communicated externally.

All the time! It is so critical for PMM teams to talk to customers to understand their pain points, their jobs to be done, their delighters, motivations, etc. It's also important for GTM teams to have a pulse on customer feedback via customer success, sales and account management in order to understand potential barriers or blind spots that you may have from a PMM perspective. But it's not just enough to have a consistent flow of insights and information - it's really important to synthesize all of these datapoints into the "so what" -- the key themes that inform either product improvements or campaign specific workstreams.

Like any good marketer, it's about knowing your end customer and how they would like to consume information. All sales teams are different and finding the right communication methods (format, frequency) is important to align on up front so that you can focus your energy on being efficient and effective. Here are some tips: 1. More is not always more - sometimes we might over correct for a lack of data/deliverables by creating information overload. Sometimes teams like sales might not "actually read and use it" because it's 1 of 100 things they are trying to absorb. Take a look at what pieces of training/collateral is used by sales and if you notice some are being well used and others are not, dig in on the why. 2. Listen on sales calls. Are they bringing up the right points about your product relative to competition? This is where you will find either blind spots around things like specific feature sets or pricing info that is lacking in your competitive intel. 3. Sync up with sales teams or leads to get feedback regarding what they think is missing. Also, going back to communication, be transparent with them about how maybe you don't think materials are being ultilized and try to figure out the why, together. 

Ongoing: Google alerts to get pushed industry and/or competitive content, subscribing to your competitors lead gen lists, reading earnings call transcripts. From existing customers, (SAM teams can help here a lot!) understand who is churning and where are they switching, or any complementary products being used to fill your own product gaps. Quarterly deep dive to see if there is anything critical that needs to change about your own GTM strategy, internal or external comms.