Data-Driven B2B Marketing Themes for 2024

During 2023 there was the obvious rise of using AI (and other forms of LLMs) to assist marketing’s efficiency and effectiveness.  However, most of the uses of AI I’ve seen were in the areas of (a) content generation, and (b) CS and chatbots. 

Entering 2024, I’m hoping that we see deeper use of AI/ML to enhance the marketing domains of understanding customers, enriching marketing datasets, and better analysis of customer journeys.

In short, I believe – and hope to see – the following B2B marketing trends progress… and hope that B2B Marketing leaders begin to invest in the following: 

• Use of Mass-Customization in Marketing
• Turn to Data-Driven Customer Targeting
• The Death of Traditional Lead Attribution  

I’ve also added a few resources below each observation if you’d like to look more deeply.  Please leave comments, notes and other insights so that others can learn from this! 

1. Use of Mass-Customization in Marketing: 


AI is now being applied to “mass customization” (personalization-at-scale) of content, marketing outreach, web experience, and even product experience.  As marketing departments mature from using LLMs/AI for simple content creation, they’ll find that combining AI with customer data enrichment will open the floodgates to creating even better Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP).  

AI tools are being increasingly used to enrich customer data; not just to add missing contact information and addresses, but to uncover individual customer use-cases, jobs-to-be-done, existing tech-stacks, previous purchase history, social network engagement and more. This data can be assembled for much more precise targeting, outreach, product recommendations, and of course content.

In 2024 I hope to see marketing leaders decrease their “spray-and-pray” outbound marketing and demand generation – in favor of using AI-based tools that will both harvest/enrich contact information (see below) to generate more relevant, ICP-based outreach.  The results could be an order-of-magnitude improvement in outreach response and click-through rates.

For deeper insight: 

• The Intersection Of AI & ABM: Transforming B2B Content Syndication (Mark Nachlis)
• The Power of Personalization in Mass Customization (Faster Capital) 

2. Data-Driven Customer Targeting: 

Building Ideal Customer Profiles has largely resided in the area of assembling personas - and doing so has largely been qualitative research, experimentation, and a pinch of guesswork.

In 2024, I see top-of-funnel ICP creation becoming far more precise and data-driven, leveraging new AI-driven data enrichment, correlation, and analysis. This will be guided by targeting the highest lifetime-value customers, as well as those with the lowest acquisition costs.  

As the trend continues (I hope) we’ll also see a shift to augmenting existing Customer Relationship (CRM) systems with newer Customer Data Platforms (CDPs).  CDPs collect/amass more information about customers than what is simply entered by sales and marketing teams.  I see CDPs leveraging publicly-available 3rd-party data sources, social, etc.  to add to customer profiles.  The results will (a) help better understand existing customers and needs, as well as (b) help predict sources and ways to ID net new customers. 

Source: Alignicp.com

For deeper insight: 

• What is an ideal customer profile? (Unusual Ventures) 
• The Framework for Ideal Customer Profile Development (Gartner)
• Best Customer Data Platforms (Forbes Advisor)

3. The Death of Lead Attribution  

In the very recent past, Lead Attribution and last-touch tracking was used to determine what resources “caused” customers to convert (and what org got the credit). In my opinion, this approach has been simplistic and short-sighted. 

In addition, cookie restrictions and web tracking limitations are making these approaches even more difficult to implement. 

In response, marketers will begin to use more holistic (and privacy-centric) approaches to finding the sources of marketing and sales leads. Strategies like adopting first-party data collection, data enrichment tools, investing in predictive analytics, leveraging AI-driven models, and emphasizing contextual targeting will gain traction.  

Plus, advanced analytics and ML algorithms enables a deeper understanding of customer behavior and allows for more detailed attribution models that take into account various touchpoints and interactions. One of the key benefits of using ML in attribution modeling is its ability to identify the most significant touchpoints in the customer journey, even when those touchpoints may not be obvious.

For deeper insight:

• Future of marketing attribution: How AI changes the game (Segmentstream) 
• Why It’s Time to Change Your Attribution Model (Pecan)

Final Thought

These themes are simply observations I've made as a practitioner; please leave comments, notes and other insights so that others can learn from this! 

First Steps to Find Product-Market Fit: Zero-In on Your ICP

Recently I spent 2 days at the Techstars FounderCon event in San Francisco. And during the previous week I participated in their “mentor madness” events, meeting 1:1 with dozens of founders.

What was clear in 80% of my meetings was an urgent need for early product founders to narrow-down their focus on their Ideal Customer Profile…. And to try to stop “selling to anyone”.

Indeed, so many founders - especially those with technical backgrounds - felt they were building a platform that would appeal to a huge swath of the market. The problem with this approach is that with a limited budget, their priority is to prove their concept… not to show scale (or even revenue). Investors and leadership need to know that there is actually a market for their product – one in which customers will be thrilled by the value it creates.

This is true for new products at established companies, not just startups.

Indeed, the classic product-market-fit metric, the “Sean Ellis Test”, needs to show ~ 40% of customers would be “very disappointed” if the product no longer existed. This isn’t a metric for how many people adopt your product – but rather one that shows sustainable product value.

The takeaway is first to find a narrow customer profile (perhaps uncomfortably narrow) that you can define, identify, target, and win. Worry about scaling later. The advantages of this rationale are:

• Efficiency: A narrow focus makes your outreach more cost efficient
• Data: The feedback from a narrow customer segment is statistically meaningful
• Value Focus: you’ll find the exact value you provide to a precise type of customer

A great summary from Robert Kaminski recently illustrated this – How brand-names got their start…. With an uncomfortably-narrow initial focus:

• PayPal owned payments for eBay sellers before they were in every online checkout.
• Facebook owned online social networking at Harvard, before your mom (and the rest of the world) signed up.
• Airbnb spread their concept through New York and San Francisco before they disrupted the hotel industry. (Uber did the same thing)
• Amazon dominated the book market before they owned all e-commerce.
• eBay owned the collector items market before they took over all online auctions.

Where to begin: Focus, Focus, Focus

Typically I see marketers at all sizes and types of companies default into a blurry, imprecise customer profile, believing that a firmographic customer definition is sufficient. But for an early-stage B2B company, there are many more ICP dimensions of focus you need to consider:

• Firmographics: the broadest filter to use that helps narrow-down the type of businesses you are targeting. The most common basic step to define customers.
• Psychographics: Getting to know the *buyers* and *influencers” you’ll be marketing to. Understand the language they use, the problems they’re solving, and where to find them when it comes time to market to them.
• Jobs-to-be-Done: Describes the *specific* jobs and outcomes the buyers are trying to achieve with your product. E.g. What are the specific problems, solutions, and workflows they use? How would your product fit-in and enhance their experience?
• Technical Indicators: Are there specific technologies or products that would bias the company into buying yours? Are there products in use that would *not* bias the customer to buy from you? What technology categories would they turn to find yours?

Next: Form a hypothesis, test, repeat!

Now comes hard work… manual reaching-out to, and conversations with, individuals who’ll help you validate your ICP hypothesis. These are *not* sales calls. Start with connections, colleagues, social networks, etc. and ask relatively open-ended questions. What makes sense about your product to them? How do they describe it? What do they compare it to? Do they reach an “aha!” moment where they see value? What value is it, and what got them to that point? Try to identify as many firmographic, psychographic, JTBD, and technical indicators as you can.

This process will take weeks if not months, and you should have perhaps 50 conversations – during which time you’ll find yourself constantly refining your “pitch”, challenging your value propositions, and maybe reconsidering much of the product itself. You’ll come to realize that your initial ICP might be off (or totally wrong). But the result will be invaluable learnings that you probably didn’t even anticipate when conceiving of your product.

Research Approach for ICPs

My own ICP experience at a series-A big-data startup showed how many levels and iterations of ICP research, experimentation, outreach, and refocus are needed. This process took the better part of a year before clearly understanding who to initially target. And it turns out that the “traditional” firmographics (e.g. vertical industry, company size) had almost no bearing on finding an ideal customer…




Also Ask: What’s My Category?

As you do your research, you also need to uncover the *product category* you fit into. That is, how do customers think about your product, and where do they conceptually place it? This is all about letting the market *informing you* about where your product fits. And with this knowledge, you’ll better understand competitors and alternatives, as well as keywords and search terms to use.

One important thing to note: Don’t try to create a new category! (or, at least not yet). No matter how “cool” or unique your product is, categories are defined by their competition and by having a defined market. Chances are, at an early stage, you’re not defining a new category. While some products may indeed merit a new category, a challenge is that *no one* will know to ask for, or search for, a product in a category that’s new. . So go with what’s understood.

Great places to begin to discover and define your category (and associated language to use when marketing) are product review sites and industry analysts. For example, G2, Capterra and TrustRadius group products into categories for comparison. Analysts such as Gartner (the Gartner Magic Quadrant) and Forrester (the Forrester Wave), also group products by category. Follow these market-driven definitions as you bring your own product to market.




ICP in the Broader PMF Context

Now that you have a clear 1.0 ICP – which may have taken months to hone-in on – your real go-to-market work can begin: Closing your first early-adopter customers.

As you progress in your go-to-market journey and begin growth, you still should do customer research on your ICP. Why? Because (a) you’ll find that customer expectations change, (b) markets change, (c) competition changes, (d) different customer segments have different ICP requirements.

Consider embedding an “ICP Mentality” into your marketing, customer success, and sales organizations. As you mature, you’ll iterate into a “v 2.0” ICP. This is where you also begin to identify your “superfans” (high-expectation customers who’ll give you regular detailed feedback) and a regular process to poll customers and track ICPs for different solutions, verticals, etc.. And eventually, you should build a customer advisory board made up of customer advocates and high-expectation customers … choose those that will be candid, direct, honest, and representative of the various segments that you sell to.

ICP Maturity Model Stages

Embedding an ICP Mentality also serves to align your entire organization. A single, agreed-upon ICP (or set of ICPs for different products/markets) helps focus messaging, sales and even finance… and avoids that messy finger-pointing between sales and marketing (HT to Dan Sperring):

• Marketing/Sales -
• Agreed-upon GTM & campaign focus
• Consistent lead qualification & prioritization
• Sales/Finance -
• Planning & forecasting based on ICP segment targets
• Finance/Marketing -
• Computation of CLTV based on ICP segments
• Estimation retention based on ICP segments

Other thoughts? I always welcome them!

Additional ICP References

• George Leith: What is an Ideal Customer Profile and 6 Ways to Identify ICPs
• Lenny Rachitsky: How to identify your ideal customer profile
• Product Marketing Alliance: How to create an ideal customer profile
• Gartner: The Framework for Ideal Customer Profile Development

Announcing: Fountainhead Product Marketing

I’m happy to announce my newest professional chapter: Establishing Fountainhead Product Marketing, an advisory and consulting practice focused on serving early-to-mid stage engineering-led companies.

Fountainhead is based on leveraging product-market fit as the core model to help B2B SaaS companies organize teams and improve their marketing.

Full article published here on LinkedIn

What are “Team APIs” and why should product marketers use them?

The API metaphor is a powerful concept when thinking about how marketing teams and adjacent orgs need to intercommunicate. Basically, your goal is to formalize your information exchanges, frequency, and formats so that you begin to build regular bridges with other important players at your company.  It's also a great metaphor for organizing standard company interactions of any kind....

Complete article posted on Product Marketing Alliance

A Product Marketing Tech Stack for B2B SaaS

I’ve always been a proponent of organizing Product Marketing using the Product/Market Fit framework – thinking about marketing as a set of inside-out components, as well outside-in components. And each component has its own set of technologies, as well as a set of outcome-based goals/metrics.

 

I’ve expanded on this model using a few different approaches and ultimately found it useful to organize marketing technologies as well.  Note: The products I list are only ones I’ve had direct and/or indirect work with – this is by no means a scientifically or statistically-derived list. What’s most useful (IMHO) is how to think about categorizing tools, and how those categories map onto PMM functions and organizations....

Complete Article Published on LinkedIn

5 Missteps New CMOs Should Avoid at Early-Stage B2B Companies

You’ve just landed a marketing leadership role at a Series-A or -B tech company – offering a SaaS product in the B2B space. 

During the interview process you’re told how great the product is, how unique it is in the market, how it blows-away the competition, and how it fills an un-yet met need. But, if you believe it all, be prepared to fail.  

I have to openly admit to having made just about all of the missteps below at some point in my career. So, I’m sharing these personal observations from 20+ years of leading marketing, product marketing, and product management teams in a number of small (and large) Enterprise B2B software/SaaS companies.  Think of this as a Getting-Started Playbook as an early-stage hire... or for that matter, as any type of marketing leadership hire.....

Full Article Published on LinkedIn

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The How (not the what) of Product-Led Growth

5 organizations and 14 metrics that make PLG work

There is an explosion of articles focusing on the popularity of the PLG growth model, analyses of company valuation, and quite a bit written about growth metrics for this new model. 

But I want to parse the problem a bit differently, focusing not only on the goals an aspiring PLG company should set at each stage of the sales cycle... but also on how to organize delivery of a successful PLG product.  IMO, these are the real keys to PLG success.

Most Important: How to *Organize* for Successful PLG Execution

I’ve found that most PLG articles stop at this point. But to be successful and designing and executing on the strategy, the company has to think and act in new ways. And that means core organizations need to be structured specifically in a PLG-related fashion.

Consider that the product itself needs to be designed so it’s more easily adopted and onboarded; that it needs to be instrumented differently so as to track speed bumps in the customer journey; that it generates triggers when it’s time to send-in the ‘big guns” to close large deals. 

At least 5 organizations need to be part of this company-wide effort, and each should be accountable to the overall PLG/DLG plan.  Leaders of these 5 organizations must choose which PLG metrics they can impact, and be willing to adjust/experiment/adapt to improve.  

Full article published on LinkedIn

Three SuperPowers Every Marketer Should Develop

Why Paranoia, Customer Intimacy, and Peripheral Vision are key skills for Product Marketing Management

If you’re going to be in Product Marketing - or in any company leadership position - I’ve found that the same 3 “superpowers” keep recurring in successful careers. These aren’t operational or functional skills per se. Rather, they are persistent perspectives that leaders with insight always keep in the back of their minds.

First, there’s always maintaining a healthy dose of Paranoia.  That is, you haven’t drunk the product Cool-Aide, that your product/company must be the best. Second, there is the requirement for customer closeness and intimacy - knowing your core buyers inside-and-out. Then finally, there is what I call Product Peripheral Vision - understanding your product/service in a greater customer and competitive context.

Embody these, and you’ll always add value to the company, to your product, and to your customers.  

1. A Super-Healthy Sense of Paranoia

Andy Grove - of Intel fame - literally wrote the book: “Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company.”  In this he famously pointed out that "Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction... Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive”.  He narrowed-down this statement to 6 Forces, but in my opinion, a good PMM focuses on the following paranoia:

• Competition - assume they’re always trying to be better than you - and perhaps they already are. Don’t be complacent or simply dismiss the competition. Take them seriously, and always question whether you’re really more compelling to customers.
• Alternatives - your biggest disruption won’t necessarily hit you head-on. Customers always look for alternatives, including “good-enough” solutions that can invisibly displace you.  Always be on the look-out for the closest alternatives customers use… and why.
• Differentiation - while you probably *think* you’re differentiated, you’re likely not (at least, not as much as you think).   Take a cold-hard look at how really different you are from a customer’s perspective, and push to modify your offer as well as your marketing.
• Industry changes - while you’re focused on segment or category “A”, there’s always the possibility that a completely different industry imperative will shift customers to different categories. Be ready to adapt.

2. Super Closeness to the Customer, Customer intimacy

As a marketing leader - ensuring that your product has proper market fit with your target customers, you Must be the SuperPower expert about your customers. And you need to communicate these learnings back into the company, specifically back to marketing, product management, and sales.  

• Know the customer at every level - Know the decision-makers vs. buyers vs. users. The tactical reasons they buy, as well as the strategic business reasons. 
• Why they bought - You’ll need to get inside their heads regarding why they chose your product, how they evaluated it, how they use it - on a daily basis.
• Know Alternatives - Similar to the Paranoia topic above, you’ll need to know what alternative (and competitors) they considered during the process - and *why*. What was attractive to them, how they got the names, whether they’re *still* considering the alternatives.
• Ask the critical question - “How would you feel if you *didn’t* have this product?” The answer will be telling - indicating how well your “fit” is to the customer, how much they value the uniqueness, and how critical your product is to the customer’s outcomes. 
• Intimacy vs. Focus - There are subtle differences between customer intimacy and customer closeness.  Ensure you develop the right insights and relationships so you can serve -- and even better -- anticipate their needs. 

3. Maintaining Super Peripheral Vision

One of the best SuperPowers you can develop as a marketer or businessperson is the ability to see out beyond the myopia of your own product, technology, and even industry segment.  Always be looking for (worrying about?)  adjacencies, routes-to-market, partnerships, and the “Whole Product” aspect of your offering. 

• Think “Whole Product” - That is, partners, ecosystems, channels. Most B2B products simply don’t exist in a vacuum. They are bought with, or through, other technology partners, value-add ecosystems and channels. Every product exists and abuts other products and technologies.  Every decision you make has to take these realities into account.
• Focus on indirect competition / alternatives - The notion of maintaining peripheral vision also applies to alternatives and competition.   What other distant adjacencies are (or will be) intersecting with your own market? Are any of them potential partners - before they become competition? 
• Consider similar (but different) market plays - I always like to think about product and marketing analogies in different markets that either worked or failed… and whether those analogies apply to product /market.  Do they help reframe product positioning? Value propositions? Routes-to-market? 

Got any other suggestions on critical "Super Powers" ? let me know!

Product/Market Fit As a Organizing Principle for PMMs

“Product-market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.

Marc Andreessen, co-founder and General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz, Guide to Startups

When I’m asked “What does Product Marketing do?” I respond that it’s the core role that drives product-market fit, matching the product to the right buyers. All markets are made up of buyers and sellers… and when the needs of buyers are met by the offers of sellers, there’s a transaction. For me, it’s the role of Product Marketing Management (PMM) to drive this for the company that is, to influence product development to meet the market needs, and to help find the right market buyers that need the product being offered. When both of those conditions are met (and it’s a continual process!) there’s great fit and a successful business. (Really, this is just a variation of Bid/Ask). So, PMMs are the core role rationalizing Product Management, Sales, and Go-to-Market motions. 

Full article published to LinkedIn

Advice to the Aspiring Employee

I’ve spent the past few weeks busy evaluating team performance for our semi-annual review process. And every year, I take it more seriously because every year I realize how much more important *people* are to the company. 

I used to think this was a throw-away comment - but hiring, developing, promoting and rewarding the “A” players is the difference between a high-performing company, and all the other average players.

Anyone reading this might ask, “Well, what do you mean by an ‘A’ player? I work really hard. I have great ideas. I’ve got experience. Doesn’t that make me an ‘A’ player too? How do I get promoted?” 

Well, from a manager’s perspective, here’s the advice I give, and what I look for in “A” players - and believe most other management does too.

1. Table-Stakes: Do your core job well. You’re expected to be competent, handle your responsibilities, know your skills, execute on-time, and keep your accountabilities on-track.  And for all of that, you’ll achieve being a solid “average” player.  There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this - unless you’re looking to grow, get a promotion, and excel at the company. But you have to start here.
   
   
2. Next: Your willingness and ability to go above-and-beyond. This means that if/when there is a “crunch-time”, when there is an aggressive project, an emergency, a “special assignment” etc., you’re willing to put in the extra hours to get it done. These extra hours might be over a period of days -- and occasionally over weeks. But you’ve got to be willing to show your commitment to do this. It means that you’re able to identify the important projects (maybe only 1-2 a year) and rally to deliver them on time. Your management will notice, because it shows an awareness and commitment to do what needs to get done. BTW, a word of caution: This does NOT mean you are constantly working 80 hour weeks! (you’ll burn yourself out).  
   
   
3. The hard one: Learn to push the envelope of your Job Description: Here’s the aspect of your job that signals your most “promotable” aspect: I like to think of it as “pushing the envelope” of the job. Others might call it “working at the next level above you”. Either way, it means you are thinking outside the box that’s called your job description.
   
   Is there an idea you have that management hasn’t thought of? An opportunity nobody’s identified yet? A strategy that hasn’t been pursued? Whatever the instance, it should be incremental to your role (but not so “blue-sky” as to be immediately dismissed).  But here’s the key: Management *loves* new ideas - and execution of those ideas - coming from employees. It means the employee is interested, motivated, ambitious. Who wouldn’t like someone like that on their team?
   
   One other perspective in which to hold “pushing the envelope”: It’s all about your attitude. Try this thought experiment - if you got a promotion tomorrow, what would you do differently? How would you act? What goals would you set for yourself? How would you team/partner differently? How would you communicate differently with management?  So start acting/doing all of that NOW! Promotions most frequently happen to people who are ALREADY acting and executing at the next level. 
   

What if you don’t know what “outside the box” means for you?  Then my recommendation is to brainstorm with your manager… or with their manager. You don’t need to have all the answers, but you should show the eagerness to inquire and discover. 

There are tons of other skills, attitudes, and attributes that’ll help you be a star. And sometimes, it’s just-plain experience that helps too. 

But if you’re wondering “how will I get that great review” or “am I promotable”, my suggestion is to first focus on the 3 points above.

Gartner MQ, Forrester Wave: A Disservice to Innovation?

Note: Read this blog more as a wakeup call to vendors than as a criticism of Industry Analysts. By inadvertently playing into analysts’ narrow definition of products and categories, vendors can become distracted from their real goal – pursuing meaningful, valuable, and unique innovation. 

Prologue
Industry analysts have an important job in the technology industry: To help customers better understand trends, technologies, and vendors, so they can make better, more confident purchasing decisions. And for vendors, analysts are helpful by providing market research, trend analysis and evaluation of products and technologies.

But in my experience, analysts also have a fine line to walk when they make vendor evaluations. Since analysts take money from both vendors and customers, they put themselves in potential conflict-of-interest positions, if not also risking bias.  This is made worse by lack of transparency in their evaluation methodologies.

The most popular – and influential – evaluation tools analysts offer are periodic product analyses and ratings. The well-known Gartner Magic Quadrant (MQ) and Forrester Wave are at the top of the list, with others such as KuppingerCole’s Leadership Compass. These reports are pervasive, with Wikipedia listing 66 different Gartner MQs – with many more unlisted.

Unintended consequence: Category myopia

A closer look at how the MQs, Waves, and other evaluation are constructed reveals massive spreadsheets that vendors are asked to complete. They largely focus on product feature comparisons, and to a lesser degree, company operations. I’ve personally helped complete countless numbers of these – and it’s often a multi-person, multi-week vendor effort.

But the spreadsheet questionnaires have an unintended consequence: They inadvertently treat each vendor product/category as a fungible, semi-generic solution to meet a limited set of problems.  Further, they often track technology categories that can quickly become outdated, even as analysts struggle to update them.

The result is that vendors are compelled to play the analyst’s game... not their own.   The unintended myopia – the forced “thinking-inside-the-box” – manifests itself this way:

• Vendors end up spending time, R&D resources, and marketing expense to chase feature boxes that will yield them high evaluation scores.  This inadvertent “keeping up with the Jones’ ” for feature parity does an injustice to innovation they would otherwise pursue.  It is the rare visionary vendor that’s able to say “screw the features the analysts want, we want to innovate in a different direction”.  And, unfortunately, those same vendors might be penalized in the next vendor evaluation for not “checking the boxes” even though they may have a breakthrough approach to the market.
• Customers may also be misled by these evaluations, often narrowly viewing the product sector through the narrow lens presented by the analysts.  While some customers will benefit by an apples-to-apples comparison of features, many may miss appreciating the variation in vendor options, approaches, and overall direction/strategy – things not generally reflected in simple checkbox evaluations. 

True innovators are penalized
A great set of podcasts by Christopher Lochhead focus on “legendary marketers” and innovators who re-think their products, market strategies, and ultimately create new concepts and categories.  But in the world of  standard analyst categories, innovators of new categories are penalized, because (a) they are not being considered for a MQ or wave, or (b) receive poorer ratings on the standard category ratings... even if they offer a truly revolutionary approach to solving a technology problem.


Now, to play my own devil’s advocate, I recognize the need for analysts to create some level of standardized evaluation criteria – the industry needs this. However, analyst criteria can be mistakenly held as the end-all and be-all, rather than as general guidance.  Further, most analysts fail to go the extra mile to fully explain the differentiations between vendors and products.

Note to Vendors: Analysts assess the Finite Game, not the Infinite Game
In his excellent new book The Infinite Game, Simon Sinek outlines the notion of great companies focusing on the “infinite game” – one where there is vision, constant reinvention and constant shifting of the playing field... and even shifting the definition of what it means to succeed.  This is in contrast to playing the “finite game” where the rules are defined, there is a limited set of metrics, and a singular clear goal to win.

The current mindset which is rewarded by MQs and Waves is that of the Finite Game... where vendors are encouraged play to their competition, innovate with the “check-the-box” mentality, and where customers might errantly treat vendor solutions as generic and fungible.

My candid vendor advice is this: Yes, we need to play the analyst’s game. There is absolutely a service to our customers using this approach. But proceed with caution and intelligence – There may not be not a need to “check all the boxes”, nor necessarily should you. Balance that effort against your own vision, direction and approach to differentiation. And ensure that if you opt for a powerful direction, albeit one that could weaken your evaluation, emphasize your believe/vision with the analysts.  Remember: There are lots of billion-dollar firms that aren’t leadership quadrant companies.

My advice if you’re a customer: Don’t blindly choose to put the top 3 vendors of a leadership quadrant on your short-list.  Look more deeply, and have your own set of criteria developed when selecting a vendor.   All-too-often, a vendor might have a solid offering in a given category, but ultimately fail to demonstrate the strategy and direction that will carry your company forward a few years in the future.

Coda: A note to analysts: 
I have the greatest respect for you – and for the incredible knowledge you have and advice you give.  (Even some of my own best friends are Analysts).  But please emphasize that your evaluations are standardized.  Go the extra mile to really understand and communicate

• how vendors differentiate their products
• where vendor visions lead and/or diverge
• adjacent categories to the vendors’ own (or categories that overlap)
• how the vendor’s products are either “pure-play” in the category, or how it expands the category definition. 

I look forward to your comments/feedback

Own Your Category With a Network-Effect Product

At the intersection of product marketing and product development is constructing a “data flywheel” business model 

I recently found myself speaking with a number of companies - in completely different industries - yet all expressing the same essential strategy: We’d like to make our product more valuable - and more difficult to duplicate - by making it constantly learn from our customers. 

I stopped to think about that as an increasingly common strategy…. And how (in contrast) I’d been accustomed to marketing products that are just a race against competitors who were adding similar features to mine. That old approach was an endless technology treadmill, constantly trying to outpace feature parity for leadership.  

My insight was that a *real* leader is a product (or service) that develops an unfair edge, a hard-to-duplicate sustainable advantage, that makes (and keeps) the offering a runaway success. The "network effect" of customer usage is how it keeps its edge over the competition.

This is how I rediscovered the notion of the “Data Flywheel”; The idea that the more relevant data you collect from users, the more you can build better learning/algorithms and continuously develop a better and more valuable product. And finally, this positive feedback is what helps you acquire even more users and defend against competitors. 

The concept of the data flywheel was originally conceived by Jim Collins, author of “From Good to Great” IMO, a seminal business book. Another great discussion of this model is from Christopher Lochhead’s podcast (#24) part of an excellent series of marketing discussions. This product-centric network effect isn’t a new concept, but definitely one I don’t (yet) see most companies pursue. With the acceptance and maturation of more Artificial Intelligence (AI) engines, I expect this trend to accelerate over the next few years.

Your customer data is value - and key to valuation 

I’ll begin with this contrast: If your business is purely transactional, if you have no ongoing relationship to customers, if your product is not constantly learning and improving from interactions, then this should be a warning sign. It's because your customers only present a single value-in-time (the moment of purchase) and that’s all. Worse, you'll eventually lose to a competitor and/or be disrupted by someone evolving faster than you.

Many in the financial industry believe that ongoing customer interactions and data have very *real* value. Consider the simplistic example of valuing a company for its customer list and their purchase history, not just for its existing cash flow. (A very good paper by Glue Reply is on models of valuation of data as an asset) Or, consider valuing a company for its customer database, not just for hardware sales… a great recent example is Google’s acquisition of Fitbit. Per Motley Fool, “...there's a lot of data in there, of course. Fitbit collects all this health data. They've been building this digital health platform, much like Apple. Both Fitbit and Apple want to help users be able to manage their health data on this platform". At the acquisition price of $2.1 billion, this represented a valuation of approximately $75/customer.... a bargain if you think about the follow-on products/services Google may be able to offer in the near future. 

I recommend both product marketing and product development need to re-think what information the company can (or should) consider collecting, using, and ultimately monetizing in the form of a continuously improving product/service... and one that can generate recurring revenue while doing so.

Where Product Marketing and Product Management might begin:

In some cases it might be obvious what information you could collect to begin to build an accretive “flywheel”. If not, I suggest bringing engineering, product management, customer success leaders, and product marketing together - for a facilitated brainstorm. 

Ideally you want to answer this: “If we just knew ____, we’d provide incredible new value and insight for our customers.'' Consider dwelling on questions such as...

1. How could we create a better customer “network effect”?
2. What types of benchmark customer data sets could we develop, offer, and use?
3. If we had it, what external data would we tap into? (Or, could we partner with others to develop it?)
4. Do our customers want to compare themselves to others? What questions do *they* ask that we could help answer?
5. What customer information do we already have that other business (even unrelated) want? how could we monetize it?
6. What continuously updated product feature or data would keep customers returning to use our product/service?
7. Could we apply AI/ML to detect customer use patterns for higher-value offerings?
8. During your session, it’s important to think outside your current business model, and even outside your current product category. Remember - you’re trying to pursue a potentially disruptive approach to an otherwise traditional product. It might lead you in some exciting directions.

Finally, you'll probably want to build a customer “data lake” (as I see it often referred to) a unique, highly-valuable collection of customer interactions, intentions and experiences. And, if used wisely, it’s what will make your product/service more competitive and sustainable. It could include customer use of your product, their interactions on your web properties, their profiles they (opt-in to) provide to you, and even related public-domain data. But choosing what data to capture is key...

A few examples to get you thinking (real and invented)

• A software security vendor - builds a database of past attack vectors across all of its customers, including a list of previously compromised login credentials. In turn, the security software provides customers with increasingly faster, more complete responses to security threats and attacks. 
• A network monitoring vendor - builds a customer database of network performance benchmarks and typical precursors to failures across various technical environments and architectures. It then constantly provides better predictive alerts to potential failures rather than waiting to react to existing failures.
• A vape pen provider - through its interactive app, assembles a database of feedback to/from customers about satisfaction ratings of oils, oil vendors, and optimal devices and temperature settings for each. It also correlates age and sex of users to preferred oils, to make suggestions for future use and purchases.
• Automobiles - Unlike traditional insurance vendors, Tesla can assemble a database of driving habits of individual drivers to create custom risk profiles allowing the company to often offer less-expensive automobile insurance than a typical broad-based actuarial tables would otherwise permit.
• Entertainment/content providers - Netflix, Amazon, and others constantly monitor viewing and purchasing habits and demographics to recommend additional products as well as follow-on entertainment suggestions for constant up-sell opportunities.
• Excercycles - Peloton has famously created a subscription service for its exercise hardware that gathers and constantly updates a database of user data and demographics, matches individuals for competitions, tracks improvement, and creates custom workouts.
• Custom Sports Helmet Vendor - a custom 3D-printed sports helmet manufacturer provides a database of customer-submitted custom designs and improvements, as well as user ages and sports levels - proactively recommending new/upgraded helmets for growing and advancing athletes.

I’d love to hear how some of you have pursued a “data flywheel” approach to your product or service - and I’m sure other readers would too.

For More Inspiration…. 

Here are some additional links/articles you might find relevant:

• Strategy+ Business: How to build disruptive strategic flywheels
• Forbes: How To Hack Your Way Into A Proprietary Data Set
• JP Morgan: Go deep on data and grow your e-commerce business
• Reply.com: The valuation of data as an asset: a consumption-based approach (PDF)

Thanks for reading! 

Improving Your Product Marketing Alignment

Product Marketing is a highly-networked function with multiple internal touchpoints that need to be actively developed and curated

In the tech/software world, I’m often asked how best to scale the Product Marketing function and how to make it a highly performing function in a growing organization. Really great product marketers are masters of understanding the problems their products solve, positioning those products, identifying ideal buyers and personas, and knowing the overall market. But that’s only where their work begins...

Complete article published to LinkedIn.

Measuring Marketing is Science, Not Art.

“If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing.”

~ W. Edwards Deming 

When in business school, I had the honor of meeting W Edwards Deming while taking a class on operations management. Deming literally wrote the book on quality and process control, and is known for his 14 Points of Total Quality Management. But only when I entered the realm of product marketing did I realize that many of Deming’s principles can directly apply to marketing process quality as well. 

As a product marketer, I’m always asked about how to set objectives, goals and actions for marketing - for individuals, for teams, and for organizations. My approach is to first ask about what the desired *outcomes* are - the OKR approach (Objectives and Key Results) and then analyze and break-down the stages of the marketing loop.  

I use a “loop” concept (and not funnel) because when marketing is done properly, it’s not a unidirectional process that ends with a sale. Rather it should feed on itself with customer loyalty and advocacy, ultimately helping you generate even more awareness.  When marketers refer to the funnel, it only corresponds to the stages of Discovery through Purchase… so if you don’t include the post-purchase stages, you’ll be blind to monitoring customer experience/use, loyalty and advocacy. Hence the value of the loop concept.

Step #1: Break down your stages / define your marketing processes

I like to use this 8-stage loop that’s specific to enterprise software marketing and purchases - but you can adapt it to your unique product/market circumstances.  In whatever manner you use it, It’s critical that your team crisply define each stage, and even the customer personas and desired interactions at each point in the loop. Work with your team to drive agreement on stages that seem logical to your organization.   For example:

• Discover: How, when and where potential buyers initially discover your company and products; it’s your first opportunity to expose your brand.
• Learn: Where and how potential buyers learn more in-depth details of your products and fit-for-use
• Compare: The first time potential customers begin to consider (and sometimes demo or trial) your offering, pricing etc. in the context of your competition or other close alternatives
• Choose: Where your decision-maker and influencers ultimately downselect to you over the competition. This could include “bake-off” comparisons, etc.
• Purchase: When, where and how your customer (and often, their purchasing agent) ultimately transacts (with you or with a channel partner of yours). This might be a one-time purchase, a subscription, site-licensing, etc.
• Usage: Post sale, where your customer (often many internal users) actually engage with your product - and hopefully derive the intended value you provide.
• Loyalty: The affinity that your customers develop internal with/for the product, your service, etc.
• Advocacy: Where, if your customers are delighted, they’ll become advocates of yours, helping drive continued discovery by new potential customers.

Step #2: Define metrics…. And team accountabilities

Once you’ve defined a set of marketing stages that aligns to your unique org, the most critical part of the process is to define “exit gates” (essentially outcome or OKR metrics) from each stage as it flows into the next. Getting these gates and metrics right is critical because they provide you with the process control and trends of each *outcome*.  In this manner you can adjust each stage’s marketing *actions* while keeping how you measure their outcomes consistent.

The example I give here is just that… your set of metrics, naming, etc. will be different.  

But one thing is important to internalize: The metrics measure the effectiveness / outcome of each stage, and *not* the activities in each stage. For example, in the “Learn” stage, we don’t want to measure the number of events attended, blogs posted or papers written.  Instead, you want to measure the number of attendees you achieve at events, blog views, and paper views/downloads. (Think content consumption not content production)

If resources permit, I also recommend that you organize the marketing organization in a way that a single person (or team) is directly accountable for the outcome metrics at each stage.  These individuals need to be singularly focused on the effectiveness - and outcomes - of each stage, working with the other teams to continuously improve the activities (and thus, the outcomes) at each gate.  

During your regular marketing and business reviews, effectiveness trends of each stage should be evaluated, and actions adjusted appropriately.  The key to process control is to precisely and consistently measure the outcomes of each stage - which I’ll explain next.

Step #3: Metric Definition

Finally, the most overlooked aspect of the process is defining exactly *how* your team plans to consistently measure each outcome. It’s not as simple - or as obvious - as it might seem.  For example, how will you count content views? Is it just pageviews + downloads? Which pages and which content? Are “views” limited to your website or will you include YouTube and 3rd-party syndicated content? And if syndicated content, then from which partners? (And, how to *they* measure “views”?)  Getting these details right and repeatable is important because these are the specific outcomes you’ll be trying to impact by continuously improving your marketing activities. 

Your Mileage May Vary

This is just an example. It will probably vary wildly based on they type of product you sell - if it’s a service, or B2B, or B2C etc, the stages and metrics will vary considerably.  My advice? Dissect your buyer’s journey into as many distinct phases as you can, and map your marketing organization’s activities/outcome onto it. That way, you can apply as much process control (and continuous improvement) as possible. 

Other thoughts/ideas? I’ve love to hear them!