Great B2B positioning will die inside the company if it doesn’t successfully make the jump from marketing to sales. Once you’ve worked through your positioning inside the company, the most common way for that positioning to fail is to fumble its activation in the sales team. Making that transition work is harder than it looks for many reasons. I will cover the four biggest stumbling blocks I see in the companies I work with.
100% agree too. You are THE best, April! The only thing I would add - sales never agrees with the positioning as they are still using feature-function approach to sales, which fails to communicate cohesive value. I really love your suggestion for not only involving sales, but also joining a few sales calls. There is no substitute for live prospect feedback.
Hey thanks! The most common thing I see in sales pitching in the companies I work with is the "feature dump" or product walkthrough style pitch. We can do so much better than this.
Hello April, how do we go about measuring the success of the positioning efforts? Are there some metrics (both qualitative and quantitative) that you believe we should be looking at?
I could (and should!) write a long post on this. There isn't one metric that is impacted by positioning - it impacts us across the entire customer buying journey - so it's difficult to point to a particular metric to look at to say we are good/bad. We should see improvements to where we were previously, but in B2B where we often have long sales cycles - it could take a while for us to see the impact on revenue, churn, conversion rates, deal sizes, etc. In general, if we are testing positioning using a sales pitch, we should see an immediate impact on our metrics post first sales call. In general, if the sales team feels like the new pitch is working better that is a very good early indicator that your new positioning is out-performing the old positioning.
That'd be amazing if you could write a blog about it. I believe it's very important to demonstrate and track the success of such organization-wide exercise
Really useful post, thanks April! We are just now trying to work out what a truly cross-functional process should look like for us so that the positioning and downstream messaging / sales pitch are adopted by both sales and marketing - a good reminder of the pitfalls to avoid :)
Completely agree with points 1-3. The one bit I have been trying to get my head around is that last point about champions Vs other personas in the buying process.
For us, pretty soon after the first sales pitch (which I agree needs to be primary champion focused), we need to multi-thread and start getting buy-in from other stakeholders who are very much interested in the business value - so I do feel like they need some degree of personalisation. But def agree that not quite to the extent that each should have their own distinct positioning stance / pitch.
I’m thinking that it should be the case that if we have done our positioning properly and identified the key clusters of differentiated value, these should form a solid positioning core, and it's more a question of identifying the different messaging variations on those core points of value that will resonate with different stakeholders.
And for sure, any personas (e.g. legal, security) who are not interested in the business value, we can think of more in terms of needing solid objection handling.
So I think for us - as we go through a positioning exercise - one key step will be to map out which of our personas are truly interested in the value (in which case we need to work out the different messaging versions of the same core value points) Vs those who aren't and will need objection handling :)
I would agree with this approach. If there are multiple stakeholders concerned with value, what I've seen is that we generally just need to shift the emphasis or re-prioritize the value themes - rather than building entirely new themes. It is the same product after all and the value is what it is - we don't get to just make it up.
Separating out who needs value and who need their objections handled makes it a lot easier to work you way around a large buying group.
You hit the nail on the head April! So few companies do what I consider to be the most important aspect of creating a position - involving sales team members early and often throughout the process. There are so many benefits to doing this as you point out. Once sales team members know their opinion matters they will open up and provide information you can't get anywhere else. And it comes directly from the battlefield.
This post resonates greatly! I started my career in account manager/customer-facing sales roles before transitioning more into the growth marketing side of things when becoming a founder. This makes me appreciate my time in sales more to help inform how good positioning & collateral needs to be usable and not just good looking fluff.
100% agree too. You are THE best, April! The only thing I would add - sales never agrees with the positioning as they are still using feature-function approach to sales, which fails to communicate cohesive value. I really love your suggestion for not only involving sales, but also joining a few sales calls. There is no substitute for live prospect feedback.
Hey thanks! The most common thing I see in sales pitching in the companies I work with is the "feature dump" or product walkthrough style pitch. We can do so much better than this.
Always! Sell the transformation, not the features...
Hello April, how do we go about measuring the success of the positioning efforts? Are there some metrics (both qualitative and quantitative) that you believe we should be looking at?
I could (and should!) write a long post on this. There isn't one metric that is impacted by positioning - it impacts us across the entire customer buying journey - so it's difficult to point to a particular metric to look at to say we are good/bad. We should see improvements to where we were previously, but in B2B where we often have long sales cycles - it could take a while for us to see the impact on revenue, churn, conversion rates, deal sizes, etc. In general, if we are testing positioning using a sales pitch, we should see an immediate impact on our metrics post first sales call. In general, if the sales team feels like the new pitch is working better that is a very good early indicator that your new positioning is out-performing the old positioning.
That'd be amazing if you could write a blog about it. I believe it's very important to demonstrate and track the success of such organization-wide exercise
Really useful post, thanks April! We are just now trying to work out what a truly cross-functional process should look like for us so that the positioning and downstream messaging / sales pitch are adopted by both sales and marketing - a good reminder of the pitfalls to avoid :)
Completely agree with points 1-3. The one bit I have been trying to get my head around is that last point about champions Vs other personas in the buying process.
For us, pretty soon after the first sales pitch (which I agree needs to be primary champion focused), we need to multi-thread and start getting buy-in from other stakeholders who are very much interested in the business value - so I do feel like they need some degree of personalisation. But def agree that not quite to the extent that each should have their own distinct positioning stance / pitch.
I’m thinking that it should be the case that if we have done our positioning properly and identified the key clusters of differentiated value, these should form a solid positioning core, and it's more a question of identifying the different messaging variations on those core points of value that will resonate with different stakeholders.
And for sure, any personas (e.g. legal, security) who are not interested in the business value, we can think of more in terms of needing solid objection handling.
So I think for us - as we go through a positioning exercise - one key step will be to map out which of our personas are truly interested in the value (in which case we need to work out the different messaging versions of the same core value points) Vs those who aren't and will need objection handling :)
I would agree with this approach. If there are multiple stakeholders concerned with value, what I've seen is that we generally just need to shift the emphasis or re-prioritize the value themes - rather than building entirely new themes. It is the same product after all and the value is what it is - we don't get to just make it up.
Separating out who needs value and who need their objections handled makes it a lot easier to work you way around a large buying group.
You hit the nail on the head April! So few companies do what I consider to be the most important aspect of creating a position - involving sales team members early and often throughout the process. There are so many benefits to doing this as you point out. Once sales team members know their opinion matters they will open up and provide information you can't get anywhere else. And it comes directly from the battlefield.
That's exactly it! Thanks for the comment!
This post resonates greatly! I started my career in account manager/customer-facing sales roles before transitioning more into the growth marketing side of things when becoming a founder. This makes me appreciate my time in sales more to help inform how good positioning & collateral needs to be usable and not just good looking fluff.
I 100% agree! Great insights here about B2B
Hey thanks - I appreciate that!