The Overview #14

This week: Fix positioning, buyer confusion taxes, and challenges that are a consequence of your decisions.

👋 Hey there. This is The Overview, a weekly roundup of noteworthy B2B SaaS stuff. You'll find interesting tweets and articles from around the internet, plus highlights from my personal swipe file.

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What challenge is a consequence of your decisions?

Garrison Yang @garrisonyang_

DTC marketers spend 99% of their time wondering why their paid CACs are so high instead of wondering why 99% of their new customers come from paid

What’s the product marketing equivalent of this tweet? Maybe:

Early-stage B2B SaaS founders spend 99% of their time wondering why their customers don’t care about the product, instead of wondering why 99% of their GTM strategy doesn’t involve customer insights.

Regardless of how ‘good’ your product might be, if the strategy isn’t based on your ideal customer profile and how well you understand their jobs, pains, gains, and triggers then you’re always going to struggle.

Fix it. Understand your ideal customer profile. Talk to current and future customers. Build personas. Extract value messaging and link to your product features.

Positioning isn’t difficult

Pe:p Laja @peeplaja

If you know - what the target audience wants, how they want it - how what you're telling them is landing on them it makes a huge difference. Make sure you find out.

In a similar vein, this tweet from Peep Laja really boils successful positioning into two component pieces.

1) Know what they want and how they want it

2) Know that what you’re telling them is resonating with them

If you don’t know what your customers want, talk to them. If you don’t know if your messaging resonates with them, talk to them.

NIHITO: nothing important happens in the office.

Fix it. Understand your ideal customer profile. Talk to current and future customers. Build personas. Extract value messaging and link to your product features.

Buyer confusion is killing your marketing

This older post from Velocity Partners - one from my personal swipe file that I reference a lot! - looks at the potential blockers that can prevent good buyers from understanding who you are, what you do, and how you do it.

They list five types of buyer confusion tax:

1. Problem confusion: “I don’t have that problem, it doesn’t apply to me”

2. Product confusion: “What does it actually do? Why do I need it?”

3. Tech confusion: “How does it work? How do we use it?”

4. Category confusion: “Isn’t this similar to Y? But we’re already doing X.”

5. Journey confusion: “How do I find out more? How do I actually buy it?”

These taxes appear everywhere: in your websites, sales conversations, support experience, and all of your TOFU awareness marketing.

Fix it. Understand your ideal customer profile. Talk to current and future customers. Build personas. Extract value messaging and link to your product features.

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That’s the Overview for this week

Did you notice the consistent theme for this week’s edition? 😉 I’ll spell it out one more time:

• Understand your ideal customer profile

• Talk to current and future customers

• Build personas

• Extract value messaging and link to your product features

Help shape Building Momentum: Let me know what you’d like to see covered - hit me up on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Thanks for reading, and here’s to building momentum.

James