The Overview #18

This week: value prop in 5 words, customer research, and PMM own the pitch

👋 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.

FYI: today marks 27 weeks of Building Momentum. Take a look at the archive.

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Value prop in 5 words

Pierre de Wulf @PierreDeWulf

AWS: "Get bankrupt scaling your infra" Salesforce: "Ugly UX for sales team" Intercom: "Support system with enigmatic billing" Slack: "Reduce company productivity with GIFs" Notion: "Knowledge-base with load times"

Andrea Bosoni @theandreboso

Every founder should be able to communicate their value proposition in no more than 5 words. It’s a great exercise. For example mine for Zero to Marketing is “learn marketing from case studies”.

Notion: “Knowledge-base with load times” got me 💀

I like this advice - every founder, marketer, sales rep should be able to communicate their value prop in 5 words or less.

Why? It doesn’t even matter if the words are different.

What matters is the concept: What are you and how do you help your customers?

If you have 10 people in your sales team, you can almost guarantee you’ll have 10 different value propositions.

If you have 5 product managers, you can almost guarantee that you have 5 value propositions.

That’s why focus is so important. And again, focus does not only mean ‘prioritization’ – it also means ‘clarity’.

Know who your customers are, what value is important to then, then build your product, marketing, and sales around them.

Customer research

Samantha Leal @samanthalcc

Customer research is the critical piece that makes every ad, email, landing page, or product launch resonate and engage with your audience. Yes, it’s *that* important.

One of my first posts on Building Momentum was how positioning-by-assumption doesn’t work.

Well, guess what?

Marketing-by-assumption doesn’t work either.

Understanding your customer is a competitive advantage, because you can bet your competitors aren’t doing it well enough either.

Product marketing: positioning and pitch

April Dunford @aprildunford

The two big hard things B2B product marketers need to nail are positioning and the sales pitch. All the rest of it flows from those two things.

Amplifying this message in case you haven’t heard: product marketing need to help nail the pitch, not just the positioning.

Having the best positioning in the world won’t help unless it’s executed well. The goal is to find repeatable success in a pitch format. Product marketing helps founders and VP Sales to find that, instead of relying on improvisation.

Here are some of my tips:

• Test different sales pitch formats to find what works best

• Think outside the box - it doesn’t just have to be slides

• Get inspiration from sales demos from products your company has bought

• Run a certification program for your sales reps and marketers on the pitch

• Repeat it - every sales training session, every all-hands, every meeting

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That’s the Overview for this week

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

James