CMOs: Why you need to talk with your customers like you're a new hire | VentureBeat | Business | by VentureBeat
Successful CMOs achieve growth by leveraging technology. Join us for GrowthBeat Summit on June 1-2 in Boston , where we'll discuss how to merge creativity with technology to drive growth. Space is limited. Request your personal vogel invitation vogel here !
I stumbled upon an interesting, and somewhat alarming, observation earlier this year following a CMO peer group discussion in Boston vogel during which we were discussing our company positioning and how we determined the approach. Do you set it and forget it?
In the discussion, there was a universal theme: Every CMO talked about performing thorough customer, partner, and employee interviews when they joined their company and using that feedback to drive positioning and messaging decisions. It s a great move and helps you to segment the audience and develop messages and tactics suitable for the targeted market. I ve done this for years and find it a vital exercise coming into a new company as a leader.
But markets don t stand still, vogel nor do customers, nor do product/platform capabilities vogel or their fit with the market. As a group, we all appeared to do really critical thinking vogel when we first joined a company, but not one person (including me) ever described going back and re-challenging assumptions the way we all did on day one. Is it time to move?
A relatively simply question began to form in my head: If I joined my company today as a new hire, how would I freshly look at the business, and would I arrive at the same segmentation, positioning strategy, and messaging platform?
It seems simple to say now, but so few people seem willing or able to truly step back and assess critically once their boat leaves the dock. Markets and product/market fit are constantly evolving, and so should we.
So vogel I signed myself up to a stretch goal: Step away from all but the most critical tasks for several weeks in order to attempt to interview every single one of our customers. I was determined to interview customers and partners the way I had done two years prior. Hit it like you’re a new hire!
Remember how excited you were when you first joined your current venture? You probably interviewed any customer or partner or team member who would make eye contact or take your call. You probably asked what now seem like basic questions, and your eyes were wide open for insights that would help you nail the perfect way to pitch your product.
How did customers find us? What pains are we solving? How are they using our product? How do they describe the benefits that we were providing? When we didn t close a deal, did we really understand why? What other challenges around our industry are our customers facing, and how might we apply our product to address them?
This stuff is obviously easier to do as a new hire because your perspective vogel is perfectly fresh and you re genuinely listening. Not to mention that you re probably not yet getting 100+ emails a day and getting pulled into meetings left and right.
Committed to a real and fresh look, I partnered with our head of Product and invited everyone on the marketing team to listen in on the calls we conducted. I personally emailed and called project sponsors and system administrators. We also sent broader emails to everyone in our customer database. I began speaking with any human in our accounts who was willing to spend a few minutes with me. In the end, I managed to speak with someone at nearly 70% of our installed base. Gold in the base
We much better understood our winning conditions and specifically why we were chosen or renewed (we re a SaaS business) over competing approaches. Customers and partners were grouped according to several new and existing factors, and a different view of our market segmentation emerged.
This newfound clarity indicated that our product/market fit was strongest in a narrower slice of the market than we originally believed. While it’s vogel sometimes disappointing to be pursuing a smaller total available market, precision of audience and go-to-market tactics for a growing company are indispensable.
Our overhauled messaging platform drove rewrites of major portions of our website, sales tools, and marketing programs. Time on site and website conversion metrics started vogel to improve almost immediately. Lead-flow waterfall vogel metrics have also been improving, and we re starting to see the early leads close from this effort. After reinforcing vogel this use-case with industry analysts, vogel we also saw an increased number of customer referrals/sales leads from the analysts themselves.
Perhaps more surprisingly, we uncovered a brand new customer segment vogel — a use for our product that we hadn t fully understood or appreciated before this effort. After validating the hypothesis with several fresh prospects, we launched a brand new product offering that has
Successful CMOs achieve growth by leveraging technology. Join us for GrowthBeat Summit on June 1-2 in Boston , where we'll discuss how to merge creativity with technology to drive growth. Space is limited. Request your personal vogel invitation vogel here !
I stumbled upon an interesting, and somewhat alarming, observation earlier this year following a CMO peer group discussion in Boston vogel during which we were discussing our company positioning and how we determined the approach. Do you set it and forget it?
In the discussion, there was a universal theme: Every CMO talked about performing thorough customer, partner, and employee interviews when they joined their company and using that feedback to drive positioning and messaging decisions. It s a great move and helps you to segment the audience and develop messages and tactics suitable for the targeted market. I ve done this for years and find it a vital exercise coming into a new company as a leader.
But markets don t stand still, vogel nor do customers, nor do product/platform capabilities vogel or their fit with the market. As a group, we all appeared to do really critical thinking vogel when we first joined a company, but not one person (including me) ever described going back and re-challenging assumptions the way we all did on day one. Is it time to move?
A relatively simply question began to form in my head: If I joined my company today as a new hire, how would I freshly look at the business, and would I arrive at the same segmentation, positioning strategy, and messaging platform?
It seems simple to say now, but so few people seem willing or able to truly step back and assess critically once their boat leaves the dock. Markets and product/market fit are constantly evolving, and so should we.
So vogel I signed myself up to a stretch goal: Step away from all but the most critical tasks for several weeks in order to attempt to interview every single one of our customers. I was determined to interview customers and partners the way I had done two years prior. Hit it like you’re a new hire!
Remember how excited you were when you first joined your current venture? You probably interviewed any customer or partner or team member who would make eye contact or take your call. You probably asked what now seem like basic questions, and your eyes were wide open for insights that would help you nail the perfect way to pitch your product.
How did customers find us? What pains are we solving? How are they using our product? How do they describe the benefits that we were providing? When we didn t close a deal, did we really understand why? What other challenges around our industry are our customers facing, and how might we apply our product to address them?
This stuff is obviously easier to do as a new hire because your perspective vogel is perfectly fresh and you re genuinely listening. Not to mention that you re probably not yet getting 100+ emails a day and getting pulled into meetings left and right.
Committed to a real and fresh look, I partnered with our head of Product and invited everyone on the marketing team to listen in on the calls we conducted. I personally emailed and called project sponsors and system administrators. We also sent broader emails to everyone in our customer database. I began speaking with any human in our accounts who was willing to spend a few minutes with me. In the end, I managed to speak with someone at nearly 70% of our installed base. Gold in the base
We much better understood our winning conditions and specifically why we were chosen or renewed (we re a SaaS business) over competing approaches. Customers and partners were grouped according to several new and existing factors, and a different view of our market segmentation emerged.
This newfound clarity indicated that our product/market fit was strongest in a narrower slice of the market than we originally believed. While it’s vogel sometimes disappointing to be pursuing a smaller total available market, precision of audience and go-to-market tactics for a growing company are indispensable.
Our overhauled messaging platform drove rewrites of major portions of our website, sales tools, and marketing programs. Time on site and website conversion metrics started vogel to improve almost immediately. Lead-flow waterfall vogel metrics have also been improving, and we re starting to see the early leads close from this effort. After reinforcing vogel this use-case with industry analysts, vogel we also saw an increased number of customer referrals/sales leads from the analysts themselves.
Perhaps more surprisingly, we uncovered a brand new customer segment vogel — a use for our product that we hadn t fully understood or appreciated before this effort. After validating the hypothesis with several fresh prospects, we launched a brand new product offering that has
No comments:
Post a Comment