Category: productmarketing

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b2bmarketing gtmstrategy productmarketing

How to Define your ICP with “ICP Rings”: A New Framework for Finding Your Best Customers

I’ve developed a new framework for defining ICPs & your GTM focus called the “ICP Rings”.

Most companies COULD serve many types of customers, but there’s a smaller subset of them that is your SWEET SPOT.

Using concentric circles, you can align everyone on the different levels & definitions of your ICP.

Each ring is a tighter, better fit ICP for your company. Add the characteristics that are most important for each level. I gave examples of them in the image.

Size your market so that you know the potential TAM of each ICP ring.

Then as a leadership team decide what level you want your GTM motions to focus on.

ICP template slide here.

Why is this valuable?

  • It bridges the gap between everyone you could serve and who you should really focus on acquiring
  • By getting explicit alignment on which ring(s) you want to go after, you’ll reduce friction and misalignment between departments and teams.

Think you could use this in your org?

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b2bmarketing productmarketing sentimentanalysis

Unlocking Free Sentiment Analysis & Text Summarization with ChatGPT: Revolutionize Your Business Feedback Analysis

Sentiment analysis & summarizing large amounts of text is now FREE. How? ChatGPT.  
Use this on surveys, customer interviews, product feedback, sales calls, etc.

Here are some examples we’ve recently done:

– I took a bunch of feedback from our target customers gathered through Wynter and created summaries of the responses to each question.

– I also did sentiment analysis on every response.

– Brandon Anderson summarized Zingtree’s recent G2 reviews into a paragraph and shared it internally.

Sentiment analysis and summarization like this was never possible without paying lots of money or having data science skills. 
Now that’s changed.

What types of text might you summarize with ChatGPT?

Categories
competitiveintelligence demandgeneration productmarketing

Maximizing Competitive Research: 2 Powerful Strategies to Boost Sales and Demand Generation

People talk about how to do competitive research but there’s not enough about what to DO with it. 

Here are 2 simple ways to 1) Equip your Sales team with it & 2) Use it for Demand Gen

1) Equip your Sales team with it
Give Sales the exact talking points for what to say. Literally script it out, but keep it short.

“Hooli is great for x, but there are 3 key areas that Zingtree is better. 
”

B/c it’s so short, Sales can memorize this or have it pulled up & read verbatim. If a prospect really wants to go deep, then you can pull in a Sales Engineer, PM, or CI Marketer.

2)) Use it for Demand Gen
Turn your insights into a competitive comparison web page. If your web team is really backed up, do it as a blog post first. 

Then add it to your top-level website navigation or footer so you can educate your web visitors who may be evaluating both of you.

Also, test paid search for “Hooli alternative” type keywords. 
If you have enough budget, you can test “Hooli”, “Hooli pricing”, “Hooli support”, etc. 

Then try paid social if you have even more budget.
You can try to take competitor customers by running paid social ads to accounts that use competitors. Your ad messaging will be highly targeted & relevant. Just keep in mind this is a long play if their customers are locked in annual contracts.

As you may have guessed, we’re near the end of this process for 3 competitors. Externally facing pages coming soon!

What competitive plays do you like to ship fast?

Categories
b2bmarketing competitiveintelligence productmarketing

Unlocking the Secrets of Effective Competitor Comparison: A Step-by-Step Guide by Kirill Kurmytskiy

We just launched 3 competitor comparison articles, big kudos to Kirill Kurmytskiy for his work on these! Here’s a breakdown of the structure and key elements he used:

– Don’t make it totally one-sided. Prospects can sniff that out.

– Use images to convey the differences (Venn diagram, radar chart, product screenshots, etc.)

– Talk about different product philosophies / focuses (if applicable)

– Explain key product capability differences & differentiators

– Include positive G2 examples from both

– Show a feature matrix

– Add links to sources of info

– Talk about how both products could be used together (if applicable)

What would you add or change to these? How do you like to structure competitor comparisons?

P.S. if you don’t mind, ask your Customer Support leader to consider using Zingtree 🙂

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b2bmarketing customersupport productmarketing

Creating a Successful 2023 Support Tech Landscape: An Unbiased Approach to Positioning Your Brand

Have you thought about making a tech landscape for your industry? We just created the 2023 Support Tech Landscape.

Here’s why and how we did it 👇

Why:

It didn’t exist for Customer Support, so we had a green field opportunity

We get to choose how we position ourselves in the mental map of prospects

We get to highlight the drawbacks (and strengths) of other categories of products

This is a dark social share-worthy piece for people to share with colleagues that will drive traffic to our website and help people learn about us

How:

1. We asked Support leaders NOT affiliated with Zingtree – not current customers – to write the article so that it came across more objectively

2. I suggested the categories to use

3. I suggested the structure to use:
-category definition
-short description of each vendor in the category
-pros and cons of each category

4. They wrote it

5. We reviewed and shared feedback

6. Design turned them into images

Have you created a tech landscape before? How would you improve ours? See the full article in the comments.

Categories
b2bmarketing customerinsights productmarketing

Unlocking Marketing Success: How Actively Listening to Your ICP Can Boost Your Strategy

Listening to what your ICP says is 🧠 food.

One way we’re doing that: I got the whole Marketing team set up on Gong and Evan Patrick Shaffer is training us today on it. Next quarter, everyone will have a goal to listen to 10 Gong meetings and/or speak with 10 ICPs, customers, or prospects on their own.

Then we’ll be sharing insights we learned in our weekly team meeting with each other to cross-pollinate ideas.

How have you gotten Marketing regularly hearing insights from your ICP?

Categories
b2bmarketing productmarketing

Prompts to Create Unique Point of Views (POVs) for Improving Marketing Messaging & Differentiation

If you can swap your competitor’s name onto your web pages & nothing changes 😳, you probably don’t have unique POVs.

Here are 5 prompts to help create them & stand out: 💡

1. What do we believe that our competitors would disagree with?

2. What are things we believe are true but others would view as non-obvious, an interesting insight, or different from the norm?

3. What do we take a different angle on compared to our competitors?

4. If you were giving a talk, what would be new or unique concepts for the audience to hear?

5. For a certain product, what are our unique points of view on the market based on understanding 100s of customers?

How to take action on these:
1. Make a list of answers to questions like this
2. Brainstorm them further with others
3. Choose one to write up some notes about and explore it further
4. Turn it into an article or a video talk

>>> What are other questions you like for creating unique POVs?

Categories
b2bmarketing customerresearch productmarketing

Customer Interviews for Marketing: a Real Example

Soon after starting at HST Pathways, I asked a COO at a happy customer, “What else is part of your tech stack other than HST Pathways?”

COO: confused face 😯

I quickly clarified, “What other software tools are you using?” Then she named a couple of others.

What I learned:
1. Our ICP doesn’t use the same jargon as me!
2. Most of them are not as tech-focused as other industries.
3. Reiterated the power of customer interviews, especially when in a new job.

>>> Watch the body language in customer interviews as much as you listen to the words said.

What have been some aha moments for you when speaking with customers?

Categories
b2bmarketing contentmarketing productmarketing

Best B2B Product Marketing & Content Marketing Resources: Books, Articles, Podcasts, & Communities

Want to learn B2B Product & Content Marketing fast? Read these 2 books + 1 article.

2️⃣ books
Obviously Awesome by April Dunford
The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon

1️⃣ article
The Greatest Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen by Andy Raskin

That’s it! You’ll learn 70% of the concepts from these.

 —

Want to get to near 100%? Check out these additional resources:

🎧 Podcasts:

The Bigger Narrative

Cheat Codes: Play the Marketing Game on Easy Mode

The Product Marketing Experts Podcast

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📚 Books:

Play Bigger by Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, Kevin Maney

Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout

Start with Why by Simon Sinek

Niche Down by Christopher Lochhead, Heather Clancy

Founder Brand by Dave Gerhardt

Category Creation by Anthony Kennada

Buyer Personas by Adele Revella

Ca$hvertising by Drew Eric Whitman

The Ultimate Sales Letter by Dan S. Kennedy

The Copywriter’s Handbook by Robert W. Bly

Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs by Carmine Gallo

Building a Storybrand by Donald Miller

Story by Robert McKee

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📟 Third Party Communities:

Product Marketing Alliance

Sharebird

Superpath

Writer Hangout Slack community

The Buffer community

CopyAI – Official Group Facebook group

Jasper Official Community Facebook group

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What would you add to this list?
Anything you love here?