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How often do you visit a SaaS website and have literally no clue what they do despite multiple attempts? We'll, that's a surefire way to decrease your overall performance.
So we invited Anthony from Fletch to help fix it - we focused on the difficulties especially surrounding being multi-product or segment.
So we invited Anthony from Fletch to help fix it - we focused on the difficulties especially surrounding being multi-product or segment.
- (00:00) - Introduction
- (01:33) - Meet Anthony Pierri
- (06:31) - Ugh messaging - why even bother?
- (12:01) - It's not just about outcomes
- (16:24) - Lead with one thing
- (20:59) - The channel changer
- (22:18) - Sell the suite
- (23:43) - What do you want to be known for?
- (27:53) - The problem with being visionary
- (34:42) - How do you get it used?
- (40:15) - Picking the usecase
Creators & Guests
What is The Revenue Formula?
This podcast is about scaling tech startups.
Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Mikkel Plaehn, together they look at the full funnel.
With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.
If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.
[00:00:00] Toni: Hi, everyone. This is Toni Hohlbein from Growblocks. You are listening to the Revenue Formula. In today's episode, Mikkel and I talk with Anthony Pierri about SaaS messaging, why it usually really sucks, but also how to fix it, especially if you're a multi product or multi segment.
[00:00:18] Enjoy.
[00:00:19] Mikkel: Have you ever, like, played an instrument? Not just, you know, yeah, I'm having fun, but actually, you know, dabbled in that.
[00:00:30] Toni: So, um, no besides in school, you know.
[00:00:33] And in my school, we had, like, 1 1 topic was music. Yeah. And then then you need to play an instrument and I I played the flute, you know, the the things like Yeah. That's what I played.
[00:00:46] Mikkel: Well, at least you didn't get like the cowbell or something.
[00:00:48] Yeah. It's just because so you and I, it was pretty crazy. Is that a reference to me being from, like No. No. Germany.
[00:00:53] The countryside in Germany or what? What? You get a little wild. You get a little red. So the thing is, when we started this show and basically set it up, uploaded everything, 0 downloads, the first realization I had is, like, I'm on Spotify now with Jay Z and all these amazing people.
[00:01:10] And I also found out that our guest was on Spotify. Oh. Not just on podcast. No. But he is a rock star.
[00:01:16] That's different. But he is, like, legit on Spotify. It's, uh, and you might have heard of him, maybe not through the music. I don't know. Actually, do you get that, Anthony?
[00:01:25] Do you get a lot of folks going, love the music. What do you actually do? I see you on LinkedIn, but I don't get it. Is that is that a thing? Or
[00:01:33] Anthony: No. Not normally. We I mean, they're they're very different spheres of my life. Our, uh, you know, the day job, what we do with b to b SaaS companies, uh, is a very different crowd than what, you know, me and my friends playing in bars and stuff in Chicago on on the weekends.
[00:01:51] So there's not much overlap. There is some, though. Actually, there's been some people that I've met on LinkedIn who have then discovered our band and are now probably more fans of the music than they are of our content. Um, and then on the flip side, there's some people who discovered our band and then realized that we worked with b to b SaaS companies, and they're like, oh, that my company does that too. And and we've actually moved over from the music conversation now to the messaging conversation.
[00:02:18] So a little bit of overlap, but not
[00:02:20] Mikkel: So here's the thing.
[00:02:21] Why am I talking about this stuff? Well, because today, we are gonna talk about how to manage messaging when you're a multi segment, multi product. And Anthony is kind of multi segment when you think about it. You have the music. You have the music.
[00:02:36] Wow. And then you have the messaging, right? So I’m getting ahead of myself here, sorry, because we have anthony here, and if you don’t know anthony, you’re basically the co-founder and partner at Fletch . We've worked with you, uh, you guys before on basically making better messaging for your SaaS website. That's kinda how you would put it. Right?
[00:02:54] Anthony: Yeah. Yeah. That's a that's a great summary. We we basically work with mostly earlier stage companies, but some later stage, some large publicly traded companies as well.
[00:03:03] Um, but we primarily work with companies, maybe seed to series a,
[00:03:07] around figuring out how should we position ourselves in the marketplace, and then taking all that kind of strategic stuff and figuring out how to put it onto a home page. Because what we found is that a lot of the positioning experts out there work with primarily only growth stage companies, and they'll deliver a really nice, sleek PowerPoint. And if you're a large company with a lot of employees, you're fine getting a PowerPoint, because because you're like, well, we got all these teams to go execute. That's great. If you're working with earlier stage companies, they're not paying money for just PowerPoints.
[00:03:36] And so early on, we were like, we probably can actually deliver a lot more value by taking the strategic stuff and knocking off a huge item on their to do list, which is often we need to refresh the homepage. We raised a round of funding, and we're about to go to market in a more deliberate way, and we're gonna push all these people to the page. And we haven't updated it since we first launched, and it's it's way out of date, and it doesn't really capture all the new segments we're going after and all the product features we've added. So we just need a whole wholesale revision of how we talk about ourselves. So that's basically what we'll do with most companies, come in, help them figure out what markets are they entering, what way do they should they position the product, and then how do you actually take that and and
[00:04:15] rewrite page.
[00:04:16] And so
[00:04:17] Toni: I feel a a lot of people listening will feel seen right now is number 1.
[00:04:22] And number 2, what what got me hooked I mean, I saw your I saw your post. I was like, I gotta check this guy out, and then he had this banner. It's like, we help, I I think, founders market hard to market products. I was like, that's me. You know, inbound right there.
[00:04:38] Right? Message to Anthony, uh, and then kind of this whole conversation I mean, there was a little bit of a gap between us working together and, you know, obviously being on the show, but, uh,
[00:04:46] Mikkel: that was connected. So also just to position, like, the amount of experience, how many websites have you done by now? It must be, you know, quite a few.
[00:04:56] Anthony: It's quite a few. We we've worked with close to, I wanna say, a hundred and 50 companies. So we came out of an agency that did custom services, longer term, 3 months, 6 month projects, um, very in-depth software development, product management, um, design, some combination of the 3. And so when we started Fletch, it was essentially the exact opposite.
[00:05:17] It was like, we wanna solve 1 problem a bunch of times, and it will be a very, very narrow slice of the overall pie of things that we could be doing, but we wanted to become experts at it. So we said if we just do the same problem over and over and over and over again for the same type of customer, we'll get really good, and we'll learn a lot of insights. And so our business is definitely a volume based business. We're
[00:05:41] work with as many startups as possible for actually shorter rather than longer. A lot of consultants are like, we want repeat business.
[00:05:47] We want to be on retainer. That we don't want that at all because what we're trying to optimize for is the process, our own framework, and the way that we do this approach. And so for us, we're like, every single time that we work with a company is a chance to iterate on our messaging positioning process. And so it's like we if we think of it like a software product, you know, we might work with 1 company in the morning. Okay.
[00:06:09] What do we need to tweak for the company we're gonna work with in the afternoon? And so we're shipping updates right to the software. Essentially, our framework can process, you know, every single day. So we've we've gotten to work with close to a hundred and 50, um, over probably close to a year, and and,
[00:06:24] uh, know, previous to that, when we were doing custom stuff, it was, you know, maybe a couple clients a year. So it's it's definitely a very different type of business.
[00:06:31] Mikkel: So I'm just thinking here. We we've done, you know, plus a hundred episodes by now. Usually, we talk about how to build out outbound, how to grow and scale the business, and now we've thrown in Now you're really you're really selling the show, Michael. That's what I'm getting to.
[00:06:45] Now we've thrown in messaging. Right? What is actually the big problem, and why should the listener continue to listen to this episode when we're gonna get into the stuff we're gonna get into? Right? Why is messaging so important to to these folks out there that wanna grow the business?
[00:06:59] Anthony: Well, it it really is the key I I've heard someone use the description of sales that they're like the the connectors of supply and demand. Like, salespeople are the connecting tissue that runs all economies of the world. It's the thing that's bringing everyone together to make commerce happen, to make the economies move. And so just if you broaden that out from sales to broader go to market, this connective tissue, everyone's looking for product market fit, now there's go to market fit, all sorts of different phrases, But what actually is being said at every 1 of those touch points across the whole funnel from sales to or for marketing to sales to customer success, every single sentence that you utter is essentially messaging. And how you phrase it, not like at a copywriting level, but more like what problems do you actually talk about, let's say, in your outbound emails, or what problems do you talk about when you're talking to a SVP at a enterprise company, it's all gonna change based on who you're talking to and how you're repositioning the product throughout the different life cycle for all the different stakeholders.
[00:08:22] At each stage of the go to market journey to make it so that we actually close as many sales as possible. So for us, we're like, you can have the greatest process across every single part of your go to market, but if the messaging is off in any of those individual channels or assets or anything you're creating, it doesn't really matter. So the difference between us writing a copywriter is a copywriter could look at a landing page template. You know, there's there's a million templates out there of, like, how to write a home page or how to write a cold email. The copywriter will just ask, okay.
[00:08:57] Well, this is this person. Which problem do you want me to talk about? Because at this part of the, you know, framework, it says talk about the problem we solve. Well, which 1 should we talk about? And the founder or the sales leader, whoever's on the other end of that, they have to have the right answer of which of the countless problems that we solve do we wanna bring up for this specific person, And at what level of specificity?
[00:09:18] Do we wanna talk about it in a broad general industry way? Do we wanna go hyper specific to, like, a day to day problem? Well, maybe if they're enterprise, they care more about the big picture stuff and So there's a million variations and to us, we saw a big problem where people had all these great processes and functions, but everything was breaking down at literally, like, which problem are you talking about? Which features are you talking about? How are you explaining the benefits of those features?
[00:09:45] And people do it in all sorts of wonky ways, which we think is slowing down, like, a big reason of why we think so many startups fail, is they can't get the messaging right. Even if they have a great product in a great market, the connective tissue, if it's broken, right, they could have an awesome sales process. You know, the sequence is set up perfectly in, you know, Apollo or whatever system you're using. But if the actual messages themselves it's like the reason why when you get cold emails, they're all so irrelevant because the messaging that's being carried. They could have it phrased, like, we've seen ones that are really well written from a copywriting perspective.
[00:10:18] Punchy, clever, jokes, funny, like, great language, brand but, like, the message itself that's encapsulated in all those different fancy things is fundamentally wrong. And so we you send it to spam even if it's really well written.
[00:10:32] Toni: I think the you know, if if you take a couple of steps back. Right? Because I I believe what what you're saying is right.
[00:10:38] Um, you know, the the the words we choose in order to aid the buying journey, if you will. If you disconnect those, then the buying journey will less often happen, period. Right? And and maybe end up uh, being just a 1 year deal instead of renewing, renewing, and so forth. Right?
[00:10:54] So you're kind of, uh, acquiring the wrong customers because you're mixing things up when you talk to them. I think that what everyone is thinking about primarily when they think messaging, it's, you know, what do you have on your website? And that is mostly the conversion point they're super concerned about. It's like, hey. We finally got someone on the website.
[00:11:13] We finally got someone to watch an ad. We finally got someone to, uh, read the outbound email. what is the right combination of words to get them to click the demo request. Right? And then I think, um, this top funnel piece, I think this is for messaging is extremely powerful.
[00:11:30] Right? Because the the the the reach is so far and so forth. Right? So I think when when people talk messaging, and and you're right, kind of it goes across the full funnel, I think they usually end up focusing on the on the on the top end. Is that something that you've also experienced?
[00:11:44] I mean, you're kind of fixing website messaging, so I guess kind of that that probably kind of matches here. But is this this also kind of your experience that, uh, maybe, hey. We have kind of nailed the messaging on the website. Now we don't need product marketing anymore. What's the you know, how how do people think about this?
[00:12:01] Anthony: I think, usually, at some point in the journey, people realize it's not really working. And
[00:12:06] usually, the phrase we hear on sales calls with companies that might work with us is always some variation of when they get on the demo, they get it. I show them the product and it clicks, and they're super excited.
[00:12:20] But a lot of times, they get on the demo call and they say, I don't really understand what you do. And then they look back at themselves, and they say, well, I mean, we're clearly stating it on the website. Why aren't they getting it? And then we look at the website, and we're, like, you actually didn't state it at all. Like, you didn't you actually aren't even showing any of the things that the product does.
[00:12:37] We were working with a company that, uh, is deep in, like, the logistics space, and it was so funny because we we worked through a whole process, and we were trying to figure out, like, what feature sets we wanted to highlight on the home page. And even that, right, highlight highlighting features. And this is a pretty big, uh, I think they're like series c or something, so it looked fairly large and growing. Right? And they were like, yeah, we you know, we get on these demo calls, and the people, they just, just, like, they don't they don't really get it.
[00:13:01] And so I was like, let's just take a look at your website again. And so at the at the end of our process, we had listed out all these different feature sets, and they're trying to compare. They're like, 1 guy in the call was like, we really wanna talk about this 1. We think this is really, really compelling, and we had flushed it out exactly what it does and what problem it solves, like value proposition, all that stuff. And there was, like, probably 10 different options.
[00:13:19] We probably wanna pick the top 3. It's no one's gonna read 10 different value propositions end to end in a web page. They're gonna scan maybe scan 3 if we can get them to do that. So there were big argument debate, you know, will this guy wanna talk about this, this guy wanna talk about that. And then I was like, well, let's just pause for a second.
[00:13:35] So I I scroll over in Figma to their original website, and I'm look I'm like, look. None of those 10 value propositions are on your website right now. You don't actually talk about any of them. And they they were doing what effectively almost everyone in b 2 b does is they somewhere early in their career, they're not marketers by trade. Most people are not marketers by trade, except even marketers are not really marketers by trade.
[00:13:59] But people who work on websites in startups especially, they have 1 piece of advice that they've internalized, which is sell the benefit, not the feature. Nobody cares about products. They only care about outcomes. We gotta talk about the outcome. Right?
[00:14:16] Outcome driven. Not output driven, out outcome driven. Like, it's it's baked into our product management lingo and vernacular, that whole outcome thing. Value based pricing is really hot topic. Right?
[00:14:27] Don't price on the all that stuff. So what they end up doing is they they walk up the ladder and they say, well, what outcomes do these people care about? Well, I mean, they really care about increasing revenue. They really care about lowering costs. They really care about reducing risk.
[00:14:43] And so you looked on the page, and it's essentially those 3 phrases worded 10 different ways from end to end, and they never specify how do they actually achieve those outcomes for the customer. And what they're forgetting is that they're not Salesforce. Anyone can tell you what Salesforce does, probably in all of b 2 b. don't maybe need to know the individual things, but they can loosely give you the pitch of what the product does. So if Salesforce runs, you know, the h 1 on their website, grow faster with Salesforce, and that's what they had for a while.
[00:15:17] Everyone kinda believes it because they're the market leader, and they don't need to be told what it is. When you're a startup that isn't Salesforce and you write grow faster with product name or company name, people just don't believe it. So there's a huge believability gap when people are talking about outcomes, outcomes, outcomes without ever showing the how. And so we end up with these pages that effectively don't say anything. They only talk about outcomes.
[00:15:45] And the the even funnier part is that most people, if you ask, what's the biggest problem with messaging and b to b? People would say, oh, everyone just feature dumps. They just talk about and always challenge, and I say, find me 1 b 2 b homepage that feature dumps. And I because people comment this on my LinkedIn post every day, and I'm like, I actually think that might have been a problem 20 years ago. I don't think it's a problem anymore.
[00:16:11] I think we have a new problem, which is the opposite, no features at all. then no 1 has been able to come back with, look at this website. All they do is talk about too many features. Nobody talks about any features at all.
[00:16:24] Mikkel: So I think it's it's so funny with the Salesforce example because I found myself as a market in the situation where you look at this aspirational company. Intercom is probably the most classic of them all.
[00:16:34] You go, look how great it is. We should just, you know, do like them. And then you realize, you know, you start the exercise and start thinking about it. It's like, well, our business is kinda different. We can't do it the same way.
[00:16:47] And I think that brings us to kind of 1 of the things we, uh, we wanted to talk about today. Well, what do you do if you're multi product or multi segment? Right? Then it's not actually super easy. If you if you have, like, a very specific problem you solve, like, it sounds like for you at Fletch, it's very, very clear.
[00:17:02] It's this thing and nothing else. Everything else is kinda cut away. But if you're a multiproduct, which for a lot of SaaS companies, you know, as as they grow on scale becomes a necessity almost for some of them to become a platform play, What does that do to this? How do you solve that problem, basically?
[00:17:18] Anthony: Yeah.
[00:17:18] It's a great question. And it really depends on your go to market strategy. There's, in general, maybe 3 different ways that people tackle this, and we see startups usually choose the wrong 1. So I'll give you an example. When I'd say to you, what is Stripe known for?
[00:17:40] You would likely say payments processing. Oh, Stripe does, like, payments processing. And I know this for a fact because I asked Jack GPT that exact question. And And kinda wanna gauge what's the voice of the Internet think, you just ask g p t because it's effectively, it's just summarizing what
[00:17:55] does Internet think about So I said, what is Stripe known for?
[00:17:59] Well, they're known for payments processing. Great. Stripe valuation, maybe it's a little less now that things have leveled out, but I think maybe their 20 21 or 20 22 valuation was 50 billion. So very valuable startup, very high growth, well known household name. They still lead with payments.
[00:18:21] The payments product kind of the payments product suite. But Stripe has 19 different products that span all sorts of different use cases and segments and and reasons you would wanna use them. But Stripe also knows how hard it is to get a spot in people's brains that is not easy to be remembered in the in the minds of customers. So Stripe is like, we're known for payments processing. We're fine with that.
[00:18:50] Because that's actually a great entry point to our product suite. So what they do is they actually lead with the payments still to this day. If you go on their website, it's it has a nice big, uh, uh, slogan. I think it's like the financial infrastructure for the Internet. And then in the h 2 that explains it, it says millions of customers use Stripe to accept payments, send payouts, and then I think it's like automate financial processes.
[00:19:15] they're still leading with the payments use case, and then you scroll down and it shows the main payments product, a couple different scrolls of, like, here's 1 part of the payments product, here's another. And then as you keep scrolling, they slowly reveal more products. Well, we also do this thing for fintechs. Well, we also do, you know, fraud prevention. Well, we also do, um, if you wanna become incorporated, we'll help you do that.
[00:19:35] And they start showing you their products because they're like, if you're scrolling down this far, you know, that's fine. May well, we could show you what else we do. But we really wanna capture that 1 spot in your brain, and everyone when they think of us, they think of payments. It's like a it's like a when a band back to the music theme. The band's goal, when you start a band, is to get 1 hit.
[00:19:56] Right? You wanna get a hit that you're known for, and that hit can be the entry point for people to listen to all your albums. But if you don't have a hit, people won't care about all your amazing discography. You gotta get the hit to get in there. So artists some artists hate their hit.
[00:20:13] They're so upset that everyone only knows them for the 1 song. We have so much more stuff to offer. You know, listen to all these amazing songs on our albums. We gotta, you know, this 1, and and it's like, yeah. But you're the you're the band that did that hit.
[00:20:24] So some startup founders embrace the hit. They're like, we got payments. We're worth 50 billion. We're fine with Other founders are really upset.
[00:20:35] And most of the time, they don't have a hit yet. And they're thinking, I'm gonna collectively get famous from an album. We're gonna release 10 different products. None of them are very well known, and maybe the collection of them will get us famous, uh, and famous for them would be successful
[00:20:56] with lots of customers product market fit. Right?
[00:20:59] So that that's the first 1. It's really just be okay with leading with 1 thing and push the other products down. The next stage up is more of like a we wanna show you that we have multiple products for multiple people, and we're thinking home page. Right? So a great example of this is Rippling.
[00:21:16] Rippling creates, uh, they have a bunch of different products, and when you go on their page, it basically says explore Rippling by product, and it has a menu to point you to the different pieces. Now the reason that Rippling works is because the way that they built that product suite was they have individual product teams, you know, like, okay, we're gonna give an engineer, a designer, and a product manager. You go out into this part of the the world and try to build a product and find product market fit. Once you found product market fit, we're gonna add you to the suite. So every single 1 of the products on that homepage has found product market fit on its own.
[00:21:52] And so the likelihood that someone coming to the homepage looking for any 1 of those is pretty high. So for them, we're like, we're just gonna use this page as what we call like a channel changer, which is really like, we'll just help you find the right product, and you can go to that page, and then when you get on the page, it gets hyper specific, and it basically does all the same stuff we would do on our page, Fletch, but for the specific landing page of the product. Right?
[00:22:14] Each product page becomes like its own home page. So the channel changer route is like the next step over.
[00:22:18] The last final step is the riskiest for startups makes the most sense for incumbents who have been around for really long, is to truly try to sell the product suite all at once.
[00:22:31] And so these are the examples. Office 365. Microsoft has spent the last 50 years evangelizing that your document creation software, your presentation software, your excel type software, uh, 10 others should all live together in 1 1 suite. And they've spent decades doing this, and it became an accepted product suite so much that Google could come out and say, hey, we're releasing our competitor suite, and it has the same identical products, but it's from Google.
[00:23:00] It's different. Right? It's not so cumbersome. Whatever. And so what we often find is pre product market fit companies that have essentially tried to, like I said earlier, have an album make them famous rather than the single, they try to do the Microsoft strategy.
[00:23:18] They try to sell the whole platform, the whole product suite all at once, when no 1 really cares about any of the individual solutions. And so that last method works if you're usually if you're the market leader and there is a big demand for the suite of products. It's super super dangerous for anyone else to try to bundle them all together, but that's often the most common thing we see startups are doing.
[00:23:43] Toni: I'm not sure kind of how you're gonna, you know, answer this now, but the I think there's something to the different products. I think that you laid this out, you know, beautifully.
[00:23:51] That makes total sense. What what issue that I experienced in a previous company, we were an SMB vendor, and management wanted to go up market. Right? And, uh, you know, you think about the people who land on your website and so forth. Right?
[00:24:06] And, when when you think about segmentation and kind of that changing, how do you deal with that? How do you deal with messaging that, you know, works perfectly for the SMB, but then someone says, hey. We need to go up market.
[00:24:20] How should or how would that, uh, you know, impact your website?
[00:24:25] Anthony: So I have a pretty strong take on this. I think that if you're using your website at all so if we're talking SMB,
[00:24:31] mostly, these are small annual contract value, and these are usually a more PLG approach that, like, an SMB can get 5 licenses of HubSpot, you know, just by going on the website.
[00:24:43] They don't necessarily have to talk to a salesperson. In my opinion, if a large portion of your go to market is dev devoted to S and B, PLG, self serve, that has to take precedence on the homepage. Because the flip side is if you if you make the homepage for your enterprise buyer, all you're doing is cutting off the PLG angle. Because for PLG, the homepage is likely the salesperson. Right?
[00:25:10] Like, it's gonna be the thing that convinced them to click the demo. Right? That and everything up up up funnel all in your marketing and stuff that's driving them there, but it's the main conversion point for people who are coming in through the PLG door. So if you wanna have PLG as a growth lever, great. The decision's made for you.
[00:25:27] You have to put it on the homepage. And you can look at company after company that have done this. Right? This is not a a hidden thing. It's the reason why Loom, uh, Calendly, Asana for I think and some of these, I'd have to go back and look and see if they've changed it.
[00:25:40] Most of the companies that have a PLG arm that's really strong, they've got a little button up at the top that says enterprise. And they're like, we know you're if you're here for the enterprise, don't read this page. Read this page. And they put it primarily, you know, visible up in the nav bar. If you scroll down far enough through the PLG angle, they might have a big full section that says, enter looking for enterprise? Click here. those 2 messages can't live next to each other. They just can't.
[00:26:07] And I I personally think that for the most part, having a more director level end user message on the homepage is better even for the enterprise companies, especially if you're not Salesforce. If you're anyone who's trying to get known for something, you actually have to tell them the thing that you want to be known for, and it's not gonna be we're known for increasing revenue.
[00:26:32] Right? Like, when you say Stripe's known for payments processing, you're not like, oh, Stripe's known for revenue increasing. Right? Like, no companies own business growth, even Salesforce. You're like, what's Salesforce known for?
[00:26:45] Business growth. No. They're known for CRM.
[00:26:47] And you can go down the list of every company imaginable, and for the most part, the vast majority of them will be known for for, like, the product category that they're in or the use case that they solve.
[00:26:56] Like, Calendly, what are they for? Will they help you schedule meetings? Whatever. But so in general, I still think even with the enterprise, if you write the page more about what the product actually does and for whom, it will help even the enterprise deals close better. Because those decision makers in the enterprise who are gonna buy the software, like, be the ones who sign the check, or not the physical check at this point probably, right, but the purchase order or whatever.
[00:27:21] Those people are not scanning websites. Right? That final that final sign off person is not shopping, like, on a, you know, Tinder feed, like, swiping left and right on home pages. Right? They're just not doing it.
[00:27:33] They get brought in from the people who are lower down. So long answer to your question, I still think everyone benefits when you share more what the product is and does from a perspective of, like, at least a manager or a director level, not like a SVP CEO level for the most part.
[00:27:53] Toni: Yeah. So totally agree with that. Um, and again, right, it's but he almost what he's saying is, like, hey, make your websites a little bit more boring.
[00:28:01] Right? Less less so high flying. Dumb it down. More like what it actually is, and talk to the people that, are not high up the chain. Talk to the people that probably gonna research.
[00:28:11] You know, do the research, do the footwork, uh, actually gonna read what you have written because the CRO CEO won't. Right? Um, But then, you know, especially early stage midst I mean, it does clash with and I think you have a couple of really cool LinkedIn pieces on this and I feel so seen when I read those. It does clash with the founder and the visionary and the CEO being like, what do we mean this is for taking videos? No.
[00:28:38] Loom, we are democratizing whatever we're doing. Right? It's like, how does that how does that actually work out? Right? Kind of how do you how do you square that circle?
[00:28:48] Do you just go to the CEO and say, like, stop it. And this is what we're doing or kind of how do you deal with that conundrum?
[00:28:55] Mikkel: And let's just imagine the person in this scenario is a German founder. That would help me out a lot.
[00:29:02] Anthony: I
[00:29:02] Toni: not I'm where this is going, Mikkel.
[00:29:04] But, uh, anyway yes, please.
[00:29:07] Anthony: We try to win that argument with clients before they ever actually reach out to us, which is why we post on LinkedIn the way that we do.
[00:29:16] Like, 1 1 of the standard messages now we send people, and I don't send it to everyone. If I get a hint that the founder I'm dealing with who wants to work with us is, like, I'm the big visionary, and and I'm just getting a sense they're not gonna like what we tell them to do. I actually send them a LinkedIn post that I wrote and say, before we decide to work together, you need to read this, and you need to be not only okay with it, you need to embrace it. So tell me if if if you if you're not okay with it, then we should probably not continue. And the first line of the of the post says, if you're struggling to get good product marketing and messaging as a founder, there's only 1 place that you should look to find the source of the problem, the mirror.
[00:30:03] And basically say, you are the problem. The reason your company cannot get messaging right is a hundred percent your fault, And it comes from a good place. It's because you want to be this giant company, which is great. That's what's gonna get this thing off the ground. You need the vision.
[00:30:18] But there's 2 ends of a spectrum. There's the founder's vision, and then there's good product marketing, and they're opposite ends of the spectrum.
[00:30:26] almost never the same thing. Because talking about the next 5 years, all the industries you're gonna dominate, your product roadmap, all the things you're gonna become, the way you're gonna democratize, you
[00:30:36] know, whatever. That is the opposite of good product marketing.
[00:30:41] Good product marketing is what does the product do today? For whom? What problem does it solve? And especially if you're selling, like, you can find visionary customers who are really wanting a competitive edge, who will buy into your visionary message, but they are not the mainstream market. They're not even the early market.
[00:31:00] They're they're a tiny segment of crazy people who are looking for moonshot ideas to give their companies a competitive edge, and there's not many of them. Not enough to make you a real company. And so those people will maybe buy into it, but the rest of the world is, like, I'm trying to solve problems and avoid getting fired.
[00:31:20] I'm about to get fired because we have this problem in our company, and we can't figure out how to solve it. And if you come along and say, hey, we actually solved that problem through these specific things that our product does, That's gonna actually get you the meeting, not the other 1.
[00:31:32] Toni: think, and this is maybe a personal story from my side.
[00:31:35] So, I mean, when I was kind of in a capacity as a CRO, I didn't care much about messaging, by the way. It wasn't really my thing. Now CEO, that changed it just a little bit. I think what made, you know, where where it may click for me was actually when you think about what are you putting on the website, is that the same are those the same words you're gonna be putting in an outbound email? Not not exactly.
[00:31:55] Right? It's gonna have the same core to it, but you're gonna be talking about it in a different way. Are those the same words you're gonna be putting on a LinkedIn ad or Google ad or whatever you're gonna do? No. But the course very similar.
[00:32:08] Right? And I think the the the trap that many folks fall into is that they spend a lot of time working on this investor pitch deck, which need, you know, this the the the buyers are these visionary people. Right? It's it's the ones that you just described. Kind of the crazy people that don't exist and they they buy companies, they don't buy products.
[00:32:30] and if you are successful pitching them, you will need to be this visionary guy talking about all the, you know, things you're gonna democratize and dominate and whatever you're gonna do. But but that you know, while that is true for your pitch deck and while it might work, the same angle doesn't work on your website, albeit it could have the same core to it. Right? So this this context switching, I think it's it's really important, and and I think what kind of helped me think through this was 1 of the things you were actually saying when when we kind of going through the process. Toni, who is actually going to be on this website?
[00:33:02] Who's actually gonna read the whole thing? Who's actually gonna scroll down? And and the answer was very quick. Well, it's gonna be head of revenue operations, director of revenue operations, something like that. Okay.
[00:33:11] So it's not the visionary folks, it's not the other people, it's not the VP of sales. It's that specific persona. Right? and using that in order to structure your messaging, again, it needs to be connected to the same thing in the end. Don't get me wrong.
[00:33:23] But I think that helped, uh, at least me kind of to wrestle through this. But, hey, it needs to be the same area because it actually doesn't.
[00:33:30] Anthony: Yeah. Yeah. I think you nailed it. Right? Thinking about who's actually gonna read the website is is a lot of times the thing that cuts through the clutter.
[00:33:38] Like, with with founders, especially, I'm like, do you think like, if if, like, especially if they're, like, we wanna sell into the enterprise. And they're, like, well, ultimately, we gotta sell to the the CFO or the CRO or whoever it is. And I'm, like, okay. So how many of those c suite are there in an enterprise company? 10?
[00:33:56] That's it. So it's like if you can't get Marc Benioff on the call and you're trying to sell Salesforce and you wrote the homepage for the CEO, tough luck. I guess we're moving on to the next 1. It's like, oh, yeah. Remember that there's hundreds, if not thousands, of director level people at Salesforce.
[00:34:11] And if you think your software could be used by Salesforce, you have thousands of opportunities to sell into them, and they're not those directors are not gonna resonate with the same message that Marc Benioff would need to hear to buy this. Right? And so if you if you get that wrong, writing the page for 1 person or 2 people when there's a thousand other opportunities over here, that if you just leveled it down to something a little more realistic of what the product actually does, you're just you exponentially increase the likelihood that you're get a conversion.
[00:34:42] Toni: So moving kind of a little bit of hat here. So we talked about the website and kind of what it needs to be tailored for and you have tons of expertise in in that specific area. But also in your in your intro, you talked about the full funnel. Right? How all this messaging needs to, uh, percolate down the funnel, throughout the funnel.
[00:34:59] Trico, waterfall. I don't know. I'm just using some fancy English words you know, what's your what's your experience with running this process internally? So let's just say marketing came up with new messaging.
[00:35:09] Great. Everyone is gonna be excited about that. Right? Um, how how do you make sure that, your sales rep and the reps are adopting it, that your CS reps are adopting it, that, you know, it's being used in collateral that's going out, that etcetera. Kind of how do you make this massive change happen in this organization?
[00:35:28] And it might be different scales of it. Right? If you have a smaller team, 20, 30, 40, 50 people, a different challenge than even 250 people or a thousand people.
[00:35:37] Anthony: Yeah. We don't I mean, we don't have, like, the truly the answers for the very large companies.
[00:35:42] And it's actually funny. We've worked with it it was actually even I'll step back a second. We've toyed around with ideas for software. Like, okay. If we pivoted out of services consulting, right, and and into software, we've had ideas of, like, how could you build a messaging house that actually gets these things out into the world like, into the teams so that everyone is actually aligned.
[00:36:05] Right? Brings it into their workflow and stuff. And because right now, the answer is you spend all this time with marketing or whoever. They come up with this whole positioning, this messaging, value propositions, and it lives in a 50 page Google Doc that nobody reads. And they send it out sales sales, like, okay.
[00:36:22] What do you want me to do with this? Right? Like, I'm literally I'm using my pitch deck. It's working. You want me to go read your 50 page document and somehow figure out how to translate, like, these weird esoteric value prop, like, Mad Lib things.
[00:36:34] We're a blank company for x-ray, and we saw like, that are and they're always so vague and high level that it's, like, no salesperson's ever gonna use that. So we've always been trying to figure out, like, is there a way that we could actually, like, somehow recreate it? You know, maybe with some sort of chatGPT type thing where it's trickling into whatever. And we've actually worked with, I think, 2 different startups trying to build this product. So this is a very real problem, and don't know if we're gonna be the ones to solve it.
[00:37:01] But someone will solve that problem maybe of, like, how do you align higher up in the company the types of messages you want, and then how do you have that actually trickle down or percolate each of the things. We haven't solved that problem. We don't. It's it's just it's change management. Right?
[00:37:16] It's the same a whole discipline around making that happen. For the smaller companies that we work with, we actually say, use your homepage and the landing pages as your messaging doc.
[00:37:31] So rather than having a Google doc, make the pages themselves so clear that they explain the problem, the specific problems that you solve for whom, how you solve it at a features and capabilities level. And this can be across multiple different landing pages, but the difference is that when a salesperson is using this in their workflow, they're not going into a weird pre translated set of messaging, where they have to essentially do the translation themselves of taking it from the weird Google Doc, putting it into the asset that they understand. Once you've translated it into a landing page or a home page or a product page or whatever it is, when the salesperson's like, I'm about to sell into this retail person.
[00:38:15] Right? They pull up the retail landing page, and it has been written in such a way where it's extremely clear, then it becomes a usable sales asset because the salesperson in the outbound email can include it. Right? Hey. This is you know, they can and they can pull the problems directly from the page, and it actually will align in way better.
[00:38:32] So for most of the companies we work with, we're like, this is great. You spend some time building this doc. We don't think anyone's ever gonna use it. It was probably wasted time, but that's okay. Let's get this into pages that will actually help you move the ball forward.
[00:38:45] Let's make it so that each industry page is clear enough that a sales rep could read it, send it to a prospect, and could loosely understand how you solve the specific problems with which parts of the product, everything. And then at the homepage level, right, the high level positioning of the comp company, if you have multiple products, whatever, it should be clear enough that any of your employees can just say, well, what do we do? You know, how do we explain ourselves? I'll just look at our website. The vast majority of b 2 b home pages are not up to task.
[00:39:14] Employees can look at it. Uh, prospective employees can look at it, and customers can look at it, and nobody has any idea what the company does. So it's like, make your website public assets the source of truth for everyone, and everything gets a lot more easier because it's it's just so much easier to type the company name in the website for a sales rep than it is to go navigate the endless folder structure of a marketing team's Google Drive filled with, you know, 20 different revisions of everything.
[00:39:41] Toni: I love this.
[00:39:41] This is, um, this is basically kind of the the reality check test. Right? Kind of this is this is where product marketing actually needs to go towards in order for people then to use it after the fact. So I kinda love this approach. I think Andy Raskin, he's kind of a little bit more I'm not sure kind of, uh, you know, you you do know him.
[00:39:58] Um, he, you know, his test is sales deck. Right? Kind of, let's create a sales deck and see if people are using it. I think you're coming at it from the exact or similar angle, but the exact right conclusion of, like, hey. It should actually be the the website and kind of, you know, uh, living up to that that reality check.
[00:40:15] Mikkel: I think we have kind of time for just 1 last last question. Not the longest thing. But I also know once you're gonna start this exercise and you kinda mention it, you also have to be clear on what are the the use cases and then the features you wanna highlight. And I can also just see a lot of folks struggling with that, even internally whether Is it all the same? With the same.
[00:40:34] Right? Whether they have too many or but but picking the right 1, how like, if if there's a listener out there right now sitting there like, okay. I get it. Buy into it. We have the shuffle, I think you call it.
[00:40:45] We can do that. But we still kinda have to pick some of the use cases. How like, what would your advice be to kind of land on something to get going?
[00:40:55] Anthony: So I'm rereading and I know you said don't make, you know, not necessarily long answer, but this might be a longer answer, but this is this has been the biggest eye opening thing for me and my partner, Robert, um, recently. So I just I wanna give it I'll try to keep it quick.
[00:41:09] But I've been rereading Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore, and I feel like it's a very often quoted book. The concept of it, um, is is brought up a lot in, especially, marketing circles. But I feel like most people the problem is the source material is pretty dense. The book's not an easy read. It's filled with all sorts of stuff.
[00:41:28] And when I first read it, you know, early on in my days in the tech industry, I didn't really get it. I, like, kinda got it, and I was like, this is interesting, but I didn't really get it. And now on the tail end of working with a, you know, close to a hundred and 50 startups, I'm rereading it, and it's literally blowing my mind because of how spot on all these pieces are. And he's a big proponent as we are, and we we kinda came to it from first principles seeing it on the ground, and and I'm, like, I'm reading his approach, and he's been doing it for 30 years. And he he's saying very similar stuff to us, but it's a it's a lot more eloquent and deeper and stuff.
[00:42:00] But so his whole thing is, like, choosing a target niche, a use case, especially for companies that are trying to find product market fit. Really, really honing down, niching down, shrinking the market, doing all these things that make founders wanna throw up. Right? Like, what? Our market's only a hundred company?
[00:42:16] What? No. We we gotta be a billion dollar company. You know, we need millions of companies, all that stuff. And he's like, you should focus on 1 use case, 1, uh, geography, 1 company type, uh, and and I think, like, a couple other things.
[00:42:29] It's like it's even more intense than the niche down advice that we give startups. And for the longest time, we always were like, well, this is it gives you the messaging advantage. You can talk so specific. You can really speak their language. When you try to speak to multiple, it doesn't quite work as well.
[00:42:44] And you're talking across multiple use kit. So we came at it from the messaging angle, but he actually brings up a different point that is more compelling and makes more sense intuitively. So and to give you a a brief overview for people who are not familiar with the Crossing the Chasm concept, it's basically that the early adopters of your product, they have a different mindset than the mass market that you're trying to reach. The early adopters are, like, I'm either just interested in new cool technology, and I just wanna try it out on myself, or they're like these visionary people we were talking about. I'm trying to get a competitive edge.
[00:43:16] And the reason that this early market, you can land them as a startup, even with a half built buggy product, they're saying, I'm so committed to getting a competitive edge that I'll take your half built product, and our team will shoulder the burden of training all of our employees, building out all the integrations, um, you know, integrating it in with these different systems and stuff like that. We'll shoulder the burden to get the full value to basically fill in all the gaps that you're missing. So that's the early market, and it's a small group of people who are willing to do that on an untested smaller company. The mass market is pragmatist buyers, pragmatists who are saying, I'm not gonna destroy my career by adopting some half built product and then having it not deliver, and then they go the startup goes out of business or something, and then I get fired. I'm just not gonna do it.
[00:44:10] I'm I've been in the shadows of those visionaries in the past, and when they leave to go on to their next big thing, I have to pick up all the pieces and left over from these half built things that they brought into our company that never delivered the value we thought. So the pragmatists are like, I need your product to be done. I I need it to be all the features and capabilities that you're saying, but I actually need all the ancillary stuff too. I need you to have in-depth documentation, in-depth training materials. If there's parts of our business that it needs to work with, you need to have those integrations already created.
[00:44:40] If there's partners in our ecosystem that need to be involved, you need to have pre built all those things. So, like, the difference between they call it the generic product, which is the software itself, and the whole product, which is
[00:44:51] software plus all the ancillary service related things. And the the point that he's making is that to get the pragmatist to buy it, you have to shoulder the burden of all that other stuff. And the problem is if you try to shoulder that burden for multiple different use cases, for multiple different segments, your company won't be able to do it. Because each different segment has such bespoke needs that will not be applicable to the other ones.
[00:45:17] So he gives this example of this company that was selling WiFi routers in, like, the early 2 thousands when everything was, you know, wired network. Cisco was the big player they're going against. And so the reason that picking a specific use case in a beachhead segment is so important is because to get the pragmatist to buy into it, you have to do all that extra stuff. So they picked colleges and universities as their first beachhead, which for if you're a founder and you're selling Wi Fi routers, you're like, my TAM is the whole world. Everyone needs Wi Fi routers.
[00:45:49] Right? I should go after it. So but they said, no. No. No.
[00:45:51] What we need to do is get traction in the early days. So they shrunk the TAM to, like, however many universities there are in the US. And what they said was we will deliver the whole product, And the universities had a laundry list of things that they needed before they were gonna adopt this, and those things that they needed were not shared by the other segments. Right? The financial services companies, they have their own set of things they wanted.
[00:46:17] The, you know, manufacturing companies, they have their own thing. But they built out the whole product just for colleges. And within a year, I think they had gotten 50 percent of the market share of all colleges in the US. For a smaller startup, that's a good chunk of change. And they went from being a no name person to a player, because what happens is with this tight use case based niche or, uh, customer second based niche, right, all those people talk to each other.
[00:46:44] So these these, uh, different college people were meeting. Presidents were having dinners with each other and getting together for, you know, community stuff, and they're like, oh, we just got all these Wi Fi routers. And and it's we're moving off the wire net. We're like, well, what did you do about your, you know, the grading system that connect well, actually, they solved that for us. Well, how did you get all these wireless access points into the door?
[00:47:03] Well, they came in installed it for us. So they basically the word-of-mouth, because it's a tight knit community of, you know, a couple hundred or thousand schools, it just snowballed, and they became this market leader. And now you have the revenue from selling, let's say, you know, a thousand routers to 1 school across 50 percent of all universities, now you actually have some some power and bandwidth to start adding on additional use cases and segments. When before, when you're a tiny little scrappy startup, you couldn't have done that. And the same thing about choosing, like, a specific use case to focus on, the big incumbent players like Cisco at the time, they're not gonna spend all that time with colleges to do all the stuff for colleges.
[00:47:43] Like, it's not worth it. We're multibillion dollar company. You know, we're across every continent and every whatever. So, like, the competitive advantage against the big players is the fact to do all this extra stuff for a specific segment to solve the end to end use case. So all of that is a preamble.
[00:48:00] Back to your initial question, how do you choose the use case? There isn't a formula because if there was, whoever could crack that formula would be a billionaire, if not a trillionaire, because it would be solving innovation. Right? we've solved it. We know exactly.
[00:48:16] And so in the book that I'm rereading, right, he says the same stuff that we say, but puts it better than I do. Basically, he's saying, it's a high risk, low data choice. And so you have to just accept that. You're talking about new markets that don't exist. So traditional TAM analysis, you know, market segmentation is not really gonna work to decide which use case.
[00:48:37] So you just have to accept it and you have to use, really, your founder gut intuition to choose 1 of them, and then you just have to charge at it and and say, in the next 3 to 6 months, can we land, you know, 5, 10 more customers in this specific segment around this 1 use case? And then use that as fuel snowball to to grow and expand beyond that. So if I had the answer, I would tell you, uh, all the only answer I do know is not choosing a specific 1 is the wrong answer. Choosing 10 of them is the wrong answer. Choosing 1 of them is potentially the right answer even if it's the wrong use case.
[00:49:14] Mikkel: That's it.
[00:49:16] I mean, we went through a ton here, and I'm happy to say that we're gonna actually write this up as a dedicated post on, uh, on our Substack. That's it. check that out on revenue letter dot substack dot com. And, uh, Anthony, thanks so much for joining us.
[00:49:31] It was a pleasure.
[00:49:32] Anthony: Thanks for having me. It was super fun with you guys.
[00:49:35] Toni: This was great. Thanks.