- If you're a SaaS founder,
and you are navigating the path to the next stage growth,
navigating the path to product/market fit,
marketing is probably one of the big things
that's top of mind for you.
If it's not, it should be.
Now, marketing is a very broad discipline.
There's a lot of aspects to marketing.
And one of the aspects of marketing,
which is the most important aspect in this early stage of
building your SaaS business,
but is often ignored, is product marketing.
In this episode, I'm gonna walk you
through the details of exactly what product marketing is,
why it matters,
and how you can actually implement that discipline,
so you can accelerate your path
to part market fit and revenues.
Intro.
(upbeat music)
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to "Unstoppable", I'm TK.
On this channel, I help SaaS founders like you
navigate the path to the next stage of growth
with an unstoppable strategy.
If you are new to this channel,
I drop an episode like this every Sunday,
Wednesday, and Friday,
so be sure to hit the subscribe button, and that bell icon,
that way you'll get notified every single time
I drop an episode with the TK energy.
Also, if you're already a subscriber,
if you're already a member of our SaaS go-to market program,
welcome back, it's really awesome to have you here.
Now, today I wanna talk a little bit
around product marketing.
Now, when you are driving the product/market fit,
when you're getting initial revenues,
when you're scaling revenues,
when you're trying to get to a million or 3 million ARR,
when you're trying to raise that series,
A, marketing is one of the big things
that you're likely focused on.
But one of the things I constantly see is
that founders focus on the wrong aspects of marketing.
When it comes to marketing, it's a very wide discipline.
There's brand marketing, there's content marketing,
there's events marketing, there's PR,
there's demand generation, there's outbound,
and then there's product marketing.
And it's very easy to focus
on the wrong aspects of marketing.
Turns out, when you're driving a product/market fit,
when you're trying to get revenues going
and scaling on, in the early stages,
the one discipline of marketing that matters the most,
is actually product marketing.
So in this video, I'm gonna dig
into what is product marketing?
Why product marketing is the most important
in the early stages,
and also how to implement this discipline
into your marketing function, to your early stage startup.
So if you're excited to dig in,
you wanna smash that like button
and let's get right into it.
So first of all, let's talk about
what is not product marketing.
But funnily enough, when it comes to generating demand,
when it comes to generating leads
and closing revenue in the early stages,
founders always focus on this.
I've done this, I focused on this, I've lost money on this,
but then I learned.
And so this is what product marketing is not.
Content marketing.
A lot of times I'll see founders say,
"Oh, we'll just hire a content person."
They'll put out some blogs, never works.
It's just not enough.
Other people I see, will download a tool like Outreach
or one of the many hundred outbound sales email tools
that exist, and they'll do the spray and pray on outbound.
And almost always, when I talk to founders
that are applying to join our go-to market program,
they're like, "Yeah, we did outbound.
"We sent out all these emails, but it didn't do anything."
An outbound spray and pray is like having a giant gun,
and shooting the gun at all kinds of things,
but the bullets are really bad.
That's what you guard,
so that's not the right way to do product marketing
in early stage marketing either.
And others, and I've lost money on this also,
is just running ads, or spending time on SEO.
SEO takes 18 to 24 months to actually generate real traffic,
and ads, you can quickly lose money
because Facebook will be more than eager to take your money,
but not really get the results
that you're really looking for.
So these are all the things that I have made the mistake,
I have seen other founders make the mistake,
we spend money on content marketing and content person,
we outbound spray and pray, we run ads, we try to do SEO.
None of those things really generate demand.
None of those things really get you
the revenue you're looking for in early stages.
So this is what you shouldn't be doing.
Product marketing on the other hand,
this is what product marketing really distills down to.
Now, hear what product marketing really is.
Product marketing is messaging.
It is positioning.
It is actually talking and flushing out
what your features are, and what the benefits of those are.
And it is thinking about differentiation and competition
and framing this messaging and positioning,
so that you differentiate from the rest of the market
and the competitors.
That is what product marketing is.
And if you start to think about it,
if you just jump into content, outbound, ads and SEO,
but you don't do the product marketing pieces,
these specific pieces,
can you start to see why you'll spend a lot of effort here,
but it'll completely miss the mark?
Because you haven't done the core work.
You haven't done the hard work
of what product marketing really is.
So that's what product marketing really is, right?
And you start to see the difference,
why it matters in the early stages.
This is everything in the early stage.
Your messaging, your strategic (indistinct) is everything.
Your positioning is everything, your benefits and features.
This is everything, this is what matters the most.
So that's principle number one,
it's like you gotta understand marketing is
and why it matters.
But the other disciplines of marketing aren't as important.
Principle number two is, you gotta understand
where product marketing really fits.
With product marketing, you think about your standard sales
and marketing funnel.
First what you're doing is, you're tryna attract people
in your ICP.
Then you're tryna convert them to actual leads,
so that they become known.
And then you're tryna close them.
This is what product marketing is all about.
This is the most important.
Because in the early stages,
what you don't need to do is, attract a billion people
with the wrong message,
and then convert them to leads,
but they're not really the right people.
What you really need to focus on,
is how do you close the people that absolutely should buy?
You start small over here,
and then you start to expand up to these other disciplines.
So when you actually, if you go back
to all the wrong things to do,
if you run a bunch of ads,
and spraying and praying a bunch of content,
yes, you will attract people.
Maybe you'll convert them to leads,
but they won't be tethered to the people
that might actually buy,
because your messaging is not there.
You're not attracting a specific group of people.
You're not telling them the specific differentiated story,
your message is not.
You're not talking about talking about the features
in the right way.
So it almost becomes backwards.
In the early stages, what matters most is to start here,
and then work your way upwards,
because you do the unscalable things here,
then you can scale it for a bigger volume marketing
and sales funnel.
Now, before I go to principle number three,
let me just pause here for a second.
This idea that product marketing is kind of the holy grail,
it's not just true for early stage companies.
Yes, it is very true for early stage companies,
this is what matters the most.
And you cannot outsource this.
The founder needs to own this,
you cannot outsource your marketing.
Trust me, I've lost money on that,
two others have as well.
You need to own this.
You need to own the strategic message.
You need to own all of these aspects.
But the other thing I wanted to tell you is like,
this is not just true for early stage.
As VP of strategy of Marketo,
Marketo acquired my company ToutApp,
and I joined the executive team.
It was insane, because within that first year,
I was the interim MD of Europe,
I was also head of strategy,
I was also responsible for integrating ToutApp,
to make sure we meet our acquisition goals.
I was doing all three.
I had moved to London.
And also broadly,
Marketo was going through its two-year transformation,
which led to the $4.75 billion exit to Adobe,
and so we were uploading the entire message of the company,
we were revamping the messaging,
we were rolling out new parts of the platform,
were tryna to integrate ToutApp in,
and I was trying to like get Europe rebooted,
I was tryna help hire a new leader for Europe
at the same time, while we keep everything going,
all of this was happening.
And so I was hooked into a lot of things
and I was responsible for probably more things
than I should have been responsible for,
but I was like, "Okay, cool,
"we got to do what we got to do."
And I remember, at that point,
whenever I asked a question like,
"Well, how do we mobilize this?"
Or, "How do we get this done?"
Every single time, the answer would be,
"Oh, you gotta talk to Matt Zilli's team.
And I'm like, "How come everything leads to Matt Zilli?"
And Matt Zilli an amazing person,
he was heading up product marketing
in the very early days of that transformation.
Then he became the chief customer officer at Marketo.
Now he's CEO of another company, incredible guy.
But all roads led to his tiny team
even though Marketo had like
a hundred percent marketing organization.
I was like, "What is going on?
"How come it's always his team?"
And the answer was simple.
Part of it was Matt Zilli is amazing,
and he's the smartest guy in the room.
But the other answer was, he ran product marketing.
Product marketing sat at the intersection
of product, of sales, of customer success, of everything.
And there were the ones that were really codifying
the messaging, the positioning, the benefits, the pricing,
and they were rolling it out across across geos
as we were upleveling the company,
integrating in more things.
So this is not just an early stage thing,
this is truly the most important aspect of marketing,
and you gotta own it,
and you gotta make sure you do it right.
If you certainly get this, go and smash that like button,
also hit me with a yes below,
it'll mean the world to me and my team.
Also, if you're digging more into this go-to market piece,
and you're running an early stage SaaS business,
I have a special 45-minute training for you
that you gotta check out.
I'll tell you more about it later in this video,
but let's go back to principle number three.
Principle number three is like,
okay, if you are believing like, okay,
product marketing is super important,
and I don't wanna do all of this stuff,
I don't wanna hire the content person or outsource it,
I don't wanna just do outbound spray and pray,
I don't wanna just waste a lot of money on ads.
What I really wanna do, is focus on closing deals
and really getting the messaging right,
and the position like, if you're like,
"Alright, I'm in, how do I do this?"
Principle number three is how do you implement it, right?
How do you actually implement product marketing
and these disciplines into your function?
How do you own this?
Remember, you cannot outsource marketing, you just can't.
So how do you do this?
There's three things you really need to focus on.
The first thing you need to focus on is, what is your ICP
and the research around that ideal customer profile?
The second thing you need to focus on is,
what is your strategic message?
And then the third thing you need to focus on is,
how do you mobilize that message through sales,
and through marketing channels?
And in that order.
Remember, most people try to do the spray and pray approach
and just start to attract a whole bunch of people.
What I am saying is, go backwards.
Focus on the ICP, really do the research,
then create a strategic message,
then mobilize a strategic message,
and start to roll that out.
So to kind of recap in terms of product marketing,
what you shouldn't do,
is all the other functions of marketing,
which is just content, outbound, ads, SEO,
until you get your product messaging right,
product marketing right.
That's messaging, positioning,
features and benefits, differentiation.
How do you do that?
You get your ICP down, you get your strategic message down,
and then you mobilize that in a consistent way.
Now, if you're a SaaS founder, I have two resources for you.
The first thing is,
if you're building out a go-to market machine,
the one differentiated thing that you can do
is build what I call an unstoppable sales funnel.
You wanna dig more into that?
I have a 45-minute training, it's completely free,
on how to build a differentiated go-to market machine,
including these principles I just talked through over here.
So link to it below,
or you can just go to tktrader.com/saas-training.
It's 45 minutes, it's me talking to you, completely free,
and I'll go deep into some of these principles
that I've talked through over here.
The second thing I have for you is,
if you're building out your go-to market machine,
if you have some revenues,
you have the product and the marketing,
you really wanna accelerate your path to a million ARR,
you got to put all this stuff into play,
I invite you to apply to my SaaS go-to market program.
My SaaS go-to market program has three key pieces to it.
The first is, we really hone in on your ICP,
teach how to do the research,
then we help you create a manifesto,
that's your strategic message,
and the way you actually attract attention,
and then we teach you how to run a Broadway show,
so that in a scalable way,
you can actually generate demand and close revenues.
This is a coaching program.
We're adding about two to three founders
a week right now for this.
It's an incredible program, I cannot wait
until some of the bigger success stories,
we start to put the videos together and start sharing that.
So I invite you join this program,
it puts together everything that I know about how to build
and scale SaaS businesses, and you get to work with me.
So if you're interested in that, go to tktrader.com/gtm,
also link to it below, and you can check it out.
If you got value from this video,
be sure to smash that like button,
and also, I drop an episode like this every Sunday,
Wednesday, and Friday,
so be sure to hit the subscribe button
and the bell icon if you haven't already.
And also, if you have some thoughts on product marketing
or how to generate demand in the early stages,
please comment below and tell me what you think.
And lastly, if you got value and you have a friend
that will get value from this video,
please share it with them or tweet this out.
It would mean the world to us and my team,
we put a lot of effort into these videos.
Lastly, remember, everyone needs a strategy for their life
and their business, but when you are with us,
yours is gonna be unstoppable.
I'm TK, and I'll see you in the next episode.
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