YouSaid · the spoken record

Mik Kersten

lines on the record: 63
first: 2018-02-24
most recent: 2018-02-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Of the company, and what I thought in year two of the company, and what I think now in year three of the company, they're all related. There's a very clear arc to that, but they're not the same thing. And that's success. That's not failure.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your product function. Yeah, I mean, look, the beauty of enterprise is that enterprise can be figured out over a number of years. So the reason why a founder out there is listening to us should be super excited about enterprise is that in the enterprise, relationships are forgiving and people want to help you succeed. These enterprises, we don't have people in their office every day wanting to change their life. And when they find people who they believe really want to do that, they want to work with you to help you be successful. And those relationships, the customers, if you pick the right first 20 and you know how to realize which piece of what they're saying is really right, they will actually help you figure all this stuff out. And I think to Martine's earlier point, you just need to be really squinty-eyed. Like you as a founder have to be on some level super delusional and convicted that there's this big market, but you have to be really open on the details. Maybe your persona is wrong. Maybe your features wrong. Maybe your positioning's wrong. And like, you're going to iterate and be patient with yourself. Be patient. Because in the enterprise, like what I thought in year one.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But as you said earlier, you have to be the kind of entrepreneur who can handle this uncertainty and play this level. So, what you're partying takeaway or mindset or advice for others trying to do this.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Technology in business is so complex now that you actually need IT engaged because you're like building an SOA system. If you go to even a simple SaaS company and you ask them how many tools do you have, it's like 50. How do you connect them together? Well, that's a really, really complicated. By the way, you change Zora and it breaks Marketo. Like, how often do we hear that? So when I look at that, I actually think now running the business is a very complicated technology problem in the front office. There was a narrative for some time that like IT's dead. I think IT's changing. I think IT's going to become an integration and configuration organization and it's going to become horizontal for real modern enterprise platforms. You sell the value to the business and you sell the technology challenges to IT. And you need both.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically. Actually, this has been a learning, like a big learning of mine in the last two years. It's like we all talk about the line of business being empowered, but we talk about less is that it's a transition that isn't complete yet, right? And so it really is about navigating both sides in a sales process today.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is another theme that's completely come up in this podcast multiple times is this two phase thing because you are in this market creation situation. You have people now where their head is at and where they're going, and then you have this like double phase on a lot of the things you do basically.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just one quick thing, and it's more of an underscore, which is if you have an enterprise product that's going to market today to a non-technical user, say marketing, for example, what we're seeing is that the organization hasn't fully shifted. And so most of the products we see in the space have to position both to IT and to the line of business. And it used to be just core IT, or you could imagine just the line of business. Now, one company I'm on the board of, like literally there's two pitches. Like if the IT guy's in the room, you do this. And if it's the line of business, that. Now, that may change in the future, but now realize that there are two very different stakeholders that have very different ways of speaking that you have to appeal to.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, one, I think the future of coding is in non technical people. I mean, you know, user mind is fundamentally a rules engine for non technical people. So like when you think about the future of innovation, it's democratizing development. The future of innovation is not having more developers code. The future of innovation is getting non-technical people to be coding. You know, look, I think our belief is that the answer is you actually need both a technology for the business users. You want to empower them, free them, but you need controls, both security, data, promotion, permissioning for IT. And so the winning technologies to me are ones that straddle both the really technical people and empower the business, but put controls in place so they can't just break production by doing too many deployments.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, a couple of quick things I wanted to ask. Michelle, one of the things that's fascinating to me is that you talk about this customer first journey, and this is something that every enterprise wants, every company, forget it, cares about the customer, and especially in this age of Amazon, which is pretty much nailed the whole customer part of it. What happens when you have non tech users, though, as your customer? Like, what are some of the nuances of navigating that? Because on one hand, your software gives them superpowers, which is incredible, to be like an Amazon. On the other hand, there might be differences in how they deal with software. Like, what are your lessons there”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's why product marketing matters. So product marketing's job is to articulate how whatever it is, architecturally they suck, or feature-wise they suck, drawing the box, right? So like the things that only you have, why is that a must-have for this customer? There's one way doors and two-way doors. I'm really big into painting the other vendor as a one-way door. Most enterprises that I sell to have an adoption curve, they want to think about a four-year implementation cycle of a product, a cheap competitor. They'll get you 20% of the way. We're going to get you 100% of the way. And by the way, you haven't even thought about the problem deeply enough to understand that, yeah, this year you may want some simple rules. But eventually, you know what you're going to want? You're going to want all machine learning driven customer journeys. And we're the only platform that can scale from simple rules to ML-driven journeys. So it's, again, back to the narrative arc, but that's product marketing. You have to be great at product marketing.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, a fast follower builds some crummy version of what you do, and they basically give it away. That's one bookend. The other bookkeeper is like big incumbent X says, we're going to do exactly what, say, UserMind does, we're going to do it. It's on our roadmap. But because they have the account control and because they have dollar leverage and because they can like play around with discounting and stuff, like sometimes the companies will be like, there's a segment of the market.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To me, this is the next phase is like you get past bill versus buy, and then there's some vendor who's like, you know, 70% of what user mine has at 20% of the price. And now you have now you're in war. I like that phase too. That's my favorite phase.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that doesn't mean your market isn't gigantic. Like, from my point of view, majority of companies do not have the amount of money, the commitment to tech, the good enough developers to really actually go deploy it. So first, that validates the idea. Then the second thing is how do I sell against Bill versus buy? Right? And look, now I'm making a business case. I'm trying to argue the ROI of not only not tying up opportunity costs of your existing developers to build this thing, but the ongoing cost of maintenance and the benefit of like, I'm going to do this for a thousand other customers. So you're not just going to get the thing you rolled. You're going to get the benefit of every other customer and every other feature and every other thing.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's positive. So to me, that's good. And by the way, then the other thing is an entrepreneur you have to understand is if what you do is really right, there is probably a segment of the market that is going to build it. It's so core they have to build it.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first of all, if people are thinking they're going to spend money to build your thing, that means the problem is acute enough that they're willing to put money there. So from my point of view, that's signal. That says your idea is probably right.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you talked about sometimes the competition is a status quo, and that's a really key message here, especially in a market creation category creation situation. Do you navigate the build versus buy thing and the whole not invented Here syndrome? I used to see this all the time.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right, and you're basically saying the way that you're doing it is wrong. I mean, it's not like there's no competition that you're competing against an existing process or maybe a band-aid solution. There's some ownership of that. And then if you start to have a little bit of success, then every company in the world starts to position against you, right? So then all of a sudden it's like pivots from the incumbents. Every other startup says they do what you're doing, even though they don't. And then now it's like almost like shadow boxing. You're positioning against like, you know, people have taken your tagline and so forth. And so even just from that one narrow view of competitive positioning, categorization is a very nuanced.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One small piece of what you're talking about. If you're doing category creation, you would think, well, either you're competing with some existing set or you're competing with nothing at all. And it actually tends to be not either, right? So often in category creation, you're actually competing with a status quo. That's a very nuanced message to get across without calling the baby ugly, right? You're kind of coming because people...”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clear who you should be selling to. I think very few investors and founders have the patience for the level of uncertainty that it takes to build a new category. And I think that's because you're literally debugging every piece of the supply chain. You don't exactly know who's ultimately going to.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always tell people I think this is why when you raise money, when you found a company, I think there's a lot of pressure to basically build a better existing thing. It makes more sense to people. It's easier to monetize.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, it was one of these things where we were probably 10 steps ahead of them. And I think so much of building an early enterprise company and changing the way the world works is understanding how people view the environment, mapping yourself to that, and then incrementally changing it to understand the value of your solution, which is a multi-step process. Yeah.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The narrative was there. The level of naivety I've had over the past decade in general, right, has just been enormous. And this is one example of that, which is I came from an academic environment where we kind of argued and understood all of the properties. But if you're living in kind of that bubble, you forget that other people may not even recognize the problem that you're solving. And so you're kind of coming with a solution without even having to find the problem, right? And it's like, this is such a cliche, but it's like the Henry Ford quote, which is like, if I ask them, they would have asked me for a faster horse, right?”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to go back to this idea you guys keep touching on, which is thought leadership and narrative, and it comes in different forms. But one of the challenges, and Martin in your case, you guys had the narrative baked before you even started selling. You had all those papers and all these beautiful things. Like, you guys knew the value proposition. You wrote a paper that actually offered to find networking the enterprise. You already built that. You had your content, frankly, literally.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And by the way, customers are looking to you for thought leadership. And ultimately, I always say that in a category company, product strategy also has multiple chapters. So to me, chapter one is platform. I mean, you're leading the customer with your vision, but good category companies, creators, productize content into the platform so you productize your customer advantage. And by the time somebody else pivots into your space, ideally you've created more differentiation. It's not just platform-based on that customer feedback.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Early on, you're absolutely right. There's important key aspects you've got to navigate and understand. And then hopefully if you're doing category creation right, you create your own, and then you actually control the definition of the context around them. And then others have to navigate in your wake.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly right. And so, you know, it's almost like things happen in two phases, totally to your point. So, the first one is you're reverse engineering all of the context around those things. How does this person think? How is this budget allocated? Like we did this with network virtualization. It didn't exist. It wasn't a budget item. And the first question we ask is like, are we doing networking budget or are we doing security budget? We're doing virtualization budget. And then we said, who are we selling to? The networking person, the virtualization person. We found out it was a new person. And totally to your point, after we were done, there was someone that was responsible for the virtual networking layer.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“End up doing and listen if you're entering somebody else's playing field, like you're selling tissue or something else like that, you're playing by somebody else's rules. So a lot of the time you're walking in, the existing art structure, which is built around an existing procurement process, you know, there's existing roles that are used to have relationship to existing vendors and budgets that are being allocated to certain things.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that's what we're all trying to do when we talk about dent in the universe, you're changing the way companies work, you're changing what people do on a daily basis. So that's what I believe categories end up doing.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I love it. When I founded UserMind, one of my central premises was the line between IT and the business is blurring. If you look at the future, majority of software applications that are going to be built are going to be consumed by non-IT. They're going to be bought as SaaS. And so you end up with actually now HR sales finance, our gigantic IT organizations, and they don't even realize it. So one of the questions I asked myself is like, how is the organization going to change? New teams are going to get formed in order to manage this technology. People are going to realize that you don't want to manage marketing software and sales software. What you want to deliver is services. So my theory is that customer experience, this idea of customer journeys, the same idea that transformed IT and reorganized IT. And so if you play out this idea 10 years from now, my belief is you're going to end up with a business technology team, whether it dots into IT or it stays in the business, it will own all of the technology end to end and it will be responsible for end-to-end customer journeys end-to-end customer experiences.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, it's interesting. So, I always have a pet theory that if you can create a new role in a company, it's the ultimate act of category creation. You know, at Aptio, the ultimate expression of TBM, technology business management, is that there now are TBM people in the company. We created a new function within finance in IT and a new set of roles and responsibilities to the point where the title of that person changed and their job responsibility changed. That's the ultimate expression of category creation. The ultimate expression of categorization is software changed the work in the organization. Therefore, the org looks different.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay. All right. So let's now talk about navigating the enterprise because one of the best lines I think I've ever heard is that navigating enterprise is like navigating government. It might be like navigating a city. There's lots of different players with lots of different agendas and it's not necessarily a unified view. And one of the beautiful things about software is its malleability and ability to cut across. However, you got to get in the door. So how do you guys navigate organizations with software as sort of the vector in? Like how do you break down silos?”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second one is across multiple deployments, like there's a similarity in the use case that you've solved, totally to your point of patterns, right? Like if one bought it to solve one problem, another problem, another one, another problem, you may have just built something very general, like a compiler and you're just kind of form fitting it into whatever they need. And then the last one, and this is kind of the more touchy feely, but once you actually start to see a repeatable sale from a non-expert, then I think you now have good signal. So for example, anybody that can push the deal through without actually having the original founder, I think then you're kind of getting close to product market fit. But it's unbelievable that capacity for the customer to pay to learn, and it's unbelievable the ability for strong founders to make money and sell without actually being a good product market fit. So something I think everybody in this situation needs to be very aware of.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and maybe to make it even one step more concrete Here are key indicators this is not an exact science that I look for that I'm like okay maybe there's something there so the first one is if you actually have a production deployment there could be something there I mean like it's quite possible to get a ton of engagement and a ton of money and do pox and pilots and everything else That's actually a really good point and still it's not actually moving like you can even get license revenue and it still remains shelfware but if someone puts it in production they want to use it”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and so I think just being really rigorous, this is kind of very fascinating where if you look on the consumer side, product management is very, very data driven. It's become very data-driven. That's been a big shift in the kind of product management function. But product marketing should be equally data-driven. You're looking for patterns in who's the buyer, what's the initiative? What's changing in the organization? Like you're trying to find out what's common about the things that you're doing because that's the stuff that you can scale.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. In fact, we just went through it and prepping for our kickoff, and we found a couple really interesting common patterns that customers had that if you'd asked me, I would have had no idea that those were really true.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, to me, look, the signal comes when you get enough data to see patterns, patterns that validate your ideas. So if I look at the first two years of UserMind where I'm talking to 10 or 15 customers, there's just not enough there to actually start to see patterns. And particularly because a lot of that was relationship driven. So to be honest, I never overweighted my conclusion that much. You know, once you start to get the sales motion working where lead gen is not from a CEO discussion, where lead gen is actually starting to happen, and you start to see customers kind of get far enough into the pipeline and either close or become successful, I'm a big fan of like actual deal analysis and really looking at who's the title and what's the initiative and why did they”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, but unfortunately you can go for a long ways, but you can't scale it. And so it's important in the early days to have that motion, but you have to be very self-aware. You have to realize that you're starting brush fires, but they're just brush fires and they may go out. But at some point in time, just because you're getting dollars and just because they're taking meetings doesn't mean that this is a signal. I mean, even the customer's capacity for education is enormous. They're quite happy to pay for you to educate them. So this is a real, real important thing for enterprise entrepreneurs to try and figure out what to do is like, what is real? Actually, love to hear Michelle's view on what the real signal is.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the reality is, listen, if you have a sufficiently charismatic founder, they can sell anything to anybody, right? And that's not necessarily signal. Like that's not necessarily mean you've got product market and fit. You can always find something. You could always say the right thing and they wanted to engage”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do have to ask How do you go around that? One of the primary functions of an entrepreneur is to actually get access to real market signal. And it's hard because all of our capacity for delusion is so high and we really want it to be working and we really want to have product market fit.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before you guys get too excited about this playbook and the play zone, I do have to ask you're in a category creation market readiness situation. You're also in a position where you don't necessarily know you have product market fit yet. So what happens if you have so much of a playbook that you're missing out on opportunities that are emergent like, oh, this is a use case we're hearing about that we actually could steer our product to more focus on because you might build that play off the core use case that you think, but your hypothesis might be wrong. You don't know what you don't know.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That they need to follow that has a lot of if-el statements and things like that, right? Which is a play what you're saying. But it's true. So for example, you're looking for certain actors. Depending on situations and use cases, you'll change what you say. Like I'm used to selling to high-end enterprise and telcos, man. We're talking three-year sales cycle, you know, four people in the account, you know, navigating organizations and sub organizations from like the decision maker all the way up to the C-suite, like just real complex. There is no single battle card that'll do that. There's these very complicated things. And I do think that product marketing is responsible for generating that algorithm”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to refund this because it's so beautiful. A lot of people they view sales as I'm going to give one slide deck to somebody, you know, to a salesperson. They'll take that slide deck and then they'll be successful in selling. And no, like actually you're developing an algorithm.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The person you're going to go talk to, the set of messaging you're going to give them, it turns into a product sale at the end, but it's how to find the ops, right? And that's a sales play. That's like the full prospecting, selling motion that ends in technology. That's what I mean by motion.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way, and that brings up a third function of product marketing, which is what I call playbook development. Early product marketing as positioning and sales enablement, as you get mature and you start to see enough numbers of your deals to where it's really clear that there's a set of repeatable plays, every company I've been part of, you find a couple motions. You're not just going to sell a single motion. You're going to sell multiple plays. So at Aptio, an example would have been we had a sales play called, you know, bill of materials. And so you're trying to find a new CIO whose businesses are frustrated with IT, lack of transparency. And so what you want to sell them is essentially a bill of materials from a supply chain that they can deliver to their buyers to say, here's the cost quality and value by tea. Or at user mind, a play is we dovetail under new chief digital officers. We're looking for business transformation initiatives. And if you have journeys mapped, now you're ready for us. So it's basically the set of indicators, whether it's the initiative or the problem the customer has.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd say 70% of early companies in enterprise, they're trying to figure out how to do sales. And the first thing I look for is like, do you have a product marketing function, yes or no? Because there really is no single point in the company that better encompasses the ability to sell something in a repeated fashion than in product marketing, right? And so it's interesting because I find the inclination is you're criticizing sales when often, like the salespeople are doing the best that they can, they just haven't gotten the tools.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tools so that you can train sales and presales to replicate and basically go sell the same way. You want to execute like a machine to the same people, so you're nailing your message, you're nailing your differentiation. And if you get really good at it, you're also laying landmines for your competitors, right? You're setting up the entire criteria so that, look, you want the buyer to organically come to the conclusion that you're the only solution that they can choose to solve this problem and there's compelling reasons why it's you. That's product marketing.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I was boiling it down, it's positioning and sales enablement, and ultimately it's synthesis. What do I mean by positioning? By positioning, I mean your job is to basically frame the problem, the value, and the technical solution for the customer. And ultimately, what you're trying to do is set the buying requirements such that your differentiation is the thing that the customer will value most. And so it's a mini-narrative, right? That's what product marketing is. In a sales cycle, first you're convincing them of the problem, that's the POV, how to think about something in your company differently. But ultimately what you have to do is argue that how you solve it is unique, better, and different. And that unique, better indifferent needs to be defensible against the other vendors you're going to be competing with. Product marketing are the people who decompose that. And quite often in enterprise, those differentiations are very technical. You have to be able to translate differentiation into things that you can then scale into the field. So that's the other half of product marketing to me is sales enablement. All these.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Into materials and tools that you can teach the other sales reps how to use. You're not going to be able to scale your early success or scale how to sell or scale which persona to target without that capability.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's where product marketing is just like the lifeblood of an enterprise software company. What is the box you're drawing for the customer to buy? How do you define the box? What's in the box? What's outside the box? That's product marketing. In doing that, you define your entire competitive landscape and deconstructing your secret sauce. How do you teach one, 10, 100 salespeople how to sell what's unique about you? That's the sales enablement side of product marketing. So, you know, we're a little early at user mind for this, but at Aptio, we took our first 20 customers, we got them into a customer advisory council, and we brought prospects into those meetings, and we had them all talk about what they were doing. And there's nothing more credible than big enterprises talking about in detail their use cases, their value, because now it's not you selling them. It's the customer selling them. So to me, you know, whether it's building a community or it's case studies that you arm the field with or it's reference calls or it's business ROI calculators, your job is to basically take all that proof that comes out of your first 20 customers and turn it.”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Goes down to the advice that Mark and Ben always give to everybody. I feel like it's like their two word motto, which is raise prices, raise prices. I'm not going to meditate on that, but that's like their big message. Okay, so then back to this notion of early customers as being visionaries, they might be the only one. So then how do you deal with that? Because you might have one internal champion to hell. You can even have 10. But how did they then get everyone else on board, especially with enterprise software where there's integrations involved and multiple stakeholders tell me how you convert those other people or arm them to make the case for you?”
2018-02-24 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source