I suspect most people reading this (yes, both of you) are like me, and have spent years of life in meetings.
And if they have been lucky enough to work in B2B marketing, a substantial chunk of those years have been spent talking about ‘positioning’.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. After all, you don’t have a choice as to whether your company and product is ‘positioned’, it’s only a matter of whether you take a passive or active role in the process. So doing nothing isn’t a great option.
But at the same time, and with the best will in the world, tech leaders and marketers often get hopelessly muddled up about the subject of branding and positioning.
We end up aping the outputs of B2C brand marketing and following none of the processes.
Some of this stems from envy. We’ve all seen Mad Men. And most of us would probably prefer to be swilling Scotch at noon and pitching Volkswagen than tabbing through a Google spreadsheet of the latest LinkedIn campaign reports or finding typos in endless display ads.
B2B marketing is boring. So when we’re let off the leash we can tend to go crazy. That’s probably why so many tech companies currently residing in the ‘where are they now file’ bought so many Superbowl ads over the years.
The fact is that Don Draper had a process, and we need to understand that process to deliver results. Hopefully this short piece helps, but first a short digression into the age old ‘features or benefits’ argument
Products Are Not Just A Set Of Features
This is about as far from an original observation as it is possible to get. Most tech companies understand this, but just in case you aren’t one of them, I’ll re-state the case here:
Describing the features of any product doesn’t help explain to the customer how it helps them with the things they want to get done.
That’s about the size of it. We can understand this concept very quickly by thinking in terms of consumer goods.
What are the ‘features’ of Coca Cola? You’ll find them written on the side of the can under ‘ingredients’ and precisely nobody cares about them.
What is the benefit of Coca Cola? Well, that’s a question that gets right to the heart of how branding and positioning works, but for the moment let’s stay old school and say it quenches thirst.
People who are thirsty care about drinking something that quenches that thirst - not precisely what is in the can.
So far so good. We need to learn to talk about what we have in a way that relates to what our target audience wants to get done.
Unfortunately this is often the point at which marketing teams in B2B companies lose touch with reality and go down a rabbit hole of second guessing what the ‘ultimate motivation’ for our audience is.
That’s a mistake. If we’re selling Coca Cola it’s OK, but if we’re selling widgets we need to understand that we have a specific solution to a specific challenge.
Inanities like “save more money” or “be more productive” are wallpaper. They don’t cut through and usually only engender cynicism.
The good news is that it isn’t hard to find your level. Just ask yourself the following questions:
Who has actually got the authority and motivation to buy what I sell?
What would that person have to do well to get promoted?
How is that measured?
The answers to those questions give you the benefits you need to be selling.
So if you have a digital marketing product in your hands and are selling to a digital marketing manager, you should probably be telling them that your mousetrap will “deliver more qualified leads, at less cost”, or something along those lines.
You do that because your target decision maker arrives into work every morning thinking “how can I deliver more good quality leads today?” They don’t arrive with a burning desire to buy marketing tech or implement esoteric features (that’s just work, and the less of it the better).
One final note before moving on. None of this means you will never mention features again. Of course it doesn’t.
In most B2B contexts, features do matter. But as a rule they don’t drive decision making. You might lose out if you’re missing one critical feature a particular customer needs, but it’s an item on a check list rather than the fundamental motivation.
Turning Benefits Into Positioning
So you’ve figured out how you help your potential customers and what you want to say. Now you have to make that message land.
Easier said than done. If there’s one failing common to most B2B marketing teams, it’s an unshakeable belief that anybody gives a damn what they are saying.
That isn’t usually the case. Most communication in this space is literally talking into the void. Even if you bribe a friendly journalist to write up your product announcement (they come pretty cheap these days) that’s still no guarantee.
Nobody reads TechCrunch for the obscure product announcements from software companies they’ve never heard of.
So how DO you make your message stick? Smart positioning can get you some of the way there. It’s a term more mis-understood (and mis-used) than any other in the marketing space. But done well it means real engagement and closed business.
Here’s what you need to understand about positioning: it takes place inside the prospect’s head. You don’t decide on your positioning and wave a magic wand. Instead, like any good general you take the terrain you are given and work out a plan of attack.
Here’s some practical steps to turn that into practice:
Know your prospect. Like, really know your prospect. You’ll need to understand what matters to them in order to sell benefits. But you will need to get deep into their mental landscape to get a handle on where you can fit and where there is ‘space’ for your message.
Work with what you find. It is spectacularly difficult to change somebody’s mind. Ultimately, that isn’t what marketing is about. Instead, identify what your prospect believes, or is prone to believe. Understand you are one small part of a huge landscape and look for the ‘crack’ within which you can grow or find something bigger you can be part of.
Identify the enemy and kill it. If you are changing the world for the better, be clear about what is wrong with the way things are done today, articulate it, and skewer it. Salesforce: “No Software” is the classic example of this process in action. Again - your goal is to find a (perhaps unspoken) bugbear and be the white knight that slays it. Assuming knights go around slaying bugbears, which is questionable.
Be visionary. When it comes to positioning, be bold. Keep your message simple and confident. Align the way you see the world with a better tomorrow and make that viewpoint synonymous with your product.
Be consistent. Nothing kills a business more than flip-flopping and excessive ambiguity. Once you’ve decided what you believe and how you’re attempting to position yourself in the customer’s mind, stick to it. Keep hammering the message home. Volvo have been telling the world their cars are safe - and nothing else - for the guts of 40 years. It works.
Lastly, remember the wise words of Jane Austen: “It isn't what we say or think that defines us, but what we do.”
I was lucky enough to work for the Paddy Power brand team for 6 years. In that time I learned that telling people about the values of the business was futile. They were expressed through every action the company took.
People aren’t idiots. You can’t say one thing and do another and expect that to stick. When you’ve identified how best to position your business you need to truly embody it.
Good luck!
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