Mastering the Art of Positioning: Robert Kaminski's Guide for B2B SaaS Success

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Mark Evans: If you read my LinkedIn posts or blog, you'll know that I have a fascination, maybe even an obsession with brand positioning and messaging. In my humble opinion, they're a powerful one two punch that underpins a company's marketing, sales, product development, HR, fundraising, and more. And in today's competitive market, where demand is soft and standing out is crucial, positioning and messaging are even more important. But honestly, it sometimes feels like I'm Don Quixote tilting at windmills. As much as brand positioning and messaging matter, they're not the biggest priorities for companies laser focused on sales and leads. CEOs and marketing leaders see positioning and messaging as nice to haves rather than need to haves. That's a mistake strategically and tactically. On today's podcast, I'm thrilled to have Robert Kaminski with Fletch PMM, which develops positioning and website messaging for early stage startups. And you can see that Fletch drinks the Kool Aid with its homepage message, which declares that SaaS messaging is garbage. Make yours not suck. Robert, welcome to Marketing's Park.

Guest: Thanks so much for having me, Mark. Good to be here.

Mark Evans: After that mini diatribe, why we start by looking at how did you get into product marketing and what led you to cofound Fletch PMN?

Guest: My career has taken, I think, as many product folks, a nonlinear path, and I've been fortunate enough to take, I call them tours of duty across engineering and product, and then pivot it over to the sales side of the house before officially getting into product marketing. For me, without even really realizing it being around early stage startups is I was always doing product marketing before it was product marketing. What do we build? Who are we actually building for? How do we take this thing to market? Like, all those things used to just fall under the umbrella of you're either building something or you're selling something. And so getting exposure to those different areas, it was just a no brainer that connecting those is the way I was doing work anyway. And it wasn't until I officially recognized that, and this was maybe five, six years ago now. Oh, I'm doing product marketing and spent some time at Oracle in doing product marketing with them, which was very different for me. I'd been at startups prior to that. Product marketing really is a different beast for early stage companies than it is for late stage. And left Oracle after doing that for about a year, and I joined a digital product studio where I met my now cofounder, Anthony Pierry. And at the product studio, we were working specifically with early stage companies on all things product, all things go to market in a pure agency model where it's all custom, really expensive. You know, one of the things we were collaborating on was how do you sell strategy and product work to early stage companies? We tried a bunch of different stuff, different outbound campaigns. You do it inbound. And one of the things we started tinkering with was LinkedIn. And when we started doing that, what we realized is you have to get really specific in order to sell a service to an early stage company. And so we took all this knowledge we had around product and go to market, and we just kept asking ourselves, like, what's the thing they're really struggling with? And all all of it really boils down to value propositions. And so we started asking ourselves, what's in a value proposition? We've been doing this work for years, but no one really has a no one really knows what's in them, which is, like, the hilarious thing to us. We're looking around, like, asking all these people that we'd worked with, what do you think a value prop is? And no one knew. And so we set out to develop a framework for defining what a value proposition is in relation to how you build what you build and how you go to market. After throwing a bunch of stuff at a wall and doing it on LinkedIn, it really helped us hone in and narrow our thinking. And so flash forward doing that for two years, starting from the hypothesis of, oh, we're product marketers for early stage companies all the way down to this very specific where we now just do product marketing for early stage b to b SaaS, usually horizontal companies that are trying to rewrite their homepage, and they're having a hell of a time because their positioning is a little bit all over the place. And so we founded Fletch technically inside of another agency. We're doing the work for them, but we were probably for the past six or seven months. So we decided to spin out and go on our own as we really built our business around our audience on LinkedIn. And here we are to today.

Mark Evans: Lot of different directions we could go there. One of them, I would suggest, is that strategy for early stage companies is a very hard sell because they're focused on making marketing happen, driving brand awareness, leads, and sales. When you say to them, you gotta take a step back and do strategy, they're they're most of them say, many of them say, I I don't have time for that because we need to move the business forward. The other thing when it comes to early stage, SaaS companies is that you could argue that the barriers to entry are dramatically lower than what they used to be, especially when you get into situations where you're low code or no code. So going from an idea to a product can happen a lot more quickly. But what I find in my experience is that companies are very product driven, very sales driven, and they fall down when it comes to marketing. And even at a basic level, it comes to having a narrative that is clear and doesn't even have to be compelling, but just has to be clear and makes people curious or inspired or motivated. I'm interested in your perspective on the common mistakes that early stage SaaS companies make with their positioning and messaging. You and I know it's important. Yeah. But a lot of entrepreneurs see it as something that's a supporting actor as opposed to being one of the stars of the show. So, you know, where do they go wrong? Is it ignorance? Is it just not appreciating the value of positioning and messaging?

Guest: Our take is like, startups are hard. Like, by definition, there there's so many, not only known unknowns, but there's unknown unknowns everywhere. Like, they're partially built things that haven't been done, haven't been tested. I don't think it's as much ignorance as it is from the the get go, really figuring out how to create that new value for folks in especially emerging markets where a lot of startups play. Just challenging right off the bat. And there's lot of mistakes. We built our whole business essentially on the mistakes that people run into. And I'll list off a few. The biggest one that often is the tip of the spear cascades into all these other challenges really is just a lack of specificity. And it's a lack of specificity on what problem are you actually solving, who are you actually solving for, and then going to your comment of clarity is like, what are you building to do that? When you have no, I would say, more broad sense and so a lack of specificity of what you're actually doing, that you start to overbuild your product. You're like building stuff, throwing it against the wall, which and here's like the rub. Like, the beginning, you have to be broad. Like, your early stage positioning is gonna be broad. Even thinking back to what we did with Fletch, product marketing for early stage companies, it's the whole world. It's the universe. And you have to start there, but really the ones that do the best job at their positioning recognize that they need to get specific pretty quickly and start to narrow because that's where you can get more control and actually shape the narrative and shape the messaging around it. The other things we see beyond just being specific in the positioning and messaging is the probably the big ones leading with benefits. And we fundamentally believe that's a mistake for early stage companies. There's a lot of great marketing stuff out there that's don't talk about your product. Talk about all the value and the benefits it provides. And it's not bad advice if you're in an established business and everyone knows what you do. But that scenario is not startups. It's anti startups. No one knows what the hell you do. No one knows who you are. If by leading with benefits, you're like playing the the big boy grown up game in an arena where it just makes no sense. And so we firmly believe that to counter that, you should be speaking to your capabilities, effectively what someone would do with your product, and use that as a foundation point to then get to the different benefits they have. That's the biggest thing. The the other one that comes to mind is these companies have a tendency to wanna do branding upfront. And some folks have called us the the anti brand marketing group, which is partially true. I I think when I when we look at startups, there's very few that actually compete on brand in the early days. Our point of view on brand is actually this, like, collection of everything you do and say over a long period of time. And what brand marketing is at later stage companies is, like, the tagline and this higher valued story. And there's nothing wrong with that, but in the beginning, you just have no clue what that is. And if you just say, look. We're branded now. We're this bigger picture thing. It goes back to leading with benefits, and we think that's just fundamentally broken. And so it's ironic that even with us building Fletch, we've never thought about building a brand. We've always just been very tactical of who we're helping, how we're serving them, and what we do. And now we have people bump into us. They're like, your brand's so strong. How did you build it? And we're like, I don't we just we weren't thinking about building a brand. We were just thinking of, like, how do we deliver the most value? And when you do that repetitively for years, you're gonna develop a reputation, which ultimately is the same thing as the brand. So I'll pause it. Those are big ones.

Mark Evans: I wanna talk a little more about the balancing act between specificity. Or did I say that word? Being specific in your positioning and messaging and the need to be broads. Your hypothesis is that early stage companies need to be broad so that they can capture the attention of lots of different kinds of people as they figure out who they really serve and how they can differentiate themselves from the competitors. You look at the CRM space, for example, there's 5,000 different CRMs.

Guest: Yeah.

Mark Evans: Being specific is very important, but as a product marketer, it must be really hard to say, listen. We've gotta go down this specific path because this is the way that we're gonna establish ourselves as being the obvious choice for these types of customers, but not feel like you're backing yourself into a corner. But you're also seeing at the same time, where for these specific types of customers, we're not really for all those other types of customers. And that's a challenge that takes some courage to say, this is where we're at and this is how we're gonna operate. Provide some thoughts on how Yeah. A company and how product marketers can balance these two different threads that pull at them.

Guest: I got a lot of thoughts on this because it's fundamentally what we solve with every company that comes to us who they're trying to be broad to appeal to that large audience. From a go to market standpoint, incredibly flawed. When we say starting broad, it's more being open to the opportunities, assuming you don't know the opportunity. And so we're talking very early stage. The moment you start to get signal on an opportunity is the moment you need to capture that and get specific. So the analogy that we bump into is assuming you have the opportunity to give a presentation to a a 100 people where there's gonna be a mixture of folks in the room, product leaders, engineers, marketers, and and you can even see this I don't know. We'll just take Saster as a a random example. But somehow your company is gonna be able to talk and and speak about something. And this is what meant to be an analogy of like those 100 people represent the market, all the different segments you could potentially serve. What most founders do is they say, there's gonna be all these different people in the room. Let me put together a talk track that kind of touches on these broader things that everyone will relate to, but what they're trading off is that specific piece. And so they go give the presentation. What's really happening from a resonance level is that when you deliver that pitch where a 100 people only partially get, because you're not getting into the weeds, there's no insights, you leave where zero people are really on your side. You've rallied no one. Versus if you went into that presentation and you said there's gonna be three people in your target market. Like, these are the people that, like, I have something so specific and unique that I think they'd be interested in, and they give the pitch. And you tell that to founders, and they're like, but wait. 97% of the people aren't gonna resonate at all. Wait. No. Stop. The alternative is 0%. But we don't think that way. We think in terms of this generic piece. And so the there's this issue for early stage, and that's why we say it's all about speed is you can approach things broadly, but when you get into specific go to market motions, you have to execute those specifically. The case in point for us is when we were in the broad realm, we were still writing and trying to write about very specific things. We would talk about positioning for a specific type of company. We talked about pricing. We talked about road mapping, and, like, we're going very deep on these subjects and then listening for signal. That's the only way to really get those, like, voltage connections where it's like, oh, something's here. And the the way this really flushed out is as we talked about a bunch of stuff very specifically from the meta view, we're very broad. But we were doing it so specific that we'd get all these founders to reach out to us. And so there was a period of time for about six months where we had no clue what our positioning was, but we were having meetings like this twenty minute, thirty minute meetings where founders would reach out and be like, hey. I saw this post. I think you can help me. And we'd get in the room, and we pitch them almost anything. One day, we were positioned as a pricing expert for PLG SaaS. The next day, we're like an enterprise sales deck company and all under the realm of product marketing, but we're testing the messaging so specifically. What we were looking for were patterns where would on any one of those things, were we getting repeat visits? Was a message really triggering? Where our messaging was literally changing by the hour, and myself and Anthony would, like, we get through the day. We both had 10 calls with founders. Right. What did how did yours go? What happened? And that's our story. And so what it comes back to is the balance is and for early stage is being able to move out of big picture strategy mode, opportunity seeking, and actual opportunity testing where you're going super narrow in the market, recognizing that when you go to market, we assume that once we put of like, a a message out there, that's what we're positioned as, and so far from the truth. No one cares. No one's gonna see it. What you say in one room even what you put in the public, what you put into one LinkedIn post, it's gonna be forgotten the next day. That's another thing people think, oh, I I positioned. I declared my positioning. It's no. The way you actually position over time is go say that 10 times a day for a year. Then you'll start to see your positioning get shaped. I don't know if I directly answered your question, but that's how we think about the difference between theoretical broadness and tactical specificity in relation to actually solving for what your positioning should be.

Mark Evans: I find that journey from broadness to being specific really interesting. And in our world, April Dunford is the queen of positioning. She's really established herself as the voice. If you go to one of her presentations, she always talks about her experience at Siebel Systems, was a CRM that she worked for. One of the things she talks about is they were trying to compete with some of the big CRM companies and they discovered along the way, by simply listening to their target audiences that the the product resonated with investors, financial companies. I I think that's the target audience. Then suddenly, they shifted their positioning to we are the CRM for this specific types of user. It does reflect the fact that you may position yourself in a certain way and name yourself as specific customers, but the market will tell you how you may need to think about yourself. It is demonstrated the positioning is very fluid. Sometimes it's as much art as science, and sometimes you find your way because people tell you where to go. I wanna get tactically here and ask about the framework that you use to create a compelling homepage message. How do you take that message and that framework and how do companies use it to drive go to market success?

Guest: It all comes back to like really defining a core value proposition. And there's a couple of key parts to it. If I zoom way out, our process when we work with these early stage companies is effectively to uncover who they're actually trying to help. And so we spend a lot of time upfront just asking them, like, who's your ideal customer? Like, what are they struggling with? And we have these elements that sort of piecemeal out the market view, the market side, and their company type, which is usually starts to get into, like, different models and industries. There's an element called persona. We refer to it as champion of who actually needs to be receiving the message upfront. And that's another thing specific to b to b is we know that there's so much nuance where when you change the persona, everything about the way you talk about yourself needs to shift. And so we spend a lot of time figuring out who's the main person, who's the tip of the spear where we're gonna spend the majority of our time to really solve for the core positioning. We then have this box that we've called it a bunch of things, the situation, the job to be done. Effectively, what we ask is that person who's in that specific company, what are they trying to do even before your product's in the picture? And it's usually one of two things. We try and get it down to an activity level. Like, what things are they doing? But sometimes it's an outcome, you know, trying to make an impact on some goal. And then we have what's called current way, which is basically asked the question of, like, how are they carrying out those activities today and what problems are they bumping into? And so we spend a lot of time figuring out, like, who's this target audience and what surfaces very quickly because almost everyone we work with has multiple audiences in mind. We start to highlight the implications of, hey. When you change the who and also what they're doing, everything about your positioning is gonna shift. We start to then factor in, and this is probably the missing piece I think with most positioning exercises is what are your current resources? It's like founders get into these positioning exercises, and they think they can do anything they want. They look at companies like Slack and Stripe. You're not Slack and Stripe. You're not worth $50,000,000,000. You have yourself. You hired one marketer and you have a sales guy. Your positioning work's gonna look a little bit different. The advantage goes back to specificity. And so we always ask, like, where's your growth gonna come from in the short term? And so that's step one. Who's the audience for this? We then really develop an approach of how are we gonna explain your product. Fundamentally, there's two pieces there. Do we explain you in a competitive differentiated way or a contextual differentiated way? And the reason we do this is, like, good positioning really is really all about reference points. Because when you're building something new, you're really just trying to connect how does a customer place you in their mind, and they have to do that based on where they're starting today. What's really common to do one of the two, and competitive would be something like Slack saying, we're gonna replace email. Don't send an email. Use Slack. I know what email does. You already get a sense of what Slack does. The alternative, if Slack said, hey, I wanna do contextual, they would speak more to the workflow. You know how when you're trying to send messages to your team and no one reads all the messages and everything gets lost? Use Slack. We have this thing with threads that kinda solves that. It's where you're speaking to the specific, like, activities that they're carrying out. And so we do that, and then it's about developing what are the arguments that support that. Let's uncover who it's for, uncover how we're gonna approach positioning, then and what are the leading value propositions? What things would you say to that group if you were in front of them to get them interested in your product? And the way we work that is really two ways. Like, one's top down, one's bottom up. The bottom up one is usually the most effective where we basically map out essentially all their activities, and we go through a similar exercise. How do they do that specific thing? And what sucks about it? And that's okay. What did you build? Did you build anything that addresses that? And what's left over is this complete set of all the features you've built and all the steps they're doing. We give it the scoring where we start to pull out the pieces that are the most compelling. And so by the time we get through all of that, we've uncovered core positioning via target audience and approach to the market, and then the three things that we should say to them. And then the last thing that we do is we give them a a marketing asset. We write their homepage for them. We turn that into copy. And so a bit long winded, but fundamentally, it's three steps. It's like tune and figure out the positioning, figure out what to say, and then turn that into something they might actually use in their go to market.

Mark Evans: A quick question about buyer personas related to your comment about the champion.

Guest: Yeah.

Mark Evans: In the last six months, and this was predicated with a by a conversation I had with Jim Krausz from the Buyer Persona Institute. The value of buyer personas and traditional buyer personas are, look, this is the demographics, how much money they make, and what they do when they're not working. And it's very high level, very nonspecific. And I I've changed my view on buyer personas because I think they need to be aligned with the jobs to be done approach, really getting into how people think, feel, the different ways that they do their jobs right now, some of the options, some of the tools that they use, really getting very granular into understanding how your target audiences do their job and what would trigger them to change course. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of creating buyer personas and and how it helps you shape your messaging and and positioning strategies?

Guest: You nailed it on the head. Like, we're we're not big believers in the demographic piece and, like, describing a day in the life type stuff necessarily. For us, it really comes back to, like, you said the job. It's like, what are they doing? What's their situation? So context does matter. I don't really care how they have the I it makes me think of the personas. I think it's Ozzy Osbourne and I forgot Bill Gates or someone, and they both have the same persona in some degree and some breakdown. This goes back to the contextual piece. What activities are they doing and how are they doing it today being really fundamental in a b to b context? The other piece to this related to where personas really impacts that is the person's gonna change the view on their situation and their job. This is really misunderstood. And a lot of folks in B 2 B come in and they're like, yeah. We're gonna sell to these companies, and these companies have a job. And it's, no. Not really. Like, people have jobs associated to that. We narrow the focus to the tip of the spear because at the end of the day, we're just trying to articulate your value upfront to get people into a buying process. And this gets us into the second flavor of of personas, so to speak, even though we don't really build them out this way. It's like, where in the journey is that persona? You asked earlier on about where are some of the mistakes made. There's this tendency of companies to try and over message everything, and I think it's because they're combining all these personas into one and they're combining where everyone's mindset is of whether they haven't used us, are they aware of us, are they in a different problem, are they an existing customer. They message all of them the same way. One of the things we encourage is make sure that the actual individual role is considered related to the activity that they're doing. Otherwise, you'll end up with just mixed mismatched messaging that doesn't work. And then you also need to consider what marketing asset is this gonna go into. This gets into a really big topic. And it's what do you say top of funnel? What do you say middle funnel? What do you say bottom? What do say in the buying process? The question we'll get from a lot of founders when we're trying to work on positioning is, yeah. We're trying to compete with all these people and, like, how do we say we're better than them? We start asking about how people actually buy their product. Those competitors don't come up until they're about to close. There's this tendency to them because they're thinking about their pipeline. Oh, we need a message up front. We're better than Salesforce. We're better than this. When it's, wait a minute. That's only a message for people who are in your pipeline. So it's a very narrow group versus and we're working on website messaging. The people on your website, they're not thinking about Salesforce yet. They're thinking about, hey. I'm in this situation. I'm trying to do something. So they need a different message. And so it gets into a really complex set of things. And so if I were to summarize, super important to us. The attribute piece doesn't matter nearly as much as the context and what they're trying to do. That's, like, foundationally how we even build out our ideal customer profiles.

Mark Evans: One of the challenges that I run into when I'm doing positioning and messaging work with companies is that they ask about the deliverables. We go through all this research. We look at buyer personas. We do competitive analysis. There's a lot of grunt work that needs to happen. And at the end of the day, the question is also what do I get? What are you gonna give me? One question that I wanna ask you. The other side of the coin is what's my ROI from all this positioning and messaging strategy? How can I measure whether the work that you've done actually work? In the case of Fletch, maybe you could use maybe testing on home page messaging pre and now. But there's so much subjectivity when it comes to positioning and messaging in a data driven world. So two pronged question here. One is what are the deliverables? And and how do companies measure ROI so they can look at someone like you and I and go, yes, the work you did was awesome and it really worked.

Guest: The the first one, deliverables, is really funny. We've taken our process or we've worked on a process with about a 110 startups so far. The first 20 or 30 or so, we were just delivering what we call this messaging house. Basically, like, the strategic canvas of here's our positioning and our supporting messaging. And we still do that. That's like a key part. It's like that second step before we move into copywriting. But when we put that in front of folks, they're like, this is so great. I can I'm like looking at my positioning. I'm looking at what I should say, and they had the exact question. Now what do I do? And we're like, go build your product to do this. Go say this. Go work on, like, your website. Put this into a sales pit. Go do the work that is selling your product. And they all were like, they don't know where to begin. We realized really quickly that we had to anchor around an asset. And we probably could have picked any asset from content marketing things that they could be doing. We decided to choose the homepage, And we did that strategically because we believe that the homepage is this, like, mirror image of your positioning where it's like this litmus test of can you communicate your value in a short period of time? And there's some art to that. So that's one. Those are the assets that that we think about because they do struggle, especially these early stage folks. The second question is a big one of measurement. How do you measure positioning and messaging? Honestly, if someone solves that, they'll be making a bunch of money. The way we combat that, because we get the question from folks, when you get into assets, what are you trying to actually do? And some folks come to us and they're trying to increase conversions. Conversions to what? Because without context, that means nothing. A specific example is we worked with a company who came to us and that we have pretty good conversions on our homepage message. We get 80 meetings a month. We go, okay. That's great. But we thought their messaging was not so great. And they're like, when we go through this, are you gonna we're gonna get a 100? And we're like, is the goal a 100, or is the goal the actual amount that fit your product that are gonna be good customers at the end? There's a very real outcome that's extremely positive where instead of 80 leads, we get you 50 leads, but they're much more vetted into what you actually do. By the time they get into the demo and the sales process, they're more likely to buy. For them, it clicked. For others, they look at that and they're like, they don't understand the connection of what positioning and messaging is with this big picture piece. And so the the way we combat it ultimately is we don't promise anything other than clarity around your positioning and clarity around your message. Anything else would be BS. And we think a lot of agencies out there that are like, hey. Well, fix your positioning and improve your growth and all that. We think it's bullshit. We we they can't promise that. There's too many variables. We have no control over what they've built. We have no control over their talent and the channels they're using, all the stuff that they're bringing to the site. You're effectively asking, how do you measure product market fit when you're making changes? And really product market fit, it's like really difficult to measure, and it's usually something you measure retroactively. If I look at all that, that's our views on that. It's obviously pretty squishy in terms of a topic. We just tell them we don't measure it. We wanna give you confidence and clarity to know what you're saying, and you gotta go test this, and it's gonna change. You're early stage. It's gonna be wrong. But that's how we approach it.

Mark Evans: Yeah. Two thoughts on that. In part, messaging and positioning fit into the marketing mix, and that marketing mix can involve a number of different levers. If you're looking in isolation at positioning and messaging as a game changer, then you're ignoring all the other elements that come into play. The other thought, and you mentioned it at the end of your answer, and this is the KPI that I think should be focused on is confidence when it comes to positioning and messaging. And this is squishy too. What you want is people to look at the new narrative, the new story, the new thing that you're telling the world about your product and why it matters. And you want people to feel, yeah, this feels right to me. This feels good to me. The entire organization rallies around it because it's something that they can believe in. It's something fundamentally they see as being true and authentic. It's not marketing speak. It's not something that you crafted because you wanted to simply stand up from everybody else, but it reflects your company's purpose, if I can use that word, and your reason for being, and it really establishes what you do and why you matter to the people who matter to you. So that's my view of the world Yeah. Which aligns with yours. We've talked a lot about positioning and messaging at a conceptual level. So theoretically, we both buy into the fact that it's a game changer. It makes a difference. You should do it. Blah blah blah. But it would be great if you could do a walk through through a successful positioning and messaging engagement. I'm interested in getting your insider's view on a client that came to you with a a challenge or a problem or an opportunity and the journey to take them from their current state to the promised land, a phrase that Donald Miller uses a lot. Can you give me an example of of a company that reflects the approach that you're taking and give people Yeah. Some sense of how you change their positioning and messaging?

Guest: Absolutely. A company we worked with recently, super slick product. They're called levity dot ai. They've raised some seed money, and they they've effectively built a tool that lets you use AI for workflows that you you can't really automate today with Zapier or if this then that. And when they came to us actually, let me back up. The companies that come to us, fundamentally, think they come in three varieties in relation to their positioning. Number one, vertical companies, which honestly are the the most, I'll say, easy to work with, but they're the ones who have already declared we're gonna help this group. We're gonna help these people in health care, like, vertically oriented. They already have such a leg up because their differentiation's built in, their specificity. We think we're big believers in vertical SaaS. Usually, when folks come to us in those scenarios, they just have a messaging problem, not so much a positioning problem. It's more sorting through. What do we say? We know who we're for, and we're just having we're struggling to figure out what we actually introduce about the product. The second type of company that comes to us is horizontal. These folks are like, we solve a bunch of different people, but they all have the same problem, the same use case, that same job to be done. And for them, the exercise is really like, how do we pinpoint that job to be done? And is it actually in language where everyone would say, that's my situation? So Calendly is probably one of the most perfect horizontal examples. The way they phrase it is, hey. If you're trying to schedule meetings over email, you would need Calendly. And whether you're a salesperson, whether you're a school teacher, like, if you're doing that, you go, I might be able to use this. And that's purely horizontal. Now this third type and the type that Levity falls into is what we call a platform product, and they're basically a collection of horizontal companies. So the crux of the issue is a product like Levity, it's a builder of other things. It's very similar to the Airtables and the notions of the world. I can use Airtable to build a CRM. I can use it to build a content calendar. Shit. That creates a marketing challenge. Like, hi. Those people are those are different people in different situations trying to do different things. With these types of companies, they came to us and they had this challenge. Hey. We built this thing that lets people build cool things with AI. It's like a no code tool. What do we do? And our exercise, the first thing is, and they have some traction right now, was really an audit of who's using the product now. Who are the early adopters that saw this thing and took the first step to enter into those use cases? We threw all this stuff on the board. And it was a bunch of stuff, and, actually, I have it up in front of me. It's, like, founders, customer support teams, human resources, ops roles, sales teams. And they're doing all these different things. They're managing inbound tickets. They're surveying customer feedback. They're synth synthesizing call notes. They're triaging company emails. They're conducting voice of the customer research. They're doing all this stuff. And we just look at them. We're like, okay. That's great. What the exercise began with is just where do you think your growth's gonna come from in the short term? And I think all platform companies, and even all horizontal, but especially these platform companies, have to make a decision early on. When you think of someone like Airtable, and I've heard their founders speak of this on other podcasts as well, they had the broad thing where they just let early adopters pick up all these use cases. But at some point, they had to rally around that early signal and start creating things like templates. And templates are this asset that we believe should mimic your go to market assets of getting people to like, oh, you're doing this. We do that. Here's how we do it. Here's how you get started where you're almost, like, connecting marketing into the product journey. And so for them and it was it's a painful exercise. We think you should pick one of those use cases. They were, at first, pretty uncomfortable with that. But when when you start to draw out the connections of, hey. When you pick managing a company inbox versus synthesizing customer interviews, the people change, the way you explain your product changes, we would walk that out. And we did get them to pick to go through the exercise with us because the with these platform companies, they're gonna have to do this on repeat. Zapier is an extreme example. Zapier's go to market, they have 10,000 use cases. I'm trying to connect LinkedIn to this thing. I'm trying to connect Notion to this other thing. And the way that they built this out is they actually built 10,000 unique messages. They built 10,000 unique landing pages, and they then put them out in the world and use SEO that whenever anyone was searching for that specific piece, and they used long tail to get into this platform where then later they could say, oh, yeah. We're this integrator of stuff. And long story short with Levity, and and I'd curious, any questions that you have come up, but we picked this use case, and we ended up picking managing company inboxes. So those that are managing a high volume of emails in a shared company inbox. And what this allowed them to do is craft these really great arguments of, hey. When you're managing a company inbox, you've probably tried putting things into different folders. You've probably tried using rules, but they don't quite work. You're doing a lot of copy and pasting after the fact. You're trying to use email templates, but they don't work. And we use those kind of market situations as a way to introduce their product as, hey. You can well, let AI automatically categorize things. Let AI automatically add those things to your systems. Let AI draft the email responses based on what you're doing. The product value props got really specific, and we built the page. And it just resonates. You come to it. You know exactly what it's for, when you would use it, and that's gonna be a pillar for them. And the last thing that we did is and this is for a lot of platform companies are gonna wanna do this. The homepage for these types of companies, they're not really product marketing messages. They're product explainer messages. We did create a homepage, and it was really just to a how to of, hey. Here's what you would do with Levity. And I believe that's what they have on their page. I'm not sure. We recently worked with them. I'm not sure if they've made these updates just yet.

Mark Evans: I mean, that's the question that I have when it comes to Levity. It comes to clients in general because a lot of the work that we do, they're super excited. You're thinking, I did an amazing job. And then you go to their homepage a month from now or two months from now, it's the same messaging because they just can't take the final step. And with levity, it's probably a case of them taking some time to implement.

Guest: It is up to date.

Mark Evans: Here's the question though for you is you've got specificity here and their messaging on their homepage is build AI workflows without code. Okay. That's pretty high level, pretty general. They have a reference here below the fold. If people visit the site levity.ai, new email classifier, and then they show the path. And then you have to go down the page below the company logos, and it says, manage your emails with an AI driven inbox. The question to you as the messaging guy is, why are they leading with build AI workflows versus manage your emails with an AI driven inbox. I I don't wanna put you on the spot.

Guest: This is a beautiful question. It comes back to go to market. We actually said, you have two options. Based on the resources and what they do, take that specific one, which you highlighted, it's and funny that they brought AI back into it. But the one we crafted for them was get control over your company's inbox as a main use case. We said you could put that on the homepage as the tip of the spear, and we recommend that. If you're gonna be putting your marketing efforts into bringing people to the page and they're gonna hit there, that's likely the place they'll go. But they were confident that in their go to market motions with all the stuff they're doing in the marketing, they're actually gonna drive people to the subpage. And that's maybe the page that they haven't deployed yet. No. I don't think they've deployed it yet. So that's the one they're working on right now. So they're gonna get people to the inbox page and leave the homepage as the front door, but in reverse. We just told them to be really mindful of that because the risk, as you just pointed out, is someone comes to the page, they're not at a level of fidelity where they're gonna use it that way. And so if you did something in your funnel of, hey, struggling to manage an inbox or, like, pounding the payment on all the issues and you brought them to the homepage, it's probably not gonna work versus if you connect them directly. So I love that question when we talk about positioning and messaging changes and gets very tactical in relation to go to market, and we lose sight of this sometimes. And, yeah, they are gonna address it in that way where we consider it like a it's very zapier, but it's a bottoms up motion with the website. They're actually not trying to drive traffic to the homepage. They want people to come to the subpage and then maybe discover other use cases when they eventually click back to the homepage. Like, how else would I use this?

Mark Evans: Without going into the weeds, it's an interesting strategic approach because they found a use case and you've helped them find that use case that resonates, and they'll leverage marketing to send people to that use case, to that specific landing page. But at the same time, it's almost like they're hedging their bets a little bit by saying, you can use us for lots of other things if people visit the homepage and that's there's obviously gonna be self discovery. It is very interesting because as much as you do all the work and do all the research, it's almost like they say, yes, but then just gotta deal with that reality.

Guest: It's a 100% reality. We even tell them, we're not SaaS whisperers. We know the implications of good and bad positioning and what it's gonna do to your messaging and what it means for your go to market. The decisions are all theirs. Take levity. Someone may hit their homepage and then find the use case. Someone might do that, and they might be able to even track it. I'm like, look. Somebody did that. And it is it an outlier? That's the part for us is what's the and it's not always eighty twenty, but what's the primary path? The happy path, the logical path that makes sense. And that's the part that the founders just own. And so we always say, hey, Go specific to a level you're comfortable with. We always are gonna try and push you to the most specific level, but we do get a lot of resistance. And there's a ton of things driving that. I think one of the things is venture backed. I would say of the 100 plus companies we worked with, probably 90 of them are venture backed, and they've been successful with this broad message. AI no code. Wow. Everyone's gonna use AI. Non technical people are gonna use AI. What a great opportunity space, which it is. That's a message that gets you money. It's not a message that gets you customers. We try and influence that, but a lot of times these founders, they think they can sell the vision. And I'm not saying that's what's happening here, but they are still listening for signal back to our early conversations. Can we keep the broadness up so that maybe someone looks to the second or third use case? And maybe we were wrong. Maybe it's not manage a company inbox, and it's this other one. It's a fair and valid argument.

Mark Evans: The reality is that as third party marketing specialists, we're providing perspective. We're providing ideas and our view of the world based on research and input from key stakeholders. And our deliverables are here's an idea, here's something that we believe will work, But at the end of the day, they have to strategically and tactically embrace it. There are lots of things beyond our control, lots of key stakeholders who have their own views of the world. Sometimes our work doesn't see the light of day, but it doesn't mean it doesn't mean it doesn't have any impact on the organization. So I think that's just a reality of what what we work in. Final question. I know that you and Anthony spend a lot of time on LinkedIn writing posts that offer great insight into positioning and messaging, and people should definitely connect with you and follow you. For people interested in enhancing their knowledge about these two topics, do you have any suggestions about people to follow, books to read, podcasts to listen to?

Guest: There's a bunch of people out there. I guess I'll start with podcasts. We'll go piece by piece of what we look for influence. Obviously, April, she's extremely knowledgeable on this topic. A little bit more so for later stage companies. But her new podcast, I think, is great. She just released a book, which is terrific. The podcast we listen to as well, we love Lenny's podcast. We listen to First Round Capital quite a bit. Dave Gerhardt over at Exit Five's got some great stuff for b to b marketing and was kind enough to have have Anthony on recently. Let me see if I miss any podcast. Books, it's interesting. There's not a whole lot of books out there. The ones that I find myself even going back to and when folks reach out to me saying, hey. I'm trying to get into product marketing, trying to understand positioning and messaging. Crossing the Chasm, absolute must read. April's book for sure. I also think the stuff that Sankram Vaji or Vajray, I've got his book couple of books up here. He's got a couple of books. One called Move. He's really into the ABM side. I think it really provides a really good framework and starting point for go to market and the importance of segmentation. Folks to follow on LinkedIn, besides Anthony and myself, I actually think Chris Walker stuff is really great related to attribution. He's a little bit further along, so maybe not so much messaging, but he's got some really insightful things related to go to market. And I'm blanking on all

Mark Evans: the other folks. There's I would say if it the the classic positioning book is our recent Jack Trout, Positioning the Battle for Your Mind. If you want a primer on positioning, that's probably the place to start.

Guest: Anthony and I were just talking about that book. What's so fascinating about it, and it's maybe why it's so brilliant, is he never really defines positioning. He talks about it through an advertising lens, so it's incredibly tactical. And it surfaces this idea, that difference that we talked about earlier. There's a difference between strategic positioning, your intentions of position, and the perception in the market and how it unfolds. Definitely a a great one, and he's got some great case studies in there that highlights as well. It's a good catch there, Mark.

Mark Evans: Great conversation. Tons of amazing insight into into positioning messaging for anybody interested in knowing why positioning and messaging matter and what you should do with it. I think they've got a an excellent primer here. One final question. If, people wanna learn more about you and Fletch and Anthony, do they go?

Guest: Yeah. LinkedIn is the easiest place to find us. Shoot us a DM. We're really active there. We try and message everyone individually. We haven't handed that off to bots or any assistance yet, so you'll be speaking to us. You can also just go right to our website, fletchpmm.com, get a sense of our services, but prefer LinkedIn, the open dialogue. Contribute. That's how we learn. Always sharing stuff regularly, asking questions, learning in public. We're big believers in that.

Mark Evans: Thanks, Robert, and thanks for everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, rate it and subscribe via Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app and share via social media. If you're a b to b or a SaaS company looking for more sales and leads but struggling to do marketing and makes an impact, we should talk. And one more thing, I recently published the second edition of my book, Marketing Spark. It's more of a guide than a book. It features tools, templates, and worksheets to jump start your marketing. It's perfect for entrepreneurs. And, of course, you can find it on Amazon. If you wanna connect with me, you can do so, via LinkedIn or old school email, Mark@MarkEvans.ca. I'll talk to you soon.