The game in B2B: get inside the consideration set of category buyers.

Contrary to popular belief, B2B buyers are not all-rational beings. All-rational buyer would consider dozens of tools, compare their product specifications and prices, and choose the best possible option. Recent research by Ehrenberg-Bass Institute showed that out of B2B buyers that need a new financial service, 47% go straight to their existing bank, and 75% of those who claim to shop around also end up with their existing bank. And most don’t even consider more than two brands.

How to test the effectiveness of your messaging if you can't run an A/B test?

Most B2B pages don't get enough transaction volume for A/B testing (as a rough ballpark, you'd need a minimum of 600+ signups/mo) from that page, so A/B testing is typically out of the question. That's also fine in most cases as A/B testing is a measurement methodology. It'll tell you whether B is better than A, and by how much. It won't tell you why, or how to improve anything.

That's why message testing is actually the better way to go for B2B.

I've been massively nerding out on competitive strategy these past years.

There's a lot that goes on there, and a lot of theory/background one should know to have a full picture.

Here's a great, simplified way to think about competitive strategy.

A 🧵: Every SaaS tool, every agency fits into a "job to be done" box.

E.g. Hotjar goes into the "heatmaps for SMBs" JTBD box and CXL is "digital marketing training".

Depending on the person, we only keep ~3-5 options per box (typically referred to as the 'consideration set').

Product marketing as a function is still unfamiliar and confusing to many, and even some product marketers can't define it well.

The best way to think about it: product marketing is strategy.

It's basically the same thing. And we need to start explaining it that way. Product marketers work to understand the market and customers.

They choose the market segments to target, determine what attributes the product needs to win against the competition, design an effective go-to-market plan along with the required positioning and messaging.

Fast eat the slow. Speed is a competitive advantage.

A fast organization has more people deciding and taking action, and fewer people briefing each other, reporting, seeking approvals, sitting in a myriad of unproductive meetings.

Ways to make your organization faster: 1. Reduce the need for meetings.

This not the same as no meetings.

Set clear rules and guidelines for how decision-making should happen. What is the standard for quality?

https://twitter.com/peeplaja/status/1367966133295472645

There are 100s of vendors in almost every space these days.

In martech, the competition is up 5300% since 2011.

I did a bit of exploring in the email marketing category (various forms of it).

It's very hard to be a shopper there and compare the tools. Sameness everywhere. "Promote your brand"

Leading with a basic explanation of what email marketing is about is weak, and frankly insulting to the savvy buyer.

Why are you still pitching yourself as if you're the only one doing what you're doing?

Sameness.

Winning on messaging starts with your identity: what's your brand DNA, your story.

After your brand identity comes positioning: which well-defined audience are you for, what use case are you solving for.

And then we get to the tactical layer: messaging. High-stakes messaging (on your home page, landing pages you drive expensive traffic to) is where most companies botch their efforts.

All that important strategy work that came before can be wasted with poor messaging.

Symptoms of ineffective messaging aren't easy to spot.

In more areas than one, the game is rigged in the favor of big companies. One of these is advertising.

The deciding factor for brand effectiveness is - the size of the brand behind the campaign. One of the ways companies grow is when their share of voice (e.g. their ad spend) is bigger than their market share. This is known as an excess share of voice.

Typically sales volume and advertising budgets tend to move in lockstep.

The most common strategy in business is playing the brand preference game.

"My brand is better than yours".

The problem is that customers don't find incremental improvement exciting, and traditional "better", "cheaper", or "easier" communication is 'meh' at best. Another common strategy to compete is to do better marketing. Outspend the competition. Do better creative.

Monday.com is a recent example - a brand that bought its way into our consideration set.

The challenge here is that better creative is extremely hard.

Some of the best marketing research comes from Les Binet and Peter Field. If you haven't read "The Long and The Short of It" yet, do yourself a favor.

Some of their findings for what works in B2B marketing: “Share of voice is a relevant metric in B2B. How fast a brand grows to a very large depends on its share of voice and in particular whether its share of voice is above or below its share of market."

SOV is the share of conversations generated around your brand (vs competition).

When you're competing in a saturated category (most of us are), you need to take a fundamentally differentiated position in the market.

You need a narrative to compete on.

Here are the most common types of stories/narratives: "Small brand explicitly challenging a big brand"

This is the David vs Goliath story. You name the giant in your category, and call them out. You position against them directly, and by doing it you're positioning yourself as a good alternative.

Like @heyhey here:

If you're doing something that's a bit innovative, selling it might need breaking some false beliefs first.

People aren’t buying your product because they believe a story. Something they’re telling themselves.

You need to first break the false belief, then plant a new story. Identify what is the story in their head right now. E.g. "more outbound is the way" or "best product wins".

What are the external things that they blame their circumstance on? "I'm not seeing the growth I want because ...". Maybe the game is rigged, maybe too little funding.

How to compete

A couple of truths:
- there have never been as many brands as there are today
- barriers of entry have never been lower: access to capital, affordable tech, know-how, and talent is plentiful
- this results in *so much* competition in almost every market imaginable - in martech alone there's been over a 5233% increase in the number of companies over the last 10 years
- every single month roughly 775,000 startups are launched in the U.S. market (half of them will fail before their 5th bday)
- it's really noisy out there

What most marketing and conversion optimization folks optimize B2B website content for: "why sign up".

That's wrong.

2 key reasons:

1) only if you're a fan (of the company or founder) and/or you go through a warm referral you consider signing up with company X and nobody else 2) in almost all other cases you consider multiple options: typically 3-5, sometimes as many as 10.

If you pitch your email marketing tool by describing what you enable people to do: send email newsletters, track open rates, integrate with zapier, etc - you're making 2 mistakes

Personal brand is a massive asset. You should cultivate it accordingly.

When done well, a personal brand's halo shines a light on the business, will help it stand out, and even differentiate.

It works for both small business and large. It's massive when starting out. Most consultants/agencies are chosen because of the people in there.

Fans of @elonmusk are more likely to buy a Tesla. Who's the CEO of Chevrolet or Mazda?

Microsoft and Apple used personal brands even when giant corporations.

You can do without, but it sure helps.

What once required expensive tech and data scientists is now available for all marketers. ML as a service is an unstoppable trend, and predictive analytics is now available as a no-code service.

What this means is that anyone can now use historical data to predict future events. You can answer questions like:

Will this lead become a customer?
Will the customer have a high lifetime value?
Will the lead respond to this marketing campaign?
What offer should I make next?
What products will customers buy next?
How should I personalize the experience?

etc

Differentiation is about standing out and providing a reason to choose your business over others.

You’d think companies would be all about that. Curiously, not so much.

In fact, the opposite is true. The default is sameness.

How to escape sameness and differentiate? Thread: What’s sameness?

Sameness is the combined effect of companies being too similar in their offers, poorly differentiated in their branding, and indistinct in their communication.

Most state their value proposition as if they were the only company doing what they’re doing.

I see so many terrible sales pitches.

Yet sales is a critical business skill.

Obviously it depends, but here are the general principles and flow of how I pitch: 1. Do max 50% of the talking. The more they talk, the better.

2. Aim for 80% conversation and 20% actual demo/pitch. Be human. Don't be fake. Note: demo is not a tour!

3. Build rapport, find something in common. Research before the call.

The smaller you are, the more important branding is for you.
A strong brand is the reason why companies are successful; it is not a reward for its success.

The less awareness there is about you, the more differentiation you need. Brand and differentiation are inseparable. If you start a new health supplements company, you can't be about health and fitness goals. It's been done to death. That place is already occupied.

To stand out and get noticed, you need to be a purple cow.

So much of whether your marketing/PR works is whether you have something interesting to say, consistently.

Most don't. It's hard.

But being someone's favorite media for a niche is huge.

Invest in having things to say. Read/listen. Hire full-time analysts/researchers. What if instead of that blog post that says the same things as 100 other posts, you could publish original research?

It's what @Backlinko is doing at a very small company level, @ProfitWell as an SME, and @RecordedFuture at a mid-size level, and it works.

Today is the 9th birthday of @CXLdotcom.

In the beginning there was my personal blog ConversionXL, and I set up a small web dev agency called Markitekt: 1 designer, 1 dev + a project manager. (All these people are still at CXL).

This was the very first home page in 2011: The blog generated the leads, sent traffic to the agency site. This was confusing.

Quickly learned that web dev is a commodity, people hired us for CRO expertise. In 2013 stopped all dev work and focused 100% on conversion optimization.

Merged blog and agency: "ConversionXL".