The Transaction

TT - 042 - Bob Wright - Full Episode
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Bob Wright: [00:00:00] sell the problem, not the product.

If you answer those three questions, why now? How are you different? And why does it matter to me? Then they're going to raise their hand and go, Oh my God, show me how it works.

What's your viewpoint, Bring the market something different they haven't thought about.

In the absence of any differentiation, what's a buyer going to do? They're either going to do nothing or they're going to go with a brand name company.

Stop explaining. Start inspiring.

Craig Rosenberg: Bob, thanks for coming on. Um, I got to tell you the, uh, the specialty you have is something Matt and I haven't dug in on. So, like, we're very excited for both you and the topic. Um, and so, you know, uh, this will be, uh, this will be a great experience for us and don't fret if you're talking and we're just listening because we're gonna learn.

We learn as much as. I mean, it's part, you know, we, we started the show because Matt and I were sitting there. A, we have fun talking to each other, but B, we had this thing, which is like, you know, the playbook [00:01:00] for B2Bs go to market is continuing to evolve. Like, let's, you know, who can we talk to, to go continue to understand what works and what doesn't.

And so we're like, let's do a podcast. And so,

Speaker 2: From ABM to PLG, from Medic to MedPIC, the world of business is constantly evolving. We'll cover the who, what, where, when, why, and most importantly, how you get the transaction. I'm Matt Amundsen and he's Craig Rosenberg. Let's get started.

Craig Rosenberg: so Matt, Bob came to me through AJ Gandhi.

Matt Amundson: Mm.

Craig Rosenberg: Do you know, you guys ever have this experience where you meet someone or you learn about someone and then all of a sudden they're just in your life, like all over the place.

So like,

Bob Wright: like the red Corvette. You're right. You buy a Corvette and then you see one everywhere.

Craig Rosenberg: yeah. So, Uh, so yeah, so with Bob, I like, you know, I met him [00:02:00] and I'm like, wow, this guy's, this guy's unbelievable. And then now I'm like, All these folks that like I, yesterday I got sent to LinkedIn and like, you know, they did some work with Bob and then I'm like looking at, I'm seeing him everywhere. And like, everyone's talking to him.

I asked someone for a positioning specialist. They're like, well, yeah, have you, have you ever talked to Bob? I'm like going, Whoa, dude, this guy's like, yeah, he came into my life. And now I'm, so this will happen to everyone else too. Um, so, um, so Bob, uh, I, uh, We're just getting to know you. And so that's the lead in on how we found you.

But like, if you were going to describe yourself and what you guys do in, I don't know, four sentences or less, what would that, what would you say?

Bob Wright: Yeah. We are very, very specialized consulting firm. We just do one thing. We just, all our clients are B2B tech. And our core competency is positioning. So we help [00:03:00] companies when they want to get more clearly differentiated in the marketplace, when they want to create urgency and sales cycles, when they want to hop up and get out of feature functions and hop up to more of an executive level conversation and really carve out. Uh, category leadership. That's typically where we get involved. And we have a process that we take executive teams through that's been honed from, uh, from us just doing this narrow expertise of B2B positioning over and over and over again for over 300 different B2B tech companies and products. So I feel like we have the best practices around positioning.

And, um, I think particularly in today's tight, Buying climate positioning now has moved to a forefront as a key lever for companies to drive revenue growth and certainly valuation.

Craig Rosenberg: That's amazing. If you were going to tell, sorry, we have the big question we asked, but, uh, Matt has changed me on the first one after the intro. Yeah, you've affected me, man, in a way that's [00:04:00] gonna help the show. What's like a story, I'm trying to think of how we'd think about 300 positioning clients. So like, and we love Hero, like we love these stories from underdog to winner.

Is there any kind of like great stories over your years of Folks that were, everything was kind of, you know, I know you'd have to be careful, but broke in and like, but the positioning exercise just changed their fortunes in a way that was just unbelievable. Like, what was that and how did they get, like, what, what would be your favorite story there?

Bob Wright: Boy, there's tons of them. Um, I can, I can think of one. This is really, really typical. We work with this one client and this was a number of years ago when the emerging category of identity as a service was morphing out of SSO and, uh, Okta was just, Company VCs were just throwing money at Okta and they were just blowing [00:05:00] this market up and taken away.

And I had a client that had really gotten into the market earlier, but again, their market maker position was quickly in danger of disappearing and being taken over before it was too late. So they hired us and we came in. And of course they had Microsoft too in that market at that time too, which was a big player.

So you got up. Legacy established player that has account control and the same time you're competing against this disruption. Disruptive company, really hot tech company out of Silicon Valley was creating this new category. Where do we fit in? And we're in danger of losing our um, position in the marketplace and it's going to take off.

At the same time, their sales cycles were like, Oh my God. They were like, Average selling price of a deal is like 90k, you know, 70k, 40k. And it didn't even sniff a million dollar deal ever, you know. So we [00:06:00] got contacted by the founder and he came to us and said, look, I, I've got a desperate situation here.

This market will be gone in a year from now if we don't do something. So we came in and did a quick analysis, figured out what their assets were. And, um, talked to a number of customers they had sold and, uh, looked at the strengths and weaknesses of the respective competitors in the category, looked at the assets this company had, and we carved out a very unique position.

It actually happened to be identities of service, but it was around a security angle because they had some unique assets around security. And we created an executive level conversation around The importance of identity as a service, but particularly from a security angle and carved out a unique corner of the category, um, around the security angle.

And boy, I tell you, 12 months later, he had 64 deals in the pipeline or they sold that were 500 K or more. And then he had sold like 17 1 million deals [00:07:00] and they were bought then you know, 18 months later by a PE firm for like a 14x valuation. They since have gone public, and then they since have gone back to the VC, went private again, bought out again.

So it's just a real success story against, um, I would say, again, early category, formidable competitors, and how do you car ride a unique position that drives revenue? This isn't just branding of a nice logo or anything. This is positioning, right? How do I own and shape a category? And how do I accelerate revenue growth?

And so they're a really, really good example. One of the poster, many imposter childs of companies we work with.

Craig Rosenberg: That was a good one. I actually have a lot of questions about it, but I'm going to hold it because we want to, in our last episode, I asked the big question with like 10 minutes left. All right. So here's the big one. What's something that the market, um, thinks is right or they're doing right?

It could be an approach, methodology, tactics. It could be more [00:08:00] than one as well. And they're actually wrong, um, uh, or they should be thinking about it differently. You know, what is that and what should they be doing?

Bob Wright: boy, there's a bunch of them. I think I would, I'll, I'll frame it a little bit differently. I always say. say, We're in the tech world. I came out of B2B tech. I was in sales. I was in marketing. You spend all the time with the product marketing folks and the engineering and the customers to bring out the new product.

What's the first thing you want to talk about? It's the product and all its features. Wrong. Nobody cares. Particularly executive buyers don't care. They don't need any more tech. And frankly, they don't care how your product works. So I always say one of the things, one of the key tenets to building category leadership and really driving Significant revenue growth, particularly in today's buying climate.

Titan buying climate is sell the problem, not the product.

Matt Amundson: Mm hmm.

Bob Wright: the problem, not the product. Can you own a problem? Can you name it? A problem [00:09:00] that your, your target executive buyer typically really, really cares about. Either make them a hero or if they don't solve the problem, they're going to get fired.

So, one of the key tenets That I see companies get all wrong is they're so enamored by their product and technology. Every single story and presentation is all about them, all about us, how we're great. We got a company dog, we got all these features, got AI now, nobody cares, right?

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah.

Bob Wright: No, what's the problem you solve and sell the problem because people buy from pain and then set the buying criteria up necessary to solve that problem and connect that to your differentiation. I think that's one of the big issues, I think, in our industry. We're, we're just so enamored with our features and products.

Craig Rosenberg: Matt, I think you've said some version of what Bob just said. Multiple times on the show.

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Craig Rosenberg: you were, that was a real nodding of the head, right?

Matt Amundson: Yeah. It really was. I mean, this is the thing that I see as sort of, uh, an epidemic in the space, which is, [00:10:00] uh, I, I often talk about the fact that there's almost never any kind of, uh, personal connection to product anymore. So like, what's my reason for buying, not just, Hey, this thing exists and can I map that to something that, uh, I efficiencies around.

Um, but. You know, when I see product launches now pretty frequently, they are basically just people broadcasting a product sheet, right? We built this. Here's what it is. Here's what it does. Buy it. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Craig Rosenberg: you have time this weekend, buy

Bob Wright: I know. Right. And you know, what's the problem is particularly now look at AI, right? We got AI, every, the great AI washing is upon us. Everybody's got to have an AI wash. Can you imagine an executive buyer right now, listening to all the vendors that everybody sounds the same.

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah. Oh

Bob Wright: so we always say it's.[00:11:00]

It's a fundamental shift from a conversation about how the product works to a conversation about why it matters, why it matters to your buyer and a key and good positioning. Answers three key questions for your target buyers. Number one, why your product now? Not last year, not seven years ago, but why now?

What is the hairy, urgent multi million dollar problem you solve? Secondly, how is your product different? How can you uniquely solve that problem? Including A lot of the competition today is frankly the status quo, do nothing. But you can't forget the third question. How are you going to make my life better?

How do you make Show me a promised land. And if you answer those three questions, why now? How are you different? And why does it matter to me? Then they're going to raise their hand and go, Oh my God, show me how it works. Then you can bring your demos and your product slides and all that kind of stuff.

Everybody loves, we're, we're enamored by, but every, most tech companies. [00:12:00] Do not clearly articulate the why they matter. And, and, and as a result, we got these stalled growth rates, no urgency in sales cycles, horrible wind loss ratios. We're too low in sales cycles. And you got all these desperate vendors now chasing, right?

Fewer and fewer sales cycles.

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah. Actually, you know, that was the thing when you were talking earlier is that you knew, well, how many years have you been doing this?

Bob Wright: Oh, geez. I haven't had a real, I haven't had a real job in years. Um, I probably been doing positioning 20 years now. Yeah, geez.

Craig Rosenberg: yeah, I bet three, I mean 300. Yeah,

three.

Bob Wright: so ha

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah, that's right.

Sam. Yeah. Yeah. Like, um, I don't know how much has changed from what you're trying to help people go do. You might have a comment on that, but like your big point, which was early, which is like in this hyper competitive, hyper confusing [00:13:00] tech world, uh, if you don't differentiate, like now the urgency of, uh, your positioning is, I mean, I feel like it's, we're in a, like, this is like, uh, do or die, you know?

Matt Amundson: Mm

Bob Wright: For a lot of companies, it is. It's a very, you know, before we could kind of get by with lame messaging, feature function message. You could probably get by if you have a superior sales organization. Those days are all gone now. As you mentioned, the whole go to market model is completely different. The way our buyers buy is completely different.

And it's a tight buying climate. Nobody needs any more technology. Like enough is enough. So I think in that kind of environment, again, positioning really moves to the forefront. But you got to do it right. What's really important is you have to have a viewpoint. What's your viewpoint, right? Bring the market something different they haven't thought about.

Bring your buyers something they haven't thought about before. And typically it's around a problem, right? But bring them something that they can actually then go to the board and say, look, we got the XYZ problem. I think we need to [00:14:00] solve it. Here's the three things we need, five things we need to do to do it.

And oh, by the way, I got a technology platform over here that can help me do it. But Give them something that they can actually, I always put my head in the mind like a CISO. Jeez, just think how many security vendors are out there and what a horrible job, right? You know, and the lifespan of that job is really short and, but can you give them something to make them a hero to go in front of the board and actually give them added value, right?

And, and our different viewpoint, the board, give them something different to think about. So can you have a view, can you wake up the market with a different viewpoint? And again, can you solve a problem that your buyers really deeply care about? And that's, for me, that's the winning, winning position strategies are the companies that are doing that.

And there's some really good examples of companies that are doing that. And those are usually the category leaders and they're the usually ones that are driving growth rates right now.

Matt Amundson: Yep. Yep.

Craig Rosenberg: you feel like they, this is a random question. I'll ask the crowd [00:15:00] it is. So, you know, Bob, you've done 300, but like, that's out of 10s, hundreds of thousands of companies. And then it does feel like some of these companies get hot and then start to think about the fundamentals of these things, right? Yeah,

Bob Wright: Yeah, you see it all the time. So what happens is, and you know, a company will get hot. They'll luck on an idea or a problem that's being solved. They have some new technology. They can solve it and they create a category. Generally, it's a new category creator, right? They'll come in and create a new category.

We see it all the time. Then what happens is, The category is created, all the competitors come flooding in. Oh, this looks like a good category. So all the big players come flooding in and the market gets commoditized and the company, again, the category creator is in danger of losing their category leadership position because now it's an undifferentiated commoditized market.

So in the absence of any differentiation, [00:16:00] what's a buyer going to do? They're either going to do nothing or they're going to go with a brand name company. So usually. So if you're an SAP, a Salesforce, a Microsoft, you want Arkansas to look commoditized and Oracle, right? But for everybody else, it's a bad place to be.

So in that instance, it's a great time to come in and do positioning because you've got to move. the needle again. You've got to move the definition of the category again. And you have to be the one that wakes the market up and said, okay, this category is formed to this, but now it needs to move to this.

And reshape the buying criterion, retake that category leadership position and move the buying criterion, um, goalposts once again.

Craig Rosenberg: I love that. The, uh, it feels like, yeah, like I said, I mean, this is, this is the moment where you got to do it and it's like, it's just, you know, when you're winning, it's hard when you're losing, I think your ears poke up and you got to figure out what you need to go do. But what you're talking about, like I do look back, you know, I was an analyst before and like, You do look back at the category [00:17:00] leader who lost.

There was product issues, I think, in, in some cases, let's be honest, because they created a category based on promise and then other people came from behind. But like, had they thought about, uh, repositioning earlier, even as the leader, they could have headed off a lot of different, uh, Yeah, you know, folks coming from behind.

Bob Wright: The other big thing that we're seeing right now is because there's been a lot of acquisitions in our industry right now. We're seeing the need for portfolio positioning. So what happens is for growth a lot of times companies are buying multiple companies. So they end up with a portfolio of 5, 6, 7 products.

The issue they're running into is each of those products is typically a different selling motion. And there's point players that are in there just kicking their ass cause they're modern, modern technology, modern vendors. And they're going, Oh my God. So, and they might, these companies typically have a good brand, but what they don't have and what's missing is portfolio positioning.

The umbrella positioning about [00:18:00] why all these products. They don't even have to be integrated, but why do we have this acquisition strategy? And what's the combined value and power of them? Can we set up an expansion motion? Can we at least have an umbrella conversation that can really help differentiate each selling motion, if you will?

And we're, so we're getting involved in a lot of portfolio positioning right now.

Craig Rosenberg: yeah, I bet you are. I mean, that's like everyone rolled up a ton of acquisitions. And as you said, then the innovators start coming, they're pecking away at certain parts of that market. Like, but what I I'm just actually curious, like what's. How do you handle a portfolio? Sorry, I mean, that's always been hard for me, um, to sort of think about, grasp, like when people, you know, I don't, I've seen this before, so like, give, can you give us an example of like how you play the portfolio positioning

Bob Wright: It's definitely not for the faint of heart

Craig Rosenberg: Well, that's why they bring you in. Yeah.

Bob Wright: Well, you know, a lot of times, frankly, it's easier coming from the [00:19:00] outside. Typically, you know, we're, we're working with one of the premier SAS vendors, right? Um, and they had, again, they had 36 different products and they had HCM products, finance products, planning products, right? The problem is they organized by those products.

So they had really good positioning for each of the individual products. They had a really good brand, but they didn't have the portfolio positioning. And the problem is they had to go to multiple buyers. Now, I don't know the age. The HR buyer, executive, but the finance executive and even the CIO. So our task was to come in and build a portfolio position.

It would resonate equally with all three of those executives. And again, it comes down. What's the common problem at that time? What do we call it? The acceleration gap. Companies were too slow, right? They're getting left behind. It's going to get worse. And, you know, and there's some combination of assets across all these portfolios that we identified that were common to them all.

[00:20:00] Process, um, the way they know data core, right? Bringing all the data together. Uh, Their ability to re have business owners reconfigure processes, which were common across all those applications. So we looked for commonalities and build a case based upon this business problem. Here's some capabilities you need.

And where do you want to get started? This product, this product, this product, but it needed also. And then we had value proposition set up. What are I got this acceleration gap? But what are the questions? That a CIO needs to answer. What's the questions that the CFO needs to answer? What's the questions that a CHRO needs to answer in the context of that problem?

So it helped us elevate the conversation up equally to those three buyers, but also build, frankly, a larger conversation that their point solutions could sit underneath.

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah. Actually. I love that. Cause my other thing was you, you had said something, this is probably, there's probably some redundancy here. Cause a lot of the things you said would lead up to this, but like the, [00:21:00] uh, the move towards the executive suite, the positioning. So, so it sounds like in a portfolio scenario, I can actually, Uh, now tie this to any size company where you have multiple stakeholder like, well, I'll give you two problems and then you could just sort of sort me out.

One is most of the, uh, emerging organizations that come up, come up through the, like the

user. And then they got to figure out how to get higher. So that's one. And then two is as they get higher, get more competitive. And in this buying environment, they've got multiple stakeholders with their hands in the pot.

So, uh, in, so in that scenario, A, you got to get higher B, you got to get Uh, through, uh, a bigger map than before. Is, does the p, are you looking for the positioning that catches all or are you looking, because you said in that, on the portfolio, uh, the portfolio play where it's like, no, we need to know what [00:22:00] H questions H uh, h the HR guy has and et cetera.

So I'd love to hear your react. That is a pain that

Bob Wright: it is, you know, and I think we are B2B tech. One of the uniquenesses about us and why our firm is very unique, because I think it's not like B2C, B2B has complicated sales cycles. with even more influencers and buyers than ever before in these sales cycles, right? So I think there's a couple of things.

Number one, frankly, a lot of our clients can't get to an executive level. They've never even talked to an executive in their whole life, right? They're lower level in the organization. So the opportunity is, okay, let's give, let's write the positioning for their, their boss.

Right.

You see what I'm saying? And say, look, we'll arm you with this.

Go take it up to your boss. Right? So you make them the hero, if you will, in the eyes

of their boss. That's a lot of times you look at it, but we always try to go high because that's where the money is. And if we always say, if everybody says no, and this person [00:23:00] said yes, They'd still go with you. Who would that be?

Oh, well that's who we need to write the position for and then we can spin it for the other, other, uh, influencers within the sales cycles. The other key thing that companies do all the time is they don't look at their next set of buyers. They're always positioning to the past. So when we show up and say, okay, give us six customers we can talk to.

They'll give us customers they sold like five years ago, right? They're premier customers. Now, I don't want to talk to them. I want to talk to somebody that bought last year, or it's in a pipeline right now, or just, you know, because the buying climate and the buyers are very, very different when the company first started versus where they are today.

So the fundamental question is, where's the revenue growth going to come from? And what do those buyers look like? And they could be very, very different from where you've sold in the past.

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah. I love that. And then there's a second part to it. And then I'll, I, you know, I'm sorry. I'm just, this is very interesting to me. So the, the big one too, uh, Bob, you said like, who's going to get us our [00:24:00] next set of revenue growth. So the other big thing that we see for me, like we're A investors and I'll see B and C you start to say.

Well, how do we go get into this market? Right? There's the enterprise, which is the classic, right? Everyone sort of comes up to the tech mid market and then they figure that out. Okay, so that's one. The other one is when they start to verticalize, they start to segment in like, with different groups of buyers, um, and they don't have the data.

Data per se as well for either of those moves. What, like, tell us about that. Like, how do we, how do we

Bob Wright: Yeah, it's a, it's a real issue, you know. If, you know, okay, we want to go into XYZ market. Well, how many, you know, we, we've sold two in the enterprise. Well, geez, you know, that's not a big sample size, right? One was probably the buddy

Craig Rosenberg: Well, two's better than the one that normally people have when they make that

Bob Wright: Well, there's two, one your chairman's buddies with [00:25:00] the other one.

You sold, you gave him money to buy, you know, or something, whatever that is, but, um, or it's your next door neighbor. So you know what we do in that? I mean, the best way to do it is you actually go out and do formal market research, you know, and, and that sort of thing in the absence of that. Cause a lot of companies don't have the time or the budget or even the, you know, I patience to do that.

What will you do is you got to validate it. So let's use your best guess, hunch, hypotheses, experience, right? We'll build the best positioning strategy and story based upon that and then let's go test it. So we work with a market research firm that'll go out. and recruit prospects, right, of your target market and they'll test the story blind and at the end they do the reveal.

But boy, then you really get, then you'll know whether it's right on or boy, we really missed something. So in the absence of any market research, do testing validation in the back end.

Craig Rosenberg: I [00:26:00] agree with that. And then like, you know, for a lot of companies who can't even do the, Yeah. Market research. I mean, I just tell them take your best guess and go and come back every week. And Yeah, that's why the validation helps, right? Because the issue with positioning a lot of times, one of the worst. One of the problems I see a lot of times with positioning is you build the story and the executive will go out and have a sales call, come running back. Oh, I've got to change it. Man, this guy, marketing always said something.

Bob Wright: Then a sales rep will go out. Oh, come running back. I've got to change it. Then another sales rep will come out. Oh, we've got to change it. Right? And positioning is not code. Positioning is not code. It's not iterative code. Positioning is Stick with the positioning until you are sick of telling that story is just when the market's starting to pick it up. Stick with it. A quarter. Do it a quarter. But keep, have a feedback loop in there. And just take [00:27:00] feedback. Don't change anything. Just stay the course and at the end of the corner, take a look at the feedback and then look at the patterns and then adjust it based upon the patterns, not just one from one single conversation or one single opinion.

And, but I find that discipline a lot, particularly for some of the smaller tech led, engineering led, um, companies, clients of ours, it's really hard to do because they're so used to just doing iteration, iteration, iteration. And I would suggest that's probably not the best thing to do when you're doing positioning.

Matt Amundson: Yeah. I think another big challenge that happens with positioning is when you have. A core buyer, core audience, and you're going to expand into, you know, a new space, like, you know, Craig was talking about enterprise, but maybe, maybe, maybe not necessarily exactly that. Uh, and how do you, how do you start to tell the story more broadly without, um, Without sort of ostracizing your existing core buyer.

That [00:28:00] always ends up being the, one of the biggest challenges that I face as an operator. It's like, okay, our buyer looks like this and our ICP is like this. And we've got messaging and a product and the flywheels going. And now we want to go do this other thing. We don't, you know, like I think in everyone's mind, the easiest answer is, you know, you create this split on the homepage where one goes this way and one goes the other.

And that just, you know, of course that never works at all, but like everybody always hypothesizes that it could work. Um, how do you think about that? Or maybe like, what are some of the steps that you give to, to, to your customers or in your process to, to do the risk mitigation there?

Bob Wright: Yeah, I think there's two issues. Number one, you've been successful with one certain ICP, and now you're going to go to another one. Next segment. Which is a natural evolution for growth. The problem is, who you sold before is going, Whoa, wait, are you diverting funds? And from us and your core, that's one issue, right?

And then the other issue [00:29:00] is just defocusing the company. You know, I think what I always look at is, well, why are you going into this segment? What gives you the right to go into the segment? Oh, we're really good at, at, at. Unstructured documents that are really labored intensive and that's why we did really well at this ICP.

That unique IP is also applicable to this segment here and this segment and this segment. So what's the unique IP that is applicable? It may show up differently, but that's applicable to these and build a case like that. It's the X, Y, Z unstructured document issue crisis, right? And it's hitting every company.

We started here and that's where we honed it. Cause it's really acute here, but Oh, we found out here's some other segments. It's just as acute and, but keep to that core, right? This is the core IP that, that is common across all these, um, ICPs or segments.

Matt Amundson: hmm.

Craig Rosenberg: By the way, really quick, you guys, I just gotta divert. Sam, what, what were you [00:30:00] laughing at? What, did you hear me eating this amazing chocolate from Alaska Airlines?

Sam Guertin: Yes, it was so loud!

Bob Wright: But Alaska really gives good food now, you know?

Craig Rosenberg: this, this is, it's got Rice Krispie, like, popping Rice Krispie treats in it. It's amazing. Sorry, guys. I was worried that that was the case.

I just had to have some. It was just sitting in front of I get Um,

Sam Guertin: mail you were opening earlier sorry,

Craig Rosenberg: sorry, Bob.

Bob Wright: It's all

right. It's

all good.

Craig Rosenberg: guys? I'm, I'm actually, the mail was, I was getting my notepad out, but yeah, all right.

Bob, is there, what you said, there was a whole bunch of them.

What else would you say about, um, areas where the market should be, uh, rethinking approach? Uh, any

Bob Wright: I would, yeah, in addition to sell the problem, not the

product. Right. And look at your next set of buyers. And the other thing I always say is stop explaining. Start inspiring. If you're explaining, that's not a good [00:31:00] place to be. Right? And then I think the other thing I mentioned before is why you matter, not how it works, why you matter needs to be, not why it works.

But I would say, you know, for me. You know what frustrates me a lot is positioning should be a CEO initiative. It is a strategic, it should be, it shouldn't consume the entire CMO's budget. You know, the way we look at positioning, actually last year was the first time 75 percent of our engagements came through the board or CEOs.

And it was the first time that happened that that tilted. And what's happening now, I think particularly because of AI and this market climate, I think CEOs are waking up going, holy cow, you know. But the CEO needs to own the initiative. The CMO needs to run the process, but the CEO needs to own it. It needs to be a company wide process, and it needs to take budget out of everybody.

Because if you do positioning right, it's going to impact sales, it's going to impact product, it's going to impact your employees.

[00:32:00] right? And

probably customer success. So the most successful engagements we, and we actually require it. Now, if the CEO is not involved, we can't do it right. They have to have it's when we run our process, we run it through the executive team.

So we sit them all down in a workshop, you know, it's two half days of an input. And then we come back two days later with a story, but that's the executive team. Cause they all have to be aligned. And they all have to give their input into it. And they also have to all own it. Now Markey runs the process and activates it, but boy, it, it's, it should be a CEO initiative.

What?

Craig Rosenberg: Matt jumping. Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Amundson: yeah. The, the, the other thing that always happens when it's run by marketing, not in a, not in a silo or a vacuum, because it's, you know, usually multiple members of the marketing team is like, you sort of, you get it, you nail it, you, you, you put the, the red silk sheet [00:33:00] over it and you unveil it and everyone's just kind of like.

Craig Rosenberg: yeah, yeah, yeah,

Matt Amundson: And like, that's, yeah, that's the thing that everybody hates. That's that moment where you're like, okay, cool. Here's, you know, 12 weeks worth of work and everybody's pretty meh about it. Uh, and that's, and that's, that's when you're like, God, this was, this was a flawed process from the beginning. It needs to involve everybody.

But, you know, certainly getting people to dedicate their time to it is the, is one of the hardest challenges there. And I, I love the thought process of doing like a two day workshop and just kind of banging it out really fast.

Bob Wright: We do. And that's a thing. There's a couple things I see. You know, a lot of times I used to do this. Go off in the corner office with the CEO or CMO, come running out, Oh, here's the best solution. This is great. Never works. Right? And, um, cause you don't get your best thinking. You know, I think it's really great to get the power of everybody and the, you know, the product teams and, and, and.

And say, particularly sales, and there's always a lot of times, a [00:34:00] lot of chasm between sales and marketing, bring them into the fold, right? This is your position, you know, and, um, get their viewpoint in it. So when we're done, sales has ownership of it. Product has ownership of it. It's just not marketing or the CEOs.

It's theirs. That's one thing. The other thing is, um, that I was going to say is have a process. Right? Have a process, run a process, whether it's a Firebird process or not, get a process. And the other advantage is a third party person, whether it's Firebird or whoever. Here's the, I heard a lot of time the objectives.

Well, I hired this really smart CMO. They should be able to do positioning. Why should I hire you?

Matt Amundson: Right.

Bob Wright: And my, um, response to that is, well, number one, you can't hire a CMO that's done 300 positionings. You can't, right? Number two, we've got a process, but number three, everybody can't see it anymore. You're too close to it.

Bring an outside [00:35:00] view. And it's really hard for a marketer and executive to get up there and try to facilitate all the executives. I can stand up in front of a room, say the stupid things, you know, push back on people, you know, and it's a lot easier for me to do it. And it's easier for me because I'm not, I don't have a perspective.

I'm not, I'm not wedded to the past. So I can see things from a fresh perspective that perhaps can't be seen anymore in the company because you're too close to it anymore.

So I would say CEO, sponsor, have a process, make it a company wide and, and get it outside facilitator, run the thing and get it done fast.

Don't, I just talked to a company today. We've been working on our position since March and it's still not done. Jesus, just let us come in and we can get the damn thing done in two weeks and get out. Right? Get going. You don't have to waste any more sales cycles. Um, right? Yeah.

Craig Rosenberg: that a breath that you were taking in the breath to say something or [00:36:00] Yeah,

Matt Amundson: question, like, what is, you know, people, what I've seen from a lot of companies is they, you know, they sort of, either they're raising their first round or they're coming out of seed and they've, you know, they've achieved some kind of financial milestone. And it's usually around the time where they're thinking about hiring a CMO that they're really starting to think about positioning.

Where, where do you think in a company's journey is the right time to, to I mean, it's always the right time to nail your positioning, but like, at what point, like, do you typically see the most successful companies that you work for start, start working with you? Is it in that 20 million range? 50 million range?

When is it appropriate?

Bob Wright: a great question. I think first off, You always need good positioning, but what we're seeing, I think it's really critical when you're ready to scale. If you're a smaller company, you got product market fit. The founders no longer can be in every sales engagement, right? They're going to hire 20, 30 reps and we're ready to scale.

So [00:37:00] we need a consistent, concise, easy. Message, right? That's one point. The other point is again, when you become a cat, if you're, if you're a category leader and everybody else comes in, right? And you're not differentiating anymore. That's another inflection point. The other one is when you move from a single product company to a multi product company.

That's another inflection point as

well. Now the other inflection point I'm seeing right now is everybody's got to have an AI story. Everybody's got to have an AI story. And so we're getting called in a lot just for AI strategy or AI stories. Um, cause everybody needs one right now. Boy, that's a whole nother thing.

It reminds me of the year, you know, the year of cloud, everybody had a cloud story, right? And there's so much cloud washing. Well, same thing's happening now. AI washing is happening right now. So we got some frameworks that we found is really working. We're working with not only AI native companies, but also with companies like.

HPE, what's their AI, AI strategy.

And, you know, also other. Cloud based company. Everybody needs an AI story right [00:38:00] now. So we're seeing a big uptick in interest and it just can't be stick AI on there and that's what we are. It's just so stupid, right?

Matt Amundson: Yeah. Yeah.

Craig Rosenberg: actually, AI is a driver of more of the issue that you brought up, which is focus on the problem, Totally. the features. AI has like created another monster, man.

Bob Wright: Well, I'll give you, I'll give you some, um, here's what we're seeing that's working in AI. Again, it's not AI for AIs. Say, just like you talked about, what's the problem it solves? And, can you build a case you have a specialized type of AI? And, name it, right? The XYZ AI. Because it's specialized, it's not general purpose.

And the other key thing is the data, as you know. Name the data, right? It's based on XYZ data. You know, so it's not generic AI, it's specialized AI. And name the [00:39:00] data too. It's trained on this certain data core, certain kind of data here, and name that as well. And then what's the big problem it solves, right?

That's the thing. And then you have to have the whole governance conversation, of course, in there about explainable and et cetera, et cetera. Auditable. you know, that sort of thing. But I find we found that that's the winning ticket for positioning of AI today.

Craig Rosenberg: beautiful. Um, wait, Matt, can I jump? I have one more thing I wanted to revisit. Or did you have one?

Matt Amundson: No, no, go ahead. Go ahead. I, I mean, I could monopolize Bob's time this entire call. Like

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah, yeah.

Matt Amundson: the company that I currently work for, I think checks three of the four boxes that he was discussing. So

Craig Rosenberg: Well, if you want to keep going, I honestly

Matt Amundson: no, no. I need to have a private conversation with him afterwards.

Craig Rosenberg: Okay. All right. So, um, take it, you're going to take it offline is what I

Matt Amundson: [00:40:00] I might, I might take it offline. Yeah.

Craig Rosenberg: Uh, you actually said something earlier about where it felt like, so you did two, you were, uh, you talked about the actual process of selling. Right? And that, you know, when you're thinking about positioning and you're, you know, in the case of you working with customers, but everyone should be thinking about is, you know, how does the revenue come to life and how does the positioning come in?

And then you that. Yeah. interesting, which was, which felt like you were looking at different parts of the sales cycle when you said, well, look, I'm going to give you this, go give it to your boss. And, uh, I was really intrigued by that because I feel like, um, um, good messaging, good positioning, all of these things as it gets manifested into the sales team is just the opening deck.

Bob Wright: That's right.

Craig Rosenberg: And that's not how it should be. We got to think about all, what are all the interactions that we have on the way to [00:41:00] winning the deal? And how does the positioning play in each one? So I'd love to, if you Yeah, I. some of these things offline, I'll jump in.

Bob Wright: You know, it's interesting. I, you know, it depends on, you know, what, what do you emphasize in what part of the sales cycle with the positioning? I think, um, well, there's a couple of things we look at, look at sales cycles. Is it, you're trying to, um, there it's a different positioning. Strategy. If, if I'm in a highly competitive, almost commoditized market, the positioning is usually downstream.

There's already a buying cycle going on and the conversation is why we're different, right? The other end of it is there, maybe you have to generate a sales cycle, right? So it's more like, what's the problem you solve? And that's really what you emphasize, right? And, but it's not an either or, but it depends on, on the point of emphasis.

Sales. Based upon, you know, where you are in that sales cycle. I think one thing I wanted to [00:42:00] mention that you just spurred this is how do you even measure positioning, right? Should it be measured, right? I mean, that's just marketing stuff. I think we're spending money, but I'm not sure if it's making any difference.

Here's how I think every client of ours, we say, okay, let's set up very specific positioning objectives. And they should be things like. Win loss ratio, right? Is your win rate getting better? Uh, the length of your sales cycle. Are you creating, or is the position creating urgency in sales cycles? So it's collapsing from six months to three months on average.

How, what percentage of your sales cycles do you actually engage an executive buyer, right? Um, those are some, and, and is your, um, ARR or even CLV, Increasing, right, per deal and poor engagement. The other thing we look at, too, is from a category perspective. Are the market analysts starting to pick up your viewpoint?

Are they starting to pick up your language, right? Are they starting to write [00:43:00] about using some of your language, right? And you're, of course, it takes a while, but you're moving up in, in the magic quadrant, so to speak, or wherever. But, you know, a lot of market analysts, Frankly, they're, they're just reporting the past.

And I always tell companies by the time a market analyst calls a category, it's a cat, you're already lost, right? The winners have already been crowned. And, you know, so a lot of companies spend a lot of time on worried about what the market analysts are thinking. And I'm alone. Well, I'd rather worry about what the buyers frankly are thinking and focus the thing on that and understand you have to play the market analyst games, but boy, they report the past a lot.

And there's not a lot of new thinking coming out of that. Unfortunately, like they used to, down in that group,

Craig Rosenberg: Yep. That, that's, uh, I was an analyst at Gartner,

Bob Wright: right?

Craig Rosenberg: you know, and I learned a lot. Well,

Bob Wright: they were great.

They

Craig Rosenberg: know, they, everyone talks about like, you know, they basically you've got, you know, from an organizational perspective, [00:44:00] they have to make sure that the, they can't make a bet on a category

that won't, when in the long term.

And it's like, yeah, so, but I did once meet a, um, uh, he was like a Wall Street guy and was at some, you know, party with, you know, uh, that with a bunch of those types there, which by the way, yeah, they like to drink hard alcohol just as a

heads up there. So the guy was saying like, you know, their, one of their investment strategies is, uh, they were I think maybe, I don't know, but like, They, they, if there's already a magic quadrant, they're out.

Bob Wright: Yeah,

Craig Rosenberg: They want to, they gotta be, yeah, they gotta beat them to the punch. Yeah, it's really interesting. Um, all right, cool. So, Matt, do, do you have one in that you don't want to take offline that you can, uh, ask to, to expose the whole crowd as we sort of wind this thing down?

Matt Amundson: I think one thing that [00:45:00] probably a lot of marketers, uh, think about when they're working with a, with a, with an outside, um, agency is how am I going to explain this to my board?

Bob Wright: Yeah, totally.

Matt Amundson: how, how am I going to tell my board like, Hey, I know I was brought on to do this, but I'm working with someone else to help.

Uh, I think a lot of people have fear around those types of

Bob Wright: Yeah, they do. And that's why I say it should be a CEO initiative, right? But say it isn't, right? If you're a CMO, how do you sell this? I think you gotta sell it a couple of ways. Number one, we need to bring a process in here,

right? Number two, we need to bring in a specialist. I'm good at positioning, but I've done positioning once a year maybe for 12 15 years, right?

This is so important right now, we can't mess, we can't fuck around, right? We're gonna miss our market opportunity. We gotta, we gotta make the investment. We gotta bring a specialist in here that has a process. [00:46:00] The other thing is, I got a full time job. Just trying to keep the pipeline going and all that stuff.

I need a dedicated resource that's gonna drive it through the company and get the thing done. And the third thing is, and the fourth thing is, I need some,

We need

we can't see it anymore. We need some fresh ideas right in here. So that's typically how it's sold.

Yes.

Craig Rosenberg: exposure to, you know, in the role that I'm in, they It is important that they know, like a lot of them do know that the, we have a positioning problem. Am I, am I crazy on that? Because like I, I, you know, I, Yeah, and then that's probably the, from a CMO perspective, unless they invented some positioning and that's part of the issue.

Uh, but you do, you do need that. Matt, I do, I, I definitely can understand that trepidation, right? Um, but, and that's [00:47:00] why, you know, it is important and it is common. Well, maybe not common, but it is a thing where the board. And then the CEO do understand that they have a positioning problem. I think they also would understand a lot of we're selling the problem, not the features.

Like with the stuff Bob brought up, which is like, here comes the cavalry. Um, and you know, what's our story, you know, our story could be the solution to that.

Bob Wright: that's right.

Craig Rosenberg: I think in a lot of cases it is. I mean, there's a feature thing, but like the way people can create features now. Um, you know, it can be fast and they can have some, some parity up pretty quickly.

It is typically a story positioning problem. yeah. uh, just so you guys know, I'm going to lose battery here really, really quickly here. So if I just abruptly leave

Matt Amundson: we're out of time.

Craig Rosenberg: You know, you know what, Bob, you gotta, you gotta work with a battery company so that we don't have these

Bob Wright: All I can do is positioning. Everything else, [00:48:00] just,

Matt Amundson: I run

Bob Wright: my life is hell.

Matt Amundson: battery consulting agency on the side.

Bob Wright: The rest of my life is chaos, but positioning?

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah, that's how that's me too. That's me too. I can attest that. All right. Well, look guys like that was amazing.

I

Matt Amundson: love, I loved it. So

great.

Craig Rosenberg: that was crazy. I don't talk. We don't just don't talk about it enough. So like it was really really interesting to me. It's so fundamental. I'm embarrassed.

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Craig Rosenberg: about it.

enough.

You know what I mean? It's it's like that's so embarrassing. I'm so

Bob Wright: Don't waste all your go to market investments on shitty messaging.

Craig Rosenberg: Boom,

there we go. the There's

That's the transaction for you. All right. Well, awesome bob. Thanks for coming on man before you lose your battery. I appreciate you All right, guys. Thanks sam. Good work. Take it easy

Speaker: Thanks for joining us for another episode of The Transaction. Craig and I really appreciate the fact that you've listened all the way to the end. [00:49:00] What are you actually doing here? For show notes and other episodes, please visit us at thetransactionpod. com. Like and subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other place you get your podcasts.

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