[Best of B2B] Creating a Value Prop, Fixing Your Website Messaging (with Anthony Pierri, Fletch PMM)

0:00Dash, remember when McKeel from Optimizely won our Exit 5 live AI agent showcase? The 2000 custom landing pages? That was really impressive. So he's their director of AI innovation and he built them with Optimizely's agent platform, one for every account in an ABM campaign. He built them from signals like job postings, press releases, and leadership changes. That's like the holy grail of ABM. That's why today's sponsor, Optimizely, is where I'd point anyone who wants to know what AI agents can do for marketing. Their agent platform is built specifically for B2B marketers. Build your own agents or pull from a directory of 50 plus prebuilt ones.

0:35They also launch virtual teammates. These are digital team members that learn over time, can join meetings, complete tasks, support campaigns, and keep your website optimized. Why do I need to go to work? Let me get those. Okay, I need one of those. Same. Being asked to look into AI agents, which I know a lot of you listeners are right now, go check out Optimizely. Put them at the top of your list and you can go build cool stuff just like Mikheel did. Check them out at optimizely.com slash exit five. Hey, quick shout out to Webflow, who is also sponsoring today's episode. Their team actually ran one of the highest rated workshops at Drive this year, which is our big annual conference.

1:11People raved about that one. Guy, their chief evangelist, really knows AEO, and he shared a ton of advice on turning your website into an ongoing revenue driver. And that matters a lot right now, right? AI is cutting into organic traffic. I don't go to Google and search anymore. I'm talking to my AI agents all day long. So AI is cutting into organic traffic and buyers, just like you and me, are using AI to make purchase decisions about 95 % of the time. Webflow, they're a great team to follow on this. More than 300 ,000 brands, can you believe that, build on their platform. It helps you get discovered in AI search, build fully custom sites without a developer, govern your content, and see how agents read it all in one place.

1:48And they just launched Webflow campaigns. Agents help you write a campaign brief from your brand system, then generate on-brand landing pages and matching ads together. Check it out at webflow.com slash exit-5 and make your website your biggest growth engine in 2027. That's webflow.com slash exit-5. All right, look, everywhere you look online right now, everyone's telling you the new way to do marketing because of AI. And I think because of that, there's so much perceived change and innovation and speed and technology and AI and agents in marketing right now. I think we've forgotten a little bit about the timeless lessons in marketing.

2:28Just like life, there's a bunch of timeless principles that kind of always work. Whether I'm reading a book from 1925 about advertising and copywriting that still applies today, or if I'm doing an interview with someone here on our podcast, I'm just reminded all the time about how it's easy to open up LinkedIn and feel like you're behind or feel like you need to chase the newest tool, tactic or channel. And so we want to profile some of the more timeless lessons here on our Exit 5 podcast, right? Everybody in B2B is chasing what's new, new channels, new tools, new playbooks, but the fundamentals haven't changed.

3:01Some marketing lessons never go out of style. And that's why we handpicked this episode for you in your ears. We're blessing this as one of the greatest hits of the Exit 5 podcast. one of our all-time most played episodes. And here's this one for you. I hope this is a dose of timeless marketing that you need to ground yourself today. One, two, three, four. Exit. Fire.

3:28Exit.

3:32Exit. Fire. All right, Anthony's here. He was hanging out on this Zencaster link waiting for me. I didn't know my camera was on. I'm in the other room talking trash, making a coffee, taking my sweet time. I came back to my desk and I just heard from a closed tab in my browser. Hello? So anyway, I'm glad you're here. I've been following your stuff. So what's cool is I made a shift in this podcast a couple months ago to just talk to more people who are like doing the work. And I guess I would call it like more subject matter experts. I think for a while I was doing more like, hey, this person is the CMO at this company.

4:12Tell me about being a CMO and managing your team and blah, blah, blah. And I think that content is great. It just stopped being as interesting to me. And it started, and people wanted, what I noticed from the Exit 5 community is people want really tactical, if I'm going to make this podcast, make it a podcast that I can listen to to get better at my job. And so I wanted to bring in more people doing the stuff. And you were on that list. You've come up in a bunch of different calls and you mentioned a bunch of the previous podcasts podcast episodes, whether that's Lachey or Tass or others. And so I've been looking forward to this conversation for a bit.

4:43Can you just tell people so they can hear your voice? Like, who are you? The name of your company? What do you do? Yeah, definitely. Thanks for having me. Super excited to be on. I've been following your podcast for a long time. The old agency that I worked for, we always would talk about the different episodes when they would launch. So it's super cool and surreal for me to be on. Yeah, my name is Anthony Pieri. I work for Fletch PMM. It's a two-person product marketing agency that I work with, my partner, Robert Kaminsky. And the two of us are pretty much primarily focused on doing one thing.

5:13So subject matter expertise is very, very narrow. Beyond our little niche, we're not quite as reliable, but within our very specific niche, we primarily help early stage SaaS, B2B startups. Usually the founder or the head of marketing is struggling with having a more horizontal product that can be used by a lot of different industries, a lot of different use cases, a lot of different teams. And we really try to help them come in and figure out the best way to position and message their product on their homepage. So the scope of our work usually is focused primarily on just that website front door experience.

5:48How do we get across the most interesting things about our product to our target customers in the clearest way possible? We've had a chance to work with a bunch of startups. We do shorter engagements because we're primarily focused on making our framework and process better and better and better. So we treat the framework like it's a product. And every chance we work with a company is another chance to iterate on it. So we've worked with close to 100 startups now at this point. And that's me and Robert directly with all of them, not handing it off to associate level people or a big team or anything.

6:16We've been in the trenches, which obviously has its ups and its downs, but it's gotten a lot better. Companies 95 and 96, our process was a lot better and more ironed out than companies one through 10. So sometimes I feel bad about the early people and I think about sending them refunds for, I don't know what the heck we must have been doing back then, but it's gotten a lot better. Yeah, but you also probably spent more time on them. And so they don't feel bad. You probably delivered something helpful for them. But instead of it, you probably had to spend 10 hours with a client. And now you kind of have this nailed where you're not going to be able, you don't have to spend that time, right?

6:48100%. Yeah, that's a great, great way of putting it. Don't feel bad about the money that you earned from that. I love it. You have a skill. You have a skill. They paid for that. So you started this business doing, how do you talk about, you have this kind of niche business where you help people do websites, but I see you post about positioning frameworks. When you talk about the framework, and I want to get into the framework, what is the phrase, is it positioning? What are you calling? What is it that you're doing? Yeah, so it's funny. It's been a constant evolution of our own positioning. Even when we started, we spun out of a larger agency that does design and development.

7:22When we were working there, our hypothesis was we could help startups with positioning. And that was about as narrow as we knew. We knew that April Dunford, who I think was a guest in your podcast, we knew she did positioning and we knew there was something there. And I'm like, we had a hunch she probably couldn't service every possible client. So we were like, there's probably a market there. And so we came in with that hypothesis, positioning and startups. But over time, it's gotten way, way more narrow and way more specific. And I actually think we're working with a segment of people that April usually doesn't work with a lot earlier stage.

7:53And so we call ourselves product marketing consultants, and we try to give the qualifier consultants who actually help you do the work because sometimes consultants just come in, tell you some stuff and then leave. But yeah, we primarily say we're focused on website messaging and positioning with that qualifier being website because your website really isn't fully representative of your overall positioning. And just to give one small example, a company like Notion is selling bottoms up for a lot of their companies to the end user. And then they're also selling to sometimes top-down and enterprises.

8:26But they've decided to use the homepage mainly to speak to the bottoms-up user rather than the enterprise buyer. So positioning on the homepage is not necessarily this is everything we do for everyone. It's just one of your main marketing assets. And so that's really the niche where we've really focused on is trying to help those people figure that out. Because the early stages are so stressful because there's so many unknowns. You might have 10 different use cases you're exploring. You have all these different customer types. But you have to put something on there. And rather than putting something really vague and broad and confusing, we think you can do a decent job even with all the uncertainty.

8:59Have you found that people are willing to pay a price that you're okay with for that? Because I've kind of like in my career come across this catch, which is like early stage, which is why like if you're April, right? April can command the big bucks from the IBM competitor or whatever, right? They're going to bring her in. And this is not a knock. I would have a miserable time working with the companies that she works with. I am much more of an early stage person. But a lot of the early stage companies, it's like, I think about this all the time. You talk to the founder or whoever's doing marketing, it's like, they want a million dollar or billion dollar positioning, but their budget is like 500 bucks or something.

9:38And I've always found that that to be a miss. How have you talked through the pricing point, the price point at this? And I'm also going to say, just so I don't forget this, I'll shut up and let you rant in a second. I also think that it's very smart what you're doing in, I think that one of the missing ingredients with positioning is there are many positioning consultants and inside of the company, I worked at a company once and we hired a positioning guy to come in and he gives us all this and we get this Google doc and I'm like, okay, but like, this isn't the freaking, like to me, positioning is the website.

10:09Like I've always thought of like product marketing and positioning is the website. And so like, if we don't have website copy, it doesn't matter what our positioning doc is. The VP of sales is going to be on my ass because what she's going to do is go to the website, pull up the website and be like, this makes no sense. And so I think it's super smart that you're focusing on the website, but answer my first question first. Yeah, for sure. So we have over time, we've realized the power of choosing a very specific niche. And now we're deep, deep believers, especially if you're a service business that there's just two of us, right?

10:40So we don't need to have thousands and thousands of people to work with at once. So once we got the niche down, we knew that it was seed to roughly series A is our sweet spot. And at that level, you have some venture funding, but you're not like stacks of cash. You're not like sitting on 50 million or something, maybe a 5 million or somewhere around there. And so when we started trying to design the service for that group, we started to reverse engineer what would be things that would make them like it. One of them is the thing you just mentioned. having a very tangible output. When you're Series B, Series C plus, giant publicly traded, you can pay a ton of money to have a really nice PowerPoint that lays out here's our positioning and then all the teams scurry out and make that a reality.

11:26When you're early stage, you're not going to pay someone for strategy. You're not going to pay them for just high level thinking. You're paying for things that are going to move the ball forward. And so we said, rather than just selling a really nice PDF. We're going to sell a rewritten homepage because that's going to start driving change almost immediately. In the same way, we said, how can we get the price point lower for these people, but also potentially shrink the size of the engagement so it's still worth it for us? And so one of the main things that we killed was us doing the primary research.

11:57So in a past life, my partner and I, we would do jobs to be done on the ground customer research. We would synthesize. We'd bring these reports, bring them back to the founders and say, hey, this is what we found from the customers. And inevitably, what would happen would be that the founders, if we brought back research that they didn't like, they would just ignore it. Or they would say, nah, that doesn't seem right. I don't believe it. So we were like, we're not going to do that anymore. We're really just going to focus in on the parts that we can do, which is we're going to have take you as the founder or the head of marketing.

12:26we're going to try to extract the work that you've done with your customers and your understanding of what you built as a product and help you organize it, arrange it, bubble up the most important things using our process. And so we often say, even in the sales calls that we have with founders, this project is really only going to be as valuable as the time that you've already spent with your customers. And sometimes people will say to us, we don't really feel comfortable moving forward because we actually probably need to go and validate some of the things we're thinking. But other people will come in and they'll say, I've listened to all my gong recordings.

12:56I have a pretty good sense. And then those projects are obviously way, way better. But so all those things, we've been able to design the service. It's way lower price point than someone like April, probably like a factor, like a one-tenth or one-one-hundredth of what she would charge. But it's because it's way shorter than what she'll do. I'm pretty sure she does customer interviews. I think she's like actually meeting with people. So we don't really do that. We run some workshops with the founders and the heads of marketing. We have a copywriter that we work with on our team who then will help arrange it into a page.

13:23some designers who sometimes help with that piece. But essentially, that's been able to shrink the package where it really is a win-win for everyone. They actually get to move a lot faster. It's usually like a two-week turnaround rather than a multi-month project so they can get something up and running and get feedback on. But then it still is a very viable product for us as well. So you're not doing the customer research, but are they providing their customer research to you and then you're able to read through it and digest it and write stuff back? We actually have them synthesize their own research.

13:56And so that was even one of the ways we helped shrink it a little bit. Because the other thing is, since we're solving this one very specific problem across a ton of different industries, even within SaaS, people talk about SaaS as a niche. Like, that's so unbelievably broad. We're working with deep AI, ML, technical companies. We're working with construction companies. We're working with all sorts because SaaS exists on a very, very large spectrum. So rather than us pretending like we're going to be able to go in, read through all this stuff, become subject matter experts, we just say we're going to coax this information out of you in the best way that you can give it to us and then work from that as our starting point.

14:34Yeah, I love that. One of my favorite parts of the marketing stuff is the positioning and messaging and copywriting. And I've often thought like, I'd love to start a business where I help companies do that. And the process that you just mentioned is the exact reason that I didn't want to do that Because, you know, companies want to like hire you and then they expect in like, you know, two weeks for you to become an expert on their customer base when it's like, come on, you have this information in your head. It's either in your, and I've worked with any founders in the past. The founder usually has a deep understanding of the industry anyway, because they either had this problem before or did a company before or like some reason led them to start the company.

15:14Every company is using some type of like call recording or note taking, like you have all that stuff. And I think I'm a better copywriter than I am somebody who knows about an industry. And so if you can surface the common pain points and objectives and challenges and reasons people buy your product, if you go and listen to Lachey's podcast, she has this template for bottom of the funnel content. It's basically all these great questions that she asks people to give her so she can create that content. If you're a good writer, you have that. You can go and create that. So I think it's wise that you put it on the company.

15:44And if they can't give you that, they got bigger problems than like trying to figure out what messaging should be on the homepage, right? 100%. It's a problem at that point, way higher up the chain. That's a product strategy problem, you know, target customer problem, all those types of things that we're not going to weigh in on anyways. I also think what's smart is, you know, too often the positioning doc is a Google doc and it just becomes that and then it needs to be translated in other things. But like, to me, nailing your positioning means nailing the website. Everyone from prospective customers to future employees to investors to acquirers to whoever, what are they going to do when they want to learn about your company?

16:25They're going to Google you or go to your website and they're going to make the best conclusion about what you do based on your website. You have to be in the funnel at a different stage to see the deck or to see the pitch or to see the presentation. And so I've been in multiple conversations with founders and they're like, don't worry at our web, don't worry about what's on the website right now. I'm like, no, what do you mean? That's all there is. The website is the thing, right? 100%. Yeah, totally agree. You started off not in tech, right? And you've now done 100 of these B2B SaaS startup websites.

16:59Did being an outsider, now that you have some wisdom on this, did it help you in any way? Did it hurt you in any way? What perspective were you able to bring as an outsider into this industry? and how has it helped you in this job? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think it's drastically helped me. I worked in a lot of industries that were not so much on the up and up as B2B SaaS is. And so a lot of the toil and the struggle to turn things around. So just to give you some context, I used to work in a lot of different churches actually. So I worked for like a very large mega church for a while in Chicago.

17:36The church was actually declining in attendance and there's giant societal trends and shifts of all why this is, things that we can't really control. So me and some of the other people working there were like really trying to turn this around and we brought as much energy and innovation and thoughtfulness as we possibly could. We'd slave at this, trying to make it better and better. And we still weren't really able to ever move the needle. On the side of that, in my less professional life, I've always been involved with like, I've had bands and stuff with me and my friends. So I'm currently in like a pop punk band with some of my good friends, But I've been doing that for a long time.

18:10And those are more B2C, or not even B, really, just like consumer-type stuff. And growing something in a consumer world is just very, very difficult. So those two pieces of my life of always trying to grow these things in very difficult environments and kind of consistently failing, when I took the same level of energy and focus and put it into tech and specifically B2B SaaS, which is an industry that is growing and becoming more prominent in the world, it just took off. And I'll even talk to other people and I'm like, it feels like it's so easy. And sometimes they're struggling and stuff because they've only lived in that world forever.

18:47And it's like, I think it was like Marc Andreessen or someone who was saying, would you rather have a great team, a great product or a great market? And now I'm like, it's the market. Being in this world, there's just so much more opportunity. And so I took a lot of my background, which is around content creation and teaching and things like that, pointed it towards a platform like LinkedIn. And me and my partner have been able to really, really grow our followings pretty quickly, all things being equal, in ways that when I tried to do this on the consumer side for my own personal music pursuits and things like that, I was never really able to get that same level of growth.

19:21So I think the outside perspective though has helped a ton coming in. And also, it just kept me from having any level of ego coming in. So like not being like, well, I have this giant career as a product manager. And so that's who I am and I'm not going to change. I was more open to what's the best spot for me to find where I can take my talents and put them when it's going to really be helpful. And basically stumbled into product marketing and positioning and messaging and all this type of stuff. And even my partner, who has actually worked a long time in tech, really big career in startups, and he worked for really big companies like Oracle and stuff.

19:52He was even at the beginning like, do I want to just be known as a product marketer? I have so much experience in tech. And so for him, it was a really hard decision to say like, this is what we're going to focus on. But for me, I'm like, I'll take whatever I can get. Like I've been floundering for the last 15 years like without really finding a spot. So those are probably like the biggest things that I've seen coming in from the outside. You mentioned something interesting, which is you've been able to build an audience, grow a following on LinkedIn. I just pulled you up. You have 34 ,000 followers, which is plenty to run a successful business on.

20:23LinkedIn named you a top product marketing voice, which is so fantastic to help the brand, right? It's great. We'll take any award that we can get. For sure. But you mentioned like, basically if you were writing content about music, for example, right? On LinkedIn, that might be fun for you and it might scratch a passion itch, but it's not going to help you build a following and build a business because it's too wide. There's just so much there. But now all of a sudden you shrink this down and you're basically like, hey, I'm going to use LinkedIn and on LinkedIn, I'm going to talk about positioning and messaging for B2B SaaS startups.

21:00You start writing really tactical, practical content about that. Now you have posts that have 1 ,000, like 360 comments, right? And you can, your inbound machine can be driven from your LinkedIn. I think that's just a great example of what it takes to grow an audience online. You can't write about anything that you want, really. You can, it's great. Have fun, do it. I do that all the time, but I don't expect any results from that. Like if I was trying to grow something, that's going to help grow the business, it's got to be focused on a niche like you have, right? A hundred percent. And honestly, like we now tell everyone who's thinking about going solo, you're a single solopreneur, find something very, very small that feels uncomfortably small because that's usually where you're going to make the most traction.

21:42Even just the way the algorithms work. Like algorithms are trying to find the most targeted content and show it to the people who care about that the most because it's going to make the platform better. Like that's our litmus test mostly for our content. What's going to help LinkedIn the most? What's going to make people come back to LinkedIn the most? It's going to be content that's extremely tactical that people could use immediately that feels perfectly tailored to their job. And so the more we just lean in to what LinkedIn would want, the more the algorithm is just doing all of our distribution for us.

22:12So, you know, we've never ran a paid ad. We'll do podcasts and stuff like this, which is always great. But the primary driver of our, all of our business is LinkedIn, people finding our content. And we always know a sales call is going to close. If the person gets on the call and says, I've been reading your content for six months. It's so valuable. I know we're probably going to close versus someone comes on and says, oh, someone mentioned your name. I'm not really sure you do. I'm like, there's no chance I'm going to do the whole demand generation process in the next 25 minutes and convince you of this.

22:42I totally agree. I'm not doing any now, but for like a year or so after I left my job, I was doing consulting and I only did inbound and I learned this, not the hard way, but there's just like one or two engagements that weren't the right fit. But the best relationships and the best customers were the ones that came 100 % inbound. They wanted to work with me specifically. They were like, hey, I've been following this thing that you did and you did this thing and I want to learn how to do that. And I'm like, okay, this, I can really quickly just read who's going to be the right fit to work with.

23:13And it's like, in your example, it's like, yeah, all these people are already indoctrinated with the way that you think and they know what they're going to get versus like if you're like, hey, do you need a new website? Oh, well, I don't like, and you got a pitch. It's like, no, I don't want to. I don't want that business. I don't I don't want to be trying to pitch this right. Like quick break for Zoom webinars. This is the platform behind the world famous Exit 5 Live. Someone on LinkedIn just said, I compare all other webinars against Exit 5 Live now. How good is that? So good. I want to print that out, send it to my mom, put it on my fridge.

23:45In a world of AI slot, we just want to make something that's worth showing up for, even a webinar. Especially a webinar. But don't you dare call it a webinar, even though I'd break my own rule and do that all the time. It's a live session. Our team puts over seven hours a week into each one of these, choosing the topic, the prep calls, building to run a show, and making it valuable and engaging. Zoom webinars is a big part of how we pull it off. We average 1 ,500 plus registrants per session. Hundreds of people show up live and the chat goes off. Yeah, the last time we have a new high watermark, we had 527 people live for an hour with us.

24:20Zoom does registration, emails, polls, analytics, and it all lives in one place. So running a polished session every two weeks isn't a scramble. At Showtime, our team swears by Zoom's production studio. They preset every scene and push each one live on cue. Clean transition, zero chaos, at least that anyone can see. Just please do not look at our internal Slack. Okay, all the caps lock in there. Don't share that. That's our pro-level webinar production powered by Zoom. Check it out, zoom.com slash exit5. Learn more about Zoom and all the webinars and all their products there and come see it live.

24:53We do these basically every week now. Go and check them out. It's called Exit 5 Live and learn more about Zoom at zoom.com slash exit5. All right, if you're at a B2B tech company spending over$50 ,000 a month on paid media, Compound Growth Marketing wants to give you two free sessions to build out your 2027 plan. Free? Okay, I'm listening. What do you get? I know, free is usually too good to be true, but check this out. In the first session, they're going to learn your business, and in the second, they will deliver you a custom plan. So you'd know how to split demand capture and creation, which channels drive the best ROI, and where you're reporting has gaps.

25:29And look, I trust them with it. I've hired CGM twice. They're one of the best agencies I've worked with back in my day as a head of marketing. Twice? Wow. I've hired plenty of agencies as a VP of marketing, and that is rare. I'm more than just a thought leader, Dashiell. You should know that. So CGM helps high growth cybersecurity and enterprise software companies show up earlier in the buying journey with full funnel, paid media, AEO, and a dedicated GTM engineering team. Ooh, and a former VP of marketing started it. So they actually get B2B. That's right. John was one of us back in the day. So check it out.

26:01You can go book your 2027 planning session right now at compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit five. That's compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit5. Link in the show notes. Tell me about the framework. Let's talk about the framework. What is the framework? Where did it come from? Is this the framework that I see that you post a lot where you kind of have this like colored text where it's like benefit, persona, capability, problem, feature, category, ICP? Is it like just Mad Libs? You fill in the blank. What's the framework? Yeah, so it started originally when we were like, we want to help with positioning.

26:38And we thought the website was a place where this would show up. So we said, let's try to audit some websites. Let's figure out how are people positioning today? And what we quickly realized is when you look up the different Mad Libs that exist about talking about positioning, we're a blank type of company that helps blank type of customer. We quickly realized that every one of the words that people throw around don't really have an agreed upon definition. Nobody really knows what the value proposition is. Nobody even really knows what the word value means. And then we'd see stuff like people don't care about features.

27:09They care about benefits. You should lead with benefits. All sorts of stuff, even like a problem. What constitutes a good problem versus a bad problem? So we would do these really lightweight audits where we would take someone's website and we were in Miro at that point. And we're in Miro, we're using sticky notes and we basically mark out, hey, this is the problem I think you're solving. Here's the features that power it, the benefits. And we would post this and then we'd get all sorts of comments, and we're trying to follow what everyone is saying, follow the market. And what we realized was that before we could do anything, we needed to spend a bunch of time just defining what do these words mean.

27:42So we have like a glossary of definitions of each of these specific things that we're constantly updating, and we're getting better and better even about specific words. And so these types of words become the basis for building messaging and building value propositions at a high level. Those things that you listed out, Like those would be, I guess if you had like a classic, like if you Googled, like, what is a positioning statement? That's what those are, right? The classic positioning statement is like for target customer with benefit. You know, I don't even forget. I haven't used one. I just kind of make it up.

28:19But is that what that's based on? Like the kind of like classic positioning statement? Yeah, a lot. It's loosely based on that. But for us, it's really about the messaging elements. And we talked about, we had a post once where we had a periodic table of messaging elements and things like that. We're getting all clever and stuff. But ultimately, it's like, what does it take to write a value proposition end to end? What are the pieces that you actually need to know? So we have several components and I can list them off quick. For us, when you think about a customer segment, it really has like five or six different things within it.

28:51One, what type of company are we talking about? So company type, that's one of our blocks. to what's our persona that we're targeting. And we use that word, we've called it persona, we've called it champion. It's essentially like, who's the person that's gonna be most interested in pushing this deal through? Knowing that the vast majority of B2B SaaS deal cycles are six to 12 months, who's the person that we wanna get involved early on who's gonna help us meet with procurement and legal and their boss and their boss's boss and the technical buyers and everything? You have to find someone that you're gonna target specifically.

29:26And that person's usually on like a team. So the level of specificity is sort of dictated by the product and the willingness to go more specific of the founders and the heads of marketing. So company type, persona or champion. And then the piece where it gets a little bit more interesting is, we've had this box for a long time. We've named it 25 different things. Essentially, we've been calling it more often the situation and it really falls into one of two buckets. We frame it as, I'm trying to do blank. and that could be, I'm trying to do a specific set of activities. I'm trying to schedule a meeting with someone online.

30:00It also could be a desired outcome. I'm trying to increase conversions on my website. So this box, it's like sometimes you would see it as like the job to be done box but even jobs has its whole own history and stuff that we've stayed away from calling it that. So you have a type of company, you have a person in the type of company who's in a specific situation trying to do something and then there's one level deeper which we call the current way which is what tools, processes, how are they executing on that essentially situation box? What are they actually doing? And then from there, what are the problems?

30:36What are the problems with doing it that specific way? So when you walk that out, that actually is what constitutes a segment. And you can remove some of the elements and it'll be a little bit less clear, but an end-to-end segment of customers is both not just firmographic, specific user type, but it's also what are they actually trying to do? That's like what creates the opening for the use case of when a product would come into the picture. And then what specific problems are they running into? So like to give you an example, let's say you're a head of marketing at a B2B SaaS company. And what are you trying to do?

31:15You're trying to schedule meetings with other people that you're working with. Problem, you send emails to people, they don't know your calendar, so you have to send back and forth and it gets really annoying to go back and forth. So like that market segment is a prime market segment for a product like Calendly, which we use Calendly. Our business runs on Calendly for everyone to book it. So now when you've got the market side, now you have to say, okay, well, what do I wanna talk about on the product side? How do I wanna actually connect product market fit, all that pieces? It's even in the name, right?

31:44Product marketing. How do we wanna talk about the market? How do we wanna talk about the product? What do we wanna elevate to the top that's gonna actually make this interesting? So rather than talking about features and benefits, which is essentially how most people talk about products, tell me about the features, tell me about the benefits. There's actually a third capability. So that's actually the word. The third thing is called the capability, which is essentially answering the question, what do I do with the product? The feature is like the technical aspect of something in there. Like it's usually like one or two words, like notifications, a dashboard, analytics.

32:16Those are like features. the benefits are the outcome of actually doing the capability. So for Calendly as an instance, the shareable booking link is the feature and the capability is what do I do with it is you let other people book time directly on your calendar. The benefit then is why would that matter? What would be the outcome that you're looking for? And it usually will be the inverse of the problem. So if the market segment, the problem is it takes so long to get meetings scheduled scheduled, the benefit of using a tool like Calendly is you can schedule meetings way, way faster, you know.

32:53So essentially on the product side, you have feature capability, which is missing for most people's definitions that usually are just features and benefits. What do I actually do with the product? Then you have the benefit, which is the outcome. And then really the last element on the product side that often is a struggling point for early stage startups is what product category are you in in the first place? And sometimes this could be a mix of multiple product categories. If you're doing something new, maybe it's a brand new product category or you exist in an existing category, but you're modifying it in some way.

33:25Like TikTok, when TikTok comes out, they were in the product category of like video platform, but they carved out a sub niche, short form video, and they dominated this whole space that was a subcategory with a big one. So product category, obviously, it's a giant topic in and of itself. Is that what you would call the differentiator? Because like April harps really strongly on differentiation. And I've gone in different waves of positioning school of thought, but in working with a couple of companies over the last few years, I do find that it does come back to differentiation and that like, yeah, there's a thousand other tools or perception, like what is your, you have your value prop, but that has to be based on some differentiated position.

34:07And she gave an example on our podcast a couple episodes ago of, I was like, you know, what do you do when the company really has none or needs to innovate on that? And she's like, well, I have this one company that I worked with where from a technology standpoint, they weren't doing anything unique. They weren't doing anything new, but they were the only company at the time that was offering basically like full scale custom services, like we will do it for you. And so like they switched the messaging to be like, Hey, you want this. There's lots of companies that do this, but we're the only ones that will do it for you.

34:39And that's a perfect example of like how of differentiation works. When I was at Privy there, we changed the messaging to be something from like, it used to be like a website pop-up tool to capture email addresses on your website to we wanted to reposition the company to be more of a marketing platform, but we wanted to focus on small businesses. So solo entrepreneurs and small Shopify stores, like, Hey, there's lots of other tools you could use. If you have this massive marketing machine, you should be using something like Klaviyo as an example, right? But if you're a solo entrepreneur, you don't have a marketing team, you don't have a full unit behind this, like you should use our tool and that became a powerful differentiator.

35:19So how does that fit into where, because I feel like you can do all the frameworks that you want, but when you're working with a company, they need to have that clear differentiator. If we have the clear differentiator, then the positioning exercise becomes easy, right? Yeah, and so we see it two ways. We see that in the early stages of a startup, The question is not why you over the competitors. The question is actually, when would I use you? So most early startups aren't really directly competing with other companies because they're often new additions. Like take Calendly. There wasn't really a direct competitor to Calendly when they came out on the market.

35:57And the question was more, when would I use Calendly than why would I pick Calendly over other scheduling automation tools? because that wasn't really a thing yet. So for us, the way we think about differentiation is in the very early stage, we would call this contextual differentiation, which if later stages, more competitive differentiation, when would I use, for example, the Arc browser? A lot of people talk about the Arc browser. It's a brand new from a company called the Browser Company. It's like a Chrome competitor, Safari competitor, extremely competitive, saturated, mature market, internet browsers.

36:29We know what the options are. We know what's available. So the question when someone comes out with a new browser, the question you immediately have to answer is, why would I pick Arc browser over Chrome or Safari? And so the impetus is on pure competitive differentiation. Well, they do things for this, we do it in this way, all that stuff that you mentioned. In the early stages, it's a bigger question of saying contextual differentiation. Here's how you normally execute a workflow. You normally would send an email, you'd look at your calendar, you'd write down the times that you're available, you send it over email, you wait for them to respond.

37:02They come back, oh, none of those different didn't work, or maybe I'm in a different time zone than you. Here's one some back, and you go this back and forth, and that's like an annoying workflow. So contextual differentiation would say, take that context, and now here's a brand new way of doing it. You share one link, it has all the pre-selected times that they can choose from. They book it, and then Calendly will invite both people to the meeting. So for us, that's where the differentiation changes from early stage to later stage. So yeah, that's sort of how we view it. What's the most common mistake or the most common, you know, you got 300 companies that reach out to you, you start to see some patterns.

37:38What's the most common mistake with positioning and the website that you see? So B2B SaaS specifically, they get wrapped around the axle in one very specific way. Most of the time, it's a marketer or early founder, usually early founder, who doesn't actually have in-depth marketing experience because the founding team of most companies is a builder and a seller. I'm going to be the technical guy. You're going to go out, sell the investors, sell early customers. Most companies don't really have that marketing represented. That's why the question is, when should we hire our first marketing hire?

38:09And VCs, they don't really have marketing background. I think it's like Emily Kramer. It's like, as I said, it's like 1 % of VCs come from the marketing world. So the whole ecosystem is kind of missing this marketing piece. So the only marketing that most people know is like one piece of advice that's taken drastically out of context and misapplied over and over and over again. It's the buyers don't care about features. They just care about benefits. They don't care what your product does. They just want to know the outcome that you can deliver. and there's a famous picture of Mario and he eats the little thing and then they're like, you don't sell this, you sell, and Mario's really big.

38:48Yeah, that's my favorite. So you take that image, you take that advice and you take the idea that buyers care about the outcome. The other one is the, you're not buying a quarter inch drill, you're buying a quarter inch hole, all the most common ones. It's like if I started golfing and my only knowledge of golf was from the movie Happy Gilmore where he says, It's all in the hips. So I'm like, that's all I have. And I'm going off of that. And I'm going to go start learning golf again. I'm swinging my hips all around. And I'm looking like an absolute fool. But I don't even really realize it because that's what everyone is doing.

39:21So when you look at websites, 99 % of them in early stage are just talking about outcomes. And remember, the question that you want to ask in the early days that most people are wondering is, when would I use this? And talking about outcomes does not answer that question. So I just did a big post about this. I won't say who the companies are, but you could easily figure it out. These are just a couple of the examples of some websites of current early stage companies. Product growth unlocked. Activate more users, increase feature adoption, and drive expansion revenue. That's the H1, H2 of the hero of their product.

39:56Hold on, I'm gonna give you more right now because this is your work. I'm gonna write about it. I'm gonna talk about it. Great teamwork starts with a digital HQ. It's so good. You know that one? I do. You know that one? another one connect everything achieve anything yes yes so so one more one more one one platform to connect this is you have not to take us off this track but you have this great post which is like the message clarity degrades over time which is like so true i've been at a company long enough to see that but like you have zoom years ago just said use zoom for video conference rooms in your phone.

40:38That's fantastic. What's wrong with that? But then we try to over market it. And all of a sudden we have one platform to connect or you go back to the original Slack messaging, which is today it's the great teamwork start to the digital HQ. The old messaging was Slack replaces email inside of your company. Oh, interesting. Okay. Tell me why I need that. Okay. I see an enemy emails the enemy, but then they make a couple of acquisitions, you know, a lot of bunch of things happen and then you got to, you got to change the network. This is why I got to be a startup guy. I can't, I can't do this nonsense.

41:06I can't do it. I know. And I actually, it's so funny that post got so much heat because so many people, a baffling amount of people came out swinging, defending connect everything, achieve anything. And it really, it fell into like four different buckets so much that I did a follow-up post and then another follow-up post because I was so upset. And I bet, I bet there was also people in the comments. Well, like, well, Slack's a pretty, you know, Slack, Airtable, and Zoom are pretty successful companies. Like, Like, okay, most of 99 % of us on this call are not going to be one of those companies, right?

41:38Like one out of 100 ,000 startups has a successful exit. You're not going to probably be that company. And so like, don't pander to that. Exactly. And then, so my first rebuttal was when they basically said, this is good, right? It really fell into three buckets. People said either the unclear messaging is inevitable because as your company gets more complicated, it just has to get vague because you're serving so many different customer types different buyers and all that stuff. So one was, it's inevitable. Other ones said it's strategic, where they said, no, no, no, enterprise buyers like that.

42:11They like to have you talk about the nonsense. Like I use the example today. This is a real company. This is, and I don't feel bad calling them out because they're worth like 200 billion or something. ServiceNow, their hero said, put yes to work, save or grow, satisfy shareholders or satisfy customers. When facing tough choices, choose the one platform that lets you say yes to both. And then the CTA, the button says, make yes work. That's the button they want you to click. So they were like, people were arguing, no, no, no, these big hotshot enterprise buyers, like that's what they want, which I'm like, I feel like it's insulting to their intelligence that they're just looking around for like the shiniest.

42:52Oh, I want to buy that for my 10 ,000 person company because it sounds, I just don't think that that's true. And then a lot of people were like, it doesn't matter. They're so big, who cares? you know, where I'm like, I also don't think that's true. I think it's pretty important. People spend millions of dollars on branding refreshes and homepages like when you're big. So I think it does matter. But I think it's more what you're saying that it's the internal stakeholders are all kind of fighting for what they want it to be. And there's like this political battle. And I think that's how you end up with some of this stuff.

43:19But all of that stuff, right? Your original question, this over emphasis on outcomes, vague benefits without ever saying, when would I use this? How would I use this? Why would I use this? That is the most pervasive problem facing all of tech startup websites, in my opinion. I need to ask you something else, but I just happened to look this up and this is fantastic. So I went to salesforce.com and I went to hubspot.com. The headline, Salesforce's headline is grow faster with Salesforce. Hubspot's headline, grow better with Hubspot.

43:56so that enterprise buyer how good is that how good is that they've got two this is in their minds this is what people's minds i'm a svp at some fortune 500 and i've got both pages up and i'm like this which one do i pick do i want to grow faster or do i want to grow better this has really made it easy for me i want to grow faster so they're going to choose i'm gonna i'm gonna make this i'm gonna make a linkedin post people are not gonna like that because i I know people at both companies, but it's great. It's great. Yeah, which one do you want? Do you want to go faster or do you want better? Do you want faster or better?

44:25In the silly part, what I tried to combat the objections was there are large companies that are still very clear. Like Stripe. Stripe was the most valuable startup, I think, in the world. Maybe still is based on their valuation and all that stuff. Their H2 underneath the main headline, millions of companies of all sizes use Stripe online and in person to, and then it says, accept payments, send payouts, and automate financial processes. So that right there is like three example use cases of when someone might use Stripe. Giant company, really complicated, does a million things for a million different people, clear messaging.

45:04So I'm like, it doesn't have to be bad. You could make the decision to not make it bad, but for all those other factors, it ends up staying bad for most of these big companies. All right, we will have to have you back on in a couple months and do a follow-up session. and talk more. But one thing I want to get your perspective on is talk to me about what's your point of view about the homepage headline. And you have this kind of value prop positioning statement that I've seen you post. And we talked through earlier, since you do websites and you have this, that's the output. Where does that lead?

45:34What's your, does it have to be in the headline? Does the homepage headline matter? Is that where you write the full statement? Can people, or do you kind of give them a taste and like you get the picture from the website by scrolling? what's your point of view on the role of the headline? So the way we think about it is we call it your minimum viable positioning shows up in the H1 and the H2 on your website. Just the hero image. Sometimes even if you can get the like trusted by section with the logos, if you can squeeze those all into a hero, you can communicate a lot of information. So when we think about minimum viable positioning, it's essentially you have to say one of those messaging elements from the market side and one of the messaging elements from the product side.

46:16You can't have everything from one or the other, or in some of these cases, none of them, right? Like put yes to work or whatever. That doesn't have any elements of anything. So what you really need is something about the product and something about the market in order to create a message that will potentially resonate with anyone. So you see a lot of examples of this. Good examples of this are when it actually says like, here's the use case of maybe when you would use it. That's speaking to the market side. and then maybe you say, we're the product category for this specific type of person. Like we're the CRM for small businesses.

46:50Even that saying we're the CRM for small businesses is enough for you to go, interesting, I'm gonna read on. I have a loose idea of what you do because CRM would be on the product side. Small businesses would be on the target customer side. But it doesn't have to be like a vertical slice of like we're only talking about this industry or this team. It could also be use case based, right? It could say something along like, It's so annoying to book meetings online. We let you book them with one click or something like that. That's the problem on the market side with the capability on the product side.

47:21There was another one too, like Loom, who just was acquired by Atlassian. Their messaging was really, really good for a long time. And it was around, they made the enemy was meetings. And so for a while, their H1 was meetings off, Loom on or something like that, or Loom on, meetings off. And so even in there, they were saying people who are in meetings and don't like the meetings. And then underneath it, it was like, send quick videos, which we would call capability, and reduce the amount of time you spend in meetings by 29%. It was some outcome. But across that, it's like we would call it holistic messaging.

47:53You're not just talking one thing on one side. You're painting a picture, bridging between product and market. And again, you do not, because you're early stage, you probably can't fill out one of those Mad Libs end to end because you don't actually know yet. but you can say something about the market side and something about the product side. And that's enough to get you started. I love the Loom example. That's a great, because like I think you can have the value prop be the headline, but to me, that's like what you should do if you don't have like good copy or something witty. Like I think a website should still have that good punchy hook.

48:27It doesn't need to always be like the world's all-in-one CRM platform, right? Where like, I like the, you know, say goodbye to meetings or whatever. At Drift for a while, we had this, we kind of did this whole brand campaign around, we said, welcome to now. And that was because we kind of came up with this whole narrative that like traditional B2B sales and marketing software was about later, like fill out this form and someone get back to you later. Right. And so we came up with this campaign at Drift, which is like, welcome to now Drift connects you with potential customers right now. And so if the homepage just said, welcome to now, people would be like, I have no idea what you do.

49:04But if you say, welcome to now is the headline. And then as you go down the page, you're like, welcome to now drift is the leading conversational marketing plat, you know, drift is the only conversational marketing platform that helps you do X, Y, and Z that gives context to that. Right. And as you scroll down that loom page, you start to understand, Oh yeah, I understand what this tool does. And so this does make sense. I can get rid of meetings right there. So I think that's an area where a lot of companies get stuck is the, I have a love and hate with the homepage headline. I think it's very important, but I also think at the same time, it's something that the VP of sales and the VP of customer success and VP of product and VP of marketing like argue about for no real reason when especially in B2B, it's the whole of the like, the headline to me is a hook.

49:47It's like to get you the goal of the headline is to get you to read the next part and the next part and the next part and then you understand it. And then you're going to raise your hand and be interested in it. It's not like I have no idea, you know, and I don't think we need to obsess over it as much as we do. And we say in general, clear for early stage startups, clear is usually better than clever. That if you have to prioritize one over the other, you should try to be clear first. And then the cleverness will come later. I love that. People hit the rewind on your podcast thing and go rewind 15 seconds.

50:18Clear is better than clever. And if you're going to go clever, it has to be like the clever that everyone in the company like instantly gets. Like go and test it with 10 or 20 people. It's like, you can't tell the joke and people don't, it can't be a joke that like, you can't quote some obscure line from a movie that not everyone's seen. If you're going to use the joke, you got to make sure like the whole industry knows the joke, knows the punchline. And like Uber, for example, Uber's early website headline, I think was everyone's private driver, which is like very clever, but also very clear of what Uber is.

50:53Like someone's going to pick me up and drive me from one place to another. and that's when they were doing the black cars where it was much more high end and so they were like pitching that vision. But yeah, you can be clever as long as you're clear if you're early stage because you don't have any room and you have no credibility for people to just want to learn more about you because of all this recognition that you don't have yet. So you have to be clear and usually in our opinion, if you can get in the Hero, the H1 or the H2, the main use cases or the main capabilities that your product can do when you would actually use it, how you would use it.

51:26If you can get that in there, it's going to make you exponentially more likely to have people keep scrolling to see the rest. All right, Anthony, thank you for coming on. I got a lot of notes. I'm excited to put this episode out. We should set it up to email each other in a month or two and book another time to come on. I would love to, you know, maybe we could do something for exit five actually where we're like showing people examples. That would be really cool. Anyway, this is great. Go to LinkedIn, go find him. Anthony Pieri, he's got a guitar emoji next to his name because he can shred. He's a top product marketing voice on LinkedIn.

51:58And I just think whether you're going to buy from him or not, if you want to get smarter about positioning and messaging, if you're a B2B startup, great person to follow. And you can do the best thing for me, which is send Anthony a message, tell him that you learned something from him on this episode, and then he'll screenshot and send it to me. Those are the things that make me happy. Other than that, Anthony, thank you, man. Great to have you on. I wish you continued success in the business. Keep sharing your practical content. It's very helpful. I'm learning a bunch from it as you go. And I appreciate you taking the time to come on.

52:28Definitely. Thanks so much for having me. It's been a blast. All right. Thank you. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over at exit5.com. We've got articles. We've got videos. We've got templates. Plus, we have a community, a community of over 4 ,000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about, get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company, go and check it out.

53:03It's exit5.com. You can get on the email list there. You can join the community. There's 4 ,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out, exit5.com. And I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's hatch.fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do. And they work with B2B companies just like yours.

53:35They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you got to do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's hatch.fm. The best marketing leaders have a strong agency or two backing them up, and Convertive is one I'd put on that list, especially if AEO is a priority for you right now. It definitely is, and a good one is a lifesaver. They bring fresh creative angles and go deep on specialties like AEO when your team's short on bandwidth. If you're shopping for a B2B agency, check out Convertive.

54:13They help enterprise marketing and ops leaders grow revenue across the business. Who do they work with? They work with legit companies like DocuSign, Databank, and Constructor, and they build on the search work that you're already doing, optimizing your site so more buyers find you and turn it into pipeline. And this month, Exit 5 listeners get a free AEO search snapshot. They'll run your buyers' real questions through Google and AI tools, show how you stack up against competitors, and tell you what's worth fixing. So if you're building your AEO strategy for 2027, start here. Go and check out convertive.com slash exit5.

54:48That's convertive.com slash exit5. And you can see the link in the show notes.