CMOs & leaders, are you telling the wrong story?
TL;DR: Avoid overly-zoomed-in-thinking, and get really good at telling people their baby’s ugly.
Read time: 4 minutes & 40 seconds
The following is a conversation with Steve LaChance, a SaaS marketing veteran with 20+ years of experience. He's a former CMO, the best-selling author of Marketing for Product-Led Growth & owner of Discernr, a Product-Led Growth consultancy.
Why do SaaS companies care about metrics more than stories?
Most of the market (like 99% of it) is kinda just sitting there watching you evolve. They’re not in a buying cycle but SaaS companies tend to just look at the ones in a buying cycle.
This creates incentives to look at metrics instead of telling stories. Even if they're not useful metrics.
Finding the real market story you need to be telling means companies need to zoom out in their thinking. The world doesn’t run on your quarterly metrics.
Enterprise B2B SaaS sales cycles are long – like 12-18 months long. Think of your customers’ world as a market story and not internal quarterly numbers to hit.
Then how should marketers adjust messaging with market shifts and customer feedback?
Slowly.
Devote as much research and time to changes as you did the initial messaging. If you’re changing significantly more than once every 18 months, you probably never had a good grasp of the market.
At minimum, don’t change more often than twice your buying cycle. And don’t get caught up in rapid testing sprints.
Fast adjustments are fine for things like button colors or CTA text, but core messaging should never outpace customer decision cycles.
How should marketers keep their positioning consistent for complex B2B products?
At this point, most companies have pivoted themselves off the court because of an overly-zoomed-in view of the world.
Zooming out isn’t about being lazy. It’s about not doing the wrong things.
One of my favorite companies I’ve worked with is a high-end construction company in southeast Michigan. Here, it's about $800 per square foot.
We simplify the stressful problem of choosing a general contractor and provide insane value at each step.
This market is so small that we can’t be changing who we are because some competitor did this or the market changed slightly.
Who “owns” the story?
Marketing owns it, period.
Other departments collaborate on the narrative’s structure and details, but Marketing is the author.
If you’re going to be accountable for the story, you might as well take full control of it.
Organizational structures often push marketing towards short-term goals because of job uncertainty over a 12-18 month period.
This leads to incentives like “I need to ship 2,000 words this month” when it should be to tell the right story going on in your customers’ minds.
How can CMOs & VPs better navigate this?
Know how your company is funded – VC, operations, debt, private equity – and understand your company's valuation and revenue goals.
For VC-funded companies, it’s about achieving top-line growth in 12-18 months. Know your operating profit and the context of your funds.
Is their focus on a great product or just getting their investment back?
There's often a hyper-focus on the short term – things that can be controlled like A/B testing, because there’s a lack of market understanding and inability to write a clear story.
So marketing should be more of the author and not the editor.
Yes.
A marketer should be wary if other departments are handing them completed stories, rather than involving them in the creation process.
That's a sign of misalignment.
And misalignment means fragmentation of the story.
How do you be a change agent for this as a CMO?
I see my customers as both internal and external.
That includes our CEO, CTO, CSO, and of course, the buyer. My job is to anticipate their needs, frustrations, problem-solving approaches, and how to present solutions.
Sometimes, you have to be the one to tell them their idea isn't working.
Filtering ideas and gracefully telling them their baby is ugly is part of your job.
MBA programs teach the 4 Ps of marketing: product, price, promotion, placement. But marketing has often been relegated to just promotion.
It's not just about telling stories but being an active member in discussions about product, price, and placement, and delivering these narratives in a stable, repeatable, profitable manner.
And sales has its own pressures.
Sales has hard quotas. They operate in an actively adversarial world, which breeds urgency.
Marketing needs to be right there, collecting data alongside them. If sales won't let you on calls, settle it like adults and find a way.
It seems there's a language barrier between companies and customers.
Take Reddit for example. It’s a goldmine for actual market information.
Marketers should tap into this kind of unfiltered conversation to remove language barriers between their company and customers.
Any actions readers can take right now to improve?
Just reach out to a sales rep. Ask to sit in on a call. Just observe.
And try not to freak out. Marketing has a chance to lead in core business areas: product, promotion, pricing, and placement. I explore these themes in an international bestseller I wrote.
Steve’s links: