Message-Market Fit Trumps Product-Market Fit?

May 3, 2017 | Breakthrough Marketing

Product – Market Fit is an important concept in very early stage start-ups.  It is the thing that is perceived by founders and investors alike as THE milestone to signify that customers want the product and it is time to accelerate growth investments.  As Marc Andreessen is quoted as saying, “Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market”. Blogger Sean Ellis (@seanellis) of GrowthHackers.com defines Product Market Fit as the time when 40% of your initial customers say they would be  “very disappointed” without your product.  Netscape’s CEO Jim Barksdale said it in a bit more folksy way, “It’s not dog food if the dogs don’t come off the porch and eat it.”  Product market fit, implies that it is indeed dog food that’s in your dog food can.  So, now, we gotta let the dogs know it’s time to come and get it.

However, as Dan Olsen (@danolsen), author of The Lean Product Playbook, discusses in this slideshare entitled, “How to Achieve Messaging-Market Fit” Message-Market Fit is determined by “How appealing the messaging sounds” to the customer, not by how well the product meets their needs as in Product-Market Fit.  Dan goes on to give a good primer on the basics of good messaging and positioning.

In my book, Launching to Leading, I dive deeply into the market leadership life-cycle and what that leaders must do to breakthrough and lead.  Here, let’s use the lens of Message-Market fit to frame this discussion.  There are three levels of Message Market fit that you must achieve to lead and win your market. Let’s call there Level I Value Fit, Level II- Unique Value Fit and Level III – Viewpoint Fit.  Moving through all 3 of these levels is necessary as you grow from launching to leading your market.  Let’s take a quick look at these three levels.

Message Market Fit Level I – Value Fit –  When we launch and start to invest in growth marketing, many are at a Level 1 Value fit.  Value fit means we have articulated a set of benefits that our initial set of customers are willing to pay for.  And that this value is greater than the cost of acquisition and ongoing use or implementation of the solution, it has a positive ROI.  Unfortunately, at this level of fit, we are only launching into the market, we are not yet moving toward leadership.   To begin to participate in shaping and leading the market, we must move to a Level II message market fit, Unique Value.

Message Market Fit Level II – Unique Value – To achieve this level of Message Market fit, we must move from Value to Unique Value.  Unique Value are the benefits we can deliver to the market that the competitive alternatives, be they other products, services, build you own, or do nothing, can not.  And these Unique Values must matter more to the customer than any Unique Values that our competitors can deliver.  And, this is NOT a feature discussion, it is a benefit one.  Unique Value is the first time we begin to establish our participation in the market as a leader.  This level of fit is how we win competitive deals, but it can be expensive, bloody street fighting.  To really breakthrough and lead, we must move to Level III of Message-Market Fit, Viewpoint Fit, and in doing so we tilt the entire market battle in our favor.

Message Market Fit Level III, Viewpoint Fit – This level of Message Market fit operates at a level above the other two, that of context as opposed to direct benefit.  When we achieve this level of fit, we answer perhaps the most challenging question of all, why should customers listen to us in the first place.  How do we rise above the cacophony of noise in the marketplace to get attention so we can communicate our Level II Unique value to more and more receptive prospects?

Customers live in their context, not ours.  To achieve Level III Message Market First, we must relate our uniqueness to the customer’s world.  We must show them why we matter, and why our mattering aligns to their world and it’s challenges and opportunities.  We should them how our unique approach, our mindset, our innovation aligns with their world and how it can be the magical power that can make their world so so much better. I call this telling your Viewpoint Story, and you can read more about how in the detailed blog series here.

Market are conversations.  These conversations are framed in the customer’s world and in the known approaches to solving their problems.  By starting our conversation with prospects with a Viewpoint anchored in their world, we raise our importance, breakthrough, AND actually can grow our Unique Value.  Leaders with Level III Message-Market fit start and end their stories with the customer and their reality.

Product-Market fit is a necessary first step to growth.  However, without paying close attention to Message-Market fit, and driving through the 3 levels of Message-Market fit, companies will stall and fail to grow despite having a product that fits the market.  And who wants to join the set of companies who solve a problem but fail to matter.

Pure Go To Market Harmony – Why We Need Both Classical and Jazz Performers and Performances

Apr 20, 2017 | Leadership

“We built the best deck ever, and sales just insists on changing it, they can’t stay on message” – Head of Marketing

“That marketing deck is out of touch, our audience just doesn’t want to listen to that” – Head of Sales

Sometimes, as a consultant, I just want to go all Rodney King on my clients and scream – WHY CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG!

The truth of course lies somewhere in between, as it usually does.  Marketing, for it’s part, needs a story that scales.  They need to grab attention, keep it and create sales opportunities, real ones.   And while we can tailor our message by audience and industry, the number of variations we can effectively create and manage is by the very nature of marketing, somewhat limited, by bandwidth, budget and media channels.   And while Account Based Marketing and sales, buyer persona driven marketing, and technology driven personalization let us do more, we are still at the end of the day more like Classical Composers and conductors, writing and conducting the score to a large audience.

Sales on the other hand needs the story that wins NOW, with this customer, in this industry, against this competitor, in this economic environment, it this part of the buying cycle.  Now, this conversation, not tomorrow’s or next weeks.

While at the Topo Summit last week, I was chatting with my friend Paul McGee, founder and CEO of sales enablement vendor Sharper Ax about sales and marketing messaging, and how they differ.  Paul and I had done some previous work together for Sharper Ax and Paul had come up with the metaphor that great sales reps are like Jazz musicians, they know a lot of riffs, and they play the ones that are right for the small intimate audience they are performing for that day.  Great sales reps are Jazz Musicians.

Great marketers are Classical Music Composers and Conductors.   

Great sales reps are Jazz Musicians. 

NO WONDER WE CAN’T GET ALONG!!!

To succeed we need to both understand and learn from each other.  Here’s my ideas for how we can bring our sales and marketing music into pure Go To Market Harmony –

Marketers MUST understand that sales is a performance more akin to Jazz and Improvisation than scripted set pieces.  While marketing needs classical music to do their jobs, sales performers need small repeatable riffs that they can string into story and on the spot performances that resonate with their audience of the moment.  Providing sales with these riffs; be they stories, value statements, silver bullets and the like, is a critical sales enablement task for marketing teams.  So when supporting sales, stop just writing symphonies and novels, and start writing musical riffs and poems.

Sales professional MUST understand that without classical training, your jazz improvisations will fail.  Take the symphony (“The Deck”) as a work of art, worthy of respect. Before you start riffing on your own, master the classical version.  Only then make it your own.   Respect the effort and thought that goes into the deck,  find the value, and then amplify it with you improvisation.  And rather that telling marketing they “don’t understand” the audience, teach them by constructively telling them which riffs and passages are getting the most applause from the buying audience. Be a partner so they get you better raw material to build your performances from.

We all must understand that to win, we need both Classical and Jazz music performers and performances in our Go To Market approach, then we can all get along!

CyberTech San Diego: Marketing Hero’s Journey Workshop with Ken Rutsky

Apr 13, 2017 | Past Events

Join me for an interactive workshop where you will learn how to tell your story like Disney, Lucas, and other masters of film and media while transforming your messaging and selling, by being the magic in your Customer’s Hero’s Journey.   And leave with a framework and toolset that you can apply to your business today!

Link here for more information and registration.

The Way of the Go To Market Warrior – Charting Your Leadership Journey

Apr 4, 2017 | Leadership

“When you can snatch the pebble from my hand, it will be time for you to leave.” — Master Kan, speaking to the young Caine in Kung Fu.

Today, being a Go To Market leader in an organization is harder than ever.  I’ve written in the past that to be a Go To Market leader, you need to be Part Yoda, Part Leonardo and Part MLK, and I’ve also written about the 8 domain skills that organizations need to have on their team to build leadership that can take their products and services to the top of the market.

So with three personas and 8 domain skills, how can you possibly “do it well”?

Let me suggest one path to being a Go To Market leader that I have found useful in coaching clients, thinking about my career, and making sense of what I see in the world I practice in, Business to Business, or B2B Marketing, I call it the Way of the Go To Market Warrior and it looks like this:

As you can see, we all start as novices, as we learn and achieve the mythical 10,000 hours of practice, we become an expert.   In the Go To Market leadership journey, we first focus on SKILLS, mastering one of the functional skills in Go to Market, be it Messaging and Positioning, Growth Hacking, Events, Sales Enablement, or one of the roles on the skills wheel, whichever you choose or is chosen for you.  But we quickly learn that to increase our impact and build our career, expertise in one skill, however valuable, does not a leader make.  We must become a skills polyglot, like Leonardo DiVinci.  In fact, in the first third of our journey, Leonardo is our spirit guide, and our focus is on skills acquisition. Our Journey looks like this:

 

While we have upped our impact, skills will only take us so far.  We can have great success, even be seen as a star, but to move the organization further and be a leader, we must expand our knowledge beyond our skills, and catalyze others to drive success.  Our spirit guide for this segment of our Journey is none other than Yoda.  To catalyze success and impact, we must learn the context in which we apply our skills.  In the Go to Market world, this KNOWLEDGE means, deep understanding of the market, the selling and buying process, and the available solutions in the market, both ours and competitions’.  Only with that knowledge can we catalyze our impact to extend not just to our skills, but to top line revenue, customer success and product roadmap.  Our impact reaches beyond our domain and function and we emerge as a leader in the business.  Yoda can take us far!

However, Yoda isn’t so good in a leading a big crowd.  Yoda can coach and mentor you and lead by example in how you grow your knowledge and turn it into a force of impact (pun intended), but he’s not going to be much of the influencer of the big crowd.  Become a master of Go to Market and moving from catalyzing others to leveraging yourself and the organization to accomplish the impossible, requires you to call on INFLUENCE as your focus, and Martin Luthur King as your spirit guide, or even spiritual guide, if you so care! Harnessing your skills and knowledge as the base, we now become the Master, the influencer, the larger than life leader in the organization and beyond.  We are now a true leader and master; skillful ,knowledgeable and influential yet humble and serving.  Our final journey looks like this, the Way of The Go To Market Warrior:

And from here, the journey begins again, with a new challenge and a new set of spirit guides. That’s a matter for a different day!

“The seeds of our destiny are nurtured by the roots of our past” – Master Po to Caine in Kung Fu

This post is dedicated to all my mentors of the past, present and future.  I’ve grabbed a few pebbles and drop some too, but either way you have never failed to inspire me. 
I love to Mentor others and do so with what I hope is mastery, competence and humility, and I consider it one of life’s greatest honors and privileges.  If you are on a journey to leadership in the Go To Market domain, I’d love to connect and see how we can accelerate our journeys together!