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Hi everybody, welcome to this episode of Said Differently, the podcast about messaging, positioning, and B2B storytelling.
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It's brought to you by Troop.
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I'm your host, Jennifer Sakora.
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And today we have a topic we haven't tackled yet, and I'm excited about this one.
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It's about competitive messaging.
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And we're not talking about the down and dirty, I'm gonna develop this battle card against competitor X.
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We're talking about bigger picture, strategic competitive positioning in your marketplace and what that means, right?
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So we're talking today with Kevin Chan, who is the founding and senior director of product marketing over at Locust.
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Troop met Kevin through a recent customer engagement, and we have been stalking him since then and excited to have him on the show.
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Kevin, why don't you say a little bit more about your background before we dive into the topic today?
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Yeah.
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Well, nice to be everyone, and yeah, thanks, Jennifer, for having me.
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Um I am very proud to have been stalked by Troop.
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And so uh I'm based in Vancouver, Canada.
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Um I have two small kids, and so outside of product marketing, I uh spend my time, you know, trying to be the best I can for them.
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But um have been in product marketing for close to 10 years now, um, largely in very vertical SaaS kind of industries.
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Most recently, um I was at a company called Fledio, and now I find myself here at Locus and really operating in the physical operations space.
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So um, whether that's transportation management software, which is what we do here at Locus, or at Fledio, where we were uh uh working with uh fleet managers over in the fleet maintenance and management space.
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So it's really great to be able to dig into some real-world problems and help solve those through technology, and I think that's what we're all about here at uh, you know, with uh in in the discipline of product marketing.
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So it's it's great to be here.
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Cool.
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Uh Kevin, two small kids.
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Then uh in product marketing speak, you are an expert on objection handling, I'm sure.
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So yeah, it's a scale-up environment, is maybe what I'm calling it.
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Yeah.
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All right.
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So you and I had a prep call for this, and we talked about it around a couple different ideas for what we wanted to talk about, and competition really kind of kept rising up.
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And obviously, every company out there in the world is telling a story to the market.
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And as they are telling that story to their potential buyers, their competitors are also trying to get those same the attention of those same buyers, right?
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So, not only are you battling with that, you're battling for attention, and how are you gonna stand up?
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So, you know, I guess let's talk about kind of you know, bigger picture.
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Um what is your general philosophy and philosophy and your point of view on, you know, let's start with some foundation setting.
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How much do you believe competitive messaging should be factored into the crafting of your positioning narrative and your messaging points?
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Like how much weight do you give the competition?
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I would say um probably less than what the average person should do spend already uh thinking about competitive messaging.
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I think that um competitive messaging is just really easy to overreact to.
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Um I think that if you were to use any one of those sort of website um update alert kind of tools that are out there nowadays, and you were to sort of, hey, put like two people who are in the same industry and you know, track uh vendor A and vendor B, you probably would notice that for every maybe one to two times that vendor A is updating their website, vendor B is probably noticing that and updating it in kind.
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And so I think that uh, you know, with AI and everything, it's just very easy for us to um overreact to what messaging is out there.
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Uh and probably where the strength actually is for us today, and especially in spaces like uh the physical operation space where I've spent a number of years today, is like it's actually more difficult to not change your messaging on a whim and instead say, I know this is what we stand for, you know, because competitors are just one part of the types of messaging or market movements that we're paying attention to, right?
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Whether that's our customers, uh, you know, our buyers or prospects, uh, you know, analysts, trade publications, things like that.
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Yeah, no, that's uh it it can be very noisy out there, especially as you mentioned, since there's so many things that can alert us at a snap of the finger to any even tiny change that the competitors make in what they're doing in the public domain.
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Um, but when when does it matter to you, Kevin?
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How how when you think about the competitive landscape, how do you view it?
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Like what do you factor in?
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What's important to you?
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Yeah.
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When I look at competitor messaging, I actually try to look at it not as a point in time, but as a combination of different activities.
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And so one of the things that I think um, you know, I've toyed around with on my own has been um being able to track over a time horizon how is this competitor actually evolving their messaging, whether that's on the home page, whether that's maybe even things that you're garnering from uh, you know, what a rep might be feeding you in terms of what a prospect is saying that competitor is saying.
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And you should be really filtering it to not overreact on a certain point in time, but instead being able to filter out, okay, um, based on the various breadcrumbs that they've been dropping for us over this past little while, what are they trying to evolve their narrative to be?
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It's about an evolution, it's not about that one point in time.
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Um and then just further than that, too, I think like just a healthy dose of skepticism in competitor messaging, I think is always useful.
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Where um, you know, I think we've all been there, you know, you wake up on wake up in the morning, you're drinking your first cup of coffee, and you have a, you know, your CEO or your other executive leaders sort of send you, hey, did you notice that this competitor changed their homepage?
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Like, should do we need to be reacting in kind?
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Or hey, they just released this case study.
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Do we need to like combat this case study that they had with a prominent customer of theirs?
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And the reaction that I always sort of have is like, we need to look one layer deeper, right?
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Like they might say, Hey, you know, we um we now work with this customer, but what you should be actually looking at is like, what are they actually doing for that customer?
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What are the types of outcomes that they're driving for that customer?
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That's probably more telling in terms of, hey, um, these are the types of outcomes we want to be driving for all of our customers.
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And so then you know, hey, when one of their sellers is probably engaging in a deal where we're head to head, these are the types of value propositions or KPIs that they're probably trying to rationalize in, you know, the in the buyer's decision-making process.
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So it's about you know digging one that that one layer deeper and not just um, you know, if they wake up with uh, we are the first IGENTEC X, you don't say, oh, you know, we are too.
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Yeah.
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I those examples are ever present.
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I I have two that just as you were talking popped into my brain.
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Um, one was an early stage company that I've been was providing some advisory work for, and they were kind of honestly first to market in what they were doing.
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But then a much, much bigger player came up and announced a competitive offering.
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Um, and it was hair on fire, right?
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The the startup team was like, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, how can they make these claims?
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This is terrible.
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They're basically, you know, ripping us off our messaging.
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Um but it turns out that that product wasn't really real.
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Like it was um that company like putting a competitive messaging stake into the market without a lot of product to back it up.
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So that was one example for me.
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And another one is I've been doing some messaging consulting work, and a recent client of mine warned me that every time they make a messaging change, they have a competitor that very quickly just adopts it, just steals it.
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And sure enough, when we did this large refresh, literally one week later, the competitor had revamped their whole website and built the messaging into their own.
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Those are tricky, right, Kevin?
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You want to react to that.
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Yeah, for sure.
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And I think like, like I said, like everybody, everybody also wants you to react to that, right?
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And that's where I think like we as PMMs, um, you know, not to uh maybe be too biased or overindulge here, but I think that like one of the fundamental reasons why PMMs are part of the company is to be a bit of like the truth teller to the rest of the organization, right?
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And the truth teller is, you know, the truth isn't always changing, right?
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I think the truth evolves over time, and that's the way that we should be approaching it too as PMMs is sometimes like allowing the organization to say, uh, or sorry, to tell the rest of the organization, like, let's just take a collective deep breath here and like let's look at the facts, right?
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Like, are they changing as they change that messaging, is that actually changing anything about who we are as a company and what we can provide?
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And you know, is that even showing up in altering things like the decision-making criteria of a buyer?
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Because if it isn't, then is that messaging that the competitor is putting out there, you know, even all that effective to begin with?
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Yeah, and you and I were just talking as well about another recent podcast we just had, which is how AI is pouring an accelerant on all of this, right?
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So not only can messaging change like that, thanks to generative AI help, but it is having a very real impact on product velocity, product uh release cadence.
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And so you might be in a position where in your competitive space, your company is on the leading edge and they're actually innovating much faster on the product side.
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And now you have the dilemma of keeping your message pace with that.
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But then you might be in the other position where you're at the disadvantage of a competitor whose product is moving faster than yours is.
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How do you view each of these situations, Kevin, in light of AI as a product accelerant?
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Yeah.
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I think that's such a great question.
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Um I actually was speaking with a CPO the other day, and one of the things that um, you know, I think was was great to hear from a CPO of all types of you know executive personas that you could speak to that would have this opinion is um with AI, it it has been, as you mentioned, Jennifer, a strong accelerant in the way that um uh new features, new products, new use cases can be deployed just like that, right?
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And so, like, what is the difference between uh and and I think that actually is changing go to market and not just the way that you need to stay on top of all of these releases, it also takes into consideration how much more companies can future sell a vision than they ever could before, because that vision can become a reality instead of in years, in months, or sometimes in weeks, right?
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And so the way that I sort of think about that from a competitive perspective is really um, you know, AI may be the accelerant, but AI is often not the problem that a lot of our buyers in any industry are looking to solve, right?
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Like, I don't think that um, again, thinking about like a physical operations buyer, a supply chain leader, uh, you know, a fleet manager, their boss isn't coming to them and saying, like, hey, you know, uh we woke up this morning and like our fleet has an AI problem.
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Like, go go solve, you know, go get AIs to solve our problem.
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Yeah.
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Um, the the common problem is what probably what they've been suffering for for the past one, three, five years, which is I need to find ways to add efficiencies to my fleet, to my supply chain, to my transportation management system or software.
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And um, they don't really care whether it's driven by AI or not, right?
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And so, like, that's where I think you get a lot of these companies that are chasing after or fighting over buzzwords around agentic this, AI native this.
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And uh, and really at the end of the day, what we want to be able to say is, as product marketers, again, being those true sayers, is hey, if we can cut through all the noise for you, like you have a fundamentally, you have a uh X problem, and we can solve that problem and whether we use Y and Y as AI to solve it, or maybe we actually just build a workflow, an automated workflow for you, and it's not even a gen tick, and it still solves your problem at the end of the day, that's what they care about, right?
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And um, I'll give a quick plug here.
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Like, I had a great PMM team when I was at Fleadio, and uh one of the product marketers on the team, Bree, um, she came up with like this really great slogan that we had taken to market, which was like fleet managers don't have an AI problem.
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They have a they have a fleet maintenance problem.
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And so we're here to solve a fleet maintenance problem because if we go to you and say, hey, like we think you have an AI problem, um, you know, I don't know how well that's gonna resonate to a lot of folks that probably are um not even sure what that means in in certain terms, right?
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So yeah, for sure.
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I mean, I I was at a conference recently, um, and you know, I'm sure a lot of folks are seeing this the sort of sea of sameness among the competitors in terms of messaging, right?
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Everybody's slapping the buzzwords on, and you know, not that that's a new thing, right?
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That all happened with cloud, that happened with you know lots of other things in the past, but uh it feels like especially if we're leaning too much on AI's help to help us do competitive messaging, it can really water everything down and everything starts to sound very similar.
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And so going back to the product marketer being not just the truth teller, I think they also need to help cut through all of that sameness.
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Because if you feed a bunch of inputs into AI, all the competitor stories can start to sound identical.
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And that's not what you want either.
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Exactly.
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Yeah, I think uh yeah, I was just thinking about this while you're while you're while you're mentioning that, Jennifer, is I wonder if someone could run a study on uh how we've probably seen fewer home pages with like the words all in one or seamless, and like a lot more home pages with the words like agentic or AI.
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AI color, you know.
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Exactly, yeah.
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And uh I bet you there's a strong um FOMO aspect that like uh you know, when you think about competitors doing things like that, that that makes other people follow suit.
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Oh yeah, yeah.
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Well, I mean, actually, uh it's an interesting segue into you know, one of the things we're building into Troop right now.
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So Troop, uh, you know, just for those who don't know, is a platform that helps you monitor and measure what is actually happening with your messaging in terms of pipeline outcomes and revenue.
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So we're actually finally connecting your messaging plan to your messaging execution to the outcomes that come out of all of that.
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One of the things we are building is the ability to say, okay, well, how does this size up?
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How does your messaging plan compare to your competitors?
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And when those competitors are present, what happens to outcomes?
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And I know you've played around with, you know, as many have, you know, using large language models, you know, Claude or Gemini to do your own competitive messaging analysis too.
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So it's fairly, you know, it's helpful to do that so you can start to understand where are the high areas of overlap and where is their white space?
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Where can we carve out a space for our message?
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Right.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, exactly.
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I think um, yeah, I I think, you know, like you guys have been, I've been in talks with you guys for a little while now.
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I think what you guys are doing at Troop is amazing.
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I uh I couldn't, you know, I couldn't agree more.
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I think that from one of the things again, um that uh RCMO at Fleadio had really reinforced, which was wonderful for the PMM team, was really simply the fact that all messaging is competitive messaging.
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All campaigns are competitive campaigns.
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Whether you you know acknowledge it or not, part of what you are trying to change the market's perception on is what other alternative solutions are out there and why they're not a good fit, right?
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And so, you know, you could obviously be applying that to competitor vendors, you could be complain comparing them to other modalities of ways of getting those same use cases or jobs to be done completed, whether that's like the all-too common kind of Excel spreadsheet or whatever.
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But I think um that's great.
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And I think like, you know, if as a some of a DAY DIYer uh on the PMM side, playing around with LLMs and things like that, yeah.
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There's a lot of ways that you can obviously like stay on top of competitive messaging changes.
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We spoke about some of them off the top with like website trackers and you know all the good stuff there.
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But I think that um the the the relevance factor I think is really like what makes the difference difficult, which is hey, okay, so um I'll use this example.
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Uh a competitor changes their website, right?
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That might actually have very little relevance to um you as a company because I don't know how, like, aside from PMMs who are probably bred this way, I don't know how many uh buyers are putting up uh split screening their screen and having you know uh one website on one side, one website on the other side, and going, okay, like which messaging like speaks to me more, like which one's more differentiated?
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Yeah.
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Where things actually start um you know coming a bit more undone in that way is when they're doing the ping-ponging of sales calls, right?
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So you're a little bit further in the funnel, you're starting to have those discovery calls or those demo calls, and uh whether they're asking out over overtly, and so like, hey, what's the difference between Locus and this other competitor or other vendor that we're analyzing?
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Or um, hey, you know, I just you know got out of a call and they won't tell you with what vendor, and they said, you know, um, one of the the workflows or things that I think we need now is X.
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Like, can you do X?
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Like that is a referential competitive statement.
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And I think those are the things that like become more and more and more interesting, um, especially as we're fighting over so little mind share on the internet nowadays with the way things are.
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Uh, the only way that they're starting to, they might be doing some initial discovery, but I think like being able to set somebody straight at the beginning is really important.
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And how can you do that is through getting ahead of those you know, uh referential competitive statements that are happening uh you know in cycle that you often lose lose sight of.
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So very good point, Kevin.
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And you were talking about how like, you know, as you get further into the buyer's journey and into the selling process, you know, one of the things you we you know were talking a little bit also about before we taped is the you know how Troop does the measurement, but why is that important now?
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And you had made the the note to me that selling is more complex, right?
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So measuring um what's happening, you know, you have to you can't just do it at the sort of campaign level with what used to be just really kind of, I would maybe argue superficial metrics like how many people downloaded this ebook or how many of these webinar attendees did we convert to an SDR call?
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Um, those are fine metrics, but that doesn't really follow the story through the whole buyer's journey, right?
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So, you know, what is happening on that second call, that third call, that first deep dive demo, right?
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What messages are working?
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So when you think about measuring, Kevin, like what why do you think it's important now?
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And what would you what do you want to measure?
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Yeah.
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So as you said from the top, uh yeah, selling is becoming more complex.
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I actually was speaking to a couple PMMs over the past couple of weeks, uh, slightly maybe to prepare for our conversation here.
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And uh one of the things that they had mentioned was that um, you know, in in in their companies where they sell to a variety of segments, right?
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So whether that's SMB, mid-market, or enterprise, that um an SMB deal is starting to feel like a mid-market deal.
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A mid-market deal is starting to feel like an enterprise deal, and they don't even want to think about what the enterprise deals are starting to feel like, right?
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Like um, I guess you know, one quantification that I heard was, you know, hey, you know, in a in an enterprise deal, maybe two or three years ago, we were seeing like maybe five different stakeholders that were multi-threaded through that opportunity that at some point we needed to engage in.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, yeah.
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And now they're like, We're we're happy if we get five in a mid-market deal.
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And so, like in an enterprise deal, they're seeing, you know, maybe like 10 to a dozen.
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And that's like, you know, some of those are gas ghosts, ghost committee stakeholders where you might not even actually get a chance to present to them in the room, but they're deliberating behind the you know, behind.
00:20:39.279 --> 00:20:39.680
Well, you're right.
00:20:39.759 --> 00:20:47.519
You've got infosec people, you have maybe AI AI ops needs to review if there's AI in the product, which probably there is.
00:20:47.680 --> 00:20:49.200
Yeah, go on.
00:20:49.680 --> 00:20:56.799
Yes, and so I think that um that's really the true messaging test nowadays, in my opinion.
00:20:56.960 --> 00:21:07.119
Is like, you know, you can I would say that the the challenge of writing marketing uh copy for or write good good messaging for a website is difficult.
00:21:07.200 --> 00:21:24.720
But to me, what's more difficult is can your messaging then stand that test when it's being hyper-analyzed by 12 different stakeholders who probably all have 12 different um KPIs that you and you might be only aware of three of those stakeholders' KPIs um around you know how they are evaluating you and and and to your competitors or or not, right?
00:21:24.799 --> 00:21:50.480
And so the types of metrics that I really look at and you know things that I've talked to my teams about in places that I've gone has been, you know, what um instead of like it's good to obviously look at messaging that's working, but it's also good to like understand um what your sellers are also saying that might be going off script that can help you, and with tools can help you do that, then that's a big part of the game because you know your messaging should be helping uh I uh solve for stall deals, right?
00:21:50.559 --> 00:21:59.680
Messaging should be helping with higher win rates or you know, um higher share of wallet when actually you multi thread properly and you are actually saying, hey, everybody's gonna, this is not a zero sum game.
00:22:00.319 --> 00:22:00.960
Everybody can win.
00:22:01.039 --> 00:22:02.240
All of the stakeholders can win.
00:22:02.319 --> 00:22:09.039
Then you're going to get a higher share wallet because everyone believes in what that, you know, what you can do through the partnership that you're going to be establishing with that buyer.
00:22:09.200 --> 00:22:20.960
And so yeah, I think I'm like a big proponent of all that type of, you know, tracking all those things and um where there's just like messaging to me is just one of those like never-ending, you're you're always learning um through messaging.
00:22:21.200 --> 00:22:21.519
It's true.
00:22:21.599 --> 00:22:21.920
Uh yeah.
00:22:22.160 --> 00:22:22.640
It's true.
00:22:22.799 --> 00:22:23.039
Yeah.
00:22:23.119 --> 00:22:28.319
And I think now we're at the point, especially with tools like Troop, you know, we can now look for real patterns.
00:22:28.480 --> 00:22:31.519
So it's not just anecdotal, it's not just one-offs, right?
00:22:31.599 --> 00:22:39.200
Like your salesperson comes to you and says, Hey, I was just, you know, we're in a competitive deal cycle with this competitor.
00:22:39.359 --> 00:22:41.119
This is how the last call went.
00:22:41.359 --> 00:22:46.400
These competitive messages didn't work, or they did work.
00:22:46.640 --> 00:23:11.200
So it's helpful, but it's like one data point, or maybe you get a handful of those data points per month or per quarter, which you know, you get bias from the salesperson, you get, you don't, you know, but when you start to get bigger data sets of that and start to see real patterns in that data, then you can really start to hone in on how do we sharpen this competitive messaging?
00:23:11.359 --> 00:23:12.880
How do we do a better job?
00:23:13.039 --> 00:23:21.200
Nobody wants their messaging to be called out for not working, but you've got to kind of face the music, right?
00:23:21.279 --> 00:23:23.599
You have to, otherwise you're not getting better.
00:23:23.759 --> 00:23:30.720
So, bottom line, let's kind of wrap some of this up a little bit.
00:23:32.400 --> 00:23:45.839
You know, the the we talked about this whole sea of sameness on the trade show floor, comparing different home pages, you know, people getting inundated with content and competitive messaging.
00:23:46.240 --> 00:23:50.079
Um analysts even have an influence in a lot of things.
00:23:50.240 --> 00:23:59.519
But how like what are techniques you like to stand out, like to make your story stand out?
00:23:59.920 --> 00:24:00.400
Yeah.
00:24:00.640 --> 00:24:01.200
Yeah.
00:24:01.519 --> 00:24:01.759
Yeah.
00:24:01.920 --> 00:24:04.640
I think message, yeah, messaging is like a recipe, right?
00:24:04.720 --> 00:24:18.480
And so I think that um you on the surface, uh you might go to someone's, you know, a homepage, pitch deck, whatever you want to, one pager brochure, whatever you want to look uh look at, and you just see, you know, you're reading the copy.
00:24:18.720 --> 00:24:26.240
And I think that like good messaging that delivers good copy has enough for like has enough slices for everybody.
00:24:26.319 --> 00:24:39.359
And I think that like what makes that effective messaging is through understanding real plain language ways that your buyers are describing their problems, not filtered through a seller, not filtered through a survey, but hearing it verbatim.
00:24:39.519 --> 00:24:49.359
And however you collect that data, whether it's through, yeah, like aggregating larger data sets or whether that's you know actually going and talking to customers yourself on the trade floor, there's a lot of ways you can do that.
00:24:49.440 --> 00:25:03.440
But at the end of the day, that to me is like what taste and messaging is about is do you actually know your customer where you could get in a room with them and maybe not fool them 100% of the time, but have a real conversation with them about their problems in the way that they want to be communicated to you.
00:25:03.920 --> 00:25:13.920
You know, that's why, you know, um unfortunately I don't count myself around among one of them, but a lot of good PMMs that I know um are sometimes born and bred in those industries and they can really speak that language.
00:25:14.079 --> 00:25:25.359
And I'm not saying all PMMs need to come from that, but it sure helps when you have one who can also coach the rest of the PMM team and say, hey, you know, like I've I've walked in in their shoes and I can teach you guys how to think that way too.
00:25:25.519 --> 00:25:28.160
Um I've seen that be hugely successful as well.
00:25:28.240 --> 00:25:28.799
So yeah.
00:25:29.200 --> 00:25:30.079
Yeah, yeah.
00:25:30.319 --> 00:25:35.200
And I think there's a big difference between copy and messaging, right?
00:25:35.359 --> 00:25:38.799
So I frankly, I'm probably not that great at copy.
00:25:38.880 --> 00:25:41.039
Um I I I neither am I.
00:25:41.359 --> 00:25:47.440
There's other people that are much better than at punching up the script than than I am.
00:25:47.680 --> 00:25:54.960
Um, but I think you have it a big part of it is just having that analytical thinking hat on.
00:25:55.039 --> 00:25:57.200
And and AI can't do that for you.
00:25:57.279 --> 00:26:10.559
You know, you can't turn to AI and help it, it can't strategically look at the big picture of your category, your competitors, what's happening in your with your buyers, and say, this is really where we need to focus.
00:26:10.720 --> 00:26:10.960
Yeah.
00:26:11.119 --> 00:26:14.559
And because, you know, but then you need the data to validate that.
00:26:14.799 --> 00:26:15.039
Yeah.
00:26:15.200 --> 00:26:16.960
So can I just say that's a very good point?
00:26:17.039 --> 00:26:29.039
Actually, I was mentoring a PMM the other day, and one of actually the points of feedback that I had given to him was um, you know, uh, I don't think that he was wholly relying on AI for everything that he was doing in terms of like producing messaging.
00:26:29.279 --> 00:26:38.960
But um, one of the things that can really come undone here, and this is again talking buyer language, is you also don't want to overexplain to a buyer the problems that they're having.
00:26:39.039 --> 00:26:59.200
And I think that's what you can actually get into a really slippery slope when using AI too much can do is AI assumes, and probably because of the data sets that it's using as well, that everyone is probably coming in with some sort of like, hey, I need to go zero to 100, or like bring them along a ride of like um explaining to them, you know, what like what the industry is or you know who what the buyer is thinking about.
00:26:59.359 --> 00:27:15.920
But you put that on, you know, you use that messaging and you, you know, you test it with a customer or a prospect or whatever, and they're gonna be like, Are you really spending the first two to three sentences of your messaging where everything is so vital and you're just talking to me about something that I knew the first six months when I was on the job, right?
00:27:16.000 --> 00:27:18.640
Like show me that you understand me, right?
00:27:18.720 --> 00:27:19.839
Show me, prove it to me.
00:27:19.920 --> 00:27:27.039
And I think that's again where um you know hearing it directly from the buyer is better than you know, hearing it directly from Claude or something like that.
00:27:27.599 --> 00:27:29.039
I agree, I agree.
00:27:29.279 --> 00:27:30.960
Um this is amazing.
00:27:31.119 --> 00:27:34.400
So, Kevin, thanks so much for lending your insight.
00:27:34.480 --> 00:27:42.160
I I love, you know, some one of the things that's gonna stick out with me about our conversation is to just not overreact to the competitors.
00:27:42.559 --> 00:27:50.799
Um and to really just kind of find that clarity on your own message and and and have the data to back it up.
00:27:51.039 --> 00:27:53.279
So I love I loved our conversation.
00:27:53.440 --> 00:27:54.160
Thank you so much.
00:27:54.400 --> 00:28:00.079
Any uh last words or thoughts uh as you embark on your role over at uh Locus?
00:28:01.279 --> 00:28:02.559
Uh no, well, thanks.
00:28:02.640 --> 00:28:04.640
Yeah, first of all, thanks for having me, Jennifer.
00:28:04.799 --> 00:28:07.599
Uh, you know, again, love all the work that you guys are doing at Troop.
00:28:07.759 --> 00:28:14.640
Uh, if anyone wants to connect with me, talk PMM, uh, talk competitive messaging, anything like that, uh, you know, folks can find me on LinkedIn.
00:28:14.880 --> 00:28:16.160
Always happy to chat.
00:28:16.319 --> 00:28:19.039
Um and uh, but yeah, thanks for the invite.
00:28:19.359 --> 00:28:19.759
All right.
00:28:19.920 --> 00:28:21.200
Thank you, Kevin.
00:00:15.439 --> 00:00:24.399
Hi everybody, welcome to this episode of Said Differently, the podcast about messaging, positioning, and B2B storytelling.
00:00:24.480 --> 00:00:25.920
It's brought to you by Troop.
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I'm your host, Jennifer Sakora.
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And today we have a topic we haven't tackled yet, and I'm excited about this one.
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It's about competitive messaging.
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And we're not talking about the down and dirty, I'm gonna develop this battle card against competitor X.
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We're talking about bigger picture, strategic competitive positioning in your marketplace and what that means, right?
00:00:49.679 --> 00:00:56.320
So we're talking today with Kevin Chan, who is the founding and senior director of product marketing over at Locust.
00:00:56.640 --> 00:01:06.799
Troop met Kevin through a recent customer engagement, and we have been stalking him since then and excited to have him on the show.
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Kevin, why don't you say a little bit more about your background before we dive into the topic today?
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Yeah.
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Well, nice to be everyone, and yeah, thanks, Jennifer, for having me.
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Um I am very proud to have been stalked by Troop.
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And so uh I'm based in Vancouver, Canada.
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Um I have two small kids, and so outside of product marketing, I uh spend my time, you know, trying to be the best I can for them.
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But um have been in product marketing for close to 10 years now, um, largely in very vertical SaaS kind of industries.
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Most recently, um I was at a company called Fledio, and now I find myself here at Locus and really operating in the physical operations space.
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So um, whether that's transportation management software, which is what we do here at Locus, or at Fledio, where we were uh uh working with uh fleet managers over in the fleet maintenance and management space.
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So it's really great to be able to dig into some real-world problems and help solve those through technology, and I think that's what we're all about here at uh, you know, with uh in in the discipline of product marketing.
00:02:06.079 --> 00:02:07.280
So it's it's great to be here.
00:02:07.599 --> 00:02:07.920
Cool.
00:02:08.080 --> 00:02:09.759
Uh Kevin, two small kids.
00:02:09.919 --> 00:02:14.879
Then uh in product marketing speak, you are an expert on objection handling, I'm sure.
00:02:15.039 --> 00:02:18.319
So yeah, it's a scale-up environment, is maybe what I'm calling it.
00:02:18.960 --> 00:02:19.199
Yeah.
00:02:19.439 --> 00:02:19.759
All right.
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So you and I had a prep call for this, and we talked about it around a couple different ideas for what we wanted to talk about, and competition really kind of kept rising up.
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And obviously, every company out there in the world is telling a story to the market.
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And as they are telling that story to their potential buyers, their competitors are also trying to get those same the attention of those same buyers, right?
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So, not only are you battling with that, you're battling for attention, and how are you gonna stand up?
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So, you know, I guess let's talk about kind of you know, bigger picture.
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Um what is your general philosophy and philosophy and your point of view on, you know, let's start with some foundation setting.
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How much do you believe competitive messaging should be factored into the crafting of your positioning narrative and your messaging points?
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Like how much weight do you give the competition?
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I would say um probably less than what the average person should do spend already uh thinking about competitive messaging.
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I think that um competitive messaging is just really easy to overreact to.
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Um I think that if you were to use any one of those sort of website um update alert kind of tools that are out there nowadays, and you were to sort of, hey, put like two people who are in the same industry and you know, track uh vendor A and vendor B, you probably would notice that for every maybe one to two times that vendor A is updating their website, vendor B is probably noticing that and updating it in kind.
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And so I think that uh, you know, with AI and everything, it's just very easy for us to um overreact to what messaging is out there.
00:04:02.319 --> 00:04:25.120
Uh and probably where the strength actually is for us today, and especially in spaces like uh the physical operation space where I've spent a number of years today, is like it's actually more difficult to not change your messaging on a whim and instead say, I know this is what we stand for, you know, because competitors are just one part of the types of messaging or market movements that we're paying attention to, right?
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Whether that's our customers, uh, you know, our buyers or prospects, uh, you know, analysts, trade publications, things like that.
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Yeah, no, that's uh it it can be very noisy out there, especially as you mentioned, since there's so many things that can alert us at a snap of the finger to any even tiny change that the competitors make in what they're doing in the public domain.
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Um, but when when does it matter to you, Kevin?
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How how when you think about the competitive landscape, how do you view it?
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Like what do you factor in?
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What's important to you?
00:05:01.040 --> 00:05:01.439
Yeah.
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When I look at competitor messaging, I actually try to look at it not as a point in time, but as a combination of different activities.
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And so one of the things that I think um, you know, I've toyed around with on my own has been um being able to track over a time horizon how is this competitor actually evolving their messaging, whether that's on the home page, whether that's maybe even things that you're garnering from uh, you know, what a rep might be feeding you in terms of what a prospect is saying that competitor is saying.
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And you should be really filtering it to not overreact on a certain point in time, but instead being able to filter out, okay, um, based on the various breadcrumbs that they've been dropping for us over this past little while, what are they trying to evolve their narrative to be?
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It's about an evolution, it's not about that one point in time.
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Um and then just further than that, too, I think like just a healthy dose of skepticism in competitor messaging, I think is always useful.
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Where um, you know, I think we've all been there, you know, you wake up on wake up in the morning, you're drinking your first cup of coffee, and you have a, you know, your CEO or your other executive leaders sort of send you, hey, did you notice that this competitor changed their homepage?
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Like, should do we need to be reacting in kind?
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Or hey, they just released this case study.
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Do we need to like combat this case study that they had with a prominent customer of theirs?
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And the reaction that I always sort of have is like, we need to look one layer deeper, right?
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Like they might say, Hey, you know, we um we now work with this customer, but what you should be actually looking at is like, what are they actually doing for that customer?
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What are the types of outcomes that they're driving for that customer?
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That's probably more telling in terms of, hey, um, these are the types of outcomes we want to be driving for all of our customers.
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And so then you know, hey, when one of their sellers is probably engaging in a deal where we're head to head, these are the types of value propositions or KPIs that they're probably trying to rationalize in, you know, the in the buyer's decision-making process.
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So it's about you know digging one that that one layer deeper and not just um, you know, if they wake up with uh, we are the first IGENTEC X, you don't say, oh, you know, we are too.
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Yeah.
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I those examples are ever present.
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I I have two that just as you were talking popped into my brain.
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Um, one was an early stage company that I've been was providing some advisory work for, and they were kind of honestly first to market in what they were doing.
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But then a much, much bigger player came up and announced a competitive offering.
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Um, and it was hair on fire, right?
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The the startup team was like, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, how can they make these claims?
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This is terrible.
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They're basically, you know, ripping us off our messaging.
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Um but it turns out that that product wasn't really real.
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Like it was um that company like putting a competitive messaging stake into the market without a lot of product to back it up.
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So that was one example for me.
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And another one is I've been doing some messaging consulting work, and a recent client of mine warned me that every time they make a messaging change, they have a competitor that very quickly just adopts it, just steals it.
00:08:02.319 --> 00:08:12.879
And sure enough, when we did this large refresh, literally one week later, the competitor had revamped their whole website and built the messaging into their own.
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Those are tricky, right, Kevin?
00:08:15.040 --> 00:08:16.639
You want to react to that.
00:08:17.040 --> 00:08:17.759
Yeah, for sure.
00:08:17.920 --> 00:08:22.879
And I think like, like I said, like everybody, everybody also wants you to react to that, right?
00:08:22.959 --> 00:08:38.399
And that's where I think like we as PMMs, um, you know, not to uh maybe be too biased or overindulge here, but I think that like one of the fundamental reasons why PMMs are part of the company is to be a bit of like the truth teller to the rest of the organization, right?
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And the truth teller is, you know, the truth isn't always changing, right?
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I think the truth evolves over time, and that's the way that we should be approaching it too as PMMs is sometimes like allowing the organization to say, uh, or sorry, to tell the rest of the organization, like, let's just take a collective deep breath here and like let's look at the facts, right?
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Like, are they changing as they change that messaging, is that actually changing anything about who we are as a company and what we can provide?
00:09:03.279 --> 00:09:09.360
And you know, is that even showing up in altering things like the decision-making criteria of a buyer?
00:09:09.440 --> 00:09:14.639
Because if it isn't, then is that messaging that the competitor is putting out there, you know, even all that effective to begin with?
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Yeah, and you and I were just talking as well about another recent podcast we just had, which is how AI is pouring an accelerant on all of this, right?
00:09:25.360 --> 00:09:37.679
So not only can messaging change like that, thanks to generative AI help, but it is having a very real impact on product velocity, product uh release cadence.
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And so you might be in a position where in your competitive space, your company is on the leading edge and they're actually innovating much faster on the product side.
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And now you have the dilemma of keeping your message pace with that.
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But then you might be in the other position where you're at the disadvantage of a competitor whose product is moving faster than yours is.
00:10:03.120 --> 00:10:09.759
How do you view each of these situations, Kevin, in light of AI as a product accelerant?
00:10:10.000 --> 00:10:10.320
Yeah.
00:10:10.639 --> 00:10:12.639
I think that's such a great question.
00:10:12.879 --> 00:10:38.639
Um I actually was speaking with a CPO the other day, and one of the things that um, you know, I think was was great to hear from a CPO of all types of you know executive personas that you could speak to that would have this opinion is um with AI, it it has been, as you mentioned, Jennifer, a strong accelerant in the way that um uh new features, new products, new use cases can be deployed just like that, right?
00:10:38.799 --> 00:11:00.559
And so, like, what is the difference between uh and and I think that actually is changing go to market and not just the way that you need to stay on top of all of these releases, it also takes into consideration how much more companies can future sell a vision than they ever could before, because that vision can become a reality instead of in years, in months, or sometimes in weeks, right?
00:11:00.639 --> 00:11:15.039
And so the way that I sort of think about that from a competitive perspective is really um, you know, AI may be the accelerant, but AI is often not the problem that a lot of our buyers in any industry are looking to solve, right?
00:11:15.120 --> 00:11:28.879
Like, I don't think that um, again, thinking about like a physical operations buyer, a supply chain leader, uh, you know, a fleet manager, their boss isn't coming to them and saying, like, hey, you know, uh we woke up this morning and like our fleet has an AI problem.
00:11:28.960 --> 00:11:32.159
Like, go go solve, you know, go get AIs to solve our problem.
00:11:32.320 --> 00:11:32.480
Yeah.
00:11:32.720 --> 00:11:47.759
Um, the the common problem is what probably what they've been suffering for for the past one, three, five years, which is I need to find ways to add efficiencies to my fleet, to my supply chain, to my transportation management system or software.
00:11:48.080 --> 00:11:52.399
And um, they don't really care whether it's driven by AI or not, right?
00:11:52.480 --> 00:11:59.360
And so, like, that's where I think you get a lot of these companies that are chasing after or fighting over buzzwords around agentic this, AI native this.
00:11:59.519 --> 00:12:24.559
And uh, and really at the end of the day, what we want to be able to say is, as product marketers, again, being those true sayers, is hey, if we can cut through all the noise for you, like you have a fundamentally, you have a uh X problem, and we can solve that problem and whether we use Y and Y as AI to solve it, or maybe we actually just build a workflow, an automated workflow for you, and it's not even a gen tick, and it still solves your problem at the end of the day, that's what they care about, right?
00:12:24.639 --> 00:12:26.559
And um, I'll give a quick plug here.
00:12:26.639 --> 00:12:39.360
Like, I had a great PMM team when I was at Fleadio, and uh one of the product marketers on the team, Bree, um, she came up with like this really great slogan that we had taken to market, which was like fleet managers don't have an AI problem.
00:12:39.519 --> 00:12:41.360
They have a they have a fleet maintenance problem.
00:12:41.440 --> 00:12:54.320
And so we're here to solve a fleet maintenance problem because if we go to you and say, hey, like we think you have an AI problem, um, you know, I don't know how well that's gonna resonate to a lot of folks that probably are um not even sure what that means in in certain terms, right?
00:12:54.399 --> 00:12:56.000
So yeah, for sure.
00:12:56.080 --> 00:13:06.480
I mean, I I was at a conference recently, um, and you know, I'm sure a lot of folks are seeing this the sort of sea of sameness among the competitors in terms of messaging, right?
00:13:06.639 --> 00:13:11.120
Everybody's slapping the buzzwords on, and you know, not that that's a new thing, right?
00:13:11.200 --> 00:13:31.440
That all happened with cloud, that happened with you know lots of other things in the past, but uh it feels like especially if we're leaning too much on AI's help to help us do competitive messaging, it can really water everything down and everything starts to sound very similar.
00:13:31.600 --> 00:13:46.240
And so going back to the product marketer being not just the truth teller, I think they also need to help cut through all of that sameness.
00:13:46.879 --> 00:13:54.960
Because if you feed a bunch of inputs into AI, all the competitor stories can start to sound identical.
00:13:55.120 --> 00:13:57.039
And that's not what you want either.
00:13:57.519 --> 00:13:57.919
Exactly.
00:13:58.080 --> 00:14:14.559
Yeah, I think uh yeah, I was just thinking about this while you're while you're while you're mentioning that, Jennifer, is I wonder if someone could run a study on uh how we've probably seen fewer home pages with like the words all in one or seamless, and like a lot more home pages with the words like agentic or AI.
00:14:14.960 --> 00:14:16.320
AI color, you know.
00:14:16.559 --> 00:14:17.279
Exactly, yeah.
00:14:17.360 --> 00:14:25.919
And uh I bet you there's a strong um FOMO aspect that like uh you know, when you think about competitors doing things like that, that that makes other people follow suit.
00:14:26.240 --> 00:14:26.960
Oh yeah, yeah.
00:14:27.039 --> 00:14:32.480
Well, I mean, actually, uh it's an interesting segue into you know, one of the things we're building into Troop right now.
00:14:32.559 --> 00:14:42.000
So Troop, uh, you know, just for those who don't know, is a platform that helps you monitor and measure what is actually happening with your messaging in terms of pipeline outcomes and revenue.
00:14:42.159 --> 00:14:49.919
So we're actually finally connecting your messaging plan to your messaging execution to the outcomes that come out of all of that.
00:14:50.159 --> 00:14:54.879
One of the things we are building is the ability to say, okay, well, how does this size up?
00:14:55.039 --> 00:14:58.879
How does your messaging plan compare to your competitors?
00:14:59.120 --> 00:15:03.440
And when those competitors are present, what happens to outcomes?
00:15:03.679 --> 00:15:14.720
And I know you've played around with, you know, as many have, you know, using large language models, you know, Claude or Gemini to do your own competitive messaging analysis too.
00:15:14.879 --> 00:15:26.559
So it's fairly, you know, it's helpful to do that so you can start to understand where are the high areas of overlap and where is their white space?
00:15:26.720 --> 00:15:30.000
Where can we carve out a space for our message?
00:15:30.240 --> 00:15:30.799
Right.
00:15:31.120 --> 00:15:31.600
Yeah.
00:15:31.840 --> 00:15:32.960
Yeah, exactly.
00:15:33.120 --> 00:15:40.399
I think um, yeah, I I think, you know, like you guys have been, I've been in talks with you guys for a little while now.
00:15:40.480 --> 00:15:42.320
I think what you guys are doing at Troop is amazing.
00:15:42.480 --> 00:15:44.799
I uh I couldn't, you know, I couldn't agree more.
00:15:44.879 --> 00:15:58.159
I think that from one of the things again, um that uh RCMO at Fleadio had really reinforced, which was wonderful for the PMM team, was really simply the fact that all messaging is competitive messaging.
00:15:58.240 --> 00:16:00.559
All campaigns are competitive campaigns.
00:16:00.720 --> 00:16:09.600
Whether you you know acknowledge it or not, part of what you are trying to change the market's perception on is what other alternative solutions are out there and why they're not a good fit, right?
00:16:09.679 --> 00:16:24.399
And so, you know, you could obviously be applying that to competitor vendors, you could be complain comparing them to other modalities of ways of getting those same use cases or jobs to be done completed, whether that's like the all-too common kind of Excel spreadsheet or whatever.
00:16:24.639 --> 00:16:27.039
But I think um that's great.
00:16:27.120 --> 00:16:35.120
And I think like, you know, if as a some of a DAY DIYer uh on the PMM side, playing around with LLMs and things like that, yeah.
00:16:35.279 --> 00:16:39.759
There's a lot of ways that you can obviously like stay on top of competitive messaging changes.
00:16:39.840 --> 00:16:43.679
We spoke about some of them off the top with like website trackers and you know all the good stuff there.
00:16:43.840 --> 00:16:53.840
But I think that um the the the relevance factor I think is really like what makes the difference difficult, which is hey, okay, so um I'll use this example.
00:16:54.080 --> 00:16:56.720
Uh a competitor changes their website, right?
00:16:56.879 --> 00:17:17.759
That might actually have very little relevance to um you as a company because I don't know how, like, aside from PMMs who are probably bred this way, I don't know how many uh buyers are putting up uh split screening their screen and having you know uh one website on one side, one website on the other side, and going, okay, like which messaging like speaks to me more, like which one's more differentiated?
00:17:18.559 --> 00:17:18.960
Yeah.
00:17:19.839 --> 00:17:26.240
Where things actually start um you know coming a bit more undone in that way is when they're doing the ping-ponging of sales calls, right?
00:17:26.319 --> 00:17:38.880
So you're a little bit further in the funnel, you're starting to have those discovery calls or those demo calls, and uh whether they're asking out over overtly, and so like, hey, what's the difference between Locus and this other competitor or other vendor that we're analyzing?
00:17:39.039 --> 00:17:49.039
Or um, hey, you know, I just you know got out of a call and they won't tell you with what vendor, and they said, you know, um, one of the the workflows or things that I think we need now is X.
00:17:49.279 --> 00:17:50.240
Like, can you do X?
00:17:50.480 --> 00:17:52.799
Like that is a referential competitive statement.
00:17:52.960 --> 00:18:04.640
And I think those are the things that like become more and more and more interesting, um, especially as we're fighting over so little mind share on the internet nowadays with the way things are.
00:18:04.720 --> 00:18:11.200
Uh, the only way that they're starting to, they might be doing some initial discovery, but I think like being able to set somebody straight at the beginning is really important.
00:18:11.279 --> 00:18:18.960
And how can you do that is through getting ahead of those you know, uh referential competitive statements that are happening uh you know in cycle that you often lose lose sight of.
00:18:19.039 --> 00:18:20.880
So very good point, Kevin.
00:18:20.960 --> 00:18:37.839
And you were talking about how like, you know, as you get further into the buyer's journey and into the selling process, you know, one of the things you we you know were talking a little bit also about before we taped is the you know how Troop does the measurement, but why is that important now?
00:18:38.000 --> 00:18:43.680
And you had made the the note to me that selling is more complex, right?
00:18:43.920 --> 00:19:06.400
So measuring um what's happening, you know, you have to you can't just do it at the sort of campaign level with what used to be just really kind of, I would maybe argue superficial metrics like how many people downloaded this ebook or how many of these webinar attendees did we convert to an SDR call?
00:19:06.640 --> 00:19:14.240
Um, those are fine metrics, but that doesn't really follow the story through the whole buyer's journey, right?
00:19:14.400 --> 00:19:21.119
So, you know, what is happening on that second call, that third call, that first deep dive demo, right?
00:19:21.279 --> 00:19:22.640
What messages are working?
00:19:22.880 --> 00:19:29.279
So when you think about measuring, Kevin, like what why do you think it's important now?
00:19:29.440 --> 00:19:32.480
And what would you what do you want to measure?
00:19:32.799 --> 00:19:33.279
Yeah.
00:19:33.599 --> 00:19:37.839
So as you said from the top, uh yeah, selling is becoming more complex.
00:19:38.000 --> 00:19:44.079
I actually was speaking to a couple PMMs over the past couple of weeks, uh, slightly maybe to prepare for our conversation here.
00:19:44.240 --> 00:19:52.799
And uh one of the things that they had mentioned was that um, you know, in in in their companies where they sell to a variety of segments, right?
00:19:52.880 --> 00:19:59.680
So whether that's SMB, mid-market, or enterprise, that um an SMB deal is starting to feel like a mid-market deal.
00:19:59.839 --> 00:20:05.440
A mid-market deal is starting to feel like an enterprise deal, and they don't even want to think about what the enterprise deals are starting to feel like, right?
00:20:05.599 --> 00:20:19.839
Like um, I guess you know, one quantification that I heard was, you know, hey, you know, in a in an enterprise deal, maybe two or three years ago, we were seeing like maybe five different stakeholders that were multi-threaded through that opportunity that at some point we needed to engage in.
00:20:21.200 --> 00:20:21.440
Yeah.
00:20:21.680 --> 00:20:22.319
Yeah, yeah.
00:20:22.400 --> 00:20:25.759
And now they're like, We're we're happy if we get five in a mid-market deal.
00:20:25.839 --> 00:20:30.319
And so, like in an enterprise deal, they're seeing, you know, maybe like 10 to a dozen.
00:20:30.400 --> 00:20:38.880
And that's like, you know, some of those are gas ghosts, ghost committee stakeholders where you might not even actually get a chance to present to them in the room, but they're deliberating behind the you know, behind.
00:20:39.279 --> 00:20:39.680
Well, you're right.
00:20:39.759 --> 00:20:47.519
You've got infosec people, you have maybe AI AI ops needs to review if there's AI in the product, which probably there is.
00:20:47.680 --> 00:20:49.200
Yeah, go on.
00:20:49.680 --> 00:20:56.799
Yes, and so I think that um that's really the true messaging test nowadays, in my opinion.
00:20:56.960 --> 00:21:07.119
Is like, you know, you can I would say that the the challenge of writing marketing uh copy for or write good good messaging for a website is difficult.
00:21:07.200 --> 00:21:24.720
But to me, what's more difficult is can your messaging then stand that test when it's being hyper-analyzed by 12 different stakeholders who probably all have 12 different um KPIs that you and you might be only aware of three of those stakeholders' KPIs um around you know how they are evaluating you and and and to your competitors or or not, right?
00:21:24.799 --> 00:21:50.480
And so the types of metrics that I really look at and you know things that I've talked to my teams about in places that I've gone has been, you know, what um instead of like it's good to obviously look at messaging that's working, but it's also good to like understand um what your sellers are also saying that might be going off script that can help you, and with tools can help you do that, then that's a big part of the game because you know your messaging should be helping uh I uh solve for stall deals, right?
00:21:50.559 --> 00:21:59.680
Messaging should be helping with higher win rates or you know, um higher share of wallet when actually you multi thread properly and you are actually saying, hey, everybody's gonna, this is not a zero sum game.
00:22:00.319 --> 00:22:00.960
Everybody can win.
00:22:01.039 --> 00:22:02.240
All of the stakeholders can win.
00:22:02.319 --> 00:22:09.039
Then you're going to get a higher share wallet because everyone believes in what that, you know, what you can do through the partnership that you're going to be establishing with that buyer.
00:22:09.200 --> 00:22:20.960
And so yeah, I think I'm like a big proponent of all that type of, you know, tracking all those things and um where there's just like messaging to me is just one of those like never-ending, you're you're always learning um through messaging.
00:22:21.200 --> 00:22:21.519
It's true.
00:22:21.599 --> 00:22:21.920
Uh yeah.
00:22:22.160 --> 00:22:22.640
It's true.
00:22:22.799 --> 00:22:23.039
Yeah.
00:22:23.119 --> 00:22:28.319
And I think now we're at the point, especially with tools like Troop, you know, we can now look for real patterns.
00:22:28.480 --> 00:22:31.519
So it's not just anecdotal, it's not just one-offs, right?
00:22:31.599 --> 00:22:39.200
Like your salesperson comes to you and says, Hey, I was just, you know, we're in a competitive deal cycle with this competitor.
00:22:39.359 --> 00:22:41.119
This is how the last call went.
00:22:41.359 --> 00:22:46.400
These competitive messages didn't work, or they did work.
00:22:46.640 --> 00:23:11.200
So it's helpful, but it's like one data point, or maybe you get a handful of those data points per month or per quarter, which you know, you get bias from the salesperson, you get, you don't, you know, but when you start to get bigger data sets of that and start to see real patterns in that data, then you can really start to hone in on how do we sharpen this competitive messaging?
00:23:11.359 --> 00:23:12.880
How do we do a better job?
00:23:13.039 --> 00:23:21.200
Nobody wants their messaging to be called out for not working, but you've got to kind of face the music, right?
00:23:21.279 --> 00:23:23.599
You have to, otherwise you're not getting better.
00:23:23.759 --> 00:23:30.720
So, bottom line, let's kind of wrap some of this up a little bit.
00:23:32.400 --> 00:23:45.839
You know, the the we talked about this whole sea of sameness on the trade show floor, comparing different home pages, you know, people getting inundated with content and competitive messaging.
00:23:46.240 --> 00:23:50.079
Um analysts even have an influence in a lot of things.
00:23:50.240 --> 00:23:59.519
But how like what are techniques you like to stand out, like to make your story stand out?
00:23:59.920 --> 00:24:00.400
Yeah.
00:24:00.640 --> 00:24:01.200
Yeah.
00:24:01.519 --> 00:24:01.759
Yeah.
00:24:01.920 --> 00:24:04.640
I think message, yeah, messaging is like a recipe, right?
00:24:04.720 --> 00:24:18.480
And so I think that um you on the surface, uh you might go to someone's, you know, a homepage, pitch deck, whatever you want to, one pager brochure, whatever you want to look uh look at, and you just see, you know, you're reading the copy.
00:24:18.720 --> 00:24:26.240
And I think that like good messaging that delivers good copy has enough for like has enough slices for everybody.
00:24:26.319 --> 00:24:39.359
And I think that like what makes that effective messaging is through understanding real plain language ways that your buyers are describing their problems, not filtered through a seller, not filtered through a survey, but hearing it verbatim.
00:24:39.519 --> 00:24:49.359
And however you collect that data, whether it's through, yeah, like aggregating larger data sets or whether that's you know actually going and talking to customers yourself on the trade floor, there's a lot of ways you can do that.
00:24:49.440 --> 00:25:03.440
But at the end of the day, that to me is like what taste and messaging is about is do you actually know your customer where you could get in a room with them and maybe not fool them 100% of the time, but have a real conversation with them about their problems in the way that they want to be communicated to you.
00:25:03.920 --> 00:25:13.920
You know, that's why, you know, um unfortunately I don't count myself around among one of them, but a lot of good PMMs that I know um are sometimes born and bred in those industries and they can really speak that language.
00:25:14.079 --> 00:25:25.359
And I'm not saying all PMMs need to come from that, but it sure helps when you have one who can also coach the rest of the PMM team and say, hey, you know, like I've I've walked in in their shoes and I can teach you guys how to think that way too.
00:25:25.519 --> 00:25:28.160
Um I've seen that be hugely successful as well.
00:25:28.240 --> 00:25:28.799
So yeah.
00:25:29.200 --> 00:25:30.079
Yeah, yeah.
00:25:30.319 --> 00:25:35.200
And I think there's a big difference between copy and messaging, right?
00:25:35.359 --> 00:25:38.799
So I frankly, I'm probably not that great at copy.
00:25:38.880 --> 00:25:41.039
Um I I I neither am I.
00:25:41.359 --> 00:25:47.440
There's other people that are much better than at punching up the script than than I am.
00:25:47.680 --> 00:25:54.960
Um, but I think you have it a big part of it is just having that analytical thinking hat on.
00:25:55.039 --> 00:25:57.200
And and AI can't do that for you.
00:25:57.279 --> 00:26:10.559
You know, you can't turn to AI and help it, it can't strategically look at the big picture of your category, your competitors, what's happening in your with your buyers, and say, this is really where we need to focus.
00:26:10.720 --> 00:26:10.960
Yeah.
00:26:11.119 --> 00:26:14.559
And because, you know, but then you need the data to validate that.
00:26:14.799 --> 00:26:15.039
Yeah.
00:26:15.200 --> 00:26:16.960
So can I just say that's a very good point?
00:26:17.039 --> 00:26:29.039
Actually, I was mentoring a PMM the other day, and one of actually the points of feedback that I had given to him was um, you know, uh, I don't think that he was wholly relying on AI for everything that he was doing in terms of like producing messaging.
00:26:29.279 --> 00:26:38.960
But um, one of the things that can really come undone here, and this is again talking buyer language, is you also don't want to overexplain to a buyer the problems that they're having.
00:26:39.039 --> 00:26:59.200
And I think that's what you can actually get into a really slippery slope when using AI too much can do is AI assumes, and probably because of the data sets that it's using as well, that everyone is probably coming in with some sort of like, hey, I need to go zero to 100, or like bring them along a ride of like um explaining to them, you know, what like what the industry is or you know who what the buyer is thinking about.
00:26:59.359 --> 00:27:15.920
But you put that on, you know, you use that messaging and you, you know, you test it with a customer or a prospect or whatever, and they're gonna be like, Are you really spending the first two to three sentences of your messaging where everything is so vital and you're just talking to me about something that I knew the first six months when I was on the job, right?
00:27:16.000 --> 00:27:18.640
Like show me that you understand me, right?
00:27:18.720 --> 00:27:19.839
Show me, prove it to me.
00:27:19.920 --> 00:27:27.039
And I think that's again where um you know hearing it directly from the buyer is better than you know, hearing it directly from Claude or something like that.
00:27:27.599 --> 00:27:29.039
I agree, I agree.
00:27:29.279 --> 00:27:30.960
Um this is amazing.
00:27:31.119 --> 00:27:34.400
So, Kevin, thanks so much for lending your insight.
00:27:34.480 --> 00:27:42.160
I I love, you know, some one of the things that's gonna stick out with me about our conversation is to just not overreact to the competitors.
00:27:42.559 --> 00:27:50.799
Um and to really just kind of find that clarity on your own message and and and have the data to back it up.
00:27:51.039 --> 00:27:53.279
So I love I loved our conversation.
00:27:53.440 --> 00:27:54.160
Thank you so much.
00:27:54.400 --> 00:28:00.079
Any uh last words or thoughts uh as you embark on your role over at uh Locus?
00:28:01.279 --> 00:28:02.559
Uh no, well, thanks.
00:28:02.640 --> 00:28:04.640
Yeah, first of all, thanks for having me, Jennifer.
00:28:04.799 --> 00:28:07.599
Uh, you know, again, love all the work that you guys are doing at Troop.
00:28:07.759 --> 00:28:14.640
Uh, if anyone wants to connect with me, talk PMM, uh, talk competitive messaging, anything like that, uh, you know, folks can find me on LinkedIn.
00:28:14.880 --> 00:28:16.160
Always happy to chat.
00:28:16.319 --> 00:28:19.039
Um and uh, but yeah, thanks for the invite.
00:28:19.359 --> 00:28:19.759
All right.
00:28:19.920 --> 00:28:21.200
Thank you, Kevin.
