Lessons from Positioning Leaders
We reached out to 16 of our top C-level clients to get their secrets for rolling out new positioning. It’s a question we get all the time. What sets the positioning leaders apart from laggards?
The short answer is cross-functional buy-in and execution. The long answer is figuring out the role key members of the C-suite play in getting your positioning breakthrough from a Google doc to the hearts and minds of all your stakeholders.
Why and how to get the C-suite on board
The first step is getting buy-in on the positioning from the C-suite. If positioning is viewed as a marketing exercise, it’s easy to dismiss. As ThoughtSpot CMO Scott Holden put it, “Great messaging needs an echo chamber to truly take flight, and your best early echos will come from other company leaders. Make sure they are bought-in or you'll be back to the drawing board quickly.” (Learn more from Scott in our Positioning Leader Spotlight.)
Getting cross-functional buy-in works best when it’s baked in from the beginning. We’ve found these two steps are critical: (1) include all members of the leadership team at the start, listen and include their input, then (2) put all positioning concepts through A/B testing with customers and prospects. When the sales and engineering leaders see which ideas get the market jazzed, they’re quick to get on board.
Once you have alignment on the positioning from the leadership team, here’s what key members of the C-suite can do to drive positioning success.
CEO: Keeper of the story
Most successful brands have leaders in front of them evangelizing their story. The tech industry is home to some of the world’s most renowned visionaries, from Steve Jobs to Elon Musk. More than any other person or function, the CEO is the keeper and champion of the story.
Many of our charismatic CEOs take immediate ownership of the new positioning and announce it company-wide in an all-hands meeting. In this meeting, they’ll outline why the positioning matters to customers, the importance of getting the team on board and end with some version of “this is where the train is heading, get on board.”
One CEO of a $17B company delivered the positioning to its worldwide salesforce with the notice that each time he caught a salesperson off message, they owed him $25. When Gary Swart was CEO of oDesk (now Gary is a Partner at Polaris Partners), he started every meeting reminding everyone of the company’s positioning and what they stood for. Today’s CEO is a visionary thought leader, with the platform to reinforce the positioning with every talk, tweet and blog.
CMO: The consistency czar
Marketing is in the hot seat to prove ROI for messaging projects, especially when they’re new to the company or pivoting strategy. B2B tech companies typically spend 15% of total budget on marketing, so pressure is on to make sure all those investments are delivering value. Snowflake CMO Denise Persson swears by ZOOM’s data-driven process and driving consistency as her first step to success. If anyone strays from the message, the marketing team catches and resolves it. People have a tendency to want to see something fresh, shared Scott Holden, but there's plenty of opportunities to create fresh messaging in different ad channels. Don't be afraid to lean into your core message and keep that constant.
One common suggestion is to maintain a positioning guide—a single document with the approved positioning, supporting messages, proof points and storyline. Refer to this when someone is off message and make sure every employee has a copy. Stay close to the content your customers want by meeting with the field regularly and make customers the heroes in your story. Like Snowflake you could end up with thousands of customer brand ambassadors doing your marketing for you every day.
CRO: The rubber hits the road
Marketing can create the most amazing positioning and content in the world, only to find salespeople roll their eyes and put it on the proverbial shelf. They continue doing what they’ve always done, telling the same story.
The sales team is the ultimate reality check to let you know if your positioning will fly and drive growth. So, the first meeting after we sign a new client is with the top salesperson. We ask her what’s working and where she’s stuck. All too frequently, she’ll confide she’s created her own version of the sales presentation and marketing materials because marketing is out of touch or the message is too high level. The litmus test of a good positioning statement is that the sales people use it in 1:1s with customers without rolling their eyes. We often say the difference between positioning and branding is that positioning is said with a straight face. Slogans like “just do it, or “your potential our passion," would rarely be used by salespeople in conversation with prospects.
How to get the sales team on board? Involvement, involvement, involvement! We involve sales leaders throughout the process and invite the CRO to all critical checkpoint meetings to get their buy-in on every positioning statement we test. Another tip is testing positioning statements with prospects who often turn into leads.
Once the CRO and key sales leaders are bought in, the next step is rolling it out to the entire sales organization. This typically happens at the annual SKO where the focus is on making positioning training competitive and fun. Here, the CRO kicks off by delivering the new positioning baked into the sales presentation. Next, the teams break into groups that compete to win over judges for their delivery of the new positioning. Clients love to play this part up like American Idol or The Voice where the judges—usually the CEO, CMO and CRO—offer critique, compliments and prizes. Sales team members also pick up best practices and anecdotes that bring home the positioning.
Just on the heels of ZOOMing, Bill McCarthy, then Infoblox EVP, Worldwide Field Operations & CRO got the sales enablement up to speed to bake the positioning into their Global SKO. The event rallied the team with an opening inspirational video and Bill’s new story pitch (and the research that got us there). Each exec consistently told the same story and teams were given the tools to bring the story to market. Ultimately, Bill modeled the story, empowered the team and set expectations to hit the ground running.
CTO: CX is the new brand
Execs surveyed in a recent Forbes Insight report ranked the top three benefits of CX as customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and brand awareness. Step four of Forbes’ 7 Steps for Creating an Ideal CX Strategy—after defining your brand and customer base—is determining the features that deliver on your brand promise.
Many of our astute clients agree and put their roadmap to the test. Dariusz Paczuski (now at Malwarebytes) a serial ZOOMer, always makes sure to test features against positioning. With input from customers and prospects, it not only informs feature prioritization, but how to improve them and position them. After testing 10 features while at Telenav, Dariusz focused the team on the top four. For Yahoo! Search, Dariusz and team discovered two of five feature concepts were seen as unique against their biggest competitor (that starts with a “G”). And, for Yahoo! Mail, four of six features came to the top. With more than 20% of revenues spent on software R&D, testing features helps focus resources on a customer experience that’s strategic and on brand.
CPO: Power the people
Increasingly, the head People person is also a Positioning person! HR leaders love getting involved in positioning projects because they view it as essential to their success in focusing an organization’s human capital on what matters. Today’s CPO is a visionary leader whose role is to maximize the talent to fuel growth.
The first step is figuring out a fun way to make sure every employee is up to speed on the positioning. Cultivate your tribe with wearables and other give-aways that bring home who you are as a company and what makes you different. One client gave out stopwatches to bring home their “time to market” point. CPOs also collaborate with functional leads to develop examples of how team members can translate positioning into action for their function. Clearly demonstrate how each employee can live and breathe it by building your story into recruiting efforts, onboarding materials, employee training and performance management.
Creative CPO’s translate the positioning into all the processes that involve people. For example, if your key positioning concept is simplicity, the CPO helps actively build simplicity into all processes and interactions. Our client FloQast’s positioning uniqueness is “created by accountants for accountants...” so FloQast ensures people with accounting backgrounds are represented in every function of the company.
As CEO, Gary Swart would hold people accountable to know the positioning, and make it fun to know it. At his prior company, new hires would get up in front of the entire company and say, “This is who we are. This is what we do. This is why we’re different.” Take it a step further and ask people how they put the positioning into practice every day.
CFO: Put your message where your money is
Clients often think they need a separate message for investors and customers, but we’ve found that’s not the case. The best way to get investors’ attention is to have your customers buy your product or service. If you can back up your positioning with customer and revenue growth, it gives you that much more credibility.
Client Snowflake has proven that keeping your message simple and consistent while telling the same story to customers, the Board and Wall Street pays off (in their case in the form of the largest software IPO ever). Clients Databricks and ThoughtSpot, who’ve been consistent with customers and investors over the years, have been valued in the billions. We can’t wait to see what records they break!
How does your C-suite play a role in positioning leadership?
Think back to all the times you’ve been part of a team on a mission to change the world, or win a national championship. Getting the whole team on board, working together, supporting each other to achieve the same goal is an amazing feeling. In the tech world, it starts with knowing the hill you’re going to conquer and getting the whole team marching up that mountain. It starts with the C-Suite playing on the same team. There’s nothing more powerful than when marketing markets what sales sells and engineering builds.