Positioning Leader Spotlight
Meet Scott Holden, CMO, ThoughtSpot
When Scott joined ThoughtSpot as CMO the company had no revenue, 40 employees, and three marketing people. Today this data unicorn has over $100 million in revenue and a $4.2 billion valuation. ThoughtSpot is known as the analytics company that’s as easy as your favorite app.
How did Scott lead ThoughtSpot to this position of leadership? We asked.
When did you know you wanted to get into marketing?
Marketing is my third career so far. Once I discovered it, I knew I'd found my calling. My first career was as an investment banker for JPMorgan and then I switched to operations at Walmart.com. It was at Walmart where I first noticed the marketing team seemed to have the most fun. I admired how they got to use their creativity in new ways. At the same time, I was also having fun building internal software apps with the product management team at Walmart and thought that could also be a fun new career direction. And that's when I came across what seemed like the best of both worlds—the role of product marketing. It is close to product management, but also has a big creative marketing component. I applied to business school with that job in mind and landed my first official marketing job after graduation as a Product Marketing Manager for Salesforce.
What are the biggest risks you’ve taken?
“I’ve always been a mission-driven person and never shied away from risks in pursuit of something I’m passionate about.”
I’ve made some big career changes in my life. Each of them required me to take a big step backward before I could go forward. I took large pay cuts and fell back to the bottom of the corporate ladder each time. That was hard, but I had conviction to follow my gut and pursue opportunities where my passion outweighed the short term optics and financial setbacks.
When I left Salesforce it had 20,000 employees and I was running marketing for a billion dollar product line and leading a team of 30+ marketers. Days later when I arrived at ThoughtSpot, we had 40 employees, no revenue, and only 3 people in marketing. Looking back on that decision, it was highly risky by any concrete evaluation measure. But I’ve always been a mission-driven person and never shied away from risks if they were in pursuit of something I’m passionate about.
As a trained data analyst in my first two careers, I was super passionate about ThoughtSpot's mission to make analytics more accessible to non-technical business people. After meeting the founding technical team, I felt convinced they had the talent to deliver on their highly ambitious vision. Looking back, it’s all gone according to plan, which I now realize is a bit of a miracle in the world of startups. My passion and optimism was probably concealing a little naivety. Fortunately, it's worked out and I've found a career I enjoy struggling to improve at every day.
What are the keys to positioning leadership?
For me, great positioning is about showcasing your product differentiation with message clarity, consistency, and fidelity. As marketers, our jobs are to flesh out our product's differentiation and to make the benefits of that differentiation perfectly clear to our target audience. We strive for consistency and fidelity across every touch point, whether that's across marketing channels or the people in the company.
“We strive for consistency and fidelity across every touch point, whether that’s across marketing channels or the people in the company. ”
Put another way, what leads to bad positioning is soft differentiation, muddy messaging, impatience, and weak conviction from others across your company. People often get swayed away from a new position or message before they've had time for it to truly be absorbed by the market. I see conviction as critical to message fidelity and I've found it only exists once the broader company leadership team is bought into any new positioning exercise.
What is breakthrough about ThoughtSpot’s positioning?
Scott and team are consistent in delivering their breakthrough positioning: As easy as your favorite app.
ThoughtSpot has always stood out as the easiest-to-use analytics platform on the market. However, if you were to go to any of our competitors' websites, they will tout that their products are incredibly easy-to-use too. That obviously makes the messaging challenge even harder. Our insight was that the message of "easy" varies depending on the skills of your buyer. The question you have to ask yourself is "easy for who?" Just because you can do something, doesn't mean it's easy. Going to a training class for 3 days to use software is not easy. To tease apart this nuance, we engaged the team at ZOOM to help us. They helped sharpen our positioning with the statement "analytics as easy as your favorite app." When it comes to consumer-grade ease-of-use, our competition is far less credible so we seized the opportunity.
What are the keys to successfully rolling out and scaling positioning?
“It doesn’t matter how great you think your messaging is, if you roll it out before testing it with your executive team, you’re asking for trouble.”
Focus groups and surveys play a huge role in any good positioning exercise. They take time and a strong methodology, but they are worth it. Messaging is subjective after all, so it helps to have some data to guide your thinking. The other critical component is executive buy-in. It doesn't matter how great you think your messaging is, if you roll it out before testing it with the rest of your executive team, you're asking for trouble. 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.
How do you know your positioning’s working? How do you measure it?
“I always get feedback from new sales people that their first meetings pitching our product are the best they’ve ever had. That’s a great sign that our message is working.”
Advertising performance is a great way to test positioning and messaging. So are focus groups and surveys. You should do that formally with broader brand studies, but you can also do it informally as part of every customer and partner meeting. I always look for which of my messaging slides get the "head nods" during a presentation. It's not the most scientific signal, but it's directionally very useful.
Another signal I've come to trust is whether your sales people gravitate to your positioning. Every marketer has horror stories about the difference between what they write on the website and what sellers say in their 1:1 meetings. If you find your marketing message in their decks or on their LinkedIn profiles, you know you've broken through. I always get feedback from new sales people at ThoughtSpot that their first meetings pitching our product are the best they've ever had. That is a great sign that our message is working.
What positioning leader do you admire and why?
I'm going to pick a company from outside the world of enterprise software and give a nod to one of my favorite consumer brands: Yeti.
Yeti makes coolers, insulated drinkware, and all types of outdoor gear. I love their backpack cooler for picnic hikes with my kids. Meanwhile, everyone in my family has a Yeti mug that we drink from throughout the day. They are known for their premium features, high quality design, and durability.
What I love about the brand is that coolers have been sold as a commodity for decades, yet they have figured out how to create a massive business charging a significant premium for their high quality products.
Word of mouth has played a huge role in their success, but their positioning also played a big role. I love their early tagline: "Wildly Stronger. Keep Ice Longer." It's short and clever, but it also gets to the heart of both their differentiation and the customer benefit. The durability of their coolers was their most differentiated feature and the benefit to customers is that ice (and beer) stay colder longer. It looks easy when a short line packs that much of a punch, but I'm sure they obsessed about it for a long time.