Robert Kaminski 🎯’s Post

Calendly, I love your product… BUT you don’t help me “Hit my number”. You don’t help me “Increase Revenue.” And you don’t help me “Retain Customers.” These proposed benefits are a HUGE stretch from what your product actually helps me accomplish—which is, quite simply, an easier and faster way to schedule my meetings. It’s bad enough to use 5th-order messaging on your homepage. But when you use it like this to make a claim that is so unbelievable, it insults the intelligence of your prospects. It also comes across as salesy and desperate. You have a badass product with a compelling capability! You don’t need to dress it up. ——— The takeaway for other SaaS startups working on their messaging… Highlight your most compelling capabilities and support them with a clear 1st-order benefit. Save the 5th-order domino argument for your sales meetings. #productmarketing #saas #messaging

It’s not good enough to create demand for your product. You must also create demand for the USE CASE of your product. “But wait, aren’t those the same things?” No. Because you can’t create demand for your product if your target audience isn’t even thinking about the activity your product would help them carry out (use case). Take Commsor 🦕, for example. They help sales reps ask for warm intros to prospects from their network. If sales teams aren’t “asking for warm intros”, then any message from Commsor saying: “We’re a better way of asking for warm intros” will not work. Before they can create demand for their product, they need to create demand for their use case. (ie. Convincing people they should be “asking for warm intros”. To do this, they’d use Use Case Positioning. By anchoring on an outcome of “generating more sales leads,” they can speak to the alternative activities sales teams are doing to reach this goal: cold emailing, cold calling, attending events, etc. And they’d sell the concept of the new activity: “asking for warm intros.” Once they have these people convinced they should be doing this new thing… THEN, they can create demand for the product by positioning it against the alternative ways of carrying out that use case. (manually scanning LinkedIn and writing emails) And they’d sell the product capability of automating this activity. ——— Remember, your positioning and messaging will change based on the awareness of your target audience. The mistake is thinking you can have a universal set of positioning and messaging that can be used for everyone and in every sales & marketing asset. #positioning #messaging #demandgeneration #b2b 

There is only one thing worse than trying to market a product that DOESN’T HAVE product-market fit. Trying to market a product that doesn’t have product-market fit…and the founder thinks they have product-market fit. 🤦🏻♂️

Are you a B2B founder trying to re-write your homepage with clearer positioning & messaging? This is the ONLY thing we do over here at FletchPMM — and have worked with over 175 startups. We attract customers by openly sharing our POV, frameworks, and process here on LinkedIn. And we’re going to push the idea of “Open Sourcing” our service a bit further. We are offering a 50% discount to select companies that would be willing to go through our entire process... ...live on LinkedIn. 🎙️ The first participant is Andy Mewborn for his company Distribute's homepage. If you're interested in this discount for your startup, shoot me a DM!

How everyone thinks startups market to win big B2B markets: ❌ A grandiose brand message ❌ A catchy tagline ❌ A big vision This might work for companies that are already successful… But for 99% of startups, no one knows who you are! Instead of trying to cover the whole market with a big message… 👉 Break down your market into multiple hyper-specific messages. At this level, you’ll be able to: ✅ Speak to segment-specific problems your prospects care about ✅ Highlight the unique features that best solve those problems ✅ Your messaging is more likely to resonate. Take Square, for example. They can’t just blast every industry and sector with: “Power all the ways you do business with software and hardware platforms millions of people trust.” Different segments have different problems. - The local coffee shop owner struggling to get customers to use their loyalty program. - Medical Spa manager who’s having trouble scheduling patient appointments. - The multi-location fast food restaurant that can’t figure out payroll. 👆 These all require a unique set of messaging — Which Square has developed (see image). ——— Remember, when you are a startup, most of your prospects have never heard of you. So, they certainly aren’t going to care about your brand or your vision. Instead of talking about yourself… Talk about how you’re going to solve their specific problems. #startups #b2bmarketing #saas

My 9 biggest learnings building and growing Fletch from 0 to $1M+: 1️⃣ A strong co-founder relationship lets you go 10x faster. Having a daily sparring partner to figure things out is a must. Fletch would not be nearly as successful without Anthony Pierri 🎸 as my business partner. Because of the positive pressure and support we provide one another daily, we've covered five years of learning in one year. 2️⃣ Do ONLY one thing. I used to think that the hard part of entrepreneurship was finding “the right idea”. But I now see that the real challenge is picking a single idea AND STICKING WITH IT. 3️⃣ Building an audience is the ultimate leverage. Instead of starting with a product, start by building a bridge to the market. When you have direct access to your market, building a good product or service becomes 100x easier. And when it comes time to monetize, you’ll be playing on easy mode because of all the trust and credibility you’ve created. 4️⃣ Give 10x more than you take. Too many founders look at the value equation with customers as a 50/50 trade, and they struggle to build trust and credibility (and, more importantly, they struggle to make money). When you give way more than you take, you’ll make it easy for customers to buy your product. 5️⃣ Create and share content every day. This learning is not just about getting the attention of your prospects. It’s about sharpening your thinking and the rapid feedback loop. The trick is to focus on the daily process. Put in the time, hit publish, and the quality will come. 6️⃣ Personal health leads to business health. When I do the little things in my daily routine to take care of myself (working out, eating right, journalling, etc.), the quality of my work goes through the roof. When these things start to slip, even the simple things in the business get hard. 7️⃣ Delegate AFTER you’ve figured out how to do it. You can’t expect outside experts to go from 0 to 1 in any part of your business — even if they are experts in a specific topic. You have to give them the specific playbook you know works — and let them optimize it. 8️⃣ Quick actions > perfect decision making. Whenever Anthony or I come up with an idea for something new for the business, we’ll talk about it for 15-30 minutes and give each other permission to try it. If it works, we’ll try it a few more times. If it keeps working, THEN we’ll formally bring it into the business. If we stopped to analyze to try and get to the perfect idea each time we’d never actually do anything. 9️⃣ Love the boring work The media portrays entrepreneurship as a glamorous lifestyle where founders do exciting things every day. This is a lie. 90% of building a business is doing the boring day-to-day work: creating content for marketing, taking sales calls, and servicing customers. Ignore all the shiny tools and tactics—just get the basics right and be consistent. #entrepreneurship #b2bmarketing #founders #growth 

Many founders are delusional when it comes to building marketing programs and creating demand. 🔵 They live in a dream world where... Everyone loves their product and sales & marketing is going to be easy. They can go after every market at the same time with limited resources. They just need a sexy brand and a catchy tagline to get prospects to care. They can just "turn on" a multi-channel, multi-segment marketing machine using automation tools and AI. Having venture capital means that they are minted. But this is a fantasy world. 🔴 In the real world... The best product doesn't always win. Markets are won brick by brick — earning trust with individuals through a high volume of quality content. Your reputation is forged by showing up every day and putting in the work for many years. New channels and tactics are painstakingly figured out through experimentation and time. Venture capital is just a resource to help customers and not an end result in itself. — In the end, the choice is yours founders. Which do you choose to live in? 🔴 The Real World? 🔵 Or The Dream World? #founders #marketing #b2b #startups

Should your homepage messaging strategy differ if you are venture-backed vs. bootstrapped? Anthony Pierri 🎸 and I don’t think so. At the end of the day, your homepage is one of your most important marketing assets. It should be used to communicate a clear and compelling message to your target prospects. Yet, we often see many startups take the opposite strategy: Using a homepage to deliver an unclear vision and brand message to no specific audience at all. There is no more stark example of these two strategies than Slack and @Campfire, a 37signals signals product. (see image) Both are company chat tools, but their approaches to homepage messaging couldn’t be more different. Campfire is trying to help visitors understand the product and its value. Slack is trying to… well, I’m actually not sure what they are trying to do. My best guess is that they are trying to keep an executive happy, but who knows? — Some may defend Slack's messaging and say it doesn’t matter what Slack does on their homepage. “Everyone already knows who Slack is.” But I challenge this assumption. Yes, everyone who works in tech knows who Slack is. But does everyone who works outside of SaaS know about Slack? I highly doubt it. Slack has publicly stated that its TAM is 1 billion knowledge workers (the majority of whom don’t work in tech). And they have only captured 4% of that market (40m users). For a homepage that gets almost 1 million new visits each month, I think their current homepage messaging is a wasted marketing opportunity. — *Additional note: Anyone looking for inspiration for creating a super clear homepage should look at Campfire’s entire page—it’s a master class in clear and compelling product messaging.

Ultimate decision-makers really don’t care about your startup’s product. They have businesses to run. Investors and board members to address. Employees to manage. Customers to deal with. ❌ They aren’t going to read your homepage. ❌ They aren’t going to watch your product release video. ❌ They aren’t going to read your latest blog post. Yet, many startups target decision-makers in their marketing materials. 💀 “Decision makers are the ones that sign the contract — we need to convince them our product is important.” This approach ignores how the ultimate decision maker will actually engage in buying a B2B product. Decision makers will (almost) always come into the buying process at the end of a sales cycle. They will rely on the voices of their team leaders to inform a decision, not your marketing materials. — So the best thing a startup marketing team can do is target the ideal champion for their product — and get them to understand the differentiated value. This is the person or team that is close enough to the problem to care about the product. They will be the ones to translate the product value into the specific business value for the organization.  

Offer design and value proposition design are DIFFERENT activities. 🔵 Offer design answers the question: “What are we selling?” 🟢 Value proposition design answers the question: “How will we explain what we are selling?” While these two activities are connected in some ways… ❌ They should NOT be executed at the same time. Trying to do them at the same time leads to confusion and dysfunction in GTM teams. #valueproposition #offerdesign #productmarketing