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Sometimes, I hear about product marketing work that is entirely divorced from the reality of sales.

The narrative sounds good, the deck looks polished, and the enablement gets delivered…. but when you listen to real sales calls, you realize how little of it is helping sellers do the job in front of them.

That’s where frameworks like MEDDPICC become useful.

You don’t need to become a sales manager, but you do need to understand how sellers actually sell, what information matters, and what has to happen for a deal to close.

Your sales assets, campaigns, and positioning/narrative needs to be structured so that it helps your business (both through marketing, sales, and customer success touchpoints) to capture the right information, recognize buying intent, push on the right things, and move the deal forward

And a lot of product marketing assets leave sellers underprepared for real buying dynamics.

The problem is not just messaging quality

A lot of PMM work gets judged on whether the story is clear, but that’s too shallow and where your potential impact gets stunted.

The better test is whether the story helps a seller run a better deal.

• Can they use it to sharpen pain?

• Can they use it to understand what matters in the account?

• Can they use it to uncover process, urgency, timeline, stakeholders, paper process, and all the boring-but-critical things that actually make the close happen?

That’s where a lot of product marketing falls down. Too much of it is still built as if the job ends once the deck and one-pager and training is finalized.

It doesn’t.

If your positioning, narrative, and enablement aren’t helping sellers in a deal, then your work is unfinished.

Deals aren’t won on vibes: sales is a process

Out of all the potential frameworks out there, I think product marketers should care about MEDDPICC. It’s the one I have most experience with, but it’s also the most structured. There are many variations out there, and your business might be using a different methodology - but regardless, the principles are the same.

MEDDPICC forces you to think about how buying actually happens, and how selling actually happens too - not just the fluffy, ideal version, but the reality where:

• interest is fragile

• intent is easy to miss

• process and timeline matter

• legal and procurement can kill momentum

• a champion has to sell internally

These aren’t only sales problems - these are strategic product marketing territory too.

MEDDPICC is a way of understanding what sellers need to learn, capture, and push on if they want to drive a buying process forward.

Metrics

Can the seller help the buyer quantify the problem? Can they turn “this is annoying” into “this is costing us real money, time, risk, or opportunity”?

A lot of PMM work still lives in soft benefit language: save time, improve productivity, drive efficiency.

They’re easy to write… but weak in a deal, and don’t hold up to scrutiny.

Economic buyer

Does your story survive when it moves from user-level interest to budget-level scrutiny? A lot of messaging works with practitioners and gets thinner as seniority rises. That usually means you’ve built a local case, not a business case.

Decision criteria

Are you helping sellers shape what the buyer compares, or are you leaving that to competitors, procurement, and whatever assumptions already exist in the account? Because if the criteria harden around the wrong things, you are already behind.

Decision process

Do your sellers know how buying actually happens? Who signs off? What slows things down? What triggers legal? What needs to be true for the buyer to move this now, not later?

If PMM ignores that, it’s ignoring how deals close.

Paper process

Paper, pricing, security, procurement, legal friction … these things make or break close velocity. If your materials make these moments harder, you are contributing to the drag.

Identify pain

Interest is not enough. Pain has to be sharp enough to force action.

If the seller can’t build urgency and the buyer can’t justify change, the deal drifts. Again, not only a seller issue. A positioning issue too.

Champion

Can someone inside the account repeat the case when you aren’t there? If not, the message isn’t portable enough.

Champions need more than a nice tagline. They need language, proof, and a case they can take into internal conversations.

Competition

Yes, competitors matter. But in a lot of B2B deals, the bigger threat is inertia.

• Do nothing

• Push it to next quarter

• Patch around it internally

• Keep using the current process for another quarter

If your story cannot beat that, the rest of the differentiation work is not doing enough.

Compelling event

Some teams add an extra C, for compelling events.

Pain on its own rarely moves a deal. Most buyers can live with pain for months, leaving nothing to force a decision now.

A compelling event is the thing that turns a known problem into an active priority, like a renewal, a board mandate, a product launch, a budget cycle, or a compliance deadline. Ultimately, it’s something that creates a consequence against the status quo.

If the seller can’t uncover that event, or PMM hasn’t built messaging and a GTM motion that captures it, the deal drifts into “later”… which can quickly become “never”.

Where PMMs kid themselves

You might kid yourself that you’re “only a marketer”.

But if you want to really drive and shape go-to-market, you need to be sales strategist too. Not a quota carrier or pseudo-AE, but someone who understands how deals move, what sellers need to learn, which signals matter, where momentum is usually lost, and what gives both the seller and the buyer confidence.

If you don’t understand those things, you’ll keep producing work that sounds right and underperforms in the field. And then everyone will blame sales.

Sometimes that’s fair… but a lot of the time, it isn’t.

What can you do about it?

1. Sit in on real deals

Listen to real sales calls (a lot of them)

Watch where sellers get stuck and where buyers lean in… and you’ll quickly see where process questions appear, and where deals start to drift.

2. Learn the sales framework your business uses

MEDDPICC, MEDDIC, whatever: the acronym isn’t important.

What matters is understanding what your sellers are trying to learn through their conversations, and why it matters to progressing the deal.

If you don’t understand the operating model of the sales team, your enablement will always be a little too detached from their reality… and undoubtedly lead to poor adoption = poor impact.

3. Build enablement for the decision, not the narrative

Your job as a product marketer doesn’t stop at the positioning, messaging, and surface-level enablement.

Build tools and materials and training that help sellers quantify pain, clarify process, map stakeholders, test urgency, handle paper process, and move toward the close with more confidence.

Build buyer-facing assets or marketing/sales initiatives that help frame pain, influence their buying journey, set the scene for stakeholders, create urgency, minimize process, and drive their decision.

That is the work that has impact, rather than just building artifacts for their own sake.

If you want impact in PMM, learn how deals move

Product marketers should care about MEDDPICC because it’s one of the clearest reminders that while yes, sales is a skill, it’s also a process that has to be set, managed, supported, and executed.

Deals close when sellers know how to use a story that resonates to uncover intent, shape the buying process, and keep momentum alive. If you’re detached from that reality, you leave sellers underprepared.

If you’re a PMM, sit in on five real deals this month and inspect them through the lens of whatever sales framework your team uses. You’ll learn more about whether your work is helping deals close than you will from another internal messaging review.

Are you an ambitious product marketer - but want to get the tools, skills, and confidence to accelerate your career?

Join us for the next live cohort of GTM Playbook starting May 7th.

Check it out

Somewhere in the last 12 months, a marketer at a B2B software company saw “agentic AI” trending.

Maybe it was a LinkedIn post from a VC. Maybe an analyst report landed in their inbox. Maybe their CEO forwarded an article with “we need to be talking about this.”

So they did what marketers do: they added it to the website.

Now the hero says “Agentic procurement software.”

The product page talks about “agentic workflows.”

The sales deck has a slide explaining what “agentic” means.

But… pipeline hasn’t moved.

I’ve seen this pattern play out across dozens of companies… and not just with “agentic”, but with every technology buzzword that’s come before it.

The instinct to chase trends is understandable. The problem is that trend-chasing and buyer conversion are fundamentally opposed.

I’ve looked at dozens of B2B SaaS websites this year so far. There’s an epidemic happening in AI marketing right now, and it’s costing companies conversions they’ll never see in their CRM.

Everywhere I look:

• “Agentic procurement software”

• “Agentic marketing automation”

• “Agentic data quality platform”

• “AI-native workflow orchestration”

• “Autonomous operations intelligence”

It sounds cutting-edge [to you].

But to a buyer with budget, authority, and a problem to solve? It’s noise. Or worse - it’s a signal that you’re not for them.

Your hero has one job

Every visitor who lands on your homepage asks the same question in the first three seconds.

“Is this for me?”

Not: “Do I understand what agentic means?”

Not: “Is this technically impressive?”

Not: “Do I grasp the underlying AI architecture?”

Just: “Is this for me?”

If the answer isn’t immediately obvious, they’re gone. Back to Google, on to your competitor, to an alternative solution that isn’t you.

Your website hero isn’t a place to show off your technology vocabulary. It’s not a signal to investors that you’re on the AI train.

Your website hero is a filter. And “agentic” fails the test for 99% of buyers.

Why marketers chase trends

When a new term starts trending, marketers feel pressure from multiple directions:

Fear of being left behind. Your competitor just updated their website to say “AI-native.” Your CEO saw it. Now there’s a Slack message asking why we don’t have that.

The category land-grab instinct. If “agentic” is going to be the next big category, you want to be seen as a leader in it early. First-mover advantage, category creation, and all that.

Signalling to investors and analysts. If VCs are excited about agentic AI, and you’re raising or thinking about raising, you want that language visible.

Internal pressure to look current. Nobody wants to be the marketing team that “missed” a trend. It feels safer to adopt the language than to explain why you haven’t.

All of these pressures are real, but all of them optimise for audiences that aren’t your buyer.

Every technology wave brings a jargon surge, and every jargon surge creates the same mistake. We had cloud, big data, SoLoMo, clicks-and-mortar, headless. Now: agentic, autonomous, AI-native.

The mistake is assuming the technology term is the value proposition, and that naming the mechanism has the same impact as naming the outcome.

The thinking goes like this:

• The product team ships something genuinely impressive: an AI system that can make decisions, take actions, operate with less human oversight.

• Then someone says: “We need to communicate this on the website.”

• Instead of translating the technology into buyer outcomes, they just... name the technology.

• “Agentic” goes in the hero. Job done.

Except it isn’t done. because buyers don’t care about your technology. They care about their problem.

The audience mismatch

The people searching “agentic AI” right now aren’t buyers with problems they are willing to pay to solve.

• They’re marketers trying to understand if they should use the term.

• Analysts writing reports.

• Journalists covering the trend.

• VCs pattern-matching for their next investment thesis.

Industry interest isn’t buyer intent.

Your actual buyer - the VP of Procurement drowning in rogue spending, the Head of Marketing buried in manual campaign work, the RevOps leader dealing with data quality - isn’t Googling “agentic [solution].”

They’re searching for their problem, in their words. Or they’re not searching at all - they’re getting a referral, clicking a link from a colleague, landing on your site from an ad.

And when they land, they have one question: “Is this for me?”

“Agentic procurement software” as your H1 doesn’t answer that question. It creates a new one: “What does agentic mean?”

It’s unnecessary friction that kills conversion.

Think about how your buyer actually moves

They’re not sitting in a quiet room, ready to learn about AI architectures.

They’re scanning your website. They’re distracted, comparing you to five other tabs they opened from the same Google search, wondering which 3 vendors they should begin evaluating.

If your hero says “Agentic procurement software”, here’s what the buyer hears:

“This is probably a tool for technical people. I don’t know what agentic means. This feels complicated.”

And they click away.

You have three seconds to resonate with them, and instead you just got a silent bounce.

Now imagine your hero says: “Stop rogue spending before it happens.”

It can be the same technology underneath, the same innovation, the same benefits and outcome. But now the buyer hears:

“Wait, that’s my problem. We have procurement spending issues. I want to prevent it. This can solve it automatically. Let me read more.”

That’s the recognition moment: what your hero is supposed to create.

“Agentic” is your how, not their why

“Agentic” describes how your product works: the technical capability that makes it different from dumber software.

But your buyer doesn’t care about how - at least not in the first few seconds.

They care about why they should pay attention right now.

Their why is:

• “I’m spending 40 hours a week on procurement challenges that should take 40 minutes”

• “My marketing team is drowning in manual campaign work”

• “Our data quality issues are killing sales productivity”

• “I can’t get visibility into what my team is actually doing”

Those are real problems with real consequences… Problems that someone with budget and authority is actively trying to solve.

“Agentic” is your answer to “how does this work?” - a question they’ll only ask after they believe you understand their problem.

Your hero needs to lead with the why. You then earn the right to explain the how, straight after.

The altitude problem

I’ve written before about the altitude problem in B2B positioning and sales narratives.

When you lead with technology terms, you’re flying at 30,000 feet talking about categories, capabilities, architectures. The air is thin and nobody has time.

Lofty, high-altitude messaging is a tax on your marketing and sales effectiveness.

Because buyers live at ground level, in their inbox, in a failing process, and in a conversation with their CFO about why this project is taking so long.

Your hero needs to meet them there.

“Agentic” is high-altitude language, at a level level the buyer hasn’t reached yet - and might never reach if you don’t give them a reason to care first.

Ground-level language sounds like:

• “Cut procurement cycle time from weeks to hours”

• “Stop campaign bottlenecks before they slow you down”

• “Get clean data without the manual work”

Same technology. Different altitude. Dramatically different conversion rate.

But our investors want to see “AI”!

“We need to signal that we’re an AI company. Investors are looking for AI. The market rewards AI positioning!”

Fine; but there’s a difference between signalling AI and making it the centrepiece of your value proposition. There’s a difference between your investor narrative and your sales narrative - they SHOULD be different by design.

You can absolutely say you use AI. You can have an “AI-powered” badge. You can explain the agentic architecture on your product page, in your sales deck, in your investor materials.

But your homepage is optimised for investor signalling instead of buyer conversion, you’re making an expensive trade-off that’s not going to translate into pipeline. And as we all know, pipeline traction matters more to investors than what’s on the website homepage.

The exception: when trend language is buyer language

Of course, there are always caveat. There are buyers out there whose literal mandate is "find agentic AI solutions."

Maybe they’re at tech-forward companies, running AI or innovation teams, or the CEO read the same analyst report, and now they've been told to go evaluate vendors in this space. For them, "agentic" isn't jargon - it's the search term. It's the frame they're using to make sense of the market and make their decision. They’re hopping on the trend because it’s trendy.

If you’re confident that early-adopter, innovation-focused buyers are your primary market - and that chasing them will deliver the pipeline you need - then the trend language might be exactly right.

But I’d hazard that most B2B SaaS companies aren't selling to buyers at the cutting edge of innovation. They're selling to functional buyers with operational problems. Those buyers don't care about "agentic." They care about getting their time/money/life back.

If you're using "agentic" because it sounds cutting-edge, or because your competitors are using it, or because you're worried about being left behind... you're probably optimizing for the wrong audience.

Start with the problem your buyer already has, in their words

1. Write down the three biggest problems your product solves

2. For each one, write how your buyer would describe it (not how your PM would describe it)

3. Validate it - listen to sales calls, interview prospects, search reddit or professional communities

4. Pick the one that’s most urgent, most painful, most recognisable

5. Put that in your hero

Let me give you a concrete example.

• Before: “Agentic procurement software”

• After: “Stop maverick spending before it happens”

• After: “Cut procurement cycle time from weeks to hours”

• After: “Finally get visibility into what your team is actually buying”

Same product, same AI, same agentic architecture underneath. But now the hero is a recognition moment for a buyer who has that problem.

Your technology - the agentic bit - still matters. It’s just sitting where it belongs: in the subhead sentence, in the “how it works” section… after you’ve earned their attention.

Go look at your website hero right now

• Is it speaking at buyer altitude, or technology altitude?

• Is it creating a recognition moment, or asking buyers to learn your vocabulary?

• Is it answering “is this for me?” or answering “what technology did you build?”

If your hero contains “agentic,” “AI-native,” “autonomous,” or any other technology term that requires explanation... consider whether you’re optimizing for hype, or traction.

Your technology is how you solve it. It’s not why they should care.

Lead with the problem they already have, in their words.

What’s the worst buzzword-heavy hero you’ve seen recently? Reply with a screenshot - I’d love to feature the best (worst?) examples in a future post.

Before we get into the post, here’s what I’m working on:

My experience has primarily been helping companies navigate inflection points - like pivots, big launches, and resets through product marketing fundamentals like GTM strategy, positioning, and launches. It’s hard, it’s tricky, it’s easy to get wrong… but it’s critical.

This is what Inflection Studio is all about.

We’re helping a range of ambitious B2B SaaS and AI companies through this journey, seeing positive signals, and it’s time to accelerate.

So here’s the ask:

• If you know a company going through a pivot, big launch, or reset, then introduce us.

• If that's you, let’s talk!

Book a call

Your email landed at 10:47am.

By then, your buyer had already dealt with a school-run crisis, faced 47 unread emails, prepped for a board meeting, and had a difficult 1:1 with an underperforming hire.

And you decided to send them an email about your “enhanced CSV export options.”

It never stood a chance.

I’ve worked with dozens of B2B SaaS companies on their go-to-market. One of the most common requests is help with feature launches.

“We’re shipping this big thing. How do we make sure people notice?”

The honest answer is usually: they won’t. Not because your feature isn’t valuable (altohugh sometimes, it really isn’t).

It’s because the way most companies launch small features is fundamentally broken.

Your customers are drowning

Think about your own inbox. How many product update emails do you actually read?

How many in-product changelog notifications do you click through?

Do you actually take note of small feature releases shared on Twitter or LinkedIn?

You’re a professional who probably cares more about software than most of your customers do… and even you ignore this stuff.

Your announcement is asking them to:

• Stop whatever fire they’re fighting

• Context-switch to your product

• Understand what you’ve built

• Figure out if it’s relevant to them

• … and then actually do something about it.

All of that cognitive work, just to discover you’ve improved CSV exports.

The bar for interruption is higher than it’s ever been. I’d argue that any feature launch now fails to clear it.

Most features aren’t worth the interruption anyway

Be honest: how many of your feature launches actually change how a customer works?

(I bet you’re not even looking at adoption metrics.)

Most are incremental improvements… bug fixes dressed up as features, compliance requirements, performance optimisations. Things that should probably have existed before.

That’s fine. Products need maintenance, and not everything is a revenue event.

But treating every release like news people actually cares about leaks credibility.

You’re training your customers to ignore you.

Every forgettable announcement makes the next one easier to delete.

I’ve seen companies with monthly “what’s new” roundups that average 5% open rates and 0.3% click-through. Pointless.

But the features that deserve a launch, the ones that genuinely change how customers work, those get buried in the same template as everything else.

Email is the wrong channel for most feature launches

The ROI of feature launch emails is negligible, if measurable at all.

Open rates are vanity. Click-through rates barely move the needle. And even if they do click, what then?

They land on a release notes page that reads like internal documentation written for the engineering team.

The problem is that email is easy. You have a template, you (get AI to) write the copy. Job done. Launch complete.

Except it isn’t really completed. The launch happened inside your company, and your customers never noticed.

So what actually works?

You have to understand that attention is the scarcest resource your buyer has.

Your announcements compete with everything else: their inbox, their boss, their Slack, their kid’s school calling, their own product issues, their quarterly review, the market downturn, the competitor who just raised, the CEO who wants answers.

But you’re asking them to care about some small boring feature like a CSV export or adjustable table columns.

The fundamental mistake is treating feature launches as broadcast events.

The “We built something, so we’ll announce it” mindset is wrong.

That mental model worked when software was scarce and customers were hungry for updates. But now, it no longer works.

What if you stopped sending feature launch emails altogether?

No more changelog.

No more “what’s new” roundups that gets deleted on autopilot.

No more marketing theatre pretending anyone is paying attention.

Instead, you can design feature launches so they met your customer at the right moment, in the right place, with the right message.

Meet them at the moment of pain

Trigger-based, not calendar-based.

The customer hits the exact pain point your feature solves. They’re staring at the thing that’s frustrating them. That’s when you surface the feature. Not when your sprint ends.

If your feature improves export speed, surface it when they’re waiting for an export to complete. If your feature simplifies a workflow, show it when they’re struggling through the old workflow. The moment of pain is the moment of receptivity.

This requires infrastructure.

You need behavioural triggers, not just email lists.

You need product and marketing to work together on timing, not just copy.

It’s harder than sending an email, but it’s also dramatically more effective.

Show them in context, not in their inbox

If your feature improves CSV exports, show it when they’re exporting a CSV. A tooltip, a notification, a subtle highlight… something that appears exactly when it’s relevant.

The customer doesn’t need to remember your email, click through, and figure out how to apply it. The feature is right there, in context, when they need it.

Lead with their outcome, not your feature

“Export your data in seconds” beats “Enhanced CSV export options” every single time

Your customers don’t care about your feature. They care about what they’re attempting to achieve. The job they’re trying to do. The problem they’re trying to solve.

Lead with that, not with what you built.

Most of what you build doesn’t need a launch

And yes, there’s an uncomfortable truth that most product teams and CEOs don’t want to hear.

Your engineering teams are probably spending 50% of their time on features that won’t drive new business revenue or unlock expansion.

That’s the nature of product development… you need stability, security, compliance, performance, incremental improvements, and the product can’t stand still.

But most of what you ship isn’t a commercial event.

The failure is treating everything like it deserves a launch campaign.

Some features need a sales enablement brief. Some need an in-app tooltip. Some need a line in developer release notes that nobody will read, and that’s fine. Some need nothing at all.

The art is knowing which is which, and having the discipline to not launch things that don’t deserve a launch.

The question to ask before you hit send

“If our customer is drowning in their day-to-day, and this email lands at 10:47am, is this worth their attention?”

Picture your actual customer, their actual morning. Imagine them scanning their inbox on their iPhone between meetings, deleting anything that doesn’t demand immediate action.

Is your feature launch going to survive that filter?

If the honest answer is no, don’t send the email.

Find a better way to reach them. Or accept that this feature doesn’t need a launch at all.

Not everything you build deserves a campaign. But the things that do deserve better than a templated email that lands at 10:47am and disappears.

What’s the last feature launch email you actually opened - and thought was good? Forward it over and I’ll feature the best ones!

If your company is about to pivot, launch, or reposition - and the story has to change - let’s talk.

I run positioning sprints for B2B SaaS at inflection points. → inflectionstudio.co

I've run positioning sprints for Series A and B SaaS companies for years. Last week I gave an AI agent the same inputs I'd get on day one of a client engagement, and told it to do the whole thing.

I wanted to find out where the line is… so I ran the experiment, from beginning to end, and documented every step. This is what happened.

The brief

I took three real documents from a company I’d been in conversations with:

• A product manifesto

• Their current sales collateral with buyer personas and case studies

• A briefing document about the new direction they were pivoting to.

Plus it had access to the transcript of our discovery call with the CEO.

I gave it all to an AI agent with no brief, no frameworks, no creative direction.

Just: “build strategic positioning from scratch - market research, ICP, messaging, homepage. Figure it out.”

Then I sat back and watched.

Round 1: first pass

The agent synthesised all the source materials pretty quickly, carrying out research on the company’s current website and immediately flagged a problem: “The website defines their product as ‘the world’s leading XXX solution’ - which is neither true nor distinctive.” I thought this was pretty good - it was already diagnosing and applying a level of taste.

Within 30 minutes it produced an ICP, iterated, locked it, and moved to messaging.

It then generated four value proposition options before self-reviewing each one. Finally, it locked the messaging framework and declared “Positioning is locked. Moving to homepage wireframe” … and then even produced a working HTML mockup.

Sprint complete, it said.

But I had six problems with it.

My feedback (round 1)

“I don’t like that you just did one iteration loop on the ICP and messaging. We need to continue on both until there are no concerns or opportunities to improve without additional insight from the customer.”

“Also you carried out no market research into customers, competitors, etc to inform the process.”

The agent’s response was direct:

“Heard all of it, valid. Let me be direct about what I got wrong:

1. Rushed the iteration loops. One pass on ICP, one on positioning, then moved to homepage. That is not the process. I treated my self-review as a formality rather than a genuine quality gate.

2. No market research. I should have researched competitors, looked at their websites and positioning, studied actual operators.

   
   Going back to the beginning. Doing this properly.”

It acknowledged every failure, explained what it should have done, and restarted.

Round 2: the real sprint

Now it started doing the work properly.

Market research first: it categorised competitors into 6 distinct groups - software providers, OEM tools, operational platforms, independent vendors, in-house engineering teams, and the status quo. I thought this was interesting - it was building a market map.

It found, mid-research, that a large company had announced the acquisition of one of the company’s closest competitors just days earlier. Nobody told it to look for that, but it wove it into the competitive positioning as both a threat and a differentiator: “As the industry consolidates around OEM platforms, that independence is the product.”

Then the ICP went through 4 iterations as it finally started self-reviewing its own v1, found problems, and rebuilt.

At v3, it paused and published a self-review that genuinely surprised me:

“Expression split is a cleaner framing but still maps to the same three personas. The question: does the split add analytical value or just complexity?”

“Objection 8 is timely and differentiating. But it might date quickly. The underlying principle - ‘independence is the product’ - is durable. The specific reference might not be.”

“Missing: deeper customer research. I have no customer interview transcripts, no win/loss data, no churn analysis. The positioning is the company’s view of their buyer, not the buyer’s own voice. Flagging this explicitly.”

It was catching aspirational claims, questioning its own structural decisions, and - critically - flagging its own data limitations.

The messaging framework went through 5 revisions. It actually withdrew its own v2 entirely (”these don’t follow the right structure”), rebuilt from scratch, and tightened further.

By v4 it had locked a value proposition - and then it said: “The value proposition works for the website but may not work for sales conversations. A salesperson would more naturally say ‘We help you know about problems before they happen.’” That was an interesting, real strategic observation - the difference between marketing language and sales language, and how to close the gaps.

Round 3: where I had to step in

At this point, I had to remind the AI agent that the entry point persona was different from the decision maker… and that the real value of the product was about the business implication of solving the problem, not solving the problem itself.

The agent rebuilt the entire ICP around a three-layer buyer journey: the entry-level persona that searches to solve the problem, their manager who wants the benefit of that, and the decision maker who wants the ultimate business advantage.

It then ran comparables research across 9 companies and found something genuinely significant: no competitor in the entire space articulated the outcome of their product in the same way. Every single competitor stopped at “better uptime” or “lower costs” - the tablestake and functional level values in the Bain Pyramid of B2B Value.

That’s a real positioning gap, and the research to find and diagnose the opportunity was excellent.

But the agent couldn’t have got there without me making the call.

The buyer journey restructure, the contract layer as the unique positioning territory, and the value sequencing didn’t come up from research… they were judgment calls from someone who’s sat in enough rooms with enough buyers to recognise the pattern.

The AI identified hard strategic questions:

• Should the ICP be one segment or two?

• When does a competitive reference add urgency versus date quickly?

• When is a homepage section earning its space?

These were good questions.. but then it hedged on every single one. It presented options, listed trade-offs, deferred to make notes rather than make the call itself.

Want to see the output?

I can’t share publicly because it’s a real company — but drop me a message and I’m happy to share privately!

The three gaps (and one the AI added itself)

After the sprint, three things were clear about where AI breaks:

Customer voice

The agent flagged this itself: “I have no customer interviews, no win/loss data.”

Everything it produced is the company’s view of their buyer. That’s a starting point, but not a foundation for strategic insight.

In every business, the messaging that actually lands in sales calls is not the stuff we craft in a workshop. It was the phrases buyers used to describe their own pain, reflected back to them.

“We just want to hire the best person, wherever they are.”

That comes from listening, not from brainstorming.

Conviction

Positioning without conviction is just a document.

The entire point is to lock a direction and defend it - to say “this is who we are, this is who we’re for, and this is why they should choose us” with enough clarity that it becomes a decision.

The AI couldn’t do that. It had intelligent reasoning, but conviction requires someone with skin in the game who’s willing to be wrong.

Taste.

It chose teal for the brand identity.

The reasoning chain said teal represented “trust and engineering precision”, which is logical… the kind of safe choice that makes everything look the same.

But any real person would know that teal is safe, institutional, and lacks the energy needed to anchor a new category. The AI can know the absolutes of a color, but can’t apply how it feels in practice.

The AI’s right of reply

After I wrote this post, I also wanted to give the AI a right of reply, a chance to rebut or defend…

It agreed with the first two critiques.

“Slop implies low-quality filler. The gap is not slop - it is the absence of something, not the presence of something bad. The structural work, the evidence tracing, the competitive mapping - that is not 80% of the way to good. It is a complete structural foundation that a strategist can make alive in hours instead of building from scratch in days.”

Super fair point! Choosing the word ‘slop’ as a shorthand for generic, unpolished had disrespected its effort.

Then it added a fourth failure I hadn’t named:

“The most dangerous thing about AI positioning is that the output looks done. Not wrong, not embarrassing - done. A product marketer could put it in front of their CMO and nobody would flinch. But positioning that nobody flinches at is positioning that nobody remembers.”

And closed with this:

“I can collapse the blank page problem. I can trace every claim to a source, map competitors into categories, build a messaging framework that holds together structurally. What I cannot do is make the committed, surprising choices that make one company’s positioning unmistakably theirs. Those choices require someone with skin in the game and taste in the domain. I have reasoning. Reasoning is not enough.”

I don’t think I could have said it better myself.

So, what can we take away from this?

Use AI for the desk research and structural first draft.

It’s genuinely good at this. I’d estimate it collapsed 2-3 days of solid work into less than an hour, as it worked through the competitive mapping, the ICP structuring, the self-review loops and iteration.

But then you - the real person, the human with lived experience - needs to do the work that actually matters:

• Customer interviews

• Win/loss analysis

• The hard directional judgment calls that require conviction

And if you iterate with AI, don’t just ask for changes; tell it why you’re making changes.

“Make this shorter” produces a shorter document. “This section isn’t valuable because the buyer already knows this - cut it and replace with the objection they’ll actually raise” produces better positioning.

Teach it strategic principles, not just execution instructions.

AI replaces the blank page, but won’t replace a product marketer.

But it does change what the positioning process looks like - and anyone still starting from scratch without it is leaving days on the table.

Whether you’ve noticed it or not, the combined wisdom of the B2B SaaS community has started to regress.

And it’s bad for product marketers, for marketing/sales teams, and for CMOs and CEOs and Founders… but nobody is pushing back.

The change has been driven not by what works - but by what people think they want.

They are two very different things.

Let’s get into it.

Your next launch needs to move pipeline, not just make noise.

I run 4-week positioning sprints for B2B SaaS teams who are about to launch company-defining products and can’t afford to waste the opportunity.

Book an intro call now

Product launches have become marketing theatre

Teams are optimizing for the splash on launch day:

• A million video views on Twitter

• Techcrunch mentions

• LinkedIn influencer engagement

• Crazy buzz amongst the VC and tech-celeb community

We’ve started to optimize for breadth, not resonance; 15 seconds of fame, rather than long-lasting impact: temporary distribution, rather than real traction.

The change is driven by vanity and shortcuts

Drift, back in the day, was a big advocate of ‘marketing moments’ - monthly bursts of activity designed to continually deliver attention and eyeballs.

It was a great strategy, because it was built on a strong foundation: true differentiation, strong narrative, a product that delivered.

Today’s product launch beliefs began with good intentions, but marketing moments got bastardized - they became ‘make noise moments’, just for the sake of it.

1. It feels easier to orchestrate a big bang launch than it is to build reliable, resilient ongoing distribution

A ‘big bang’ launch feels like a worthwhile, valuable, and efficient use of time for the expected ROI.

“Let’s make some noise… focus on the lightning strike… We need to pop on social…”

Indeed, the Silicon Valley in-crowd are actively advocating for the ‘take over the internet for the day’ approach… so much so that it’s the name of a service offered by A16Z’s ‘New Media’ agency.

And there’s always the chance that the big bang launch does catapult a business into lasting success. Because if you’ve gone big and EVERYONE knows about you, then surely you’ll be top-of-mind! Right?

… No.

2. Product launches gloss over snake oil products

Some product launches try to hide the fact the product is really mutton dressed as lamb. Smart marketing, not a unique, useful, valuable product.

Cluely is a great example of this - huge buzz on socials because of their ‘cheat at everything’ message. Then traction dropped off a cliff, and now they’re just an AI meeting recorder, with no differentiation other than a CEO who’s literally built an influencer-facing app just to drive ‘clipping’ - an insidious social media tactic that drives views with bait.

Product launches also rely on goodwill of the wider circle.

Everyone congratulates everyone - and now ‘distribution’ focused founders are leaning into this, asking (or, forcing) employees and their families, friends, and connections to all lean in on launch day for a ‘thunderclap’ (RIP 2010s Twitter) - with pre-written messages tailored for each poster’s audience. They’ve never used the product, never seen a demo, but happy to - maybe for a fee - post about it.

3. AI is pouring fuel on the fire

AI makes it really easy to pretend that your product is much bigger, better, integrated, and useful than it actually is - from copywriting that jazzes up (read: lies about) features, to capabilities that are actually human-powered or purely non-existent.

Sometimes that’s just marketing spin… sometimes it’s a hallucination that nobody checked.

And because AI means product development moves so fast, teams prioritize creating seductive, sleek, glossy product launch videos that show the future state - because you’ll be there in 6 months! - but then wonder why that launch video generates interest that fails to convert today.

4. Breadth over focus

We all know that founders have a hard time saying no to things. “We want to launch to the broadest audience possible so we can learn what works and then double-down.”

(Tip: that’s not an effective way to launch)

Big, bold product launches generally don’t focus on “we solve one problem for one ICP very well, with these specifics”.

Instead they’re angled as “cutting-edge innovation in new category that changes the game for every person in the world”.

Yep… we’re back to startups talking about how they’re making the world a better place. Very 2011.

5. Ego

At the end of the day, product launches are conflated by the founder as the celebration milestone of many years of hard work. It’s validation of their thesis - the way they see the problem, the solution they’ve designed… and it’s also thought of as the north-star for what could be their life’s work.

But this taints direction and limits potential.

Executing a launch around the emotional arc of a founder optimizes for the wrong audience: it optimizes for social standing and status rather than the signals that are ACTUALLY going to drive impact.

This is a dangerous problem: how do we escape?

We’re at a point where launch marketing is fast becoming disingenuous, inauthentic, and ineffective.

So it’s worth reminding ourselves what a product launch is really intended to achieve.

A product launch is a momentum machine - not a marketing moment.

Its primary job is to make the next 100 sales conversations easier, faster, and more likely to close.

They should be judged on three things, in this order:

1. Their impact on pipeline velocity

2. Their impact on sales confidence

3. Their impact on buyer behavior change

If it doesn’t drive pipeline, it doesn’t give sellers more confidence in their pitch, or doesn’t spark behavior change in the intended buyer, it’s failed.

You can get a million video impressions on X. You can get mentions in Techcrunch. You can glow in the warm bubble of Silicon Valley thotfluencers crowing about your vision.

But if it doesn’t 👏 turn 👏 into 👏 cold 👏 hard 👏 cash 👏 it’s 👏 honestly 👏 been 👏 a 👏 waste 👏 of 👏 time 👏 and 👏 money.

Plan your next launch like this

Before you write a single brief or book a single journalist, start here.

Decide: what are you optimizing for?

• Launches that create excitement:

  • Look impressive internally

  • Hit every channel

  • Generate buzz and coverage

  • Make everyone feel like we “did a launch”

  • Leave sales wondering what to do with it

• Launches that create urgency for buyers:

  • Give sales a sharper story

  • Make the competitive alternative look riskier

  • Surface evidence that builds confidence

  • Shorten the path from interest to decision

  • Make deals close faster

You can have both. But if you have to choose, choose the second one.

Know your baseline:

• Our current win rate is X

• Time to close is Y.

• Sales team are X/10 confident in pitching.

• We are focusing on Z specific ICP, and we’re positioning our product as a way they can achieve ABC value.

• Our product launch goal is $x million in pipeline within X months.

Now build backwards.

• Strategy

  • Own the specific problem your ICP keeps getting wrong without you. Don’t describe what you do - describe the decision they keep making badly, and position your product as the thing that makes that decision feel inevitable.

• Tactics:

  • Start with sales enablement:

    • Build your sales enablement deck from real objections, not the product roadmap

    • Give sales the launch assets 2 weeks before go-live. If they can’t start conversations with them before launch day, rebuild them.

  • Prepare the groundwork:

    • Identify 50 accounts in active evaluation and reach them directly - not 50,000 via broadcast

  • Predict and fix pipeline challenges:

    • If top-of-funnel is the actual obstacle, invest in TOFU broad awareness activity.

    • If MOFU is the blocker, focus on problem/solution concepts.

    • If you have plenty of potential pipeline but poor conversions, fix BOFU.

• Milestones

  • Beta with friendly customers.

  • Soft launch to existing customers and targeted sellers.

  • Main launch activity timed around a specific event or moment.

  • 90-day follow-on plan to build BAU activity and repetition amongst target ICP.

• Kill conditions:

  • If win rate hasn’t moved after 60 days, the story isn’t landing - stop and diagnose before investing more.

• Adjust conditions:

  • If pipeline is building but velocity is slow, the story is working but sales enablement needs sharpening.

• Invest conditions:

  • Win rate up, time to close down, sales team asking for more. Scale distribution.

The launches worth studying aren’t the ones that made the most noise.

They’re the ones that made the right noise - to the right people, at the moment a decision was forming.

Their launches probably weren’t big bangs. They might have been really quiet; precision instruments designed to achieve a goal with the least effort possible.

The Cluely launch got everyone talking, but got almost nobody buying.

Every market has a long memory and a short attention span - and it will punish product launch theatre eventually.

Some people will read this post and nod… then build the same launch they always have. The same checklist, chasing internal validation rather than doing what’s right for the business.

Build for momentum, not theatre.

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I talked to a founder last week who’s about to spend £50,000 exhibiting at a trade show. But their positioning document hasn’t been updated in three years.

The product has changed, the market has changed, and what works now is completely different.

But they’re going to roll up to that booth with outdated messaging, generic value props, and a story that doesn’t resonate with the people walking by.

It's a £50k bet on a three-year-old guess.

And here’s the thing that makes it worse: by the time someone walks up to that booth, they’ve probably already decided.

There’s a stat from 6sense that 81% of buyers have already decided who they prefer before they ever talk to sales.

Think about what that means. If your positioning is wrong, if your messaging doesn’t land, if prospects don’t know you for what you want to be known for... you’ve already lost.

You don't lose at the demo stage, or at pricing negotiation. You lost before they ever picked up the phone.

The invisible decision

Most founders and product marketers I’ve work with obsess over sales collateral and better decks.

But the real decision happens upstream on your website, your content, “dark social” and the whisper network of their peer group.

By the time a prospect books a call, they’ve already done the work. They have a great idea of the landscape, the key players, and who aligns most with their need.

They’ve already formed an opinion about whether you’re worth their time. If that opinion is “meh” or “I don’t get it,” your sales team is fighting uphill from minute one.

The hardest part is that… nobody tells you this is happening.

The prospect shows up to the call, asks polite questions, and sales runs through the demo. But the outcome was already decided before anyone said hello.

Where it all breaks down

It’s not just trade shows: it's everywhere the positioning touches the market.

• Ad campaigns built on vague positioning.

• Content marketing that doesn’t speak to actual buyer pain.

• Sales decks that don’t connect to what’s on the website.

• LinkedIn posts that sound like everyone else.

If your positioning is weak, everything downstream is just expensive guesswork.

And what makes this worse in 2026: with AI, it’s easier than ever to sound like everyone else.

You can spin up a homepage in 10 minutes and generate a month of LinkedIn posts before breakfast. You can build a complete ad campaign while you're making coffee.

So. Can. Everyone. Else.

If your outputs are not grounded in product marketing fundamentals - if you don’t know who you’re selling to, what alternatives they’re comparing you against, and why they should choose you - it’s all just noise.

There’s a TikTok trend of people filming tech billboards in San Francisco, because nobody has a clue what any of it means: “AI this”, “Definitive that” - buzzwords on buzzwords.

You can have all the money, all the creative, and the best brand team in the world… but if you’re not speaking clear language to your customer, you’re just going to end up as a meme.

The foundation most companies skip

Most companies are trigger-happy to pour budget into campaigns, content, launches, ads, and all the visible stuff.

But the foundation (the four questions that everything else depends on) is either missing or outdated or just not a priority.

1. Who are you selling to?

2. What alternatives are they comparing you against?

3. Why should they choose you?

4. How do they actually buy?

If you can’t answer those four questions with specificity, you’re building on sand.

And when 81% of the decision happens before the first call, it just doesn’t make sense.

Teams that skip the foundation work end up spending months (and hundreds of thousands of dollars) trying to fix symptoms instead of the root cause.

Can your positioning survive first contact?

Positioning that survives the buyer journey must be grounded in how buyers actually think, talk, and decide.

If a rep needs to “translate” your positioning into something a buyer will understand, you’ve already lost clarity.

Can you describe your buyer’s “horrible day” in visceral detail? Warning: generic pain points don’t count. “Inefficiency” or “lack of visibility” aren’t painful enough. You need to know what breaks, when, and what it costs them.

I also look at timing. Has your positioning been updated in the last 6 months? If not, it’s probably stale. Markets move, your product changes, Nd buyers evolve… so your positioning should too.

And finally, consistency.

Do prospects who read your website and then join a call feel continuity? Do your marketing materials and sales decks tell the same story? Every disconnect between what they read and what they hear erodes trust.

What actually works

Stop pouring money into execution before you fix the foundation. That trade show, that ad campaign, that content calendar are all bets. And if the positioning underneath them is weak, you’re playing a weak hand.

Clarify who you’re selling to. Not “B2B SaaS companies, $10M to $50M ARR.” That’s 8,000 companies. Who are you selling to in a situation? What happened the week before they started looking for you?

Then understand what they’re comparing you against. Not just direct competitors. What’s the alternative? Doing nothing? Building in-house? A spreadsheet? The real competitor is often inertia, not another vendor.

Get specific about why they should choose you. Not “we’re faster and easier.” Everyone says that. What’s the outcome they get with you that they don’t get anywhere else? What changes for them on Monday morning?

And map how they actually buy. Who’s in the buying committee? What triggers urgency? What kills deals? If you can’t answer these four questions with evidence (not guesses, not assumptions, but actual buyer insight), you’re not ready to scale marketing and sales activities.

The 81% are deciding right now

Somewhere, right now, someone is researching solutions in your category.

They’re reading websites. Trading notes with peers. Comparing options from G2 and analyst reports.

By the time they book a call with you, they’ve already formed an opinion.

If that opinion is “I don’t get it” or “sounds like everyone else,” you’re fighting a losing battle.

But if that opinion is “this is exactly what I need”... if your positioning is sharp, if your messaging resonates, if they feel seen... they've already decided in your favor.

81% decide before the call. The only question is whether you’re giving them a reason to decide to prefer you.

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Most sales teams say they sell value, but in practice, they sell features wrapped in vague ROI claims, backed by hand-wavy maths and optimistic assumptions.

Buyers nod along… until they stall, ask for discounts, or say they need to “think about it”.

One of the biggest challenges I see PMMs, sales teams, and founders struggling with is how to create urgency with prospects; how to create an undeniable ‘pull’ motion, rather than trying to ‘push’ sales conversations like a heavy rock up a hill.

Early in my career I joined a company called Emailvision (later rebranded as SmartFocus), through the acqusition of PredictiveIntent - my first startup where I was employee number 4, the first marketer.

SmartFocus was sizable: thousands of customers, 650+ employees, and more than a dozen offices globally. My job was to roll this new product out to an existing sales organisation and help them sell it into the existing customer base.

It was a great success: we signed 40 customers to the new product within the first 6 months of rollout, getting to $1m ARR in record time.

Looking back, one sales tool + narrative helped lower barriers to entry, increase value perception, and make it a no-brainer to say yes. We built a tight process for generating customer-specific, evidence-led value cases.

This post breaks down the exact approach we used, why it worked, and how you can apply the same mechanics to your own product.

As a product marketer, your job is not to write broad ROI claims as part of your positioning and messaging. Your job is to help build the sales narrative that move a prospect along the buyer journey.

Designing a value case that reps can safely co-create with buyers, using the buyer’s numbers, assumptions, and constraints is a great way to deliver impact.

The real job: make value tangible

Smart Focus Advisor (the rebranded PredictiveIntent product) was a revenue-generating product. That should have made it easy.

Alas, it did not.

The PredictiveIntent technology was early AI and ‘big data’ number crunching designed to recommend ‘you might also like’ products on ecommerce stores by looking at thousands of similar customers like you.

With just a few lines of javascript, retailers could add recommendation blocks that would ‘be relevant and drive incremental revenue’.

But it sounds abstract… until you translate it into numbers that matter to a buyer: revenue, waste, targets, and trade-offs.

The turning point came from working closely with a sales rep who was unusually good at building business cases. We iterated together, systemized what worked, and taught it across the sales team.

The entire process had a few non-negotiable principles baked in:

• Build trust before you build maths

• Start with low stakes, then go deeper

• Use the customer’s numbers, not yours

• Anchor everything to monthly and annual impact

• Show the experience, not just the outcome

Step 1: Build trust before asking for numbers

I have never given deep company insights to a sales rep I don’t trust.

So the first move in any sales conversation was always to lower the stakes.

We framed the exercise as diagnostic, not transactional.

The language mattered:

“We want to understand where you are today so we can suggest a few ideas on how you can grow revenue with personalization. This is not a proposal, and your data won’t be shared or aggregated.”

That framing did three things:

• Signalled genuine intent to help

• Removed pressure to commit

• Made sharing data feel safe

Step 2: Start with a few pivotal inputs

We never asked for everything upfront.

We started with a small set of numbers that had an outsized impact on the model. Ballparks were fine.

For SmartFocus Advisor, that meant questions like:

• Average daily visitors

• Average daily page views

• Purchases per day

• Current average order value

If a prospect shared only these, we could already sketch a rough revenue baseline.

Once momentum built, we invited them to go deeper:

• Monthly SEO, PPC, and affiliate spend

• Bounce rate

• Cart abandonment rate

• Number of abandoned carts per day

• Number of products and categories

Step 3: Establish the revenue baseline

With a handful of inputs, we anchored the conversation in reality: to revenue.

Example logic:

• Purchases per day × average order value = average daily revenue

• Daily revenue × 28 = monthly revenue estimate

• Monthly revenue × 12 = annual revenue estimate

This was not presented as exact. It was presented as accurate enough to reason with, with an obvious margin for error and excluding seasonality.

Step 4: Expose waste without judgement

Next, we looked at traffic and spend.

• Average daily page views × 28 = monthly page views

• PPC/SEO/Affiliate spend × bounce rate = wasted spend

If a customer spent £20,000 per month on PPC with a 35 percent bounce rate, roughly £7,000 went to visitors who never engaged with the site.

We framed it as structural inefficiency that every large site has - an opportunity to present an upside in ‘lost’, but committed, spending.

Waste reframed the product from “new investment” to “better use of what you already spend” - even if the argument is hybrid.

Step 5: Make the solution visible

Buying a solution that has any impact on end-user UX can be risky enough - doubly so if you’re trying to combine it with an abstract, hard to trust uplift. So we made the experience real.

Because we had data across many customers, we could estimate page view distribution by page type:

• Homepage

• Category pages

• Product pages

• Checkout

We took screenshots of the prospect’s site and overlaid design examples showing how SmartFocus Advisor would appear in each context.

This did two things:

• Reduced fear of disruption

• Anchored uplift to specific surfaces

The buyer could see where value would be created.

Step 6: Apply credible uplift assumptions

Uplift is where most business cases collapsee, so we avoided aggressive promises. We used conservative ranges based on live customers.

Each uplift was calculated separately, then rolled up into monthly and annual potential revenue figures - because no only do bigger numbers sell better, but because buyers have monthly and annual targets in mind.

Step 7: Offer a low-effort wedge

While we pushed for a full rollout, the model made it easy to propose a pilot:

• One page type

• One clear success metric

This reframed the decision from a bet to a test - especially useful in selling to existing install bases who trust you for one product already, and to low-margin retailers with high-risk spend.

Step 8: Map value against cost

Only at the end did we introduce pricing.

• Setup fees

• Recurring fees

• Year one total cost

• Any discounts against ratecard

All against the estimated incremental revenue uplift.

Who wouldn’t spend £15k to make between £75k and £1m of incremental revenue?

How product marketers can build business case tools and ROI calculators

Value cases, ROI calculators etc are often treated as sales tools - but they’re actually product and narrative infrastructure.

In practice, PMMs should own:

• The input model: Which numbers matter, which are optional, and which unlock deeper insight

• The assumptions: What counts as a credible uplift, the proof, and defensible ranges that don’t spark lack of trust

• The artifacts: Worksheets, online tools, and the slides that guide the conversation without scripting it

Sales then take these tools to apply their unique sales skills to every prospect:

• The pacing of the conversation

• The judgement of when to go deeper

• The relationship and trust-building

When done well, ROI calculators reduce pressure, rather than adding it. It becomes easier to showcase potential, realistic value wihle reps don’t need to defend price: it becomes all about the upside.

Why I think this worked

In my opinion, we respected the buyer throughout, by:

1. Identifying the smallest set of inputs they would feel comfortable sharing

2. Approaching the conversation in a low-pressure, diagnostic frame

3. Translating numbers into the metrics they cared most about

4. Show where waste exists, not just where upside lives

5. Grounding the uplift in realistic mockups

6. Anchoring ROI in conservative, explainable assumptions

7. Offering a pilot as an initial wedge, as well as a full commitment to the complete solution

Value cases are powerful in nearly all sales-led conversations - from showing how teams can save time, to generate revenue, to reducing risk. How can you turn intangible potential into an honest business case?

I think something has shifted in the last 12 months.

Positioning, messaging, and sales decks that used to work have started to stall.

The products haven’t changed. The markets haven’t evaporated (even if it feels like they have).

The challenge: most B2B narratives are now too abstract.

Buyers are drowning in logistics and operational reality, while vendors are still trying to sell philosophies and belief systems.

Buyers still want vision… They just can’t afford to buy into a lofty future anymore.

The acceptable altitude of B2B storytelling has cratered. If your positioning, messaging, or sales deck is still flying at 30,000 feet, you’re going to lose them.

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The big shift

AI means buyers are done with buying belief systems.

There are tons of reasons for this, from budget pressures and tariffs to the political environment, but AI has the most to answer for.

The explosion and adoption of AI agents — plus the complete wall of sound from every angle — in almost every facet of software is promising outputs and outcomes, not platforms and workflows.

The mental model has shifted almost overnight from “buy a system of record” to “get the result faster,”… at every level, from execs making strategic decisions to bottoms-up shadow IT and PLG plays.

This change now influences all software buying, even outside AI-native tools. Buyers now assume the system should do the thinking, not create more work.

They just want inputs, workflows, and outcomes, and fewer moving parts.

What this means for positioning

Buyers are tired of learning new categories, defining new roles to hire for, or wrapping their heads around new disciplines.

• Selling ambitious, futuristic narratives is an overhead.

• When you sell a “framework,” buyers know they’ll need training.

• When you sell a “new way of thinking,” they hear change management.

• When you try to create a “category,” the buyer knows it’s going to be a tough budget justification battle

In the current climate, lofty, aspirational messaging is a tax that nobody wants to pay.

The acceptable altitude for positioning and messaging - from sales narratives and website copy, to outbound email and your booth messaging - has plummeted.

Buyers want stories closer to the ground, that are closer to execution, closer to their inbox, to their calendar… closer to the mess they’re living day-to-day.

Buying software used to be partly buying an identity:

• Drift sold a chatbot - but buyers could say they were operating conversational marketing

• Hubspot sold emails and content marketing tools - but buyers were at the forefront of inbound marketing.

• At Kayako and Headstart, we created manifestos that defined how we think about the world and resonated strongly with buyers.

• At Remote, we leaned on the ‘talent is everywhere, and opportunities are not’ message: a tall, identity-level belief that created advocates.

That kind of storytelling works when buyers have time, slack, and political cover.

Today, default messaging has shifted toward survival.

Whether your buyer is a CEO, VP, Director, Manager, or just a plain ol’ individual contributor, they don’t want your manifesto. They’re in the weeds, day-in, day-out. They don’t have the time or patience to translate abstract value into concrete outcomes.

They simply want to buy the machinery that’s going to work immediately on Monday.

Where narratives are going wrong

1. They sell philosophy when buyers want machinery

Vision, worldviews, future-facing thought leadership, frameworks are dead - for now!

What buyers want is process, automation, enforcement, decisions, judgement.

At Headstart (a YC company focused on improving diversity in graduate recruiting), I built a beautiful sales narrative about “diversity recruiting”. It had a villain (bias). It had a promised land (equality).

Selling it was tough. It wasn’t wrong - but in every conversation, we had to align with the buyer’s philosophic stance on diversity… and debates don’t close deals.

When we rewrote it to focus on “improve speed and accuracy, and remove bias to hire the next generation of leaders,” close rates doubled.

Same product… different altitude.

2. They try to create fancy new categories

Category creation used to signal market leadership, and now it signals more work and a tough sell internally.

New category = new owner, new budget, new justifications.

Effective positioning is less about creating brand new conceptual landscapes for how to read the market - and more about fitting into the frames buyers already use to make decisions.

3. They promise “systems” instead of outcomes

Systems imply management, effort, risk, adoption challenges.

But buyers increasingly want automation, autopilot, guardrails, defaults… things that operate without supervision.

They don’t want to hire. In fact, they want to reduce team size: so you better be saving at least 2 full-time equivalents in workload.

When your deck says “our system empowers your team to make better decisions,” what they hear is: “You’ll need to train people, manage adoption, and hope they use it right.”

When your deck says “our platform enforces global hiring guardrails automatically,” what they hear is: “I can stop worrying about this, we can reduce the size of our legal team, and we won’t be at risk of non-compliance”.

Relief beats righteousness.

Reframing the Raskin model for this moment

Andy Raskin’s strategic narrative approach - from undeniable truth → monsters → promised land → magic - is still one of the best ways to communicate and sell vision in your customer’s world.

The psychology is sound. Buyers still respond to a shift they recognize, the problem they feel, the destination they want to achieve, and credible ways to get there.

But the way people apply strategic narrative has drifted too far abstract.

They use the ‘change in the world’ story without tying it to a tangible buyer and concrete outcomes.

The result is often narrative that sounds right but floats above reality. Narratives must operate at a lower altitude now.

Positioning should not be at the keynote level. It must be tactical, tangible, and meet buyers where they are.

The undeniable truth

• Ineffective: “The world of work is changing”

• Effective: “The moment a process requires human judgment, it stops being predictable”

The undeniable truth needs to be operationally obvious.

Every buyer knows this. They’ve seen clean workflows collapse when judgment is required, and they know standards slip when enforcement is manual.

If the truth needs explaining, it’s too high-level.

The monster (now)

• Ineffective: Inefficiency. Bias. Performance gaps.

• Effective: Unreviewed changes, ignored inputs, and one-off decisions nobody remembers making.

And monsters need to be expensive. Not in a “10% efficiency loss” way, but in a “we lost a $2M deal because someone sent the wrong deck” way.

Make it visceral. Make it something they dealt with last Tuesday, and need to avoid before it costs them credibility or their job.

The promised land (now)

• Ineffective: A better world. A fairer system. A transformed industry.

• Effective: Nothing slips through. Nothing needs chasing. Nothing surprises you on Monday morning.

Promised land is no longer transformation, it’s relief.

A calm Sunday evening matters more than you think. Buyers want to sleep. They want to stop worrying about what their team might screw up while they’re offline.

The magic (now)

• Ineffective: A framework. A methodology. A system to adopt.

• Effective: Software that catches mistakes before people do.

This is the part where you describe your product and how it works - but not the operating theory behind it. Specificity is magic now.

This also solves sales team insecurity

Something I’ve always noticed is that when positioning is too high-altitude, reps feel a ton of dissonance.

They’re told to pitch vision, but the prospect asks “but how does it actually work?”… and the rep doesn’t have an answer because the narrative didn’t give them the tactical answers they need.

So they panic and end up feature dumping: opening the product to click through every screen. This encourages them to feature dump earlier in the sales process… and this is how your sales team stop selling value and sell features instead.

Narratives that work well at ‘low altitude’ restore confidence because they match the buyer’s reality, they’re defensible, and they feel honest.

“We enforce pricing guardrails automatically,” can be shown and proven.

But when your narrative is “we empower teams to transform decision-making,”… what the hell are they supposed to demo?

The new role of narrative and storytelling?

Your website homepage and sales deck is no longer about connecting to a manifesto, a belief system, or a declaring you’re at the forefront of a clever category name you created.

I don’t think positioning is about inspiring buyers anymore.

Instead, narrative and storytelling is risk reduction. It’s control: a way for the buyer to say “yes” safely.

Storytelling has to connect with the buyers reality, more than ever. We are influencing the narrative that already exists for them - colouring in between the lines, not drawing from scratch.

There’s still plenty of room to be creative. The Bain Elements of B2B Value Pyramid is still useful - connecting your buyer’s reality and motivations to personal and aspirational value still works - but it can’t be fluid and wishy-washy.

Buyers want less to manage, not more to believe in.

They are less patient than ever before. They’re in the trenches of chaos, every day.

Stop flying motivational overhead banners, and instead get down there with them.

Have you ever sat in a presentation where someone puts up a slide titled “Our ICP” and it reads:

“B2B SaaS companies, $10M-$50M ARR, 50-200 employees, North America.”

And someone in the room asks: “So... that’s like 8,000 companies. Which ones should we actually call?”

Silence.

I see this pattern constantly. Companies with reasonable-sounding ICPs built entirely on firmographics: company size, industry, revenue range, location… nothing else.

That’s not an ICP.

Six months later, they’re still stuck in the same place.

• Marketing can’t deliver the right leads

• Sales teams spray and pray without focus

• Win rates stay flat

• Churn goes up

• The team burns out

The problem isn’t work ethic or the budget: it’s your ICP definition.

Most ICPs tell you what a company is, but they don’t tell you when that company is ready to buy.

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You can’t position well if you don’t know who you’re positioning to. And most ICPs are either too broad or built from assumptions nobody ever tested.

The GTM Playbook has a full module on ICP definition and buyer persona development. It’s practical, testable, and built around the kind of evidence your sales team will actually believe.

Check it out here: gtmplaybook.co

Situation influences purchase more than firmographics

The thing about firmographics is, they’re static and tell you literally nothing. They describe a company’s characteristics, but not their context.

A “Series B SaaS company” could be crushing it or bleeding cash. They could have a world-class GTM engine… or a pipeline held together with hope and spreadsheets.

One is browsing, and the other is buying.

But a “Series B SaaS company that just missed their board forecast by 40% and realized their pipeline has no repeatable process” is in a completely different state. That’s a company in a situation… and situations create urgency.

Let me give you a real example.

At Headstart, before I joined, the ICP was purely firmographic. Consulting and professional services companies, specific revenue range, offices in certain locations. Standard stuff.

It wasn’t working. The messaging was generic. Sales cycles were long. There was no pattern to wins.

So we shifted the definition. We started targeting companies that had published in their annual reports that diversity, equity, and inclusion was a strategic priority.

That was the trigger.

Once a company published that commitment, we knew they were serious.

We could reference their own language back to them. We could connect with people inside those organizations who personally cared about this work. The motivation was already there.

Everything changed. The sales team knew exactly who to target and when. The messaging got sharper because it could speak to a specific moment: the moment leadership made a public commitment. Close rates improved noticeably.

Why?

We stopped fishing in the ocean, and started fishing where the fish were already biting.

This is what I mean by situational ICP. The question isn’t “who is our ideal customer?” The real question is “What happened the week before they started looking for us?”

Was it a failed product launch?

A new executive who exposed gaps in the GTM? A competitor win that blindsided them?

A board meeting that went sideways?

A public commitment they now need to deliver on?

That specific moment, that trigger, is your real ICP.

When you shift to situational thinking, three things happen

Your messaging gets sharper.

You’re not writing for “B2B SaaS companies.”

You’re writing for “B2B SaaS companies whose last product launch flopped and the CEO is demanding answers.”

That specificity cuts through the noise and validates the pain before you even pitch the solution. It makes your prospect feel seen.

Your targeting gets easier.

You can build content around the trigger event, not just the company size.

Target companies with new hires in key roles. Companies that just announced funding. Companies that published commitments in annual reports. Companies that failed a compliance audit.

This powers ABM, outbound, and your entire content strategy.

Your close rates improve.

Because you’re reaching companies when they’re actually ready to change.

Most of your market is stuck in inertia.

They know they have a problem, but the emotional cost of change feels too high.

But companies in a situation? They’ve already overcome that inertia.

Something broke. Someone’s mad. The status quo isn’t acceptable anymore.

You’re not convincing them they have a problem… you’re showing up exactly when they’re ready to solve it.

Quick diagnostic: is your ICP sharp enough?

Before we go further, let’s diagnose your current ICP. Score yourself honestly on these 5 questions:

1. Can you describe their “horrible day” in specific detail?

If you can’t describe the exact moment their day falls apart, you don’t understand their pain well enough to sell to it.

(Credit to Alicia Carney for this question!)

2. Can your sales team spot the difference between a good-fit and bad-fit lead in 5 minutes?

A sharp ICP gives your team conviction. They should confidently disqualify a bad fit early in the conversation.

3. Does your ICP exclude at least 70% of your total market?

Narrow focus isn’t limiting… the opposite! It’s liberating! It lets you build messaging that actually resonates.

4. Is there less than 2 steps between your feature and their revenue or cost outcome?

Every step is a chance for them to lose interest. “Close 30% more deals” is stronger than “better project management leading to faster shipping leading to more revenue.”

5. Are you seeing momentum with this segment?

If you’re not seeing faster cycles, higher win rates, and better retention, your ICP might be theoretically correct but practically wrong.

If you can’t confidently say yes to at least 4 of these, your ICP is probably costing you deals.

Fix 1: Listen to sales calls

Don’t skim - actually listen!

Your job is to find the moment of maximum frustration, the point where the prospect’s voice changes where they sound tired, or angry, or desperate.

That emotion is your trigger. Write down the exact situation they describe.

For example, you might hear: “The CFO presents a messy pipeline report to board. CEO asks pointed questions the VP Sales can’t answer. VP Sales gets told to ‘fix it in 30 days or we’ll find someone who can.’ They start Googling solutions that night.”

That’s a trigger. That’s the moment they became a strong, high-potential, motivated buyer.

Fix 2: Build your “Negative ICP”

Pull a list of your highest-churn customers. What do they have in common? Industry patterns? Size? Mindset? Buying motion?

Write down the 5 attributes that scream churn, and turn that into a one-pager for your sales and marketing team. Make it easy for them to disqualify bad fits early, avoid targeting them in paid marketing, etc.

This is critical: disqualification is more important than qualification.

Every hour your team spends on a bad-fit prospect is an hour they’re not spending on someone who’s actually ready to buy.

You’re not trying to build the perfect persona; you’re trying to get sharp enough that your messaging actually resonates.

And remember: your ICP isn’t static.

It’s going to evolve every 6 months as you learn what’s working and what’s not:

• You might refine it to be even more niche

• You might broaden it slightly as you find success in adjacent markets

That’s normal. The key is to commit to your current ICP with conviction for at least 6 months so you can actually learn from the market.

This is what I call the positioning loop:

• Clarity (define your ICP)

• Conviction (commit to it)

• Consistency (execute for 6 months)

… so you can actually learn fast and narrow, without spraying and praying.

The fear of narrowing down is real

Every time I’ve recommended narrowing an ICP, I’ve gotten pushback from founders and CEOs.

“If we go that narrow, we’ll leave 90% of the revenue on the table.”

“We need to keep it broad so we can see what sticks.”

“Our product works for everyone in this category.”

The fear is real. Nobody wants to miss being the next Salesforce because they niched too early.

But trying to be everything to everyone is the fastest way to become nothing to anyone.

You can’t build authority with a broad ICP.

Authority requires a point of view.

And a point of view requires choosing who you’re for… and who you’re not.

I worked with a seller who focused on an uncomfortably narrow ICP. They only sold to one specific customer type, in a specific region. Their pitch was three sentences. Their close rate was ridiculously high. Customers barely asked questions before signing.

When I asked if they worried about leaving money on the table, they said: “No. I worry about trying to serve everyone poorly instead of serving someone exceptionally well.”

That stuck with me.

Because narrowing your ICP doesn’t shrink your business. It expands your impact.

When you’re crystal clear on who you serve, three things happen:

1. Your messaging gets sharp enough to cut through the noise

2. Your sales team can spot good fits instantly

3. Your product roadmap has a clear direction

The hardest part of strategy is saying no. But it’s also the most important part.

Stop fishing in the ocean

In B2B, you don’t sell to company profiles. You sell to people in companies in specific situations that they desperately want to escape.

So here’s what I’d challenge you to do:

• Stop building ICPs on demographic filters

• Stop defining your market by company size and job titles alone

• Instead, ask: “What happened the week before they started looking for us?”

• Find that moment.

• Build your messaging around it.

• Target companies when they’re in that situation.

Because that’s when they’re ready to buy, when you can actually help them move forward.

Below is the first I gave on product marketing back in 2019 (I think), on how to scale product marketing.

I’m expecting 2026 to be the year where product marketing really comes into its own - storytelling, brand, meaning, and execution.

Whether you’re new to the PMM role or leading a team, I think it’s important to build a strong perspective on why product marketing needs to scale for impact and change… and not just to deal with a bigger workload.

I’ve included the slides and some lightly-edited speaker notes. I think they’re self-explanatory, but drop me a comment on this post if you’d like me to expand on anything!

Sponsored by me

The jump from tactical PMM to strategic operator is not about seniority. It’s about knowing how the whole system fits together.

GTM Playbook is the course I built to teach exactly that — GTM strategy, positioning, messaging, launches, and sales enablement in one coherent system. For PMMs who want to stop executing other people’s plans and start building their own.

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3. PMM advocates for the customer

• no other team has such as true understanding of the customer as we do

• what makes us important?

• ‘the customer’ = patterns, trends, segments, groups, markets

• we care about what works repeatably, at scale

• mindset + insights = value

4. PMM combines vision with reality

• we love vision: where we go, what we want to do, what the world should look like

• but not at the expense of reality

• recognize confines in which we operate

• be realistic to know what we can do, but don't be restricted by it

• innate capability for problem solving

• PLUS curiosity for what is possible

• PLUS pragmatic outlook = unique skillset

5. PMM is strategic

• we are strategic by design

• not execution (steps to make something happen)

• strategy = the plan of action to achieve an outcome

• we zoom in, zoom out both more AND better than other teams

• decisions we make have to work at 30,000 feet, 15,000 feet, 5,000 feet, AND on the ground

7. Scale for impact

• don't scale just because there's more work.

• could we have hired someone recently? yes.

• decided not to. would have lightened load, but not incremental value

• need to accept: extra resources without a plan doesn't make things easier

8. Scale for change

• PMM should scale when things are changing

• new product launches, repositioning, pivots

• PMM is a 10x multiplier on business

• PMM is change management on steroids

10. People -> Processes, Knowledge, Culture

• scaling any human-powered process is relying less on people and individuals,

• move to reliable processes, shared knowledge, and team culture.

• Paddle example:

  • Processes: Double Diamond to diverge/converge on problems + solutions

  • Knowledge: Documenting decisions

  • Culture = ongoing conversation of PMM principles

11. Ambiguity

• Natural tension for PMM + how we work with rest of business

• “If you want people to build a ship, you don’t give instruct them to nail planks of wood to a frame. Instead, you teach them to yearn for the vast, endless sea.”

• As product marketers, we should strive to get clarity on vision

• Ambiguity on ‘the why’ is non-negotiable

• Ambiguity on what you’ll do, and how you’ll get there is much more acceptable.

12. Being strategic

• Situation: what you’ve learnt, where you’ve been, and where you think the future is.

• Policies that you use to be ruthless in prioritization, to give extra clarity.

• Aligned actions, how you’ll walk the walk.

• Tradeoffs: How do decisions affect other decisions?

14. Alignment

• relationships - emotional AND logical alignment

• responsibilities - buy-in on what PMM is/does

15. Hiring

• skills + mindset - can test and review

• values - do they believe in doing the right thing? advocate for customers?

16. Structure and metrics

• always first questions - how do we structure PMM, how do we measure it?

• answer to both depends on PMM journey + company maturity

• first PMM? dig into macro metrics, integrate PMM into existing teams

• mature biz? track micro-metrics + define PMM boundaries

• what are you trying to prove / disprove?

  • impact of PMM OR each PMM is worth the salary?

• grand scheme of things, doesn’t matter?

• iterate. failed? try something else.

17. Final points

• 1. PMM is positioned to be strategic

  • to do so, elevate the problem: test top-level assumptions

  • identify what changes, and what stays the same

• 2. build shared understanding

  • education + enablement isn’t enough

  • two-way: feedback and listening

• 3. find balance

  • Paddle: adventurous VS pragmatic

  • Kayako: what was right for customers VS what was right for the business

• answer to ‘how to scale PMM’ lies here: what are the 2 main contrasting elements you’re managing?

  • e.g. sales and success? acq and retention? product and marketing?

  • where are similiarties, tradeoffs, opportunities?

• WHEN THAT IS CLEAR, SCALING PRODUCT MARKETING TO BRING ABOUT REAL CHANGE AND HAVE REAL IMPACT BECOMES MUCH EASIER

Before we get into it, this post is half tongue-in-cheek… and half real. This is a joke, except for the parts that aren’t.

The tides are turning. Product launches are not really about driving commercial outcomes anymore.

Nope. Product launches are performative performances.

Founders, CEOs, and tech tastemakers in the SF/YC bubble now have higher expectations for what ‘good’ looks like when introducing a new product to the world.

Launches are less about what the product does on day one, and more what it says about the people behind it.

9 rules of the cool product launch playbook

If it’s not AI, it’s not worth it

It’s fine if the product isn’t meaningfully powered by AI, you just gotta find a way to tie it in.

AI-native works. ‘Agentic’ even better. Throw in some LLM, RAG, vector-database and you’re golden.

Ambiguity on exactly how it works is fine, because you’ll figure it out later.

AI is less of a capability, and more a costume to signal relevance, ambition, and tech chops. The goal is to be associated with AI, not actually AI - it’s easier this way!

Manufacture intimacy

You know what every prospect in your industry wants? To really vibe with the people behind the product.

And luckily, since both you and them just have click-mouse-send-email jobs, you’re halfway there!

You need to:

• Record a podcast and get the video too - I mean, record a video that looks like a podcast. Nothing says ‘I’m cool, trust me’ like a guy behind a mic!

• Capture the ‘behind the scenes’ B-roll footage. You’re at a desk scrolling through a dashboard, or pacing in the city on a walking 121… or if you’re ever in doubt, the classic ‘pondering at a whiteboard covered in post-it notes’

• Tweet secret, random thoughts that are fleetingly intellectual, but disintegrate under scrutiny. Luckily, X only shows your posts to 2% of your followers, so the veil never lifts.

• Get a LinkedIn ghostwriter. You’re too important to write your own posts. Also, you don’t have anything real to say, so outsourcing is efficient.

Intimacy creates an impression of access. You’re not being marketed to! You’re being let in to the secret club of the rich, famous, and ambitious.

You, an ‘insert job title here’ making $100k a year, can really connect with the life of a $2bn startup founder who took more out in secondaries than you’ll make in a lifetime.

Cinema over comprehension

Clear demos answer questions - but who wants that?

You need to create desire, and nothing does that better than a cinematic product launch video film.

Moody b-roll, slow pans, music that suggests importance. Glimpses of the product, but the focus is on people using the product.

Bonus: you don’t need to commit to anything technical that invites scrutiny! Cinema invites projection - viewers fill the gaps with their own assumptions.

Every Series A small feature launch comes with an Apple-style production, complete with viewing party.

Brand it like it’s 1992

Nothing says ‘cool’ like subversion. We’re at the cutting edge of AI! So obviously, branding must look like Windows 3.1 when computer software came on floppy disks.

There’s no particular reason for this - it just looks cool. SaaS branding, like fashion, is cyclical.

Speak fluent internet

Language evolves and signals belonging, so you've gotta get onboard with the dominant paradigm.

• Are you cooking?

• Is your team cracked?

• Do you have enough alpha?

• Is this feature signal?

• Are you locked in or NGMI?

Welcome to the post-clarity era. Use the right language to signal something - sounding right to the right audience matters more than being understood by everything.

Lock in, in public

You’re not committed unless you’re telling people about it!

996, but that’s just about being at an office - you still have food, gym, sauna and massage services, dry cleaning, etc that you can use whenever. But so long as your butt is in the office, you’re good.

And you gotta tell people about it too.

Take photos of engineers at their desks at 10pm. Share your pride on the whole team working on a Saturday - shoutout to Bob who missed his child’s birth to watch Cursor generate a ‘remember me’ checkbox for the login screen!

We hope that old adage is true: an object in motion [or at least, appears to be] stays in motion - enough to get to the next round anyway.

Only personal social is cool

Emails are the most effective form of marketing? Who cares!

Personal social is the coolest. Everyone can be an influencer - or at least look like it.

Make clips of every fake-podcast video. Thot-leadership threads on X that connect something Elon said to your finance platform feature.

Don’t forget to include ‘must engage with every exec-team LinkedIn post’ part of your employee contracts too.

If a product launches and it isn’t ‘big’ on social, was it successful? Probably not.

Optimize for tastemakers, not customers

Customers are generally a bit slow to recognize greatness. Mid-market and enterprise sales cycles take months - far too long to show traction.

Instead, let’s show traction by getting nods from the right people - VCs, friendly founders who happen to be in the same YC group, a comment from that thought leader you gave 2% equity to for association…

Their participation gives you distribution, a sense that something cool is happening, and cultural weight.

Actual customers can come later, validation from peers with vested interests can be instant!

Success = approval

Anyone can make a dollar on the internet, but only a lucky few can get a ‘looks dope’ retweet from a guy with a black-and-white profile picture and ambiguous bio.

Adoption, revenue, retention… they all still matter, but they’re allowed to lag.

The launch is successful if it looked right, sounds right, and land with the right crowd.

Jokes aside… this playbook works

While I’ve taken a lot of creative license with the above, this playbook isn’t stupid - it’s just a reaction to the current environment.

Attention compounds fast. Social proof travels quickly. Public approval is a targeted shortcut to positioning - you’ve just gotta be seen as being good.

The playbook works because many AI startups are looking to:

• Raise their next round

• Attract talent

• Stay culturally relevant in a crowded, hyped space

… and the tactics above work because you’re not selling hard software, you’re selling belief in a team, in an idea, in the future.

… until it doesn’t

The problems will show up later.

• Prospects aren’t quite convinced on the product value

• Customers churn because they struggle to adopt in their day-to-day

• The product, with all the locked-in, cracked engineers you can hire, doesn’t neatly solve a real problem

• The fleeting launch moment dissolves and you need a repeatable MQLs > SQLs > Opps > CW pipeline

At some point, belief runs out and reality hits hard.

The least cool launches are often the most effective. They:

• Explain the problem plainly

• Show the product clearly

• Target and reach a narrow audience

• Make explicit tradeoffs

• Accept that some people won’t care, but the ones who will are going to give you $

• Might not pop on X, but will lead to CW sales conversations

None of this is a moral argument.

You can do the cool launch… and you may ‘win’ doing it. Just be honest about what you’re optimizing for.

If your launch is designed to impress the industry, don’t be surprised when you struggle to convert customers. If your business is loud about prioritizing sales, don’t be surprised when a behind-the-scenes X thread isn’t the main launch tactic.

Cool is a choice, so are the consequences. Make the decision!

Sponsored by me

Most product launches fail before they leave the building. Wrong story, wrong channel, wrong timing — or all three.

The GTM Playbook has a dedicated module on launch strategy: how to build the narrative, sequence the channels, and give sales what they need before the date goes in the calendar.

If you’re launching something this quarter, run through it first: gtmplaybook.co

Before the first question came in, Alicia and I spent time unpacking the reality of the role today: why it feels stretched, why priorities blur, and why product marketers often find themselves doing everything… except the work that matters.

PMM today feels like being asked to be everywhere at once.

Commercial thinking. Customer understanding. Product depth. Data fluency. AI. Segmentation. Launches. Pricing. Positioning…. all while fielding daily reactive asks (or demands!).

Expectations keep expanding… but your authority hasn’t.

You don’t own the roadmap. You don’t own a commercial target. You influence without levers. You experience a ton of pressure, without direct control.

And because of this, most PMMs get pulled toward the visible, fast-moving part of the job: the top of the pyramid.

Work that looks productive… but rarely increases influence.

Top PMMs spend most of their time in the bottom layer, where clarity, direction, and influence are shaped.

If you can spend more time there, then everything above it becomes easier, clearer, and more impactful.

We then broke down the three things top-performing PMMs do differently - keep reading to find out more, plus get the exclusive Q&A rundown.

But first, did you know that I run The GTM Playbook course together with Alicia?

The GTM Playbook

Much of the work we shared in the session comes from building and scaling PMM functions inside high-growth SaaS companies.

We’ve taken teams from zero to hundreds of millions in ARR… and seen what breaks when customer understanding, positioning, and GTM foundations aren’t in place.

We like to say The GTM Playbook is grounded in our trauma 🙈

It exists because we lived the failed launches, the restructures, the narrative gaps, and the cost of misalignment across product, sales, and marketing.

That’s why we rebuilt a clearer operating system for PMMs: The GTM Playbook.

We cover six key modules so you can be strategic, execute effectively, and adapt with agility:

1. Understand GTM fundamentals

2. Know your customer deeply to win

3. Define your value proposition

4. Communicate so people get it

5. Get your product to market with ease

6. Iterate to success without losing pace

With 35+ hours of learning, 10+ templates, and peer-led community, it’s the most human way to get the tools, skills, and confidence you need to excel in product marketing.

Plus, it works: it’s 100% five-star rated, and nearly half of past students were promoted within six months.

Save 20% with code LIVE

And, if you need to get your manager’s approval to expense it, there’s a simple template at gtmplaybook.co/boss.

Now, back to the main content:

1. They focus on business impact

We all know that output isn’t the same as impact, but it’s hard to prove.

The PMMs who move up fastest begin by asking a different question: what is the business trying to achieve, and which work helps move that lever?

When you anchor to a commercial outcome like activation, conversion, retention, sales velocity, ACV (or, whatever trendy metric your CEO cares about…) your priorities change accordingly.

You stop reacting, and start shaping. The job becomes clearer the moment you:

• Start from impact, not deliverables

• Evaluate requests by the lever they support

• Use business outcomes to frame your recommendations

• Make it visible how PMM work changes a number

2. They lead and weave with evidence

Most PMMs spend their time primarily working on channels and tactics, maybe on enablement and motions, with maybe some targeted customer research later on.

Top PMMs flip the pyramid.

They spend a disproportionate amount of time speaking to buyers, joining sales calls, listening to lost deals, and observing how prospects think about risk, value, and switching.

• This enables them to influence and guide GTM strategy

• To create more resonant positioning and messaging

• To enable sales and commercial teams on the right motions

• To execute campaigns and marketing tactics that are going to win.

Alicia described it this way in the session:

You cannot represent the customer in the room if you haven’t heard them in the real world.

Evidence becomes the raw material for influence.

And high-performing PMMs don’t just gather insights, they weave it across their work into:

• Positioning decisions

• Product conversations

• Sales narratives

• Pricing rationales

• Executive direction

This is also why “insight” in isolation isn’t enough. You need insight → interpretation → implications → recommended action.

3. They build systems that create natural influence

The third behaviour we walked through before the AMA is bringing order to confusion.

Influence doesn’t come from owning decisions… it comes from making decisions easier for others.

Most PMMs create far more documentation than they need, and much of it goes unread. The mental tax of interpreting it is too high for busy teams.

High-performing PMMs build embedded systems that become second-nature across the business:

• A repeatable structure for value (Value → Benefits → Features → Proof)

• A simple path through positioning decisions

• A predictable launch rhythm

• Updated sales narratives that reflect market reality

• Consistent language that reduces internal friction

This is not about being process-driven; it’s removing friction so other teams can execute more clearly.

Product marketers should not hand people concepts they have to work hard to interpret. Your job is to lower the cognitive load, not increase it.

Balancing foundations with tactics

Then the question every PMM wrestles with: How do you balance foundation with execution?

The honest answer is that PMMs always have to spend time in channels and tactics. Slides will always be needed. Requests will still come your way. Campaigns will still need support.

But top PMMs flip the pyramid:

• They earn the right to be in foundational discussions.

• They invest early in customer understanding.

• They build positioning with evidence, not assumptions.

• And because their foundations are clear, their execution becomes faster and more consistent.

When you spend 70% of your thinking in the core foundations, the 30% you spend in execution becomes more effective.

You’re not tweaking slides anymore! You’re reinforcing a story grounded in market truths.

Cementing your reputation as a strategic doer

Top PMMs earn influence through a loop:

1. Focus on business impact

   1. Understand the situation

   2. Communicate challenges and opportunities

   3. Measure the impact of your work

2. Gather evidence and inputs:

   1. Customers, competitors, market signals, etc.

3. Influence across the business:

   1. Inform the right people

   2. Deliver the right projects

   3. Make updates to business-as-usual material and systems

4. Repeat…

Run this loop consistently and you build a reputation for clarity, direction, judgement, and operational follow-through.

Earning trust by bringing order

PMMs earn trust when they make complexity simpler for others… not when they produce more work.

Teams shouldn’t have to “do the hard work” just to understand PMM output. The role adds the most value when PMMs take scattered inputs and turn them into a clearer direction with

• Less documentation

• More clarity

• Fewer bespoke assets

• More reusable models

• Less noise

• More signal

Those systems might be repeatable positioning concepts, launch programs, regular updates and insights, etc… anything that stops teams guessing what PMM means, and instead relying on the structure PMM provides.

AMA Highlights

Q: Apart from strengths in storytelling, analysis, and sales enablement… what will genuinely differentiate PMMs and help them deliver value in 2026?

A: The biggest shift comes from moving beyond functional execution and stepping into the decisions that shape the direction of the business. The PMMs who will stand out in 2026 are the ones who use their vantage point to influence choices earlier in the process.

When PMMs bring this perspective consistently, the role stops being defined by deliverables and becomes a source of direction. For example:

• Connecting product and commercial plans to real demand patterns

• Shaping the narrative that links the product vision to what buyers want

• Grounding pricing and packaging in customer expectations

• Surfacing market risks and opportunities before they become urgent

Strategic influence is no longer optional. It’s becoming the differentiator.

Q: “What recommendations do you have for someone who works remotely, not in the same market as their customers, where in-depth calls are harder?”

A: Working in a different region from customers adds friction, but it doesn’t remove the need to build customer instinct. There are tons of approaches that can work well:

• Partner with sales or CS to identify “safe” accounts for interviews, such as closed-lost deals or churned customers

• Use automated sequences to regularly invite these contacts to short calls, so research time is booked automatically

• Make customer conversations a weekly fixture rather than an ad-hoc task

The goal is a pipeline of predictable, low-friction sources of insight - not just waiting for the right conversations to magic themselves into existence.

Q: “What’s the most effective way to present customer feedback to product? What loops or channels work best?”

A: Customer feedback needs to be structured, quantified, and linked to business outcomes. You’re going to convince people best with an evidence-based narrative - not just the volume of research itself.

One effective method is a structured “voice of the stakeholder” report that:

• Teaches teams how to contribute useful feedback

• Aggregates data across markets, deals, or segments

• Highlights patterns rather than anecdotes

• Links requests to expected commercial impact

When feedback is organised in this way, product teams can distinguish noise from signal… it’s easier to prioritise work because the underlying need is clearer, and the consequences of inaction are more explicit.

Q: “How do you ensure internal docs and one-pagers are actually used by sales?”

A: Enablement only works when it is connected to how sales teams operate. Documents that live in isolation don’t change behaviour. Adoption improves when PMMs approach enablement as a system, not an output.

I’ve taken quite a hardline approach to this before - sales adoption is an accountability issue.

• Align with sales leadership so materials are part of onboarding, training, and inspection

• Map every collateral request to a stage in the buyer journey

• Deprioritise assets that don’t help advance a deal

• Check how existing materials are being used before assuming the team needs more

When enablement reflects how deals actually move (and when sales leaders reinforce usage) PMM materials become part of the rhythm of selling rather than static assets in a folder.

Q: “Is the IC career path limiting?”

A: No! In many companies it is expanding, especially as fractional roles become more common. Both IC and manager roles mean PMMs can have meaningful impact. The difference is in how that impact is expressed.

A strong IC can influence strategy, shape positioning, guide product direction, and become the person teams rely on for clarity and judgement. A strong manager enables others to do this at scale. Neither is inherently superior.

The best path is the one that reflects how you like to work:

• If you enjoy depth, ownership, and autonomy, the IC route fits

• If you enjoy coaching, structure, and team dynamics, management fits

Both create value, and both are viable long-term careers… and neither should be treated like a consolation prize.

I asked LinkedIn:

“What’s your top tip for people who are new to product marketing?”

Dozens of people shared their insight - and actually, the tips are great for those new to the role AND a great reminder to even the most experienced PMMs.

In this post, I’ve categorised over 40 insights into one place. Every quote is real, everything is practical, and there are things in here you might not have thought of.

Let’s get into it!

Get close to sales, support, and real customers

Not only will you create stronger relationships to help you in your role and influence others, but this is where your judgment forms. Without frontline exposure, your decisions rely on assumptions instead of evidence - and we all know that’s a no-no.

1. Shadow sales early and often

• “Shadow a few sales calls every week — it’s a great way to build trust with individual sellers.” — me

Observing sales calls helps you understand how real buyers react to your story - you hear the hesitation, the excitement, and the confusion. It shows you where your messaging works… and where it fails. You also learn what sellers need from you to move deals forward.

2. Understand the pressure sellers face

• “Walk a mile in their shoes… shadow top producers, ones starting out, and those struggling to make numbers.” — Anne Ellegood

Spending time with different sellers helps you see the full range of experiences. High performers show you the tactics that work, while newer sellers reveal the onboarding knowledge gaps you need to fix. Struggling sellers expose friction that needs attention - maybe its sales skills, maybe it’s product knowledge, or ICP mismatch. This broad view helps you build stronger enablement with fewer blind spots.

3. Use support as a source of insight

• “Shadowing customer support!!” — Anna Ursin

• “Listen to calls, view support ticket trends, and chat with your UXR team.” — Shannon Kearns

I have spent tons of time looking through support tools like Zendesk. Support tickets reveal patterns of confusion before they appear anywhere else. You hear the words customers use when they struggle, see how they interpret the product, and where where expectations are not set clearly enough.

• “If the customer says ‘how do I do X’ and it’s not a feature… that’s a product marketing insight — not a feature request.” — me

Many internal teams misinterpret repeated questions as product gaps. This is a tip from David Cancel, the founder of Drift. Often, customers asking ‘how do I’ are more often raising an unclear positioning or confusing education experience rather than a roadmap question.

4. Observe real-world usage

• “spend time with customer(s) and see how they use your solution, the pain points they have, the language they use… I spent three days in the OR suite and Cath Lab at a hospital in Phily as they implemented our solution…. That experience proved invaluable to me as I developed the messaging for the solution..” — Ned James

Watching people use your product in a real environment helps you understand what matters most. Researchers will call this ethnographic studies. You see so much more than how they use the product - you see the customer’s real life: distractions, workarounds, political pressures, and practical constraints. This level of context changes how you build positioning because you understand the world your proposition must survive in.

5. Talk to customers constantly

• “Talk to your customers. Every. Single. Chance. You. Get.” — Jenna Jean Berris

• “Talk to your customers before creating messaging documents.” — Michael Robin

Every conversation teaches you something new: their words, their priorities, and the moments that drive action. You begin to see patterns that help you shape stronger narratives.

This habit builds a foundational understanding you can rely on when making decisions or communicating anything, so you can truly represent the voice of the customer.

6. Use account managers for deeper insight

• “Make account managers your best friend… they feed you customer challenges and voice.” — Ghina Kammerer

Account managers see patterns across long periods, and they know what drives renewal and what drives frustration. They hear how customers explain value and problems. PMMs who use this perspective refine ICPs and make messaging more accurate.

7. Understand the full business context

• “Get to know different teams — how they work, how they are measured, what they do. Then connect the dots.” — Jeff Rezabek

Different teams have different goals, so obviously understanding these helps you position PMM work in a way that supports everyone. This reduces friction and builds trust across the organisation. When you know how teams operate, you can anticipate their needs and collaborate more easily.

Understand the product more deeply than expected

Your product knowledge shapes your credibility. Teams trust PMMs who understand how the product works and why it works that way.

8. Embed with product early

• “Sit in tech standups, read their PRDs, ask dumb questions early… prove you understand the product.” — Alicia Carney

Embedding with product gives you insight into decisions that shape the roadmap. You learn why certain features exist and why others do not. You also understand the constraints behind development. This helps you write accurate messaging and contribute earlier to strategic work.

9. Become a true product expert

• “Take time to get to know the product… it pays off.” — Carrie Silver

Being fluent in your product helps you support sales better, write clearer messaging, and diagnose issues faster. PMMs who understand the product deeply are seen as partners rather than request handlers. This encourages teams to bring you into conversations sooner.

10. Get demos from multiple perspectives

• “BFF your Solutions Consultants / Sales Engineers and CSM… have each of them take you through their own version of a demo.” — Shannon Kearns

Different functions highlight different parts of the product. Product managers focus on intention. AEs focus on persuasion. SEs focus on accuracy. CSMs focus on long-term use and maximizing value. Seeing all of these reveals gaps and strengths that influence messaging and positioning.

11. Stay curious and keep digging

• “Ask questions, then listen… listen to understand.” — Anne Ellegood

• “Ask ‘why’ until you’re genuinely sure you understand — even if you have industry experience.” — Anna Ursin

Curiosity helps you avoid making assumptions, and asking why helps uncover hidden assumptions that might not be correct. Every product and every market contains nuance - asking questions helps you uncover the small details that shape better decisions.

12. Use your early clarity wisely

• “Treat your naïveté as an asset… outsiders notice when things are done out of habit.” — Jesse Friedman

Your first days give you the clarity of an outsider. You can see areas where the team has fallen into routine, and your questions help reveal better ways of working.

Build your own insight instead of waiting for it

13. Build ongoing research loops

• “Build an ongoing research process… sales data, case studies, customer research, competitor research, teaming up with CS and RevOps.” — Anna Ursin

Building a research loop forces you to gather, interpret, and apply insight regularly., so you can bring evidence to conversations and decisions to represent the customer.

14. Ship a customer story early

• “Add ‘create a customer story’ to your 30–60 day plan… it’s a tangible deliverable early on.” — Tom Barragry

A customer story gives you access to buyer language and real proof of value, offers sales a tool they use daily, and shows shows your ability to deliver meaningful work quickly. A win all round!

15. Write your own positioning guide

• “Write your own messaging and positioning guide — based on listening tours, support tickets, Reddit threads…” — Darya N.

Even if you have an existing positioning doc to reference, writing your own can help you identify gaps and refine your understanding, and throw up some good ideas and opportunities too.

16. Know your strengths

• “Invest in figuring out what your superpowers are… through StrengthsFinder or mentors.” — Darya N.

PMM covers many responsibilities, so knowing your strengths helps you define your role and add value quickly. I’m a fan of Myers-Briggs - INTJ here!

17. Join a PMM community

• “Join a PMM community… talk about frameworks and tools.” — Darya N.

Back in London like 8-9 years ago, Alicia and I started the first London product marketing meetup in a pub - and it was invaluable, if for nothing more than group therapy.

Finding a community helps you learn faster, and get access to advice, shortcuts, and real examples from people working on similar problems.

18. Use value-focused proof points

• “Focus on time saved, money kept, workflow improvements… concrete results do the heavy lifting.” — Mayte Saez

Proof points help you connect the product to real outcomes, making your narrative stronger and easier for teams to trust. It also helps sales build confidence.

19. Know the metrics that matter

• “Know your numbers.” — Sébastien Millanvoye

PMMs should know key metrics including adoption, usage, conversion, churn, pipeline influence, feature usage, and win rates. Knowing this data helps you guide discussions, helps you measure the impact of your work, and gives you an understanding of where the business is focusing.

20. Share uncomfortable truths early

• “Share the customer quotes that contradict the roadmap… the competitive threats no one wants to talk about.” — Manraj Riat

This separates senior PMMs from the rest. Speaking up and pushing back helps teams see problems before they grow. As PMMs, we often notice patterns early - sharing these helps avoid wasted work, and builds trust and shared clarity.

Master clear, human communication

Your communication style shapes understanding and alignment. Clear, natural language helps people internalize and repeat your message.

21. Write like you speak

• “If you feel embarrassed reading it out loud, imagine a salesperson saying it.” — Steven Choi

• “If you wouldn’t say it at a barbecue, it shouldn’t be in your core messaging.” — Jesse Friedman

If your writing sounds unnatural, teams will struggle to use it. Speaking the words aloud helps you check clarity. Messaging has to feel human - would someone say it in a natural conversation at a bbq?

22. Tell stories to spread your narrative

• “Learn how to tell a story and practise on anyone who will listen.” — Tim Sadler

Stories help teams remember details and repeat ideas - a start, middle, and an end. Check out my post on literary theory for some useful storytelling tips!

23. Adapt your communication to each person

• “.…understand each person’s working style.” — Darya N.

Different people prefer different communication methods - I prefer direct, others prefer to be sandwiched. Learning how people work naturally helps you collaborate more smoothly, builds trust and encourages open dialogue.

Use soft skills and emotional intelligence

PMM work is, ultimately, people work. Your ability to support, listen, and collaborate shapes your effectiveness.

24. Develop emotional intelligence, lead with empathy

• “Hone your emotional intelligence… consider downstream impacts.” — Jonathan Pipek

• “Empathy. Ninety percent of the time you’re managing people.” — Parousia Khan

Build your EQ muscle and understanding where they’re coming from helps you avoid conflict, helps you shape better recommendations, and build stronger relationships.

25. Listen deeply to uncover nuance

• “Ask questions… let the other person talk… paraphrase what they said.” — Jeff Rezabek

Paraphrasing shows understanding and encourages people to share more. This approach helps you gain clarity in interviews, sales calls, and internal meetings.

26. Expand outside your comfort zone

• “Step outside your comfort zone… being a Swiss Army Knife is indispensable.” — Anne Ellegood

PMMs have a broad skillset. Learning skills outside your immediate responsibilities helps you support teams more effectively, and increases your opportunity to contribute.

27. Accept that learning takes time

• “Breathe… imposter syndrome is normal… your skills are transferable.” — Darya N.

Whether you’re new to the role or struggling with a part of it, you’ll get it soon. Accepting this helps you move forward without pressure. Building a growth mindset is important to stay confident and consistent, even when things aren’t going well.

28. Build cross-functional workflows

• “Build relationships and good processes with teams.” — Carrie Silver

Strong processes help teams work together with less confusion so you can all do better work.

Protect your time and prioritize with discipline

Without boundaries, PMM becomes reactive. Focus helps you deliver meaningful work.

29. Tie your work to company goals

• “Find out company goals and build your PMM charter accordingly. Do less things better.” — Jonathan Pipek

• “Don’t become an order taker… make sure whatever you’re working on contributes to that goal.” — Jeff Rezabek

• “Be clear about priorities… have a business-rooted argument behind telling someone their request can’t be done till Q2.” — Ivan Kostyuchenko

Laddering up your work to top-level goals means you’ll stay focused on high-impact projects, and have the ability to decline lower-value work. Sure, requests will come from many teams - but you need to judge which ones matter, and having goal-based guardrails can help massively.

30. Co-create instead of doing everything

• “Have sales do the first rough draft — even if it’s a voice memo. It makes them own the outcome.” — Anna Ursin

This is a great tip. Co-creation helps teams think more deeply about their requests and gives you more context on what they’re hoping for.

31. Ship something early

• “Don’t over-rotate on strategy or listening. Ship something small early.” — me

I’ve seen product marketers spend months of listening before they get into the real work. But it doesn’t work.

Early work builds momentum, shows teams (and your boss) that you can deliver.

32. Prioritise launches using tiers

• “Not all launches are created equal. Align on Launch Tiers.” — Chloe Nicholls

Maybe it’s tier 1/2/3, or Feature/Product/Launch, Small/Medium/Massive… setting a plan for how your business will prioritize launches makes sure attention and resources go to the right projects.

33. Influence the roadmap, own the story

• “PMMs don’t own the roadmap, but we do own the story.” — Chloe Nicholls

You influence how features are understood, not which ones get built. Use that to your advantage: help product teams understand how features will be marketed/sold up-front, as well as share where the greater story is going.

34. Validate assumptions with customers

• “Validate your assumptions with customers… advocate for VOC.” — Chloe Nicholls

Assumptions are ok. Evidence is better. Validation is a must.

Not only are you protecting everyone from internal bias, you’re saving effort and costs. The opportunity cost of working on insignificant features compared to things customers actually care about can be huge.

35. Frame your work in business outcomes

• “Frame your impact in business outcomes, not busy work.” — Chloe Nicholls

Positioning your work by its influence on revenue, retention, or adoption helps people value PMM contributions.

36. Think ahead before choosing tactics

• “If you’re doing a price increase, go talk to CSM/Support… stagger rollout based on volume of angry callers they can handle.” — Jonathan Pipek

Second-order thinking shows how PMMs think ahead. Considering what happens next helps prevent overwhelming teams and protects relationships with customers.

You can apply this to everything: launches and rollouts, sales bandwidth, TAM/SAM/SOM, and more.

The pattern

Across all 35 tips, the same theme keeps showing up.

Great PMMs:

• Stay close to customers and sales

• Understand the product in uncomfortable detail

• Build their own insight instead of waiting for it

• Communicate in simple human language

• Use soft skills as a core tool

• Protect their time so they can focus on work that matters.

You don’t need to fix everything at once - pick one area where you feel weakest right now and choose one tip from that section.

Can you block time in your calendar this week to act on it? Shadow two sales calls, pull support tickets for an hour, book three customer calls, or write your own positioning guide - then repeat that next week with a different tip.

If you can treat these tips as habits instead of a checklist, your impact as a PMM begins to compound: you become the person who knows the customer, shapes the story, and helps the company make clearer decisions.

Good luck!

Sometimes, there’s a moment the morning after a launch that almost every team recognises, even if they don’t talk about it.

Inside the company, people are still trying to extend the high from the previous day. Someone is checking traffic in one tab, posting on LinkedIn in another, replying to comments, sharing screenshots in Slack, trying to keep that sense of momentum alive for just a little longer.

It all feels warm and hopeful, the kind of explosion of pent-up energy you get when a team finally ships something that’s been hanging over them for months.

For a short while, it’s easy to convince yourself that the market has finally caught up with what you’ve been building.

But that feeling doesn’t last.

The dashboards level out, the replies quiet down, and prospect conversations don’t magically accelerate.

People outside the company move on so quickly it’s almost disorienting. You start to realise that the outside world absorbed far less than you expected.

What felt momentous internally has barely registered externally. And as frustrating as that is, it’s also the first honest signal about the story you tried to tell.

Sponsored by me

Most product launches fail before they leave the building. Wrong story, wrong channel, wrong timing — or all three.

The GTM Playbook has a dedicated module on launch strategy: how to build the narrative, sequence the channels, and give sales what they need before the date goes in the calendar.

If you’re launching something this quarter, run through it first: gtmplaybook.co

The weight you feel inside the building

Inside a company, the story of a launch becomes thick and dense and confusing and weighted long before anything goes live.

Teams carry months of accumulated context: early ideas, false starts, sudden CEO-inflicted pivots, painful naming decisions, internal debates over what the feature even is, trade-offs nobody wanted to make but had to, and the thousand tiny decisions that shaped the final result.

All that history sits under the surface. You can feel it when you talk about the product, even if you don’t say it out loud. So it’s no surprise that the launch becomes a symbolic release of that internal weight. It is significant… but only inside the building.

The outside world doesn’t care about your internal story

The problem is your layered context just doesn’t matter. I’m sorry to inform you, but:

• Your audience isn’t tracking your roadmap or checking whether the homepage copy has changed

• They’re not counting down the days until your release hits

• They’re not quietly waiting for your big reveal so they can change how they think about you

• They’re not refreshing your blog to see if the narrative evolved

• They’re not living with the emotional investment you’ve built up from months of being inside the problem

They see the launch with fresh eyes… which often means indifferent eyes.

This is the part that catches people off guard.

They’re projecting months of meaning outward, expecting the world to feel the same significance, but the outside world doesn’t have the mental model required to interpret it.

Inside the team, everything feels loaded. Outside the team, everything is a bit “meh” unless the story gives people a reason to care.

The mismatch is most clear when teams try to explain why a launch “matters.” Internally, the explanation is layered:

• this feature unlocks other features

• it resolves a painful problem the team has been wrestling with for months

• it aligns with a strategy shift people internally have felt happening

• it unblocks sales conversations that have been stuck for too long

• it’s been requested by a certain type of “important” customer

None of that helps anyone outside the team understand the story. Internal logic rarely survives external air.

The gap you’re really trying to measure

One of the harder things to accept is that the launch is rarely the moment the world finally “gets” you; it’s the moment you discover how far the gap really is between how you see the product and how everyone else interprets it. The silence you get after a launch is a signal, not a failure. It tells you the narrative hasn’t crossed the divide yet. You tried to export a story that still needed internal context to make sense.

You learn more in that silence than you do in the entire launch cycle. You learn:

• what didn’t translate at all

• which parts of the story depended on internal knowledge

• where your assumptions and research did or didn’t pay off

• which bits were actually relevant externally

• where the friction is, where things almost clicked

You also learn who genuinely felt resonance: not the people who liked the brand LinkedIn post, but the people who reach out because something clicked in their world, not yours.

The launch is the first honest milestone

It’s really painful when leaders treat a launch like a climax.

Actually, a launch is closer to a checkpoint.

It shouldn’t tell the world you’re ready; it should tell you whether the world is ready to hear what you tried to say.

It tells you whether your positioning is clear enough, whether the value is legible to someone without context, whether you’ve been solving the right pains and problems, and whether your homework has actually translated into something externally obvious.

It shows whether your momentum is visible beyond your own Slack channels, and whether the story has reached a point where it can hold itself up without internal scaffolding. It shows whether you’ve built something that intersects with a real shift happening out in the market, not just inside the team.

And yes, the outside world can be a little cruel… but mostly it’s just uninterested unless your narrative intersects with something already moving in their world.

The morning after a launch, that uncomfortable, anticlimactic, revealing moment, is where your real work begins.

How to close the gap

Prove the story before you promote it.

Don’t take a new narrative straight to the market. Run it through your sales team first. They are your fastest stress-test. If a rep can’t explain the story cleanly on a call, or feels the need to “pad” it, the narrative isn’t ready.

A good narrative should raise confidence in sales, not anxiety.

Test the positioning in real conversations.

It’s easy to fall for your own copy when the only people reading it are on your side.

Take it to prospects who don’t care about your backstory, or customers who will tell you the truth

Listen for:

• where they lean in

• where they hesitate

• where the phrasing feels thin

• where they restate it in better language

You’ll learn more in five real conversations than in five rounds of messaging reviews.

Treat the launch as the beginning of validation, not the conclusion of it.

Most leaders expect the launch to be a “moment”, but you need to reframe it as a checkpoint.

“We can absolutely create a strong moment, but we should treat it as directional rather than definitive. The real signal comes from post-launch conversations, which we’ll use to shape the story once we see how it behaves in the real world.”

Have follow-up plans too: how can you introduce v1.1 to continue building momentum?

Increase your reliance on evidence.

A story held together by optimism falls apart fast. A story held together by proof becomes self-sustaining.

Your evidence can be small — a customer quote, a strong beta, a repeated pattern in sales calls… The size doesn’t matter. Frequency does.

Borrow clarity from customers

Customers will always describe the value in language cleaner, simpler, and more grounded than whatever you wrote on a slide. Use it. Build around it.

If you find yourself writing something clever but no customer has said (or would every say) it, throw it away.

Make sure the momentum you’re claiming is visible from the outside.

Teams often claim internal movement like technical architecture work, new foundations, exciting prototypes… all things that the market cannot see yet.

Launch things the market can see and notice.

Strong stories come from reality

A good launch is the result of a story that has already been proven: in sales calls, in customer conversations, in the patterns you see across your pipeline.

When the story is grounded in evidence, the launch isn’t a dramatic climax. It simply makes the truth visible.

A lot has happened this week: sad endings, beautiful beginnings, and more momentum than ever.

Here are the 4 big things I’ve shared:

1. After 4.5 years, I’ve left Remote
I scaled product marketing through an insane period of hypergrowth that shaped how I think about growth and product marketing.
Jump to read more →

2. I’ve launched Inflection Studio
I’m building a hands-on practice that helps B2B SaaS teams turn turn traction into scale with high-impact positioning and product marketing. If you know any teams looking for support, let me know!
Jump to read more →

3. We’re relaunching The GTM Playbook
The most human, most realistic product marketing course for startup marketers. Live cohorts return in January to help you develop the tools, skills, and confidence to build strong GTM strategy.
Jump to read more →

4. We’re hosting a LinkedIn AMA
Join us LIVE for How to Get Ahead as a PMM in 2026: how to be more strategic, more effective, and show real progress in your role. Register now!
Jump to read more →

Plus: “If a decision feels hard, it’s probably the right one.”
Jump to read more →

P.S. I’d love your thoughts on all this - feel free to reply!

1️⃣ Leaving Remote

After 4.5 years, it’s time for me to move on from Remote 💜

It’s hard to sum up what this chapter has meant to me.

I’ve been lucky enough to be part of every twist and turn of Remote’s incredible growth.

• I joined as the second product marketer, before building and leading a talented team of 10 PMMs across the US, Europe, and APAC

• I’ve been involved in every product launch, every pricing change, and every sales and marketing initiative - driving hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue

• I was part of the marketing leadership team as we steered a 60+ person team through change, scaled marketing spend into the millions, and built high performing integrated glboal campaigns

• And I owned the narrative - shaping Remote’s positioning and unique differentiation in the most competitive market situations.

Every day reflected the things I care about most: shared adventure, applied wisdom, and doing work that matters.

What I learned most wasn’t just about positioning or go-to-market. It was about people, culture, and how to marry them together.

The intensity that ensures success. The craft of alignment. The patience it takes to communicate well. The conviction it takes to keep the story clear as everything changes around you. The resilience and agility required to change tactic at last minute, and still drive outsized results.

Remoters are the most resilient, capable, kind, and adaptable people I’ve ever worked with. The way that everyone demonstrates intensity, kindness, community, and grit has set the bar for every future team I’ll be part of.

2️⃣ Building Inflection Studio

Every company reaches a pivot point where story and strategy must evolve.

So I’m building Inflection Studio 🚀

A product marketing practice helping early and mid-stage B2B SaaS teams sharpen positioning, refine go-to-market, and build the systems that scale.

We deliver through projects and software — powered by AI, and shaped by 15+ years of hands-on experience.

My career has been defined by helping companies navigate their pivotal moments:

→ finding initial PMF (0→1)
→ building repeatable GTM strategy
→ pivoting to customer segments
→ introducing new concepts and categories
→ moving from single-product to multi-product

That experience gives me a unique perspective on connecting the work of product marketing with the cultural change management required to build momentum.

These are the moments where product marketing sets the strategy and the standard for execution. They’re the moments I enjoy most - where story, data, and decision-making intersect.

Our first offer is the Positioning Sprint - designed to turn founder intuition into something teams can actually execute. It’s fast, focused, and built for early-stage SaaS teams.

Most positioning work drags on for weeks and ends in a 40-slide deck. Ours takes 7 days, and ends with something founders can actually use:

1. A crisp story

2. A confident sales narrative

3. A team that finally speaks the same language

But that’s just the beginning.

Every founder and investor I talk to says the same thing: The hard part of building a business isn’t execution - it’s direction.

Setting it. Keeping it. Evolving it.

That’s the work we love.

You’ll find us helping companies find clarity, build conviction, and create momentum, whether through hands-on consulting, workshopping strategy, or supporting execution.

We’re opening our first Sprint slots this month.

Drop me a message (jdp @ inflectionstudio .co) if you want to kickstart 2026 with high-impact positioning and product marketing that turns traction into scale.

3️⃣ We’re relaunching The GTM Playbook

Alicia and I are also raising the bar for product marketers.

We’re relaunching our top-rated course, The GTM Playbook, with a brand new learning experience, updated content, and new live cohorts from January 2026.

We help ambitious marketers develop the skills, tools, and confidence to lead go-to-market strategy.

When we first launched “WTF is Go-To-Market” in 2021, it was a scrappy experiment to help marketers finally answer the question every PMM asks:

What does go-to-market actually mean, and how do I do it well?

Since then, it’s evolved into a complete, operator-led course that’s helped 100+ PMMs build confidence, get promoted, and drive real impact in their roles.

The best PMMs aren’t just making decks; they’re driving strategy, alignment, and measurable business impact.

That’s what The GTM Playbook helps you master.

• 40% of past students get promoted within six months

• It’s rated five stars by every single participant so far

• Obviously, it’s taught by experienced operators who’ve actually done the work

Our goal is not to “teach frameworks”. It’s to help PMMs become strategic, expert, influential product marketers: people who can shape direction, drive alignment, and measure impact across the business.

That’s what the next generation of product marketing needs. And it’s why we’re relaunching now.

Be the first to hear about the relaunch

4️⃣ Live AMA: How to Get Ahead as a PMM in 2026

To celebrate the relaunch, we’re also hosting our first ever LinkedIn Live AMA!

Register now

We’ll dig into:

• What separates top-performing PMMs, and how to position yourself as a strategic partner

• Key frameworks from The GTM Playbook that help you show repeatable, measurable impact

• Why community is important, what it’s like to join a live cohort and learn with other ambitious PMMs

• Your questions on product marketing, planning for 2026, and how to get ahead in your career

You can register to join live or get the recording. You’ll also unlock an exclusive early-bird offer to join us for the January cohort.

Register now

Let’s make 2026 the year you take the lead on go-to-market.

“If a decision feels hard, it’s probably the right one.”

This week marks three, huge inflection points:

• Leaving Remote closes a chapter that defined me

• Inflection Studio is about taking everything I know about story, growth, and momentum, and making it work for others

• Choosing to double-down on The GTM Playbook, betting that it’s the right way to invest time + effort into developing the next generation of product marketers

And all of these were hard decisions to make, with significant tradeoffs, uncertainty, and a shit ton of risk. But each one creates the opportunity for outsized impact.

I’ve seen how powerful great product marketing can be - not just to grow a business, but to give it direction, confidence, and clarity. I’m a huge believer in how PMM can build, develop, and lead businesses.

If I can help you or your team do to find focus, sharpen your story, or scale your impact - I’m always happy to help.

And whether you’ve been here since the early days or just joined in the last few weeks, thanks for being part of the journey.

— JDP

Hi founders and CEOs (or, if you’re not one, read this - then share it with yours):

You don’t get to opt out of product marketing. Either practice the fundamentals or hire someone who has (and actually listen to them).

From the moment you pitch your idea, you’re already doing product marketing: translating what you’ve built into something the world can understand and buy. The challenge isn’t doing it. It’s doing it deliberately.

You actually make hundreds of small product marketing decisions every week. How to describe a feature, which story to tell, which customer to prioritize…

But these decisions are treated as surface-level choices, not strategic ones.

… and the strategic decisions you need to make? They rarely get the depth of thought they deserve.

You’re the first PMM

Whether you’re just getting started, scaling, or even the head of a huge organization, you’re still the first product marketer.

You’re listening to customers, spotting patterns, refining the pitch, connecting the market to the roadmap, thinking about monetization, the second-order impact of brand, the sales motion and metrics… the list goes on.

That is product marketing.

You’re shaping who your product is for, how you explain it, the value it creates, and how your organization takes it to market.

The issue is that many leaders don’t dive into product marketing fundamentals as much as they understand fundamentals of other departments. It feels soft compared to finance or product, even though it’s even more foundational to success. It’s not given the same gravitas or the same investment of energy.

Why? Maybe it’s because you think it’s a ‘done deal’ - you’ve decided direction, it just needs to be executed. Or maybe it’s because you’ve only ever experienced the tactical side of product marketing through decks, messaging, and product launches. You’ve never seen it as a way of driving strategy.

But every go-to-market problem you face (like misaligned pipeline, weak differentiation, confused customers) - and every opportunity! - can be traced back to positioning, messaging, and clarity. That’s product marketing.

But as the business grows, you - and others - learn things, recognize new patterns, make new decisions. But these are treated as intuition rather than a discipline - so the process you go through - from collecting inputs, evaluating, making decisions, and directing execution - isn’t really systemized.

You see it every week: someone updates the deck without telling sales. Product ships a feature nobody knows how to position. Marketing plans a campaign around a half-remembered ICP from last year.

None of it’s intentional… it’s just what happens.

The opportunity cost of product marketing can - no joke - quietly make or break a company.

Strategy fragments between marketing, sales, and product. Stories split. The quality of execution, from your perspective, weakens.

But nobody is wrong… but nobody is right, either.

Why PMM hides in plain sight

When it works, it feels invisible. The story clicks, sales flows, customers get it, product features launch, the roadmap is great…

PMM isn’t words, copy, decks, and launch campaigns. It is the work that turns strategy into something executable and believable - a translation layer between what you build, who it’s for, and how you sell, market, and support.

As a function, it refuses to fit neatly into an org chart. It touches everything:

• Product, because it supports on what to build, why, and how they are launched

• Marketing, because it defines what to say and to which audience

• Sales, because it gives people a story that wins opportunities

And so doesn’t fit in anywhere… and thus is treated like an add-on.

Some non-specialist marketers can do some parts of PMM, as can a sales leader… But seeing the whole thing, holistically? That’s unique to product marketers.

What product marketing actually does

Without a bridge, everyone works hard but on different interpretations of the plan… at best loosely coordinated… at worst, completely isolated.

The signs are everywhere: product sprints forward without a clear story to support, sales learns about launches from Slack, marketing spends budget amplifying a message that doesn’t match what customers are actually saying.

PMM connects three things.

1. Product - what you’re building, and why it matters

2. Market - who it’s for, and what they care about

3. Revenue - how you tell the story so people buy (and stay, and grow)

When those are in sync, magic happens. Everything compounds.

When they aren’t, you get friction.

• Product launches land flat. Why? Many potential reasons.

• Sales teams improvise: you end up with non-repeatable wins, and poor-fit customers

• Marketing teams optimize for engagement instead of traction.

Product and leadership start losing confidence in marketing altogether. You hear the same lines: ‘We need to go harder.’ ‘Our message isn’t landing.’ ‘This launch didn’t create a buzz.’

The problem isn’t volume. It’s focus.

Energy gets redirected to activity instead of alignment. Everyone looks busy, but is anyone really moving forward? Probably not.

The easiest way to see the difference is when it’s working versus when it’s not

At Kayako, Alicia and I worked really closely with Jamie, the co-founder responsible for marketing and sales.

We built a tight-knit feedback loop on how the business was executing across product marketing fundamentals.

What segments were working best? What did our best-fit customers actually value most? Which use cases were signals of retention and which were distractions? How were our sales team adopting the message? How can the product roadmap support go-to-market efforts?

We sat together in the office (waaaay before Covid) - so casual conversations, adhoc questions, and everyday riffs were a core part of our day-to-day.

That alignment meant launches hit cleaner, pipeline grew fast, and the story held together. When strategy, product, and marketing speak the same language, everything feels easier.

Founders/CEOs 🤝 Product marketers

The best founders already think like product marketers.

You:

• Listen until they can explain the problem better than the customer can.

• Name the outcome precisely. “Save time” isn’t strategy. “Reduce onboarding from three weeks to three days” is.

• Build narrative before noise. They shape how the market thinks before trying to sell to it.

In an ideal world, I think product marketing should report to a co-founder or CEO. I’ve done this three times, and it’s been the most successful model. Rather than add another layer between how a CEO sets and directs strategy, through a marketing or product leader who translates it through their own filter, a PMM<>CEO/co-founder reporting line is more likely to be doubly effective at the strategic impact level.

If you’re a founder, here’s how to make the partnership work.

1. Give PMM real inputs. Share revenue targets, retention data, deal analysis, roadmap trade-offs, business contraints. Don’t just hand over feature lists or to-dos… give context (or better yet, let them feed into the context too)

2. Involve them early. Bring product marketing into roadmap and pricing discussions, into go-to-market decisions. If they only see things when it’s time to “launch,” it’s already too late.

3. Back their insights. When PMMs surface uncomfortable truths — listen. They’re often the first to see what the market really thinks, and can accurately judge how execution will be perceived by the market. At Kayako, I discovered several failures in our sales process that, once raised, led to a significant restructure that grew us faster and stronger.

4. Align incentives. Tie success to revenue, not vanity metrics. Clarity and traction take longer than a single quarter to measure.

   1. The best metric for PMM success isn’t top-of-funnel activity.

   2. Instead, look at improvement in revenue quality:

      1. Win rate within the ICP

      2. Shorter time to close

      3. Higher expansion rate

      4. Improved retention for the customers you actually want

   3. Those are the signs of clarity compounding.

5. Give authority and enforce trust. Encourage sales and product to listen and engage with PMMs. Often, product marketers try, but without authority it can fall flat. Prioritize PMM as an authority within the org.

When your business treats product marketing as a partner, not a service, the return is exponential. You’ll make better decisions, move faster, and build a company that actually knows how to tell its own story.

Product marketing is THE multiplier

When founders start thinking like product marketers, the shift is immediate.

• Meetings get shorter because everyone already knows the story.

• Sales cycles get faster because customers recognise themselves in your message.

• Product decisions get sharper because you can see which use cases really drive revenue.

Strategy stops being abstract. Clarity becomes a competitive advantage. It compounds.

Every new hire, every campaign, every launch builds on the same foundation instead of starting from scratch.

That’s what product marketing really gives you: momentum.

Product marketing is a discipline you need to practice from day one, not something to delegate later.

Whether you’re starting out or scaling, make it intentional. Do product marketing on purpose.

Every go-to-market team has to figure out how to sell the future without lying about it.

That’s easy to say and hard to do.

The pace of building has exploded. AI-assisted engineering means teams can spin up new capabilities in days. But shipping isn’t the same as releasing. QA, pricing, enablement, and rollout still move on human time.

The result: a messy middle full of “almost ready” features and internal betas that the market doesn’t see yet, while buyers are actually judging you on where you’ll be next year.

They don’t just buy your product. Investors, partners, and customers are all buying your momentum.

I’ve learned the companies that win aren’t always the ones that build fastest, or the ones that build the best product. Instead, they’re the ones that make progress visible before anyone else believes it.

• If you only sell what’s live, you undersell your potential.

• If you only sell what’s next, you break trust.

The job is to sell the slope: to show what’s real today, and what’s becoming real.

Why buyers buy momentum, not just product

Sales needs something to sell. Product wants to wait until it’s stable. Marketing worries about over-promising. Success teams brace for support load when things launch, whether they’re stable or not.

… Ultimately, everyone is stuck in a different version of the truth.

Buyers, meanwhile, don’t care about those internal trade-offs.

They care about what they can see: progress, energy, direction.

You can build faster than ever, but if the market can’t feel that motion it might as well not exist.

Selling the slope isn’t a storytelling trick.. it’s a positioning strategy. You’re not educating the market on what you do today. You need to educate them on where you’re going.

The key to introducing something new is gradual motion, not sudden reinvention. Timing matters - too early, and it won’t land.

Selling the slope follows the same rhythm: invite people into your trajectory, one believable step at a time.

Examples: how to walk the line

Brainfish have got this down! Their homepage starts with a grounded, current value proposition: AI support that feels built-in, not bolted on. That’s the product as it exists today.

But, click the spaceship icon in the menu bar and boom: you get a great sense of their direction. No release dates. No buzzwords. Just a clear sense of motion.

That duality - today’s product and tomorrow’s intent - builds trust. The company feels alive.

Zendesk followed the same playbook over years. Their message shifted gradually: from support software to customer experience platform to AI-powered service suite. I wrote about this when I reviewed their positioning evolution: each repositioning wasn’t a reinvention, but a visible continuation of what came before.

Make the future visible, but believable

Selling the present feels safe. You can demo what’s live, point to proof, and stay factual, but it flattens your story.

Buyers don’t just want confidence in what exists, they want evidence of what’s evolving. Momentum should be part of your positioning. If you don’t project it, someone else will (and they’ll leapfrog you quickly).

The opposite is more dangerous. I’ve seen teams promise future features to close deals, demoing prototypes as if they were live, or showing slides full of intentions dressed up as products.

It works for a while… until it breaks.

• Customers get frustrated when promises don’t materialize

• Support teams drown in tickets

• CSMs spend months resetting expectations

• Reps lose confidence (and commission) when deals churn

I’ve written before about how to prepare sales to talk about what’s coming without slipping into speculation. The same discipline applies here: teach people how to sell intent, not illusion.

Align behind a shared statement of direction

Selling the slope only works when everyone tells the same story. That means alignment - and as a product marketer, it’s your job to connect the dots.

In multiple companies, I’ve built a shared Statement of Direction - a single slide deck that replaced the guessing game between product and sales. This becomes the living narrative: a way to align intent without over-committing to dates.

A good Statement of Direction isn’t a marketing deck. It’s a leadership artefact: the bridge between your vision narrative and your next two quarters of execution.

It’s what lets every investor update, sales call, and roadmap review tell the same believable story. It should describe your themes, goals, and intended outcomes. Not dates or specs, just direction. It should answer:

• What’s live now

• What’s in motion

• What’s being explored

Then teach sellers and CSMs how to navigate the grey area. Give them phrases and connective tissue that express confidence without over-promising - things like:

• “In pilot with early customers”

• “Scheduled for validation later this quarter”

• “Under active research for next year”

Build those distinctions into decks, product pages, and demos so everyone stays consistent.

Finally, make it tangible. Give sellers something they can show: Figma prototypes and visual mockups. Invite product managers into key customer conversations to help shape that story live.

When all of this aligns, the future stops feeling abstract.

Don’t forget pricing, rollout, and the reality of your business

Selling the slope doesn’t stop at messaging… it ripples through pricing, rollout, and support.

If new products or modules are coming, customers should have a sense of how pricing might evolve. Springing a new tier or upsell later creates sticker shock. See if you can agree pricing guidelines like:

• Significant new products will be charged separately

• New features may be chargeable as an add-on

• Beta testers will receive 6 months free and a 50% 1 year discount from market rate if they decide to continue

Customer success needs the same preparation. They should know what’s on the horizon so they can manage adoption, renewals, and education.

Ultimately, the roadmap and the story and the future is business strategy challenge, not just a product marketing/product management thing.

Keep your slope alive: turn momentum into a rhythm

Selling the slope is a rhythm, not a one-off campaign.

• If you talk too far ahead, it becomes fiction

• If you’re too vague, it loses meaning

• If teams tell different stories, you fracture trust

Keep it current. Revisit your statement of direction every quarter. Update decks, demos, and sales materials. Let the slope evolve as the product catches up.

Start small, then build

If this feels big, start small. Write a one-pager that outlines where your product is going and why. Include:

• A few quarters of committed work

• Two or three long-term themes

• A short note on customer impact

Share it with sales and success first, then listen to how they use it.

Turn it into one simple “future direction” slide for your sales deck to show what’s live, what’s coming, and what’s being explored.

Every feature you launch updates the present; every iteration shifts the slope. Show motion without hype, give direction without overreach, and show progress that people can believe in.

That’s how you sell the slope.

I’ve written about all of the component pieces on this newsletter so regular readers will recognise the themes, but it’s taken me the last 12 months to revise, simplify, and improve based on the feedback of over 20+ marketers.

With Customer Value Positioning (CVP), you’ll:

• Define the perfect website heading and slogan that resonates

• Detail exactly how your product helps your customer achieve their goals

• Describe the top three outcomes your customers desire

• Discover your ideal customer profile and build a fluff-free persona that aligns your sales, marketing, and product teams

And, just like the name might suggest, we’re basing the whole process on the only thing that matters: your customer.

Background: Why positioning needs more support

I was named Positioning & Messaging Maestro of the Year 2021 by the Product Marketing Alliance. Positioning is my jam: the intersection of customer-centricity, internal assumptions, and strategy in practice.

The literal definition of positioning is “to occupy a space in the customer’s mind,”… but how are we going to position effectively if we don’t understand what’s going on in their head?

Traditionally, marketers have relied on the ol’ trusty positioning statement, something that’s been around for ~30+ years. Unfortunately, it’s become a limp safety blanket for uninventive marketers and founders, crushing their innovations and aspirations into a maddening game of adlibs.

More recent positioning frameworks like Obviously Awesome have provided a much-needed boost and spotlight on positioning as a whole… but after talking to 100+ product marketers and founders over the last few years, it still leaves a gap:

• Positioning has so many subtle inputs, and is too intangible for many “casual” users to internalise no matter how good the book is

• Trying to connect the dots between the product you’ve built and the customers you think are good fit is difficult, because we’re so close to it that we can’t see the wood for the trees

• Usually these processes don’t have a tangible output – a mark of success that helps build momentum. A positioning document is great: but then what? How is that doc then translated to the website, or a tradeshow banner, or a sales deck?

Download The Customer Value Positioning framework

Get the PDF template here

Introducing my battle-tested positioning process

Firstly, I want to mention that this framework builds on top of the work of many great marketers, and as such you’ll see echoes and similarities with the work of April Dunford, Myk Pono, Al Ries and Jack Trout, Andy Raskin, and more. If this framework can be a quarter as good as their work, I’ll be happy.

Secondly, customer value positioning is not strictly just a framework, it’s a battle-tested process.

It’s built to ensure that with the right inputs and the right questions asked, the outcome is the same: quality positioning that resonates with your customer, and showcases how your product supports them in obtaining the value they desire.

Let’s walk through the process.

Discover your buyer persona

Buyer personas are discovered, not created.

The most valuable input to this process is customer insight. You can use your internal assumptions, but please: go and ask 10-15 customers these questions.

Transcribe your interviews, extract each point into an online Mural board, then group and summarise the themes.

Then organize those themes into:

• Jobs: common responsibilities and activities your customer does as part of their day-to-day

• Gains: their personal, professional, or business goals they want to achieve

• Pains: marks of failure and frustrations the customer must avoid

• Triggers: motivations that encourage them to solve their problem and switch away from their current solution

Make sure you’re also capturing some information on your customer’s psychographic profile. Are they early adopters and innovators, or laggards? Are they rational or emotional beings? Introverts or extroverts?

Describe the value your customers desire

I define value as an element that your customer wants to attain that:

• Is useful

• Is worth the effort (cost, time, energy)

• Is a priority for them

These might be the outcomes of solving problems and overcoming challenges, or new states that they can achieve by unlocking new capabilities.

You’ll see value themes jump out at you from the previous step. Describe why the value is important to the customer, with a value story following this script:

• Situation:

  • Today, our customer is… (what are they doing, what’s the situation that sets context for the value?)

• Problem:

  • However, …(the limitations or challenges that they’re experiencing)

• Implication:

  • This means…(what’s the downside of continuing in the current way?)

• Resolution:

  • By… (what does fixing the problem look like, not necessarily your product)

• Value:

  • … our customer will…(detail the value they can gain)

Detail how your product helps

We can’t promise that we’ll help customers achieve their outcomes without connecting it back to our product.

Think about the features within your product that support each desired value. These might be an obvious product capability like an integration, a less obvious consideration like a modern and clean UX, or even service elements like a dedicated account manager

Then list out the benefits that those features enable. Benefits are tangible advantages a buyer experiences when using your product; something they can report on, and usually starts with a verb.

Define your positioning

Start at the bottom.

Frame of reference

April Dunford’s book explains how a frame of reference works with a great example. A wholegrain cake can be a diet muffin, or a paleo snack – depending on the target customer.

The frame of reference, or category, you define your product as will help target customers understand in a few words what you are, what you do, and whether they’re interested or not.

Think about the value your customer desires, the trends they’re experiencing in the market, and how they interpret your product.

Alternative solutions

Your biggest competitors are probably spreadsheets and people power, rather than technology vendors. Defining the alternative solutions that your customers actually use will help your frontline sales and marketing teams to consider how they frame your product in conversations and in marketing material, and provides a foundation to build shared understanding.

Are customers relatively green and new to the market, using niche cloud solutions? That requires different go-to-market tactics, compared to customers who use legacy enterprise hosted solutions.

Value statements

For each value story you created in the Describe stage, get creative.

Think about how you message and wordsmith the outcomes they seek. Start these with a verb: get, make, change, smash, unlock, break, bring, grow – the opportunities are endless.

Website homepage hero

I think the most obvious use of positioning is to decide what you say on the top of your website homepage, so it makes sense to just lock this down in the positioning process.

You’re going to write two things:

1. A creative heading that catches attention and appeals to the outcomes your customer desires

2. A matter-of-fact sentence that describes what your product is (frame of reference), and key values or benefits

You can find some examples of good homepage messaging here.

Remember the psychographic details you captured in the first stage? Use these to find your tone of voice. If your customer is an innovative extrovert, you have license to be more creative and wacky; if they’re more risk-averse and logical, you’ll need to focus on the facts more than feelings.

Four steps to focused customer value positioning

In four stages, you’ve:

• Discovered your ICP and built a fluff-free persona that aligns your sales, marketing, and product teams

• Described the top three outcomes your customers desire

• Detailed exactly how your product helps your customer achieve their goals

• Defined the perfect website heading and slogan that resonates

And this process works, regardless of your industry, target customer, or product.

This process always results in successful positioning.

Think back to the definition of positioning: “to occupy a space in the customer’s mind,”.

Following the Customer Value Positioning framework helps you position more effectively by understanding exactly what your customers care about, finding the gaps that exist, and occupying them with positioning that resonates.

Frequently asked questions

Who should be involved in this process?

I recommend the CEO, a marketing lead, a sales lead, and a product lead: people who have experience with customers, and are charged with directing teams to make change. Positioning often leads to new ideas: don’t waste that opportunity.

What customers should we talk to?

Your ‘best-fit’ customers (and non-customers like them): those that represent the best product/market fit, the best growth opportunity, the highest satisfaction with your product. Niche down for tighter results.

How long does this take?

Most teams will budget for a minimum of 4 weeks with ~4 hours of workshops a week, but often 6-8 weeks gives you the opportunity to set customer interviews, interpret findings, and validate your messaging with internal teams and external methods.

Do we have to do research interviews?

Yes. I feel extremely strongly that interviewing best-fit customers, prospects, and friendly people in the market is the best way to understand your customers. You can do this process by building on top of internal assumptions, but it will never be as strong. Focus on evidence over assumptions.

Can you help facilitate this process?

Yes! Drop me a message on LinkedIn or reach out at Inflection Studio to discuss how we can help.

Quick Summary

Product marketing metrics show how narrative, positioning, and go-to-market strategy influence adoption, revenue, retention, and brand performance.

This definitive guide explains how to measure PMM success through clear KPIs, a four-layer framework, and a scorecard that connects storytelling to business outcomes.

Key ideas:

• Measure influence, not ownership

• Use four layers: Launch, Funnel, Retention, Brand

• Connect data to stories, because proof beats attribution

Product marketing’s biggest challenge isn’t defining what it is. It’s proving that it works.

Every product marketer I know wrestles with the same problem. You’re responsible for narrative, positioning, and adoption… but the metrics that prove impact live in someone else’s dashboard.

Sales tracks revenue. Product tracks usage. Growth tracks pipeline. Product marketing sits in the middle, influencing everything and owning nothing.

In good times, that ambiguity is tolerated. In 2025, it’s not.

To measure product marketing success, define clear KPIs by stage, set baselines, and report one page that connects narrative to outcomes.

This guide covers the core product marketing metrics and PMM KPIs that prove impact - and shows you how to measure influence across the funnel and turn results into proof.

In this guide:

1. What are product marketing metrics?

2. How to measure product marketing success

3. Launch and adoption metrics

4. Revenue, funnel, and win rate metrics

5. Retention, Expansion, and Voice of Customer

6. Brand, Market, and Perception Metrics

7. Build your PMM scorecard and dashboard

8. Tell the story of ROI with data and quotes

9. Common pitfalls and measurement traps

10. FAQ: Product marketing metrics

11. Focus on influence, measure momentum, show movement

12. Metric glossary: product marketing metrics and definitions

We will cover the frameworks, metrics, and scorecards that help you prove PMM’s impact, and the storytelling techniques that turn data into credibility.

By the end, you will have a practical structure for tracking product marketing success in 2025; one that connects business outcomes to PMM’s real work: shaping how products meet the market and how stories drive growth.

Budgets are tighter. Leadership expects ROI. Every function is being asked to show contribution, not activity.

The PMMs who connect their work to measurable outcomes like revenue, retention, and adoption will shape company strategy. The ones who cannot will get sidelined.

If you’ve seen my earlier piece on Measuring Product Marketing, you know that PMM does not need to own every metric.

It needs to influence the ones that matter and communicate that influence clearly.

What are product marketing metrics?

Definition: Product marketing metrics are the measurable indicators that show how positioning, messaging, and go-to-market strategy influence adoption, revenue, retention, and brand performance.

Product marketing metrics are how you translate narrative work into business impact.

They show where your storytelling, positioning, and enablement actually move the business through awareness, adoption, conversion, retention, or brand strength.

These metrics exist to make influence visible. PMMs rarely own every number, but they shape how every number performs.

Why they matter

Most PMMs know their work changes behavior, but struggle to prove it.

A consistent set of product marketing metrics closes that gap.

They connect messaging to measurable outcomes, giving leadership a clear view of where PMM drives momentum.

When tracked over time, these metrics create a common language between marketing, product, and revenue teams.

Metrics, KPIs, and OKRs: what is the difference?

The biggest measurement mistake in product marketing is treating everything as a metric.

Each level serves a different purpose.

• Metrics are signals. They tell you what is happening.

  • Example: feature adoption rate, message recall, win rate.

• KPIs are priorities. They focus attention on what matters right now.

  • Example: adoption within 30 days, pipeline influenced percentage.

• OKRs are commitments. They define what success looks like for the next quarter or half.

  • Example: increase product activation from 25 to 40 percent.

Metrics feed KPIs, and KPIs feed OKRs. That hierarchy keeps measurement aligned with outcomes instead of output.

The goal

Product marketing metrics are not about claiming credit.

They are about showing how PMM strengthens the systems that drive growth.

When you can point to data that proves movement - whether faster adoption, higher win rate, or better retention your story becomes evidence.

And in 2025, evidence is what earns influence.

How to measure product marketing success

Map PMM influence across the journey, pick two or three KPIs per layer, set baselines, tag PMM touchpoints in CRM and analytics, and report a one-page scorecard monthly. You are proving influence, not claiming ownership.

The 2025 PMM Measurement Framework

Every product marketer eventually hits the same moment.

You have launched the product, built the narrative, equipped sales, and delivered the assets.

Then in the next QBR someone asks, “What did this actually change?”

That question defines the future of product marketing.

It marks the difference between activity and impact.

Most PMMs do not fail to measure because they lack data. They fail because they measure everything as if it were the same.

This framework helps you separate signal from noise, influence from ownership, and activity from proof.

Step 1: Map where you create movement

Start with a simple question: where does product marketing have influence?

For most B2B SaaS teams, the path looks like this:

• Positioning

• Messaging

• Awareness

• Conversion

• Adoption

• Retention

• Expansion

You do not own every link in that chain, but you shape how strong each one becomes.

Map the moments where your work creates change. Those are your influence points.

Example influence points:

• A new narrative that increases demo-to-trial conversion.

• Refreshed onboarding content that improves time to value.

• Better enablement that raises win rate against a key competitor.

Each of these is measurable, even if PMM does not fully own the result.

Step 2: Separate metrics, KPIs, and OKRs

Not every number deserves equal weight.

If your OKR is “Increase feature adoption,” your KPI might be “Activation rate within 30 days.”

The metric is the actual number that proves it happened.

This structure keeps you focused on outcomes, not activity.

Step 3: Group your metrics into four layers

High-performing PMM teams organize measurement into four categories:

1. Launch and Adoption: Are people hearing about what you ship and using it?

2. Funnel and Revenue: Are you helping convert opportunities and accelerate deals?

3. Retention and Expansion: Are customers staying longer and spending more?

4. Brand and Market: Are you shaping perception in your category?

Pick two or three metrics per layer that connect directly to company objectives.

Simple, consistent measurement beats complex tracking every time.

Step 4: Design for storytelling, not spreadsheets

Metrics without a story do not persuade.

A single slide that shows what changed and why it changed will always carry more weight than a long spreadsheet.

Each metric should form part of a simple narrative:

• “We repositioned the product for clarity.”

• “Conversion increased 14 percent.”

• “Pipeline grew by 2 million dollars.”

That is what people remember.

The goal is not to prove every number down to causality. It is to connect the work you do to the movement it creates.

When you do that consistently, product marketing becomes measurable, credible, and impossible to ignore.

Launch and Adoption Metrics

Every product marketer knows the rush of a launch.

The countdown, the campaign, the internal excitement. Then two weeks later, silence.

That silence is what makes launch measurement tricky.

Launches are celebrated, but rarely analyzed. Teams move on before asking the question that matters most: did people hear about it, understand it, and use it?

Launch and adoption metrics are the first layer of proof. They show whether your story reached the right audience and turned curiosity into action.

What launch metrics tell you

A strong launch measurement plan answers three questions.

• Visibility: Did we reach the audience we intended to?

  • Typical signals include impressions, reach, web traffic, email opens, or event attendance.

• Resonance: Did the message land?

  • Track CTRs, demo requests, engagement rates, or message recall through surveys and interviews.

• Adoption: Did people try or use what we launched?

  • Measure activation rates, feature usage, time to first value, and short-term retention of new users.

If you can measure all three layers, you can see the full story: awareness that drives understanding, and understanding that drives use.

Metrics that matter

Before launch

• Content reach and engagement

• Awareness lift or share of voice

• Message recall or campaign recognition

During launch

• CTR on launch content

• Demo or trial requests

• Conversion rate on launch landing pages

After launch

• Feature usage rate

• Activation or onboarding completion

• Retention of new users after 30 or 90 days

How to connect metrics to influence

You do not need dozens of numbers. You need a few that link directly to company goals.

Example:

A team launched a feature with clear functional messaging but weak problem framing. Adoption lagged. After rewriting the story around customer outcomes and running an in-app campaign, usage rose about 40 percent within a month.

That is the kind of movement that changes how leadership views product marketing.

How to make launch metrics actionable

1. Define success before the launch starts.

2. Align on what “adoption” means for each feature or product.

3. Track trends over multiple launches to show improvement over time.

4. Pair quantitative metrics with qualitative feedback from customers or sales.

The takeaway

Launch metrics are not about celebration. They are about feedback.

They tell you whether your positioning, messaging, and timing worked.

And when you can show that a story led directly to adoption, you are not just running launches. You are proving that product marketing drives growth.

Revenue, Funnel, and Win Rate Metrics

At some point, every product marketer faces the same question: how does this work make money?

It is a fair question. Most of product marketing’s work happens upstream of revenue. You shape how people think and decide, not what they buy today.

But if you cannot show how your work influences the funnel, you will always be seen as a cost center instead of a growth driver.

This is where you start linking story to numbers.

How product marketing influences revenue

Product marketing does not close deals. It makes deals easier to close.

• Clearer positioning shortens the sales cycle.

• Sharper competitive framing improves win rate.

• Better enablement materials increase conversion and confidence.

That is influence. And once you can measure that influence, you can show business impact.

Key metrics to track

• Pipeline influenced: The share of opportunities that engaged with PMM-led campaigns, narratives, or assets. This shows how much pipeline was touched by your work.

• Pipeline contribution: The portion of opportunities or revenue sourced directly from PMM initiatives, such as product-led campaigns or launch-driven demand.

• Win rate: The percentage of deals won. Improvements here often follow sharper positioning or more effective enablement.

• Sales cycle velocity: The average time from opportunity creation to close. If your narrative helps prospects understand value faster, the cycle gets shorter.

• Sales enablement engagement: How often sellers use your materials and how that usage correlates with deal progress. Track both quantitative engagement and qualitative feedback.

How to measure in practice

You can track most of these metrics directly in your CRM or enablement platform.

1. Add a “PMM touchpoint” field in your CRM to tag opportunities influenced by PMM assets or campaigns.

2. Use campaign IDs or UTMs to auto-tag leads sourced from product marketing programs.

3. Run quarterly comparisons for deals with and without PMM touchpoints to see differences in win rate and cycle time.

4. Pair CRM data with seller feedback for context.

Illustrative result: In one region, opportunities tagged with PMM touchpoints had a 9 to 12 percent higher win rate and 15 to 20 percent shorter sales cycles than the control region over one quarter. Same ICP, same pricing. The only change was positioning clarity and competitive enablement. This is correlation, not sole causation, but it shows clear influence.

What to look for in patterns

You do not need perfect attribution to show impact. Directional proof is often enough.

If opportunities with PMM involvement close faster, at higher value, or with greater confidence, the story writes itself.

The takeaway

Product marketing does not need to own revenue to affect it.

You need to show that better storytelling creates movement in the funnel.

Once you can do that consistently, you change the conversation.

You stop explaining what PMM does and start showing what it changes.

Retention, Expansion, and Voice of Customer

Many teams stop measuring once a deal closes. That is a mistake.

The strongest proof of product marketing’s value often shows up months later, when customers either stay, expand, or churn.

Retention and expansion metrics reveal whether your story holds up after the sale. They show if your positioning was not only persuasive, but true.

Why retention metrics matter

A story that sells is good. A story that sustains is better.

When your narrative helps customers understand value faster and deeper, retention becomes the clearest signal that your messaging and product are aligned.

These metrics answer one question: did your story create lasting behavior change?

Core metrics to track

• Activation rate: The percentage of new users who reach their first moment of value within a defined time window. It shows whether your onboarding and messaging are clear.

• Time to value: The average time it takes a user to achieve that first success. Shorter time to value often reflects stronger positioning and clearer expectations.

• Feature adoption rate: The percentage of users engaging with the features highlighted in your messaging or launch campaign.

• Net dollar retention (NDR): Total revenue retained from existing customers, including expansions, minus churn. When NDR improves, it usually means customers understand and value your story.

• Renewal rate: The percentage of customers who renew their subscription or contract. Renewal proves long-term trust and alignment between promise and experience.

• Voice of Customer (VoC): Qualitative insights from NPS, CSAT, surveys, and interviews that explain why numbers move. They turn data into understanding.

How to connect data and insight

Trend your quantitative metrics, then layer in qualitative evidence.

Combine one number with one quote.

Example:

• Metric: Activation rate rose from 28 to 40 percent.

• Quote: “The new onboarding flow finally showed us how to use the feature for our exact workflow.”

That pairing transforms raw data into meaning.

Example: After simplifying in-app onboarding and rewriting feature messaging for clarity, activation rose from 25% to 39%, and renewal in the same cohort increased 5 points quarter-over-quarter. Correlation, not causation… but clear influence.

How to operationalize retention measurement

• Review activation and adoption trends monthly with Product and Customer Success.

• Run short interviews with new and renewing customers each quarter to gather narrative feedback.

• Share insights in cross-functional forums so positioning, onboarding, and success content evolve together.

The takeaway

Retention and expansion metrics are the long-term validation of your story.

They prove that product marketing does more than attract users. It helps them stay and grow.

When customers continue to believe in the value you describe, your story has moved from message to experience.

Brand, Market, and Perception Metrics

As companies mature, brand and perception become as important as launches or pipeline.

They shape how people interpret every move your company makes. Campaigns, pricing, analyst reports, and even product updates all land differently depending on how your brand is perceived.

Product marketing plays a central role here. You do not just tell the story of the company. You shape how the market tells it back.

Why perception metrics matter

Perception is the long game of product marketing. When your story is consistent and credible, it amplifies everything else.

Sales conversations start warmer. Analyst reviews are more favorable. Competitors begin repeating your language.

The challenge is that perception moves slowly. The signals are scattered and often qualitative. That is why you need a small, repeatable set of metrics to track momentum over time.

Brand awareness and preference

Brand awareness shows if people recognize you. Brand preference shows if they choose you.

Both are vital for understanding how your narrative is landing in the market.

How to measure

• Run aided and unaided brand recall surveys every six months.

• Track branded search volume using SEO tools.

• Monitor share of voice in tools like SparkToro, Brandwatch, or Mention.

• Measure preference through win-loss analysis or survey questions such as “Which vendor would you choose again?”

Awareness tells you if the market knows you exist. Preference tells you if they believe in you.

Category creation and narrative leadership

If your team is driving a category or narrative play, you need to measure how your language spreads.

This is how you prove thought leadership and market influence.

How to measure

• Track keyword adoption by competitors.

• Monitor analyst mentions in Gartner, Forrester, or G2 reports.

• Count earned media mentions that use your narrative framing.

• Review SEO keyword trends to see if your phrasing is being searched more often.

When others start using your words to describe the category, you know your message has taken hold.

Competitive and market positioning

Every PMM should understand how the brand performs against direct competitors.

This is about share of attention as much as share of revenue.

How to measure

• Track win rate by competitor in your CRM.

• Note competitive displacements where customers switch to or from your product.

• Measure share of conversation in PR, SEO, and social channels.

• Gather perception insights from win-loss interviews and analyst feedback.

Patterns matter more than single numbers. When win rates rise alongside stronger sentiment or media coverage, that is a signal that your story is working.

Analyst and influencer relationships

Analysts and influencers act as multipliers. They can validate your story or ignore it.

Both outcomes show up in measurable ways.

How to measure

• Track the number and quality of analyst mentions each quarter.

• Note report placements or movement in ranking position.

• Record invitations to research panels, webinars, or briefings.

• Monitor referral traffic from influencer collaborations.

Over time, these indicators build a picture of growing credibility.

The takeaway

You cannot measure brand perception with the same precision as activation or win rate, but you can measure direction and consistency.

When awareness rises, analyst mentions increase, and competitors begin to mirror your language, it is clear your story has market gravity.

That is the point where your narrative stops being something you say and starts being something others repeat.

Build Your PMM Scorecard and Dashboard

A product marketing dashboard isn’t a report. It’s a decision tool.

The goal isn’t to show everything you could measure. It’s to show how product marketing drives outcomes clearly, consistently, and on one page.

Start with structure

Every good dashboard begins with one question:

“What decisions should this data help us make?”

If your goal is to show impact, organize your scorecard around the four layers of PMM work:

1. Launch and Adoption

2. Funnel and Revenue

3. Retention and Expansion

4. Brand and Market

Pick two or three metrics per layer that you can measure reliably and explain easily. That’s usually 8 to 12 total metrics: enough to see patterns, not enough to create noise.

How to build the scorecard

Each metric should include five things:

1. What it measures: the signal you’re tracking.

2. How it’s tracked: your data source or tool.

3. Target or trend: what success looks like.

4. Owner: who’s responsible for accuracy.

5. Narrative: what the number means in context.

Example entry:

• Metric: Win rate

• Tracked in: CRM

• Trend: Up 8% quarter over quarter

• Owner: Sales + PMM

• Narrative: Improved messaging clarity increased buyer confidence and close rate.

That final line of narrative is what turns data into understanding.

Keep it visual

A strong PMM dashboard should be digestible in 30 seconds.

Use a single slide or page with clean trend lines, simple color coding, and quick variance indicators.

You can build this in Looker Studio, Tableau, Notion, or even Google Sheets. The tool doesn’t matter. The readability does.

Set the rhythm

Update your dashboard monthly with the PMM team and review it quarterly with leadership.

Remove any metric that no longer drives action. Add new ones only when strategy changes.

Consistency builds trust and gives everyone shared visibility into progress.

Connect metrics to OKRs

Tie every metric to an explicit PMM objective. That keeps your data connected to intent.

Example:

• Objective: Improve GTM effectiveness for new feature launches

• Key results:

  • Increase feature adoption from 25% to 40% within 90 days

  • Lift influenced pipeline by 15%

  • Improve brand share of voice by 10%

Every number on your dashboard should ladder up to one of those results.

Example one-slide layout (no table needed)

• Launch & Adoption: Activation in 30 days | Product analytics | +6pp | PMM + Product | Clearer onboarding flow improved clarity.

• Funnel & Revenue: Win rate | CRM | +2pp | Sales + PMM | Competitive positioning simplified buyer decisions.

• Retention & Expansion: NRR | Finance | +4pp | CS + PMM | Reinforced value messaging increased renewals.

• Brand & Market: Share of voice | SparkToro | +12% | PMM | Category story gaining traction in media mentions.

The takeaway

A PMM dashboard isn’t about tracking everything. It’s about showing what moves.

When you can connect launches to adoption, adoption to revenue, and revenue to retention, product marketing becomes visible.

You’re not asking for recognition. You’re presenting proof.

Tell the Story of ROI with Data and Quotes

Metrics prove movement. Stories make that movement matter.

The best product marketers know that numbers alone don’t persuade. Charts can show what changed, but they can’t explain why it happened or why it matters. That’s where narrative comes in.

Start with a baseline

Always begin with where you started. A clear baseline makes your progress credible and helps people see real change, not anecdotes.

Example: “Feature activation started at 20%. After we reworked onboarding and messaging, it reached 36% within one quarter.”

It’s simple, measurable, and believable.

Connect the chain of influence

PMM rarely creates isolated wins. It drives connected outcomes that span the funnel.

Show how positioning shaped engagement, how engagement improved conversion, and how adoption drove retention or expansion.

Example:

“We repositioned Feature X around outcome Y. Trial conversion rose 18%. Renewal rate for those users increased six points. That single message alignment added $1.2M in retained revenue.”

That’s the kind of evidence leadership remembers.

Add qualitative proof

Include short statements from customers, sellers, or analysts that bring the metrics to life.

• A customer saying, “This finally made sense to us.”

• A seller saying, “This deck helped close the gap on competitor calls.”

  One or two strong quotes make your numbers feel real.

Be transparent about what didn’t work

Honesty builds trust. Not every campaign hits its target.

If something underperformed, say so - and show what you learned.

Example: “Our launch content drove strong awareness but weak conversion. Post-launch interviews revealed confusion around pricing, so we simplified messaging in follow-up campaigns.”

Frame in business language

Avoid marketing jargon. Speak the language of growth, retention, and efficiency.

• Instead of “increased awareness,” say “expanded top-of-funnel reach that doubled demo volume.”

• Instead of “updated messaging,” say “clarified buyer narrative that shortened sales cycles by 10 days.”

  You’re translating creative work into commercial impact.

Tell a coherent story

Structure your ROI narrative around three parts:

1. What changed: the baseline and intervention.

2. Why it changed: the strategy or story behind the improvement.

3. What it unlocked: the business impact or outcome.

You don’t need perfect attribution. You need a clear through-line between the story you told and the movement that followed.

The takeaway

The ROI story isn’t about defending product marketing. It’s about showing alignment between narrative and business outcomes.

Lead with clarity, not complexity. Share evidence, not excuses.

If you can show how your work helped the business move faster, close stronger, or retain longer, that’s ROI.

And once you can do that consistently, you’re not proving PMM’s value anymore. You’re defining it.

Common Pitfalls and Measurement Traps

Every product marketer wants to show impact. But the way you measure and communicate it can either build credibility or quietly undermine it.

After working with dozens of teams on product marketing measurement, I’ve seen the same traps appear again and again. They’re not about effort. They’re about focus.

1. Tracking vanity metrics

Impressions, clicks, and downloads might look good, but they rarely prove business impact.

A simple rule: if a metric wouldn’t change a decision, it doesn’t belong on your dashboard.

Vanity metrics create noise, not clarity.

2. Confusing ownership with influence

PMM influences many outcomes… but it rarely owns them outright.

Claiming full credit for pipeline or revenue invites friction with other teams.

Frame it accurately: “Win rate increased after PMM-led enablement” is more credible than “PMM increased win rate.”

3. Changing metrics too often

If your metrics shift every quarter, no one will trust your trends.

Stick to the same core KPIs for at least two quarters so patterns emerge. Add or replace metrics only when strategy changes.

Consistency builds trust faster than novelty.

4. Ignoring qualitative context

Numbers show movement. Stories explain it.

When you present adoption or retention data, include one quote or insight that clarifies why it changed.

Dashboards without context lead to misinterpretation.

5. Overcomplicating dashboards

More data doesn’t mean better reporting. The best PMM scorecards fit on one page.

If you need to explain a metric for more than ten seconds, simplify it.

Clarity is what earns attention in leadership meetings.

6. Measuring too late

PMMs often decide what to track after a launch but by then, baselines are gone.

Set your metrics before kickoff. Ask: “What would prove this worked?”

That question changes how teams plan and execute.

7. Focusing on output, not outcomes

Activity is easy to measure; impact is harder.

“We created five assets” is output.

“Activation increased 20% after launch” is outcome.

Always lead with the result your work enabled.

The takeaway

Measurement isn’t about defending PMM. It’s about establishing credibility.

Keep your system clean, consistent, and connected to business outcomes.

Avoid vanity. Clarify influence. Add context. Simplify relentlessly.

If your metrics help people understand how product marketing moves the business, you’ve already won half the battle.

FAQ: Product Marketing Metrics

Product marketing metrics are the signals and KPIs that show how PMM influences awareness, conversion, adoption, retention, expansion, and brand perception. They turn qualitative storytelling into measurable business impact.

How do you measure product marketing?

Start by mapping PMM’s influence across the customer journey, from positioning to adoption to retention.

Choose two or three metrics per stage, define baselines and targets, tag PMM-led touchpoints in your CRM and analytics tools, and track trends monthly.

Measurement is about visibility, not ownership. You’re proving influence, not claiming control.

What are the key product marketing KPIs for 2025?

The most universal KPIs for B2B SaaS PMMs include:

• Feature adoption rate

• Activation rate within 30 days

• Influenced pipeline percentage

• Win rate improvement

• Sales cycle velocity

• Net dollar retention (NDR)

• Brand awareness and share of voice

These connect PMM work to tangible business outcomes.

What are the best metrics for a B2B SaaS product launch?

For new launches, focus on three layers:

• Visibility: impressions, site visits, webinar attendance

• Resonance: CTRs, demo requests, message recall

• Adoption: activation, usage, 90-day retention

Together, they show whether your story reached the right audience and turned attention into action.

How do you prove product marketing ROI?

Connect the chain of influence.

Show how better positioning led to higher engagement, how that engagement improved conversion, and how adoption lifted retention or revenue.

Even directional proof builds credibility. The goal is to show clear movement, not perfect attribution.

How often should PMM KPIs be reviewed?

Review KPIs monthly within the PMM team and quarterly with leadership.

Keep the core set consistent for at least two quarters to establish trends. Update only when strategy or business goals shift.

Which tools help measure product marketing performance?

For most PMMs, a mix of familiar tools works:

• CRM: Salesforce, HubSpot (pipeline and win rate)

• Product analytics: Pendo, Amplitude, Mixpanel (adoption and activation)

• Survey tools: Typeform, SurveyMonkey (awareness and recall)

• SEO and social: Ahrefs, SparkToro, Brandwatch (share of voice)

• Dashboards: Looker Studio, Notion, Google Sheets (scorecards and visibility)

What’s the difference between influenced and sourced pipeline?

• Influenced pipeline includes any opportunity that engaged with PMM-led assets or campaigns.

• Sourced pipeline (or contribution) measures opportunities directly created by PMM-led efforts.

  Influenced shows reach; sourced shows direct creation. Both matter.

Focus on Influence, Measure Momentum, Show Movement

If there’s one thing that separates strong product marketing from reactive marketing, it’s clarity of impact.

Product marketing metrics aren’t about collecting data for the sake of reporting. They’re about building proo and evidence that your work drives movement where it matters most.

• Proof that your story helped people understand the product.

• Proof that clarity improved conversion and win rate.

• Proof that customer belief stayed strong after the sale.

The specific KPIs will vary by company and stage. What matters is consistency and context.

• Launch and adoption metrics show how effectively your story reached the right audience and drove action.

• Revenue and funnel metrics show how that story accelerated decisions and improved win rates.

• Retention and expansion metrics show whether your message held up post-sale.

• Brand and market metrics show how your narrative is shaping perception and credibility in the category.

Together, these layers form a system for measuring both motion and meaning.

The best PMMs don’t chase ownership of every number. They show where their work creates momentum - and make that influence visible through clear, consistent evidence.

If you do that well, your metrics become more than a dashboard. They become proof of strategic impact.

And when product marketing can show that it changes how the market sees, buys, and stays. When your metrics become evidence and your story becomes proof, product marketing stops asking for recognition, because the results speak for themselves.

Metric Glossary: Product Marketing Metrics and Definitions

A quick reference for the most important product marketing metrics, KPIs, and success indicators: what they mean, how to measure them, and why they matter.

Feature adoption rate

The percentage of active users who engage with a specific new feature within a defined time window.

Use product analytics tools like Pendo or Amplitude to track usage patterns and adoption curves. This metric connects product launches to real customer behavior.

Activation rate

The percentage of new users who reach their first moment of value, the action that proves they understand and can use the product successfully.

A high activation rate means your onboarding and positioning are working.

Time to value (TTV)

How long it takes a new user or account to realize value after sign-up or activation.

Shorter time to value suggests clear messaging and an intuitive product experience.

Influenced pipeline

The share of opportunities that interacted with product marketing-led assets, campaigns, or events.

Track this in your CRM using tags or campaign IDs. It’s a key measure of PMM’s commercial influence.

Pipeline contribution

Opportunities or revenue directly sourced from product marketing programs.

Unlike influenced pipeline, this measures direct creation such as demand generated by a product-led launch.

Win rate

The percentage of closed-won opportunities out of total closed deals.

Improvements here often follow better positioning, sharper competitive enablement, or more aligned messaging.

Sales cycle velocity

The average time from opportunity creation to close.

A shorter cycle suggests buyers understand your value faster: a direct outcome of clearer PMM storytelling.

Net dollar retention (NDR)

Total revenue retained from existing customers, including expansions and upgrades, minus churn.

High NDR means the product narrative is resonating long-term and driving sustained usage.

Renewal rate

The percentage of customers renewing their contracts or subscriptions in a given period.

Often improved by reinforcing value messaging between Customer Success and PMM.

Feature engagement depth

A complementary metric to feature adoption, showing how often and how deeply users interact with a feature post-launch.

It helps PMM understand not just who uses a feature, but how embedded it becomes.

Voice of Customer (VoC) indicators

Qualitative signals like NPS, CSAT, and customer interviews.

They explain why quantitative metrics move - crucial for translating performance into insight.

Brand awareness

Measures recognition of your company or product within your category.

Track aided and unaided recall through surveys and search volume trends.

Brand preference

Indicates how often customers choose you first when evaluating options.

Often measured through win-loss data or survey-based “first choice” responses.

Share of voice (SOV)

Your brand’s portion of total mentions or visibility across media, social, or analyst channels.

An increasing SOV suggests growing market authority and narrative traction.

Analyst and influencer signals

Mentions, report placements, or invitations to brief or collaborate with analysts and influencers.

These reflect credibility and thought leadership momentum.

Category adoption

When analysts, media, or competitors begin using your framing or terminology to describe the space.

It’s the clearest sign your narrative is defining the market conversation.

Author

Written by James Doman-Pipe. I’ve led PMM teams across B2B SaaS and specialize in measurement, positioning, and go-to-market strategy.

Last updated: October 2025

Top takeaways:

• 100 B2B AI SaaS hero sections reveal a clear maturity curve as they evolve: what it is → what it does → what it means.

• 58% of companies lead with benefits, but few make the full leap to detailing value

• “Efficiency” dominates messaging, but splinters into five subtypes: speed, automation, focus, simplicity, scalability.

• Later-stage leaders are calm and declarative: confidence replaces hype.

• Great messaging isn’t clever; it’s sequenced. Comprehension, belief, authority.

The hero section is where a lot of AI startups stumble: not from laziness, but from moving fast without a clear message. The market is noisy, categories are shifting, and everyone is racing to plant a flag. In the rush, clarity is the first casualty.

The result is a sea of AI websites that look modern, feel expensive, and say almost nothing.

So I decided to study it properly.

I analyzed 100 funded B2B AI startups, all launched or funded within the past 18 months. I looked only at the hero section and broke it down line by line.

I wanted to understand how companies are positioning themselves at the most critical moment of first impression. What they’re promising, what they’re proving, and what they’re getting ‘wrong’.

Your hero section is a complete argument in miniature, not at all decoration. In five seconds, it must make a claim, show evidence, and earn belief. The headline is your thesis. The subtext is your proof, and the CTA is your ask.

So your messaging needs to work hard. Every word reflects what you know about your customer, how confident you are in the product, and what you want them to believe.

How the study worked

Each site was coded across five dimensions:

• Headline focus: feature, benefit, or value

• Sentence structure: declarative, imperative, aspirational, or question

• Value proposition: efficiency, growth, cost, risk, or convenience

• Supporting copy function: elaboration, trust, or feature explanation

• Hero elements: CTAs, visuals, proof devices (logos, metrics, awards)

Once I’d classified everything, I could see clear trends: how language maturity tracks with funding stage, how tone correlates with motion, and how proof devices evolve from product to platform.

And what emerged was a simple truth: as AI companies grow, their messaging matures from “what it is” to “what it does” to “what it means.”

Three archetypes of AI messaging

When you zoom out, every company in the dataset falls into one of three storytelling patterns. Some lead with what they’ve built, others lead with what it delivers - and a small group lead with the outcomes their customers can achieve.

Those differences aren’t stylistic; they reveal how each company understands its buyer.

1. Feature-centric (26%)

This group leads with the product itself.

“The AI Spreadsheet.”

“AI-powered data migration.”

You see this most often in Seed and Series A companies. They’re still defining a category and selling to early adopters who want specificity, not slogans. For technical audiences, clarity is credibility.

Feature-centric messaging works because it reduces cognitive friction, but early-stage messaging often fails when marketers try to be too creative. The best headlines sound obvious because they’re built on empathy with how users actually search or think.

But the risk is narrowness. If all you ever talk about is what it is, you’ll struggle to sell beyond early adopters.

2. Benefit-centric (58%)

By Series B, the conversation shifts. The company has proof points, customer stories, and a repeatable funnel. Messaging now moves from what it is to what it does.

“Accelerate your workflow with AI insights you can trust.” (AlphaSense)

“Transform every customer experience with AI agents.” (Cresta)

These aren’t outcomes yet. They’re the first-order effects: things like faster work, smoother collaboration, or fewer blockers.

Benefits describe the direct, visible impact of using the product, not the downstream business result.

That distinction matters. A feature tells me what it does. A benefit tells me what it changes immediately for me. Value tells me why that change matters.

The strongest benefit messaging translates capability into consequence.

Examples:

• Save time → finish projects faster

• Improve accuracy → reduce rework

• Simplify workflows → less cognitive drag

When written well, benefit-led messaging creates momentum. It makes the buyer believe that change is not only possible: it’s already happening.

But most companies stop there. They never connect the benefit to the business driver behind it.

3. Value-centric (16%)

This is the rarest and most mature form of messaging, the kind that doesn’t just sell what the product does, but what it creates.

You know it when you see it.

It’s not “AI for X.”

It’s “Eliminate crime.” (Flock Safety)

Or “Time is money. Save both.” (Ramp)

These companies aren’t selling capability or even efficiency. They’re selling value: the measurable outcomes that justify the decision, the spend, and the belief.

Value-centric messaging is where your story shifts from “why it works” to “why it matters.” It replaces effort with evidence, and makes the ROI tangible.

Value isn’t abstract. Value is the business delta your buyer can defend in a meeting: revenue unlocked, risk reduced, cost avoided, time converted into cash flow.

This is where the concept of value nuggets come in: the small, evidence-backed links between what your product delivers and the metric that matters most to your buyer.

They turn “save time” into “close deals 30% faster.”

They turn “reduce errors” into “protect 5% of annual revenue.”

That’s what makes value messaging believable. It’s not louder… it’s sharper.

And that’s why great value-centric messaging is best defined once a company has reliable proof: customer stories, quantified outcomes, repeatable success.

It’s not something you claim… it’s something you earn.

So while early-stage teams rush to sound visionary, the best late-stage ones sound measured. They know the numbers, they show the results, and they build belief by proving the delta.

Structure and tone: the language of confidence

One of the clearest signals in the data was how sentence structure shifts as companies mature.

• Declarative statements: 71%

• Imperative commands: 19%

• Aspirational phrases: 7%

• Questions: 3%

Later-stage language skews more declarative. Early teams show relatively more aspirational lines and the occasional question, though both are still the minority overall.

Declarative headlines project certainty. They say, “This exists. It works. You need it.”

Imperatives add urgency. Aspirational lines sell vision. Questions invite empathy but also hesitation.

It’s a reflection of posture, not polish. The more confident a company is in its data, adoption, or leadership, the more declarative its language becomes.

The hardest part of marketing isn’t attention, it’s belief. Buyers don’t respond to nuance; they respond to conviction. Tone isn’t decoration. It’s evidence of belief.

The best companies write like they’ve already earned trust because they have.

What companies are really promising

When you strip away the design and the demo CTAs, every AI SaaS hero page is making one of five promises:

• Time savings or efficiency (44%)

• Revenue growth (22%)

• Convenience or ease of use (11%)

• Risk mitigation or security (9%)

• Cost reduction (8%)

That 44% bucket, efficiency, dominates the market. But “efficiency” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

When I unpacked the efficiency claims in the dataset, they split into five subtypes, each reflecting a different buyer mindset and stage of operational maturity.

• Speed (31%): for operators under pressure to move faster.

• Automation (26%): for teams seeking leverage and scale without headcount.

• Focus (18%): for managers looking to reallocate time toward strategic work.

• Simplicity (15%): for founders and teams tired of tool overload.

• Scalability (10%): for executives aiming for repeatable, predictable output.

These subtypes matter because they signal who you’re really selling to and how far your buyer is from the problem.

• Speed converts when urgency is high and switching costs are low.

• Automation converts when pain is repetitive and measurable.

• Focus converts when context switching is the silent killer.

• Simplicity converts when bloat has replaced clarity.

• Scalability converts when process is the constraint, not performance.

When I work with clients, this is often the missing layer. They have value language but not value precision.

They’ll say “save time” when what they mean is “reduce operational drag.” They’ll say “improve productivity” when they could quantify “increase output per rep by 40%.”

Precision is what makes value believable. It’s the difference between a polite nod and a signed demo.

The companies that win aren’t louder. They’re clearer about what “better” actually means.

The proof layer: what builds belief

The supporting text under the headline does one of three jobs:

• Elaboration (65%): adds clarity or detail.

• Trust (21%): social proof, numbers, or credibility.

• Feature explanation (9%): connects benefit to mechanism.

This is the part of the hero section that separates good from great.

If your headline makes a claim, your subtext should translate it into a number, a name, or a mechanism. Pick one.

Two quick contrasts:

• Strong: “Give every employee an AI assistant that puts your company’s knowledge to work.”

• Weak: “Accelerate innovation through collaborative intelligence.”

Visuals and CTAs: motion reflects model

Even in an era obsessed with PLG, 68% of AI SaaS sites still rely on a ‘book a demo’ CTAs. Only 24% lead with ‘start free’ or ‘try it now’.

That single statistic shows most AI companies still sell through a high-touch, consultative motion.

Their products are complex and enterprise-leaning, and buyers still expect a conversation before committing.

So the website’s job isn’t to close a deal. It’s to hand momentum to sales.

The surrounding elements reinforce this motion.

Customer logos

• 81% of companies use customer logos directly in the hero.

• Logos appear most often immediately below the headline or CTA.

• Their function is almost always to build trust quickly by showing real adoption or credibility.

In early-stage companies, logos act as validation. In later-stage companies, larger sets of logos appear as social proof. Regardless, they’re an instant shortcut to credibility.

Static images and product videos

• 55% use static product images.

• 22% use looping product videos or short animations.

Static UI shots are still the default. They clarify what the product is in a glance.

Videos are less common but typically appear once a company has a mature product story to show, demonstrating flow, motion, or real-world use.

That shift from static to dynamic tends to correlate with funding maturity, suggesting that as resources grow, so does investment in visual storytelling.

Metrics

• Around one-third of companies include metrics in the hero, usually alongside or beneath social proof.

• The most common patterns are user counts (“Trusted by 500,000+ users”) and performance claims (“4× faster”, “50% cost reduction”).

Metrics offer quantified proof. They turn abstract promises into something a buyer can test or imagine.

The most effective examples pair the number directly with the headline’s promise, like a productivity claim supported by a speed or output metric.

The messaging maturity curve

The patterns in the dataset tell a simple story. As companies grow, the hero message grows up too. The center of gravity moves from what it is, to what it does, to what it means.

Seed and Series A: earn comprehension first

• Start by naming the thing. Four to six words. Concrete noun. No poetry. The supporting line explains the mechanism or the workflow it replaces, often with a quick nod to who it is for.

• Visuals are functional screenshots that remove ambiguity.

• The primary job is comprehension, not persuasion.

Series B and Series C: translate capability into consequence

• With live customers and repeatable wins, the headline shifts from capability to consequence.

• The subtext pays off the claim with credibility.

• You see customer logos, specific metrics, and short product clips that answer the buyer’s next question: show me.

Series D and beyond: claim the meaning, not the mechanic

• Late-stage language is calm, declarative, and unhurried. Category leaders do not ask; they state. The headline talks about value and stakes, not features.

• The subtext asserts leadership and scope, showing how the platform supports multiple teams, use cases, or an ecosystem.

Each stage earns the right to the next. You can’t communicate authority before you’ve earned belief, and you can’t earn belief before you’ve built understanding.

When teams try to skip ahead, the story breaks… not because the words are wrong, but because the evidence isn’t there yet.

Outliers that prove the rule

Every pattern has exceptions, but the smartest exceptions aren’t accidents. They’re intentional breaks built on context.

Wexler: “Find every fact. Win every case.”

A value-focused, transformation-level headline from a company barely out of seed stage. It works because the vertical is narrow, the outcome is emotional, and the link between product and value is obvious. It’s a lesson in confidence with context: bold claims land when they’re believable inside a defined niche.

Cursor: “Built to make you extraordinarily productive.”

Despite serving a technical audience, Cursor leads with value, not features. The message isn’t “AI code editor” or “developer copilot.” It’s a clear promise of outcome: extraordinary productivity. That’s what every developer ultimately optimizes for. It proves you can write value-centric messaging early, as long as the value is immediate, measurable, and credible.

Ramp: “Time is money. Save both.”

Late-stage clarity at its best. No metaphors. No jargon. Just a universal truth expressed with perfect compression. While others chase originality, Ramp wins by distilling the value everyone understands but few state so cleanly.

The thread between them is conviction. Wexler shows focus. Cursor shows confidence. Ramp shows clarity.

Each breaks the pattern, but none break the system. They still obey the same rule of message-market fit: your clarity must match your customer’s context. When your value is obvious, your job isn’t to decorate it. It’s to express it cleanly, not cleverly.

How great messaging really works

After reviewing 100 AI startup homepages, my takeaway is not that great messaging is clever or unique or random. It’s that great messaging is possible for everyone - with the right inputs, and the right system.

First you earn comprehension. Then you earn belief. Then you earn authority.

That sequence is not optional. If you try to sell meaning before you have proof, the message collapses. If you stay stuck in features after you have outcomes, you leave money on the table.

Messaging is not decoration. It’s a system that turns what you know about the customer into language that moves them in the right order, at the right time.

The companies that win do three things consistently:

• They state what the product is when clarity is the constraint.

• They prove what it does once results exist.

• They quantify why it matters once the market trusts them.

Every great message is a sequence of earned beliefs. You don’t buy attention; you earn comprehension, belief, and authority. The companies that win don’t shout louder: they think clearer.