Ton Dobbe 🔆

We all know triggering an emotion can very effective in messaging - yet in 99% out of 100 B2B SaaS websites / posts / emails I read it's absent. As if we think B2B audiences only respond to facts. Even the biggest bean counters and blue collar engineers are humans. They have frustrations. They care about different things. They have anxieties. Aspirations. All of that makes them real - and a better or worse fit for your product. It's therefore always part of step 1, 2 and 3 in my repositioning projects. Not getting this right makes it impossible to - articulate who you're for and who not - build a compelling value proposition - position your product in a way that stands out - even create pricing power. Emotional appeal is foundational

Niching down is by far the most powerful first step to take to create defensible differentiation. In my day to day work repositioning sales-led saas companies, this represents the full first week of the process. Why? Because it requires you to go way deeper than the traditional firmographics /demographics. Most companies stop there - and that's a shame. Companies that are the same size, same vertical, same region and with the same service are still radically different on the inside just by what they aspire and care about, their dynamics, their business model, their risk appetite, their belief system and so on. These ingredients make all the difference if you look at what keeps them up at night - and hence what solution they need.

In hindsight what worked out better than I could ever have imagined is two things: 1) Writing my book The Remarkable Effect (see featured section). It helped me to get my thinking organized around what it takes to build software businesses that we start talking about, and keep taking about. That's the essence of product marketing if you ask me. 2) Write daily about the challenges (your) software companies face and how to go about solving that in smart ways. Daily writing just makes everything sharper. And my fear I'd run out of topics has been proven wrong pretty early on. Now on a 2 year streak - and the list of topics is I should still write about is well over 2 years long. Just start.

One of the aspects that's underrated in B2B marketing - at least for what I see in software space that's aimed at mid- to large sized companies - is the use of emotions. Just open 99 out 100 B2B SaaS website - and you'll see emotion isn't use anywhere. We seem to believe that, because we're in B2B we need to talk big numbers and ROI - but isn't it true that CFOs, Heads of Engineering or VPs of Legal are people as well? I've come to realize in the day to day repositioning work I do with software companies that emotion is one of the most powerful ingredients of the value prop and positioning statements. Not to make people cry But to make people feel heard, understood and seen.

In all the repositioning work I do with Sales-led SaaS companies the #1 activity in week 1 is always deeply understanding who they're for, and who they're not for. This dynamic of for/ not for is critical - in particular in understanding what differs in what they - care about - fear - get frustrated with - aspire From there we then zoom into what keeps them up at night - i.e. getting to the heart of the pains & problems they struggle. Next: ranking the problem on two important ingredients: How valuable they are to solve (scale 1-10) and how critical they are to solve (scale 1-10) This always drives heated but highly clarifying discussions. Next: validate the essence of this with actual customers. Do they recognize themselves?

This is a tricky area because it's very easy to skim over the most important nuances. And secondly, very often, I see SaaS vendors (when running internal positioning project) get the problem definition wrong due to bias. You simply don't see it/hear it. So, reflecting on respositioning dozens of Sales-Led SaaS companies - here are some tips: To challenge whether you’ve nailed the problem definition, I always check 3 questions: Does reading the pain 1 - get to an emotional connection at the sensory level? 2 - give the owner of the problem an itchy feeling? make the owner of the problem cringe? 3 - If your problem definition doesn’t give that reaction, most of the time, you need to dig deeper Getting the problem right is half the success