The Overview #89: Interview for mindset, survey the right way, marketing vs product

Published over 1 year ago • 2 min read

Your marketing site has to be better than your product

100%. It’s really easy for you to think about your website as ‘done’ to be added to with new pages… but refreshing the whole thing? Huge project, huge investment, let’s put it off.

But your website HAS to be more iterative than how you build your product, simply because the feedback loops are much, much shorter. You can react much more quickly to lead volumes and flows, as ICP patterns become clearer, as you refine your positioning, as you learn your customer’s objections, and what the market is looking for.

When was the last time you really took a minute to refresh your messaging on the website?

Here are some of the tips from Jason’s article I think are the most interesting to take note of:

Get your exec team around the table and just ask: “Is our marketing site better than our product?”. Ask everyone. If they don’t agree, make changes this month.
Adopt the persona of any customer segment with > 10% of your revenue. Does your marketing site really speak to them? Are you sure?
Does the marketing site let me get information how I like it to process it? Is there a weekly webinar? A whitepaper? An FAQ? Intercom? Why not? Why do prospects have to process information one single way?
Is your marketing site more professional than the competition? It isn’t? Then why would I pick you?

B2B SaaS is just all forms

Absolutely. It’s all forms.

So how do you differentiate against other forms? Hint: it’s not with features. It’s with the value of what those forms enable.

Survey correctly, please

This is a great example of a survey that a company spent a lot of time figuring out, and will trust the results, but won’t be practically accurate for them.

I’ve written before about how to use surveys for marketing purposes and for understanding your customers, and they’re great tools, but the biggest mistake I see – apart from executional oversights like the one above – is that folks will jump to use surveys first. That’s wrong.

Surveys are best used after qualitative research has taken place. You want to first understand what the patterns and variables that matter are – before then using surveys to see the spread of representation across your target response base.

Interview for mindset

If you’re interviewing product marketers, find those that have the right mindset. And don’t ask them to complete crappy take home tasks. We all hate them, so why do we continue to ask others to do them?

In the thread linked above, Alicia talks about her process to interview for mindset:

I used to give candidates a problem and I’d ask them to walk me through how they’d approach building a GTM strategy for solving this problem — usually in-person with a white board …

This was:
– Casual and collaborative so they didn’t feel performance pressure (we did it together) and I could see how they responded to feedback
– A good way to identify if their mindset defaulted to understanding the customer, or goes straight into picking the right channel
– Doesn’t require an ounce of thinking outside of the allotted interview time. There’s no deliverable, it’s 100% an assessment of customer-first mindset because the rest can be taught! Hope this helps.

Something to keep in mind when you’re hiring your next team member.

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