Wait – is it Friday? Nope, it is indeed Saturday.
Dropping into your inbox with a Saturday special today, and here’s why: this week was a particularly busy one, capped off by our first GTMfund dinner of the year.
Speaking of which, GTMfund’s value proposition perfectly illustrates this week’s main newsletter topic: the critical importance of messaging and positioning. Take a look at these contrasting statements:
🚫 GTMfund is an early-stage venture capital firm investing in pre-seed to series A software companies.
✅ GTMfund is an exclusive network of proven revenue leaders investing in the next wave of SaaS. Let us help you get from 0 – IPO.
See the difference? That’s the power of positioning and messaging.
In today’s market, where technological moats are declining, this becomes even more crucial, especially for early-stage companies fighting to carve out their niche.
However, crafting a script that both encapsulates your unique value and resonates with your audience is tough. It’s an art that requires meticulous ideation, consistent editing, and a deep understanding of your brand’s identity.
Let’s get into it.
The Attributes of Good Messaging and Positioning
Jesse Williams and David Stillman of Stori break down the attributes👇
Good messaging isn’t just about crafting catchy phrases or memorable taglines. It’s fundamentally about clearly articulating your unique value and standing out in the crowded market.
But how do you gauge if your messaging hits the mark? Here are a few indicators:
- Look at your top-of-the-funnel bounce rates.
- If people are landing on your website and immediately bouncing, it’s possible they don’t understand what you’re offering or believe that you’re a genuinely competitive solution.
- Check the conversion from the top-of-funnel to middle-of-funnel leads.
- If there’s a discrepancy with the expectations and intentions between these stages, that’s usually a sign that your messaging isn’t aligned.
- Take note of qualitative feedback.
- If you’re repetitively hearing surprise when people learn what you do, that’s an indicator.
If it does need work, these are three attributes of good messaging and positioning to consider:
1. Audience-aware
Effective messaging starts with understanding your audience. Without deep knowledge of who you’re speaking to, your messages may not resonate with your target audience’s specific needs and interests. When you look at how to segment your audience for messaging, consider these three broad categories:
- Industry: This is your wider audience that cares about who you are and what you do.
- Category: These are your decision-makers. They want compelling reasons why they should choose you over other options.
- Product: These are your end-users who want to know how your product or service can help them achieve specific goals.
Understanding these categories can help you tailor your messaging for optimum impact.
2. Competitor Evaluation
Evaluating your competitors is crucial to positioning your business effectively. The principle here is simple: your messaging must draw a clear line of differentiation between “them” and “us.” It’s not enough to say you’re “the best” or “the first” in your field.
More than often than not, we can actually take the text from one site and just copy and paste it right over to the other one. And if we change the color of it, change the background image, you wouldn’t know.
You need to provide hard, quantifiable benefits that set you apart, and those benefits need to strike a balance between what brings value to your consumers and distinguishes you from your competitors.
3. Clarity
Clarity is another critical component of effective messaging. If your message is bogged down with jargon, unnecessary adverbs or adjectives, or technical language beyond the comprehension of your target audience, it will only lead to confusion.
Running qualitative interviews with your ICP is an effective way to gauge how clear your messaging is.
💚 Sponsor shoutout:
This newsletter is brought to you by Common Room—the modern buyer journey platform.
Common Room supercharges your GTM motion by bringing all of your product usage data, social media signals, community activity, and CRM insights together so you can surface high-intent prospects, convert customers faster, and drive more revenue.
What you’ll see in Common Room:
- High-fit leads across 30+ sources, tailored to your ICP
- Deep context from product, community, social, and CRM data
- Intent signals tied to individual buyers
- Automated ways to convert prospect —> pipeline
Check out Common Room and give your GTM teams the gift of conversion.
👀 More for your eyeballs:
Google’s popular web browser, Chrome, is getting a makeover with the latest release of Chrome M121, which introduces three new generative AI features that aim to make browsing easier, more efficient and more personalized. They are aimed at automating and enhancing common tasks such as organizing tabs, creating custom themes and writing text on the web. Read more about Google Chrome’s 3 AI features here.
👂 More for your eardrums:
Max Altschuler is the Founder and General Partner of our company GTMfund, an early-stage fund focused on B2B SaaS startup backed by the world’s best tech GTM leaders – which GTMnow is the media extension of.
Previously, he was the Founder and CEO of Sales Hacker, a global digital media company that he grew and successfully sold to Outreach in 2018. He then took over as VP of Marketing for rapidly growing Outreach. In 2023, Max acquired the company he once founded, SalesHacker, bringing it under the GTMfund umbrella and rebranding it as GTMnow.
Max has been published by Forbes, Inc., HBR, MIT Review, Time, Salesforce, and Nasdaq, and was named one of LinkedIn’s Top Voices for Sales and Crunchbase’s 25 Sales Leaders to Follow. He is the author of three books and multiple Wiley publications, including bestselling books Hacking Sales and Career Hacking for Millennials.
In this episode, you’ll hear a recap of 2023 at GTMfund and Max’s predictions for 2024 – from M&A, to remote work, to the role of the SDR.
🚀 Start-ups to watch:
Roam: This is a virtual office that has started to address the challenge of working with distributed teams. As an incredible go-to-market leader expresses: “since adding Roam, I’ve eliminated 90% of my recurring meetings and my average meeting is roughly 7 minutes. Acceleration and accessibility were the primary motivations for me and its been a game changer.”
🔥 Hottest GTM jobs of the week:
- Head of Growth at CloseFactor (Remote – US)
- Head of Customer Experience at Kick (Remote – US)
- Strategic Sales Engineer at Atlan (Remote – US)
- Business Development Representative at OfferFit (Remote)
- Account Manager at Crossbeam (Remote – US)
See more top GTM jobs on the GTMfund Job Board.
That’s it, that’s all.
Wrapping up a super energizing trip. This quote has been circulating my brain: “The more you lose yourself in something bigger than yourself, the more energy you will have.”
Enjoy the rest of your weekend!
Barker ✌️
