# Baking Marketing into Your Product Roadmap with Patty Radford Henderson

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3nmnDRf8vo
Duration: 17 min
Language: English
Words: 3017
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/J3nmnDRf8vo

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[0:00] again in those top trusted people a person like myself so a customer sharing their experience with the product is so important so I built it right into my Charter partner user agreements that once I earned their endorsement after 30 days they would participate in a case study I made a Google form they filled it out I asked them what was the situation like prior to working with me why did they choose and um how did it make a difference how was implementation what were the results and was there any Roi and then I wrote it in their voice and I've got pull quotes that I'm able

[0:35] to merchandise throughout my website and other places I'm Patty Radford Henderson I am the CEO and founder of annum Adam is a master marketing calendar that allows you to get an integrated view of all of your marketing channels along with holidays cultural events customer insights in one universal view so you can make strategic decisions when you're putting your plan together so I have been a marketer for I had quite a lengthy career as a marketer I am now a founder and CEO of a martech company a SAS product and this is the first time that I've been in a room with peers and I am very grateful to be here

[1:14] and I appreciate how kind and supportive everyone is so today what I wanted to do was give you what I've done share what I have done as a Founder ramping up a software company to kind of slowly ramp up marketing at the same time using some of the principles I've used throughout my entire career so the first thing I want to start off with is before your beta and from the people I've talked to we've got people spread out all over kind of the life cycle of a SAS startup so if this doesn't relate to you immediately for the stage you're in please take it for what it's worth and

[1:52] maybe it's something that you can apply no matter where you're at but what I really think is the opportunity before you're actually getting customers into your software is of course customer Discovery making sure you understand the problem but also getting to how the customer describes the problem and this is something that I did that was super helpful and it was customer problem interviews so I wasn't pitching my product I wasn't showing my product I was just talking to them and I was talking to them specifically about the problem I was solving um not uh in general about you know what are all your pain points but just let's

[2:30] get specific about the problem that I'm solving and I shared my frustration and then I just let them go and let them just kind of rant about it um what is so great about this is I was then able to pull phrases and words from them that I have now pulled all the way through my marketing so I'm using my customers voice to explain back to them the problem and it's you know a very powerful thing the other thing that it I believe is very important right away is to establish your brand online so Adelman does a trust survey a trust barometer every year and they list who are

[3:09] considered the most trusted spokespeople for companies number one would be an academic expert number two would be a technical expert within the company three is a person just like me so that would be like another customer who's had an experience and four would be the CEO so if you're either the CEO or the technical expert in your company you're considered a trusted source and you really need to establish your credibility and number one I would say is build out your LinkedIn profile to actually show the credentials that you have and make sure that your title in LinkedIn gets a lot of value because if you are commenting or posting things

[3:48] people are going to see you know the name of your company but I've also put a couple words there to describe what the company is I've listed an accelerator I am I've been in and other things to just kind of build that credibility right off the bat the other thing of course is get a website up do some keyword research if you can put some helpful content out there to start building some SEO that's great start a wait list Etc next I would recommend uh your toe in social media and if you're a B2B SAS LinkedIn is the place where you want to be I'm not a natural one to

[4:22] social media so this was something that I had to kind of work myself up towards I do a lot of Consulting and what people should do but just not so natural for me so what I found worked for me was to think about it as you are sharing your journey with your network not think of it as you've got your sales hat on and trying to sell sell sell convert convert convert but really you're letting your network know what's going on and you're sharing your journey and don't really worry about likes or comments but just start slowly doing it my goal was once a week when I started out

[4:57] it's also a great opportunity for you to document Milestones so whenever something great happened that I felt good about or maybe there was a big decision I made put it out there on LinkedIn share it with my network it was surprising how many people would come back to me when I would talk to them later oh I saw you did this or you had that happen or I could go back and reference LinkedIn to find out when something actually happened and I was also starting to get some demos out of it when I was doing this too it's another great opportunity for you to start working on storytelling

[5:28] storytelling is so important in terms of getting your journey out there engaging people and telling stories through short little LinkedIn posts is a great way to start so now we're moving into your beta you have got software you want to start getting some customers on that software and there is still a lot you can learn you've learned a lot about how they talk about the problem but now we can learn about their buying jobs and this has kind of been a theme today but what I find is super helpful is this diagram from Gartner they've got five different buying jobs that a B2B buyer has to go

[6:09] through the first is actually identifying the problem someone brought up in the last session I was in like how do you get someone to move off the status quo you need to help them understand that there actually is a problem because they're just doing workarounds and they don't see it as a problem it's solution exploration so understanding all the different Avenues I can go into the requirements building so building that list of what my needs are determining who are the suppliers that I'm going to review weighing them against that list and then you've decided who you want to go forward with but you need to validate that how do you

[6:47] validate it so you're not making a mistake and then there's always that consensus building so this is kind of a lot to unpack but this is something that you can do during your demo phase so every time you're doing a demo you can find out what is important to them when they're making the buying decision who is the person to make the decision what other products are they weighing me against what um what do they they hope their criteria to be so while you're doing those demos you can gather against those six different buying jobs all the Intel that you need to help you as you

[7:20] get later on in your stages at this stage um something that I'm so grateful that I did is I put a big effort into building out case studies and again in those top trusted people a person like myself so a customer sharing their experience with the product is so important so I built it right into my Charter partner user agreements that once I earned their endorsement after 30 days they would participate in a case study I made a Google form they filled it out I asked them what was the situation like prior to working with me why did they choose and um how did it make a difference how

[7:58] was implementation what were the results and was there any Roi and then I wrote it in their voice and I've got pull quotes that I'm able to merchandise throughout my website and other places but this is really you know about kind of that validation job that we're wanting to build content for also during this stage you've built out your you know credentials on LinkedIn but I really uh would like to urge you to build out your about us page people want to make sure that they are working with a credible company they want to understand who the CEO is who are the Techno technical people and the why behind you started it

[8:38] so if you go to adamplanning.com you're going to read our story of of where the idea came from how I how I came up with the idea to move forward with this you're also going to see a lengthy bio and you're going to see a list of all the speaking engagements and some logos of clients I worked with because I'm like okay these people don't know me I want anyone who goes to check out the company to understand my background because I'm going to be trying to get on stage at things like this and also to get press written about me and I want to get my credentials right up in front so

[9:11] in working with a lot of clients as a marketer I often found there was traffic to the about us page and the about us page was rather thin so if yours is then I would really urge you to put some effort there so people can really know what you've got and now that you've you know talked to customers about the problem you've been doing the demos it's time for you to get out there and talk about the problem this is something that um you can truly own and start sharing with others again through social media um and and you know blogging or what it would be your point of view on the

[9:44] problem and what causes it and you know then leading people back to you um the other thing that you can start doing and I'm trying to kind of do this um you know approach to kind of wading into the social media Waters and giving you more things to talk about would be to share those frequently asked questions that come up you're going to see customers during demos are going to continue to kind of ask some of the similar questions and you can just start creating content that speaks exactly to those questions that you are dealing with when you're doing those demos and you're going to really want to use

[10:19] it as a social platform so engage with others support their content give them likes share their things answer their questions and when you write posts think about calling out the people that have supported you and mentored you along the way while you're sharing updates about your journey it's reciprocal once you start supporting others on the platform they'll start supporting you and then you're actually going to start to see um you know more exposure of your posts on the platform okay so we have uh gotten through the beta hurray and we're able to start selling we're going to move into kind of full-on sales and marketing mode and

[11:00] we've got these six buyer jobs that we know that our customers have to work through so this is a good the good news Gartner says that customers that find helpful information from a company are 2.8 times more likely to have ease of purchase when they're going through the process and three times more likely to have a high value low regret purchase so you can address those buyer jobs with content if you think of each of those stick Spire jobs what content can you publish on your website that will help them achieve that goal and then how can you amplify that content out so if it is

[11:42] the problem how can you convince them that this is a problem and they need to move on it you could write a white paper that completely breaks down that problem um understanding you know what their options are you can show a comparison at a high level of the big categories of tools and what they're going to do for you you can build out a criteria list that they should use when they're trying to select a vendor you can do side by side comparisons between you and the top vendors when it comes to validation showcase those case studies can you get an analyst to write about you can you make

[12:20] sure that your about us page is filled out and your credentials are there so they understand you are a technical expert and then that last one was consensus how can you help them build consensus one of my favorite examples here is a conference that had like how to convince your boss to let you go to the conference so you could think about content like that that is particularly targeted to helping somebody else sell it in and also at this phase I'd like to urge you to claim your topics of expertise you've done enough work what can you own you know I am standing up and owning the

[12:57] problem of marketing planning silos that is huge in my business I also want to see as the go-to for integrated marketing planning and omnichannel planning as well as baking marketing into your product roadmap as we've got here today so determining what those are so then you can do sponsorships get speaking events and start to be known as the person who has a point of view about that topic and that it relates to the problem you're solving Into Your solution and then lastly under um uh you know post post beta is amplifying it all so what I think is so great about the customer stories is that they have

[13:38] so much use you can take a pull quote and turn it into a post and put it on LinkedIn and then you can promote that post you can pitch yourself and your customer co-presenting at a conference you could take that case study send it to a publication and try to pitch them writing an article about how that customer was able to solve their marketing planning silos so The credibility of having a customer speak could really be leveraged in terms of getting you some broader awareness and then also you know establish establishing those platforms that you talk about can get you on you know podcasts guest blogging speaking at

[14:18] conferences again getting in front of your target audience so that you can build some awareness okay the last thing I want to talk about is staying on track because when you've got everything spinning as a CEO and I'm finding it hard to stay on top of marketing with trying to keep everything going um and this is how I do it and this is actually a screen capture from my tool annum which is a master marketing calendar I put everything on one big picture view along the bottom you're not going to be able to read any of this but along the bottom in yellow are my phases

[14:50] of development that I've got planned okay if it shifts out I will shift them out but right now that's the plan I've also got events that I'm going microcomp is on there and I'm sponsoring a marketing Gathering I've got a row for email and all my regular emails are on there that are going out I've got a row for what's happening on my website so the content that I need to have before the different features roll out is marked so I know I need to get that page up I need to do this page I need to make this update and then I've got social media posts once you've got got

[15:25] everything filled in it's kind of easy to be like well I'm going to post that I'm at microconf I'm going to post that we're sponsoring this event I'm going to post that we're launching this feature and then all of a sudden the calendar starts to fill up and you're not looking at a blank page and that's something that um you know I I think is super helpful is when you do have a plan and you're able to sit down you can look at it you can evaluate see where the gaps are figure out where you're able to you know fill in the blanks but at a high

[15:52] level if you start with the activities that you know about and your product roadmap you can build a plan a couple months out and then keep it rolling and evolving so four three two one that's the um gosh hit it on the nose that's that's pretty good thank you so much appreciate your time thank you Patty

[16:31] [Music]

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