Chris Handy

Brand can buy your offering a “fast pass” to the consideration set.

Lack of brand can buy your offering a “fast pass” for the race to the bottom.

Most SDR outreach is wayyyy too needy.

Customers and prospects don’t typically care that the quarter is about to close.

Spend time getting internal buy-in for your launch strategy. Ask for feedback and involve more people in the process as you refine your message. People who have weighed in will feel more invested in the product launch when it comes time to rally the team.

#productmarketing

Friction is the enemy of adoption.

Along with the broader marketing group, it’s on folks in product marketing and demand generation specifically to act as a path clearer for the customer. Removing unnecessary steps everywhere will eventually help fill the funnel with happy customers. It’s on leadership to have the patience to stick with it.

Time for some more jargon surgery. Acronyms and BizSpeak in meetings are the worst. But not for the reason you might think.

Most people aren’t going to stop to explain them for you. They’ll just keep going and assume you know what they’re talking about. But it’s not their fault. It’s yours.

If you hear an acronym or term you don’t know yet… ASK.

People don’t know what they don’t know and they will definitely assume you understand the words they use if you dont… ASK.

For the managers out there, take time to explain the terms you hear people using when addressing your team.

Whether it’s offering commentary in the zoom chat alongside the conversation, or directly asking the speaker to define the term for your team, it’s on you too.

I’ve personally witnessed a colleague stop to do help teach his team and it inspired this post.

Time is more valuable than money. Defend it.

So much of early stage marketing success relies on “hand to hand” stuff. The stuff that the “will it scale?” people can often derail. Don’t let them. Automation is easy for humans to subconsciously detect and gives the market permission to ignore it in favor of more “real” stuff.

This $200 IKEA whiteboard will instantly upgrade your work life, especially if you work from home.

It can serve multiple purposes: off the cuff sketches, pinning notes and papers, kid art; and even act as a “clutter in background hider” for zoom calls.

When writing copy, it’s always worth going back and performing some jargon surgery.

Acronyms, industry terms, and other biz speak must be removed carefully and simplified.

Leave the story better than you found it, but remove parts that will hurt it in the long run.

#marketing

Demand Generation is a myth.

Eugene Schwartz taught us that you can’t create demand out of thin air, but you can identify, understand, and harness existing demand. That’s the job of great marketers.

Harness. Existing. Demand.

Tell them what you are going to tell them. Tell them. Tell them what you told them. That’s the sandwich method for internal marketing and enablement. Here’s that in action with the TL;DR, ToC, ICYMI Framework.

1. Tell them what you are going to tell them with a TL;DR. Don’t bury the lede, but don’t tell all the details right away. Use intrigue, mystery to build anticipation for digging into the details. This is a great time to use the rule of three. What are the top three highlights to call attention to?

2. Tell them with a ToC (Table of Contents): In this section, you want to have a relevant headline, description, and representative image for each point you want to hit. Building it this way allows people to skip around to what interests them most with a scannable H2 structure.

3. Tell them what you told them with the ICYMI section: In case you missed it, let’s recap what we’ve learned. But this time, color in the lines on the three points from the TL;DR and give away the key details once more.

Structuring the story this way allows you to build anticipation, but also to keep people reading from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph.

Does this person have a problem? Do they know they have that problem? Do they want to fix the problem? Can I help them with the problem? Do they want my help?

These are all things that come before “BANT” and marketing can help.