Christian Klepp, Chantelle Little

Chantelle Little  00:00

One key pitfall I see is just treating brand as a cosmetic exercise, right? So it’s really, especially when people are, you know, not super familiar with brand, not super familiar with marketing. It can be really easy to, you know, associate logo with brand, and it’s, it’s a lot more comprehensive than that.

Christian Klepp  00:19

It’s something that tends to get overlooked in the world of B2B SaaS and tech, yet it’s a crucial component in helping companies to shorten sales cycles and lower Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) I’m talking about clear brand differentiation and positioning. When done the right way, it can transform everything from strategic alignment across teams to campaign effectiveness and sales velocity. So how can B2B Marketing Teams develop clear brand differentiation for growth? Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers in the Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp, today I’ll be talking to Chantelle Little, who will be answering this question. She’s the founder and CEO of Tiller Digital that helps B2B, SaaS and tech companies scale through strategic customer centric marketing. Tune in to find out more about what the speed to be Marketers Mission is okay, and away we go. Chantelle Little, welcome to the show.

Chantelle Little  01:13

Thanks for having me, Christian. I appreciate it.

Christian Klepp  01:15

Great to have you on the show. You know, we had such a great pre interview conversation, and I’m really looking forward to this discussion because, man, this is something that’s so important. And I’m not saying this because I also do branding, but it’s just something that I think is really important. I personally feel from my own experience, it’s something that tends to get overlooked a lot, especially in in the world that you operate in, which is in B2B, SaaS and tech, all right, so I’m going to keep the audience in suspense a little while longer, while I go through the first question.

Chantelle Little  01:48

Okay, sounds good.

Christian Klepp  01:49

So you’re on a mission to help B2B SaaS teams clarify their story, sharpen positioning, and build websites that drive pipeline. And who doesn’t want that? I think is the better question. But for this conversation, I’d like to narrow it down to the topic of how clear brand differentiation and positioning shorten sales cycles and lower CAC. So for those that don’t know what CAC is, it’s Customer Acquisition Cost. So let’s kick off the conversation with two questions, and I’m happy to repeat them. So question number one, why do you believe that brand differentiation is the most underrated growth lever in B2B? And question number two, as a follow up, where do you see many B2B SaaS companies struggle?

Chantelle Little  02:36

Yeah, well, maybe I can kick off with the differentiation and positioning pieces. I think one thought that comes to mind is that differentiation from a branding perspective, perspective has always mattered. But the market has changed a lot in in the last decade, but even in the last 18 months, last two years, it has shifted a lot. One of the things that has changed so much is that the SaaS market in particular has matured a lot over the last number of years. And I love to follow all the stats on what’s happening in the market. And if you just consider that, we’re like mid 2020s, and it’s like the SaaS market is roughly 300, 400 billion. And a lot of you know data out there suggesting that that market could double between now and 2030 so in the next four years, kind of thing, we might see that market reach closer to 700 billion. So I share that, because a decade ago, when people were entering the SaaS market, there were fewer that. There was less competition. There were fewer people to actually compete with. By nature, there were fewer buyers as well, because less companies have shifted a lot in terms of their use of SaaS products in operating their businesses, but the market has shifted so it’s more mature, there’s more competition, there’s higher expectations that come with that as well. And then the other thing you know, in addition to saturation in the market, is that the barriers to entry have dramatically lowered, right? So I think last week, I was reading an article about, yet again, another company that has used lovable to launch a you know, product in market within two weeks and generated millions of dollars of revenue. I’m worried about misstating the facts so, but it was like millions of revenue in a short period of time. So when the barriers are lower, the market is saturated, there’s more of a need for differentiation, and I’m really passionate about that, because if we communicate the same story, and if we communicate sameness, we’re never going to win. AI (Artificial Intelligence), obviously lovable is a good example of an AI platform companies are using, but it also has accelerated the ability to create products, but also it is contributing to sameness, like if you put your your competitors into AI and you ask it to spit out positioning for you and your key messaging, it’s a great start, and I’m actually. A huge advocate of using AI for those those steps, but probably talk about that a little bit later in the podcast too. But it’s really critical that human judgment is layered into that that work. Otherwise, you know, brands will be just spit out from AI, and by nature, they will probably become more similar, not more distinct. So those are a couple to answer. Kind of the first question on why I think it’s underrated. I think if companies can really nail that, it really helps with getting traction, and not just, you know, a little bubble of success, but long term traction and long term performance, which is really key. That’s a that’s a big one for brand. So hopefully that that helps, and then I could go into, like, some of the things where I see companies really struggling. I think there’s a few areas I think that a lot of companies, really, if I’m talking early stage for a moment, a lot of companies that I’ve worked with, or I’ve seen, have really struggled to understand the power of getting those foundational brand pieces figured out. So if I use positioning as an example, if you don’t get your positioning correct, all the money invested after that really might, you know, not work in the way that you’re hoping it will work. So it’s kind of going to that foundational layer, and really making sure the foundation is solid, and then building off of that foundation worth saying, hard to get it right. You know, like the first time, you’re constantly iterating on your positioning, not just in the early stage, but as you scale up, you know, I go back to our positioning as a company every year, if not more frequently than that, and you start to tune and experiment and hone it. But I think the core piece is that if you don’t position yourself, you will be positioned by the market, and it may not be in your favor. So being intentional and strategic about that, it may be seemingly insignificant, but it’s really, really critical in terms of getting momentum. So that’s just kind of one thing is like undervaluing brand, which I know we’re going to talk about more here today.

Christian Klepp  07:14

Absolutely, absolutely no thanks for sharing that. And that’s something that like, really, you know, when you brought it up, it makes me clench my teeth and I just, I just like, you know, because every time, I mean, not always, you know, certainly there’s, there’s companies that we work with that, um, they either do get it or they’re open to a different perspective, right?

Chantelle Little  07:37

Yeah.

Christian Klepp  07:38

But more often than not, especially in B2B, I always find that there’s always got to be somebody down there that pushes back on the whole branding aspect and says that’s a complete waste of our time.

Chantelle Little  07:50

Yes.

Christian Klepp  07:51

Right? And I feel, and perhaps this has been your experience as well. But not to sound harsh, but you know, ignorance is bliss.

Chantelle Little  07:57

Yes.

Christian Klepp  07:59

Because, you know, if people don’t understand something the dangerous Well, if I don’t understand it, then perhaps it’s not that important, and nothing can be further from the truth.

Chantelle Little  08:11

Yeah.

Christian Klepp  08:11

Right. So what’s your take on that? Because, I mean, you must, you know, in your in your day to day dealings with clients, especially in those sectors that you serve, you probably get some pushback on, well, why should we do this foundation piece? Why should we do this branding like, you know, we it just sounds like it’s gonna run up, you know, our costs, it’s, it’s, it’s more investment. Why should we do that? We should focus on generating pipeline instead. But what’s your take on that?

Chantelle Little  08:40

Yeah, I definitely have experienced that, so it’s a great question. And have come up that come up against that a lot, and I don’t like generalizations, but generally speaking, a lot of founders that you know, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with and work with over the years are not necessarily coming from a marketing background, and often not coming from a sales background as well. They they usually have a specific area of expertise. It could be domain knowledge, it could be subject matter knowledge, but they’re very focused on the product itself, especially in the SaaS space. So it’s, it’s very product centric. And that’s good, because if, if all you have is sales and marketing and you don’t have a product, then it doesn’t work. Either it’s it’s really about this balance and this, this tension between the two. So the pushback that I often get is that it’s too early to invest in brand. That’s the the one that I hear quite frequently. It’s not worth the investment, or it’s too early, or we need to have 100 customers before we’re going to spend that much money or that much effort. And I think some of it stems from limited data pools. We only have so much data, and we only have so many customers we can speak to that spending money on it. Now we’re making too many hypotheses. So why would we over invest? And like I said, a balance is needed because you don’t want to over invest. But the pattern that I see sometimes downstream is that those founders are sometimes struggling to get investment, struggling to attract top talent, struggling to, you know, convince beta users to convert into paid customers. There there’s some downstream effects that happen and they offer. There’s nuance to its of course, that changes by the nature of the business. But my observation is that founders that are willing to invest, you know that reasonable amount in brand see friction removed from a lot of those different kind of goals that they’re trying to achieve. So I think that that’s, that’s super, super key, is that, you know, proper positioning, proper differentiation, and I mean even going to the visual side of branding as well. Is that credible brand? It really helps, especially in a world where there is a lot of skepticism, right? Like, is that fake? Is that real? Like, am I really going to spend money on that? It concerns compliance, like, the list goes on. You know? How do I know this is credible? And brand plays a really, really big, critical role in that. So I do see that pattern quite a bit, and I’ve seen those that are willing to take the investment, and I’ve seen friction be removed.

Christian Klepp  11:30

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. I’m going to move us on to the next question about key pitfalls. So if we’re talking about marketing teams within B2B SaaS or tech. What are some of these key pitfalls that you would say they should be avoiding, and what should they do instead?

Chantelle Little  11:49

Yeah, so there’s a couple that come to mind. One is, one key pitfall I see is just treating brand as a cosmetic exercise, right? So it’s really, especially when people are, you know, not super familiar with brand, not super familiar with marketing, it can be really easy to, you know, associate logo with brand, and it’s, it’s a lot more comprehensive than that. So I think just remembering that just because you have a nice logo, it doesn’t mean that you’ve clearly positioned yourself. Just because you have a really strong, you know, a nice looking website, it doesn’t mean that the value has been clearly articulated and that you’ve differentiated yourself from, you know, competitors, and that all can go go right through. So it really impacts, you know, sales. If you don’t get those, those P those, those specific foundations in place. So I think you know do instead is you want to start with the positioning as the most critical piece, clarify what market you’re playing in. So this is, like, really practical, but like, clarify what market you’re playing in, because you want to make it easy for buyers to assess you against competitive alternatives. This is really challenging if you’re creating a new category, because the competitive alternatives are less clear. But if you’re entering a market where there are more competitive alternatives, like really making sure that you, you know, figure out what market you’re playing in and what value you’re you’re delivering. So that’s kind of like a couple of key things. So that’s one pitfall. The other one that I definitely could talk about for a while is just over reliance on internal perspective. So this is again challenging, and I see it at different stages, because, you know, I’ve worked with, you know, different founders or leadership teams at variety of different scales, some pre revenue, most in sort of a mid market growth phase, a rate up through it to enterprise. So you see this in different ways, shapes and forms. When you’re in the earlier stages, you have a lot of assumptions that you’re making as an internal team. So the more beta users you can talk to, the more potential customers you can talk to, and if none of that’s available, leverage look alike audiences like get as much input as you can to shape your strategy. It’s quite high risk, and it’s usually ineffective to sit in a room with two people that like your idea, and just brainstorm and build a strategy, because it’s not informed by much other than a couple people’s perspectives. So that’s that’s kind of one at larger scales. This gets really tricky, because if you have an executive team of 10 people, right, and then you have other layers of leadership, so Csuite, and maybe there’s VPs (Vice President) and director levels. It’s really tricky for all those people to get into a room and start to debate what makes sense, because sometimes ego gets in the way. You know, people have their own unique perspective, and then, as a marketer, you’re kind of left with trying to integrate all of that. So I’m a big believer in getting customer feedback, be it interviews, be it surveys, you know, if you’re a B2B tech company or SaaS company, looking at competitor reviews on G2 like, looking for patterns in vocabulary, in how people talk about pain solutions, whatever it might be if you don’t have G2 profiles, like, you know, you can go and get look at your competitors, G2 profiles, and start to look at what people are complaining about and what they’re celebrating about your competitors. And you can mine for patterns there. So that’s, that’s another pitfall is just like over reliance on on internal perspective, and then the the cascading effect of all the assumptions that are made in that in that process as well.

Christian Klepp  15:42

Yeah, yeah. No, I was, um, I was kind of having a little bit of a chuckle to myself when you said over relying internal perspective. Because, um, it’s, um, I think, I think they’ve diagnosed this, um, this malaise. It’s um, it’s analysis paralysis and opinion.

Chantelle Little  16:00

Oh, nice, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Christian Klepp  16:03

Yeah. I tried to say that with a very serious face, yes, but, um, but it’s but it’s so true though, right? Like you just mentioned it, and I’ve been in situations. I’ve certainly been in meetings where there was this constant and very heated, like debate about positioning on what the brand stands for from an internal perspective. And it was usually like, unfortunately, more often than not, the loudest voice in the room at once, right?

Chantelle Little  16:30

Yeah.

Christian Klepp  16:31

Or, depending on the person’s level of seniority as well. And I would then see that falter when they take it to market.

Chantelle Little  16:41

Yes.

Christian Klepp  16:41

Because, as you rightfully pointed out, just because they agreed upon it in the meeting room, that doesn’t mean that the market agrees with that person.

Chantelle Little  16:49

Yes, yes, yeah. Real balance to to to find, and it’s not easy, but it is also surprising how many companies are reluctant. I mean, I talk to B2B, SaaS companies, day in and day out, and there is a reluctancy to ask the customer for a case study or to ask the customer for an interview or survey. And I think some of it comes from, you know, it takes time and energy, which is a very precious commodity in today’s world. But sometimes, I think deep down, people don’t really want to know because they’re trying to protect something, and that’s really tricky. So I think a growth mindset and being willing to accept that customer feedback can be quite, quite powerful, because it creates an ally and ambassador from the customer, not always, but that’s the vision, that’s the goal, right? So if done properly, it really can create that. And then now we have fuel to put in the marketing engine that will help us go further, faster. And that’s a really exciting thing.

Christian Klepp  17:57

It is an exciting thing. It is also a very thin line to walk, because I’ve been in a situation previously where I was a product marketer and I had to go out into the field with salespeople and listen to the way that they would conduct, conduct the meetings with the prospects, and listen to the concerns, the objections and the questions and whatnot, right? And from there to your point is, we can see what the prospect really thinks about the product.

Chantelle Little  18:26

Yes.

Christian Klepp  18:27

Versus what the you know, sometimes when the sales come back, they say, oh yeah. The meeting, the meeting went well. They said they think about it. But when you’re actually there in the meeting, then you actually hear what their concerns are, it’s like, yeah, they like it however they have, they had all of these different questions and concerns, and if that’s not captured in some shape or form, yeah, then anything that we put out from a marketing perspective might not be relevant to them, might not help them, might not also move the sales closer to to getting a deal.

Chantelle Little  19:02

Yeah. Well, and I love that you bring that up Christian, because that kind of reminds me of just the other challenge of scaling brand. It’s at like scaling brand, right? And how it can fracture as you try to scale it.

Christian Klepp  19:15

Yeah.

Chantelle Little  19:15

And one of the things that you you mentioned is just that alignment between product marketing and sales like that is one of the biggest challenges that companies face as they scale. And so it’s like, if sales isn’t, you know, having these great conversations, they’re getting clear on objections, not feeding that back to marketing. And if marketing doesn’t have that Intel or those inputs, it gets difficult to learn from every opportunity to improve conversion performance and improve performance in general. So, yeah, I love that. It’s, it’s really key.

Christian Klepp  19:47

Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. For sure. We already talked about this a little bit, you know, like how to deal with pushback, especially from founders. And you know, more often than not, they’re not from a marketing background. They’re not from us. Sales background. But I think the question that I want to ask you is basically, how do you convince them, or how do you prove to them, I think is the better word. How do you prove to them that brand differentiation and positioning can indeed shorten sales cycles and CAC.

Chantelle Little  20:14

Yeah, I think when speaking to founders and early stage leadership teams, I think it’s important to speak their language. So there’s like, when I’m when I’m talking to a CMO of a, you know, $80 million company, you are dealing with different context and perspective and experience. And so you can kind of adjust your your your pitch and your conversation around more common marketing related terminology. But I’d say when you’re talking to founders, it’s really important for them to see this in context of revenue and a context of how it’s going to really, really move the needle. And so there’s a few different things. Like, there’s different ways that you can that you can position it, but I think really understanding there’s a couple things that I love to understand is, I love to understand about average deal size. Like, I like to understand, okay, so how much money do we anticipate we can make off of this customer in one year? But more important than that, how much do we think that you’re going to make off the customer over the course of the lifetime of the customer? So is it three years, you know, lifetime value, five years lifetime value, whatever that might be, whatever the customer lifetime value is. That’s actually more important than the the annual recurring revenue for one year or one month, right? So if, if I know that, then it becomes easier to work backwards and figure out, okay, so if that customer is worth $20,000 to you over the lifetime of the customer, how much would you be willing to spend to get that customer? If, if that customer is worth 700,000 or a million over the lifetime of the customer. How much would you spend there? And kind of get into some of the unit economics of it, and then help them understand what makes sense to spend to acquire that customer. And I think, like, like I said, talking in context of revenue, talking in context of, you know, the cost to acquire the lead is really helpful. And so let’s just, you know, use a simple example. A couple weeks back, I was speaking to someone, they were sharing that their their cack was closer to $1,000 and based on their price point, it just didn’t make sense. Like the economics only work when we run the numbers. It only works if we can get that down to three or $400 so the question is, how do you move the needle from a CAC of 1000 to a CAC of 300 to 400 and there’s different levers we can pull right? But when you know that that’s the target, we have to reduce the cost to acquire the customer down to 300 400 for all the economics to work and for you to put more money into this and to really scale it now we can start to look for all the friction that’s in the process that or that’s in the buyer journey, the user journey, depending on what context we’re talking about, and remove every little bit of friction. And when we start to see that, if, okay, if we remove that friction, if we change the messaging, if we do better message mismatching or better message matching from the ad to the landing page. If we, you know, maybe improve the brand, because right now, you feel early stage, and we could through better visuals, make you, you know, position you better amongst your four competitors that you’re trying to beat. If we start to change those little levers, then we can start to, you know, incrementally bring down that number. And you have to be careful talking about this, because there’s so many other things that are variables, right, that influence costs to acquire a customer that are outside of, you know, our ability to influence. But I think talking about it in context of the numbers is most helpful, because now we have really concrete goals all anchored to trying to achieve something that could be scaled and sometimes the answer might be, you need to increase your price, like I’ve come along that before as well. It doesn’t work, not because the CAC is wrong, but because the price is actually wrong. When I look at the competitive landscape, you could double your price, and, you know, not price yourself out of market. So there’s, there’s different levers, and that’s actually what’s so fun about marketing, is that it’s like being a mad scientist and sitting there with all your beakers and putting different things in there and seeing what you can achieve, like what you can create, in terms of results that that is what it’s it’s like. So I think that’s, that’s really key. So I think, like, just really practically as it relates to sales cycles, if you have weak positioning, it usually leads to confusion. Buyers are confused. You know, now I’m having to give repeated explanations of what we do. There’s the the marketing website, but now the sales team is having to, like, repeat or re explain or re educate or change the prospects perspective, and then objections end up getting rooted in misunderstandings, like in the sales process, right? So if we have strong positioning, the opposite would be true. Now we probably have better self qualification, so the quality of leads in your pipeline would be going up. In theory, that’s what would happen, right? We’d have easier comparison. The competitor can compare you better against competitive alternatives. Like it starts to make more sense, less friction, less cognitive load. And then, you know, it will someone will move through the pipeline with less friction. So usually shorter sales cycles. That really matters, right? If you could turn 60 day sales cycles into 30, like, what would that mean for you from a cash flow perspective, right? So it’s kind of looking at at all of those different variables.

Christian Klepp  25:51

I love it. I love it. When you talked about the mad scientist that you know, the thing that came to mind was like, Dr. Frankenstein saying.

Chantelle Little  25:59

Yeah, exactly that.

Christian Klepp  26:03

But I love how you started out with as contradictory as it sounds, it’s very profound working backwards.

Chantelle Little  26:11

Yes.

Christian Klepp  26:12

What’s the end game? How much? How much is a customer worth to you, right? And working from there, because if you don’t start out like that, everything is really a guesstimation for for lack of a better description. But going back to something that you said, which I thought is really interesting, because at least I’ve seen this a lot. Do you think a lot of this the issue with differentiation and positioning as it pertains to SaaS and tech, also stems from a, this might sound oversimplified, but it stems from a lack of an actual lack of understanding of who the who the customer is,

Chantelle Little  26:53

Yes.

Christian Klepp  26:53

And what their pain points are, and how you have the ability to address those pain points, versus like, Oh, look at, look at our platform with all these neat features?

Chantelle Little  27:02

Yes, yeah, absolutely. I think it’s, it’s hard, like, really, simply, it’s really hard to serve someone if you don’t know their problem first,

Christian Klepp  27:12

Right.

Chantelle Little  27:13

Right? And I think that’s why I don’t remember the exact quote, and I should look it up, because I keep misquoting it. Then that whole concept of, like, if I had to solve a problem, I’d spend 90% of the time solving the problem, and then whatever, 10% of the time executing against that to actually solve the problem, something like that, right? It is. It is some of that. It’s kind of like if we don’t know the problem, if we don’t know the pain, it’s really hard to solve it. So I think putting adequate energy into understanding, defining the pain, is really critical.

Christian Klepp  27:47

Absolutely, absolutely, okay, you’ve given us quite a bit now, but like, walk us through these steps, right? Like, like, like, without that magic formula of yours, I’m joking. We know. We know that it’s not magic. There’s a lot of hard work that goes into this, right?

Chantelle Little  28:02

Yeah.

Christian Klepp  28:03

Walk us through these steps that that process, right? That helps B2B SaaS teams find their differentiation and strategic positioning. So what? What steps do they need to take? How? How do they? How can they, I should say, conduct research, generate insights, and move rapidly. I think the name of the game is speed too. Like a lot of these guys, especially founder led, they don’t have five years to prove what they have us working.

Chantelle Little  28:31

Yeah.

Christian Klepp  28:32

We’re talking about months here, right?

Chantelle Little  28:34

Yeah, yeah, no, that’s, that’s such a great question. So I’ll try to do this in a way that’s easy to, you know, kind of explain so, so the first part is really defining the market. So in order for us to do positioning like step one, define the market, a couple key questions you can ask is, what cat or category are you in? Right? That’s, that’s really key. And then, what are the competitive alternatives that exist in the market? I’m a big April Dunford fan. I like, there’s a lot of frameworks that there are a lot of books out there about this, but she uses the language of competitive alternatives. And I’ve really, I’ve really taken that and leveraged that, because I think you want to understand who people what I find is that when you start to ask, what are the competitive alternatives? You might realize that the category you originally said you play in is not quite the right category. So if you ask both questions, you can use them to hone in on the right the right spot for early stage founders. I think narrowing in early is really key, and then you can expand really intentionally and strategically later down the line. So what I mean by that is it’s really hard to get traction with the new product in market when you’re trying to solve 30 problems. You know, we’ve talked, talked to so many founders, where it’s like, well, we can do this, we can do this, we can do this. We’re solving this problem, this problem, this problem, this problem, and and so it gets difficult because you need traction. So it’s either, you know, simplify the number of problems you’re solving, or maybe simplify how many industries you’re trying to go after, like start in your best hypothesis industry, get traction there, and then expand later. But I think it’s just being careful, careful about that from a positioning perspective. So that’s kind of step one, just a couple key questions you can ask. Step two is gathering those inputs. So, you know, for customer interviews, you know that’s something that you can do on your own. You can work with an agency to help you do that. I know that that can be really challenging to get people’s time, but for that, it’s really about designing the right script. It’s about making sure that you kind of maintain some continuity through those through those interviews, so that you start to be able to mine for patterns versus changing up the question set every time, leveraging customer surveys. I mean that that requires that you have an outreach list, but often you can, you know, build a bit of an outreach list from the network of folks on your team. But I would say on that one to be really, really careful about narrowing in on the right persona, like the right person, so that you don’t get, you know, the wrong type of input and the wrong type of data. One other thing that you know is really effective is doing a competitor messaging audit. So if you pull up all your competitor websites, and you can use AI to also help you get a start on it, at least you can pull up those websites and basically try to create a bit of a map, right? So it’s like, what is the positioning of each competitor and then what’s their core value prop? Like, that’s that’s also really helpful, outside of positioning. What’s a core value prop? And then, what are some of the key messages that are being highlighted? And then, what proof are they stating? So, is it case studies? Is it testimonials? Is it data points? Like, if that company is saying, we reduce time by 20% or whatever, like, What is the proof that they’re attaching to the message. And again, if you create a bit of a map of those competitors, you can start to see patterns where there’s overlap, and you can also start to see where there’s open gaps, like places you could play that aren’t directly competing. So it can be quite strategic. It can be a lot of fun. You can leverage AI. You could bring all that data back to your team and analyze it. So that’s another one. The review mining, like looking at G2 reviews, that’s really helpful as well, for looking for patterns, again, for all of these things, I we definitely have, you know, really advanced the way that we use AI to do these things, so doing them, but then also validating, making sure you’re using deep research. Sometimes we use multiple platforms so to see if we’re getting the same data from multiple platforms. But I think when you have all this data, AI can be really helpful for analyzing and looking for patterns. So that’s a really useful, useful case. And then internal workshops. I mean, if you’ve got someone on your team that you know is able to run an internal workshop, then that would be a great way to gather feedback from your team and have some of that necessary dialog to drive alignment and pull from the different perspectives on your team. In a perfect world, it’s great if you have a sales perspective, a marketing perspective, a product perspective, and if you’re unsure how to run these workshops, one that’s really useful is just doing a jobs, pains and gains, type or jobs to be done. Using that framework, even that could be really helpful to try map out, you know, the jobs that you believe your customer is doing. And then you can use customer interviews and surveys to validate some of that. And then, to your point, Christian about speed, we actually were. We’ve, we’ve had this a couple times with some customers that we’ve worked with, and even for our own testing, where we will use third party, you know, B2B platforms to, you know, interview look alike audiences. And there’s a whole science to that. So it’s not as simple as just going paying money and then, boom, you get 50 people’s feedback. You have to be super strategic about how you structure the surveys and the questions and what tests you run. But that’s beautiful, because now, 48 hours from now, you’re getting feedback. Now you’re able to leverage that, put that in AI look for patterns. It can be quite helpful when, when speed is the game. So that’s, that’s another one. So that’s kind of step two, gathering the real inputs. Step three is your mining for that true differentiation. A couple things that I’ll just quickly mention here is like, really try avoid table stakes. I see this time and time again, and even it’s very tempting to say, well, we’re we’ve got great customer service, whatever company is going to claim they do. Now, the customer interviews might say something different, and the customer, the competitor reviews online, might say something different, but like, is that sticky enough as a differentiation? Or like, even when people talk about their brand personality, it’s like, well, we’re professional. Well, that’s table stakes, right? Like, everyone’s expecting a level of professionalism.

Christian Klepp  34:58

We hope so.

Chantelle Little  34:59

We hope, we hope, right? So it’s like, try avoid that, or try avoid really vague adjectives. Like, get like, really specific. Don’t be satisfied with like, the vague. So here’s, like, the process where, now that you’ve done all that pre work, right now, you’re trying to, like, look for specific strengths and just where that real uniqueness is. And I believe that when it’s really grounded in real customer language, or maybe it’s lookalike audience language, it drives better performance from a marketing perspective. So that’s something to really look for. And step four, of course, like once you’ve actually found the differentiation, now you have to operationalize all of that, right? So that’s a whole other thing. I could go on and on and on, but it’s a whole other thing, because it can’t just live in a slide deck or a pitch deck. Now we have to figure out, how do we change the website, our sales decks, our email, outbound emails, like literally every touch point so that it aligns with that positioning, because everything that’s out of alignment is going to create confusion and potentially introduce friction. So that’s kind of the other part. So I’ll stop there. Does that help?

Christian Klepp  36:15

I think you’ve got enough material here for an audio book.

Chantelle Little  36:21

So that’s not the first time I’ve been described as robust.

Christian Klepp  36:27

But jokes aside. I mean, I think that that was, that was quite comprehensive, and thank you for walking us through that. And by appreciate the amount of detail that you’ve provided here, because it is, again, one of the reasons why we agreed to discuss this topic on, you know, on this episode, is because this is a component, a vital component, that tends to get overlooked because they feel like, like it’s not such a big deal, or it’s something that’s easy to come up with. And now that you’ve met, you know, you’ve put in the effort to, like, walk us through what that actual process looks like.

Chantelle Little  37:04

Yeah.

Christian Klepp  37:06

We hopefully have dispelled that myth of how easy this is. Because, you know, as you’ve rightfully pointed out, it’s not, I mean, even if you Yes, of course you can use AI. I mean, like, we use it too, but there’s a certain way to use it and leverage it, where it generates, like you said, it helps to aggregate data, it helps to identify patterns, and it helps to generate those insights that also create true differentiation.

Chantelle Little  37:34

Yes.

Christian Klepp  37:35

None of this nonsense. And you know where I’m going with this, like you know, our true brand, our true differentiation, you know, lies in our people.

Chantelle Little  37:43

Right?

Christian Klepp  37:44

No, it does not right.

Chantelle Little  37:45

Yeah, yeah.

Christian Klepp  37:47

It lies in your ability to solve your you know, whatever challenges and problems and pain points your customer is facing, whatever those may be.

Chantelle Little  37:56

Yes, yeah, yeah. And I think I love that you said that, because I think we also are living in this like world where outcomes, there’s so much focus on outcomes. So if you have a B in the B2B SaaS space, you know, saying that we have good customer service, saying that we have good people, those are, those are how we create value. They’re not the value.

Christian Klepp  38:21

Right?

Chantelle Little  38:21

So it’s like the the, you know, old challenge of people that focus on their features versus focusing on the value that they’re creating. And in today’s world, you can’t stand out if you don’t lean into outcomes,

Christian Klepp  38:34

Correct.

Chantelle Little  38:35

Right? So,

Christian Klepp  38:36

I’ll come I’ll come focused, I’ll come driven.

Chantelle Little  38:39

Yes,

Christian Klepp  38:40

Right? I’m love it or hate it, right? Metrics, you know, at some point, especially in the world of SaaS and tech, which is, you know, very technical. Sorry, I’m trying to, try not to use any puns here, but, like, you know, right? But, but, but you, you will have to, especially if you’re dealing with founders and people that are have a very technical background, they need to be able to, like, grab on to something tangible.

Chantelle Little  39:09

Yes.

Christian Klepp  39:10

And sometimes, and I hate to say this myself, because I am that person that that lives and breathes branding, but sometimes that’s not something that’s that’s tangible to them, so you have to show them. This is working. We are making progress here. So what kind of metrics would you suggest marketers pay attention to when it comes to differentiation and positioning?

Chantelle Little  39:31

Yeah, yeah, it’s a great question, and you’ve already alluded to the fact that measuring brand performance is like the thing that every marketer wishes they could do with higher degrees of precision and accuracy, because when they’re sitting, especially we work with so many mid mark, mid market, you know, marketers, and I hear about them going into the Csuite meetings, the board meetings, and I hear how difficult it is for them to get that approval on brand investments. Because, like everyone wants demand, we want x, you know, pipeline by the end of this year. We want, you know, this many (MQL) Marketing Qualified Leads by, you know, July, whatever it is, right? There’s these high expectations for performance, and usually more tendency to focus on demand investments than brand. So I think there’s a number of metrics like, I could go on and on and probably do an audio book on that one too Christian. But the one that I thought was worth maybe highlighting, because I think it’s not talked about enough, is this concept of unaided recall. And it’s it’s a little bit tricky to measure that as well. But I think what, what conceptually, you know, I try to encourage founders to think about is that at any given point in time, only 5% of your market is, like in market ready to buy. So if we run any demand campaigns, we are focused on converting that 5% into customers, right? But the other 95% we don’t want to alienate them. We don’t want to forget about want to forget about them, because they’re not in market today, but they might be tomorrow. They might be next month, next quarter, next year. So how can we build some mental availability with that 95% so that when they go in market and they become in the category of the 5% they think of your brand first, that’s, that’s the una like the recall piece. So typically, you know, we encourage people to think about what buying triggers, what moments in time happen that essentially prompt someone to move from the 95% that aren’t in market to the 5% that are in market. And then we try build campaigns and marketing around those buying triggers. But the key point is, is that we do that to build mental availability, right? So I think of it like this when you think of this category. So I’ll just use (CRM) customer relationship management. We think of this category of customer relationship management, who comes to mind, right? HubSpot, Salesforce.

Christian Klepp  42:00

Yeah, right.

Chantelle Little  42:01

So you kind of want to be the one that comes to mind. So it’s about really building that so. So I think measuring, like unaided, unaided recall, maybe aided recognition too. There’s you can. You can use branded search growth to help, you know, figure that out. Sometimes branded search growth, you know, you have to think about that in context. But are we seeing more people directly search for our solution? You know that could be an indication that they are aware of your company and your brand. There could be direct traffic trends that could be measured, but you’re trying to really think about if, if someone was prompted, like, if someone has pain, and that buying trigger happens like I now have pain. Do they think of your brand first, right? And I mean, some people will say, well, that’s hard to achieve because HubSpot Salesforce, they have these huge they have these huge budgets. And I’m not, you know, trying to gloss over that. That is a reality, but I think that there are targeted ways to build brand awareness and that mental availability and measure those metrics and help boards and Csuite understand the value of that so that they will approve brand investments, because when we invest in brand demand, performs better, right?

Christian Klepp  43:19

Amen. Amen. Absolutely, absolutely. Oh, gosh, I wish. I wish more people would be saying something like that, but you said something which I thought was like, almost like a key phrase in this conversation, almost like an outcome. It’s like the it’s the logical, like, next step. It’s this building mental availability.

Chantelle Little  43:40

Yes.

Christian Klepp  43:41

Because that’s really a big part of what this exercise is.

Chantelle Little  43:46

Yes.

Christian Klepp  43:47

Especially in B2B, as you, as you rightfully pointed out that not everybody’s out there like, oh yeah, I need to get me some of that software. Let me pull up my credit card.

Chantelle Little  43:55

Yes.

Christian Klepp  43:56

It doesn’t happen that way, right? It usually is a much longer process. It usually involves a buying committee of anywhere between four to six people, maybe even more.

Chantelle Little  44:05

Yes.

Christian Klepp  44:05

Right? And they they do, you know, they do their own due diligence and research, and what they find online is extremely important.

Chantelle Little  44:14

Yes.

Christian Klepp  44:16

To your point, about like, not just the review sites, but what you know and what other people are saying, but you know, what are people online commenting, with regards to the software? What’s out there that’s available? Like, okay, if you, if you, if you Google or, or in the this day and age, you do AI search, what is AI saying?

Chantelle Little  44:35

Yes,

Christian Klepp  44:36

Right?

Chantelle Little  44:37

Yeah.

Christian Klepp  44:37

All important.

Chantelle Little  44:38

Yeah. And I think, obviously, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say, of course, you want to measure measure like branded related metrics, like we’ve talked about. But I think you know, it’s also important to be measuring your your CAC, right? Because, like, some people aren’t even measuring their CAC.

Christian Klepp  44:55

That’s right.

Chantelle Little  44:56

And so measuring CAC is important, because if we want to prove you. That increased investment in brand reduces cap. We also have to measure CAC right conversion rates like, that’s a that’s another thing that you we can be measuring on the web level and paid campaigns. We can measure sales cycles, whether they’re shortening right. These are things brand influences. So ideally, we and we measure, you know, how brand is performing, and then we measure the things, the things that we’re trying to improve, right? CAC, conversion rates, sales cycles, all that kind of stuff, quality, right? Inbound quality. What’s the sales team say about the quality of these leads?

Christian Klepp  45:34

Absolutely.

Chantelle Little  45:35

All those pieces could be measured, and it will help us prove that brand is is helping remove friction.

Christian Klepp  45:43

That’s absolutely right. Well, Chantelle, we could have gone on for another 10 hours, but like you know, in the interest of time, I’d like to thank you for coming on, and thank you for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. So please quick introduction to yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you.

Chantelle Little  45:59

Sure. Thanks Christian for having me. I appreciate it. So I’m Chantelle Little, founder and CEO of a digital marketing agency that serves B2B SaaS companies, and we help B2B SaaS teams clarify positioning, build differentiated brands, and also create websites and campaigns that drive qualified pipeline and ultimately revenue. That’s the key. So, so that’s that’s that in terms of connecting with me, you can check out our agency at tillerdigital.com that’s T, I, L, L, E R digital.com and feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn as well.

Christian Klepp  46:35

Perfect and we will drop the links to those all in the show notes when this episode comes out so once again. Chantelle, thank you so much for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Chantelle Little  46:45

Thanks, Christian, see ya.

Christian Klepp  46:47

Thank you. Bye for now.