#119: Strategy | B2B Positioning, Understanding How People Buy and Building Wynter (with Peep Laja)

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1, 2, 3, 4. Exit. Exit. Exit.

My guest on this episode is Pep Laia. Okay, Pep is here. I wanted to have you on because I'm really interested in your company. I've become a fan of you and I'm interested in your company and I think there's just an interesting use case for B2B marketers. And so I wanted to talk to you about that, your story. So first, for just people that don't know you, can you just give me a quick background from what you've done? How'd you get here? Why'd you start? Winner.

Yeah, I was in sales, was good at sales and this is like 20 years ago and they made me head of sales and then they said, hey, why don't you run marketing too? And this is like 2006 and there's like, okay. So that was my first foray into marketing and then I liked it and became an SEO PPC guy in the late 2000s until I discovered, hey, there's this thing called conversion optimization. It's a new emerging thing in the world. And I decided to become number one in the world at it emerging category, if you will. So hopped on it and built basically two companies in that space over the last 10 years, CXL and Spiro, and then landed on the idea for Winter while solving my own problem where I learned a long time ago that most impactful thing you can do to increase conversion rates is to improve copy. But if you want to improve copy, you need to know what's wrong with it. I was looking for a tool that would help me figure out, tell me what the problems are and so didn't find any. So built one myself.

Okay, I have two follow ups on that. Number one, can you tell me more about this? You just woke up one day and said I'm going to be number one at conversion. There's a lot of marketing nerds that listen to this. So like give me the actual, how did you make that a reality?

So I was like a full stack marketer, like the all purpose, you know, I dabbled in a bunch of stuff and SEO and PPC in a year is 2010 already seemed pretty crowded. You know, Rand Fishkin was big already, you know, and all that stuff. And so I get a niche down. I can't be like a all purpose marketer that will never get me anywhere. So I gotta focus and I'll say what do I focus on? And so I literally did like type of market research. Which blogs were big back then, not social media and so which topic doesn't have enough blogs. And so CRO was one of those fields where maybe there were like five, six blogs out there and all the content was mediocre. And I'm like, I can totally dominate this. I can just write better blog content. And then I studied, what are the people in the space that are doing the current leaders? What are they doing? Okay, they have conferences. Okay, I'll have a conference. They wrote a book. I'm going to fucking write a book. They have their traded frameworks for how to do CRO. So, okay, I'll make my own frameworks. And I did all of those things. And so within five years, I went from who is this guy? Into like, oh, this is the most influential name in the business.

If you were a marketer today, like, if somebody's listening to this and they're a generalist today, would you still tell them, like, go specialize. Like, what's your point of view?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's the same as in business. If you, you know, you want to build a CRM. I mean, there's no way you can kick Salesforce and HubSpot off the throne. You gotta be CRM. For accountants. That space is unoccupied. So the same idea in business. So you specialize. I mean, look at April Dunford, right? Positioning. Well, who's number two in the positioning business? Who knows? I don't know. So she's raking in 90% of the category money. So specialization for the win.

Also, like, I think a lot of people take that path of like, I'm a generalist. I don't want to specialize. I want to be the generalist founder, generalist, marketing leader. But I've learned the same thing, which is almost like it's counterintuitive, but, like, specializing, not only does it give you a niche to grow in, but I feel like it gets you, like, a seat at the table. And so, like, if you want to be CMO one day, a great thing to be is, like, be the best product marketer and then, like, rise through product marketing. And as a product marketer, you'll talk to all these other teams and people and so you'll learn those other things. It's like, even if you're a specialist, you end up learning all these other things because if you come really good at what you do, you're going to be surrounded by others doing good in their field.

I think so too. Yeah. And I mean, you should start your career as a generalist. You need to know quite a bit about everything. Then you focus.

Yeah, okay. I think it's good advice. It's just cool to hear somebody like, I like when people just Yeah, I own this thing. And you did, I remember. So you created Conversion XL and rebranded to cxl. I remember, like, for me, early days of Drift, cxl, like, was one of the most influential websites in the. It was like CXL, growthhackers.com, inbound.org and Moz. Like, you built this amazing company and now 10 years later, everybody's talking about building media companies. I mean, look, look, look what I'm trying to do with DJMG Exit 5, right? Did you know you were building a media property or like, did you use like Pep brand and it just kind.

Of became that now? I mean, I did. I definitely was very intentional about building business on top of content. I was always a prolific writer. Writing came easy for me. So I went all in with that and didn't have enough money to buy tons of ads, but I could write and then adding on events and stuff was just like a natural progression. Also, I love the saying of your competitor is your first prototype. So as I was saying, I modeled the people who were already big in the space. I was like, at least those are my benchmark. I'll get to their level and then I'll innovate from there. And today with Winter, that work that I did just made my life so much easier in terms of like, I had an audience, email list reputation that my social Media drove first 10,000 signups for winter before we even, you know, and also in an email list or anything.

See, this is the stuff. Like, this is why I did the founder brand stuff is why some people, when you talk about like personal brand, they think it's very like ego driven. And it's not at all. It's. For me, it's this, exactly what you said, which is like, it gives you. If you're trying to build a business, it can give. It doesn't always work that way, but it can give you a huge advantage when starting the business. So the fact that you had CXL and people knew you and you had this audience, you didn't just automatically turn them all into winner, but you said, hey, you know me, you think I'm smart about this thing, Maybe you trust me, go and check out my new business. It's not about vanity metrics, it's about using your audience to drive them for something meaningful.

That's exactly right. Yeah. Even though I had much bigger hopes for converting my existing audience into Winter customers because my first hypothesis was that, hey, like conversion optimization, people are going to be all over this stuff. But that proved not to be true. And it was like product marketers, actually. And so now for the last two years, I guess I've been infiltrating the product marketing world, building a new following. Circles.

Yeah, I feel like you, at least from like, how I viewed you, I feel like I was in B2B SaaS following you for conversion stuff. Now you're in the middle of B2B SaaS. Like, it's been interesting to see you shift that. Okay, I want to just go back to some other thing. Can you give people a sense of like, how big CXL was or is as a content business?

As a content business, not revenue, but.

Like how, you know, website traffic, reach, email. Like, how big was the audience that you built?

I think 250, 300,000amonth in terms of visits. Email list of about 100,000. Yeah. So I really hopped on my own social maybe like two years ago when I decided to become really intentional about it. I mean, I've been on Twitter since a long time ago, but it was a lot of like what I ate for lunch then.

How do you think about Twitter now? And how do you use Twitter and LinkedIn differently for you?

Well, LinkedIn penalizes you if you post more than once a day. Crazy reach. Whereas on Twitter you can send a tweet per minute. And that's all fine. Each tweet lives their own life. And so really, I rapid test ideas that might have resonance on Twitter. I tweet 10 times a day. If something seems to have legs, I'll expand on it on LinkedIn. Or sometimes I just do a tweet storm based on my successful LinkedIn content. Mostly it's the same stuff.

Okay, so it's one idea and you're using both channels to chop it up.

Kind of, yeah. And then I use Twitter more for like testing ideas resonance.

But I feel like winter LinkedIn is a better channel for you now, especially as you're building Winter.

Absolutely. It is. Whenever I ask people on during demos, like, you hear about Winter because like, we're just an early stage startup and it's like, oh, I saw you somewhere on LinkedIn and they're not really sure who, where. And what I found out is that influencer marketing really worked. So in both ways, like me, myself as an influencer and also if people of influence mention Winter casually in a comment, like people that, you know, like, I don't know, Kathleen Booth is like writing about messaging on Twitter or LinkedIn and somebody hey, so what should you use for that? Oh, Winter or you know, the guys at Chili Piper or whatever. Metadata.

I think you wrote this somewhere, but you were like, 80% of your pipeline is from Guillaume.

That is right. So he sent us a company cap chase, I think, and they had great success. And then now he's sending everybody he works with our way. And it's like, if a lead from GE is coming in, I'm already counting revenue because the pitch has been done by.

This, to me, is the fun part about, like, startups. Right. At least on this podcast, we're talking mostly to marketers. It's like the bigger the company is, it's very hard to measure, like, the feeling of, like, I don't know, we get a lot of referrals from this person or we get a lot of comments on LinkedIn. But, like, right now, when you're doing it, it is so much less quantifiable. It is more like, no, you're doing it, you're not going to stop doing it. You do it as the founder, you feel this. It's not like some number. Have you thought about, like, how can you bottle that, though? Because I think the next question is like, wow, this referrals are working. How can we make that a more intentional thing?

I think the main way is just meet more people and make sure they're aware what you do. And so it's like the classic networking thing, but not in this lazy way where we go to networking events and then pitch each other and give business cards, but be a normal person, make friends and then just casually also make them aware of what you do. Business people typically ask each other, so what do you do? I've been quite intentional about it in my weekly goals to at least have dinner with one new person every single week. And I host meetups and dinners and things like that.

You're in Austin?

Yeah.

Okay, so if you're listening and you're a startup founder in Austin, reach out to pep. We will talk about Winter and the function of Winter, but I'm interested in just the marketing of Winter still. So you had an existing audience that helped LinkedIn. It seems like you're doubling down on LinkedIn. Like, the winner account has been cranked up. How do you think about the difference between you on LinkedIn and the winter company page on LinkedIn?

We hopped on the winter LinkedIn page based on the success for the with CXL because, like, we really didn't pay much attention because it seemed like LinkedIn pages are dead. And then suddenly some, you know, people started trying and actually it's working. And mainly what we're trying to do, my number one marketing goal is to create awareness that we exist as a number one job. And in LinkedIn, the more followers you have, the bigger the reach. So number one thing is, you know, get engagement so more people will see you. And we figured out memes. Memes really work. And how I figured it out is like, we need to go to LinkedIn page analytics. There's this thing called competitors, right?

Yeah.

Where you can put any LinkedIn page there and then you can see their engagement. And so basically I put a bunch of brands that I know and then it's like, who's killing it with engagement? And I go check their content and what I found was like, they have advice, advice, funny post meme advice, advice. And like the engagement on memes was like 10x100x something. Yeah, okay, I'll try that. Now we post a meme a day and it's working great.

I love what you just said for a bunch of different reasons. Number one, like that your number one goal right now is awareness. And I love the approach of like, you're very specific about what that means though. You're not like, yeah, we're hiring a PR firm, we're trying to speak at these events. You're like, no, we're focusing on LinkedIn. And like, even though you're a startup founder, I think people listening is like as marketing, trying to get things going. It's like to me, it's this focus of like one channel. You're not trying to do a hundred things. You have a hypothesis that LinkedIn is good in your market, B2B SaaS. And so let's grow the company page. And I also think, like a lot of startups listen to this, they're missing out on growing their company pages. And then people say, well, how are you going to convert that into business if you just post memes? But like to your point, literally the more followers you have on LinkedIn, then you can tell them about something winter related and they're actually going to sign up versus if no one's listening, then you post, hey, go join us at the Winter Games or whatever. Nobody's there.

There's an underlying strategic assumption here. I'm a big believer in the work of like Byron Sharp and so on, like the ideas of mental availability. And then for the last two years I've been a student of competitive strategy. And so I even have a blog about that. And really my current assumption, my working assumption is that building mental availability, meaning being thought of by Buyers in category, buyers in buying situations is most important thing. And today, Winter is the only game in town. There's nobody else that does what we do. And that's not forever. But while we are the only game in town, I need to make aware that Winter exists. And this is what you use us for. That's all I need you to know. And so that's all my marketing. That's what we focus on. And so we build the job to be done in your head, oh, I need to test my messaging. Boom, Winter.

But there's also like 50 other things you could be doing. You could be doing events, you could be doing this, you could be that, you could be doing commercial rate on the website SEO. But I just think that the clarity of like, here's how we're approaching this and here's how we're measuring marketing today. Are more people hearing about us as opposed to 15 ways you could measure? I think that's fantastic. Okay, let's talk about Winter specifically. Now, you mentioned when you're talking about cxl, that the number one way to improve conversion that you learned is to improve the copy.

Exactly right.

I always thought it was like technical stuff though.

Fundamentally there are two levers that you have reducing friction, you know, making it easier to do whatever, sign up or, you know, fill your form. And then increasing motivation make people want to take action. And increasing motivation is like 10 times more powerful than reducing friction. And that's what most your average optimizer is focusing on, reducing friction, less form fields or whatever. That will help to an extent. But if their motivation is high, they will put up with a lot of friction if necessary. That's why like all this gated. Get a demo like this B2B Sass plays. That's why they work. They're still motivated. Go through the sales motion.

Well, it's also why, like, even if the website is really old and I got to fill out 30 forms, if I'm going to fill out your forms to order my pizza, like, you know, you deal with some like some shitty website experience online ordering because you're like, I want that pizza.

That's right.

But that's interesting. That's interesting. This will be a clip because I've thought about the friction side a lot, but I think what you said is so powerful that motivation is way more important. And I think it's just easy to be like, how do we reduce friction? But it seems like your point of view is like, how do you turn more of a, how can we create motivation?

And you increase motivation through words, not fancy graphics or design. I mean, design is there to help communicate the message, but it's mainly about the message. And you might not even have the prettiest website. I mean, I think personally, like, good enough is good enough in terms of like getting it from 80% to 85%, diminishing returns. So you will get much more ROI if you put that money into copy and messaging optimization.

Who should own that? At a typical B2B SaaS company, typically it's product marketing.

But what I also see is product marketers. I'm generalizing, of course. They're also not great copywriters. I mean, some are, but most are not. But they own it. And typically what ends up happening is that everybody can write words and so they write the words, but it's typically not the most compelling stuff. If you have 30 minutes, I can pitch you on anything. Anybody can pitch on anything if they have 30 minutes. But to condense it down into one compelling statement, short and concise, while value packed. But that's hard work.

I think hiring a copywriter, I totally agree with you, at least from what I've seen is like product marketing owns the website and they own the positioning. But when it comes to the actual execution of the website, headline, the subhead, the body copy, all that, it's like, I can manage that project.

Yeah.

And then it's like, well, let's find somebody to do it. And you got to find an agency. Go find an agency. There's definitely a need to have a badass copywriter on the marketing team and have them sit within product marketing. Then you own the full story and the execution of it.

Yeah. So it really depends on the company size because often you don't have enough work to justify a full time copywriter. I mean, it depends on how often do you deploy new pages for landing pages or even registration things. So it might make sense, might not make sense. I think also every product marketer or every marketer can become a pretty good copywriter if they learn the fundamentals. Maybe they read your and commandments book or whatever that was. And then it's mainly the feedback loops. Like feedback loops, OODA loops. If you're familiar with the military terminology.

Oh yeah, I heard, I think I've heard that from Jocko. It's like something orientate. What is it? What does OODA stand for?

Observe, orient, decide, act. So basically it's like the first version of your whatever, messaging and then put it in front of the very people you're trying to influence. And you get feedback on what's clear, unclear, interesting, boring, et cetera. And then you can make changes. And then again, you put it in front of people. And so how fast your feedback loops are, that determines how fast you get to a copy that actually works and resonates and converts. Sometimes if you have slow feedback loops, like, one feedback loop takes months. You're obviously slow. But if your feedback loop is 24 hours, which is totally possible, you get to a really good copy fast.

Well, it's also like one. I think one of the really underrated things about a company having an audience is you can. It's not like you're getting website testing, but like a tweet could be your homepage headline, which could give you feedback on something that you can use. And so I think you can use signals from other channels. It's not just your website. And ideally, great copywriting is not like, I don't think I'm a great writer at all, but I know how to write copy. It's not that I'm a great copywriter. I know how to do which is like, I know that things should be specific and people want examples, and I know the objections that people might have, and I know that things like, you know, it's not that grammar's not important, but things just need to be clear. And it's more about being understood than being perfect. And great copywriting, just cobbling things together, you're like, oh, we got this from Gong calls. We got this from customer reviews. People talk about this like this on Twitter. It's more like editing. Copywriting gets like a weird rap. Like, it's not like you're sitting in some, like, silent retreat figuring out how to write, you know, write copy. It's like you're just kind of stitching together all these things, which this should be what product marketing is doing anyway.

And as with any skill, the more reps you put in, you know, the better you get. Yeah, practice, practice, practice. Ship, ship, ship. And feedback loops is essential because we all have curse of knowledge when it comes to our own business. Like, we know everything, and so we forget what it's like to be exposed to this idea, to the product, whatever, for the very first time. So often you omit important details. You're not specific enough, or worse, if you're trying to satisfy various stakeholders, you know, CEO wants to say this sales believes that marketing, whatever, you know, so. And then, oh, how can we say something that makes everybody happy? And then it's like this vague bullshit.

Yeah, I think that's the problem with most B2B SaaS websites is vague bullshit. If you don't have anything to say, like, write way less. Have a super simple homepage. But like, how many homepages do you see that are just kind of like, there's lots of stuff on the page but nobody, nothing is being said. It's just sections like, oh, we need a section about features and we need a section about integrations. But like the words there are just placeholder words.

That's right. And I think also the process, internal process is backwards where the designer designed something nice in Figma and oh, we allocated this space for words. So like, can you just put some words in there? So copywriters become decorators, not copywriters.

This is my bias. But like, I think it's. I'm working on a new website right now and I'm working with agency to build it out and before they did anything they were like, right, I'm the copywriter on this project, I wrote all the copy first. It's not perfect, but I don't know how they could possibly design the right website for me if I can't tell them what I think the headline is and what I think the features are and what I think the explainers are. I think having that copy first is so, is so important.

Absolutely. I mean, because the information hierarchy and like how much attention in design do you dedicate to certain things? I mean the role of design is to help communicate the message, not vice versa.

Do you think there's like a framework for websites? Like, can it be cookie cutter? Like there's just so many, everyone's got it. I see so many questions like in the community, like, hey, anyone have a good. How often do people ask you, hey, giving a good example of a website and it's like there's some are short, some are long. Is there a framework that you think about for website?

I think there is a best practice and of course the best practices. It doesn't mean that it's the best, but it's a good enough starting point. So in my mind it's like you need to first know as much as you possibly can about the target customer. First thing, you lead with the category because people ask, what isn't? We're an email marketing tool, we're CRM for bookkeepers, Whatever answer what is it? And then their mind can ease up, oh, I get it what it is. And then you hit with your value proposition that ideally also communicates your onlyness. Another big issue with B2B SaaS is everybody is in a very saturated category, like most everybody. Yet they communicate as if they're the only one doing what they're doing, which is complete bullshit. And nobody is considering you or nobody else. No, no. I'm looking into like five, ten tools. Right. So if you leave it to the visitor to figure out like how one company is different and or better than the other, you're going to lose or like you could be winning way more if you made the case for them.

Yeah, I love that. Being aware of that most people are shopping because it can be used to your advantage in marketing. You will market differently if you know that going in. I just did a podcast last week with Sydney Sloan. She was a CMO at Salesloft and she was like, we were in a market where we knew that everyone was shopping. They were between Salesloft, Outreach and Clary. And so we treated everybody differently. If someone booked a demo and they haven't, they had evaluated Outreach already. That conversation was going to be different than, oh, this is somebody who's new to the category.

Yeah, if you would know. That's the problem with website copies. That is not a sales conversation. Like you can't ask questions you don't know. So it's kind of like one way monologue. Which of course makes message testing ever more important to check in how it's actually landing on the intended recipient.

Back to your framework for a second. So is this how you would treat the headline? Like the first thing that the homepage should address, which is the headline is what category do you plan or what do you do?

It doesn't need to be necessarily in the headline but in the above the fold value prop area in general it can be a pre header so. And so is an email marketing tool. And then the value prop, the headline.

Oh right, yeah. Like on the Winter site it's W Y N T E R. For those listening, you have small head small like Winter is a target customer feedback tool. Then big bold headline is learn if your messaging hits the mark. I like that. That's a good framework because it's like it doesn't matter if it's in the headline or this or that's just like somewhere in the first boom of landing on your website. Can people get that sense?

Exactly right. Yeah.

I think people try to be too cute with their website headlines sometimes too.

Absolutely. Yeah. So for my this new web show that I'm doing, do you even resonate with next episode is coming out sooner. So I was yesterday looking at a.

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Reads like a teacher nagging, hey, you're doing this wrong and this other thing wrong. It was like, oh, I don't know. That's how I want to feel. It's also like, we're still emotional creatures. So if I'm evaluating tools and one is talking down to me, I might be less interested in getting a demo with them, even though the tool might be awesome. I think communicating your onlyness right out the gate is important. And in terms of imagery, so many companies use, you know, whatever, doodles, beautiful graphics where people want to see how does it work. So real screenshots is the way to go.

It's so true. They just want to know how it works. You know, it's funny, it used to be like, I think five years ago was like, everybody used stock photos. And then there's a whole trend like, you know, don't use stock photos now. It's like doodles and all that shit everywhere on the page. It's like become the new stock photo. It's like everybody just copies that from each other.

Yeah, because people forget what is the purpose of any imagery on your website? I mean, there's the brand feeling and maybe we're a whimsical, fun loving brand. That's fine. But also the clarity is still the most important thing. So if you do show images that communicate an idea of your product, why just not show the actual product? That's the most clear thing there possibly is.

Doesn't like the go to market the. The type of business also affect the headline? So like, I'm looking at this company, proof. Use proof.com. their headline is Boost your website conversion by 15% in under 15 minutes. Try for free. That feels like that's the right type of headline and call to action for this type of free freemium business versus, like, if you're more of like an enterprise tool, it's. It might be a little bit different.

I think the problem with that particular headline is that they never address what is it? Yeah, okay, 15% conversion rate. Sure. But like, what is it? How.

How do you do that? I slice off my right arm. Okay, maybe.

Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. Like, if you make people wonder how that makes them, you know, interested in scrolling and reading more. And so hopefully the pitch eventually goes into that. First, I know from proof, because I know these people there, you know, my home is here in Austin. This product has been kind of shelved, so they're not actively working on it because It's Jasper, the AI GTP3 tool. That's killing it. That's their new thing.

Oh, interesting. Hey, what do I know? That's great. All right, let me go back to winter stuff. Okay, so we talked about the role of copy. We talked about where it sits in product marketing. I know you have kind of strong opinions on positioning and different ways for companies to express themselves. How do you think about positioning for B2B SaaS companies out there?

I definitely don't want to argue over, you know, semantics and exact definitions and April, done for definition is great. Go with that. So the way I think of it in a very simplified way is who are we for and which use case do we. What do you use us for? What do you use us for and for whom? That's your positioning. And obviously that positioning is not line of copy. That's just for you for internal understanding. And now you use messaging to communicate that idea. So if I'm your ideal customer on your website, I should know that this is for me. That's another common mistake is if I'm reading, it's like, who am I, who am I and who are you? And if I don't understand, I have to make assumptions. And of course, assumptions often wrong.

Yeah, like speaking. People want to walk into your store and see that they're speaking the same language.

If you're for E commerce, you know, just say it, you're for E commerce. Oh, yeah, that's for me. I'm E Commerce.

Yeah. Great. What do you think about social proof? I see it in a common ingredient. How do you think about it? How do you use it?

Well, there's table sticks, social proof, let's say, like the customer logos. So I don't think the customer logos make anybody trust you more, but the absence of those logos make them doubt you. It's this weird thing, like it's become what do you expect? There's this saying, I'm not the author of it, but I don't remember who said it. But basically where do most people spend their time? It's on other websites, not your website. So there's this study by Google, like, what makes people love a website? There are two factors there, and one of the most common ones is prototypicality, meaning that your website needs to fit look like other websites to an extent. It can't look too weird. And so I think social proof logos is one of those things that people expect it, but it doesn't make you trust it because like, sure, sure, everybody has a logo. So what actually tends to work is specific outcomes so at winter we have customer app queues, which is a product engagement onboarding tool. And so we did message testing for them. They didn't have this on the homepage, but in one of the sub pages and maybe down below on one of the Pages was like 3 customers and the results they achieved with AppQueues like 30% more faster adoption online, whatever. The stats were like specific numbers, specific customers and for that part people like holy shit. Wow, that's impressive. Yeah, I'm just like those guys. And so we realized that and we took it from the sub page and we moved it to AppCues homepage and made it pretty prominent. So right now if you go to appcues.com, you can see it's like basically above default. And we did other improvements like this using message testing and basically we doubled their conversion rate. They're getting twice the amount of demos.

This is a good website actually. Appcues.

Yeah we're writing up like a case study of basically how we work with AppCues team and we did like number of messages like this feedback loops that I mentioned, then preference test and we tested different headlines.

Yeah, yeah. I love the. I think especially today like with the rise of the. I like this homepage for like all the little customer examples and the testimonials is smart, just like the little percentages and charts and stuff. But I love the 4.7 out of 5 star thing on G2 crowd and kept her. I've seen that on a bunch of different sites. I think that's great. What you're saying like the way you're explaining websites to me just like the reason I like talking to you is because we like to just make things sound more complicated or be more complicated or they're not some framework for this. But like if you're. The way that I interpret what you've talked about with website is like can you simplify it down? Can you explain what do you do? Who are you for? Give me some examples, give me proof. Like I think answering. Just simplify it to like those four questions. It doesn't have to be something. You didn't have to go to product marketing school to know those things. It's like as a buyer, what are people going to ask? And I also like you mentioned examples Pep because I think one of the best ways to do product marketing today is through examples. I think a lot of times people just put kind of like features and integrations and stuff. Be like, here's an example because you can get basically a two for One, you get social proof and example. So like, here's Winter. They're a customer. They use our product to do these two things. They saw this result. Like, that's like the combination of all those things.

So somebody signing up is an effect. Somebody signing up for a demo or trial or whatever. And something is a cause. That's like increasing user motivation to take action. And that cause we can distill it down in terms of messaging and copy into components. And so we talked about clarity. People need to get, what is it and how does it work? So clarity, number one, they don't get it. They don't buy it. Second is relevance. The things that you're promising and talking about. Do I care about this thing? So, for instance, you know, AppCues website, I was like, what did they say? Get users to their aha moment faster. Is that something that I'm actively thinking about? And if it is, it's aligned with my internal conversation in my head. I'm like, oh, yes, I'm talking about aha moments. Or maybe I'm not. And I'm like, don't care about that at all. So you need to know, like, what's. What are the actual priorities and challenges? And so then you can write relevant copy and the information hierarchy, like, what's above the fold and what's in the next block and the third block and so on. That has to be prioritized in the order of importance for the customer. So you need to know what is their number one priorities, two, three, and so on. Then we get into value. Do I want the value communicating? And finally, differentiation. Like, I need to know, why choose you and not the other guys? And brand perception might be important for some companies. Like, are we whimsical or not?

Yeah, that's great. I mean, it's like, go back to like, just simplified thinking. It's like, the better I know you, the better I can sell to you or gift you something. If I know Pep really well and somebody's like, what should I get him for his birthday? I can actually give you something meaningful. It's like, that is marketing. How well do you know people? That's why I don't think I'm a great copywriter. But if you give me the right information, I could be a good copywriter if I can find out enough about you to be relevant.

And if we understand these components that make a great page, a homepage or otherwise, then we can also have a unified discussion inside the companies. Like, we don't need to debate. I like this you like that? That's very subjective. But is it clear or not? That's pretty objective. Or is this relevant to their priorities or not? So we get into this objective discussion and also when we do iterations, which you absolutely have to do, then that's what you measure. Did we get more clear? Did we increase relevance? Did we increase value, perceived value, things like that?

Okay, let's wrap up and tell me about Winter. Talk to an audience of B2B marketers. How are people using Winter? How should you be using Winter? I think that this is one of the most helpful tools that I wish was available to me. Well, I mean it is now, but running a marketing team. So give me the overview.

In the NutShell, it's for B2B companies and it gives you feedback from your target customer, the target market. And so behind the scenes, how it works, it's like a two sided marketplace. Kind of like Uber has riders and drivers. We have software vendors, maybe like appques and software buyers, people who buy onboarding software. And we put those two together. So if you're a B2B SaaS company or any kind of B2B company, every B2B company sells to a title at a type of company, you know, like a marketing director at a SaaS company with 100 employees or whatever. So we can put your website, your outbound email copy, like whatever, figma, mock up in front of that audience, the audience you're trying to influence, and ask very specific questions, research questions. Hey, like after reading this pitch, how likely are you to how interested are you in getting a demo with us? And like why? Why or why not? Or you read the whole thing. What's still unclear? What questions do you still have about this? Do you understand why I choose this company over others? Things like that. And you get rich qualitative data on how well your messaging lands on the intended recipient. Then you can make tweaks. So that's message testing. And we also do preference testing where it's like you have three headlines, three value propositions. I wonder which one is most likely to work. And before you spend $10,000 of ad money on testing these, you can pre validate the winning value proposition and put money on the offer that's actually resonating with people.

Right? So basically you're getting me a room of I have an idea, I have a message. You're putting together a room. Hey Dave, in that room are 20 of your ideal customers. Before you go and run out the door with that message, we're going to just get their Feedback on it first.

Exactly. And it's a platform where setting this up is click, click, click, done, and you get answers in, like, 24 hours. So it's not an evolved process because typically without Winter, if you want to do buyer research and figure out what your target customers want, it's a big pain in the butt and it's very slow. And everybody knows we need to do customer research. Right. We all know this, but we're not doing it because, frankly, it's a pain in the butt to do it. Yeah, right. And so Winter just does it all for you with a couple of clicks or.

I think, like, people, what I like about your company is, like, I just think people. Everybody talks about customer test, customer feedback, but I don't think people know. What does that actually mean? How do you, like, do you send out an email and do a survey? Like, and so I think this is a very actionable, like, you're doing lots of copy stuff. You're making lots of website changes. You're testing this stuff. Why don't you throw it up on Winter and see what you get back, and then you can feel good about going into the process. What's the right time to bring Winter in? Is it like, we've done the whole homepage, let's go run it by. Or like, can it even be, like, one off? Like, we're doing a landing page for this? Can you talk through some of that stuff?

Well, just like company building is never done, your product is never done. In same sense, your messaging is never done. And you're likely losing out on conversions because your messaging is just not optimal. It's suboptimal. So the best time to do it is today. I would do it. The typical process that I recommend everybody is like, start with your most important, your money pages, your homepage, and maybe key product pages, features pages, things like that. And then what you get back is a bunch of insight on what's not working. Then you take the data, and then you can rewrite the copy, and then you do another round. They didn't get this. Now we clarify that. Are they now getting it? Or maybe they are. Maybe they're still not getting it. So you iterate on that. And then before you launch a new product, before you announce your next virtual conference, you build that landing page and start driving expensive LinkedIn PPC traffic onto it. Just make sure the copy is really hitting home before you spend all that money. I would do it preventatively as well as optimizing all the pages you already have.

Preventatively is a great way to put it. Can you do it with a Google? Could I just give you a Google Doc or does it have to be.

A design Google Doc? A bunch of people, in fact well known brands that use Winter, they usually give me a balsamic wireframe and not me, but they upload to the tool with the logo removed, their design removed because they don't want you to be biased by the logo. Because like if it's Intercom or HubSpot, you know right away and you have preconceived ideas of what the brand is or is not. And so if they just want to make the copy better, they just test it on like a Google Doc thing or Balsamiq wireframe or like if your.

CEO thinks that they love some headline or whatever, you'd be like, I'm not going to tell him that I think this is terrible. Let's do a winter test. Here's the results, boss.

Exactly right. So I wrote a headline for Winter that I thought was so clever. It said make them want it. Make your customers want whatever you're selling. And I was so proud of myself. What a concise way I found to make it sexy and appealing. Then I tested it and people were like, make who want what? Or this sounds sexy and not in a good way.

It sounds borderline like sexually inappropriate.

Exactly. It's like sexually innuendo. Not what I was going for. And so confronted with this data from my actual target market and they're not, it's like right out the gate is like a turn off. Of course I changed the headline. So I think every CEO is a rational actor. I mean maybe not every, but most rational actors. So if they have data on their headline or value prop is not working, they'll change their mind.

Love it. Okay. You know, and I, I forgot that I asked people to give me questions for you and now we have a bunch. So let's do rapid fire, like 1, 2 sentence answers as best you can.

Perfect.

Okay. These are all from the community you can join@exit5.com if you're not a member. Soon to be. We're recording this before the website's available, so let's hurry up and get that done. This question's from yado. How do you position message a company with two products that have completely different sets of values.

So a you would do positioning and messaging separately for each product and you would try to find an umbrella positioning for the company that's not tied to the product. But if the target markets and use cases are way different. Might consider building a separate brand.

Yeah, that's a good answer. You can't just like retrofit it and be like, this is our. It's a good opportunity to reevaluate like which company are we? Then it might force you into making that.

I mean CXL used to be agency services and eLearning two in one. And it was so confusing that we, you know, we spun out the this into a separate brand. Spiro.

Yeah. Good advice.

Do you.

This is from Jordan. Do you have any frameworks, templates, processes?

Go to resources for positioning your offers?

Read April Dunford's book. That's the go to resource.

This is a bad question to ask this late in the podcast. So that's on me. This podcast will have been very helpful. Jordan, I think this is a good one from my friend Jess. Any tips for messaging around highly technical products? My advice was yes, use big fancy words. What's your advice?

Well, no, if you're selling to the economic buyer or the end user.

Ooh, good one.

And for the end user who's highly technical, you need to use highly technical language. You can't dumb it down because they want to know very specific things. But if it's like the fancy CMO who's buying the tool, then I mean, you need to use some other language and ideally you have two versions of it.

That's great, great advice. So first break it down and say like which audience is it? The economic buyer, the technical buyer? If it's a technical buyer, you can't bullshit it. So find a way to get that technical content. If it's the economical buyer, know what things matter. Great advice. How do you do user market test positioning? You go to winter.com and do that. If you'd start today, how would you work on Winter? How will things change with added experience up market?

Well, I think I've done most things right. I started with I was too slow to pivot. So when we launched I thought it's for consumer buyers, like selling to e commerce companies. And it took us six months to pivot and I wish we would have pivoted to B2B sooner. So basically faster feedback loops. I think I've built a pretty good learning machine inside the company. Could be even faster also.

I just don't think people should underrate. You built a massive media business before this. You had an audience. Yes. You said some of that didn't transfer, but I think it's not like you had to come up with some super crazy next level marketing strategy. To launch this company, it's like you understood the market, you got the right fit, you have a little bit of an audience in the space. It's like those things do really matter a lot.

Oh absolutely. I mean the experience of building this previous company, CXL and Spiro I mean was invaluable. So this one is just so much easier because I just know what to do. I have other problems where not enough hands, not enough money.

Think about how you've even talked about it. Like what's the number one challenge right now? Telling more people about Winter. You know, it's like you can go solve that problem. Okay, let's wrap up on this one. This is from Peter. Dave, you talk a lot about simple messaging. Just tell people what the product does and how it helps them. But how do you message a product that's much more of an enterprise sale? That is six, seven figure ACV targeting VPC level execs who care about things like digital transformation. How do you handle that Pip?

I mean I don't think that's any different from any product led growth strategy companies. So still the reader is a human, the fancy VP is also human being. They also need to get. So don't still hide behind big words. So digital transformation is a nice umbrella, but like what does it really, what do we really mean? Like is it like are we trying to get rid of the fax machine inside our enterprise which is it is an actual priority. What are we really talking about here? So I would still be specific, relevant, value packed, same idea.

What's like your advice before right? Like how well do you know that person and what do they want and do they really want digital transformation? Because if they do, then to your point, be specific about it and tell them that.

And if you don't know, that's another thing that Winter does is what we have what we call buyer intelligence service. So like which title is it that you sell to or is it a CPO? Well fine, like within 24 hours, ask them questions, what do they care about?

That's great. And also like that VPC level person can also be influenced by the people on their team. Oftentimes they are buying things because people on their team are like you should check this out or we should be doing this totally.

I mean mostly how you get inside those, how you get invited to pitch, so to speak to VPs is like they delegate to more junior people to create that first 10 companies that we're going to check out and they're going to filter some people out so for sure you want to appeal to the manager director level first.

Okay. Great stuff. Thank you, sir. I appreciate your time. Before we wrap up, just tell people where to follow you on, where to connect with you on LinkedIn, where to follow you on Twitter, and any last winter plug if you want to do it.

Well, I mean, there's nobody else with my name, so tune in for the daily peep show. Actually, PEP show on LinkedIn and Twitter. If you just search for my name.

Perfect. And then winter is winter. Like winter, but with a yeah. All right, Pep. Thank you, sir. I'll see you later. Appreciate you doing this. It'll be out soon and I'll tell you more about it then.

Peace. Thank you. All right.

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