Transcript excerpt from a talk discussing Optimand's go-to-market mistake: the product (ACS) was positioned and marketed like a 'vitamin' (nice-to-have) while sales messaging treated it as a 'painkiller' (must-have), causing misalignment and poor GTM performance. The speaker emphasizes that painkillers are easier to sell but not all successful products are painkillers.
And painkillers are the must haves. And because of the must haves, they end up being the easiest things to sell. Not every product must be a painkiller to be successful. And again, painkillers tend to be the easiest to sell. Now the problem that we had with Optimand was we were failing to communicate what we were offering. The UI was candy, the marketing made it feel like a vitamin, but we were selling it as if it was a must have and it was just completely misaligned and our entire go to market suffered as a result. And what I found during those interviews was ACS really was a vitamin, and it wasn't a painkiller. ACS was not a must have. Given these quotes, it was a nice to have, right? And screams vitamin in terms of this taxonomy of vitamins and painkillers.
