This week was the Product Marketing Summit, and Richard, the CEO, posted a clip of April Dunford's talk related to her new book, Sales Pitch.
If you don't know April, she's a positioning expert, and her previous book Obviously Awesome is a "classic" now.
Anywhoo, in the clip, April says that your sales pitch needs to lead with your insight, not the problem. What does this mean in practice? April gives an example of the time she worked at Oracle selling databases. The problem with leading with "the problem" is that it's the same for all databases.
"We have a lot of data. We need a way to... manage... all that data."
It's undifferentiated. Every database vendor solves the same problem.
The key, she says, is uncovering your "insight" and then leading with that. This is your point of view. It's the why behind why your product exists – clearly you have some POV, or your product wouldn't exist.
Your unique insight is also what sets you apart from competitors. If developers don't understand what you're about, they won't bother trying your product – that's why positioning is such a critical part of breaking down barriers to developer adoption.
So how would you approach this for a developer product? Since we're talking about databases, and there are over 600+ of them, an excellent example of communicating your insight is TypeDB's "Philosophy" page which almost reads more like an ebook. It's a technical narrative that describes their unique point of view.
This is all well and good when you know what your insight is. But what if you don't? What if you have an idea but you're not sure if it's accurate? How do you "arrive" at your insight?
I'll share an example of how we've been gaining insight for our open source project, Excalibur.js, in the next email.
Have a lovely day,
Kamran
