Category Creation

There are no (or very few) competitors in the space. That’s ok though, right? You’ve discovered how to solve a complex problem before others have. There are no analysts or media covering the space. If you squint your eyes, one of those 2x2 quadrants could make sense for your concept, but doesn’t really paint the full picture of the vision. There exists a small and early cohort of people who believe deeply in the idea. Well that’s reassuring—but why isn’t any company paying attention to them in a meaningful way? (Location 403)

Category creation is a business strategy that focuses on positioning and evangelizing a brand new problem observed in the marketplace, in addition to the solution for that very problem. (Location 458)

Examples of Category Creators (Location 472)

One of the best examples of category creation in B2B is HubSpot, who in 2005 observed that the way consumers were interacting with marketing was fundamentally changing. (Location 488)

In 2009, co-founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah coined the term Inbound Marketing by publishing the category-defining book of the same name. (Location 494)

How to Tell Whether You’re Creating a Category (Location 519)

One of our first acts as a team was to reach out to tier-one industry analysts to get some feedback on how the “experts” viewed our opportunity. We gave them demos of our product, organized briefings with our customers, and shared with them our vision for managing customers in a subscription world. When the firms shared their perspectives with us, we were surprised to see that they had completely misunderstood our vision—or at least didn’t agree with the way we viewed our opportunity. Instead, they recommended we align JBara’s positioning to their research disciplines—had we followed their advice, we would have taken a challenger position in categories such as: (Location 600)

So we rebranded the company from JBara Software to Gainsight, and decided that we would devote our marketing energy to spreading broad awareness that churn was the massive problem for subscription businesses that no one was talking about, that Customer Success was the business discipline with the charter to own it, and Gainsight was the technology platform to operationalize it. We made an early bet to focus less on positioning our solution, but to put forth more effort to advance the interests of the Customer Success profession by facilitating the exchange of best practices, building community, and ultimately creating industry around the profession that Salesforce is credited with establishing. (Location 629)

Unlike any other marketing strategy, creating a category often feels like starting a movement, as you’ll typically find a strong emotive component deep within its fabric. (Location 649)

Brand is more than just visual design, creative and advertising campaigns. Seth Godin, author and recognized brand expert, defines it as “a set of expectations, memories, stories, and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.” (Location 698)

One of the primary objectives on your journey will be to develop a brand that authentically recognizes and serves your audience as heroes, stokes conviction behind the problem you aim to solve together, and equips them with the tools, resources, and opportunities to self-actualize within the new industry you are creating. (Location 707)

A category-oriented marketer, on the other hand, would create content on how to solve complex problems that the audience is challenged with, ignore the competition, and plan an industry event to bring the community together to learn and grow. The marketer in the former example is focused inward on the company and product, while the latter is focused outward on the market and customer. (Location 712)

Disruption-Oriented vs. Category-Oriented Brand Programs (Location 718)

Your products and solutions are critically important in serving customers when they’re in-market for solutions, but make no mistake, your brand is where the real enterprise value resides in category creation. (Location 731)

One of the best examples of brand as a function of creating a category is Salesforce. In the company’s early days, they articulated and evangelized an “end of software” mission that sparked a global movement behind the Cloud Computing category that, according to Gartner, is a market projected to grow 17.3 percent in 2019 to total $206.2 billion, up from $175.8 billion in 2018.1 While they positioned the brand around “ending” software, the company was actually in market with a CRM (Location 733)

In Behind the Cloud, Benioff underscores the importance of brand on category creation with a master class for entrepreneurs and marketers inspired by the Salesforce playbook. (Location 743)

A B2H marketing strategy is equal parts philosophy and practice—philosophy as it pertains to the narrative that you develop to engage with your audience, and practice as it pertains to the channels that you leverage to reach them. The underlying principle of the philosophy is defining the narrative in service of the individuals rather than the companies they work for: how can I help them solve problems, meet peers and mentors, and earn a seat at the executive table? These themes will undoubtedly come up as you develop a content marketing strategy. The practice can reflect many of the same content form factors that have become commonplace in the market to date—blogs, e-books, live events, webinars, direct mail, etc.—but can also be re-imagined to reach your audience in other channels where they spend time. (Location 824)

I found the exact opposite to be true about brand and its effect on our growth at Gainsight. The truth is, if you asked anybody affiliated with Gainsight where much of our success had come from, they would rattle off a number of items that would all categorically fall under brand: our thought leadership helped align Gainsight with the movement we were creating in Customer Success, our content drove organic traffic to our web properties and led the growth of our marketable database, and our community became a platform for the industry to connect together and advance the discipline forward. These investments have been instrumental to our ability to create the Customer Success category, and paradoxically has led to more than just revenue or logo growth, but even to follow-on rounds of funding, customer satisfaction, employee recruitment, and teammate retention. (Location 843)

The Six Challenges of Creating a Category (Location 880)

Let’s explore six challenges of creating a category as well as some key considerations to overcome them. While this list may sound daunting (because it is), going into your journey with eyes wide open will serve you well. (Location 922)

Many of our programs required two parallel work streams—positioning Customer Success (the category) and then also positioning Gainsight (the company and product). An example would be a quantitative ROI study we conducted early in our journey that required extra scope than perhaps a traditional business. We partnered with a third-party research firm to help us quantify the pain of churn in subscription companies, as well as unrealized expansion revenue and scaling challenges that would justify an investment in the practice of Customer Success. Among other takeaways, the study proved that companies who adopted Customer Success programs reported a significant boost in sales revenues to the tune of an additional $11M over a three-year period. Now that we had a compelling argument we could evangelize in the marketplace, we wanted to prove the incremental value of using Gainsight to operationalize the Customer Success effort. (Location 933)

Customers Are Initially Interested in Education, Not Your Product (Location 954)

This is where the bulk of your content marketing effort will be spent—defining the best practices in the category you’re creating, so that anyone seeking information on the category can quickly and easily find resources online, and more importantly, that the value delivery is attributed to your brand. Nothing is more important in the age of the digitally empowered buyer. Do this right, and a few things will happen: (1) your brand becomes aligned with the category you’re creating in a thought leadership position, and (2) you begin to build an opt-in database of conversions from an audience listening to what you have to say. This strategy should feel somewhat familiar—this is the Inbound Marketing playbook that HubSpot has evangelized. The bet is that if your brand can act as a partner in strategy definition in the market at scale, when companies are ready to evaluate solutions, they’ll engage your team in a sales process, having already received value from your content and perceived you as a trusted partner all along. (Location 965)

The reality is that this is extremely hard to do—especially in the early days when finding time or resources to create high-quality content is difficult. You’ll feel like you’re spending more time creating content about the category than your own products, a feeling you need to become very comfortable with. For a time at Gainsight, we even moved product marketing into the Product organization to focus Marketing’s efforts on category marketing programs. While that tradeoff had its own set of challenges, it was the right thing to do for where we were at the time as a business. What happens next is arguably the most difficult challenge in category creation—a phenomenon that I’m calling the two funnel effect. (Location 972)

However, for category creators, the chasm between funnel one (interest in the category) and funnel two (interest in the product) can become quite wide. It’s common to find that you’ve won the hearts of your audience by selling them on the problem, but are yet to win their minds by selling them on your product as the solution. (Location 984)

Building a great funnel one will create a competitive moat around your brand unlike any other tactic, as customers generally prefer to do business with the market leader. Marketing is primarily responsible for building funnel one, as well as closing the divide into funnel two— (Location 992)

As referenced in Figure 3.3 the company over-invested early as a percentage of revenue to create the level of awareness required to spark the flywheel for their category. (Location 1004)

It’s no surprise that in new categories the eventual winner is the best-funded, as resources in the early days help category creators (and frankly fast followers as well) distance themselves from the competition. (Location 1016)

But especially in the early days, companies need to fight risk aversion and invest in marketing programs that will build the foundation for new industry. (Location 1022)

Short-Term Planning Is Extremely Hard (Location 1052)

Sales quarters can be bumpy, CAC ratios out of whack in the early innings, but building something amazing requires patience, courage, and conviction. (Location 1073)

However, in new markets, it’s really not about the competition, but rather all about the market itself. The true competition for category creators, especially in the early days, is creating enough inertia to will the market into existence— (Location 1090)

While it may seem counterintuitive, competition is actually a critical component to the success of new markets—otherwise inviting the criticism of whether or not it’s a real category at all. (Location 1093)

Within Gainsight’s core business, we made the decision to respectfully “ignore” the competitors in our young category and focus primarily on building the market while positioning our brand as the thought leader. We chose to take up as much of the oxygen in Customer Success as we could, recognizing that there were other vendors in our market who were contributing to the conversation as well. (Location 1095)

Mark believes that losing deals to the competition is a better alternative than losing to status quo, as it means demand for the category is growing. (Location 1102)

At this point, if you are a startup founder or marketer interested in creating a category from the ground up, I want to give you permission to skip ahead to Chapter Five, (Location 1108)

Seven Principles to Create (and Dominate) a Category (Location 1309)

Sinek’s message was as profound as it was simple—that people don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. The greatest generational companies of our time, such as Apple, Harley-Davidson, and Southwest Airlines, deliver so much more than just products customers love; they create movements around their brands. Their secret? According to Sinek, these outlier companies inspire loyalty and motivate their followers and employees to stick with them through thick or thin by starting with why, while their competitors start with what. Category creation, too, must start with why. (Location 1316)

According to the 2018 Cone/Porter Novelli Purpose Study, nearly eight in ten (79%) of Americans say they are more loyal to purpose-driven brands than to traditional brands and 66% would switch from a product they typically buy, to a new product from a purpose-driven company. (Location 1336)

In perhaps his most iconic work, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, (Location 1364)

In Built to Last, Collins goes on to name five important characteristics of a good expression of a company’s core purpose: (Location 1369)

Also, defining the why behind your business is only the beginning of truly unlocking the leadership principles that will power your success moving forward. (Location 1419)

Success for All. Our “bottom line” requires us to drive success for not only shareholders, but also customers, teammates, their families, and our communities around us. (Location 1429)

Human-first means always thinking about people in the decisions you make about business: (Location 1450)

We’ll unpack why building and growing community is key to category creation (Location 1473)

In a recursive sort of way, Gainsight’s purpose nests well in the purpose of the customer success community—the movement that we serve at Gainsight. Customer success is fundamentally about realizing that your customer is not a transaction or a deal or an opportunity or a lead. Your customer is a bunch of human beings just like you. And just like you, they want to succeed with what they do. In a way, customer success is about bringing humanity back into this technology-driven world. (Location 1479)

How to Activate Purpose and Values (Location 1487)

Marketing plays a critical role here to “activate” purpose, or said another way, to increase both internal and external awareness and engagement around it. That’s critically important to make sure everyone who interacts with your brand—whether online, in meetings, or at live events—can be left with an impression of who you are and what you stand for. These activations, when communicated authentically, help invest in your brand equity as the category leader and inspire your followers to stay engaged as you lead them into the future. (Location 1489)

It’s important to keep purpose and values in front of teammates as well, as they, ultimately, are the most important constituents of these principles and whose buy-in may be the difference between success and failure in the long game of category creation. (Location 1515)

Figuring out repeatable sales models and scalable GTM processes will come over time and typically after making many mistakes— (Location 1528)

50% of employees lack a level of meaning and significance at work. However, employees who derive meaning from their work are more than three times as likely to stay with their company, and also report 1.7x higher job satisfaction and are 1.4x more engaged at work. (Location 1531)

Focus on the People in Your Market—Not Just Your Products (Location 1550)

As we discussed in Chapter Two, category creation is in and of itself a subset of B2H marketing—a belief that behind every logo that companies are trying to market and sell to is a human, (Location 1559)

Your job in defining the category, at a very simplistic level, is to serve them as a trusted advisor on their journey up the pyramid. Can you help them justify the strategic importance of their role or initiative within the organization to management (safety)? Can you build a community of peers and innovators around them (belonging)? Can you help them get promoted or recognized at their company and within the industry (esteem)? (Location 1565)

Rogers defines early adopters as influencers early in the innovation adoption lifecycle (Location 1588)

If this sounds familiar, you’ll certainly recognize the line between early adopter and early majority as the toughest leap of the entire curve (Location 1590)

by Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers. (Location 1592)

Creating a category will require building a groundswell of support from early adopters in the industry—the select few who already “get it” and those within their sphere of influence. Understanding how to develop content, community, and other strategies that activate their motivations of information, novelty, and status is critical. Whether that’s telling their story on your blog as innovators in the category, providing them with speaking opportunities, or asking them to speak on a podcast, getting early adopters on your team early is important to build long-term brand equity in the category. Their support can create a network effect that propels category awareness and thought leadership into the marketplace, sparking a flywheel that will compound and gain momentum as time goes on. (Location 1610)

A Primer on Content Marketing (Location 1619)

Content marketing, as Marketo defines it, “is the process of creating high-quality, valuable content to attract, inform, and engage an audience, while also promoting the brand itself.” (Location 1624)

Middle stage content is almost always gated in order to capture the buying intent (Location 1634)

Late stage content is typically not gated and will often be best leveraged to enable the sales team to advance their pipeline and close deals. (Location 1637)

In category creation, the majority of effort and resources are spent developing early stage content, educating the market on a problem they don’t know they have, why it’s important, and how to solve it. (Location 1639)

Today over 60% of the traffic to Gainsight.com is through organic channels, a testament to the early stage content marketing investments we’ve made from early days and continue to invest in today. (Location 1646)

So what do you do with middle and late stage content in new categories? These types of assets are important to develop, just not quite as important as early stage content in the foundational chapters of your journey. As your category starts to mature, middle and late stage content assets are critical to position your solution as the answer of record to the problem that the market is now starting to understand. (Location 1655)

One of the ways to build a bridge from funnel one to funnel two, or to otherwise inspire a product evaluation within your new category, is to take middle and late stage content, remove them from behind the gate, and promote them as if they were early stage content. (Location 1661)

Consider creating a Platform Buyer’s Guide e-book and promoting that on social media or to your marketable database. Invest early in customer testimonials and case studies—a strategy we’ll cover in depth (Location 1665)

Design a sample RFP asset and promote that to your audience, evangelizing buying criteria for products in your new category. (Location 1668)

Developing a Content Marketing Strategy for New Categories (Location 1673)

Name Your Category (Location 1677)

Consider instead anchoring your category name on the outcomes that your customers hope to achieve through your products. (Location 1689)

Selecting a category name is the first step of your content marketing journey. Once you get there, wave the flag for the category everywhere you possibly can—buy the domains, write to the hashtag, set up social analytics and Google Alerts to track share of voice and search volume. (Location 1697)

Some companies have even hired subject matter experts who are early adopters in the young market as evangelists who write content and speak at events as their full-time job. (Location 1707)

Not having every article on your web properties written by someone at your company has a positive secondary effect on your credibility as the category leader. (Location 1715)

I’ve advised founders to commit to one weekend of writing—perhaps with no Wi-Fi—to create 12 chapters of an e-book manifesto for the new category. (Location 1725)

As Maslow’s pyramid would indicate, humans have a psychological need for safety that may be triggered before they can bet their careers on your category positioning. Create content that helps the newly converted justify an investment in your category to their executives and networks. Arm them with the data, case studies, and other proof points that they need to create broad awareness inside and outside of their organization in order to green light a project. We’ve spent a lot of time at Gainsight writing content on how to justify an investment in Customer Success to the CEO or board. We also created a business case (Location 1737)

4. Educate on the “How” After getting some momentum behind your category, the logical next set of questions from people in the young community will be around how to actually put the learnings of the category into practice. (Location 1746)

Build the online destination for category best practices on your blog, so that the market will come to align your website with industry thought leadership. (Location 1749)

With so many potential topics to cover, how can you prioritize your content roadmap and know exactly what to write? I’ve found that there are three places to look in order to source content ideas: (Location 1762)

5. Evangelize the Category as the Leaders of the Movement As your content efforts start to bear fruit, eventually your brand will become recognized as the official torch-bearer and leader behind the movement of your category. Your company will be asked to speak at conferences, investor events, and local meetups. (Location 1776)

As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, I learned a lot about building content marketing programs from Marketo and some of the great evangelistic content they created in their “definitive guide” e-book series. (Location 1786)

Ten Tips for Supercharging Your Content Marketing Program (Location 1794)

When companies start thinking about marketing a product, they often start by creating a website. The problem is, as we discussed, people don’t know you, and your new category, exist, so they are not likely to show up on your homepage. Instead, you need to take all the different types of content you create and share it through various channels. (Location 1824)

I wholeheartedly agree with Anthony that we must leverage early-stage content in our category creation, but we also must let our buyer know what steps to take next. When we create content about a pain a customer is having, we can’t just recognize their pain, but we must share how we can solve that pain, including how our customers have seen success and what they can do to see similar success. (Location 1834)

This account-based content strategy is very company-to-human centric and can help prospects know how truly committed your company is to solve their pain, building trust. (Location 1846)

In content marketing for category creation, competition is not the enemy. (Location 1853)

Another response to the “noise problem” in email was the birth of the account-based marketing (ABM) category— a new approach to marketing that exhorts hyper-personalization of content and context delivered to a specific account (or hyper- targeted set of accounts), leveraging other channels outside of email such as display networks, direct mail, and the corporate website itself. The operating principle of ABM is that personalized campaigns will be much more effective than the alternative, eliminating any wasted effort and resources. (Location 1906)

While articulating the “why” and educating on the “how” of your category are important, the way that the content is produced and delivered can help create and contribute to the culture of your community. For companies creating categories within the business context, an analog for lifestyle brand would be career companion—the sum of your content marketing efforts can inspire, guide, and motivate the professional development of the people in your community. (Location 1946)

While video continues to be popular for middle and late stage content assets such as recorded demos and customer testimonials, the idea of developing episodic, early stage content around the “why” and “how” of your category is where the innovation is headed. Video will also add a face to your category, which can benefit both external and internal spokespeople. Featuring customers or non-customer members of the community is a great way to appeal to the novelty and status motivators of the early adopters in your category and provide them an opportunity to share their stories. (Location 1959)

Since video is an extremely engaging medium, the likelihood of creating a network effect around that content when shared in their networks will benefit both of your brands. Internally, video is an incredible mechanism to live your values and culture out loud and to build authenticity and trust in the market by positioning your executives as the embodiment of those virtues. (Location 1964)

People consume information in different ways—in fact, there are seven distinct learning styles that humans can employ. We often prefer a mix of several different styles, but one is dominant in the following categories: (Location 2009)

With education being such an important aspect of content marketing programs for early categories, marketers have a responsibility to create content that appeals to each of the seven learning styles above. (Location 2019)

The benefits of creating an industry certification program are many, especially since consumers will apply a premium to learn from the market leader. These programs are typically promoted at the top-of-funnel, meaning anyone can sign up for the online, self-paced courses without necessarily being a customer. (Location 2025)

Eventually, you’ll know you’re successful when the program is growing your database, helping Sales close deals, and program graduates are displaying their certifications proudly on their LinkedIn profiles and résumés. (Location 2033)

One of the companies in the marketplace that has done a phenomenal job of building a lifestyle brand around their category is Drift, the leading Conversational Marketing platform that turns website traffic into qualified meetings. Drift’s VP of marketing David Gerhardt (affectionately known as “DG”) is helping pioneer this new era of business-to-human marketing, and in building the Conversational Marketing category, is writing his own playbook on how to leverage digital media and creative activations to build a community around the concept of bringing humanity back into marketing. (Location 2054)

Here are five of the principles that he shared: (Location 2059)

One of the channels that DG leveraged early was LinkedIn video, a powerful and engaging method to connect and build a relationship with your professional network. With only his iPhone in hand and something profound to share, DG was able to break through the noise of the LinkedIn newsfeed and contribute to the marketing discussion in an authentic way. (Location 2076)

The key to zigging, DG believes, is deep empathy for the customer. What could the Drift team create if they themselves were on the other end of the campaign? That thinking gave way to the Drift Insider program, a free content subscription from Drift that includes exclusive interviews with authors, management lessons from the brightest minds in business, how-to sessions at the whiteboard from top leaders in sales, marketing, and product, expert-level Conversational Marketing and sales education, and other themes of premium content programs. (Location 2082)

Nobody wants to be sold to—and as DG says, we as an industry have actually become allergic to sales in our consumer lives. (Location 2088)

DG believes that charging for content is a great conversation starter, and with the success of the Drift Insider+ program, the data supports his vision for this. (Location 2100)

If you’re creating a category, writing the book on your category is a competitive brand advantage all to itself. (Location 2112)

By focusing on bringing the humanity back to marketing, DG and the Drift team are helping usher in this brand new era of B2H marketing. (Location 2114)

Community is one of the most impactful content delivery vehicles for category creators, and when done right, can build a competitive moat around your brand unlike any other program. (Location 2118)

That’s where community marketing comes in—a purposeful and authentic effort to gather the early adopters of your category and advance their interests through a variety of programs. (Location 2155)

Salesforce refers to their community as Trailblazers, while Marketo calls their faithful the Marketing Nation. In both examples, community isn’t limited to paying customers of their products, but anyone within their audience who cares about the category. (Location 2159)

organize an industry conference that would gather as many folks from the community together as would come, all in the spirit of sharing Customer Success best practices and networking. (Location 2164)

digital programs can never be a replacement for the live experience. (Location 2176)

Creating Experiences, Not Events (Location 2178)

Bizzabo found that most (41%) marketers believe that events are the single-most effective marketing channel over digital advertising, email marketing, and content marketing, (Location 2180)

a new trend in event marketing circles around creating experiences rather than events, a strategy that places a creative premium on activating an emotive and sensory journey for attendees that cultivates human connection and relationship. (Location 2184)

The details matter when creating corporate experiences— (Location 2193)

Types of Corporate Experiences (Location 2200)

That’s the key nuance for field events in the category creation context—leading with best practices over product demos and sales pitches. Sales will certainly be able to prospect for revenue opportunity, but bringing people together in their local markets to inspire, educate, and connect will create exponential value for the brand and put sales in a better position to prospect. (Location 2207)

Five Levers for Driving Conference Registration (Location 2419)

Net Promoter Score (NPS). (Location 2487)

Activate Customers as Brand Ambassadors (Location 2520)

The truth is that there’s a missing party in the narrative here who actually carries all of the leverage and authority to crown a category created—the customer. (Location 2524)

But what if that same company created a platform for other voices to position the category, with trusted voices from reputable companies? (Location 2530)

Dr. Robert Cialdini, bestselling author and career researcher of the science of influence names consensus as one of his six principles of persuasion—that people will look to the actions of others to determine their own. A recent survey by Demand Gen Report also revealed that “78% of buyers strongly agreed that they are placing a higher emphasis on the trustworthiness of content source, with 65% having higher preferences for content from industry influencers.” (Location 2533)

These individuals will play an instrumental role validating your leadership and the category that you’re creating by leasing you their brand equity. (Location 2551)

Customers Validate the Pain You’ve Observed Is Real (Location 2555)

By participating in the conversation and, ideally, referring to the category by name, your customers are effectively telling the world that they themselves have felt the pain that you’ve observed, that the solution for that pain (Location 2561)

Customers Co-Author Industry Best Practices (Location 2569)

Customers Make Your Product Better (Location 2588)

How to Create and Identify Brand Advocates Identifying advocates within your customer base is a critical step to activating them as brand ambassadors in the marketplace—but before they’re willing to advocate, you’ll need to make them successful with your products. (Location 2619)

CS = CX + CO, or Customer Success is equal to Customer Experience plus Customer Outcomes. (Location 2631)

I’ll summarize nine steps for getting started with Customer Success today. (Location 2647)

Understanding Advocacy Moments in Context of Outcomes (Location 2724)

How to Activate Customers as Brand Ambassadors in New Categories (Location 2759)

the smart category creating company also organizes the category community. This can be done physically through conferences, local speaking events and dinners, and online through discussion and community software, (Location 2786)

The company should focus on marketing the category, while the community of company advocates should be the ones to evangelize the specific company and products. When we host dinner events for category participants and prospects at Influitive, the rule is that our executives can only discuss the food, wine, children, and hobbies. The selling is done by the happy customer advocates. (Location 2790)

Video game designers have long figured this out, and ensure that users receive their “hit of dopamine” at the right times to increase their level of investment in the game. Smart marketers can leverage the same ideas. (Location 2824)

How Marketing Can Scale Trust in New Categories (Location 3251)

Success in funnel one means broad category awareness, identification of your company brand as a contributor to the discussion within the new category, and ongoing engagement around the best practices and resources that your team produces. Success in funnel two means hypergrowth. The momentum behind the first funnel must eventually correlate to momentum in the second funnel, otherwise, an observer may be right to question whether there’s a real business to be built (beyond perhaps a media company) in your category. (Location 3320)

Funnel Stage Names and Definitions (Location 3338)

Six Growth Outcomes Impacted by Category Creation (Location 3370)

Building your database typically comes from either organic or paid media efforts at the very top of the funnel. For category creators, creating enough early stage content that’s SEO friendly around the search terms relevant to your category is the best way to drive organic value. Over time, the organic effort will influence search volume on your company and category brand, which can be measured using the free Google Trends utility. (Location 3382)

There are many leading indicators to account for the successful execution of organic and paid strategies, but ultimately, the number of conversions your team is able to generate is the appropriate lagging indicator. (Location 3386)

Conversions are the right metric to use in order to quantify the impact of brand awareness of your new category (funnel one), as well as a leading indicator into future sales (funnel two) given the campaigns that will be driven into your database. The gross number in aggregate is interesting, but reporting on conversions by demographic considerations such as persona, company size, or industry vertical can lead to important revelations that can inform your go-to-market approach in your new category. (Location 3389)

As an example, are SMB companies gravitating to the messaging that you’re putting out in the marketplace more than large enterprises? (Location 3393)

Scaling your database by driving conversions—both widespread and targeted—is important, but so is the ongoing engagement of those who have already converted. (Location 3398)

An expectation gets set in the market that your brand is leading the conversation around industry best practices, along with a responsibility to deliver new and relevant content regularly into your marketable database. If contacts in your database are showing high engagement with the content that you’re creating, that is a clear signal of their interest in your category. Signs of engagement for an already opted-in conversion can include interesting moments such as webinar attendance, regular visits to your blog or website, or registering to attend a live event. (Location 3401)

It’s worth measuring and communicating both conversions and ongoing marketing engagement through an account-based lens. (Location 3408)

Understanding how engaged contacts within your target accounts are with your content may signal where they are currently in their maturity within your category (funnel one) and whether or not they are in an active evaluation process for products (funnel two). Engagement with early stage content topics such as how to build the team may indicate they are still in strategy definition mode, while engagement with late stage content topics such as how to use [your product] to solve X problem may indicate they’re in-market for a solution. Engagement can also correlate to how likely a forecasted deal is to close. If your sales team has deals in the forecast that haven’t engaged with your website or content in some time, that opportunity may be at risk. (Location 3410)

Conversions alone won’t establish a category. Ultimately, you’ll need to build the bridge from funnel one to funnel two by generating enough interest in your product to justify investments in category marketing. (Location 3418)

By implementing a lead scoring methodology, the conversions you’ve sourced at the top of the funnel are exhibiting demographic and behavioral context that can signal buying intent. Once they pass through a certain scoring threshold or exhibit behavior such as “hand raising” (asking for direct contact from sales), these conversions become MQLs that warrant a prospecting or qualification motion. The conversion-to-MQL conversion ratio is a good metric to observe for implied conversion from funnel one to funnel two. (Location 3421)

In some organizations, MQLs generate alerts for the sales development team to follow up with in order to set a meeting for the account executive, and thus generating an SQL. (Location 3426)

Most marketing organizations are measured by pipeline creation, whether that shows up as MQLs, SQLs, or SALs. The trend, however, is to measure marketing further down the funnel, as pipeline created is only relevant if enough of it eventually turns into revenue. (Location 3430)

In fact, opportunities that are exhibiting increased levels of activity and engagement with your marketing programs have a higher propensity to buy. This means that when done right, marketing should influence nearly 100% of every deal closed in new categories, even if sourced by Sales, Customer Success, or other channels. Measuring influence and deal attribution is often a difficult (and contentious) exercise, but capturing interesting moments at an account level—as explored earlier in the database engagement section—is a great place to start. We’ll cover some ideas later on how marketing can personalize thought leadership for sales to package at a specific account and, also, how late stage content can become a powerful lever to influence buyers in new categories and teach them how to buy. (Location 3439)

Typically, investors are interested in understanding how many new “lands”—or new logos—were closed in a given timeframe and, of those, how many transactions can be attributed to category marketing effort. To get ahead of that conversation, create a process around pulling together a detailed analysis of every deal closed, as well as conducting win (and even loss) interviews that capture qualitative feedback on why buyers buy. (Location 3450)

Landing is clearly an important starting point, but Customer Success effort to help customers get value from the products we sell them generates powerful new revenue opportunities around (a) ensuring they renew their contracts, (b) upselling additional licenses or enhancements, or (c) cross-selling net new products. (Location 3460)

The financial KPI that CFOs and investors care about here may differ from company to company, but is typically net revenue retention (NRR). This metric measures the total value of your renewed contracts as well as the revenue gained through upsells and cross-sells. You can evaluate NRR on a monthly or annual basis, depending on your needs. (Location 3464)

here’s what we learned about Pulse’s impact on Gainsight’s growth. (Location 3502)

How to Build a Bridge into Funnel Two Successfully building a bridge from category interest (funnel one) to product interest (funnel two) is the single biggest challenge in category creation. (Location 3539)

The first step is to understand how to prioritize marketing programs in context of those companies that are showing signals of interest in funnel two, over companies that are very happy living in funnel one. (Location 3549)

To understand what’s going on in your marketable database, you need to implement a lead scoring methodology. Lead scores are assigned to each contact in your database and measure important factors such as demographic data (e.g., Is this the right type of company, or are they a buyer or influencer persona?) and behavioral data (e.g., How often is this contact on our website, or has she registered for an event recently?). As the contact engages with your brand through various programs, his or her behavioral score improves, which can indicate intention and prioritize action for sales and marketing. By passing a certain scoring threshold, that contact becomes an MQL. Figure 12.5 introduces a framework for thinking about lead scoring in context of category creation. (Location 3551)

Once you’ve made sense of your database, you are now ready to run programs to uncover buying intent for your product. (Location 3581)

Here are some of the hacks you can deploy to aid in that effort: (Location 3584)

Category creators see this as an opportunity to engineer the sales process for their category and to teach the market how to buy products. Create the official “buyers guide” content asset for your category that educates the market on important considerations for evaluating solutions. (Location 3596)

Marketers will benefit from taking a servant leadership position with their Sales counterparts—anticipating their needs and putting their sellers in a position to win. (Location 3618)

There’s a phenomenal book on talent management written by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh called The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age. (Location 3750)

Transparency. Creating a culture of winning together requires open dialogue on what each individual at the company is learning along the journey. Teammates should feel comfortable sharing both success and failures without fear of reprimand or judgment. (Location 3793)

Buy-In. The moment that a teammate loses faith in the company, strategy, management, or mission, he’s out of the game. (Location 3797)

That’s where the management principle of disagree and commit can be helpful, a doctrine which states that individuals are allowed to disagree while a decision is being made, but that once a decision has been made, everybody must commit to it. (Location 3802)

Since category creation by its nature will require both learning and adaptability, it’s important that teammates share their feedback, creative ideas, and roadblocks with the broader team. (Location 3804)