Zoelle Egner: belief

Transcript context

…Go there. A lot of people think that the epitome of product marketing is creating your own category. And while I agree that it is useful to have strong differentiators, because it is, I think creating a category, getting a new thing in Gartner or whatever, is often a waste of your time. It is a huge lift, absolutely enormous, particularly in B2B SaaS, and I'm not always sure that it's helpful to have your super teeny tiny, little niche over here where you're like, "Oh, we have no competitors." That's not actually how buyers work. It's not really worth it. That said, there are things you can do that feel like category creation that are actually effective, and that I do think make more sense. And specifically if you can elevate a profession instead of a category, that can make way more sense. So the great example of this is that Gainsight creating customer success or many companies altogether carving out DevOps, or rebranding DevOps, to be a thing that was suddenly a sexy job to have. And I think that's valuable because a job is an identity and people will fight for an identity. A category of software is a line item on your budget. No one is excited about that. But people are very excited about their job being meaningful, and their job being important, and being taken seriously. And so if you could hold up either an existing or a brand new job and say, "This is really important for much broader business metrics, whatever else. We're going to create community for those people to come together and it's all about the job," and not about you. That can be very powerful and they'll take them with you. You become part of the identity of that career. Amazing. Do that, for sure. But like the Gartner Square, there's some opportunities for that where it makes sense. A lot of the times it doesn't. Don't do that. Amazing. I love that. Is there more you wanted to add, there?…

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