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Customer feedback analytics · London · 2021

Chattermill: what a first product marketing function does in twelve weeks.

SECTOR

Customer feedback analytics

MARKET

UK and Europe

COMPANY

Chattermill

ROLE APPLIED FOR

Head of product marketing

DATE

Nov 2021

SaaSCustomer analytics

The situation

The brief was not about a launch.

Chattermill unified customer feedback from support, reviews and surveys and analysed it in one place. The brief was not about a launch. It was about standing up the product marketing function itself: what it does, in what order, and how anyone would know it was working.

So the answer had to be a sequence rather than a set of assets, and it had to be defensible about what comes first.

01 · What this engagement produced

5 of 34 outputs

Research

Competition

Segment, position and price

Message

Launch and enable

Measure and maintain

Solid is what the brief produced. A function plan is mostly a plan to produce the rest.

02 · The decision

What the first twelve weeks buy.

A new function can spend its first quarter making things or deciding things. Making things is more visible, and it produces collateral that quotes a positioning nobody has agreed.

Struck

Start with collateral and demo videos

Visible in week two, and every asset has to be rewritten once the positioning lands.

Struck

Start with competitive tracking

Worth having, and nothing depends on it yet.

Chosen

Decide first, produce second

Mission, market, positioning and personas in weeks one to four; the assets that quote them after.

Weeks one to four decide, five to eight produce, nine to twelve measure and feed back. Assets built before the decisions get rewritten, and the rewrite is invisible on a plan.

03 · What the plan carried

The shape of the twelve weeks.

12

weeks, in three bands

6

categories in the competitive read

3

phases the function is measured in

Written from the public product and site. No access to their customers, pipeline or usage data.

04 · What I built

4 workstreams

Four workstreams, from the competitive read to the scorecard.

01The competitive readSix categories, not a feature list.

02 Competition

  • Market, product, positioning, marketing, sales and company kept as separate categories rather than one comparison table
  • Under marketing: taglines, content, keywords, partnerships, events and campaigns, since a competitor's marketing is public and tells you what they believe
  • Under company: mission, history, growth and what they are hiring for
02Buyer and user, separatedTwo profiles, different questions.

03 Segment, position & price

  • The buyer profile carries role in the buying process, validators, and what they value least as well as most
  • The user profile carries the daily job and communication preferences, because the person who uses it is often not the person who signs
  • Both carry verbatim quotes rather than invented characteristics
03A read of their own homepageWhat was missing behind the line.

04 Message

  • The existing line said what the product was, simply, which is more than most manage
  • Nothing stood behind it: no value proposition, no differentiation, no mission or vision, no comparison against alternatives
  • Named as gaps rather than replaced with a new line I had no evidence for
04How the function is measuredThree phases, different numbers.

06 Measure & maintain

  • Foundation: the communication loop between sales, marketing, product and customer success actually existing, and the messaging agreed
  • Adoption: signups, usage, upgrades, sales effectiveness, conversion in the target market, and feedback on whether the messaging worked
  • Acceleration: awareness, inbound effectiveness, loyalty and advocacy, then retention and churn

05 · The judgment call

Naming the gaps instead of rewriting the line.

The obvious move on a take-home is to rewrite the homepage headline and show your range. It reads well and it is unfalsifiable, because nobody can check a line written without evidence.

Their line was fine. What was missing was everything meant to sit behind it. Saying so was the more useful answer, and it is the same order the six-stage map runs in now: decide, then write.

06 · What this proves

Sequence, separation, evidence, phased measurement.

I sequence before I produce.

Decisions in the first four weeks, assets after.

I separate the buyer from the user.

Two profiles, two sets of questions.

I read a page for what is behind it.

The line was fine, the evidence was absent.

I measure a function in phases.

Different numbers matter at foundation and at scale.

Scope

Briefed by the company. Unpaid, one week, written from the public product and site.