Showing Love to our People

Brought to you by Jody Geiger , Jenna Bugiardini and Klue

Voices of Revenue is a monthly newsletter spotlighting revenue operators making waves and sharing best practices.

The pace at which content is produced, lands and leaves our feeds is remarkable and alarming. We are here to ensure you don't fall behind the curve!

Volume 4

Love is in the air and we are shouting our love from the rooftops for Klue 's The Compete Network Community! Just like George Harrison strummed "Something" for his love, The Compete Network is a serenade to competitive professionals.

The Compete Network is a Fab Four community of brilliant minds in product marketing, competitive intelligence, enablement and go-to-market revenue teams. This rockstar community’s camaraderie, insights and best practices are hotter than a Beatles concert in 1965!

Klue's Compete Network is where the beats of competition meet the incredible community shaping the future of compete. Ready to rock? Read on to learn from the best and most recent highlights from The Compete Network's setlist.?

Competing in an AI World

AI In Competitive Intelligence Report. Created by The Compete Network

Link to Original Report: AI Research Report

Quote: “AI will replace data collection and summary from a marketing perspective. There is a long way for it to replace product and positioning knowledge and capabilities… the CI mastery will still require us to be part of accumulating, analyzing and training sales.”

Takeaways:

• The Compete Network looked at 67 PMMs, CI and GTM leaders to understand how compete pros are leveraging AI in their day to day.?
• The consensus is that 76% of people are using AI regularly to help speed up the creation of competitive intel.
• Very few have cracked the code on how to use AI to distribute their compete content.
• Trust will remain a challenge. AI hallucinations are very real and can provide a lot of skepticism for those using it.

Experimenting at Klue:

• AI is huge for our Klue team this year. We believe deeply that AI is the future and it is going to help accelerate our vision. Last year, with the help of AI we released “Review Insights” which allows a PMM to get access to thousands of review summaries and add them to a competitor battlecard in one click.

Embracing Erosion. Created by Devon O'Rourke with guests Derek Osgood and Jason Oakley

Link to Original Voice: 2024 Predictions and Trends

Key Quote: “AI will create a larger gap between great product marketers and average…I think really great product marketers are going to take advantage of new tooling and create greater separation between those folks.”

Takeaways:

• A really good product marketer is excellent at their job. They understand messaging and positioning and AI is only going to be an extension of that. It will speed up the process in the creation of their already exceptional work.
• There’s a lot of noise right now with AI and it can be hard to decipher quality. Every tool has some sort of AI feature. Coming into this year the tools that they are going to adopt are the ones that are intuitive and help them do their job without having to overcome a big learning curve.
• Product marketers in 2024 need to focus on clear positioning and messaging to stay above the noise of AI.?

Experimenting at Klue:?

• At Klue our content services team uses AI to help them speed up content creation. With the help of AI and very clever prompts they can accelerate the time it takes them to create battlecards and custom content for our clients. However, the content expert is always meticulous about validating that the information is true and accurate.?

Coffee and Compete. Created by Klue and Adam McQueen

Link to Original Newsletter: How the competitive intel community is using AI

Quote: “AL's been swamped. Rumour has it he spent all weekend trying to make sense of 1000's of competitor reviews...Good thing AI is here to help. Check out the latest of our AL and AI series to see how AI is helping product marketers and compete pros speed up the most time-consuming part of their job.”

Takeaways:

• One of the most time-consuming tasks for PMMs is customer interview writing. On an episode of Healthy Competition ?? Jess Petrella shared some killer prompts that can help save time writing scripts. Leveraging ChatGPT this way will give you a list of questions that you can ask your customers.
• ChatGPT can’t make your battlecards for you. A lot of the information found on ChatGPT is from before 2021. That’s a huge risk for compete teams if they are sharing out-of-date content with their end users.
• 70% of compete pros are using AI to analyze and summarize intel. If you’re not doing this as a compete pro you are falling behind.

Experimenting at Klue:

• We ran “AI day” at Klue. Every single person in our company took a full day off from their regular work to experiment and try our different AI tools. Everyone then shared the tools that they found and was given a budget to try out their top tool. Coming out of it the company felt much more equipped and aware of how AI impacts their day-to-day. No Klubees are at risk of becoming like AL; we’re all leaning into AI.

Positioning Yourself to Win

Old Way vs. New Way. Created by PMM Files with Jason Oakley

Link to Original Voice: BrightHire’s Old Way vs. New Way

Quote: “Instead of a traditional feature benefit section, they use an old way vs. new way design to contrast their approach against the traditional way of hiring.”

Takeaways:

• Don’t just highlight your product’s key capabilities, contrast them!
• Contrast your company’s approach with an old or worse way of doing the job.
• Do this and your value and differentiation become instantly clear.

Experimenting at Klue:

• We love this concept. It is so simple and effective. It makes us think of how we can incorporate more overt contrasting at Klue. An idea we are now noodling on:The old way to conduct competitive intelligence was gathering intel from external sources like scraping the web and gathering internal intelligence from your team’s experience in the field.?The new way is to power-up that intel with buyer insights from always on win-loss interviews. Incorporating intel from your customers allows you to triangulate the data from multiple sources to develop a comprehensive understanding of how you are winning or losing and what you should do about it to win more.

Amber Deibert on Winning as Women. Created by Jody Geiger and guest Amber Deibert

Link to Original Voice: Overcoming Imposter Syndrome

Quote: “The opposite of imposter syndrome is complacency.”

Takeaways:

• You can’t win if you don’t play the game.
• Many times we stop ourselves from playing the game because the little voice inside our head tells us we aren’t good enough, prepared enough, experienced enough…just not enough.
• That little voice has a name and it is Imposter Syndrome.
• Amber Deibert reframes Imposter Syndrome. It is a signal that you are growing, stretching and becoming more.
• Lean into that feeling. You are about to win.

Experimenting at Klue:

• Context, Content and Contact. Our enablement philosophy at Klue is that we have done our jobs well if we have equipped revenue drivers with these 3 C’s:Context (what matters and why it matters)Content (tools and resources to execute)Contact (experience, or at-bats executing and getting feedback to get a feel)
• At our Revenue Kickoff, we created a simulation of our customer journey for all customer-facing roles. Folks had to perform their intro call, discovery call or demo live in front of their peers and be evaluated on their effectiveness. This would normally induce some performance anxiety, but add your CEO Jason Smith as an observer and people were feeling performance anxiety kick in.?Guess what? People stepped up, nerves and all, and played the game to win.?
• You have to step in the arena time and again and fight your nerves.
• If you have done it once, you can do it again!

Blind Spots. Created by Ryan Sorley and guest Meg Fitzgerald

Link to Original Voice:? How Win-Loss Powers Brand Perception

Quote: “Brand is the promise you make to your customer. It is your messaging and positioning strategy. It is the category that you play in. It is how you describe why you are different, not just better than your competition.”

Takeaways:

• Brand measurement is often the most popular question from leaders and executives in organizations, and it is essential for driving revenue and business performance.
• Companies should start their brand measurement efforts by gaining a deep understanding of their customers through voice of the customer research and leveraging those insights to inform their messaging and positioning.
• It’s crucial to align brand measurement efforts with business objectives and track key performance indicators, ensuring that the insights drive decision-making and change.

Experimenting at Klue:

• Our marketing team at Klue often gets recognized for punching above its weight. It is rare that an early stage company’s brand has such a strong presence and is referenced by marketing peers as leaders in brand voice, content, thought leadership and advertising.
• If you ask our VP Marketing, Katie Berg , it is all about the vibes. Good ideas come from vibes. The desire to work hard and innovate together, comes from vibes.
• At Klue’s company kickoff, the marketing team held a “Mad-Ads Pitch Party” where all Kluebees could get up and pitch an idea for an ad that Klue would produce. Everyone was jumping up with wild ideas and half-baked thoughts. The Klue marketing team set the stage for fun with “no bad ideas”, and the vibes carried us!
• Vibes allow our marketing team to stay nimble. We stay attuned to our customer’s needs through win-loss interview data and using buyer insights to inform strategy. Staying innovative and nimble means that we are willing to pivot when we learn new information from our customers and market.

As we continue to spot trends, we'll keep you updated. See ya next month!