How to reposition your growing company for success

This article is based on Inbar’s brilliant talk at the Product Marketing Summit in Tel Aviv, 2023. PMA members can watch it in its full glory here and head to their membership dashboards for even more OnDemand product marketing insights.

Hey, I’m Inbar Yagur, Director of Content and Product Marketing at Lusha. Today, I'm excited to share our recent repositioning initiative. I’ll talk about what prompted this strategy shift and walk you through a framework to use when it’s time to reposition your brand or product.

But before we dive in, let me give you a little context…

Why we decided to reposition our offering

Let me start by telling you about Lusha, in case you haven’t heard of it. In essence, Lusha is a go-to-market platform primarily for sales and marketing teams. We help them pinpoint the perfect contacts and accounts, so they can reach out at just the right moment.

Lusha was founded in 2016. It was originally a very simple browser extension to enrich contact data on LinkedIn. For most of its early life, Lusha was bootstrapped, primarily driven by product-led growth.

Come 2021, we secured our series A and series B investments, propelling us to unicorn status. In 2022, we chose to leverage that funding to significantly expand our offerings, which naturally led to us addressing a broader audience.

From being a simple tool, Lusha evolved into a comprehensive platform. Our suite now includes integrations, buying signals, prospecting, list building, data enrichment, and yes, we've retained our original browser extension too.

Signs it’s time to reposition

It didn't take long for us to realize that with such a transformative shift, certain aspects of our approach needed to be reevaluated.

For instance, our website described our plugin and other products but didn’t tell a cohesive story. Plus, while our website had once been our main conversion engine, it was mainly attracting individual contributors; as we expanded into the enterprise realm, decision-makers weren't arriving at our site.

On top of this, we noticed huge variations in how our salespeople were pitching our products – and I'm not talking about the usual variations you expect from different salespeople; these were football-field-sized gaps between how they were talking about our product.

Creating a symphony

When you’re facing these kinds of challenges, the first thing to do is zero in on your message. Now, I hesitate to say this since it sounds a little cheesy, but it’s about creating a symphony; you want everyone to use the same sheet music.

So, what did we do first? We approached the CEO. While this might seem glaringly obvious, I've seen many marketing teams, including my own past teams, share finalized ideas with the CEO, only to receive feedback that put them back at square one.

This time, we went to our CEO right off the bat, explaining what we wanted to do and why, and we brought him along for the ride. Once we got the green light from him, it was much easier to get other stakeholders on board.

Our guiding principles

At the beginning of this process, it felt like we were fumbling in the dark. This was the first time that Lusha had been repositioned, so we didn’t have a set path to follow. Although there had been a couple of short-lived attempts at repositioning over the years, this was the first time we'd really gone for it.

Still, we had four guiding principles to steer our course:

1. Data-driven: The numbers don’t lie, so we made sure to lean on them throughout this process.
2. Collaborative: If everybody’s involved, they’re more likely to cooperate. It was vital to link our efforts to tangible business results and set corporate objectives.
3. Tied to business results: Our repositioning should support what we want to achieve as a company.
4. Present and future: Repositioning isn't just about the present. If you reposition solely for the current moment, you'll be back at the drawing board in a year. We wanted a message that would stand the test of time. It's a delicate balance to strike – crafting a message that buyers will relate to today and three, four, or five years down the line.

With these principles as our foundation, we rolled up our sleeves and got to work.

Our seven-step repositioning process

Now, when you look at the framework below, the repositioning process seems pretty straightforward. But truth be told, it wasn't. I reverse-engineered the heck out of this thing. We tried a lot of different strategies, gauging their effectiveness as we went along.

I’ll dive deeper into each step in a sec, but this is more or less the order in which we did things:

1. Discovery
2. Data
3. Landscape mapping
4. Packaging
5. Management buy-in
6. Socialization
7. Productizing

Full disclosure: we’re not done yet. We’re currently in stage seven and, honestly, I don’t know if stage seven ever ends. More on that later, but for now, let’s dive into each stage of this process.

Step one: Discovery

The first thing we did was sit down with the co-founders. We delved into their inspirations for starting the company, their vision, where they see the market going, and their aspirations for the company's growth.

We also interviewed about 30 people from around the company – not only leadership but individual contributors too. After all, they’re the ones with boots on the ground so their insights are invaluable. We asked them to reflect on Lusha's current standing, its strengths, potential pitfalls, and perceived market gaps.

Next, we carried out a SWOT analysis. As old-school as it sounds, SWOT analyses remain super useful, and I’m a big fan of them.

We then synthesized all this information into an interim report for the CEO.

Step two: Data

A little confession: I’m artistically inclined and math scares me. However, my experiences with data have taught me one thing: to use data effectively, you need to ask the right questions.

With this fact in mind, we sifted through data to see if the learnings we uncovered during the discovery phase held true. If someone claims our primary user fits a certain profile, can we confirm that? When they suggest a particular persona isn't engaging with our platform or that a specific strategy isn't working, do the numbers agree?

By diving deep into this data, we moved from relying on gut feelings to basing our understanding on hard math, and what we discovered was eye-opening.

There was a huge gap between how our team perceived our place in the market and the reality. Plus, not only did we identify our main profit drivers, but we also spotted opportunities we'd been leaving on the table.

On top of all this, we uncovered valuable insights about user personas we hadn't previously addressed, and we realized that engaging with them could unlock significant business potential.

Step three: Mapping the landscape

Once we had a firm grasp of the data, we turned our attention to the broader landscape.

Lusha’s in a "red ocean". With players like ZoomInfo, Apollo, Cognitivism, LeadIQ, Seamless, and even LinkedIn to some extent, we're surrounded by competition.

In such a fiercely competitive landscape, it’s crucial that we understand how we’re perceived and recognize where our strengths lay. What sets us apart? Where do we excel? Once we mapped out the landscape, our key differentiators became crystal clear.