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.

Step four: Packaging

Once we had a firmer understanding of our position, we tackled packaging – but not in the way you might think. I’m not talking about bundling products or creating collateral for customers or prospects.

What we did was package our findings for internal use. We took all of our research, put it in a slide deck, and made suggestions for what our new positioning and messaging should look like.

Leveraging Lusha's distinctive brand voice, we brainstormed fun taglines with our creative team. While our current motto is "search less, sell more", we're looking to start using "from cold outreach to warm outbound". These efforts are aimed not at external promotion but at internal alignment and socialization.

Step five: Management buy-in

Our first presentation was to the company's management, bringing together all the VPs and C-level executives in one room. In our presentation, we covered these crucial elements:

1. The current state of the market
2. Where we want to be
3. Our message
4. Primary personas
5. Positioning statement
6. Messaging guidelines
7. The competitive landscape

We made sure to frame this as an open conversation, then spent over an hour guiding them through our findings and collecting invaluable feedback. Some executives flagged potential objections from their respective teams, while others raised concerns about precision.

One of the greatest achievements of this presentation was that it sparked a conversation among executives about our positioning and highlighted where there was misalignment. In a rapidly-evolving company like Lusha, ensuring everyone is on the same page is paramount, and our initiative played a big part in making that happen.

Step six: Socialization and iteration

After we got feedback from management, that’s when the real fun began.

We organized roundtables to share our findings with approximately half the company, or about 150 employees. These were held in smaller groups of 10 to foster intimacy and genuine feedback.

Instead of dictating our findings, we approached these sessions as conversations, emphasizing our desire to listen and adapt based on their insights.

And while we were open to all feedback, our main focus was on the go-to-market organization. Whenever they flagged something major that they weren’t on board with, we made changes. That’s because, at the end of the day, the people we're serving are the people in the go-to-market organization. If they have an issue with what we're doing, it’s important that we listen to them.

After two or three sessions like this, the changes we had to make were minimal. Everybody was pretty much on board by that point because we’d been collaborating with them from day one, so there were very few surprises.

Now, as I mentioned earlier, we wanted to create a symphony with our new positioning, so we needed to bring in everyone, not just our go-to-market teams. It was especially important that we got our product and delivery team’s buy-in.

After our last session with the product and delivery team, I turned to Alina – our Senior Competitive Intelligence & Positioning Manager and the mastermind behind much of this operation – and gave her a hug.

In that moment, the same thought crossed both our minds: “Oh crap – now we actually have to make this happen!” Because it’s one thing to talk about it, but putting it into practice is something else entirely, right?

Navigating today’s product marketing landscape: eBook

Want to tackle the challenges of the product marketing landscape head-on? We’ve got just the guide for you!

Product Marketing AllianceAmelia Wilson

Step seven: Productizing

Now, what's our game plan? First off, we finalized our presentation and shared it with the team responsible for whipping up our marketing materials. It's essential that our content creators know our new positioning inside and out.

Our debut was at a sales kick-off presentation where I showed the team how to weave Lusha’s story around our new positioning. We're now working on refreshing our collateral, which includes a spiffy new one-sheet and a revamped message.

A major issue we spotted early on was the rampant production of marketing materials without much thought about the broader narrative.

Sound familiar?

As product marketers, we often complain that salespeople don’t use our materials. I think that’s because they grab what resonates with them. They aren't always interested in a particular feature or product; what matters to them is the story. If you package your product or feature a compelling story and highlight its value, they're way more inclined to share it.

Remember that ‘warm outbound’ thing I mentioned earlier? With the importance of storytelling in mind, that’s where we focused our first big productizing push.

We packaged three products under the banner of ‘warm outbound,’ and everything just clicked! It’s now actually in our product; if you're a self-service user cruising through our product-led growth funnel, you’ll see this shiny page inviting you to check out our warm outbound tools.

And the sales teams? They're all over it! They're sharing it, talking about it, and truly getting to grips with the value these tools provide to customers.

Now, as I mentioned, the productizing stage is still a work in progress. With hundreds of thousands of people visiting the Lusha site daily, all getting poured into our product-led funnel growth journey, we need meticulous A/B testing before making any changes. So the site is still a work in progress, and it’ll probably be another six months or so before it’s complete.

Another thing we haven’t quite cracked is getting the sales team completely on board. They’re definitely doing better than before, but there's room for improvement. So, our next challenge is reinforcing our messaging and making sure we equip them with the tools they need to share it well.

What we learned

Now, let's dive into some lessons, shall we? I love grouping things in threes, so let's keep it to three key takeaways.

Lesson one: Honesty and integrity

Let’s face it – no company is perfect. We all have our fair share of problems. We're part of the startup nation, after all. We’re always on the move, always improving.

When we acknowledged our challenges openly, it was a breath of fresh air for our sales teams. They were so used to just receiving directives and materials. But being candid about where we stand? That was a game-changer for getting their buy-in.

Fun fact: Did you know that the products that get the most conversions from review sites are not the ones with five stars? The sweet spot seems to be around 4.3 stars. If you hop onto G2 and see a product with straight five stars, it feels a bit sus, doesn't it?

As marketers, it's disingenuous of us to claim that everything's perfect. Embracing and discussing our flaws changes the conversation. Especially in a competitive market, acknowledging our wins and losses changes the game entirely.

Lesson two: Collaboration

I can't stress the importance of collaboration enough. I've always believed in bringing everyone along for the journey.

We often introduce ideas too late in the game. We present the finished product without sharing the "why" behind it. When we do this, not everyone sees or understands the process that led us to this finished product.

That’s something we want to avoid, which is why it’s important to bring as many people as possible along for the ride and keep the dialogue open.

Of course, CEOs will sometimes dive in and nitpick. That's what they do! But involving everyone, listening, explaining the "whys," and genuinely collaborating? That makes a world of difference.

Lesson three: Data is everything

It’s hard to argue with numbers. If your approach is data-driven, it's tough for someone to say, "My gut tells me this is wrong." Their gut might say it’s wrong, but your numbers say it’s right – who are you going to trust?

By the way, this happened when we released our ‘warm outbound’ features. At the last minute, one of our execs started having second thoughts, even though I'd discussed this positioning with them multiple times.

Now, I thought this might happen, so a few weeks earlier I’d used Wynter (an amazing platform for A/B testing messaging) to get some real feedback. I tested ‘warm outbound’ against ‘intense signals,’ and guess what? ‘warm outbound’ won by a landslide with 73% preference.

So, when I went to the exec with our press release, and they started expressing their doubts, I was armed with this data. I told them, "73% of sales and marketing professionals on Wynter preferred this." And just like that, they signed off.

Data really is everything. It gives your argument weight. Even though I've never been a numbers person, I've learned to embrace pivot tables. They are your greatest ally when you're trying to make a point.

Now, take the lessons and frameworks I’ve shared and – when the time is right – get ready to reposition your company for success. 🚀

Enjoy the read? 📖

Learn something new? ✨

Share the love, 🧡

Drop a review on G2!

Your feedback helps others discover our content. Plus, the first 25 reviewers of Product Marketing Alliance will get a $20 Amazon.com gift card (or equivalent) as a little thank-you.