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Author: Scott Heimgartner

Strong Tech, Slow Growth: Closing the Messaging Gap in the Age of Rapid Tech Cycles

Posted on by Scott Heimgartner

Technology cycles have been collapsing for years — and the impact of AI has only accelerated that pace. Companies aren’t just delivering more value; they’re delivering it faster. Lower barriers to entry let new players target niche use cases, scale quickly, and then expand into broader categories to challenge incumbents.

Take Treefera. They started with first-mile supply chain transparency, then rapidly expanded into commodity tracking, geospatial analytics, and compliance automation — quickly threatening established providers reliant on lagging, self-reported data. Their speed highlights a broader truth: innovation now moves faster than most markets can absorb.

And that’s where messaging becomes critical. In this era of compressed technology adoption, a strong product isn’t enough. If your story doesn’t evolve with the value you’re delivering — and at the speed you’re delivering it — buyers won’t keep up. Growth stalls, competitors gain ground, and the messaging that carried you to $20M won’t get you to $50M and beyond.

[Want to go straight to our Playbook? Click here]

Messaging In Motion

In past cycles, companies could ride a stable message for years. Early adopters tolerated rough edges, gave feedback generously, and allowed the story to evolve while the product matured.  Today, that luxury is virtually gone.

  • Markets shift fast
    New regulations, economic shocks, or disruptive competitors can reset priorities almost overnight. What mattered in Q1 may be irrelevant by Q3 — and messaging that doesn’t keep up risks sounding tone-deaf.

  • Products evolve faster than stories
    Feature velocity has outpaced narrative velocity. Engineering keeps shipping, but the story stays frozen. That gap creates confusion: innovation is invisible, misunderstood, or dismissed.

  • Buyers arrive more skeptical
    Committees are bigger, better informed, and less forgiving. Thanks to AI, competitive comparisons and peer reviews are just a click away. By the time your team connects, buyers expect clarity, differentiation, and proof — not promises.

The result is messaging debt. Like technical debt, it builds quietly, slows everything down, and gets harder to fix the longer it lingers — leaving an open lane for competitors to move in.

The Symptoms of Stale Messaging

Here’s the thing: stale messaging doesn’t announce itself. It creeps in, showing up as small cracks that widen over time — until growth erodes and eventually flatlines.

What does that look like?

  • Deals drag. Win rates slow, sales cycles stretch, and “no decision” quietly becomes your biggest competitor. Buyers don’t say your product isn’t valuable — they just can’t connect your story to a problem urgent enough to solve right now. What should feel like momentum instead feels like friction.

  • The story fractures. Sales, marketing, and product each put their own spin on the pitch. The founder’s sharp, memorable narrative gets watered down and reinterpreted until every team is telling a slightly different story. The result? Confusion in the market and wasted energy internally.

  • Competitors steal your edge. Rivals borrow your language, dress it up as their own, and erase the differentiation you once owned. What felt bold when you launched now sounds like table stakes. Without a clear, distinct message, you’re forced into price wars or feature fights instead of winning on value.

  • Innovation goes unseen. Your product keeps evolving, but the market still sees you through yesterday’s lens. New capabilities never get credit because the story hasn’t caught up. The gap between what you’ve built and what buyers perceive only widens, leaving revenue on the table.

These cracks may start small, but left unchecked, they compound. Deals stall, teams misalign, competitors catch up, and even your own innovation becomes invisible. Stale messaging isn’t just a marketing problem — it’s a growth problem.

The Four Messaging Gaps

As the Cranberries once asked, “Do you have to let it linger?” Messaging that’s treated as a one-and-done exercise always breaks down. And in our work, we’ve seen those breakdowns consistently fall into four distinct gaps — the most common ways messaging stops connecting.

  • The Clarity Gap
    Stories accumulate complexity over time. Features pile on, acronyms sneak in, and what was once crisp becomes muddled. Buyers nod politely but can’t repeat your value back in their own words. The moment champions can’t pitch you internally, momentum stalls — not because your product lacks value, but because the message is too tangled to travel.

  • The Relevance Gap
    Markets don’t sit still. New regulations, shifting budgets, or trends like AI adoption change what matters to buyers almost overnight. A message that once hit the mark now feels out of step. When your story doesn’t map to current priorities, you sound dated — and buyers tune out, even if your product is a perfect fit.

  • The Differentiation Gap
    Competitors are listening, too. They borrow your language, dress it up, and erase the edge you once had. What was bold now feels generic. Without a distinct narrative, you’re left competing on price, incremental features, or discounts — a race to the bottom rather than a story that commands value.

  • The Adoption Gap
    Even the sharpest messaging falls apart if it isn’t used consistently. Sales improvises, marketing spins their own angle, product talks features in isolation. The founder’s pitch gets bent out of shape until every function is telling a different story. Misalignment erodes trust with buyers and drains energy internally.

When these gaps start to show, they rarely fix themselves — they widen. Left unchecked, they slow growth, sap alignment, and hand competitors the advantage. Closing them requires a deliberate refresh of your story so it’s clear, relevant, differentiated, and consistently told.

How Liberis Approaches a Messaging Refresh

At Liberis Consulting, we believe messaging isn’t copywriting. It’s strategy. It’s the connective tissue between your product, your market, and your revenue growth.

Our approach is built on four core principles:

  • Outside-In First
    Messaging starts with the buyer’s reality, not internal assumptions. We ground everything in customer language, competitive context, and market priorities.

  • Collaborative Alignment
    Messaging only works if sales, marketing, product, and leadership share it. We bring cross-functional teams together to co-own the story.

  • Iterative Validation
    Messaging isn’t a one-and-done exercise. It has to be tested in the field, tuned to buyer reactions, and reinforced over time.tory.

  • Strategic Asset
    Strong messaging isn’t just a pitch deck. It’s a durable, repeatable narrative that unlocks velocity across the entire GTM engine.

Want To Go Deeper? 

We’ve published a playbook on sharpening your messaging – Sharpen Messaging to Improve Sales Outcomes – showing exactly how to connect your value to buyers. Built for B2B product marketers, it’s a step-by-step resource with ready-to-use templates to help you craft an outside-in messaging strategy that resonates.

Need Expert Guidance?

At Liberis Consulting, we’ve helped B2B teams sharpen their message to accelerate growth, align teams, and compete with confidence.  When your story starts to slip, we help you refresh it.  Contact us at Liberis Consulting and let us help you build a clear and consistent messaging framework that drives results.

Positioning That Wins: Standing Out in Crowded Markets

Posted on by Scott Heimgartner

Why clarity beats complexity in hyper-competitive markets

Launching a new product in today’s hyper-competitive B2B tech landscape isn’t just about having the best features—it’s about owning a clear, defensible place in the market.

At Liberis Consulting, we’ve seen this challenge repeatedly: Buyers are overwhelmed, competitors are loud, and your product risks getting lost in the noise. A strong product alone doesn’t close deals; clear positioning that highlights your differentiation does. 

[Want to skip all this and go straight to our Playbook? Click here]

The Challenge:  Capturing Mindshare

In B2B tech, any product (whether existing or net-new) isn’t just about winning deals—it’s about breaking through the noise and earning attention. Buyers today are overwhelmed with options, competitors are loud, and incumbents already dominate buyer mindshare. From the vendor’s perspective, several challenges make this even harder:

  • Overcrowded Marketplaces
    Buyers are bombarded with solutions that sound alike. Without a clear, differentiated story, your product risks blending into the noise.

  • Entrenched Competitors
    Established players often hold the advantage with brand recognition, existing customer bases, and proven credibility. Overcoming that bias is an uphill battle.

  • Feature Parity Across Solutions
    In crowded categories, most products offer similar capabilities. When everyone claims the same benefits, it becomes harder to stand out without a compelling narrative.

  • Skeptical, Distracted Buyers
    Decision-makers are juggling multiple priorities and have limited time. They gravitate toward known brands or default to “do nothing” if your value isn’t immediately obvious.

  • Fast-Moving Competitive Dynamics
    New entrants, shifting buyer needs, and evolving alternatives mean your product positioning can become outdated quickly if not carefully managed.

The stakes are high: if buyers can’t quickly answer “Why you?”, your product won’t even make the shortlist.

That’s why the job of positioning isn’t just to describe what your product does—it’s to own a unique and valuable space in your buyer’s mind, making your differentiated value clear against competing alternatives.

Why Positioning Matters More Than Ever

In hyper-competitive markets, where products compete for the same limited attention, positioning is what separates products that win from products that get lost. Buyers move fast, alternatives are everywhere, and competitors are louder than ever. Clear positioning gives you the advantage by:

  • Creating Instant Clarity for Buyers
    When your narrative is sharp and differentiated, buyers immediately understand who you are, what you do, and why it matters—helping you break through the noise.

  • Highlighting the Unique Value Only You Deliver
    Positioning makes it clear why your product is different and why that difference matters, shifting the conversation away from features and toward outcomes that resonate.

  • Aligning Your Teams Around One Story
    Great positioning doesn’t just live in marketing decks. It equips sales, product, and marketing teams to speak with one voice, ensuring buyers hear a consistent, compelling message at every touchpoint.

  • Equipping You to Compete with Confidence
    With a clear, defensible position, you can take control of the narrative rather than reacting to competitors. It becomes the foundation for your GTM strategy and accelerates growth.

In crowded markets, clarity isn’t optional—it’s your competitive weapon. Without it, even the best products risk blending into the background, no matter how powerful their capabilities.

How Liberis Approaches Positioning

At Liberis Consulting, we take a pragmatic, buyer-driven approach to positioning. We start by aligning on buyer needs and priorities, understanding all competitive alternatives, identifying unique product capabilities, and connecting those differentiators back to the customers who derive the greatest value.

But positioning work is never one-size-fits-all. When launching a net-new product into a hyper-competitive market—where buyers are already flooded with solutions—you need a more competitive-first strategy. In these situations, we focus on positioning directly against what buyers already know:  

  • Anchor Positioning to the Competitive Landscape
    In crowded markets, buyers need context fast. We position your product relative to known competitors so buyers immediately understand where you fit, where you stand out, and why you matter.

  • Map Competitor Strengths and Weaknesses
    We go beyond surface-level comparisons to analyze where competitors excel, where they fall short, and where unmet buyer needs exist. This allows us to pinpoint opportunity gaps your product can uniquely fill.

  • Draw Out Meaningful Differentiation
    Features alone rarely win in hyper-competitive markets. We uncover the capabilities and attributes that set your product apart—not just what’s different, but what’s most valuable to buyers in ways competitors can’t claim.

  • Craft a Buyer-Centric Positioning Narrative
    Finally, we turn these insights into a clear, compelling story that connects directly to buyer priorities and pain points. The goal: make it instantly obvious why your product matters and why it’s the better choice versus existing alternatives.

The result? A clear, defensible positioning strategy that resonates with buyers and aligns your product, marketing, and sales teams around a single, consistent narrative that drives growth.

Want To Go Deeper? 

If you’re ready for the how, our Positioning New Products in Hyper-Competitive Markets Playbook shows you exactly how to carve out a winning market position.

Designed for B2B product marketers, founders, and GTM leaders, it’s a step-by-step resource packed with ready-to-use templates that is built from the proven approach we use at Liberis Consulting to help clients stand out in crowded categories. 

Need Expert Guidance?

When you need more than a DIY approach, we’re here to help you uncover your unique value, align your teams, and position your product to win.  At Liberis Consulting, we partner with founders and go-to-market leaders to define clear, defensible positioning that drives differentiation and accelerates growth.

Why Product Marketing Is Failing B2B Tech Companies — And How to Turn It Into a Strategic Force

Posted on by Scott Heimgartner

In today’s dynamic technology landscape, B2B software and tech companies are crafting innovative products—machine learning platforms, agentic AI, low-code/no-code solutions, and cutting-edge risk mitigation tools. The pace of innovation is exhilarating. However, the journey to market often lacks the same excitement.

These tech products emerge from real-world pain points. They are born from founders who experienced the problem firsthand and were driven to find a solution. This passion leads to solutions with depth, nuance, and genuine relevance because they are crafted by individuals who have lived the challenge.

Yet, all too frequently, these groundbreaking products fail to leap to prime time. Why? It’s not merely a matter of insufficient promotion. The crux lies in inadequate product positioning or a failure to translate that positioning into actionable go-to-market strategies effectively.


1️⃣ Product marketing is too reactive.

In most early-stage organizations, Product Marketing Management (PMM) is hired after things are already in motion. Founders build. Sales sell. The leadership realizes a gap—“We need messaging!”—and PMM gets pulled in to polish up what already exists.

By then, positioning decisions have already been made: in the roadmap, pricing, and how sales frame the product. PMM is stuck retrofitting a story rather than shaping it. That’s not product marketing—it’s product cleanup.

Proper product marketing should be proactive. Strategic. Upstream. It should be the function asking: “Who are we really for, and how do we win?” Not “What tagline fits on this banner?”

2️⃣ Nobody knows what PMM is supposed to do.

Ask five people about product marketing, and you’ll get five different answers.

“Isn’t that just content?” “No, it’s messaging and launches.” “Wait, don’t they own competitive intel?” “Aren’t they the sales enablement team?”

Without clarity, PMM becomes the dumping ground for anything vaguely go-to-market. That lack of definition makes it impossible to prioritize or scale.

Good PMM sits at the intersection of product, marketing, and sales—but it’s not just a middleman. It’s the team responsible for market context, buyer insight, and strategic storytelling. And if you don’t give them the room (and respect) to do that work, you’ll never get the full value.

3️⃣ PMM is disconnected from the buyer.

Most emerging tech companies are product-first. That’s not inherently bad, but it leads to messaging obsessed with features, speed, and architecture… — totally out of sync with how genuine buyers think.

Good PMM is the voice of the customer—not in a hand-wavey “customer-centric” way, but in a real, practical, sharp-edged way. The team that knows how your buyer frames their problem. The language they use. The objections they have. The alternatives they’re comparing you to. If your PMM team isn’t spending time in actual conversations with prospects, they’re guessing. And no amount of clever copy will fix a message that’s built on a bad assumption.

4️⃣ PMM is brought in too late.

This is the pattern I see over and over again:

●      A startup gets early traction.

●      Sales starts hustling.

●      Product keeps shipping.

●      GTM gets messy.

●      Leadership brings in PMM to “fix the story.”

By that point, product positioning is baked into every layer of the business—from how the product is built to how it’s sold. PMM is left to retrofit a narrative instead of driving it from the beginning.

Product marketing should be one of the first strategic hires, not the twentieth. This is especially true in emerging tech, where buyers need a compelling story to understand what you do, let alone why it matters.

So what’s the fix?

It’s not about hiring more PMMs. It’s about elevating the role of product marketing from function to force. That means:

👉  Positioning before pitch decks. Nail the story, then scale it.

👉  Insight over instinct. Let real buyer context—not just internal opinions—drive your messaging.

👉  Collaboration over execution. PMM should influence the roadmap, not just the launch plan.

👉  Strategic ownership. PMM isn’t there to support sales. It’s there to make sales easier.

Done right, product marketing becomes the architecture of your go-to-market motion—not just the voice but the blueprint. It aligns teams, accelerates adoption, and, most importantly, ensures that your breakthrough product isn’t ignored.

Building something great isn’t enough in a crowded market. You have to make sure people understand why it matters. If you don’t, someone else—possibly with an inferior product—will do a better job telling your story.

This is where Liberis Consulting comes in.

We help emerging tech companies turn product marketing into a strategic force. From sharpening positioning to architecting your go-to-market motion, we work with founders, product leaders, and revenue teams to ensure that your messaging, motion, and market strategy reflect the potential of what you’ve built. We don’t just make things sound good—we make sure they sell.

👉 Ready to turn your breakthrough product into a market leader? Don’t settle for being just another great idea lost in the noise. At Liberis Consulting, we specialize in transforming product marketing from a reactive function into a strategic force. Whether you’re refining your positioning, architecting your go-to-market strategy, or aligning your team for accelerated adoption, we’re here to ensure your product gets the attention it deserves. Let’s work together to make your story stand out in the crowded tech landscape. Contact us today and let’s build something remarkable.

Niche Down to Stand Out: The Case for Focused GTM Strategies

Posted on by Scott Heimgartner

We all have the same thought—the bigger the market, the bigger the opportunity.  But that just isn’t rooted in what modern marketing has taught us over the last couple of decades:   

  • Your messaging gets watered down. If you’re targeting manufacturers, law firms, and eCommerce brands, you can’t speak directly to any of them.
  • Your website becomes one giant dumpster of word garbage and marketing babble. 
  • Your sales cycles get longer—more personas = more objections. More objections mean more concessions and customization, which means slower deals.
  • Because you sound like everyone else (hello commoditization), price is the only lever you can pull to win a deal. 

Example: Imagine a B2B software product enabling sales teams to generate quotes (e.g., a CPQ solution) quickly.  “CPQ for Any Business” is not very specific – it blends in and will most likely put you in direct competition with some of the most prominent players in the category. If it says “CPQ Platform Built for Sales Teams Selling High-End Manufacturing Equipment,” it immediately stands out to a niche audience that needs that specificity.

The Power of Verticalization: Why Industry-Specific SaaS Wins

Instead of going broad, go deep. Vertical SaaS companies (those that build solutions specifically for one industry) often outperform their horizontal counterparts:

  • This is evidenced in higher sales efficiency. At the $200 million revenue mark, Vertical SaaS firms typically spend $40 million on Sales and Marketing, whereas Horizontal SaaS companies spend nearly $60 million.  (reference:  https://flgpartners.com/saas-industry-centric-business-models-horizontal-vertical/)
  • Investor Confidence: Venture capital interest in vertical SaaS companies has surged, with a notable increase in funding and IPO activity. This trend signifies strong investor confidence in the scalability and profitability of industry-specific SaaS solutions.  (reference:  https://coredevsltd.com/articles/top-vertical-saas-companies/)
  • Higher Valuation Multiples: Public Vertical SaaS companies trade nearly double the Enterprise Value (EV) to Gross Profit multiples of their horizontal peers—11x compared to 5x, respectively. This premium reflects investor confidence in the specialized, defensible market positions that Vertical SaaS companies often occupy. (reference:  https://insights.euclid.vc/p/the-vertical-saas-profit-premium)

Why industry-specific over horizontal?

  • Trust:  Customers trust you more. If your product is built for them, they don’t have to guess whether it will suit their needs.  While you still need to prove it with referenceable clients, the clients you can reference will be relevant.
  • Fewer Objections/Shorter Sales Cycle:  Industry-specific use cases and integrations mean less convincing, fewer objections, and faster onboarding.
  • Messaging Resonance:  Messaging becomes sharper because you can speak your audience’s language better.  For the Government, instead of “customer,” you say “constituent.”

Micro-Niching: When Verticalization Isn’t Enough

You can go deeper even within an industry. That’s where micro-niching comes in—honing in on a specific segment of an industry or role.

Examples:

MehBetterBest
Marketing AutomationMarketing Automation for B2B SaaSMarketing Automation for B2B SaaS Sales Teams
ATS SoftwareATS Software.Marketing Automation for B2B SaaS.ATS Software for Remote-First Tech Startups
Customer Support SaaSCustomer Support SaaS for Financial ServicesCustomer Support SaaS for Wealth Management Firms

Example: Vetcove is an eCommerce platform specifically for veterinary clinics to order supplies. It is not competing with Amazon—it is dominating its niche by focusing wickedly on its audience.

In Warren Buffet’s famous words, “How do you beat Bobby Fischer? Play him at anything but chess.” 

How to Execute a Niche-Focused GTM Strategy

This is where the fun begins. You’ve identified a niche category you believe you can dominate. The next step is integrating it into your go-to-market strategy. But how?  

Nail Your Messaging & Positioning

At Liberis Consulting, every consulting engagement begins with a thorough review of your position.  That is the foundation that defines your go-to market. You must clearly understand who (or what) you compete with today and map it against your capabilities that no other competitive alternative can claim.  This points you to the audience that values the unique value only you can deliver, which helps you understand the market category in which you compete (and are winning).  

Understanding and aligning your positioning enables you to jump into your messaging. It becomes clear who you serve and why you’re different. You can use specific terminology relevant to your audience and connect to the pain points your audience faces.

Ditching broad claims like “we help businesses save time” and replacing them with specifics like “we reduce manual claims processing by 40% for large insurance agencies.”

Pro tip: If your messaging doesn’t match what your customers are talking about, you’re still being too broad.

Develop a Point of View

Once you have a niche down, you don’t stop at your positioning and messaging—you need to own a perspective on the market in which you compete. In a crowded market (particularly in B2B SaaS), having a strong, differentiated point of view (POV) helps establish credibility, attract the right customers, and drive demand beyond just features and pricing.

And that point of view manifests in the content and thought leadership you develop.  In how you pitch to your audience.  How you engage with analysts.  In the stories of your customers, you tell.  All of this should be in your point of view on the problem space.

For Sales-Led GTM Motions, Tailor Your Sales Strategy

You need to teach out your positioning and point of view about your company and your product.  They need to understand your niche inside and out.  

What does that mean?

  • Creating ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) templates that focus on your niche.
  • Training reps to handle niche-specific objections.
  • Training reps on how to pitch value and problem versus features and price.
  • Arming sales with industry-specific battle cards, decks, and customer examples.

Align Your Product Strategy with Your Niche?

This doesn’t matter if your product vision and roadmap aren’t aligned with the audience you’re focused on. However, once you align your product strategy with your niche, prioritizing feature requests that cater to your audience becomes much more manageable. This gives the product team a defensible position and justification over their build priorities; otherwise, it always defaults to the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion).

Final Thoughts

Focusing on a specific audience can be scary and often challenging. But it’s not about exclusion—it’s about focus. It’s about carving out a little space in your audience’s brains that makes you stand out.  

By niching down, you:

  • Avoid direct competition with more established players.
  • Create a stronger value proposition that resonates more deeply.
  • Shorten your sales cycle by reducing buyer hesitation.
  • Build a more defensible position in the market.

Before expanding your reach, ask yourself: Do we need more leads or more of the right leads? Discover the answer and optimize your strategy with Liberis Consulting. Visit us today to learn more.

Build for the Job, Package for the Buyer

Posted on by Scott Heimgartner

When I went through Pragmatic Marketing, they emphasized a market-driven approach to product development, teaching how to design products based on customer needs and addressing real market problems that are urgent and pervasive.  Those principles still hold today; however, I would like to think about it more precisely through the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) lens.   

German-born American economist and professor at the Harvard Business School, Theodore Leavitt, coined the phrase, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” This statement still rings true today, especially in technology and software. Your customers don’t just want a product; they want to solve a problem, complete a task, or achieve an outcome. Understanding those jobs is essential for building the right solutions. 

However, how you sell those solutions should align with how your audience makes purchasing decisions.

Build Your Product For the Job

Your customers aren’t looking for a list of features – at least not yet.  They’re looking for something that helps them accomplish their goals more effectively. When you build your product around the job they are trying to complete, you ensure you’re addressing real problems.  

When companies need a payment solution, they aren’t just looking for “payment processing.” That’s too broad and doesn’t capture their fundamental objective. They want to monetize transactions, reduce churn, and streamline reconciliation—those jobs they need to get done.

As a payment provider, you could offer an API and let your customers figure out the rest. However, that approach assumes that payments are the end goal rather than a means to achieving something more significant. Instead, if you design your solution around the jobs your customers are trying to accomplish, your product becomes significantly more valuable and more challenging to replace.

Thus, if the “job” is to reduce churn because customers are leaving due to failed payments or high dispute rates, an innovative payments provider will build a product with intelligent retry logic, subscription billing optimization, and dispute management tools.  

Package Your Offering For The Buyer

While your product should be built around the job to be done, your packaging strategy should reflect how your customers evaluate, buy, and ultimately consume solutions. This is where audience segmentation is so important. Once you master how your audience segments, you can package up and price your offerings designed to yield the most significant amount of value.  

Let’s use a specific job to illustrate—ensuring a project stays on task and under budget. This is a fundamental job across businesses. However, how the job is approached and what solutions are required varies dramatically depending on who is trying to get the job done, the project team size, the complexities involved, etc.

A small boutique agency will most likely need a lightweight, affordable solution that’s easy to implement without dedicated IT or project managers. However, an enterprise, like a Fortune 500 construction company, needs robust controls, advanced reporting, administrative rights, and deep integrations with financial and resource management systems. 

Suppose you’re a SaaS company serving both segments in this example. In that case, your audience segmentation determines how you package, price, and sell your product to ensure you meet their needs while maximizing the value you can extract.

For small businesses, you’ll probably package a self-serve, low-touch version. However, for enterprises, your focus may shift to land-and-expand. Start with the core project management tool, then upsell advanced budgeting, automation, and enterprise-grade security.  

So how do you think about a packaging strategy?

1. Start by understanding your customer and how they may cluster

  • Company Size & Maturity (Small business vs. enterprise)
  • Use Case (Basic task management vs. full project portfolio management)
  • Job-to-Be-Done (JTBD) (Different customers may need different outcomes from your product)
  • Buying Process (self-serve vs. high-touch sales-led)

Example: Slack offers a free, self-serve version for small teams but packages enterprise features (security, compliance, admin controls) for larger companies that require IT approval.

2. Identify Your Core Product vs. Add-Ons Not every customer needs everything. You should package features in a way that aligns with progressive value realization.

  • Core Product: The must-have functionality that helps customers accomplish their main job-to-be-done.
  • Add-On Modules: Specialized features for customers who need more advanced functionality (analytics, automation, integrations, compliance).

Example: HubSpot offers a free CRM (core product) but charges for marketing automation, sales enablement, and customer service tools as add-ons.

3. Align Packaging to Value Levers. Customers evaluate software based on how it’s presented and priced.  Consider:

  • Good-Better-Best Model: Offer tiers (e.g., Starter, Pro, Enterprise) where each level increases in functionality and value.
  • Usage-Based or Per-User Pricing: If your product grows with usage, consider a scalable model (e.g., API calls, storage, transactions).
  • Feature Gating: Keep entry-level plans attractive while incentivizing upgrades with premium features.

Example: AWS offers basic compute services for free but monetizes heavily through advanced add-ons like AI, analytics, and storage scaling.

4. Map Packaging to Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy,

Your GTM approach should align with how customers buy:

  • SMB & Self-Serve: Low-cost, freemium models, in-app upgrades.
  • Mid-Market & Sales-Led: Feature-based pricing with onboarding support.
  • Enterprise: Custom pricing, white-glove service, deep integrations.

Example: Monday.com starts with self-serve teams but expands into enterprise accounts through dedicated sales and customer success teams.

5. Nail It Before You Launch It – Test, Iterate, Optimize. We live in a digital world where your feedback loop is almost instantaneous. Use that to your advantage and test your packaging strategy—it should never be static, it should evolve based on data. Things you can track to evaluate the efficacy of your packaging strategy:

  • Adoption rates per package
  • Conversion rates from free → paid → premium tiers
  • Churn rates based on feature access
  • Customer feedback on feature gaps

The Takeaway?

Same job, different buyers = different solutions, messaging, and go-to-market strategies. Nail audience segmentation early, and you can optimize product fit and your company’s long-term growth.

Bringing It All Together

Success in B2B markets comes from mastering this duality: Build solutions around the jobs your audience needs to get done. Package and price them based on how your audience buys and their perception of value

Many companies get one of these right but struggle with the other. They either build a great product but fail to package it effectively, or they package solutions well but lack deep alignment with customer needs. The best companies excel at both. Ready to elevate your product marketing strategy? Contact Liberis Consulting today and make your innovation resonate where it matters most—with your customers!

The Silent Killer of Growth: Product Confusion

Posted on by Scott Heimgartner

Many companies struggle to grow, not because of a bad product, but because of a silent killer: product confusion. Even great technology products fail when customers, sales, and marketing can’t confidently explain what they do.

Product Confusion Starts Within Your Walls

If I asked ten people in your company to describe your product and its functions, what kind of answers would I get? Chances are, I would get several different responses—and that’s a big problem. If your teams cannot clearly articulate your product’s functions and the unique value it delivers, Houston has a big problem.

The result? Deals take longer to close or get stalled, your teams resort to discounting, and your messaging doesn’t resonate with your ideal customer profile.

Watered Down Messaging is the Symptom – Not the Cause

To salvage weak positioning, teams will think they need to throw more assets at the problem – a refreshed datasheet, another sales deck, content swarming your ideal customer profile. You’ll spend all this time thinking that if you bombard them, your value will finally click. Meanwhile, they’ve quietly disqualified you from their buying cycle.

I can tell you that none of this will work if your core positioning foundation is weak. If your product story isn’t nailed — clear differentiation, a strong value narrative (e.g., “reduces infrastructure costs by 30% and increases uptime to 99.99%”), ruthless clarity on the problem you solve, and a wicked understanding of the type of buyer that cares about the value you deliver — no amount of “all hands on deck” will save you.

The Cure – Rock Solid Product Marketing

Product Marketing is about focus. It’s about consistently telling the product’s narrative through a shared notion of your ideal customer profile, business champion, competitors, and differentiated messaging. And that story is told to both your internal and your external audiences. This manifests in a variety of ways:

  • Internal Tools: competitive battlecards, deal anatomy, pitch decks.
  • External Content: collateral, customer stories, web copy, campaign programs, content calendar.

However, that narrative is built off of a solid foundation of your core positioning:

  • What your product is / what it does (also called the market category that gives your prospect a frame of reference)
  • What you deliver that is unique, and the value of those unique capabilities

The best product marketers do three critical things that keep confusion from creeping into your company:

  1. They define the positioning first. Before a single slide is made, they build the positioning and messaging framework—the single source of truth for how your product is described, who it’s for, and why it matters.
  2. They align the whole company around it. Product, sales, marketing, executives—everyone sings from the same song sheet.
  3. They reinforce the story everywhere. Every touchpoint reinforces the same straightforward story in sales calls, marketing campaigns, website copy, and pricing conversations.

If your product marketing concerns making decks look pretty or pumping out content, you must fix that quickly. But that subject is for another blog post.

The Symptoms of Bad Positioning

How do you know if you have a positioning problem?

  • Your sales team automatically enters full-demo mode within ten minutes of a discovery call. (This means they are not adequately qualifying the prospect.)
  • Your prospects keep saying, “that’s a great feature just like the other guys”.
  • Sales blames marketing, marketing blames sales.
  • If your messaging starts to look like a spaghetti bowl of words or includes words like “next generation”, “seamless”, “unify”, “cloud-native”.
  • Or your messaging relies on buzzwords like ‘next generation’ or ‘AI’ without specific value propositions.

All of that is product confusion; when buyers are confused, they don’t buy—or at least not from you.

Conclusion

Don’t let product confusion stifle your growth. Invest in rock-solid product marketing, align your teams, and tell a straightforward, consistent story. Your customers will thank you. Ready to take your business to the next level? Visit Liberis Consulting today and discover how our expert team can help you overcome product confusion and drive sustainable growth. Don’t let confusion hold you back—partner with us and unlock your business’s full potential!