Conference season has begun, and I have a feeling it’s going to be a good one.

I’m coming off 3 days of learning and connecting with product marketers at the PMM Summit in San Francisco.

I attended incredible sessions from PMM leaders like Jeff Hardison (VP PMM at Calendly), Emma Stratton (Founder of Punchy) and Julien Sauvage (GVP of Marketing at Clari).

PMM Camp also held it’s first supper club event ✨ I had the BEST time hanging IRL with current Campers and new friends. (I want to host more of these in the future — let me know which city I should hit next!).

My notebook is overflowing with lessons and ideas. And, today, I want to share those lessons with you.

Here’s three takeaways I don’t want you to miss.

3 Things I Learnt This Week

I spent 16+ hours in sessions this week, and here’s the three things that are still on my mind 👇🏻

The VBF Framework

Emma Stratton, the founder of Punchy, debuted a brand new session, and it was a banger.

My biggest takeaway from this session was a concept Emma called VBS:

• Value Proposition First

• Benefit Second

• Feature Last

Benefits and value propositions translate features for your buyer. Your tech is the feature, but the benefits and value propositions are the things your customer cares about.

I’ve found these three elements of messaging are often conflated, and Emma did a great job of adding definition and clarity between the three (with a fun Star Wars analogy to boot).

She defines the three components as follows:

• A value proposition is like a big win. It’s your customer’s bigger goals and aspirations, and is a result of multiple benefits and features

• A benefit is like a superpower. It’s something new your customer can do, be or feel — and the direct result of a feature

• A feature is like a secret weapon. It’s something special your product does or has (like a capability).

How to Grow 2X Faster

I met a new friend at the summit named Maya Shah-Ceccotti. Not only does she have great taste in books, but she’s super smart too (she’s the Marketing & GTM Lead at Patlytics).

Maya gave a great talk on how to package value to meet the needs of your customers. And she opened with a powerful stat: companies spend less than 10 hours per year on pricing and packaging. YET it has about 8X the impact on new customer acquisition.

Her favorite approach to pricing? Aligning on a value metric that works for your company and your customer.

If you just spent 1 hour a month on your pricing strategy, you’d already be miles ahead of the average company. Schedule this time on your calendar now — I’ll wait.

Your Product Doesn’t Need to Be Differentiated

One of the best parts of attending the PMM Summit in San Francisco is getting to give one of my besties, Madison Leonard, a big hug.

She gave an incredible talk about how to build a differentiated strategy when your product isn’t differentiated. It’s a reality most companies struggle with but don’t have a solution for.

Two things stood out to me in her talk. First, she gave a great breakdown of what a GTM strategy really is.

In her words, it’s “the playbook you’ll follow to generate awareness, acquire, activate, retain and monetize. Your goal is to deliver the right message, at the right time, to the right audience, in the right place.”

Second, she presented a list of alternative ways to build differentiated GTM when you can’t fall back on product. These included:

• Segment

• Brand

• Motion

• Journey

And she shared a ton of examples on how both B2B and B2C brands leverage these four alternatives to win.

Were you at the conference? What were your top takeaways?

CAMPER ESSENTIALS

Here are some of the cool PMM tools I had the chance to demo at the vendor hall of the conference.

🛠️ Tools: There were a TON of interactive demo platforms, but Navattic stood out with their adorable outdoor-themed booth (we love a camp theme around here!).

🛠️ Tools: The GhostRanch team helps PMMs solve their Powerpoint woes (who doesn’t hate hearing “can you make this slide look pretty"). They design GORGEOUS presentations and enablement material that helps your sales team sell.

🛠️ Tools: Mindtickle is a revenue enablement platform for training, content, digital sales rooms and more. I haven’t used this type of tool myself but I could immediately see the value in doing so.

Until next week,