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Customer feedback analytics · London · 2021

Chattermill: what a first product marketing function does in twelve weeks.

SECTOR

Customer feedback analytics

MARKET

UK and Europe

COMPANY

Chattermill

ROLE APPLIED FOR

Head of product marketing

DATE

Nov 2021

SaaSCustomer analytics

The situation

The brief was about standing up the function.

Chattermill unified customer feedback from support, reviews and surveys and analysed it in one place. The brief was about standing up the product marketing function itself: what it does, in what order, and how anyone would know it was working.

So the answer had to be a sequence, and it had to defend what comes first.

01 · What this engagement produced

7 of 34 outputs

7 of the 34 outputs, across five of the six stages.

01Research0 of 6

6 not produced

Voice of customer, Win / loss, Market report, Why now, Assumption log, Pre-mortem

02Competition1 of 4
07The Fifty

3 not produced

Table-stakes read, AI visibility, Competitor monitor

03Segment, position and price2 of 6
11ICP and segments13Buying committee

4 not produced

Use cases, Positioning, Packaging and pricing, Deck spine

04Message1 of 4
19Landing page review

3 not produced

Messaging framework, Claim check, Message drift

05Launch and enable1 of 8
23Channel and funnel

7 not produced

Launch tiers, Launch brief, Product Oracle, Sales enablement, FAQ, Onboarding journey, Release notes

06Measure and maintain2 of 6
31Trust metrics34Six-stage readout

4 not produced

Product funnel metrics, Launch post-mortem, Customer case studies, Half-Life Map

Solid is what the brief produced. A function plan is mostly a plan to produce the rest.

02 · The decision

The first four weeks go to decisions.

A new function can spend its first quarter making things or deciding things. Making things is more visible, and it produces collateral that quotes a positioning nobody has agreed.

Struck

Start with collateral and demo videos

Visible in week two, and the team rewrites every asset once the positioning lands.

Struck

Start with competitive tracking

Worth having, and nothing depends on it yet.

Chosen

Decide first, produce second

Mission, market, positioning and personas in weeks one to four. The assets that quote them come after.

Weeks one to four decide, five to eight produce, nine to twelve measure and feed back. The team rewrites any asset built before the decisions, and a plan does not show that rewrite.

03 · What the plan carried

The shape of the twelve weeks.

12

weeks, in three bands

6

categories in the competitive read

3

phases the function is measured in

Written from the public product and site. No access to their customers, pipeline or usage data.

04 · What I built

4 workstreams

Four workstreams, from the competitive read to the scorecard.

01The competitive readSix categories.

02 Competition

  • Market, product, positioning, marketing, sales and company kept as separate categories
  • Under marketing: taglines, content, keywords, partnerships, events and campaigns, since a competitor's marketing is public and tells you what they believe
  • Under company: mission, history, growth and what they are hiring for
02Buyer and user, separatedTwo profiles, different questions.

03 Segment, position & price

  • The buyer profile carries role in the buying process, validators, and what they value least as well as most
  • The user profile carries the daily job and communication preferences, because the person who uses it is often not the person who signs
  • Both carry verbatim quotes
03A read of their own homepageWhat was missing behind the line.

04 Message

  • The existing line said what the product was, simply, which is more than most manage
  • Nothing stood behind it: no value proposition, no differentiation, no mission or vision, no comparison against alternatives
  • Named as gaps. I had no evidence for a new line
04How the function is measuredThree phases, different numbers.

06 Measure & maintain

  • Foundation: a working communication loop between sales, marketing, product and customer success, and agreed messaging
  • Adoption: signups, usage, upgrades, sales effectiveness, conversion in the target market, and feedback on whether the messaging worked
  • Acceleration: awareness, inbound effectiveness, loyalty and advocacy, then retention and churn

05 · The judgment call

I named the gaps and left their line alone.

The obvious move on a take-home is to rewrite the homepage headline and show your range. It reads well and it is unfalsifiable, because nobody can check a line written without evidence.

Their line was fine. What was missing was everything meant to sit behind it. Saying so was the more useful answer, and it is the same order the six-stage map runs in now: decide, then write.

06 · What this proves

Sequence, separation, evidence, phased measurement.

I sequence before I produce.

Decisions in the first four weeks, assets after.

I separate the buyer from the user.

Two profiles, two sets of questions.

I read a page for what is behind it.

The line was fine, the evidence was absent.

I measure a function in phases.

Different numbers matter at foundation and at scale.

Scope

Briefed by the company. Unpaid, one week, written from the public product and site.