Peep Laja

Wynter

Wynter can tell you almost anything you want to know about your ICPs, and what they think about you. 

Can you list your target customer’s top 3 priorities and pain points? 
What about the top channels they use to learn more about the types of solutions you sell?

If you don’t, your go-to-market plan is flawed. Wynter offers a suite of tools to deliver hi-fidelity insights straight from your ICPs:

• Target customer surveys
• B2B message testing
• On-demand ICP interviews and sales meetings
• B2B user testing

Verified B2B audiences, target by title and industry. Everything is self-serve and on-demand. 
Answers delivered in 12-48 hrs.

Chairman of the Board

CXL is the world leader helping determined marketers become the top 1% in the world. 

We identify the best marketing practitioners in the world and get them to teach what they know. Our courses are in-depth, follow performance-focused training methods, and get you the results you seek.

Speero

Speero, formerly known as CXL agency, is a consultancy I founded in 2011. I was the active CEO until 2016, and have been a board member since.

Founder and Principal of this conversion optimization agency. Back then known as CXL, later rebranded to Speero.

Principal

Traindom

I founded a SaaS startup for building and selling online courses. It was ahead of it's time. Didn't work out in the end. Lots of lessons learned that help me turn my next venture - CXL - into a major success.

Head of Marketing, co-founder

Panama Internet Marketing

Consulting company focused on digital marketing - high-converting websites, PPC and SEO services. Digital strategy, consulting and execution. I did a lot of lead generation and conversion optimization work for real estate, travel and hospitality industry for companies in Central America.

Digital Marketing Consultant, founder

Real24.ae

I was heading marketing and sales for an online real estate portal in the United Arab Emirates. 

I was responsible for the directing setting and vision building of the company. My responsibilities included business development, strategic and operational management of sales and marketing (both, B2B and B2C), managing the sales team, brand management, product development. I was the spokesperson for the company.

Head of Sales and Marketing

AIESEC UAE

•	Main responsibilities: overall organization country operations management, client partnership management & selling, service product development, staff training and coaching
•	Main experience and knowledge gained: strategic management, project management, sales & negotiation skills, persuasion and communication skills, working in a multi-cultural environment, creating synergy between different entities, coaching and mentoring.

Vice President Sales and Marketing

•	Main responsibilities: managing relationships with partner companies, raising new partnerships, coordinating national sales teams, networking and representing the organization in external events, managing PR for the organization, strategic country operations development, coaching and mentoring.
•	Main experience and knowledge gained: selling and negotiating, developing sustainable partnerships, networking, managing different sales teams, project management, strategic management, public relations, and product development.

Vice President External & Public Relations

Playtech

•	Main responsibilities: managing corporate accounts, servicing international clients, giving assistance to use our products.
•	Main experience and knowledge gained: Handling large corporate accounts, fast and efficient communication, problem solving and crisis management, overall understanding of global business, working together with many entities to complete tasks.

Customer Success

Millen MG

•	Main responsibilities: managing IT projects, working together with clients on completing the tasks, web development, and database design. 
•	Experience and knowledge gained: project management, web programming, system analysis and client relationship management.

Web Developer

CEO @ Wynter. 3x Founder. Insights over assumptions. Host of How to Win podcast.

Most of your future revenues are gonna come from future customers. 

If you knew *exactly* what your target customers

think about your category (and your company in particular),
what their top priorities and very big problems are,
what unsaturated channels they use to learn about solutions, 

this is what'd happen to your business:

- you'd nail your messaging, speaking exactly to their pain points
- your conversion rates would go up because your pitch resonates better,
- your CAC would go down as you'd use the right channels with the right message,
- you'd create more meaningful content that moves the dial,
- you'd be more deliberate and accurate in providing more value at every touch point,
- you'd know how to price your products to maximize willingness to pay,
- you'd know how to differentiate,
- you'd know where your go-to-market strategy is off, and could fix it. 
 
The beautiful thing?

You can know all of this with Wynter in under 48 hours.

How B2B buyers buy. 

#1. They create a shortlist (brands they already know, asking peers, googling, G2, etc)
#2. They narrow the list down to three
#3. They book demos

(Source: B2B Buyer Journey research by Wynter).

Most marketing tackles #1: to get inside the consideration set. (Yes, very important).

But most get tackling #2 wrong. They talk about themselves as if they're the only one doing what they're doing, using very generic terms ("manage your customer relationships"). But the buyer wants to know how you're different!

How to compare yourself to the competition? By using relative value tables.  

Too many companies use long tables listing all the features with green checkmarks or red Xs. That's a value table, not very useful.

Instead, use relative value tables that highlight your differences against alternatives. When buyers are comparing solutions, they only care about the differences.

Step 1. You only focus on solutions or features that are differentiated from a competitor.  
Step 2. Quantify the difference in results. What's the value of having these differentiators?  

This way you actually help buyers make a decision, and win more often.

Come work with me: we’re hiring a marketing generalist at Wynter (entry level).

If you're passionate about all things B2B marketing and want to get really good at it, this is like an MBA program. Your role will be handling many of the various one-off and recurring marketing tasks common to B2B startups.

You get all the responsibility you can handle + coached by the amazing Erik MacKinnon. 

It's the perfect role for a go-getter who wants to become great at marketing, and can execute fast, independently. You will do a wide range of hands-on work, just like you’d expect from the scrappy, bootstrapped startup that we are.

Remote position. We get the whole team together at least once a year. This photo is a pic from the last team outing in Portugal. Current team size: 16. 

Link to apply in the comments. 

Spryng 2024 has officially kicked off!

Some rain and a tornado warning, but the sun is coming out soon and life is good.

Excited for the next 2 days.

If you’re up against big brands, tough luck. The odds are against you.

There's a reason why small brands mostly stay small. 

Let's take marketing and advertising. 

Large brands get all the word of mouth. Just look at any social thread asking for tool recommendations, and it's 90% category leaders that get mentioned. "Use Hubspot!" "Gong rules!". Small upstarts get very little word of mouth.

The same goes for paid advertising. 

The deciding factor for brand effectiveness is - the size of the brand behind the campaign. Because bigger brands are better known, they get a much, much bigger ROI from advertising. Like 18x more ROI. It's insane. 

Not only that, ads run by small companies are often perceived as ads by their large competitors. They get credit for the ad with $0 spend.

One way companies grow is when their share of voice (e.g., their ad spend) is bigger than their market share. This is known as an excess share of voice. Typically sales volume and advertising budgets tend to move in lockstep.

Larger companies, however, can underspend their competition and still grow. 

This was first noticed by advertising professor John Philip Jones, and later by Paul Dyson from Data2Decisions.

Of course, large companies spend more on marketing than small ones —and not just in absolute dollars. Fortune 500 companies allocate around 11% of their revenue to marketing efforts, while small businesses may only allocate 1-5% of their revenue. 

You know you need to build a strong brand because it's your moat, but it also significantly contributes to more effective marketing. It's a virtuous circle. 

Large corporations are increasingly likely to maintain their dominant positions, while small corporations are increasingly unlikely to become big and profitable. Part of the growing divide between big and small firms is the growing R&D expenditures of large firms. 

If you compete head-on with large brands (going after the same customers with a similar product), you will likely fail.

The best way to get around that is extreme specialization. Sure, by niching down you will never get as big as the giants, but that was never in the cards anyway. You specialize, use your own particular approach to solving the customer's problem that is not the market leader's approach.

You don't take significant market share away from the category leader, and that's fine. 

I find it weird how a company's success is judged. The general lens is that unless you're a category-leading company, it's a meh. If you're not a VC, you should not use the VC lens to judge a company's success ($1B+ or it's a fail). 

IMO the correct lens to apply to the company's success is "is this a good outcome for the founder and other key shareholders?"

A bootstrapped startup getting to $10M+ in revenue and exits for like $30-$60M? That's a hella outcome for the founder. Massive success in my book. Generational wealth.

You don't need to play the category leader's game to get to that outcome. 

Over time, competitors become more and more similar to each other.

The more competition, the stronger the commitment to differentiation should be.

But mostly the opposite is true.

Constant comparison and benchmarking leads to conformity, and competitors become less differentiated over time.

As the number of products within a category multiplies, the differences among competitors get increasingly trivial, almost to the point of ridiculousness.

If you want to see sameness in action, just look at hotels. Almost every single hotel gives you shampoo, lotion, and some other toiletries (shower cap?!) for free, but no toothpaste or toothbrush.

How did that come to be? Because they all copy each other.

You could say that people expect free shampoo, and you might be right. But meeting expectations is table stakes. You need to match it and go far beyond to avoid the sameness trap, or have a completely different take on it.

You can see the same in software. Your competitor has feature X, you need feature X. You build Y, they build Y.

If 10 startups launched tomorrow tackling the exact same space—but they couldn’t see what others were doing—what would happen? I bet we’d see some wildly different companies.

Sadly, companies focus too much on the competition and not enough on original thinking on how best to serve the user.

Copying is easy. Being original is hard. 

This is why most brand messaging is nearly identical - most companies look at their competitors for direction.

Hiring for 4 roles rn across 3 companies.

The amount of candidates using ChatGPT in their in-take surveys to provide answers is mind blowing. Like maybe 20-25%. Even folks whose LinkedIn profiles look good. 

Why? I just don't get it. I get it that they are burnt out by the job finding process, but this is self-sabotage.

Insta-rejection, of course.

Spryng, our B2B SaaS event kicks off in 12 days.

What to expect from this year's event:

- Intentionally intimate: we're limiting it to just 200 people. This is to ensure quality connections - the focus of the event. 
- A few keynotes and five hours of group discussions. Events are for relationships, not powerpoints. You have real and actual challenges -- discuss those challenges with your peers, and learn what they've tried or how they've solved them.
- Cool Austin venue where we hang out in a relaxed atmosphere. 
- All you can eat and drink included with your ticket.
- 3 parties for more connections and conversations.

Nothing is filmed, you have to be there.

Ticket sales end Mar 31st. 

A lot of companies do messaging by inserting a bunch of adjectives in their value prop, e.g.:

"Achieve X with trust, speed, and ease."

It's just not credible. Nobody thinks you're trustworthy or easy to use just because you use that adjective. 

What to do instead: specifics. 

Whatever value you want to communicate, use stats. Let's say you're a job portal and want to communicate the volume of getting applicants: "200% higher apply rate than the industry average."

Any specific number like that is much more believable than an adjective.

An essential ingredient of positioning is answering "what is it". One of the best ways to explain it is to make it clear what it replaces. 

People wanna put you in a box, and you should let them.

Look at this example. What do you think it replaces?

Maybe Slack? Or Google Docs and other collab apps? Or Asana/Clickup type of stuff? 

It's not clear. 

And hence it's easier to dismiss it and move on with your day rather than figure it out.

We held our 2nd annual #Spryng conference last week, and I jotted down some notes about the experience. 

1. It's so good to be around people. Especially when the event is designed around conversations. I am very grateful to everyone who attended.

2. Different stands out. Events are very competitive (esp in the marketing space). The fact that our event is not like other events gave us a way in.

3. Events are marketing. There is no way we could have afforded to buy all the impressions we got here on LinkedIn (people talking about Spryng). 

The interesting thing to observe was that people repeated the messaging we used to promote the event to describe the event. My takeaway here is that the messaging resonated (and the product matched the promise).

4. Even though my event was not about presentations, a lot of folks talking about it on LinkedIn still shared what they learned from speaker X or Y. I find that curious. 

A lot of it is habit probably (that's what you talk about when it comes to events, right?), and I need to work on giving people different talking points. Maybe.

5. Organizing the logistics of an event (venue, food, parties, etc.) is not hard. Like the previous year, I organized all the pre-event stuff singlehandedly, and if all those activities had been done in a single day, it would have taken just one day. 

You do not need an events company or an events person for small events (under 500 people). 

During the event itself of course you need a crew, but the prior prep? Naah.

6. Selling tickets is hard work.

7. Events cost money to put on and hence you need to work with sponsors. We had very creative partners this year. Non-traditional events require non-traditional sponsorships. 

Next year, I'm not even gonna allow any traditional booths anymore, it just doesn't fit. 

8. The more parties, the better. It's not about drinking. It's about giving people a chance to meet people and have meaningful conversations. For our two-day event, we had four parties.

If you organize your own outings, you'll only hang out with people you already know. Parties give you a chance to meet new folks.

9. These were some very extraverted days for me. I needed multiple days of cave time to regain my mojo... but it was so worth it!

See you next spring, at Spryng.

If you could discuss any topic with your marketing peers, what would you choose?

The B2B SaaS marketing leaders coming to Spryng (Apr 9-10 in Austin TX) have voted. If you join them, you will also discuss things like GTM strategy, messaging, storytelling, demand creation and so on.

How it works: I'm grouping people with similar titles from similar-sized companies who are interested in the same topic. So everyone at your discussion table has a lot in common, with similar on-the-ground realities. 

You will learn what's working for your peers, the challenges everyone have, and you share what you know.

That's most of the event. It's unlike any other event.

If you're in B2B SaaS marketing, come. Last week to buy tickets. 

"I want to think about things where I have an advantage over others. I don't want to play a game where people have an advantage over me."

This quote by Charlie Munger illustrates how to think about finding an opening to take on a category giant. 

Adam Robinson had an email marketing tool, competing against Mailchimp. After many years, he stumbled upon an opportunity where he had an advantage. 

In the end, he spun that advantage out as a separate company, and it took only about seven months to make $1M in revenue. And less than three years to hit $20M.

Don't outsource figuring out what you do to your prospects.

This headline is a real screenshot. The company has featuritis and now does so much that it doesn't even know how to explain it.

Instead of solving the messaging problem, they pass the problem of deciphering what it is on to potential buyers.

Bad idea. 

A) It's your job to own your messaging (key ideas we want the customers to know)
B) What you're about needs to be easy to understand (cognitive fluency)
C) You want to be in control of the narrative

A long time ago, toothpaste manufacturers competed on only a few dimensions, like “freshens breath” and “fights cavities.” 

Today, consumers expect even generic toothpastes to remove plaque, prevent gum disease, and whiten teeth.

What used to be novel is now table stakes.

Happens to every single innovation. Think LLMs. We went from "wow magic" to dozens of near identical competitors in months.

Do you even resonate? Looking for B2B SaaS volunteers for upcoming episodes.   

Reply with URL and ICP (job title, industry, company size). 

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