Peep Laja

Wynter

When your ideal customers read your messaging - what do they think? Are they leaning in - "wow this is great!", or are they rolling their eyes? What's hitting home, what's turning them off? 

Wynter gives you feedback from your target customers. Get to better messaging, convert more.

There have never been as many brands as there are today. To win in these saturated markets, you need to speed up your feedback loops and out-message the competition. 

• B2B message testing for website, ad, and email copy.
• Test your positioning and narrative
• Verified B2B audiences, target by title and industry 
• On-demand. Results 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

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” 

Business success largely depends on your ability to talk to the target customers. If your messaging hits the mark, you're gonna win. 

However, the odds are good that your messaging is 'meh' and you don't even know it. Symptoms of ineffective messaging are hard to diagnose. 

That's why you need to test your messaging with your ICPs. 

Companies that speed up their customer feedback loops with Wynter are routinely driving large increases in their conversation rates: visitor to signup, prospect to demos booked, sales demos to closed won.

Hold up on AI suggestions for a second, what about people suggestions?

Wynter homepage feedback took 6-hours to return 30 answers and came piled high with suggestions from our ICP.

Lots to chew through now…

"We can't do this, we need to create a proper strategy first". 

Actually you 100% can and should. 

Yes, there are many short-term focused things happening, but I also see too many SaaS companies being too long-term in their approach.

They want to establish a perfect strategy before dipping their toes in. 

We can't throw a conference because it needs many months of careful planning first and lots of people in the events team.
We need a perfect detailed ABM plan before starting ABM.
We can't put on this virtual event, we need a full events strategy.
We can't post on LinkedIn or whatever because we don't have a full social strategy. 

All of that is mostly an excuse. 

Every strategy is a hypothesis. We can talk about it for months, but it will remain a hypothesis until you ship it. 

(I'm not talking about overall business strategy here which requires long-term bets). 

Instead of waiting to create the perfect long-term approach, think in pilots. 

Pilots for everything. Small-scale first iterations to ship for testing and learning. If something has legs, you can double down on it and invest more. Or if it's dead on arrival, change course. 

This will greatly help you move and learn much faster.

Instead of a full-blown events strategy, just throw an event and learn from it. Test some concepts and ideas.

Ship a smaller-scale ABM pilot, targeting only 20 accounts. 

And so on. 

Stop endless planning discussions, and start shipping. Once you do stuff and learn, you have actually something tangible to talk about. 

A fantastic idea: moments of impact. 

Listen to Mark Kosoglow explain what it is and how to engineer it for improved customer retention and account expansion. 

In simplest terms:

1. You design and architect Moments of Impact - specific moments where the customer receives significant value. 
2. You proactively communicate this value back to the customer. 
3. You repeat this again and again for each moment. 
4. When it's time to renew and the customer has a value conversation (internally and with you), there's an extensive list of documented value, so renewal (and expansion) becomes almost a no-brainer.

Get my full chat with Mark in the latest episode of the How to Win podcast.

Do you even resonate? This week I conducted message testing on the home page of Jellyfish (volunteered by Kyle Lacy).

One of their ICPs is engineering leaders, so that's whom I tested their messaging against. 

Jellyfish clearly solves important problems as acknowledged by their target customers. However, the effectiveness of said messaging is held back by some very specific issues. 

Right now their demo interest scores only 3.2/5. However, they can significantly increase this and drive more pipeline if they fix some key issues. 

1. How does it work? 

The home page makes a lot of marketing claims, but offers little explanation of how it's all possible. 

When your ICP reads everything and still has questions, you have a problem. They really want to know where does all this data come from, and does it require any change in the ways they work and manage. 

Sample quotes:
"I don't know how your product works or what it does. There's marketing fud claiming that it will measure my team's business impact.... but I don't believe you at all. I need to see more about how it works and what it measures."

"I didn't see anything about how it actually works. For example, how is the data collected? What kind of changes would I have to make to my departments' workflows to enable this tool to integrate?"

The audience has a lot of questions - answering these in context (when the questions arise) will help a lot. 

2. What's the setup like? What's involved?

People are worried about what it takes to set up, does it add to the workload, and is it yet another tool to look at.

"It was not made clear how this would be implemented in my environment."

"What is the overhead of maintaining this tool's data vs all the project management stuff I'm already doing?  I don't want to bring in an admin just to keep this up-to-date."

3. What kind of specific reports does it show, what specific insights does it offer?

The home page only shows one generic screenshot (one that turns most off), so people are left wondering if the insights it produces are merely superficial. 

If you leave blanks in the story, people will fill those in by themselves.

All of this lack of information is holding back people from scheduling demos. 

One VP of Engineering commented:

"I get what its goal is and I like it. But I wouldn't ask for a demo for a product going in blind."

Note: a lack of information doesn't mean it's not there somewhere on the website. It's when it's not served when the questions come up. You lose most people right there. 

This is the very point of message testing. You discover where your messaging misses the mark, so you can fix it and get more demos. 

There are also a number of smaller items that need addressing, and I go through all of them in this video.

#doyouevenresonate

A few reminders:

• there have never been as many brands as there are today
• barriers of entry have never been lower: access to capital, tech, know-how, and talent is plentiful
• this results in *so much* competition in almost every market imaginable
• it's really noisy out there, and most are doing/saying the same things; over time competitors become more and more alike
• you can't win on features (alone)... the idea that if the category leader has X amount of features and you can win with X+1 is ludicrous
• if you are basically the same as the category leader, they will go with the brand they know and trust
• people have very limited consideration sets
• if you're like most tools in your category, people won't find out about you and it's very hard to build a brand
• you need to win on either innovation or brand, ideally both
• sameness is a losing strategy, albeit it's the most common one

Do you even resonate?

This week: Optimizely (volunteered by Thilo Richter). 

I ran a message test on their "Feature Experimentation" page, testing with ecommerce/retail product leaders. 

Overall results:

Clarity: 3/5
Demo interest: 2.7/5

The results are not strong, yet again could be fixed relatively easily. A key benefit of message testing is to uncover friction - and I found a lot. 

Key issues on this page:

1. The above-the-fold area makes benefit claims that are never explained. 

They pique some curiosity with statements like "more control and impact" and "higher quality releases, safer tests, faster feature validations" - BUT those claims are never followed up with. 

2. Lack of focus

What is this page intending to achieve? Is it to pitch the feature flags product? Or the whole Optimizely suit? 

Or app testing or data core service? It has a mix of CTAs, and lacks a focused, coherent story. In the end, folks were confused about what the offer was. 

3. Overwhelming feature list

Folks are interested in the features, but the presentation of them (all at once) is ineffective, causing overwhelm. 

4. Unclear imagery

It's good that they are trying to help the clarity of the message with helpful images - but the clarity of the images used is falling short. It's not obvious what's going on there.

5. Vague subheads. 

Most people only read subheads, not paragraph copy. So if the only thing you see is "Deliver at every step", it does nothing to the value perception of the product.

Get the full story in the video here.

Want to be next in this series? Comment below with your URL and target ICP.



#doyouevenresonate

Spryng is coming.

It's not easy in B2B SaaS in 2023. 

Budgets are tight (yet goals are up). 
Demand gen channels are too costly / competitive. 
The predictability of the new ARR generated is fuzzy.
Understanding exactly what is working is challenging. 

And the same time you need to need to somehow accelerate the velocity of opportunities from identified to qualified, and you need the deals to be bigger.

You need to increase the proportion of the pipeline you are driving that is from your best-fit customers (highest ACV and best-retaining).

So what do you do, how do you win?

That's the focus of Spryng: a new B2B SaaS conference by Wynter on May 2nd in Austin TX. 

Come sit at actual fireside chats Andrew Davies Alice de Courcy Elena Verna Andrei Faji Chris Walker Emma Stratton Ben Labay and other SaaS doers. (More names announced soon).

Sick venue, amazing topics, good people. Join us! 

https://wynter.com/spryng

I haven't seen teams with too narrow focus. 

It's almost always the opposite -- trying to do too many things, and having too many priorities.

You need to move fast. 
Everything you ship needs to be high quality.
You need a culture of growth mindset and experimentation - which includes celebrating (learning from) failures.

How do you balance speed and quality? Does tolerating and celebrating mistakes ("move fast and break things") give people permission to do a sloppy job?

Because you need both - high standards ("It's either fucking great or total shit" - Steve Jobs) and a culture of learning/growth mindset .

I had a great discussion about this with Casey Carey who had a brilliant line: "quality should never be sacrificed". 

You get speed from reducing scope and quantity. The quality should always be there. 

When buyers are looking at websites of unfamiliar brands, they always ask:

"What does this replace?"
"What do I use this instead of?"

If you're a challenger brand in a bigger category, you need to make it clear. 

Most B2B SaaS companies pretend the competition doesn't exist ("Send beautiful email newsletters"), and that's a mistake - esp if you're an upstart.

Here's a brand that does it well, clearly spelling out what it's an alternative to:

Kudos where kudos is due!

If I were a SaaS product manager I would be very busy trying to reverse engineer Wynter. As a CMO, I’d be grabbing the credit card and a copy of the company messaging to test. 

I try out many many MarTech tools all the time, and I’d consider myself a harsh judge/user, but the Wynter team have nailed it.

If you are a B2B tech marketer and haven’t tried it out yet, you’re missing out on significant market validation (or insights) for your messaging.

Envy recently used it as a validation tool for our new messaging and rebrand and it blew our socks off. I go into details on how we used it in this blog but for the skimmers amongst us, you would love Wynter’s:

- Website: Simple to walk through, understand the services, compelling messaging!
- Onboarding process: Smooth, painless, even when I decided to bite the bullet and take the dreaded demo, it was short, effective and professional. Dustin Drees 💪.
- Delivery on promise: Results promised within 48 - 72 hours came in within 36 hours.  
- Testing results were exactly what we needed: We weren’t sure we were headed in the right direction with our messaging. It was a big deal to us and Wynter gave us validation and peace of mind.

So Kudos to the Wynter team for creating a tool that really does what it sets out to do: *Give us battle weary marketers some unbiased, agenda-free, hard earned insights and feedback on our B2B messaging.*

P.S. And just in case:  I am not connected to Peep Laja or Wynter in any way, shape or form.

https://lnkd.in/d2wZuJYk

#b2bmessaging #techmarketing 

Open article: Every CMO should be checking out Wynter for B2B message testing by blog.goenvy.io

https://blog.goenvy.io/try-wynter-for-b2b-messaging

It's far easier to sell what people already wanna buy. 

Yes, you will have more competition, but answering "why you" is easier than "why".

Name a B2B businesses whose mission you love and believe in. A business you choose over alternatives because of this mission.

"People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it."

I'm skeptical.

I was talking to Kevan Lee about this and he ventured that the mission matters a lot in vendor selection. It's not what you tell the CFO ("they're a B corp!"), but it's what gets people bought in so they evangelize it internally.

I personally don't know the mission of ANY of the tools in my tech stack in any of my companies.

Do you?

It seems to me that either
a) the mission is overrated as a reason why people buy you, and really it's all about value/capabilities,
or
b) B2B have mostly done a poor job communicating their mission, it's not part of their messaging. Which would make this an advantage for companies that do lean in on this.

What do you think?




Most buyers will come to you completely informed about their decision.

To do this repeatedly, you need to win 2 battles
1) mental availability - to even get into the consideration set
2) brand preference - folks come in already positively biased to choose you

If you want to get intentional about building a brand, this is where you should start according to Kevan Lee.

Get the full conversation from the How to Win podcast.

Demand acquisition channels are getting more costly and competitive. What should you do about it?

Kevan Lee from Oyster®is 

1) doubling down on brand advertising 

(btw have you seen the new data that brand-building ads also boost short-term sales?)

2) being laser-focused on their ICP with their messaging,

(this requires you to learn more about them, now is the best time to run some buyer intelligence surveys)

3) doing less land grab (2020-2022 era) and concentrating on land ownership instead.

Get the full conversation in the latest episode of the How to Win podcast. 

Among other things, positioning answers 'what is it?'

What something is determines it's price point.

HOP WTR positions it's bubbly water as a 'beer alternative', and also prices it like beer, not water.

I'm sure the margins are fabolous.


The symptoms of ineffective messaging are hard to spot.

You measure every metric imaginable, but how do you know your messaging is working?

Recently I surveyed a number of demand gen leaders and asked them to self-assess their company's messaging on a 10-point scale (1-terrible, 10-fantastic). 

Can you guess? Most gave themselves a 7 or 8.

This reminds me of that classic study with drivers, where the overwhelming majority rated their driving skills as better than average. 

That study also found that inflated self-perceptions of performance contribute to excessive risk-taking behind the wheel.

It gets more interesting: when asked if others would also think they're great, most say yes! 

A lack of insight into the thoughts of others leads people to think that others would view them as excellent drivers because in their own minds, they ARE excellent.

Remember the study when CEOs were surveyed and 88% of them said they believed that their company had exceptional customer service? 

The catch was of course that only 12% of customers agreed.

We read these things and laugh - haha how is their self-assessment so off? 

People agree with their high self-assessments due to a bias blind spot where they recognize bias in others but not in themselves.

Back to messaging. The jokes about B2B messaging being vague and full of buzzwords exist for a reason. 

You measure every metric imaginable, but how do you know your messaging is working?

Until you actually conduct message testing (put it in front of your ICPs and get their perceptions back), you don't know and your self-assessment means little. 

"How do you do that?"

This is the question you want your target buyer to ask after reading your value proposition. Ideally, your above-the-fold area contains a promise of value to be delivered. One that they want. 

So they go - 'that's interesting, how do you do that'?

Too many B2B SaaS websites make claims that never get explained. You just have to take their word for it. That's a mistake, and a big one. 

People want to know!

If you communicate benefits like "higher quality releases, safer tests, and faster feature validations" but don't elaborate on how you do that or what those things even mean, it falls flat. 

If you claim to "show the business impact of your engineering investments" but don't explain how this is done, they won't believe you. 

These are real-life examples from message tests I've seen. 

The goal of high-impact messaging (like the one on your home page or product pages) is to INCREASE user motivation to take action. You will get more signups and more demos if they WANT to sign up or get a demo. 

Hence, the focus of your messaging should be to communicate value. The underlying pre-requisite is that this communication has to be credible. 

If you just make claims without explanation and proof, it'll be ineffective. Explain the 'how'. 

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