Who better to interview about category creation than someone who’s in the midst of building a major new category right now? That’s why I asked Dave Gerhardt, VP Marketing at Drift, to join me on the latest episode of the #categorycreation series on the B2B Growth Show. In case you haven’t encountered Drift in the wild, they’re the
What’s the most effective way to stand out in a crowded market? Having the “best” technology? Access to the biggest ad budget? Pulling off some amazing “growth hack?” Nope. It’s something deeper than that. It’s the foundation that underpins classics like Toy Story, The Terminator, and Hamlet. It’s how people like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and
Startups are supposed to crush competitors, right? Well, maybe… But that’s not how Sangram Vajre, Co-Founder and Chief Evangelist at Terminus, built one of the top SaaS companies out there. Actually, they took the opposite approach. Sangram embraced his competitors (well, metaphorically, anyway), knowing that healthy competition was needed to build out a new market
If you’ve paid any attention to the B2B SaaS space, you’ve probably heard how Drift is one of the fastest-growing companies of all time. But how does Drift do it? There’s no silver bullet, but a big part of their success comes from adopting a business and marketing strategy called category design. Drift isn’t the
What if your doctor told you that she was going to build a $100MM SaaS company? Sounds crazy. But that’s exactly what Heidi Jannenga did. Heidi is the co-founder and president of WebPT, a category-defining SaaS company in the physical therapy space. She’s not a programmer, had no startup experience, and never came near business
Marketers love to talk about category design. And even though that type of positioning is a powerful marketing play, it’s not the type of strategic decision that marketing should pull off alone. In this episode of the B2B Growth Show, I interviewed Chris Orlob, Sr. Director of Product Marketing at Gong.io. Gong has been hard
You might think that category design is a positioning strategy reserved only for companies building something entirely new. But for $2B Everbridge, they found that category design can be just as beneficial to large companies as well. Everbridge (traded on NASDAQ as EVBG) had already built a leadership position in a category called Mass Notification
Every marketer needs a superpower. But Christoper Lochhead may have uncovered the greatest superpower of all. It’s something called category design. Category design is the process of building a new space that your company can own and dominate over the long term. It’s about “following your different” instead of trying to be “better.” As the co-author of
Like most marketers, I’ve had plenty of successes, but I’ve my fair share of failures, too. So I was thinking today about what led to those failures. And when I look back at the ideas that didn’t do so well, it usually comes down to one thing: trying to flying solo. In other words, when
The software demo started off like any other. A few slides about the company’s client list. Some stats on the number of employees they had, how quickly they’d grown. But as I listened to the pitch the rep gave about his company’s PR monitoring software, I started to feel pissed off. Later on, I tried
