Hey! Glad you’re here.

This is an important one.

I’m calling it my MAXIMALIST newsletter.

It’s stuffed with different types of content—interviews, news, trivia, marketing examples, and memes.

Here’s my one and only ask from you: at the bottom of this newsletter in the poll, tell me your favorite piece of content. Literally one click.

This’ll help guide me to spend more time on content that folks are most interested in.

Ready? Let’s dive in to this very important MAXIMALIST newsletter…

Founder Q&A 👊

How Inflection is disrupting the Market Automation category

“Tell me the origin story of Inflection and the gap that you saw in the market”

All of the Inflection leadership team was early at Bizible, and then later executives at Marketo. Aaron Bird, our CEO, ran Product at Marketo. Vic Davis, our Head of Customer Experience, ran enterprise Customer Success at Marketo. I ran enterprise marketing at Marketo doing ABM to our largest prospects.

All of us noticed independently across marketing, product, and success that Marketo has some glaring deficiencies for modern SaaS companies.

When we left Marketo, we interviewed over 100 marketing operations and executives on their biggest, most painful problems. Almost half of those interviews were with product-led companies, and the entire pain points were around how Marketo wasn’t built for modern data scale, to utilize product data, and just how it’s no longer innovating.

That was the origin of Inflection and gave us the motivation to build a marketing automation product.

“How do you differentiate Inflection from established competitors in your space?”

Two big areas where we differentiate from Marketo and other B2B marketing automation providers:

1. Product: Traditional marketing automation tools are basically CRM apps that use CRM data to communicate with prospects.
   Inflection, however, not only integrates well with Salesforce but also connects directly to data warehouses and product data. This means it can bring in raw data from sources like Snowflake and Segment without needing to manually create and map fields.
   This allows Inflection to communicate with both prospects and customers or users, which addresses the #1 pain point from our early customer discovery.

2. Pricing: Traditional marketing automation charges for contacts—even if you don’t email them. Inflection only charges if you run them through a journey, which addresses the #2 pain point from our early customer discovery.

“What are some of the biggest challenges you've faced while trying to disrupt the market? How have you tackled them?”

Positioning has probably been the biggest challenge so far.

“Marketing automation” means something to a lot of people and calling ourselves marketing automation in our opinion undersells our value.

We’ve toyed with the idea of building a new category that aligns with Inflection’s main value proposition, which is being able to handle prospect and customer communications.

“What's one insight or lesson learned that's been critical to your competitive success?”

This is not our first startup. Our first was Bizible where we met many amazing people who used our product. People we met 10 years ago have given us feedback on Inflection, sent us referrals, or are even customers.

SaaS marketing is a small world and it's important to cherish your network.

“Any parting advice for revenue leaders competing in crowded markets?”

The best product wins (usually).

I’ve had a number of people ask me how we compete with dozens of marketing automation providers. But the reality is, we don’t. We see HubSpot and Marketo in deals. That’s really it.

We are focused on B2B marketing automation and we are focused on providing a great product to our customers and prospects. So in a way, it’s a very small market. 3 vendors - Marketo, HubSpot, and Inflection - and over $1B in ARR.

JUICY SCOOPS 🧃

What’s happening now

• 🤖 | Lots of OpenAI news:

  • Co-Founder left to work for a top competitor [more]

  • Microsoft officially labeled them a ‘competitor’ for the first time [more]

  • Taking on Google and Perplexity with new SearchGPT release [more]

• 🎮 | Asus is giving the Steam Deck a run for its money [more]

• 📺 | Google taking on Apple TV and Roku in a new way [more]

• ✈️ | Spirit Airlines’ competitive strategy no longer working [more]

• 🚕 | Lyft struggling to reach the same profitability as their rival [more]

EXAMPLES 🍊

Your weekly dose of vitamin C(ompete)

In 2016, Sprint flipped the script by featuring Paul Marcarelli, the iconic "Can you hear me now?" guy, famously associated with Verizon, in their "Paul's Back" campaign. The switch grabbed headlines (it currently has 14M YouTube views) and also highlighted Sprint's improved network.

CI Practitioner Q&A 👊

How Klaviyo Does Competitive Intel

“How did you get into competitive intel?”

I come from a support background. I supported a small team of engineers doing data migrations to move customers from competitors to our platform and learned a ton about our competitors as a result.

After a while, I realized that our marketing team had a lot of content talking about competitors, but no one was an expert. So that’s when I started working with the Product Marketing team to build the case for someone that specialized in knowing the competition.

A competitive intelligence manager wasn’t a thing 8 years ago, so it took a while to make the case, but I eventually joined the team as the PMM who owned competitive intelligence and win/loss.

“How do you describe what you do for work?”

I like to point to a relatable example whenever possible. If you think about going to buy a new car, the sales rep at Mazda usually has to know why they are better than Hyundai. Someone has to do the work to figure out why you should buy the Mazda.

I usually jokingly say I’m that jerk that trashes on Hyundai. From there, I usually explain that I also follow market trends and work on company strategy as well.

“What are you working on that you’re excited about?”

I've been working on a new framework to handle what I call the "long tail" of the competitive landscape. If you think about all of the small competitors that you might run into, especially as your company grows, there will often be an endless number of competitors that you’ll get asked about.

So I'm creating a framework that starts by categorizing competitors into buckets. From there, you build battlecards for these "tier 3 competitors" based on how you stack up against each bucket.

The ultimate goal is to create something scalable, as even your top competitors will fit into one of these buckets. The trick is being able to eventually create a way for a sales rep to easily determine the bucket that a competitor they’ve never heard of falls into (and keeping a cheat sheet so you don’t have to repeat the process for competitors that come up more than a few times).

“What’s one thing you do now that you didn’t do a year ago?”

I have an amazing mentor, Stephen who has been part of my career since I first joined product marketing. He has always been someone that I could go to with questions or to talk through a problem.

Even after we started working at different companies, he was there to give me that boost of confidence. It’s been really amazing to continue that relationship over the years; I’ve been able to help him w/ competitive intelligence resources & frameworks.

“A new CI practitioner asks for a tip to get started, what do you tell them?”

I’d highly recommend thinking about market intelligence rather than just competitive intelligence.

When you take a view that looks at the bigger picture of your market, you can better understand not only your competitors but the challenges facing your customers.

It also helps you appear a lot more “friendly” when you talk to folks outside of your company. Customers might assume the competitive intelligence person is going to stack the deck in your favor, but the market intelligence person is just super knowledgeable about everything going on including your competitors.

Peachy memes 🍑

Game time, baby! Let me know what you think below please 🙏 

Stay Healthy, my friends.

💚Andy