Katey Mokelke: Hitting the bullseye with Positioning

Bob McDonald: Hi, this is Bob McDonald, and welcome to Differentiate or Die, the Firebrick Consulting podcast series that focuses on the keys to great positioning. On this edition, Firebrick founder Bob Wright and I are going to be talking about hitting the bullseye with your positioning — best practices for operationalizing your story — with one of our own Firebrick positioning consultants, Katey Mokelke. Katey just celebrated her seventh anniversary at Firebrick, and she has now worked on over 50 Firebrick positioning engagements. When she came to Firebrick seven years ago, Katey brought over 15 years of experience leading launch, pre- and post-acquisition, and market-differentiating communications programs for dozens of B2B tech companies. Most notably, Katey was a vice president at Horn Group, one of the most enduring agency brands in the tech industry. At Horn, she was the go-to player for any account with a complex positioning problem, whether for technology, market or reputation reasons. She helped lead a number of Horn’s largest clients, including Novell and RightNow. She also led the company’s book launch practice, working closely with, among others, Crossing the Chasm author Geoffrey Moore. Katey, welcome to the podcast.

Bob Wright: As some of our listeners are aware, our Firebrick business cards now carry, in addition to our title, a word that best describes a talent we each contribute to the Firebrick positioning process. Tell us what’s behind your choice of the word “Illuminator.”

Katey Mokelke: Thanks — and first, thanks for having me. It’s really fun to talk to you both about this. We had a lot of fun with those titles and a lot of good conversations. I chose Illuminator because I like to think I help shine a light on things for Firebrick — for our team, for our clients, and in the process we have — helping bring our ideas and concepts to life. That’s really the idea behind Illuminator.

Bob Wright: On many levels — not just in the workshops themselves, where you also play that role.

Katey Mokelke: Yes. It’s illuminating what a company needs to do at a strategy level with its positioning, but also, overall, how to get a client from point A to point B with a really strong positioning story. And I think that ties into today’s topic, because it’s not just about creating the positioning story; it’s also about how you roll it out. That’s just as important as the story itself.

Don’t throw it over the wall

Bob Wright: Let’s talk about that in more detail, Katey. You’ve seen a lot of positioning rollouts in your career. In a positioning engagement, we spend an intense six to eight weeks developing a positioning strategy, positioning story and messaging for a client. Then we hand over those deliverables, and they’re ready to operationalize. What’s the first thing you always recommend to a client for a successful rollout?

Katey Mokelke: That’s a really good question. The first thing I’ll say is what you don’t do. After all that great thought and time spent on the positioning, bringing in multiple stakeholders, you don’t just throw it over the wall and say, “Here you go, run with it.” What’s really important is that clients take a step back, be really intentional about how they want to roll out the positioning, and come up with a plan — for the internal rollout of the story, and also externally.

The internal rollout

Bob Wright: What are some of the key elements of that plan — the buckets they need to think about before they start telling people about the great new positioning?

Katey Mokelke: One of the first things I always want to see is an internal company rollout: figuring out the right time to roll it out to all employees. That could be a town hall meeting, an internal sales kickoff, or another important internal milestone meeting, where the executive team introduces the new positioning, talks about the process and journey that got them there, and takes the time to celebrate: “We got to this point, we’re putting a stake in the ground — now come join us on this journey. This is the story we’re taking to market.”

Bob McDonald: When we talk about the internal rollout, many clients immediately think of sales enablement, but you’re talking beyond sales enablement — to company enablement, and how you’re going to train the company on the new positioning.

Katey Mokelke: Yes. It’s really about making sure you set aside the time, particularly for the executives, to introduce the story to the rest of the employees. That’s one key thing. The other thing I really love to see is finding a couple of very senior ambassadors for the positioning within the company — usually the CEO or CMO, or maybe the head of sales — someone who will practice giving the story. You might even record them giving it on video, so it can be distributed across the organization and people can actually hear someone give the positioning, hear it come to life, and really get their heads around it.

Sales enablement

Bob Wright: Katey, in addition to the internal rollout, there’s the external rollout, and we also talked about sales enablement. What are the best practices you’ve seen for getting a sales organization up to speed on new positioning?

Katey Mokelke: There are a couple of things. The first step is making sure that, in addition to the positioning and the positioning presentation, you have supporting materials created specifically for the sales team. They give background on what the positioning is and how to use it, what to look for, and what the different elements of the strategy are, along with specific messages written for a sales audience. How do you translate the positioning down to the field sales team so they have the right language to engage their buyers? So the first thing is having supporting materials they can use to put the positioning into practice. The second is, again, being intentional and setting aside the time to train the right people in the sales organization, so they’re equipped not only to start using it, but to model for the rest of the sales team how to use it. A lot of times we’ll do a train-the-trainer session: we set aside a half day or a full day with key sales leaders, walk them through the positioning — often they were involved in developing it — talk them through the components, the slides and the rationale behind them, address their questions, objections and feedback, and give them an opportunity to practice giving it in front of their peers, so they really get behind the story.

Bob McDonald: One of the great benefits of our process, of course, is that some of the key sales executives have participated in developing the positioning story, so they’re already queued up to play those leadership roles.

Katey Mokelke: Absolutely. Although I’m always surprised that even for anyone who’s been along on the journey the whole way — even for me — everyone benefits from setting aside time to really delve into it: practicing delivering the slides and the talking points, and thinking about additional examples to expand on the slides.

Staying the course

Bob Wright: How important is it for the executive team to drive consistency during the operationalizing and rollout of a new positioning?

Katey Mokelke: Very important — you might have guessed I was going to say that. It’s really, really important, because once you start using the story in the field — with customers, analysts or investors — you’re going to get feedback, and that’s a natural part of the process. You need the leadership behind it, because you don’t want people taking it, getting feedback, and changing it based on the last conversation they had. You really need consistency over a quarter or two, and then you take a holistic look at the positioning and maybe make some adjustments. Having the leadership team behind the positioning ahead of time helps you stay the course.

Bob McDonald: So staying the course is really important at the beginning of the rollout, and doing some tuning six months in is a good time to step back and see what’s working and what’s not.

Katey Mokelke: Absolutely. After a quarter or two, have some mechanism along the way to capture the feedback, and then create a milestone where you get together as a group — often Firebrick comes back in for a positioning review — or run some sort of survey. Just set aside time to look at it and figure out how to fine-tune it based on everything you’ve learned.

Testing the positioning before rollout

Bob Wright: Another topic I know you feel strongly about is testing the positioning after it’s developed, before you roll it out. Talk about that for a moment.

Katey Mokelke: I love to bring this up during workshops, because I believe so strongly that it’s important for companies to have some sort of validation phase for the positioning, for a couple of reasons. First, you really want real market feedback before you roll it out, so figure out a way to build that into the process. Second, getting that feedback gives you the confidence that you have the right story — or tells you what adjustments to make so you’ll have the right story. That confidence is key for everyone to get behind it and drive the consistency we were just talking about. And there are different levels of testing. It doesn’t have to be long and drawn out; there are quick and easy ways to do it, and multiple approaches.

Bob Wright: Give us some examples. What do you see clients do at the lighter end, and at the more extensive end?

Katey Mokelke: The way I think about it, there are almost three levels. The first is what we’d call soft testing: going to a conference and setting up a couple of meetings with customers, or using an upcoming customer advisory board meeting to get feedback. It’s essentially an informal conversation where you introduce some concepts from the positioning and ask key questions to see whether elements of the positioning align with their thinking. You might even show a couple of key slides. The second level is more formal one-on-one interviews with a handful of clients. Clients can do that internally or employ us to do it. You’d have a more developed discussion guide, so you create consistency across, say, ten customers. And you want to make sure you’re interviewing not just customers, but customers who represent the next set of buyers you’re trying to reach. In those conversations, you might hand-pick three or four slides that are really important to the positioning and ask pretty prescriptive questions, designed to get the kind of feedback that helps you summarize results and make specific decisions about adjustments. The third level is formal focus group testing. For that you’d use a third-party firm — we work with a couple of really great ones — and it includes blind testing with buyers who represent your next set of buyers, maybe 10 to 20 of them, walking them through a prescriptive, formal process to get their feedback on the slides.

Bob McDonald: And just to clarify, blind testing means they don’t know the company that’s introducing these ideas to them. Often in focus group testing, you’re testing the ideas in the positioning without associating them with the company’s brand.

Katey Mokelke: Right. They don’t know who they’re dealing with, so you hopefully get much more objective feedback. You get really great feedback that way — not only on the positioning, but generally about what it’s like to be that buyer: what keeps them up at night and what dynamics they’re seeing in the market. That can be really instrumental for companies, too.

Creative ideas for driving adoption

Bob Wright: Katey, are there other tips or creative ideas you’ve seen that would help our audience roll out a new positioning?

Katey Mokelke: It’s been really fun over the years to see the different ideas clients come up with, all in the spirit of driving consistency, staying the course, and giving people different ways to engage with the content so they really internalize it. For example, New Relic was one of our clients. They took the positioning pillars we developed with them — the differentiators — and printed them on a card with a cool rocket ship graphic, laminated it, and handed it out to every employee to tack up in their cubicle, so they had the differentiators in front of them every day. I thought that was a great idea. I’ve also seen companies create little pocket guides to the positioning with the supporting messaging — an easy handout people can keep on hand. And one fun example: ClickSoftware did a game show–style activity. Volunteers got up and gave the positioning presentation in front of their peers, and the peers voted on who did the best job. I think the winner got $1,000, which is pretty cool.

Bob McDonald: That’s motivating. I could have been in that competition.

What makes the Firebrick process different

Bob Wright: Before you joined us seven years ago, you’d of course been working on positioning engagements throughout your career. What makes the Firebrick process you’re part of now different from what you’ve seen in the industry?

Katey Mokelke: That’s a really great question, because on the PR side we did a lot of positioning ourselves and were brought in to do that kind of work all the time. First and foremost, we have an amazing process that we’ve honed over the years. People can do positioning on their own; it’s just really hard. As a team, we’ve spent so much time and brainpower figuring out the best way to lead companies through the positioning process as quickly as possible, with the best ideas, leveraging all our knowledge. I think we’ve done a really good job of institutionalizing what we’ve learned and making it a seamless process for a company, bringing in all the right people. That’s the key thing. What I’ve seen before is that everyone can come up with good ideas, but it’s not just about the ideas. It’s about getting everyone aligned around the right ideas, and having the right steps in place to hit the right milestones, so it all comes together into a really cohesive, great story.

Positioning versus messaging

Bob Wright: Katey, given your corporate communications and PR background, what do you see as the difference between positioning and messaging?

Katey Mokelke: That’s such a good question — funnily enough, I was talking about that today with someone I was interviewing. Lots of people have different opinions. I think of positioning as the core elements of a company’s go-to-market strategy: where they’re putting their stake in the ground in a few key areas — the target buyer, the competition, differentiation and category. What position are they taking in the market? The messaging is the words they use to communicate that position. It’s a gray area, and they overlap quite a bit, but that’s how I like to think about it.

Bob Wright: What I see is that PR messaging has a different audience. PR messaging is targeted specifically at getting press headlines. That’s a very different objective from positioning, which is used to drive revenue, engage sales cycles, drive valuation and create categories.

Katey Mokelke: Yes. It’s hard when you’re in PR shoes, because you’re beholden to what you’ve talked about most recently with the press. If you’ve already talked about something or made an announcement and it’s not new, you feel limited. Whereas we can take a more holistic view of what customers really care about. Customers might be a little behind the market or a little ahead of it, but you really meet customers where they are, and I think that’s so important for companies.

Bob McDonald: Katey, thank you for joining us to talk about best practices for operationalizing your positioning story. We invite all our listeners to enjoy the whole series of podcasts on our website, firebk.com. Until next time, this is Bob McDonald for Firebrick.