How Positioning impacts B2B Tech Revenue Growth - with Bob Wright, Firebrick

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talk to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS, and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed decisions. Now on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Bob Wright, founding partner of Marketing Arts and Firebrick Consulting. Today, we will be covering three main areas. How did COVID impact the prioritization of messaging and positioning? Some examples of how great positioning impacts revenue performance, and the metrics that are impacted most by relevant and differentiated positioning and messaging. Bob, please take a moment to give our audience a brief background of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Bob Wright** (1:08)
Ray, thank you very much. I really appreciate the opportunity. I love talking about positioning, so this is right up my power alley. I'm a partner, as you mentioned, at Firebrick. We're a very specialized consulting firm that specializes in B2B tech, and our core competency is positioning. I'm going to share with you my experience of positioning probably over 400 different B2B tech companies and products. We've got a process or methodology that we've developed just doing this very narrow expertise over and over again.
Specifically, companies come to us when they're ready to scale up. We've got a lot of experience with new categories, and everybody comes to us when they want to move out of features and functions and have an executive level conversation.

**Ray Rike** (1:48)
I'm really interested in taking more upon this, but I'm sure you didn't come out of your undergraduate degree saying, I'm going to be a messaging and positioning thought leader. How did you actually transition into this thought leadership role for B2B tech companies?

**Bob Wright** (2:04)
Yeah, that's a great question. I actually came out of college fortunate enough selling computers right out of college. Before B2B tech was even a thing, I was in the tech industry, I was in sales, and then quickly found out that my talent was really in marketing. I had product marketing roles, corporate marketing roles, industry marketing roles. What I got really good at doing at these software companies is launch new products. I didn't care so much about the features and functions and the MRDs and all that sort of thing. I created this thing called Launch Marketing. When the product's ready, give it to me and I'll go pop it. Because of my sales background, I could really pop the revenue of a new product. I built a launch methodology or process, and I began launching our company's products. Then after a while, I thought, maybe I should go out on my own, and I decided to become a launch consultant. I had a methodology or process that I had built, and I started doing launches for different tech companies, PeopleSoft, etc. Back in the day, what happened is every time I did a launch, the messaging always sucks. I quickly pivoted and just got really good at messaging. That was a craft, and I built a craft out of doing positioning. I haven't had a real job in a long time, and that's really how I got into what I do. I call it a craft, the craft of positioning, and there's some very specialized expertise.

**Ray Rike** (3:20)
Well, let me double-click on that a little bit, because you would think the experts on their solution, their target market, their value proposition, would be internal to an organization. What do you as an outside consultant add to that process?

**Bob Wright** (3:35)
I get that asked a lot by CEOs. Hey, I just hired this very, very expensive CMO in this there job. First thing I always say is, well, you can hire the very best CMOs, but no CMO you can hire has ever done positioning 400 times. If you need the absolute best possible, if you're a CMO, you might have done maybe once or twice a year, maybe, so nobody's done it 400 times. Position is really, really important. Why not get specialized expertise to do it? Secondly, the role of the CMO is so huge right now. You can't be deep experts in everything. Again, positioning being a very specialized expertise. But I think the real value is a process. We take companies through a process. I always say the CEO, this is your initiative. It's run by marketing, but it's a CEO initiative. You're taking your company through a positioning process. What happens is if you're working for a company for a while, after a while, you just can't see it anymore because you're too close to it. We give an outside perspective and a fresh perspective. If you're looking to wake up the market with a fresh viewpoint, some new language, and a new way of looking at it, that's very, very hard to do inside. The second reason you hire somebody from the outside is you got to get it done. If you try to do this internally, they'll drag on and on and on. We run this process through the company, get it done in 6 to 8 weeks, so there's a speed question with it too. But I think fundamentally, what most companies come to us is because what they want to do is they want to run a cross-company process or initiative, and they want to get a fresh thinking, a fresh viewpoint. And also have somebody from the outside call them on their BS. That doesn't make any sense or this. And drive alignment across the company around a singular positioning. And a lot of times, driving alignment is very difficult to do internally, if you're an internal member of the executive team.