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Positioning & Messaging: Untangled
Jay Nathan & Jeff Breunsbach
June 12, 2024
The Middle from GrowthCurve.io
Three ideas to level up your week.
Hey Reader,
Welcome to The Middle, your midweek rundown of the most interesting things we've read this week.
This weekend is my son's birthday (he turns 2), so I'm bracing for impact when little minions show up to run around my house. Wish me luck.
Let's get into it...
Jeffe lunch if you use the link above).
Cheers.
Jeff
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AI Gross Margin Challenges
A recent article on Mostly Metrics offers an insightful perspective on the financial implications of AI in business.
CJ Gustafson highlights the gross margin of several AI companies, including Anthropic:
As AI continues to integrate into various business operations, it's essential to understand its financial impact. High processing power needs mean increased operational costs, which can squeeze gross margins.
“Notably, Anthropic’s gross margin doesn’t reflect the server costs of training AI models, which Anthropic includes in its research and development expenses. These costs can add up to as much as $100 million per model, according to Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.”
His analysis focuses solely on AI-focused software companies, but his point applies to software companies looking to integrate AI into their current solutions.
For SaaS leaders, this means balancing innovation with cost management.
AI is a powerful tool, but its financial impact must be carefully managed to maintain profitability. This might include investing in more efficient algorithms, negotiating better rates with cloud service providers, or exploring alternative technologies that offer similar benefits at a lower cost.
AI is certainly here to stay, just be aware of how its going to impact the financials of your business.
Positioning & Messaging: Untangled
Robert Kaminski created this graphic to help marketers decipher the three hotly debated topics of positioning, messaging, and copywriting.
I don't have much to add (usually not a challenge for me), so here it is, full-sized for you to read through.
Prompt: Summarize customer onboarding responses for a SaaS business
How It Helps: Use ChatGPT to understand and analyze responses during the onboarding process. This helps tailor your approach and improve customer experience.
Example Prompt Structure:
We ask our new customers several key questions as they onboard. I'd like for you to summarize responses from our new customers who signed up and build them into cohorts with significant sizes.
Include answers to questions like 'Why did you sign up?', 'What is your role?' and 'How did you hear about us?'.
Provide insights into any common themes or significant data points that we should pursue. This could include workflows, content, and future analyses.
If your team is using AI in your day-to-day work, press reply with a specific tool or prompt that you use so we can highlight you.
Translating your culture
Nearly every place I've worked has built a culture around abstract absolute positives (integrity, respect, trust, and so on). This has always left me befuddled, thinking, "What company doesn't want its employees to act with [blank]?"
And then I read this sentence from Erin Meyer in a recent HBR article:
When you articulate your culture using absolute positives, it makes a statement, but it’s unlikely to drive the day-to-day decision-making (and therefore the behavior) of your workforce.
Translating the abstract absolute positive into day-to-day work never happens.
What does it really mean to act with integrity?
Day in and day out, what would that look like?
Well, Meyer shares a way to bring that to life...
The trick to making a desired culture come alive is to debate and articulate it using dilemmas.
If you identify the tough dilemmas your employees routinely face and clearly state how they should be resolved—“In this company, when we come across this dilemma, we turn left”—then your desired culture will take root and influence the behavior of the team.
When you take a word like integrity, it sounds like there is a right and wrong way. But we all know that businesses and people are far more nuanced than that.
When presented with a dilemma (situation), it becomes clear that there are multiple right choices. Each can be defended, rationalized, and even debated -- and that's the point: the way you build culture is, over time, through repetition.
Your leaders will be guided by their personal preferences unless the business culture can guide them.
 Jeff Breunsbach |  Jay Nathan |
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