E253 | Optimising Positioning, Messaging, and Buyer Enablement to Drive Customer Success with Jason Oakley

Today on the show we have Jason Oakley, the founder of Productive PMM and former Director of Product Marketing at Klue and Chili Piper.

In this episode, Jason shares his experience in building product marketing from the ground up, focusing on the critical areas of positioning, messaging, and buyer enablement.

We discussed how these elements play a crucial role in driving customer success and improving retention, along with practical strategies for implementation.

We wrapped up by discussing the role of product marketing in working with sales, customer success, and product teams to ensure a seamless customer experience from onboarding to retention.

‍Mentioned Resources

• Productive PMM
• UserEvidence
• Chili Piper

Churn FM is sponsored by Vitally, the all-in-one Customer Success Platform.

Course: How to find your Ideal Customer Profile 'ICP' in B2B SaaS

Transcript

[00:00:00] Andrew Michael: You get to a point where, say, your sales team is looking for quantifiable metrics of success that customers have had. And then you always end up being like, God, we have to start asking these questions when people first start using the product so that we'll have a delta that we can show later on. I think the fact that most companies, that is something that they always talk about they need to do more, just shows that when people onboard a customer, there's very little of a conversation around what is the outcome you're looking for? What are you at today? Where are you trying to get to?

[00:00:38] Andrew Michael: This is Churn.FM, the podcast for subscription economy pros. Each week we hear how the world's fastest growing companies are tackling churn and using retention to fuel their growth.

[00:00:50] VO: How do you build a habit forming product? We crossed over that magic threshold to negative churn. If you need to invest in customer success, it always comes down to retention and engagement. Completely bootstrapped, profitable and growing. 

[00:00:00] Andrew Michael: Strategies, tactics and ideas brought together to help your business thrive in the subscription economy. I'm your host, Andrew Michael, and here's today's episode. 

[00:01:14] Andrew Michael: Hey Jason, welcome to the show. 

[00:01:17] Jason Oakley: Hey Andrew, thanks for having me.

[00:001:18] Andrew Michael: It's great to have you. For the listeners, Jason is the founder of Productive PMM, helping startups and founding product marketing managers build product marketing from zero. Jason is also an advisor to UserEvidence and NAVC, and prior to Productive PMM, was a director of product marketing at both Clue and Chili Piper. So my first question for you, Jason, is what has been your biggest challenge since making the leap to start Productive PMM? 

[00:01:45] Jason Oakley: Oh, good question. Well, first off, thanks for having me. Love to come on and talk about churn, which is something that, you know, within product marketing, a lot of times you don't get to focus on it as much as you'd like or talk about it as much as you'd like. So it's cool to be on your show. So the toughest thing since making the transition to Productive PMM, I would say so Productive PMM, I'm a solopreneur do my own thing. I do a mix of things and that kind of gets me to my point of the problem, I talk about this a lot because I've worked mostly with founding PMMs and they're sitting in these companies, they're the first product marketer and they're kind of overwhelmed with requests and things that they could do. So prioritization becomes super important. 

[00:02:17] Jason Oakley: And you think that when, hey, when I leave now and I go out and I leave the kind of in-house world and I go out and do my own thing, I'll be the one who gets to decide and I'll keep everything. I'll always have a prioritized list and know exactly what I want to focus on. And I think now that I'm out and I decide exactly what I do. I think the biggest thing that's been the challenge is there are so many things I wanna do. So prioritization, focusing on the things that are gonna drive the most impact or help me grow my business, it is really hard to do. It's hard when you're inside a company, it's hard when you are on your own. And I think that is the biggest thing. And I'm sure maybe you feel the same way too. 

[00:03:04] Andrew Michael: Yeah, and absolutely, I think that is a big challenge as well because I think a lot of times... Especially as a solo founder, you're so vested in the problem and the space that you're working in, that it's very difficult to take an objective view as well and understand really what is most critical at any given time. And that's why I love like making sure I have a good network of like advisors and mentors that you can lean into it. You can just give them a sense of, okay, this is what I'm focused on. This is what I think is most important at this given time, because a lot of times they'll just like throw like a side ball at you and say, wait a second, like what you're working on is absolute crap and here's why, and this is what you should be focusing on. 

[00:03:41] Jason Oakley: And when you're on your own, no one's there to tell you that. 

[00:03:43] Andrew Michael: No one's..

[00:03:43] Jason Oakley: You're just like, oh, they're on my wife. My wife, she's sick of hearing me tell her about my business, you know? So yeah, having coaches, mentors, it's a really good point. Like without that, you really don't have a sounding board. 

[00:03:56] Andrew Michael: So you help sort of founding PMMs, set the function up from ground zero from a product marketing perspective. I think maybe let's dive into this a little bit before we dive into like the topic for today. But when you get started with companies like, and with individuals, where would you say is the first place startups should be thinking about from a product marketing perspective to get the function off the ground? 

[00:04:18] Jason Oakley: To get the function off the ground. I think, I think the first thing typically is positioning and messaging. So it's right. Who is our best fit customer? What is the problem we're solving? Why are we the best fit product to do it? And why are we different than the better, different, better than the competition. So I think positioning is a big thing because it's not just the message that you're putting out there, but it's also just being very clear on who you sell to, how you're different, right? And so it shapes a number of different things, not just your messaging, but the product and what you build. 

[00:04:49] Jason Oakley: So I think positioning and then turning that into messaging, your website, content that sales team might use, all of that. So I think without that, you really are kind of... You don't have much to build on. So I think for most startups, like that's where you see their product marketing teams first focus on is, is that. And then now another one that you see a lot of, and when I start to work with founding PMMs is bringing new features, products to market to like product launches and they're the kind of, a lot of times those are the two big things. 

[00:05:24] Andrew Michael: So yeah, those are sort of the two first areas that you see quite commonly. And I think a little bit about this project to show, but I think positioning is one of those things that probably has one of the biggest impacts on churner retention that's not that obvious from the surface level. And I think quite a lot of times, I think what you might hear in startups, where you say we pivoted could also just be like ground down to a position exercise and like just repositioning the same product or service to go after a different market or a different use case.

[00:05:55] Andrew Michael: And I think it's probably one of the most underutilized aspects as well. Like we spend so much time. Like over-engineering, like onboarding and feature adoption and these sorts of aspects when a lot of times just going back to drawing board and realizing, okay, like maybe we're not serving the right audience and we're not hitting them with the right messaging to begin with could save us a lot of the pain. And then a slight tweak in messaging can have this monumental impact so down the funnel as well. So...

[00:06:22] Jason Oakley: Yeah. It's kind of like, I find a lot of times what happens is when you get into conversations around retention and churn and all that. It's like product marketing is brought in then where it's like, hey, product marketing. We need things to help drive adoption or we need help. I've worked on, you know, presentations for the CS team to be able to present to a customer, to try to get them to stay with the company where after the fact, you're trying to help them understand the value of it and, or the potential that they might not have seen yet. It's like, that's way too late. And a lot of times it's because you're talking to the wrong person.

[00:06:58] Jason Oakley: It's not the company you should have sold to and so much of that happens. But also too, it's like when they came in and they bought the product or even when they're going through onboarding, it's like you are not setting them up for success with helping them understand what it is the product does, how they're going to get value from it, the different use cases for it, all of that. And you just try to come in at the end when it's way too late. At that point, they're gone.

[00:07:22] Jason Oakley: And so I think a lot with positioning, it's if you can go out and you know exactly the best fit customer to sell it to. It's like, they're the ones who are gonna come in and a lot of times they don't need as much onboarding. They don't need as much buyer enablement to help them get the most out of the product because they're just so motivated to use it.

[00:07:42] Andrew Michael: Let's double click on this area for today. I think it's quite a broad space to go into and let's just get started. Like I come to you, hey Jason, like we're in product at the moment. There's an issue I'm pulling in as the product marketer. Like where would you get started?

[00:07:57] Jason Oakley: So like you're on the product team. You said...

[00:08:00] Andrew Michael: Product team. We have an issue with channel retention and we need your help. Where do we get started? 

[00:08:04] Jason Oakley: Yeah. Great question. So one big thing with product marketing, obviously there's great product marketers are really tapped into the prospect and the customer and they do that through, you know, listening to sales calls, listening to it's like CS calls doing wind loss and in the case of churn. I think if you're seeing churn, a good place to start for a product marketer is to try to dive in and understand why. And so with win-loss today, there's this whole aspect of win-loss that isn't necessarily one in lost deals, it's churn. And so my time at Clue, for example, we worked a lot with DoubleCheck, and DoubleCheck is a win-loss company. All the win-loss companies out there do churn analysis too.

[00:08:48] Jason Oakley: And I think the beauty of that is, yeah, you were talking to these people that just recently stopped using your product left churned and you're trying to find out why. So I think before a product marketer tries to come in and fix something or anything like that, they should have first like diagnose it and really try to understand why are these people churning? Because a lot of times you'll come in and it'll just be too expensive. It didn't have the features they needed. Like you'll hear things from CS that a lot of times there's more to it.

[00:09:20] Jason Oakley: And also a lot of times customers aren't open to really sharing it with their CSM, the true reasons and stuff like that. So I think when lost, then house is a good place to start. And once you like once you have a sense of why, like, so it could be a number of reasons. But I think if you find out that people are churning because, you know, at the end of the day, what they were sold, like what we have in our marketing and what they saw when they came in, they really didn't match. Like their expectations didn't match the product that they ended up getting.

[00:09:50] Jason Oakley: Like you might find like the one of the most common ones is, you know, you got a champion who, who ate your company, who leaves and you have all these reasons, but you might find out that that company just wasn't the right fit for the product that you were actually selling. And I think in, when you find out something like that, that is when you have a positioning problem, or you have a problem where you know what your positioning is, but no one's following it. 

[00:10:12] Andrew Michael: Yeah. And you mentioned, so you would go to the wind loss analysis to sort of determine some of the reasons losing deals, but then also doing churn analysis to understand why people are churning to begin with. I think you mentioned something there in the beginning and I definitely agree with that, is that often at this stage, it's too late because you've already lost them and a lot of churn deflection, I think tactics start with people looking at how do we stop people from churning. 

[00:10:37] Andrew Michael: When actually it's more important that you follow further up the funnel and see, okay, do we have a positioning problem? Do we have an onboarding problem? Do have an activation, like where does the problem really lie? And then how can we start as early on as the funnel is possible? Because one, like we're getting these compounding impacts over time if we make an impact earlier on in the funnel. And two, the goal is to make people successful, not to avoid them churning. And I think when you focus on avoiding churn as opposed to like driving success, like you get the outcome you're trying to avoid, I think at the end of the day. 

[00:11:10] Jason Oakley: It's a great question. It's, it's funny, like every company that I've been at, when you get to the end, yeah, every company goes through this. You get to a point where, say, your sales team is looking for quantifiable metrics of success that customers have had. And then you always end up being like, God, we gotta start asking these questions when people first start using the product so that we'll have a delta that we can show later on. 

[00:11:32] Jason Oakley: I think the fact that most companies, that is something that they always talk about, they need to do more, just shows that when people onboard a customer, there's very little of a conversation around what is the outcome you're looking for? What are you at today? Where are you trying to get to? Because if that was a part of the conversation, you would get to a point with like doing the Delta and like having quantifiable metrics of how you impact your customers with your product. It'd be a lot easier to find. And so I think it's an interesting point is when you go through the onboarding process right after someone buys, that should be, because it's also the time when they're the most, I don't know, the most excited, like they wanna work with you.

[00:12:12] Jason Oakley: And I think a lot of times, onboarding is just too focused on reaching the end, like reaching the end of onboarding, doing all the sessions, getting the thing live. It's less about like truly understanding what their goals are and, and like making sure that all the right people are using the product. Because I think that's another big thing too, is when you're onboarding, and I think a lot of times where you might even be targeting the right companies. Like you might be bringing the right people onto your product, the right companies, and you've got a really motivated, bought-in champion. 

[00:12:47] Jason Oakley: But I think a lot of times what causes churn is you don't have everyone who needs to be bought in, bought in. And so I come from all companies that I've been at, the last three, like all the ones where I was the first product marketer there, they all had a product that we sold into marketing, but a huge user was sales teams. So a lot of times when you would see churn, it's because you might have a really motivated marketer, someone who's really bought into it. They understand the value, right? They get it, but you don't necessarily have the sales team bought in. 

[00:13:21] Jason Oakley: Say if this marketer is trying to push a product on sales, get them to use it, unless the value of your product is immediately clear to those people and it's something that they also want, you're going to have trouble with adoption, regardless how motivated your champion might be.

[00:13:39] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I think we spend a lot of time as well from that acquisition perspective as all like trying, understanding who the buyer person is and then really focused trying to acquire them, as you say. But in a lot of cases, the buyer person is not always going to be the active user persona within an account. And in a lot of times, like you mentioned, like roles being the device there in other areas, it's leadership as well. So in one case you might have like an exec who purchased the product platform and they're mostly interested in the reporting capabilities. But then at the end of the day, if we think about CRM sort of thing, the person who's in the day-to-day tool is the one who really needs to be adopting it for the final outcome to be there from the person who purchased it.

[00:14:20] Andrew Michael: So, Jason, how do you sort of tackle this in those cases, the three companies you started at? Obviously the priority in the beginning, I think for every marketing team is like, let's make sure we're acquiring customers and we're speaking to them and we know who the buyer is. But ultimately, if they're not the person who's most active in using the product and we need to get them to being adopted, like what do you do in these cases as a product marketer and how do you advocate for this content, first of all? And then second, like, how do you go about prioritizing it? 

[00:14:47] Jason Oakley: Yeah. Well, I think like we, we had talked about when law, when loss, like doing the analysis to understand why you're churning. And it might be, if you find for example, that it's because a big part, a big user of your product is just, you can't engage them. For some reason, the people who are churning, user X just never adopts the product. I think one is you need to make sure that as a product marketing team, you are doing more to actually help sell the value and to get that user interested in actually using the product. So it could be working with the post-sale, that aspect of the sales cycle, post-sale, onboarding, all of that in terms of how we, a lot of it comes down to buyer enablement.

[00:15:35] Jason Oakley: So what kind of, how can we through better buyer enablement, targeted specifically at those salespeople, get them more motivated, get them engaged in the product, help them understand the value of it and why they should use it. And a lot of times too, it's, it's not that you need to necessarily do it on your own, but a lot of times you're enabling your champion, the marketer in this case, who is the one who might be the admin in the product, you're helping them create awareness or drive engagement with their sales team. 

[00:16:05] Jason Oakley: And so we've tried different things. One thing, for example, that we found when I was at Chili Piper, we actually found that when we would sell into marketers, so even pre-sale, like you're selling into a marketer, those sales, we would have larger deals, more successful deals, I think our win rate even went up, when we would also include the SDR team as part of the evaluation. So it would take longer because it's more people, the sales cycle's a little bit more complex. But when you finally do actually sell those deals, everyone's bought in. 

[00:16:38] Jason Oakley: And it just makes for a much more successful implementation and stickier product and all that. So I think that if you can help your sales and marketing team understand who the most important personas are that you actually need to get to the table and convince, then that's where you could see that come to, like, come to like take shape where you're actually saying, okay, we need to bring these people into the deal. You actually need to make sure you're involving this persona as well. 

[00:17:04] Jason Oakley: Or in some cases too, like you see this a lot too now where budgets are becoming tighter and maybe budgets are being cut in marketing teams. But if you know that your product is really valued by sales teams and you can help the marketing team understand that like say for example, at Clue, like we started to realize, hey, we should also be targeting sales teams, targeting sales leaders, CROs, things like that, not just focusing on CI teams and marketers and being like, hey, there are other people that care about this product. 

[00:17:35] Jason Oakley: And if you can get a CRO bot into this and get them to understand why they should be enabling their sales team with competitive content, then one, it's much more easier deal to close, but it's also they'll be bought in from day one and much more likely to adopt the product.

[00:17:51] Andrew Michael: A lot of times they're probably the final decision-maker and a lot easier to get approval on something like that. So buy enablement is like a key aspect is what you're saying as well then. And just for a little bit of context, like the tools you mentioned, Chili Piper, it enables end users to be able to book calls directly with sales reps and they have similar to like maybe a Calendly as well, where you have a widget you can put on your site and then people can book meetings. 

[00:18:17] Andrew Michael: Obviously there's quite a lot more to it, but you can see how from a marketing perspective, it's an important tool for conversion rate optimization and closing deals. So being able to embed that into your site and to be able to close deals quicker, there's motivation there from the marketing team to onboard a tool like this. But then ultimately, it's really like the sales team who's going in and managing those bookings and coordinating.

[00:18:40] Andrew Michael: So what you're saying in this case, a lot of times the marketing positioning will speak to marketers to begin with, but really you need to be getting those STRs and the sales teams to the calls through the sales cycle and giving like content to enable the marketers to potentially onboard their sales team throughout this process. So...

[00:19:00] Jason Oakley: Totally. Yeah. 

[00:19:00] Andrew Michael: How do you go about doing that? What are some of the specific things you're working with on in your marketing team to enable this? 

[00:19:06] Jason Oakley: So for one, a lot of times, you start with your website. So for example, a lot of people will have say like, you still might want to have your homepage focused on marketers, but you want have subpages on your website that are focused on different personas. So that's like a very tactical thing where it's on your website. You need to make sure that if someone of that persona, if it's someone who's a CRO, for example, comes to your site, they're able to find the messaging that's right for them. 

[00:19:38] Jason Oakley: And you could even go to an extent of I've seen something recently, like I was on a site it was for a product called InShift. And they actually had when you land on their homepage, they had a welcome page. And it asked you a series of two questions, and it's allowed you to self-identify your persona, and then it put you on a homepage, essentially, that was targeted specifically to you. I think it's a cool example. A lot of people are doing it with personalization on your site and things like that. 

[00:20:05] Jason Oakley: But I think for one, it is if someone comes to your site, if they're a marketer, they should be able to see a page that is tailored to them, help them understand why they should care as a marketer. You should also have one targeted at sales.

[00:20:19] Andrew Michael: I love that as part of the website experience or something like I've always wanted to execute and doing is it like asking a couple of questions at the start and then the whole experience gets tailored from the website perspective. Like we do it in product, but not really from a marketing perspective on websites. So definitely take a look at that example.

[00:20:37] Jason Oakley: Yeah, it's really cool. Like there's, I think that a lot of times people are afraid of friction. It was interesting. Like I even add, I talked to that founder. So I included in my newsletter and then I sent him, or actually he sent me a message because he was like, I noticed we were getting signups and he was like, thanks for including us. And I was like, just curious, like how, what was your thinking around that approach and how have you been finding it? And he was like, I'm sure we are getting some drop-off. They're pre-launched, so they're still like generating a wait list and early access and stuff. 

[00:21:08] Jason Oakley: But he's like, I'd much rather have people leave because of a bit of friction than us get the wrong people. So he's like, even having a couple of the… A couple of extra steps is enough friction so that only the people who make it through are the ones who really have a problem. And I thought that was pretty interesting where a lot of people adding extra fields to a forum, doing this and that, they're afraid because it's gonna hurt conversion rate optimization. But at the end of the day, you're getting people who actually want your product that are willing to go through a few extra steps. And so yeah, it was an interesting approach. 

[00:21:38] Andrew Michael: Yeah, I think on that as well, it's just something that like people always talk about, you need to get them through as fast as possible and try and remove friction. And I think more and more, speaking to different guests, there's such a thing as positive friction. And also, as you mentioned earlier as well, the most attention you're ever going to get from your users is the time when they sign up, because they're most excited about your product then. So if you're not taking advantage of those moments, it's almost like a huge lost opportunity to be able to learn about them and to be able to put them through. So I think it's super interesting what they've done here at InShift as well, dive into it and maybe explore it a little bit more. 

[00:22:19] Jason Oakley: Yeah, that's cool. I think another thing too is as product marketers, for example, if you're a sales led organization and you have a, even if you're not sales led, right? Like buyer enablement content, if you're a sales led organization, it is sales enablement content, but arming your sales team with messaging that they can use, with like helping them create like if they're doing cold outbound, like making sure they're targeting not just the one persona. Like if there's multiple that they should be targeting, like making sure they have the messaging they need for that, making sure they have the content that they need. 

[00:22:53] Jason Oakley: It can't be a one size fits all piece of collateral or a one size fits all presentation or pitch that they might give. It has to be, you need to give them the content so that they can be able to have the right messaging and content for whoever they're talking to. And so I think that some of the initial things you can do there, yeah, is making sure that the messaging is right on your website, that you're targeting the different personas that you need to, making sure that your sales team, for example, has the content that they need, depending on who they're talking to. 

[00:23:27] Jason Oakley: And in the past too, like working with your demand gen team or your events team and just making sure that, one, they also have the right messaging, but two, they understand who those personas are. So if you're doing paid campaigns, or if you're trying to do sponsorships of events or anything like that, you're making sure that you're reaching, like a perfect example is that like Clue and Chili Piper, we might've been partnering with communities focused at on marketers, but also communities that were focused on sales reps. 

[00:23:56] Andrew Michael: And having that context then make sure that you're getting an even distribution and reaching the right audience. The other aspect as well is that, so we making sure as well, as you mentioned on the website, you're speaking to marketers say predominantly they might be the primary persona, but then you have the actual users being salespeople. So you're producing collateral and landing pages and so forth to speak to them. You're enabling sales teams as well with specific use cases and content tailored to the audiences. Going a little bit further down the funnel, like, are you working with customer success at all or product itself with in-app content or education material? 

[00:24:33] Jason Oakley: Yeah. I think the... So a lot of product marketers these days are working on things like interactive demos, or you take it right within the product and working on using something like app queues or something like that to create or chameleon to create product tours. I'm seeing a lot of interesting things now with interactive demos, where again, people are creating hubs or demo centers, where it is depending on the persona you are, or depending on even the problem you have or the industry you're in, like getting very specific and being able to kind of choose which of those demos you need to take based on who you are and the problem you're trying to solve. 

[00:25:10] Jason Oakley: So I think things like that, I think more product marketers are starting to use those. And I'm a big fan of things like interactive demos and just like anything that allows someone to get behind the wheel before they actually use your product. Because I think that's another thing too is, especially if you're even if you're a product led company, and people can sign up and use your product for free, there's still sometimes an investment they need to make. And it could be good friction to your point, but it also could be that there's a time investment that they need to take before they can actually get to that aha moment or see the value that they could get from it. 

[00:25:45] Jason Oakley: But if something like an interactive demo or something that's more interactive allows them to do that, get behind the wheel and see it before they have to invest too much time. So again, they're just that much more... have that much more intent, they're more bought in before they actually start using it, and they're more motivated to get to that end state that they had seen. So I think that things like interactive demos, when you're thinking still, you know, pre-sale potentially, but I've worked a lot with CS in the past, and it could be on things like really helping them understand the different use cases of the product. 

[00:26:19] Jason Oakley: So I think once someone buys the product, implementation, like getting things set up is one thing. Helping them understand all the different ways that they could use it, helping them, you know, and you don't want to overwhelm them at first, but just giving them material they need to even execute on the first use case that they had in mind, so that they can see success there quickly and making that as easy as possible. These things don't all have to be done by product marketing. 

[00:26:46] Jason Oakley: I don't want to paint product marketing as the one team that needs to do all of this, but... and a lot of times CS might not be aware of all the different use cases of the product, or if it's this persona, here are the different ways that they can use it. Or here's how to explain the, like why they should use it for these use cases. And I think that having that messaging, but then also creating the content that they can use to just help make that easier for them, I think is, is another thing that product marketing can, can help this, the success team get to.

[00:27:17] Andrew Michael: Yeah, a lot of times. I think expanding use cases is a great way to increase engagement as well, which ultimately increases retention. So as you mentioned, like in one aspect, like providing the material to get started with the first use case, but then a great way to increase usage and frequency usage is expanding use cases and having allowing CS to have access to different use cases for their customers and being able to push the right ones in with the right time is definitely a big play.

[00:27:44] Andrew Michael: The other one as well, you mentioned like interactive demos as well. I think it's, there's a huge benefit in doing them. And one of the other reasons I think is a lot of times like in special B2B, there's restrictions on what you can and can't sign up for and she's using company email addresses. So just having a demo, we previously had Caroline Clark from Arcade who provide these interactive demos where you can literally go in and create one in a matter of seconds. 

[00:28:10] Andrew Michael: And yeah, I think they're an excellent tool to be able to reduce friction at the same time, like I just pull the curtains back and allow users to experience the product before diving straight in. So, I see we're running up on time though, Jason. So making sure I ask a question and ask every guest. What's one thing that you know today about churn and retention that you wish you knew when you got started with your career? 

[00:28:32] Jason Oakley: Oh, wow. That is a good question. I think it's a lot of what we were talking about today. I think it's like one thing that you learned is that when you have to get to a retention call or whatever you want to call it, it is too late. And that as a product marketing team, the more you can think about product marketing, sales, like even the more that these teams can think about, how can I also be thinking about retention and making sure that we are keeping these customers when I'm trying to sell this current customer right now or I'm trying to market? 

[00:29:05] Jason Oakley: And how can we be clear and not just focus on closing deals, but also making sure we're closing the right deals. Yeah. I think if someone came back, like when I just started in SaaS, if someone came to me and was like, listen, when it's too late, when you have to have a, kind of a win back call or a churn prevention call, focus that time and energy on making sure that you're doing things up front so that they don't, so fewer of them happen. 

[00:29:29] Andrew Michael: Yeah, absolutely. Well, before we wrap up today, is there any sort of final thoughts you want to leave the listeners with? Anything you'd like to share with them or how they can keep up to speed with the work before rip up? 

[00:29:39] Jason Oakley: Sure. Yeah. I would just say for any product marketer watching this, it's know that retention is part of your job, right? I think it's a positioning, messaging, buyer enablement, all of that. Make sure that, you know, those are things that are helping you impact retention. So know that that's also part of your job description. Yeah. If anyone's trying to connect with me, I'm on LinkedIn. You know, you should, should be able to find me there. And I have a newsletter, it's called PMM files. So if you're looking for inspiration, product marketing examples, I share them every week. 

[00:30:11] Andrew Michael: Amazing. For the listeners, we'll make sure to leave everything we discussed today in the show notes so you can pick that up there. Jason, thank you so much for joining today. I wish you best of luck going forward. 

[00:30:20] Jason Oakley: Thanks, Andrew. Cheers.

[00:30:25] Andrew Michael: And that's a wrap for the show today with me, Andrew Michael. I really hope you enjoyed it and you were able to pull out something valuable for your business. To keep up to date with churn.fm and be notified about new episodes, blog posts and more, subscribe to our mailing list by visiting churn.fm. Also don't forget to subscribe to our show on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

[00:30:51] Andrew Michael: If you have any feedback, good or bad, I would love to hear from you. And you can provide your blunt, direct feedback by sending it to Andrew at churn.fm. Lastly, but most importantly, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it and leave a review as it really helps get the word out and grow the community. Thanks again for listening. See you again next week.