When your ICP is wrong and nobody's said it out loud, with Chisom Anaesiuba

Chisom Anesiuba: Foreign.

Nitin Karthik: Hey there. Welcome to product Marketing Tales from the front lines. I'm your host, Nitin Karthik. As the author of the bestselling book Product Marketing Wisdom, I've always found that real world case studies are the true litmus test for the effectiveness of any product marketing strategy. And that is why on this show we dive into the minds of industry titans as well as rising stars, unpacking their expertise in action packed episodes that showcase the power of product marketing through real world case studies. And today my friends, we are joined by product marketing maestro Chisom Anesiuba. Jisom um is a, ah, product marketing manager and currently a uh, product marketing alliance ambassador based in Lagos, Nigeria. With over 5 years of experience turning customer insights into shop positioning, messaging and go to market strategies. She has led product and feature launches, shaped ICP discovery enabled sales and customer success teams and improved onboarding by simplifying API documentation. Her career spans Golemon, Indesina, Hashem Limited and Microsoft with work across products including Microsoft Teams, OneDrive for Business Havas Icare v login, decide and originate. Passionate about helping marketers succeed, Chisom is also a founder of Juicebox, a side project focused on practical marketing tools and processes for modern growth teams today. And with that ladies and gentlemen, let's welcome Chisom Anesioba. Chisom, welcome to the show.

Chisom Anesiuba: Thank you. It's great to be here. Hi Nitim.

Nitin Karthik: Excellent. All right, I'm excited. Chisom. So today we're going to take a situation from your experience and we're going to break it down with the ABC framework. So we're going to talk about the antecedents, the prior challenges, what we'll talk about the behaviors, the actions you took and we'll talk about the conclusion, how things played out. So with that, jisoom, pick a situation from your experience and tell us what were the antecedents, what were the prior challenges?

Chisom Anesiuba: So one situation I recall from my, one of my past experiences was just having to solve for just alignments, um, between like the top level executives and just like the team. Right. Uh, so the biggest thing for any business is consistent growth and revenue. So for a startup it's literally like the lifeline. And what happened was that um, for the company I was at the sales team spent a lot of time just focusing on acquiring leads for the specifically SMEs. So a lot of like the SME segment. So we had the SME segments and the enterprise businesses. But what we realized was that what mattered to the company, I mean was like the volumes The SME segment wasn't bringing adequate, um, volumes for the business. And the real question was how do we ensure that the company like gets weddings? Because we're all like working towards like the same goal, right? On the marketing side, on the sales side, on the, I mean as a pmm, I was supporting like the sales team with like, I mean sales and even so that's emails for like the different stages, cold outreaches via LinkedIn and even down to like prospecting using clean, um, but all of those efforts were not specifically like translating to like the volumes that the business wanted. And he saw me for that. I think the. I had come to like knowledge around the time of like icps and that was still like. So I did a course with like, um, James Damon Pipe and Alicia Carney and that's led me to like discover like icps. And I realized that, I mean when I asked the big question of like, do we actually like know our ICPs? Interestingly, there wasn't like, we didn't have Mars, right? And we're kind of just like walking blind. And because we. The idea was that the product was a good fit for SMEs, um, and enterprise businesses. So I took up that discovery work of ICP discovery along with like our positioning and messaging. So I took up that, that bit of work and I was able to just figure out like, I mean I worked with data teams to get like all the data to find like our best with customers, have conversations with them and yeah, in the long run just understand what was actually like who our best fit customers were. But what happened in between that was that there was like some level of like misalignment because the work ended up going overlooked. As a pmm, I'm um, just like summarizing marketing. It's pretty common for work to go overlooked and for PMs to just be doing like a lot of strategic work that is not recognized. So that was strategic work that for um, a startup it's like oh like I want the numbers. I can also see the product launches and the campaigns. But there wasn't any visibility into like the value of like icps. And that led me down a. Oh like it seems like the PMM thing is not being like delivering value to the company. Obviously that was like a huge blow and I needed to like solve for that. Right? So the behavior in this case and um, the way I tried to like solve for this because at the end of the day you want to like, for any company you're out here trying to like deliver Value. And I, I, I'm very like big on delivering value. So first of all it has like introspect to properly understand what's happening. In this case it's like does a gap. Right? And the gap was not as a result of the, I guess the founders not knowing the value. It was more like you have to teach them there is room for educating.

Nitin Karthik: Excellent chisom. So thank you so much for telling us about the antecedents. Uh, now chisom us about the behavior. So what were some of the actions that you took for the situation?

Chisom Anesiuba: Um, so yeah, um, so some of the actions I took because I was for the stage I was asked. So I first of had to do some introspection on what had been like shared, which was the alignment between what's the PMM team, that's the expectation of the PMM and what was being done, which was like more strategic work. Um, so what I got to understand was that it wasn't a, like yeah, it was just a knowledge gap that needed to be bridged in this case. Right. Um, ICP is um, not, I would say. I mean I had just come to the knowledge and I understood the value of it. So I now get to like pass on that knowledge, um, in a way that it was going to be seen as like valuable in the long run to the company. So that was like one of the things that I did, that level of introspection. And the next thing I did was to um, just ensure that there was more visibility in what like the PMM team was doing. So documentation, I did a lot of like documentation documenting initiatives, um, the ICP discovery, sharing that company wide, um, and even just um, I took on the work of, I mean the position and messaging bit as well. So trying to understand where we're at for that bit. Um, that also included like having workshops with like the different teams within the company to understand how they currently saw our positioning and how they were like using like the message that they had, um, to I mean interact with customers and even try to like close deals as well. Um, so what happened was like from the workshops I was able to um, expose just like a number of things, um, within like the company. And in that exposure we're able to like refine the positioning together so it felt more like collaborative work and we could now have one unified messaging and like positioning that everybody was um, aligned on and working with, um, to close deals, acquire customers and even just like ensure the success of customers as well. Also those are some of like the behaviors. Um, and yeah, I think Those are like the specific behaviors I have to implement, like drive ups. Um, I love that.

Nitin Karthik: I love that.

Chisom Anesiuba: Yeah.

Nitin Karthik: So now, next, now you've told us about the behaviors. Now the final thing. Now we're all in suspense. Chisom, tell us about the conclusion. Bring it home. How did things work out in your situation?

Chisom Anesiuba: In my situation, I believe so there was now in general, there was more alignment. Right? There was like alignments in what's the understanding of what the PMM as a. What I was doing as a pmm, um, and how it was valuable. Um, so again, unified messaging, which I kind of just like touched on, um, and like positioning as well. And the other thing was now that we now identified like the ideal customer profile to pursue and focus on, which was leaving out like the small medium, the SMEs, and focusing on like the enterprise segment, because those were the ones beginning the volumes and those were the ones that we did like, specifically like focus on and target so continuously. Um, so, yeah, that ended up like being like the main focus for the business as the enterprise, um, segments. So yeah. Ah, I love it.

Nitin Karthik: I love it. Wonderful. So look at that. You had a challenge, you took a set of behaviors and then now you told us about the conclusion. So thank you so much. I think the audience can learn a lot from your case study. So now, Chison M. If people wanted to learn more about you and what's next for you, where can they do that?

Chisom Anesiuba: Um, I think the perfect place is LinkedIn. Um, I share a lot of LinkedIn and I mean, you mentioned Juicebox. Um, Juicebox is my, maybe my side project. Um, and yeah, that's definitely something that I'm pushing. So yeah, that's. Those are the two things I have ongoing.

Nitin Karthik: Excellent. Absolutely fabulous. So thank you, Chisom folks, there you have it. Please reach out to Chisom for more insights. And for even more insights, check out my book, Product marketing wisdom@productmarketingwisdom.com See you next time on Product Marketing Wise Pros.

Chisom Anesiuba: Thank. Ah, you. Thank you.