Product marketing can determine the success of a business.

Yet, it's difficult to measure or attribute product marketing's impact. That's because truly great product marketing operates in the strategic sphere, not caught up in tactics, and often has a macro effect on the business.

Positioning is the mechanism through which strategic product marketing makes its impact. It’s what drives success of the GTM approach, not the sales-led vs product-led debate that is popular today.

Let’s take a look at how positioning led to success in the survey wars between the sales-led Qualtrics and product-led SurveyMonkey.

SurveyMonkey positioned themselves as a survey tool–just another piece of tech that fulfilled a job.

Qualtrics on the other hand, positioned themselves on their impact and outcomes. This made it much easier to speak to executives that made the buying decisions, rather than the users who needed a survey tool.

Despite the differences between the GTM approaches, sales-led vs product-led, Qualtrics was able to leverage strong positioning and great product marketing to win the survey wars, securing a $17.6b valuation to SurveyMonkey’s $2.8b.

There’s much more to the story, and I highly recommend checking out Evan Armstrong’s article that inspired this post.