Work With Me
Let's figure out how to sell your innovation
Workshop
Are you having a hard time convincing your colleagues that you need to align around a single ICP? In this half day workshop, we’ll bring your key stakeholders into a room to surface each department’s POV. We’ll make room for everyone to disagree while still saving face and end the session with an eye toward building a single shared ICP everyone can get behind. .
Diagnose and Plan: ICP Audit
Do the problems and opportunities in front of you seem too vast to choose? Each as full of promise as the next, each as full of risk as the last? In this diagnostic audit we’ll evaluate your best innovation commercialization opportunities and make a plan to start evaluating with path is right for your team.
Land: Hourglass GTM Strategy Project
Do you want to know what your buyers say about you and your innovation when you’re not in the room? In this buying committee investigation I’ll study a successful deal so your team can turn the VOC data into a rich ICP and winning sales strategy.
Expand:
Things changing so quickly it’s hard to keep up? A clear ICP seems months away, but you still have lots of people you want to learn from? In this ad hoc research retainer I’ll interview a set number of buyers and users every month and report back all the learnings you won’t see in a dashboard and you won’t hear from folks afraid to hurt your feelings.
Align: ICP Radio
Does successful selling and delightful product delivery hinge on the nuances of your customers’ worlds? Is your rapid growth creating a gap in how new team members understand your customers and users? We’ll turn your existing interviews into training sessions for your team to build deep empathy for the full context your buyers and users face every day.
Launching
Launched a fintech product from 0-1, turning it into a powerhouse sales enablement tool, and growing it to 9000+ users
Launched a business skills event series for creators of physical goods to learn from experienced entrepreneurs to bring their events to market
Launched a community art event series meetups for adults to create and commune together
Growing
Identified the positioning strategy that led to 10X growth in new accounts for a collaboration software product in an emerging category
Increased conversion rates 136-300% for user groups 40,000+ through targeted research and messaging
Landed front-page media coverage in the Wall Street Journal and defining launch narratives to capture industry media attention
Drove 40%+ increase in funnel metric by repositioning sales messaging
Leading
Led a team of 10 through major pivot to launch a new product
Training entry-level team members to become high-performing ICs capable of executing conversion copywriting, user researcher, and experience design projects without supervision in under 9 months
Mobilized voice-of-customer programs at 6 organizations to enable aligned decision-making around customer wants and needs
Coached 100 team leaders on how to mobilize qualitative research and build research repositories at their organization
Aligned organizations of 100+ team members around a single ICP through an interactive training that used real voice of customer data
Advocate for customer-centric innovation at conferences, accelerators, and universities on how to tell stories that turn more strangers into raving fans
Learning
Learned conversion copywriting through study under Joanna Wiebe and Copyhackers
Cultivated technical fluency in an informal apprenticeship under a VP/Principal-level engineer, including prototyping an AI data normalization product, deploying code to production, and designing schemas
And as great as numbers are, the outcomes I'm most excited about are how I've helped the people I've worked with.Here's what some of my most successful folks have said about the impact:"Before, I had heard the term Jobs to Be Done mentioned by Product Teams but not much more than that. Now I understand how to use VOC to drive our go-to-market strategy."— TJ McGinnity, VP Customer Operations, Libra Solutions
"We were able to reduce stress, to deliver something that supports the business and move faster than we've ever moved in the past. We're able to really cut to the bottom of arguments and have much more productive discussions where the foundation of the decision is not based on the personalities or titles of the people making those decisions. We're able to design experiences that delight the customer, enabling us to get the actual numbers that we want."— Jordan Skole, VP Product, Autobooks
"Seeing someone do the thing they're really good at is mesmerizing. Watching Alli Blum do a Jobs To Be Done interview live was like watching a magician do a magic show. I thought I knew how to do it until I saw her do it."— Ramli John, Founder, Product Leaders Lab, Delight Paths"
Alli is one of those rare people who adds value to a project just by being involved. She has a natural ability to listen, synthesize competing priorities, and figure out what actually matters most. Beyond her skills, Alli is just a great person to work with. She's collaborative, curious, low-ego, and the kind of teammate who makes everyone around her better."— Kristina Bierwagen, Director of Strategic Accounts, Autobooks
The Origin Story
Have you been cursed to see the future?
I learned about this phenomenon first hand in high school art class. For my senior project with one of my all-time favorite teachers, I had a grand vision to cover a wall of windows in beautiful colored bottles. When the morning sun rose it would shine through the bottles and illuminate the gallery in a dancing rainbow of blues and greens and browns and yellows.
My Art Teacher wasn't buying it, at least not at first. She asked me if I was sure about the placement and the sparseness, she invited me to consider other options. We had a strong relationship built on mutual respect so I listened to her suggestions and heard her guidance as wisdom.
But in my youthful confidence, I rejected just about everything suggestion she made and still did what I wanted to do. I collected the bottles, stripped them of their labels and cap rings, and arranged them on the windowsill.
Then one morning at the end of the trimester, on the first bright dawn after the bottles were in place, she saw the sun shine through the bottles. She saw the lights dancing across the foyer, lighting up the galleries across the hall.
Then she did the coolest thing a teacher has ever done, which was to say, "Alli I'm really sorry I didn't trust your vision, I see what you mean now, it's beautiful."
Why is it so hard to get others to see how your innovation will help them?
I’m so lucky to have had this experience so early on, to face rejection and a lukewarm reception for a bold vision, to have the opportunity to push on anyway and to see that the future I saw in my mind’s eye did in fact generate the awe I knew others would feel.I’m lucky because now, decades later I see a version of this story play out over and over.
A brilliant visionary like you sees a bold new future full of awe and wonder and solved problems and longer lifespans and deeper human connection.
But the people on your team squint and tilt their heads as they try to wrap their minds around it.
The prospects you sell to tell you they can see how it helps them but they decide not to buy this quarter.
If your vision is larger than you can build yourself, then you are unlikely to have the luxury of rejecting the advice from colleagues and pressing on. If your vision only succeeds if people decide to give you money in exchange for your vision, then you very likely want and need to know exactly what advice your customers have to help you sell more.
That leaves a question, I wonder if you’ve pondered it:
Which department is in charge of figuring out how to sell your innovation?
If you’re not exactly hearing “no that’s a terrible idea” and you’re also not exactly hearing “shut up and take my money,” you may wonder where in your org you need to make changes. Do you need marketing help? A better sales strategy? To build one or another missing features? What about someone in charge of “growth” ?
All of the above?
None of the above?
One of my first problem area specializations was in new user onboarding and activation. I loved how every part of the business collapsed into this moment. Sales, customer success, market, product, even engineering - every department played a role in turning that new user into an actively engaged paying customer.
But after a while I started to see a pattern. The problems we were solving weren’t so much departmental problems as business problems owned by a particular department. The product’s positioning was off, but marketing was the only one acting on new positioning strategies so positioning remained off. The people sales targeted were different from the people product built for, which meant the ICP was different depending on which team you talked to. So then it followed that the messaging strategies I would develop based on the voice of customer data I collected were highly tuned to one of those ICPs, one of those struggling moments, one of those positioning strategies.
Even if that hypothesis helped our numbers go up, it remained out of line with the rest of the business. And even if I could prove with data that the problem we ought to solve was different from the one we were solving, more often than not I found myself in the position of being the one who was not getting the founder’s vision.
I started to realize that the growth problems many companies experienced and attempted to solve within a department were in fact the symptoms of innovation commercialization strategies a few layers above — and stretching across departments. Even if we humans usually sit in one department, the work we need to do to turn innovations into businesses stretches across departmental barriers.
Innovation Commercialization is the cross-functional, multi-disciplinary, data- and vision-informed work of preparing a new innovation to Meet the Market
Innovation Commercialization work (IC for short) is positioning. It’s pricing strategy. It’s Ideal Customer Profile Development. It happens on UX, product, engineering, financial models, enterprise sales, and marketing teams.
But to be really successful the strategy is not defined within a department but across. One ICP for sales and another for marketing and a third for product turns us into walking-in-place Frankensteins. One positioning model (or no positioning model at all) for sales and another for engineering means the wrong things get built and the wrong people get pitched. An approach where the product remains fixed in place The more I learned about product, UX, engineering, financial models, and enterprise sales, the more I wondered if the real work of commercializing innovations was in how the work we do in each department collides.
I found my way to innovation commercialization work by realizing that most of the problems I was excited to solve (positioning, revenue models, product strategy) were 1-2 strategic levels up from the work I was doing years ago (onboarding strategy, activation metric growth).
To get:
Paying customers
Happy users
You need:
Web copy
Marketing content
Sales collateral
Sales pitch design
New user onboarding experience
Amazing UX
Internal Communications Strategy
External Strategic Communications and Narrative Development
But if you want those building blocks in place, you need
Team Aligned
ICP Defined
Positioning Model
Messaging Strategy
User Research
Market Research
Buyer Research
Pricing Model
Clear Direction
The pain we feel leading our new innovations shows up at the top of the pyramid. Sales are slow, customers are churning. Many of us know that we need a better version of something in the middle of the pyramid to turn those frowns upside down. And still more teams will see one or another department leader chip away at one of the projects in the bottom of the tier, filtered through what matters most to that department’s objectives.
That work is your innovation commercialization strategy.
And I want to help you with yours.