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Myk Pono Follow
Entrepreneur | Marketing & Product Growth | newsletter: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/myxys
Dec 14 37 min read
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Table of Contents:
PART 1: Why care about strategic messaging and positioning
PART 2: Is your messaging eective?
PART 3: What is strategic messaging?
PART 4: What is positioning?
PART 5: How to design strategic messaging
PART 6: How to implement new messaging in organizations
Summary
. . .
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formed inaccurately?
Companies with great sales organizations all have clear sales
playbooks. Sales playbooks describe in detail such things as sales
pitches, competitive landscapes and how to address dierentiation
questions, target customer profiles, typical product oerings and
descriptions, and customer success stories. Strategic messaging
impacts every single weapon in your sales teams arsenal.
Coherent and consistent communications in the sales organization
depends on the eectiveness of your strategic messaging.
Marketing
The goal of marketing is to control perception and to change
behavior. This is a simple and accurate definition of marketing. All
marketing activities and every aspect of marketing falls under the
goals of controlling perception, changing behavior, or both. Try to
think of a marketing activity that doesnt fit this goal. And ask
yourself: can you truly change someones behavior without changing
their perception?
Here are a couple of examples. Awareness content enlightens
prospects and customers on industry trends and important issues. The
goal is to control the perception of what your target audience should
pay attention to. Running paid acquisition campaigns initiate an
action by a prospect which leads to conversionbehavioral change.
Buying and using a product requires a change in behavior.
Strategic messaging is how companies control perception in the
marketplace. It is the responsibility of the marketing team to ensure
that the message a company uses is consistent across all marketing
channels as well as across all assets and communications.
Recruiting
Recruiting is about selling your vision and your values as an
organization. The founders and CEO should never stop recruiting, and
need to dedicate a significant portion of their time to their recruiting
eorts. Recruiting is nothing more than selling your company to a
prospect. Strategic messaging will help you organize your vision and
your values so you have a simple message and story that sparks
interest in those who share your values and who are inspired by your
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vision.
It is hard to imagine anything that has more impact on your
organization than messaging, and how you communicate internally
with your team, externally with the marketplace and your target
audience. We have only discussed a few critical examples, but this list
can be expanded. Now, how do we know if our current messaging is
eective or needs a revamp?
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This quick, 20-minute exercise will help you understand how your
own team talks about your company and product. Get all your sales
reps, marketing, and product people (ideally, encourage all of your
organization participate) in one conference room, and ask them to
write answers to the following questions:
1 sentence company pitch (What we do?)
1 sentence problem pitch (What problem are we solving?)
1 sentence competitive pitch (How are we dierent from our
competitors?)
13 bullet points of values we provide for customers (Why should
customers should buy from us?)
These are very basic questions that everyone in your organization
should know the answers to. To make it even more interesting, you
can also ask your team about the company visionWhy we do what
we do?
This exercise shouldnt take more than 20 minutes. If the answers you
receive from the internal survey are fairly consistent, the next step
will be to talk to your customers. The problem is that you might have
a very consistent, but still ineective message. Your message might be
consistent and still not resonate with your customers. This is why the
next step is to understand the value and utility of your product by
interviewing your current customers.
The answers you receive in the internal survey from dierent teams
and even from members of the same team are often so dierent it will
convince your organization to take messaging seriously.
When conducting one-on-one interviews with salespeople at one
company, I was shocked at how dierent the product pitch and
company description was from one interview to another. I interviewed
one sales rep and then heard a polar opposite pitch from the next
sales rep. In this extreme case, almost every sales rep had their own
sales decks. I then shadowed their live sales calls with customers to
compare what they said during interviews and how they presented to
prospects. Some sales pitches were so far apart that if you didnt know
the company name, you would think the pitches were for dierent
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products.
But lets imagine your internal message is reasonably consistent, then
the next step in evaluation is to interview a few customers and
compare how they perceive your product and your company.
Remember, strategic messaging and positioning is all about the
perception in your customers mind. So your messaging could be
simple and consistent but still doesnt match the perception in the
mind of a customer.
External Evaluation
External evaluation of your strategic messaging can be done in two
ways: 1) customer interviews; 2) with a survey. Surveys are quicker
and easier, but interviews are more valuable. If your internal
evaluation was enough to convince your team to review your
messaging, you probably dont need to do an external evaluation.
You will talk to your customers and prospects when you start
designing your new messaging. It would be very inecient to
interview your customers once for evaluation and again when you are
designing the new messaging.
To understand how customers perceive your product, ask questions
like these:
Why did you buy our product?
What problems were you looking to solve?
How do you use our product?
What do you like most about our product? What do you like
least?
During interviews, the customer may respond that he/she likes or
dislikes the product because of one feature it has. Always follow up
with Why? questions. It is never about the feature of the product, it
is about how this feature impacts their daily work and what value and
utility it provides.
Now compare what message your organization communicates and
how customers perceive your product. Most companies are very
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shocked to find out how far apart their internal messaging is from
their customer perception.
Even though its dicult to calculate the ROI of eective strategic
messaging, its important to realize that messaging has more of an
impact than almost anything else in business. In the following
sections, well learn more about strategic messaging and positioning.
Well also find out why they are essential to your business and how to
design your own strategic messaging.
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Positioning does not explain all the details of what a product does and
especially how. In fact, positioning is not even about your product, it
is about the perception of the prospect, customer, or investor
regarding your product. This is a critical point: the answers to a
positioning problem are outside of your product and even your
company; they are in your prospects mind. In other words, the way
you describe and position your product should be dictated by your
customers and prospects, and not by product features or internal
expertise.
Lets look back at our example. Investors are very familiar with Ubers
business model, so when a founder describes their venture as Uber
for laundry, it quickly resonates with investors. They make a clear
connection by applying Ubers business model to the applicable
business, in this case, to a laundry business. Uber is already
positioned in the mind of investors; therefore, connecting a new idea
to an existing perception allows the receiver of the message to
understand the new concept with limited use of mental energy.
Positioning is a simplified concept that translates an oversimplified
message to penetrate your prospects mind and build certain
perceptions about your product.
Positioning techniques are widely used in politics. In every race,
opponents take positions on the opposite side of the issue or on the
opposite side of the solution. Lets look at the example of pro-choice
vs. pro-life positions. Which position is better framed? Pro-choice
implies the opposite position of against choice or anti-choice. Pro-life
implies the opposite position of against life or anti-life. Since our
perception views life as more important and more valuable than
choice, we subconsciously perceive the pro-life position as the
stronger argument.
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Salesforcenot software!
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positioning.
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There are a few value messaging maps you can find online. There is
no right or wrong framework. You should aim to find the one that fits
your company purpose best or you can modify an existing one. I took
a few ideas and created my own version of a value messaging map
that fits SaaS companies with multiple target customers in the buying
process.
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This is what a final strategic messaging map looks like. The order in
which you fill it out is important, so we will come back to that later.
In the meantime, lets define each item in the strategic messaging
map (see table below):
5.2. Discovery
The goal of the discovery process is to create a detailed target
customer profile by collecting as much information about your current
customers and prospects as you can. Create a list of questions for each
person you are planning to interview to ensure quality feedback.
Interview sales reps
Pick the top 510 sales reps to interview. The number will depend on
the size of your organization. Sales reps will do almost anything to
close deals and great sales people are very aware of the problems that
prospects have.
Ask them to identify a target customer
Ask about the easiest deals theyve closed
Ask about the biggest deals theyve closed
Ask about the toughest deal theyve closed
Ask about a recently lost prospect and the reasons
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yet alone customers that have been around for a year?. What can a
small, early stage startup do to design strategic communication? The
answer to this is: focus on interviewing your prospects. Make a list of
companies and people who might be interested in your product or
idea. Do whatever it takes to interview them. Pay attention not only
to the challenges they describe but also the terms they use. Carefully
record your conversation. Position your conversations as discovery,
where you truly want to know about them and their challenges, and
not as sales pitches. Even if you have a product, refrain from sales
pitches it can turn o your interviewees. The goal is to learn about
your target customers and figure out strategic messaging and not to
sell them on your product at this time.
Also, keep your eyes and ears open; you might come across someone
in your target audience who can be a great mentor or advisor to your
team. You cant overestimate how helpful an advisor who fits your
target customer profile can be early on.
Summary:
Carrying out initial discovery interviews is probably the most
time-consuming step in creating a strategic messaging map, but it is
the most important one. Your strategic message needs to connect with
your target audience (prospects and customers) and there is no better
way to find out how to do this than to ask them directly. It is critical
to keep a detailed record of your interviews so you can identify
certain patterns. The next step after your interviews are completed is
to start filling out your target customer profile and the values that
correspond with each profile.
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random opinions but some of them might hold great insight. The
dicult part is that at the beginning you cant easily say which is
which. So record them and try to validate them in the next interview.
During your next interview present an idea and get feedback. To some
degree this is a listening exercise.
Example: during one interview I did with a sales rep, he shared that
most customers do not understand analytics when its used to
describe part of our product. This was an interesting insight because
analytics was an essential word in communication with customers.
The company never asked their prospects if they even understood
what analytics meant. So during my next interview with another
sales rep, I asked whether customers ever proactively asked him to
explain the analytics feature or whether the term analytics caused any
confusion. As it turns out, this was a critical insight and if we wanted
to use analytics in the strategic messaging, we had to frame what
we meant by it.
When multiple target customer personas are involved in the buying
process, you will need to include all of them in your strategic
messaging map. Complete your Target Customer Profile for each
persona involved in the buying process.
Target CustomerProfiles
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strategic messaging map, but you will certainly benefit from analyzing
and evaluating as many dierent perspectives as possible.
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ensure that every topic falls under a specific value and specific target
customer. It doesnt have to be perfect, some topics will overlap. But
this approach will keep your content strategy organized and your
team will be aware of how often each value is covered and what
target audience is involved. Before any content is written, look at your
table to see who you are writing for (audience) and what theme
(value) you are highlighting.
Economic buyers and decision makers have greater importance in the
buying process than influencers. Therefore, estimate the proportion of
content created for each persona. In the example in the table below, it
would be reasonable to decide that 50% of all content needs to target
the CMO/CDO (economic buyer), 30% of content is related to
Engineering, and 20% of content is created for IT Operations.
As for value categories, keep track of how often you create content for
each value. For example, the CMO persona has 3 value categories that
the company needs content for. Balance it out by using a content
breakdown ratio such as 3:2:1; for every 3 stories that are related to
revenue value you should create 2 stories that cover customer
satisfaction and one that is related to product roadmap value.
There is no exact science on how to break down your content
coverage for each buying persona and for each value category. Just
remember that more content should be targeted to the target
customer that has a higher influence on the buying decision. And
dont forget that a higher influence on the buying decision doesnt
always mean a higher position in the organization. At the same time,
some values are more important, so adjust your content marketing
strategy accordingly.
The table below shows how topics can be sorted based on audience
and value category.
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TIP: When you track your content performance, put it in the context of
target audiences and value categories. Over time, you will see that some
values perform better and you can optimize and adjust your content
topics and calendar accordingly.
Now that you have your strategic messaging map, you can better
adapt your content to match your target personas and their related
values. By doing this, your content will be more valuable to them, and
the decision makers will be able to more easily understand your
products value.
Every aspect of your internal and external communication should
change with your new strategic messaging. Weve only discussed a
couple of examples related to marketing and sales in this article, but
all communications including marketing campaigns, PR, and webinars
should go through the strategic messaging filter.
Summary
Hopefully, this article has helped you realize that strategic
messaging/communication has a tremendous impact on the success of
your company and product. The easiest way to check the health of
your messaging is to compare how dierent members of your team
describe your product and company.
Designing strategic messaging is definitely worth the eort, even
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Announcement
Im opening weekly oce hours (2 hours per week, 30min per call) for
any startup team (or individual) who wants to share its challenges,
generate ideas, and get advice on marketing and growth or just to
bounce ideas around. Startups and entrepreneurship are hard, maybe I
can help? If you are interested in connecting, send me an email telling me
who you are, what you are working on, and what problem or challenge
you are facing and want to discuss.
Acknowledgements
Gil Allouche, Founder and CEO of Metadata.io, for sharing his ideas
on strategic messaging when we first discussed this topic a couple of
years ago.
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References
Some ideas were taken from this list of resources and some original
ideas shared in the article were influenced by it.
Books:
Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries & Jack Trout
The Startup Owners Manual by Steve Blank & Bob Dorf
The Essential Drucker by Peter F. Drucker
Start With Why by Simon Sinek
Words Can Change Your Brain by Andrew Newberg & Mark R.
Waldman
Cracking the CODE by Thom Hartmann
Made to Stick by Chip Heath & Dan Heath
Story by Robert McKee
Brand Thinking by Debbie Millman
The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon & Brent Adamson
Ogilvy On Advertising by David Ogilvy
Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior
by Leonard Mlodinow
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Articles:
Product positioning in Five Easy Steps
Articulate to resonate: crafting and communicating messages that
matter
Slogans vs. Taglines: What Is Your Brands Battlecry? by Laura Ries.
Want a Better Pitch? Master the Move. by Andy Raskin
What I Learned Positioning 40 Companies by Andy Raskin
Your Company Messaging Isnt Working: 5 Guesses Why by Andy
Raskin
Positioning and Messaging Framework (slide 9)
Product positioning
Getting to a Messaging Framework and Value Prop by Tiany Spencer
Startup Best Practices 15Start With The Why by Tom Tunguz
. . .
. . .
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