AMA: Asana Head of Solutions Marketing, Eric Bensley on Competitive Messaging

I think it's very helpful. For those reading this that haven't read Clayton Christensen's work, here's a good summary of the concept of "jobs to be done". When we create messaging, we need to be focused on what problem we're solving. I'll give you an example of when I worked on GoToMeeting. This was early days and not many people used online meetings, way before Zoom. If you think about what job GoToMeeting was solving, many thought the problem was better collaboration. You get screen sharing and video conferencing, that's better collaboration/communication right? Yes....and no. That's not the job people were hiring GoToMeeting to solve. People were hiring GoToMeeting to help them not travel as much. That's a much more specific job. Based on that, we created the marketing campaign with this line - "Do More. Travel Less." This was a highly successful campaign because it spoke to the job folks where trying to solve with GoToMeeting.

There's no perfect way to do this. People hate when I say this but when it comes to messaging, I'm much more into qualitative feedback vs. quantitative. If you similarly hate me, feel free to move on. If not, here are a few qualitative measures I use: * Can your sales team remember it and pitch it on calls? If you use call recording software with your team, take a listen. If your sales team is pitching it, it's working. If not, it's not. * Do a webinar or event and ask for feedback after. Incentivize response with free swag. Session scores call tell you a lot about how your messaging landed. * Is more work "falling out of it"? What I mean by this is whether other people are building on top of it. ARe they thinking about it could be used for their segment and iterating on it. The best messaging becomes an organic force at your company.

You HAVE to answer "why now" with every piece of messaging you create. This is a question I ask to draw this out with my team: why didn't our prospects need this last year and this year they must have it? It's always helpful to look at macro trends and themes in the broader world + economy. Generative AI is a great example from today's market. So many vendors are just saying Gen AI without addressing the "why?" Sure it's cool, but why do I need it? Are your prospects dealing with budget cuts and Gen AI helps them deliver the equivalent of one new hire? Does an LLM do something specific for the industry you're addressing? The biggest competitor to your product or service is almost always "do nothing". You have to create urgency or someone else will.

Call me old school but I think positioning statements do this VERY well. Here's an exercise I've used and seen success with in building alignment on the "Why" of a company or brand. 1. Create list of key stakeholders who have a say in your value prop (think like key sales leaders, product, marketing, etc) 2. Create a meeting for the entire group to get together and work through the value prop. 3. Assign homework in advance: everyone send you a completed version of the positioning statement for your company or product 4. Meet live to discuss the differences and align on each line of the positioning statement In my experience, the biggest challenging behind creating a value prop is not writing words...it's getting clarity around the problem you're solving, the market, the competitive landscape, etc. Our job in PMM is to elevate this conversations to drive clarity. I like positioning statements to do this quickly. If you're not super familiar with positioning statements, I really like April Dunford's book called Obviously Awesome.

Generally, this comes down to your company priorities. It is hard to do both well so here are a few questions you can ask to determine which approach is correct: * What percentage of your new revenue comes from SMB vs Enterprise? How are your sellers organized SMB vs. Enterprise? * What customer stories are more compelling to you target audience? * Where are your competitors focused and where is there whitespace? * Which target will help you get to your revenue goals faster? To make this decision, I would bring the answers to the above questions along with a recommendation to your key stakeholders.

With any emerging technology, I've found the best approach is to compare to the previous way of doing things. People digest a new way of doing something by comparing it to how they do it today. Think about a lot of the technologies we use today: Email = electronic mail, Software as a Service = Software that you don't run locally on your comuter, TV (tele-vision) = vision at a distance, etc. There's some real fear and trust issues with AI/ML. But there's also a lot of just fear of the unknown. Think about what AI/ML is doing for your customers and how they do that today. Make that comparison. Use metaphors/analogies to work harder for you. Make sure people know they have options to do as much or as little as they want with AI/ML.

The magic formula usually includes these 3 in my experience: -Product - they'll pull you to vision and differentiation -Sales - they'll pull you into the here and now of closing business today -Customers - they'll help you rationalize the product and sales feedback so you can meet somewhere in the middle;)

I'll give you a couple wins but want to focus more on why I see them as wins vs. the actual messaging. Here are two wins: -We created a messaging framework for SMBs to adopt CRM. It was simple. Find new leads. Win more deals. Keep customers happy. Abbreviated as Find. Win. Keep. It was a win because the sales team used it in conversation for years. When your sales team uses your messaging from memory, you got something special. -We created a campaign for GoToMeeting with the line - Do More. Travel Less. It spoke direclty to the pain point and was extremely clear. Short and sweet. Memorable and drove a lot of new customers into the business.

This is a fun one that I've spent many hours chatting about with folks. Positioning is more of a high level concept about where you fit into your target audiences head in a different way than anyone else, Messaging is more about how you say that position to the target audience. Let's take a made-up example: Let's say I market an organic dog food that has no processed ingredients and sustainable packaging. (there's an eating your own dogfood joke here but i digress) Positioning = The only dog food made of all organic ingredients and sustainable packaging. Messaging = Your best friend deserves only the best. All Organic. All Substainable.

I'd ask: What is you most significant marketing effort where you have to align on messaging and positioning? Is it your website? Is it sales kickoff? Is it a brand campaign? Look for the place where your most important stakeholders are organically engaging, whoever is most critical in this effort, should also own your messaging and positioning. It's very hard to create energy and momentum for messaging without a compelling event or tactic. Use that compelling event and date....and whoever is aligned to that compelling event.

The simplest here is if you're moving awareness, pipeline, close rates, revenue, etc. But I know that's not always immediately available. So I have a simpler answer. PITCH YOUR MESSAGING TO PEOPLE, IN PERSON. This might seem too basic but I've seen the success over and over. Pitch your messaging to customers, key stakeholders, your sales team, anyone that will listen. It's really easy to write bad messaging when you never see a human face react to it. Pitch it, iterate, pitch it, iterate, keep going! And messaging is never "done", embracing this concept is very liberating as a PMM;)

As a general best practice, I think messaging should live 6-12 months with minor updates and no major overhauls. The 6 month window is for macro changes that no one expected. This is for all of us who created messaging 6 months before ChatGPT launched. We all had to pivot to bring AI in and no one saw that massive shift happening. The 12 month window is to force us to make big changes every year to drive excitement from customers and our sales teams. We can't wait too long to update.

It should change when you position is significantly impacted by: -the market changes (ie new tech emerges - social, mobile, AI, etc) -your competition changes (ie your key competitor introduces low price offering) -the macro economy changes (ie recession, inflation) -your customer base changes (ie new target customer profile aligned with leadership) The way it should be addressed with stakeholders is they should be part of creating it. And if they can't prioritize being part of it, maybe it's not important enough to update it. I find significant company-wide efforts (kick off, campaign, event, etc) are the best forcing function. Messaging is almost impossible to update without a compelling event because you don't get the stakeholder enagement you need to make it great and amplify it.

There's no replacement for talking to humans. And the less technical the better. We can all sit in a room with people "in the know" and nod our heads as we look at messaging. But try explaining it in conversation so someone who's never heard of your category, that's a different story. Try explaining to your mom, partner, friend, kid, etc. Then ask them: -did that make sense? -how is our product different from others? -why do you think people are buying this? The more humans you get in front of, the better your messaging is going to be in the intuitive department.