AMA: Attentive VP, Product Marketing, Greg Gsell on Messaging

This is always hard and only gets harder as you move up in an organization. Ultimately, you need to figure out who is the main decision maker (is it the CEO, head of product, etc) and treat all other opinions as feedback that you may or may not incorporate. Listening to all stakeholders is key. You can also present out Option A, B, C and have a discussion and decision. You need to be upfront that an outcome is needed and be VERY clear on the question you are asking and need an answer on.

Testing it with peers, sales and customers. When you are spending a lot of time working on a message, you will end up being too close to it and you wont be able to see alternative point of views. You can do it two ways: 1. Give the pitch with no context and ask what the value props are afterwards 2. Tell them what you are trying to accomplish, give pitch and discuss how it hit or missed the mark.

The key to build messaging that scales is to spend extra time on the core messaging hierarchy at the beginning. Spend the extra time debating and socializing key concepts like: * Who is it for * What situation are they in? * Pain Points * Top level message * Supporting Messaging points * Customer Examples Once you have these nailed down, it becomes much easier to stick to a common narrative across all marketing assets and GTM training, deck, etc. However, sometimes launches come fast and you don't have enough time to build the full hierarchy out. In this case, it is critical to pick ONE asset that is the "main" asset everyone is following. I find the press release is generally best suited for this purpose due to its brief and direct nature.

Talk to your sales and CS people. The folks in your organization who are repeating the messaging to prospects/customers will have a lot of feedback right away. You can also use tools like Gong for this. We are setting up a Revenue Advisory Board who will help give feedback while we are developing the messaging then give feedback after using it in the wild

Overall, you should at least look at it annually. Based on the progress we have made, the market shifts, etc, is this still the best way to articulate the value? Is it still working with field? Sometimes you need to adjust messaging to get sellers excited to go pitch it again. You also need to evolve your messaging on a mature product as you go into new markets. A mature product probably started in a few key verticals but hopefully you figure out how to evolve into new verts. You will need to evolve the messaging to enter those markets.

It is a balance. At the core, you need to be bold and describe something new. You are doing something differently than the "old way" and you need to be assertive on why your way is best. You can allude to product they are familiar with as the "old way" to anchor the story. For example: Here is big problem Here is how people were solving it for a long time Here is how the problem evolved or how the old solution was bad Here is my new awesome solution.

An old boss used to say "don't let the product get in the way of a good story". In order to stay head of your competitors, you will likely need to future sell. It is important to be aligned with the product team on WHY they are building the product, jobs to be done, etc and articulate that north star in your marketing. The amount of detail revealed is generally correlated to the confidence in delivering the product as described. For example, for an alpha product (we aren't sure this is going to work as it exists today), you should tell a higher level story about the market shifting and how you will solve that problem. For a beta problem (we will ship it but still ironing out some kinks), you can be much more specific about the differentiators and customer testimonials.