AMA: Twilio Director of Product Marketing, Lindsey Weinig on Messaging

I find the jobs to be done framework very useful in order to keep a customer-first mindset. Truly understanding your target audience's needs serves a product marketer targeting any segment or industry. Ultimately all buyers are people whether they're purchasing as a consumer or as a representative of their employer. 

Building strong messaging, aligned across executives and stakeholders can be done using 3 key tactics. First, include and cite trusted datapoints, both qualitative and quantitative, from third party sources as well as directly from your target audience/customers. Second, enlist input from trusted experts in your field. Analyst briefings have been enlightening in my experience and documenting their feedback as a source helps reinforce the market perspective. And finally, face the feedback from key executives and stakeholders head-on. I approach this step formally, by sharing a document citing all of the sources above, with review deadlines and comment access. This allows for conflicting feedback from key execs and stakeholders to become clear early. If necessary, I schedule a meeting to review the comments, specifically the conflicts and settle them live. This way you have input, alignment, and buy-in (or at a minimum disagree + commit) from the teams you need to have onboard to activate the messaging in the market.

If you can only have one I would defer to the priorities of the business. Are you investing more in enterprise initiatives or SMB? If that prioritization is unclear, I'd use market indicators, opportunity expectations, and recent successes to break the tie. You can also take a lower-lift approach to addressing the nuance of both. It is likely that your business operates similarly for both targets, provides similiar benefits for your top level business messaging. Then it could be as simple as an additional row of adjusted messaging to target each audience's key pain points and supporting proof points within the same messaging documentation. Then you can cater to the audiences more directly in your activation of the messaging in the market.

I don't know about you, but I'm drained from an all-digital environment and love when people add some creativity to their internal enablement. Come up with a tagline, a theme, or some other creative thread you can tie all of the internal activities around. Since it's for internal audiences you can usually have a bit more of a leash without having to stay as aligned with voice and tone for the company brand. For example, years ago SendGrid launched support for handlebars syntax in our email template editor and the PMM team wore fake mustaches when enabling internal teams of the new feature and adjusted messaging. Then activate the new messaging with training as you would for a product launch, with live presentations, added as agenda items for key team meetings, internal communications via email and slack, as well as shared resources to support the new messaging including examples of it being used in the wild. 

Getting messaging into the market is the best true test. Depending on the key channel you wish you utilize the messaging this may come in the form of marketing or sales initiatives and varies based on the investment. You could start with a landing page to A/B test conversions or with a little budget a webinar covering the new messaging, promoted by digital ads, with open Q&A and a feedback survey. Alternately you get gut reactions from a few sales executives, and request they use it in an upcoming conversation with target audience, then review Gong recordings of the response/success in the wild to gauge how it landed. 

I love the power of a new perspective. I recommend an inspect, reflect, then suggest approach. Taking time to gather information from and form relationships with teams you support including product, sales, sales enablement/programs, marketing, as well as peers at your level will help you gauge your role's expectations and the business needs. Learning priorities, measures/OKRs/KPIs, recent learnings, challenges, and opportunities from these teams will help inform a perspective that will drive your approach and priorities as you ramp up.