AMA: Zuora Former Senior Director, Product Marketing, Natalie Louie on Messaging

MESSAGING FRAMEWORK Andy Raskin broke down our Zuora messaging framework perfectly: The Greatest Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen This messaging framework we use has 5 elements: * Name a Big, Relevant Change in the World * Show There’ll Be Winners and Losers * Tease the Promised Land * Introduce Features as “Magic Gifts” for Overcoming Obstacles to the Promised Land * Present Evidence that You Can Make the Story Come True Another good messaging framework Andy Raskin breaks down well is a keynote by Elon Musk Elon’s framework also has 5 elements: * Name the enemy * Answer “Why now?” * Show the promised land before explaining how you’ll get there * Identify obstacles—then explain how you’ll overcome them * Present evidence that you’re not just blowing hot air At Zuora, we use a version of both of these frameworks in all our messaging. POSITIONING FRAMEWORK Positioning also has its own framework. Notable resources are “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore and “Positioning” by Al Ries. A positioning statement has 7 elements: * For [target customers] * Who [statement of need of opportunity], * The [product name] * Is a [product category] * That [statement of key benefit]. * Unlike [primary competitive alternative], * Our product [statement of primary differentiation]. ELEVATOR PITCH FRAMEWORK A elevator pitch has 4 sentences: * What the customer is trying to do * Highlight the pains of trying to get there * Why this pain is happening * How we help Good overall book Kyle Christensen, Zuora’s CMO, recommended to me is “Made to Stick” by Chip Heath & Dan Heath. Lots of good frameworks on making sure your ideas stick! I read it 10 years ago and I'm actually reading it again right now. 

We have our brand messaging and corporate messaging which ties to our company purpose and we use it as our north star and map all related messaging to that. It’s important to work in an integrated way so that messaging is consistent and aligned across the company and the products we sell. We spend a lot of time creating our Messaging Template - a source document our PMM team uses and that we send to all cross-functional partners so they can create content and copy aligned with our messaging. Once our Messaging Template is created and in a good shape, we create the related 1st call deck for sales, the story and talk track to bring it to life. This is where the creativity comes and where we bring in valid data and proof points from our messaging template to tell the story. We’ll compare the deck to the messaging template side by side to make sure we aren’t missing anything. All other bill of materials we create then continue to spin out from these documents, i.e. data sheets, executive leave behinds, white papers, guides, webinars, live demos, blogs, press releases, explainer videos, etc..... Beyond the standard testing and iterating of these deliverables with various stakeholders, our PMM’s will do internal competitions. If we are working on new messaging, we’ll have 2 PMM’s present their version of the 1st call sales deck and message to the rest of our team and then vote on who’s was better. We’ll all give thoughtful feedback in the spirit of unlocking our best messaging. Our PMM team will also do collaboration sessions, working sessions with other teams, work with 3rd parties, hire consultants, bring on contractors and experts, attend workshops, read books, study other frameworks and really be open to any idea to uplevel our messaging game! While we may be good writers and storytellers, we have a strong growth mindset on our team and are always looking for ways to uplevel our messaging chops. 

It starts with the PMM team to come up with messaging that positions the benefits of your solutions/platform. PMM’s own the WHY and not the WHAT. Please refer to my other answers on frameworks and best practices to get to good messaging and positioning here. Once we have your messaging in a good place, our PMM team works very closely with our marketing, sales, sales enablement, product, partners and strategy counterparts to amplify our messaging. Part of the PMM’s job is to make sure our messaging is easy to understand and sticks with all of our internal cross-functional partners, because they are the ones amplifying and scaling our messaging. When I know I’ve made a mistake: If I share our messaging and train our wider marketing team on it -- then I read campaign copy they created that isn’t aligned and I’m spending a ton of time making edits...that’s on me as a PMM. I haven’t done my job in properly setting up our campaign team for success to amplify our message. Either my message is not clear or the tools I’m using to deliver my message isn’t working. It’s up to me, the PMM, to figure that out, course correct and keep iterating. When I know I’ve done a good job: Now, when my campaigns team sends me copy to read and it’s spot on and I’m making very light edits -- then I know I’ve done my job in getting them to amplify our message correctly. This is how you scale good messaging. This is very satisfying and should be the goal of every PMM!

Yes, messaging and positioning should be revisited for every single release. It is something you are constantly battle testing and iterating on. The best messaging is not something you research, create once and then go back to on an annual basis. The magic is in the iteration of messaging and positioning. Test it with your team, your co-workers, your sales teams, your executives, your partners, analysts, and subject matter experts. Test it on prospects, customers, your friends and family. Have your sales team and executives test it out on the field. Test it in your digital marketing campaigns and webinars. Humans and people are the consumers of our messaging and they have to understand it and connect with it. Look at what you compete against and keep testing it against that (because your competitors are also releasing new products, services and messaging too). Every piece of feedback and data point will inform the next iteration of your messaging. If it doesn’t resonate with someone, get the feedback and iterate. If you’ve nailed your ideal customer profile and they don’t want to buy from you? It’s not them, it’s your messaging then that’s off. And you keep iterating. That's how we look at things here at Zuora. We have our brand messaging "The Subscription Economy" and that hasn't changed in many years (but was tested and iterated on for 3 years). We have our corporate messaging and positioning that only changes once a year max as that should be very high level and broad enough to carry us through the next year. Then we have our messaging and positioning for our individual products, our portfolio of products and our releases. There’s also messaging/positioning for our verticals, competitive intel and campaigns. These messages will change with each major product release or shift in the market and will have a faster iteration of them either on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis. All of this ties and maps together. All of this messaging is constantly in a different state of iteration and development, pending the feedback we get. Tip for product level or lower level messaging: the second you publish your messaging, consider it already old and you should start working on your next iteration. Especially, if you have a lot of competitors, because they now know what your message/position is and may soon very well be copying you or positioning against you -- and you should already be working on your next version behind the scenes.

I wouldn’t prioritize it and instead focus on iterating on your existing product messaging and positioning. Get clarity on how to message and position your existing products while being mindful of your future product roadmap. Messaging and positioning is something you should always be iterating and updating pending what new products are being released, what your competitors do, what your customers' changing challenges are, what your new business strategy is, etc... So, when you have a real platform product and strategy on the horizon, then it will be time to introduce that into your positioning and messaging - during your next iteration.

We test our messaging various ways: * Talk directly to your customers and prospects, interview them, survey them * Test messaging with analysts who cover your space * Talk to partners, consultants and subject matter experts * Get feedback from sales * Present it to executives and get their feedback * Join sales calls with prospects and listen to them deliver the message or deliver the message yourself * Make it a part of your executives talk track and get their feedback (our CEO tests our messaging for us because he's always talking to executives) * Test different messaging in marketing campaigns and webinars * Conduct proper win/loss analysis and interview both the sales rep and the customer/prospect * Hire consultants or contractors to help validate and collect feedback Always look at the qualitative and quantitative data to determine where you iterate next. One way you know if your messaging is working is setting your OKRs and the outcomes you want i.e. if the prospect engages in a sales cycle with you or if they open that email from your SDR. If they don’t, then you go back to your messaging and keep iterating until you get the outcome, attention and closed deals you want.

If you want the highest company valuation possible, you need a recurring stream based on a value-based and/or usage-based pricing model. Investors and Wall Street value recurring revenue streams at a much higher multiple than one-time transactional revenue because they are predictable revenue streams with higher profit margins that build longer customer lifetime value. This is why many companies are moving to subscriptions. There are 4 key levers in determining your recurring pricing strategy for a B2B product: * Market Segment: who are your target markets and what are their shared problems? * Pricing Metric: what do you charge for and what do your customers value? This should be tied directly to how a customer thinks about their ROI. * Packaging: what are your customer’s use cases and how do you package up products and services? * Price Points: what do you charge, what’s the discount strategy, do you have promotion or trials? Many people like to do a Conjoint Analysis to figure out the willingness-to-pay when establishing their price points. A good resource for pricing courses is with Champions of Value Unlike one-time transactions where people figure out the price point first, in recurring revenue pricing strategies it is the LAST thing you determine. It’s good to work with your finance team here too in case you have a high cost of goods sold (COGS), so you can keep an eye on an agreed upon profit margin. You need to figure out #1-3 first -- and these 3 areas are square within what Product Marketers already own today! This is why I think product marketers should always have a seat at pricing strategy discussions. We know our target markets, we know what they value, we know what their use cases are and we understand what our competitors are doing. It is also important to test your pricing and keep iterating -- just like you do with your messaging. Along with a product roadmap, you need a pricing roadmap. Look at the data and signals of how your customers are buying and using your product and use it to inform how you iterate on your pricing. The Subscribed Institute has been studying subscription businesses for over a decade and the benchmarks show that B2B companies who change their pricing 3-5 times a year grow the fastest. Pricing is not something you set and forget, or something you look at annually. The data shows it needs to be looked at every quarter, at a minimum, to unlock the most value and revenue for your products.

Please look here for my pricing framework on what to think about when coming up with new value-based pricing recommendations. As a PMM I own pricing strategy and I work close with Product Managers (PM) with their product roadmap. As they are developing their products I meet with them to discuss how we will monetize a new product using my pricing framework. We'll understand how the value of our product is different than competitors, we'll understand what prospects/customers value by talking to them or surveying them if it's something brand new, we'll study the data on how people are using the product if its an enhancement to an existing product, we'll run projections on potential usage and adoption of the product, work with finance on COGS/Margin analysis -- we work together to do any and all analysis we think we need. The decsion may also be that we don't want to monetize it, but at least we've done the analysis and had a conversation. Perhaps once the product is more robust, we can monetize it too. Many decsions and recommendations will come out of these initial discussions. Then together we come up with a pricing recommendation. Then we take this to a greater cross-function pricing operations team that includes our Rev Rec team, legal, contracts, deal desk, finance, product leaders, sales operations, billing, payments, collections....etc and we work out all the downstream pricing impacts to the Order to Revenue process and get all of their approval and agree upon a timeline to get our pricing live. The last step in approvals is taking this to our Pricing Committee for approval - exectuvies across all our cross-function teams (CRO, CFO, CAO, CCO, GC, CPO, CSO etc...) will do the final sign off. There are a bunch of post operational meetings once pricing goes live. And steps we take to go back and look at the data of how our pricing recommendation is fairing. Is it driving the ARR, MRR, ACV and Customer Lifetime Value we wanted? Are our discounting policies holding? Are margins what we expected? What are bookings, cross-sell and up-sell metrics? What is usage adoption? This is where the iteration of our pricing strategy begins and how we uplevel our pricing to keep maintaining double digit revenue growth. 

We are in a constant state of updating various messaging All The Time. In fact, we never feel like we are done. Our CEO, Tien Tzuo, tells us that the magic to good messaging is in the iteration of it. We are constantly battle testing and iterating on all our messaging. Zuora spent 3 years iterating on "The Subscription Economy" before it stuck and became synonymous with our brand now. Now that this message has been battle tested, we haven't changed it. But for other messaging, the second we release it, we already know it’s old and we are working on the next update. For example, messaging for a product launch -- once it's out the door, that's old and we are looking at what's next in our product road map. Before I release new messaging to the field, I’ve been getting feedback and fine tuning it for weeks or months. If you are looking at your messaging from a few weeks ago and you aren’t cringing, you aren’t iterating enough. If you share your messaging with someone and they aren't nodding in full agreement, you aren't iterating enough. Our PMM team has a Messaging Template to align everyone on the same page. This is used as a source document to send and amplify our messaging to all cross-functional partners to create decks, content, copy, marketing campaigns, sales enablement training, etc…Based on your needs it can include: a positioning statement, macro theme, key messages, top value props, competitive differentiation, elevator pitch, messaging map, target verticals, target personas, market trends, key signals, proof points, high valued assets, customer stories, 3rd party reports. The document emcompases all our research from talking to customers, prospects, analysts, consultants, partners, sales, internal/external experts, co-workers, etc… and whittled down to the most essential information. Sometimes these can become very long when we are doing our research and validation, then eventually we have to pair it down to the most important information because no one wants to read a novel to understand our messaging and create their content.