Messaging – How do we tell our story?

Our approach to defining our messaging is "persona-first."  We believe that effective communication begins with a detailed, very clear understanding of the individuals we serve. There are two key reasons for this focus: first, modern marketing and communication allows us to communicate in a personalized highly specific fashion.   A persona first approach is useful as a forcing function for supporting this.  Second, by grounding our messaging in stories of users and buyers we foster a customer-obsessed and user-oriented mindset within our organization.

We begin by deeply defining the personas for whom we provide solutions. This includes understanding their general job functions and how our offerings are relevant to their professional or personal lives. Within each persona, we identify the relevant pains and solutions we provide, tailoring these specifically to their needs. This initial stage provides us with a high degree of clarity on who we are selling to, the compelling pains they experience that we solve, and how we solve them in a unique and compelling fashion.

Once we have a clear understanding of the specific solutions our product offers for each role, we then "step up" to develop a company-wide solution. This involves summarizing the overarching pain and solution themes that emerge from our persona analysis. We iteratively review and validate these themes to ensure consistency and coherence across all messaging. While we prioritize persona-specific messaging whenever possible, we also establish connective tissue between these specific points, mapping them back to general concepts of problems and solutions. This iterative development ensures we have both targeted persona-specific messages and broader, generic messages that resonate with a wider audience. Furthermore, we commit to revising our messaging quarterly, leveraging data from CRM records and deal progression to continually refine what's working best.

Output

• Persona Problem / Solution Pairing
  • For each persona we create up to three pairings of problems that persona faces and the solution we provided for the problem.
  • Ideally these are a simple catchy and memorable sentence or phrase plus sentence
  • Shorter, punchy and provocative are good here
• Company Problem / Solution Pairing
  • Take all the persona specific problem and solution pairing and summarize for the company as a whole
• Iterate
  • In parallel refine the persona and company pairing to make ensure they don't contradict one another and, ideally, reinforce one another

Notes

• No More Than Three - We know your product is amazing and has lots of cool benefits and features.   Your prospects attention isn't long enough to care.   Keep it short.  Keep it punchy.   Make it catchy.
• Differentiate - Competitive differentiation is about what makes the company stand out from the crowd.  The thing that makes it special, unique, better and more effectively solves the business problem at hand.   Whenever you can if we can highlight solutions to pains we unique do well it'll accrue to our benefit.   Sometimes we can do this by contrasting how we provide our benefit with the current approach in place.  The key thing: a buyer has to care about it.   Differentiation is easy - lots of things make your company different.  Competitive differentiation is the set of things that are different and unique about you the buyer cares about.  In a world of same differentiation is how you get people to choose you, stick with you, and, ideally, pay more for your solution.