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

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.

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.

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