Kelly Kipkalov

AMA: BILL Sr Director, Product Marketing, Kelly Kipkalov on Messaging

April 17 @ 11:00AM PT
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👋 Kelly Kipkalov
Hi all, I'm Kelly Kipkalov, Vice President Product Marketing @ Carta:

• 👋 Based in: San Francisco Bay Area
• 🧠 Top of mind: Writing effective SKO presentations!
• 💬 Ask me about: PMM career paths
• 🍦 Fun fact: My maiden name is Smith. I met my husband in Russia and couldn't wait to get rid of my very generic last name. :)
How do i use multiple customer quotes and case study stats to create a 2 pager sales enablement asset?
Im not sure how i can structure this document, but i have (numbers) on how our product benefited the customer and why they chose us over a competitor and multiple quotes from different customers. What is the best way to tell a story?
Kelly Kipkalov
Carta Vice President Product Marketing2y
Customer quotes are incredibly validating for prospects considering your product. One practice I've seen though is for marketers to build customer stories or quotes that ...
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3291 Views
2 requests
Kelly Kipkalov
Carta Vice President Product Marketing2y
So you're basically category building -- that's both exciting and intimidating! Exciting because you are doing something ground breaking and you get to shape the narrati...
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422 Views
2 requests
What is your messaging strategy for a new product that is early in its lifecycle, but is a differentiator for the company?
The promise of it is alluring but actual applications and the back end infrastructure is not ironed out yet.
Kelly Kipkalov
Carta Vice President Product Marketing2y
I think the worse thing you can do as a brand is to have your messaging get too far ahead of the product by promising something that you can't deliver, particularly if it...
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459 Views
2 requests
Kelly Kipkalov
Carta Vice President Product Marketing2y
We have a Go To Market Strategy document and template that we use as a forcing function to gain alignment across Product, Marketing and Revenue teams. One part of that s...
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419 Views
2 requests
Kelly Kipkalov
Carta Vice President Product Marketing2y
We iterate on copy - through in market testing - more frequently than we iterate on messaging. We treat our core messaging as more durable than copy and changing that t...
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404 Views
2 requests
What are the best practices that you have employed to create a closed-loop product messaging?
Messaging that is not just in one silo of the org. but goes through demand gen. campaigns and ISR/SDR pitches. Gather feedback from MQL, SQL's and pipeline generated from that messaging and finally use those insights to appropriately tweak the messaging.
Kelly Kipkalov
Carta Vice President Product Marketing2y
I've always found it best just to go straight to sales teams to get messaging feedback -- you need a depth of feedback that you can't get through tools like Salesforce. W...
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453 Views
2 requests
What messaging framework do you use?
Would love frameworks to share.
Kelly Kipkalov
Carta Vice President Product Marketing2y
There's only one framework that I've ever needed in my career as a product marketer and it's sort of motherhood and apple pie:Start with the customer insight written as i...
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937 Views
2 requests
Kelly Kipkalov
Carta Vice President Product Marketing2y
If you are focussed on messaging at the feature level, there's probably little you can do to differentiate if you are playing catch up with a specific piece of functional...
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444 Views
3 requests
Kelly Kipkalov
Carta Vice President Product Marketing2y
I always think it's important to be able to attribute impact or outcomes to anything we do as a product marketer. But I think it's probably more useful to test your way ...
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406 Views
2 requests
Kelly Kipkalov
Carta Vice President Product Marketing2y
Whether the audience is technical or non technical, you just need to speak their language and use their vocabulary. Using overly simple language for a technical audience...
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526 Views
2 requests
Kelly Kipkalov
Carta Vice President Product Marketing2y
Ideally you're a/b testing in-market so you get a read on actual user behavior: headline testing on your website or paid landing pages, or subject line testing in email....
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521 Views
2 requests
Kelly Kipkalov
Carta Vice President Product Marketing2y
I guess I'll have to pile on the Chat GPT bandwagon! But I will also say that we haven't used Chat GPT to create messages as much as we have used it to fine tune them, a...
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1053 Views
1 request
Kelly Kipkalov
Carta Vice President Product Marketing2y
I don't use a lot of variety in the way I approach strategic messaging - you have to be able to tell a good, cohesive story regardless of how you acquire customers. But ...
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993 Views
1 request
How do you define messaging at your company?
At my company, the term gets thrown around vaguely and broadly and while mainly owned by PMM, sometimes it is "owned" by Content or Enablement so it gets confusing. I'm curious how each of you define it and how you have successfully defined it more concretely, so that it is clear what Product Marketing owns when it comes to messaging.
Kelly Kipkalov
Carta Vice President Product Marketing2y
Anything by Trout and Ries (ancient, I realize), or April Dunford. April's 'Obviously Awesome' book is an quick and fascinating read, and while it focusses on positionin...
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1709 Views
1 request