AMA: BILL Sr Director, Product Marketing, Kelly Kipkalov on Messaging
April 17 @ 11:00AM PST
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BILL Sr Director, Product Marketing, Kelly Kipkalov on Messaging
Top Questions
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
BILL Sr Director, Product Marketing • April 18
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. We have a couple of products in market right now where we're fine tuning the value prop. Given that we didn't do any user resea......Read More
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Kelly Kipkalov
BILL Sr Director, Product Marketing • April 18
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, and to help with voice and tone. Some PMMs struggle with brevity and I've found Chat GPT helpful to take longer messages and skin......Read More
391 Views
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Kelly Kipkalov
BILL Sr Director, Product Marketing • April 18
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 functionality. But messaging the feature in the overall context of how your product is different and better than a competitors is how you......Read More
356 Views
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Kelly Kipkalov
BILL Sr Director, Product Marketing • April 18
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. Take really big swings in your messaging concepts and try to test ideas that are very different so the results will be clear. I......Read More
330 Views
2 requests
Can you share the messaging framework that you use?
Would love frameworks to share.
Kelly Kipkalov
BILL Sr Director, Product Marketing • April 18
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 if you were them (i.e. "I have xyz problem and really wish there was abc solution to help me.") * Write out your ben......Read More
337 Views
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Kelly Kipkalov
BILL Sr Director, Product Marketing • April 18
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 too frequently probably means you haven't landed on the right messaging for your product. One caveat is the pace and type of in......Read More
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What is your strategy for messaging a product that is very 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
BILL Sr Director, Product Marketing • April 18
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's on a differentiating piece of functionality that could be game changing for the company. If you lean hard into messaging som......Read More
352 Views
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Kelly Kipkalov
BILL Sr Director, Product Marketing • April 18
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 strategy doc is the positioning and messaging but it also includes the customer problem, the technical solution and why we chose ......Read More
322 Views
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Kelly Kipkalov
BILL Sr Director, Product Marketing • April 18
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 into winning messages vs launching an effort to assess the impact of messaging vs other elements of marketing like pricing, pack......Read More
314 Views
2 requests
Kelly Kipkalov
BILL Sr Director, Product Marketing • April 18
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 narrative vs fit into an existing one. Intimidating because the burden of educating the market will fall on your shoulders, and that ta......Read More
331 Views
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Kelly Kipkalov
BILL Sr Director, Product Marketing • April 18
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 won't help build credibility with that audience; using technical language with a layperson audience will just lose them in the ......Read More
381 Views
2 requests
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
BILL Sr Director, Product Marketing • April 18
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 a particular customer uses and loves a product, but they stop short of explaining why. To your point about story telling, these......Read More
366 Views
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Kelly Kipkalov
BILL Sr Director, Product Marketing • April 18
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 with PLG, it becomes a lot more important to make sure that you're following the customer journey and have really tight alignmen......Read More
364 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
BILL Sr Director, Product Marketing • April 18
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 positioning, good messaging falls out of great positioning. So start there and everything else follows!
398 Views
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