AMA: Freshworks Former Sr. Director, Product Marketing, Vivek Asija on Messaging

One of the biggest mistakes I see product marketers make is they forget that their buyer is human. They have appealed to business case, logic, industry research, and demonstrate ROI, but sometimes they fail to simply tell a human story. B2B software buyers are people too. And like any buyer of really any product, they want to be pulled in by brands that "get" them. They are looking for themselves in the pages of your datasheets, web pages, and slide decks. So I always think that product marketer ...Read More

I try to teach new product marketers how to think critically about positioning and messaging. It's very tempting to rest on more obvious product and feature descriptions that give the audience lots of detail about how things work. But what's more challenging to answer is, "what are we building and why?". What business opportunity do we see in the marketplace that we are trying to exploit? I encourage my product marketing teams to think about developing their expertise in four towers: product, ma ...Read More

I mentioned in another post that I have come up with a structured process for messaging development. with my team of product managers and product marketers, I work through a series of questions that force us to define and articulate our differentiation. This results in a number of messaging framework and source messaging documents that we hand off to the Marketing and Sales teams. We see these types of documents as foundational - the North Star for how we tell our story. Other marketing teams ex ...Read More

Competition plays a central role in messaging development and you must get extremely familar with how your competitors tell their story. After all, there's a reason we call it "positioning and messaging", because ultimately the best messaging positions you against something else. It draws contrast between you and your competitor and creates a real choice in the mind of the buyer. It's not enough to merely stand FOR something. You also have to stand AGAINST something in order for messaging to be ...Read More

Over the years I have collected and adapted a number of messaging tools. I have come up with a structured process for messaging development, and one of the deliverables is a source messaging document. Source messaging documents contain 50-, 100-, and 200-word descriptions, and usable snippets of text or approved slogans and tag lines. One of the core pieces is a matrix where we draw an oppositioin between "how we think" vs "how they think". This is useful for really internalizing what is differe ...Read More