AMA: Hubspot Former Sr. Manager, Product Marketing, Jeffrey Vocell on Messaging

Measuring the success of messaging overall generally ties back to product launch goals — whether that’s a sales or revenue number, or more user/signup focused. That being said, if you’re working on positioning and messaging outside of a launch then I’d look at metrics like length of sales cycle, demo to close rate, % of deals closed-won vs, closed lost (and against specific competitors if that’s important to your product line/business), and raw volume of sales and MRR/ARR. You can switch some of ...Read More

This is a great question. As product marketers, I think we often confuse this terminology, and due to the common use of these terms it amplifies the perception they are different. From my point of view, there are differences between positioning and messaging which I’ll cover here, but everything else you mentioned — story, pitch, etc — is either an output of positioning and messaging, or is one and the same.

 First, positioning is an internal resource that covers how your product is uniquely di ...Read More

I think it’s hard to showcase messaging in an interview unless you’re specifically bringing up documented work. At HubSpot, we like to give candidates an exercise before an interview that typically ties into positioning and messaging. Oftentimes this exercise will tie back to a recently released product or feature, and we’ll ask the candidate how they would position the product and bring that positioning to life through a launch campaign. This approach has actually worked really well and taught ...Read More

Great question. This gets at the heart of managing others, while also is central to our role as product marketers. As a manager, it's your responsibility to ensure that the right milestones are being hit which means that was the right process followed for creating messaging? Did that product marketer do background research, or run a research report to inform their positioning? Did they talk to any customers, prospects, or closed-lost accounts? Did they share the messaging with the right stakehol ...Read More

I love this question because I’ve seen many product marketers create positioning and messaging solely based on gut instinct. To truly answer this question though, I think you need to back-up before positioning and messaging is even written. Before writing anything you should ask yourself what data you have to inform your unique POV — such as analyst reports, research your company has created, or third-party studies. This data should inform how you create positioning and messaging. Once you have ...Read More

The best way I've found is to start small, and grow over-time. To explain that further, when a brand-new product marketer starts I will typically walk through step-by-step the messaging process with them at a granular feature level just to get them some repetition practicing. After doing that a number of times, I'll let them take on some of those (very) small releases on their own and will read messaging (i.e. blog content, in-app messaging, etc) ahead of time to make sure they're on the right t ...Read More

Oftentimes once we have a draft of positioning or messaging we’ll share it with a key group of folks (for example, sales & services enablement) for feedback. Usually this will go through a few rounds of revision, and once that is finalized we’ll present it to leadership to gain buy-in. One more thing that we’ve found really helpful — especially for larger launches/projects is using the DARCI project management framework to streamline who is giving feedback, and based on specific stakeholders ...Read More

I’m not sure there really are exercises. Once we have research, then we can plug it into our positioning template and answer a bunch of questions within that template (i.e. “what is the shift in the market/world that the buyer is experiencing?). Once all of those questions are answered, then it’s relatively seamless to come-up with a narrative based on that pre-work, and thus messaging. The important point is that any messaging — given it’s designed to be broadly applicable — still carries the c ...Read More

At HubSpot we have a “master” positioning guide that exists for every core product and is shared on a central wiki that everyone can access. This positioning guide helps inform the work of marketers, sales enablement, and many other customer-facing teams. To ensure alignment we work closely with these other teams, such as sales enablement, to build assets like “Demo Like a Pro” that carry our positioning and messaging and transform it into an actual sample demo from a sales rep. This is just one ...Read More

Great question. There are a few primary mechanisms we've used to test messaging: Research Reports / Messaging Surveys - These work pretty well, especially when you're entering a brand-new market and need to test messaging for and audience that isn't in your database already.  In-App - I mentioned this in another answer, but if you can directly control, or work with your product team to edit in-app messaging easily then it can be a great way to test various messaging. Within HubSpot, depending on ...Read More

This starts far before the content is shared across various platforms or to different audiences. To begin, if the product you are selling has multiple decision-makers or potential buyers you should create a priority matrix. In other words, which persona is the most important and which channels do they prioritize. This matrix can exist in a simple spreadsheet and should help you, and any other teams internally quickly understand who the primary buyer is and which channels work best for them. Once ...Read More

Great question. Ultimately I think this depends on your target audience, product, and buying cycle. If you sell enterprise software that has a long sales cycle then you can apply copy tweaks to incentivize behavior but it may not be realistic to convince a prospect to buy now for a large informed purchase that has many decision-makers. That said, a lot of this urgency is at the intersection of design and messaging. The design of specific pages (like a product page) need to be compelling and high ...Read More