AMA: Modern Treasury Manager, Product Marketing, Pranav Deshpande on Messaging

In my opinion, benefits need to describe the outcome of using the feature. The outcome should address a real pain point for the target customer of the feature. The benefit should also be relative to the next best alternative available to the target customer. When we draft positioning statements for our products at Modern Treasury, we make sure they separately articulate pain points, alternatives, and top benefits for each key product feature. For example, for our Payments product, 'Direct bank connectivity' is a feature and 'Focus on shipping your core product faster instead of figuring out how to integrate with different banks and payment methods' is the associated benefit.

To be honest, this has been difficult to figure out. I don't think we have the best solution yet, but for now, we write down positioning statetements for each product, which include key messages, to ensure that we have one clear reference for other teams in the company. Each positioning statement is versioned to make sure we're tracking how often its being changed. What I've found is these internal docs are most useful to PMM or the rest of marketing. But they aren't great at dissemination. The most effective way to disseminate your messaging is repeating it as many times in as many formats (web pages, content, developer docs, internal sales training) as possible. 

I've written about this in detail on my blog, so I'll summarize my thoughts below! Messaging and positioning work is never complete, so always treat your positioning doc as a living document that will evolve with your business. The framework I like to use involves starting with jobs to be done: Step 1: Start with the ‘jobs to be done’ What: Define the ‘jobs’ your product can be ‘hired’ to perform Why: As Peter Drucker once said, customers don’t buy products or features, they buy benefits. Jobs-to-be-done helps you look at your product from your customers perspective, making it easier to separate the benefits from the features. Step 2 Segment your TAM What: Segment customers in your TAM using obvious and visible characteristics. Why: For segmentation to be effective, it needs to be based on obvious and visible characteristics to accurately validate your messaging. Step 3 Map jobs to be done to benefits What: Map the ‘jobs’ each segment cares about to the benefits delivered by your product or feature. Why: Each customer segment does not care about all the benefits you have to offer. Mapping helps you identify which products or features, and therefore benefits you highlight when positioning your product to a particular customer segment. Step 4 Analyze competitive alternatives What: Analyze alternatives available to each customer segment for these jobs Why: You can’t identify and articulate benefits in a vacuum. Step 5 Articulate your value What: Articulate the value your product provides relative to the alternatives in a way most likely to resonate with each segment. Why: This is where you bring your positioning home. Having identified the jobs to be done, benefits, customer segments and competitive alternatives, it’s much easier to articulate the value of your offering.

Great question! The relative importance of these tips depends on your GTM motion (mostly top-down or mostly bottoms-up), but in principle they're all about contributing meaningfully to growing revenues and customer count: 1. Case studies - sales and demand gen love customer case studies. Nothing sells or converst quite like social proof, so creating a few case studies is a great way to get some early wins. 2. Competitive intelligence - competitive deep dives and analyses are foundational to PMM, but also immediately useful to product and customer facing teams. 3. Better web copy - if you've joined as the first PMM, chances are your company's websiste could use some work :) 4. Content - which types of content convert best for your business? Focus on those initially. At Modern Treasury, SEO was a clear winner for us earlier on so I helped drive the creation of Learn, our payment operations glossary.

There's both qualitative and quantitative ways to test messaging, and in my opinion both are equally important in the long run. The qualitative approach involves directly validating messaging with your target audience by: 1. Joining sales calls, pitching the product yourself, and seeing how they respond. 2. Interviewing your sales and customer success team to understand which aspects of the messaging you've drafted for them are resonating. 3. Listening to recorded customer conversations. At Modern Treasury, we're huge fans of Gong. I spend about 2 hours every week listening to Gong calls. 4. In-person events are a great place to test messaging. Some of the best signals I've received in the past have come from conversations at events. 5. Trade publications, newsletters, and other industry media that your target audience consumes are great places to find new messaging ideas! The quantitative approach involves: 1. Buying LinkedIn or display ads targeted at the roles that comprise your ICP and running different messages for the same CTA to measure relative performance. This can get expensive though, because you need to reach a large enough number to achieve significance. 2. A/B testing copy on your website. You need to make sure you can get enough unique views over your test period to achieve significance. 3. Similar to 2, email campaigns are also a great way to test different copy. If you're at a startup that's just found p/m fit, quantitative testing can be harder to do because your sample sizes might be too small. In that case, I recommend starting with qualitative approach first!