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

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-t ...Read More

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 Mo ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 c ...Read More

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, ...Read More