AMA: Pendo Sr. Director of Product Marketing, Marcus Andrews on Messaging

There is less written about marketing a platform or suite of products vs individual products so I'll start there. There are two things I think work really well when marketing a platform. 1. The Platform should unlock use cases or outcomes you can't achieve with the individual products alone. Like Captain Planet (sorry non-90's kids for the reference you can google it) is an amalgamation of a smaller team of individuals - your platform must feel like a single powerful entity made up of the individual products. But it's not a combination of them the platform is more than the sum of it's parts. 2. With a platform, especially one that is built from the ground up, the individual products should work together, and overlap, and benefit from each other. This is the true benefit of a platform and why you'll win against point solutions. You have to tell this story though. At HubSpot we branded these connections as "chevrons" and marketed them heavily. At Pendo we call the "intersections" and do the same.

I think to cover all these areas you need some sort of macro story, that then makes it easier for all these parts of marketing to stay consistent, and connected, but also thrive as individual teams. My go-to storytelling framework is what I call Narrative Design. It's a framework that roots you in the world of your audience and can help you redfine your company and category or simply have a great way to start blog post - and everything in-between. This is the best resource to learn about my framework: https://medium.com/product-marketing-alliance/what-is-narrative-design-for-business-an-intro-e1d779f25133

I don't really run structured tests to test messaging very often, but I'm constantly trying to understand if our messaging is working. Here are a few things I'm always doing. This approach really works for me and my teams. I'm always trying to figure out if things aren't working or if they are. 1. Sales adoption and specific calls with prospects / customers. Simply put if it's good sales will use it if it's not they won't. Good sales people don't waste their time with bad messaging or collateral. It's not about their opinion. Even if they don't personally like it but it's working they'll use it. They are a great barometer of success. Also get on calls and pitch the new deck yourself. Talk about the new product to a customer yourself. Pay close attention to them, do they get it? Are they asking strange questions because they are confused? Do they like it but don't find enough value in it to really push for it? Watch for it all. 2. Content performance. When I use my narrative design framework and especially when I do it well content performs better - much better. You want your blog posts, webinars, talks, collateral, etc to outperform benchmarks. More views, more leads, more internal usage. This is a direct result of great messaging. 3. C-suite feedback or a lack of it. Most c-suites have seen a lot of good and bad messaging and they'll tell you what they think. Listen to them and take the feedback. Sometimes a lack of feedback, especially from an opinionated c-suite (aren't they all) is the best sign you got it right.

There is a big difference between translation and localization. I'm a pretty good copy writer and storyteller, as an American. Translate my narratives into Spanish, or German, or even just move them into an english speaking region like UKI but with a different culture, they fall flat, are misunderstood, or at worst offend people. You can't just translate stuff. Ideally you have great sales / marketing partners or even a pmm in region who can help. My advice is lean on them, vs thinking you're clever enough to make something work messaging wise in your non-native culture.

If you have something that is truly differentiating, you need to build a case for why that thing is so critical to the success of your buyer. And then build that into everything you do with your product marketing. Pendo as a platform generally has a data advantage over our guides only competitors. So we use it. We brand a certain part of product as "the only data driven digital adoption platform" and talk about why data is so important for you to achevive the outcome you desire. And tell the story of what happens if you don't have it - hint: bad things.

Just start working on it! There are so many opportunities to do this, worse case no one notices best case you start to get pulled into really strategic conversations. A great example of this is AI. Every B2B software comapny needs an AI narrative right now. If you're to help tell that story and just go out and start doing it without being asked, good things will happen. I will say it's best to think globally but start locally. Focus the AI story on your products and your industry or segment. Don't try and rewrite the company narrative as an IC PMM or even Director. It's too big and will be frowned on.

A few thoughts. It's best to be in front of this challenge then behind it. If you are the PMM for a product, and you are waiting till the product as outgrown the messaging to then change the messaging... not great. Your messaging should ideally be out in front of the product. It should be telling the story of the product today and then near future. Selling the vision, making sure you're unique, and making sure buyers and customers have confidence in the future of your product. The tail should wag the dog within reason. This isn't always possible though I know. So I'd say at least quarterly you need to make sure product messaging is updated. I have a monthly or quarterly sync with our web team to make sure the that what our product pages say is up to date with the status of our current products and messaging.

This best way I've seen to do this is to use product usage data to Guide you. This is easy at Pendo using Pendo. We are able to target messaging to just users of specific products and slice and dice by meta data. Meta data from your CRM combine with actual product usage info gives me everything I've ever needed to focus a message. It helps to have a strong customer marketing team and I work with one today.

I always try to keep in mind that is very inexpensive to tweak your story or messaging. It's a whole lot more expensive to change a product or sales motion. So if you're getting new data you trust, change the story! Try something new, see what happens. Don't be so attached to your messaging you can't throw something out and make some changes. Just do it fast. I've seen a lot of messaging changes get over thunk in bad meetings with too many people involved. HOWEVER, you want to tweak, not re-write. When you get new good data tweak the story. Tweak the webinar, tweak the keynote, tweak the value prop, don't start over. You want to have a consistent central story. If you are always starting over you're wasting a ton of time and effort you could be spent educating the market.

I'll give you two things you can do here. 1. Write about Narrative Design or your version of the framework and publish it. I do this on Linkedin. Find examples, ask questions, examine different parts of the process, try and upack it for others. There is an endless amount of ways you can add to the discussion. This will help you get better at thinking about it and it'll attract people who are interested in using it. 2. Read. To become a better storyteller and writer you have to be constantly learning from the people who do it well. Easiest way to do that is by reading more. Don't just read business stuff too. Read a wide variety of books, fiction, other industries, podcasts work too. The more you have to pull from the better.