AMA: Snowflake Director, Product Marketing, Alexandra Gutow on Messaging

I believe 2 parts of this have already been answered, but for the persona-/vertical-based question, yes! If you're taking to a user vs an executive, those messages likely will be very different. And likely same if you're talking to a bank vs a retailer. However, the challenge for product marketing is how to scale to support different messages (and sustain the resulting assets that come from them). Don't try and tackle everything at once. Who are the most critical personas you need to win? Is verticalization necessary out of the gate (for some features/products, it very well may be!)? Develop your core materials that your field most needs, and then prioritize what might be the next critical areas to build out for your business. Partners can also help you break into new verticals or personas, and that can help buy you time as you scale your team

I actually tend to take bits and pieces from different ones that I've used in the past to create my go-to. Whatever framework you use should help you get to a focused opinion on the tagline, elevator pitch, and 3 benefit pillars. This means it should capture who is this for (primary personas) and what you're competing against (competitors) as "givens" to set the stage. Then the most valuable thing to have in the messaging are the 3 key benefit pillars of your product/solution/feature that are untouchable by the competition and matter most to your target audience. To justify your 3 key benefits, it's important that a messaging framework make you "show your work" so to speak. For each, why was it a challenge prior? How do you make it better? What's unique? What's the impact to your customer? Answering these in the framework also can make it easier when you're collecting feedback and buy-in, because it gives enough background for folks to debate. And then once you've nailed those pillars, the tagline and the elevator pitch tend to stem from there.

Similar to how you need to enable sales when you roll out new messaging, you need to enable your marketing partners as well, especially if they're part of a cross-functional launch. I encourage marketing to attend the sales trainings, but it's usually also worth doing a dedicate session with folks from all parts of marketing where it might be easier for them to ask questions. And remember it's always important to set the context around messaging or a launch. Especially if it's a more technical topic, spend time educating on the state of the market or the key audiences as a whole, to help set the context around why you're doing what you're doing. 

I love bringing the voice of the customer into messaging! It's one of the most powerful inputs you have. Nothing beats actually talking to or hearing from customers. Shadow some sales calls. Listen to customer presentations at meetups/conferences. Schedule interviews with your "friendlies". This is invaluable to understand what matters most to them and how they're talking about it. I've also worked at companies that do broader customer surveys and market regularly. I think this is great to understand changing trends and can act as directional input, but at the end of the day your messaging needs to connect with individuals. The other great thing about listening in is having the anecdotal stories that you can incorporate in your pitch. It's one thing to talk about how X task is really hard but your product makes it super easy. But if you're able to weave in stories of "I was talking with a user and they mentioned that they are frustrated with how long they spend doing X..." (even anonymously), it can also help build credibility with prospects and makes the messaging resonate more.

One of my biggest criteria for success is how much messaging is repeated. Whether that's by your sales team, customers, media/articles, etc. So I tend to bring testing and validation into the messaging process pretty early and collect that qualitative data. I'm a big fan of going directly to account reps and sales engineers, and getting their honest feedback and see if it's something they'd actually repeat to customers. If you're able, go directly to customers and see if these are the words they'd use, and that these are the leading benefits to them. Or industry analysts to see if it matches with what they've heard from their clients. Because I think getting this in depth feedback is so valuable, I actually don't over-rotate on frameworks or process here. In terms of how effective a launch was and the messaging's impact - that can depend on the goals of the launch. You can run A/B tests on web, emails, etc to see if the new messaging is creating more views/clicks/etc. One of my favorites is to work with SDRs to try out new emails and call scripts with the messaging and see if it increases response rates or meetings secured.

2 pieces of advice here: 1) Take a look at the messaging from other companies (even outside of your market or industry). Who is really nailing it and what do you like about it? And who are the players that you still can't figure out what they do? See if you can start to incorporate some of the aspects you like into your message, or prune out some of what you didn't like. One thing I love doing here is seeing if there are ways to be more colloquial in your messaging. Especially if you work in B2B, see if you can incorporate some of the fun, down to earth messaging that B2C tends to do more of. 2) Don't be afraid to have your work torn apart. It can be hard getting feedback, especially for something you've spent a lot of time and energy on. But try not to get defensive or tune out what you don't agreement with. Go get feedback from the hardest critics. And don't be afraid to ask them follow up questions (ie "Do you agree with this point directionally or you don't think it's a main value at all?" "Do you have suggestions for alternative wordings?" etc)

I love this question! This is one of my favorite parts of product marketing - getting to translate deeply technical concepts into what actually matters. As much as possible, I encourage you to dig into the technology. Spend time with your product and engineering teams to really understand what is being built and why. And don't be afraid to ask lots of questions! That's how we learn. And continuously asking why something matters or how it's different is a great push on those teams to get crisp on their responses to customers too. Take the time to stay up on the latest in the industry too. Check out presentations from competitors and listen to podcasts/webinars/etc. It's a great input to get ideas on what works and doesn't. And a great way to uncover more questions or new information on technologies. And always review your messaging to see if it's too jargon heavy or if you're simple describing a feature. What the feature is matters much less than the impact it has on customers. Start with why it matters before trying to talk about your own product.