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

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 un ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 ver ...Read 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 ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 unde ...Read More

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 ...Read More