AMA: Momentive.ai Vice President, Product Marketing, Priya Gill on Messaging

As counterintuitive as this may sound, simple messaging isn’t always the way to go. It really comes down to your target buyer(s) and the set of messages that resonate with them, which may need to be simple for a line of business buyer like Marketing or HR or more complex/technical for an IT/Developer buyer. But it always comes back to understanding your target audience and their pain points, and ensuring you're tailoring your messaging for them. Also, depending on the channel/medium where your messaging is shared, it may necessitate varying altitudes. For example, Social Media is a clear channel where you need to keep your messaging short and sweet whereas a blog is a channel where you can go more in depth.

In many cases when you’re trying to reposition a mature, market-leading product, it’s because 1) you’re either trying to change your target market’s perception of your product / product portfolio or brand relative to the competition. Interestingly enough, this is exactly what we did earlier this year with the rebranding of SurveyMonkey to Momentive. We found through our research that despite the strong aided and unaided brand awareness that we had with SurveyMonkey, the name was becoming very limiting as we we’re trying to push up market and lean into our enterprise strategy. The term “Survey” was considered very functional and limiting to that category we were trying to break into. And “Monkey” was bringing up perceptions of “silly” and “cute”, which becomes a difficult hurdle to overcome when you’re trying to sell software to enterprise buyers. So what did we do? * Research, research, research. Qualitative and quantitative studies in seven countries, with over 22,000 respondents in total plus 10 different types of studies to instill confidence that the direction and decisions were the right ones. We also did a lot of interviewing and quantitative studies with prospective customers that fit our target ICPs (ideal customer profiles), especially when it came down to determining what name to choose. * Ensure Executive buy-in at every step. You’d be dead in the water if you didn’t achieve alignment at the executive level, from beginning to end. We conducted interviews with all of our executive stakeholders and kept them apprised of ongoing updates every step of the way. * Formalize the new brand architecture and positioning. Determine how to structure different products, brands and solutions based on long-term needs and how we planned to evolve in the future. * Treat the rebrand / repositioning as a major product launch. You want to generate as much excitement and awareness as possible, both internally and externally. Treating it as a major product launch will ensure you achieve your intended outcomes: greater awareness, stronger brand perception, etc. There’s a lot more to this and our amazing VP of Brand, Karen Budell, goes into a ton of detail about how we made this happen. Adding the podcast here in case it’s helpful: https://www.93x.agency/blog/behind-the-scenes-of-surveymonkeys-rebrand

In the B2B space, getting Sales to fully adopt new messaging is almost always a challenge, especially for a product or service that has existed for quite some time. In many cases, you’ll find that even after extensive training, they may end up reverting back to their standard discovery and pitch. Old habits are hard to change but there a couple of tactics that typically work out well: * Ensure you have alignment and buy-in with Sales leadership. Sales reps trust their managers and leaders more than you, so having strong alignment with leadership and a few influential sales reps can go a long way. * If your sales team is small, having quick 15 min chats to address individual problem points and questions can be very effective. Time consuming, yes, but effective. For larger sales teams, attending their team meetings (smaller group settings) and conducting surveys can help you get down to the root of the problem quicker. * A single sales training is very rarely enough, especially for a large enough messaging shift, so temper your expectations accordingly. Coming up with creative ways to instill the new messaging over a quarter or two may be required.

There are 3 core areas that I ensure I have a solid understanding of before I create new messaging and positioning: * Target buyer(s) & their pain points: Get a clear understanding of who my target buyer is (budget, motivation to buy, purchase blockers) and what their pain points are (as it relates to the problem space your target buyer is looking to solve) * Product knowledge: What features and functionality are we delivering and how does that translate into a unique value proposition and set of customer benefits * Competitive landscape: What similar offerings exist in the market today and how does our offering differentiate From there, I leverage a messaging framework that leverages the learnings from above and includes details on the following: * Target Audience(s) * Market Trends * Problem Statement * General customer challenges / pain points * Elevator pitch * Key solution benefits (supported by features) -- I always keep these to 3-4 main ones! * Competitive differentiation * Customer evidence/proof points (if available) I usually go through several rounds of edits after receiving feedback from key internal and external stakeholders (though I typically keep it to key messages when seeking external feedback).

SurveyMonkey ;) In all seriousness though, I leveraged SurveyMonkey in the past and of course, present for message testing, product name testing, product concept testing, etc. With our Market Research panel, there's access to over 50M people and you can find your ideal respondants by chosing from 50+ demographics and qualifiers: age, gender, job function, geography, and more. I highly recommend it!

This pitch deck is commonly sited as one of the best: https://medium.com/the-mission/the-greatest-sales-deck-ive-ever-seen-4f4ef3391ba0 And I’m not surprised to see that because it has all of the elements you’d likely see in a pitch deck: a unique market shift and the challenges it presents, how your product solves, and customer proof points. It’s short, sweet and to the point. The only challenge is that it can be very difficult to find a market shift / trend that’s truly unique, so more often than not, a lot of pitch decks have the same setup, pointing to their product as the solution. I’ve heard this a number of times from CIOs who’ve expressed frustration about “long lead ups” in pitch decks and that they wish it would just get to the point faster. If you can nail the market shift and customer pain points well, and how your product uniquely solves, you’re golden.

There are 3 that I primarily look at that PMM influences (not directly drives): * Pipeline / Bookings (Demand gen / monetization efforts) * Win rates (Sales enablement and content) * Product adoption (Growth efforts) There are metrics that we can directly tie to PMM but that I find to be less meaningful, like engagement rates on content that we've created or product launch metrics which are more a moment in time. I think that it's totally fine that we don't directly drive the major metrics I mention above, but showing how PMM involvement / partnership can positively shift and impact each of those metrics is what's key.

From a tool perspective, I've been leveraging Crayon to get up to date insights on our competitiors and shifts in the competitive landscape. Doing win/loss interviews is also incredible insightful, and we leverage Clozd for that. But the best way I stay ahead of the competition is actually using competitive products, free or paid versions, to really understand their feature set and how it compares to ours. I also study their website, blogs and press releases to get an understanding of how they message and position themselves.