Playbook Page

How Retool’s Product Marketing Team Increased Their Enterprise Pipeline By Building a Cohesive Messaging Framework

Anthropic Product Marketing Leader

Summary

In this playbook, I’ll share the journey Retool took at the end of 2022 to update our messaging to better resonate in the enterprise market. Our goal was to elevate our messaging by focusing on the business impact our platform enables. Throughout our process, we emphasized the importance of consistent go-to-market messaging and internalizing real proof points.

Retool is a Series C company with 300 employees that helps developers quickly build any custom tool that speeds up or automates critical business processes. When we decided to update our messaging, our product marketing team of four collaborated with our sales leadership, Head of Product, CEO, and an outside consultant. Specifically, we sought to update our message for the enterprise market and roll out a value framework that codifies Retool’s usefulness for our customers. I’ve actually run this exercise a few times with other companies as well, so I’ll share some nuances and similarities to my previous experiences.

Who this is for:

This playbook is for product marketers who are venturing into new markets, who are seeking to enhance their messaging and positioning for a new target audience, or who are updating messaging to drive business growth.

What you will learn:

How to develop a targeted messaging strategy that aligns with audience needs and preferences.
How to tailor messaging to the unique pain points and priorities of different companies and industries.
How to create a messaging framework with value drivers, problem articulation, and customer examples.
How to achieve internal alignment and rigorous documentation for a message that resonates.
Why you should continuously refine and adapt messaging to different segments and personas.
How to collaborate across Marketing, Sales, and Sales Development Representative (SDR) teams to test and iterate messaging.
The habit of embracing messaging as a daily practice, not a one-time exercise.
Gain valuable insights and results through a value framework approach, including pipeline growth, increased contract value, and market penetration.

Playbook Content

About Retool

Retool is a San Francisco-based, Series C company that helps developers build business software. Retool is a development platform where you can build custom web apps, mobile apps, and automations significantly faster than building from scratch, meaning you can speed up and automate much more of the tedious busywork that keeps your business running.

Thousands of companies, including DoorDash, Amazon, Pinterest, Volvo, and NBC, rely on Retool for everything from customer support to inventory management — and even sending rockets into space.

The need to up-level messaging for the enterprise

To succeed in the enterprise, we knew we needed to go beyond our roots with developers and really hone our messaging and positioning to effectively engage executives and business leaders. In conversations with our Head of Sales and CEO, our team acknowledged that we needed a company-wide orientation toward the enterprise landscape, their specific needs, and subsequently, updated messaging.

To aid in that process, we brought on an expert consultant to guide our team through the development of a robust messaging framework. Our goal was to codify all of our best messaging in a way that would allow us to train future teams to quickly articulate our value proposition across all go-to-market efforts.

Update Messaging Goals

The main motivation behind this project was to better capture enterprise business—generating more pipeline, accelerating existing pipeline, and winning as many enterprise deals as possible. By running a structured and research-driven process, we knew we could feed deep audience insights into the entire go-to-market motion.

Framework

Connect Your Value Prop to The New Buyer

Our company primarily focused on developers for the first five years, using a product-led growth (PLG) strategy. Over time, we’ve invested more and more into the enterprise market—and it became clear that we needed to tailor our messaging and positioning for a broader audience, including executives. This shift in focus necessitated connecting our value proposition to their priorities, and demonstrating the impact we could deliver.

The goals for updating our messaging were clear: more pipeline, faster pipeline, and more deals won.

The method required deeply understanding our target audience’s work environment, motivations, expectations, etc. Often, product marketing teams will update messaging without really investigating (or caring) about the business impact. But the best messaging is not what sounds the most “strategic”—it’s the messaging that gets you more of the right customers at the right time.

3-Step Process to Building the Value Framework

Our approach to building our Value Framework followed 3 key steps:

Understand Your Market: We engaged with industry experts and professionals, and recognized the importance of targeting non-customers to gather invaluable insights.
Develop the Full Framework: We transitioned to a comprehensive framework by incorporating real-life stories about companies benefiting from Retool.
Assemble the Final Positioning Message: We created a cohesive messaging document that guides all communication efforts, enables personalization for different audiences, and ensures the messaging remains relevant and consistent over time.