For a highly technical product offering, how much messaging emphasis should be placed on technical value versus overall business value that your solution provides?

If by technical value, you mean “what does this thing actually do?” - a lot. Most technical categories are super crowded (and if they’re not crowded, they’re nascent and not well-understood), so being precise on “we’re different in that we solve these problems in these ways” is super important so that those details aren’t left entirely for SE’s in a discovery meeting with a prospect. If you have a highly technical product offering chances are you also have highly technical users/decision makers ...Read More

[Insert “Why not both?” meme] :)The best thing you can do is bring these stories together – when technical value solves business value, you have yourself a winner. (I don’t think I’ve ever encountered the inverse of that, now that I think about it)This manifests itself in a number of ways, but you almost always needs an explicitly budgeted project to attach to. Thinking top down – execs who mandate certain initiatives send managers out looking for technical solutions. When a practitioner tries a ...Read More

The answer is you need both, but targeted to the right audience: business value for the economic buyer and technical value for the user / implementer. In some cases, the buyer AND the user are technical personas (e.g. Github). In other cases, the roles are split. For example, for mParticle, the buyer/champion is the Director / Head of Marketing Technology, but the data engineer is the implementer. In this case, the message to the data engineer is: We make your life simpler. We take care of data ...Read More

If you get to know who you're talking to, it's a lot easier to know what to say. That's a core tenet of messaging and being a good conversationalist in general. Your first step with a question like this is to establish buyer personas. Who's involved in the buying committee? Are they the key decision maker or an influencer? What do they need to know? If you don't know, start by doing win/loss in partnership with your revenue teams. Try to get a handle on who was involved in recent purchase decisi ...Read More

I think a good exercise for figuring out how to balance the technical value and business value is to force yourself to write a single sentence with both your “why”—your business value—and your “how”—your unique approach that either creates value they thought was unattainable, or eliminates pain they thought was unavoidable. This is also useful for anchoring/orientation. Nothing else about your messaging matters if they don’t know what you’re trying to solve. Non-technical example: “The peanut bu ...Read More

This is all dependent on the personas you're trying to target. In my opinion, your positioning should not change, but you should have messaging specific to your buyer and/or user personas, or those who will be influencing the purchase in a B2B context. For example, when we're talking about the breadth of offerings we have in Morningstar Direct for financial professionals, we need to ensure that we're addressing the overall business value to those execs who are making the decision to purchase our ...Read More