How do begin to formulate your messaging? Do you generally begin with the product management team, sales team etc?

In the Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, he says "comapnies that don't have a clearly articulated story don't have a well-thought-out strategy. The company story is the company strategy." With that said, that is a good starting point to consider. Your story must explain at a fundamental level why you exist. Why does the world need your company? Why do we need to be doing what we're doig and why is it important? Working with product management to make sure the story we are communicati ...Read More

You begin with the customer - either buyer, user, or both, depending on the objective of your messaging. We should definitely consult with internal experts in product, sales, customer success, and other customer-facing teams. However, it is important to take their input as one source of information. Messaging is actually the middle step of product storytelling. The order of formulating a story starts with: Positioning - How do we want our product to be perceived in the market? What unique value ...Read More

Our messaging and positioning starts with this framework below. We combined messaging and positioning into one document and have it built out for each product, solution, and industry. We engage with product management to start and confirm the value proposition, key personas and their pain points based on current learnings from customers. Then we validate our messaging with sales, presales to gain insights into prospect conversations.  This has become the guide for the content/editorial team and ...Read More

Start with the customer. If you start anywhere else, you're likely to run into a lot of issues. While there are a number of contributing factors here, the core of it is you want to start with what your buyers think matters, not what you think matters. That said, I think a big part of the Product or Solutions Marketing role is to aggregate information from a variety of sources and distill it into simple and compelling messaging that generates customer demand and arms GTM teams to turn it into rev ...Read More