How do you approach getting approval for messaging from internal stakeholders like Product, Sales, and Customer Success?

The first step here is to share the WHY behind a messaging project. If you can get every group to align on that and the outcome, getting ‘approval’ is much easier. I start with a kickoff meeting and have often shared this article (linked below), particularly in startups where you may be dealing with multiple stakeholders who have not been through this type of project before. All those orgs listed - Product, Sales and CS - are key inputs of forming your unique value prop, but ultimately it’s up t ...Read More

Messaging is tricky, since everyone and their uncle tends to have an opinion on messaging :) The challenge with not having a clear approval process and roles/responsibilities defined upfront is that the review exercise will then typically lead to a lot of churn and take a long time to boot. So it’s really important to define the process upfront, including who the final approvers are, who needs to be informed, and who can provide feedback (you can use something like the DACI framework here). Ulti ...Read More

Oftentimes once we have a draft of positioning or messaging we’ll share it with a key group of folks (for example, sales & services enablement) for feedback. Usually this will go through a few rounds of revision, and once that is finalized we’ll present it to leadership to gain buy-in. One more thing that we’ve found really helpful — especially for larger launches/projects is using the DARCI project management framework to streamline who is giving feedback, and based on specific stakeholders ...Read More

Set a consistent expectation for what messaging entails. The best way to do that is to establish a common messaging platform you can use regardless if you are messaging a solution, product, or feature. Here is a sample messaging template. Filling out this templates ensures consistency and forces completeness every time new messaging needs to be developed and approved. The template requires details on target market/opportunity which provides critical context and aligns your messaging to the relev ...Read More

It’s important to set expectations up front in terms of what you are trying to accomplish, why it’s important and how it will be used. It’s easy for messaging related discussions to take a life of its own so aligning your stakeholders to the same goals will help focus the feedback you will receive. While PMMs are the drivers of messaging, it’s important to bring your stakeholders along as you test hypotheses and iterate on your messaging. They will often provide interesting perspectives that can ...Read More