How do you ensure messaging is used by other marketing & sales teams effectively?

A former marketing leader I worked with always emphasized the need to "market your marketing". It takes time, is often the last thing I want to do after spending months working on a deliverable (or entire Bill of Materials), but it's arguably the most important thing we do. 

Since our messaging is often most consumable in the form of customer-facing slides, we often start with a canonical pitch deck (that is maintained in our enablement hub), demo, and website. 

From there, it's a hub-and-spoke model of updating one-pagers, blogs, and other internal and external materials. Since no pitch is identical (I find most reps build their own frankendecks to fit the needs of the customer), ensuring that we have a single source of truth in the form of a canonical deck is accessible, we have confidence that at least the most important messages will reach our intended audience. 

For major messaging overhauls, we've also launched required enablement trainings for account teams to ensure they can speak to the critical messages. 

At HubSpot, I started creating what I called "Product Marketing Guides". This was a ~15 page document that was polished and nicely designed so as to feel like a reliable source of truth. The Product Marketing Guide included a detailed overview of the product positioning, pricing, benefits, features, and competitive comparisons. It also included a complete glossary of terms (think feature names and descriptions). This ended up being a really valuable resource because it could easily be shared with content creators and give them all of the ingredients they needed to be successful. It was helpful in creating pitch decks, and ensuring our agency partners understood our positioning. Perhaps the coolest use case was when we went to launch a brand campaign with a new creative agency, we were able to pass along this complete bible of our positioning and messaging and all of the details for them to work off of. The final ad campaign (which featured Kathryn Hanh as a pirate CEO) was on point and really aligned with the messaging we had set forth. The Product Marketing Guide is something I've continued to encourage and bring with me as a best practice. 

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? The same can be said for messaging being shared within Marketing and Sales organizations. If nothing is shared, how can one expect messaging to be used by the right teams?

I like to share Messaging in three stages: 1) Share out Work in Progress Messaging with key stakeholders so they feel like they can share their POV and optimize the Messaging before it's finalized , 2) Share out Finalized messaging via email launch + stakeholder syncs and 3) Follow-up to gather intel on if Messaging is working/not working/needs to be updated.  

• For stage #1 (Work in Progress): It's important to share Messaging with key Marketing & Sales stakeholders as Messaging should be a living & breathing document that consistently changes as the market and insights and customer needs consistently change. Messaging can get stale and as someone who creates Messaging, I'm not always in the Field getting the latest customer insights. So it's important I tap into my internal networks to ensure I'm gathering the right intel to build stronger Messaging.
• For stage #2 (Finalized): This is the critical step. It's best to do a mini-roadshow and share out your Messaging with Marketing & Sales stakeholders via 1 or multiple meetings. It's great to garner feedback, hear questions live and have a dialogue vs. just sending out Messaging via an email. You can do an email launch a first step and then follow it up with roadshow syncs.
• For stage #3 (Follow-up): This is an integral step to identify if the Messaging is working or not working or if it needs to be updated. Perform follow-up syncs with key stakeholders or ad-hoc Marketing and Sales representatives to gather more feedback.

Overcommunicate, overcommunicate, overcommunicate! We share messaging across multiple channels internally and often to remind people where to find the latest messaging. Most importantly, we use every opportunity we can to collect feedback so we can iterate and improve the messaging over time. Distribution channels include: 

• Slack channels
• Confluence Wikis
• Microsite (we even have T-shirts and Zoom backgrounds to remind people of the location)
• Regular stakeholder meetings

An inclusive approach to your positioning process is the best way to get buy-in and develop consensus for your positioning and messaging.

It should include informal and formal input and feedback loops with key stakeholders in sales, marketing, analyst relations, public relations, consulting, product management, support and management.

Start by making everyone aware of the process and let it be known that you are seeking input and feedback from start to finish.

Involving sales early and often throughout the positioning process is especially important for several reasons including it’s a step toward solving the alignment problem that plagues most B2B software and technology companies.

Once you have created your initial high-level messaging, share it with key stakeholders and get their feedback and input.

Use what they tell you to make changes and additions and then share the new work with them.

It may take another feedback loop or two to develop buy-in and consensus, and when you do it’s time to get management approval.

By doing so, you will overcome the biggest obstacle to successfully positioning your product – getting management team members to actually use your product positioning and messaging instead of their own special story about the product.

The inclusive nature of your positioning process should break down internal resistance some have to any work other than their own.

As you might expect, getting company-wide buy-in to your product positioning and messaging can take time and patience.

But if you are like most companies, it takes way too long to create every piece of marketing content because so many stakeholders have a say while it is being created.

Instead let them have a say during your product positioning process, so when you use it in your marketing content, they will like the content and approve it immediately.