How do you get alignment on the launch message?

In crafting the messaging, we get input and feedback not just from product management, but also from sales, executive leadership, and other key stakeholders. We also reach out to analysts and to customers to make sure that our thinking will resonate with the external market in general. It is an iterative process that helps ensure that our message will land in the market and be used by our sellers and partners as they go-to-market.

I'm sure every marketer reading this can agree, everyone has an opinion on messaging! Getting alignment is amongst one of the hardest things we do as PMMs. Here are a few tips to get started: 

1. Develop a roles & responsibilities framework. The most important step! You will want to document who your stakeholders and ultimate decision makers are. Make sure these roles are agreed upon and socialized broadly. Both RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed) or RAPID (recommend, agree, perform, inform, decide) work great for this so everyone knows their place.   
2. Get qualitative feedback. Interview existing or beta users who have experience successfully working with the produt, internal stakeholders, key decision makers, and executive leadership that may have a vested interest.   
3. Get analyst feedback. Validate your message with analysts in your industry to ensure it will land and stand out in the market. Analyst feedback on market fit is great to have in your back pocket when trying to get that final signoff too!    
4. Test internally. Test headlines, calls to action, and taglines with your digital team and run a few mock sales cycles with your sales team to find any gaps    
5. Get signoff from your decision makers. A good goal is to never have more than 2 final decision makers otherwise it will take forever to get signoff. 

Getting alignment early and checking in often is incredibly important for not only a successful launch but also ensuring that people are bought in and excited for it. Here’s how I approach it:

• Collaborate with Key Stakeholders Early: Make sure you bring in product managers, customer support, engineering, design and marketing teams from the very beginning. Each group will have valuable insights about customer pain points and help you to develop the best possible messaging strategy.

• Conduct Messaging Workshops: A way to get all these different groups together and aligned early on is through a messaging workshop. If you’re remote, you can use tools like Mural to brainstorm and whiteboard together. It’s a good idea to do some prep work in advance. I like to level set everyone on who our target audience is, relevant pain points, what we’re launching, and any research we’ve done to date that could help inform messaging. Having people actively contribute like this helps to ensure buy-in from all departments.

• Test Messaging with Customers: Use focus groups or 1:1 user interviews, surveys, or even A/B testing with your customers to validate messaging. Share this feedback with your cross-functional team and stakeholders so they can see how direct customer feedback is helping to refine the messaging and ensure that it resonates.

• Create a Messaging Framework: A messaging framework will help you more easily showcase, share and get feedback on the messaging strategy, helping you to get everyone on the same page. This also ensures that communications—whether from PR, lifecycle marketing, ads (any of your marketing channels) and in product —are aligned. Here’s what I include in my messaging framework (in addition to background info on the target audience and the objective of the launch):

  • Overall positioning

  • Value propositions (what are the core benefits)

  • Reasons to believe (what features in product support the value props)

Alignment is critical to a successful launch. There are two types of alignment to consider: internal and external. For both, get alignment EARLY and OFTEN. Take time to outline which internal and external stakeholders you need to align with. For a large launch, this can include product management, marketing, customer success, leadership (internal) and key customers, analysts, general maket (external). Write out the key objectives and R+R and work forward from there. I recommend weekly internal meetings where necessary to keep alignment, as things often change.