What do you use or do to get people to buy into your positioning plans and consistently using them?

Product marketing is often defined as the people who position the products, but I think it's as equally important (especially as you grow bigger) that Product Marketing is also the most cross functional role in marketing. Creating alignment, securing buy-in, and building momentum around a launch is just as important (if not more) as any positioning work you've done. After all what good is a great narrative if no-one put it to use? If you want to ace this there are two things you need to do reall ...Read More

Ah, a tricky one! There are a few things that you can do, starting with a core team that you trust to participate in the fluidity that is message development. Typically, this is a small group that can speak to all the core concepts that you need to discuss in detail. At Okta, this was our product management and product marketing team plus a couple of ‘super AE/SEs’ to provide field input.Once a baseline message has been developed, then it’s best to iterate quickly via testing. For example, we us ...Read More

Two words: customer stories! Product Marketers need to make sure that everyone is united in telling the same story about our product and its value. I always think of it like internal selling. And just like in the field, one of the most compelling ways to convince people is to use customer proof points to validate your position. Whenever I am enabling teams on positioning, I try to incorporate a customer story that revoleves around a few key points: What challenges was the customer trying to solv ...Read More

The key to getting adoption is to make sure you first get executive alignment along with bringing those teams (sales, marketing, product) along for the journey . As you're creating your positioning and messaging make sure you're getting sales, product, and marketing feedback. That way when you roll it out they will feel much more compelled to use it since they were part of the process.  Some other ideas: 1. Do an official " internal roadshow" where you roll this out to each team. Join team meeti ...Read More

Get your executive team aligned and bought in first - because you need them to champion this to the rest of the org, and to set the precedence by using your messaging regularly as they talk about the company. When you create new messaging - make sure you do internal activation in the form of training or some sort of a rollout. Make it fun, gamify it and do it over time so it sticks. Create Quizzes, give away prizes. Create content in different formats - docs, videos, intranet content, printed ma ...Read More

This is arguably the hardest part of positioning. In my experience, it has to start before you really start drafting positioning and as you're doing research.  First, talk with a few folks from your sales and CS teams and get a sense of any pain points they're hearing in the market. Gaining early buy-in from Sales will pave the path to making adoption a whole lot easier once positing is written. Next, once you have positioning drafted get feedback from the same group of individuals from Sales an ...Read More

This is the job within the job. You're always balancing two macro audiences: External (prospects and customers) and Internal (well, all your coworkers).  I'll reiterate what I've said elsewhere today. This is all about repetition, repetition, repetition. Put your messaging and positioning frameworks in a very visible place and refer to them constantly. Have a single slide that reinforces the pillars whenever you talk to other teams. One of my favorites - for a launch brief and planning kickoff, ...Read More

Product positioning is really a complex thoughtful approach, requiring perspectives on brand, pricing and packaging coming together. I believe strongly that its starts day-one when you build the product, define product features, who and where you want to compete with especially the type of customer segment. I find the exercise of positioning when done later as a PMM task gets muddled with "messaging". Because "messaging" can only do so much, if we don't get the first part of "why this product" i ...Read More

Of course it's difficult: Don't be fooled, just because you all work for the same company doesn't mean you're all responding to the same incentives. Start by asking what each of the three is trying to accomplish, and what success looks like for them. Then, as objectively as possible, consider if/how your positioning plan, as presented, corresponds with that. It probably doesn't, and there are probably some gaps that you, as the PMM, have mentally filled in automatically, but are still present fo ...Read More

Most important is to involve sales early and often throughout the positioning process to both gather intelligence you can't get anywhere else and also to solve the No. 1 problem in B2B SaaS and Technology - lack of alignment between sales and marketing. Throughout the positioning process seek input and feedback from key stakeholders. Once everyone buys in, the last step in the buy-in process is to get management approval. In this way, management team members will actually use the positioning rat ...Read More