What are some strategies that you've used to share messaging guides internally and ensure commercial team alignment?

At HubSpot we have a “master” positioning guide that exists for every core product and is shared on a central wiki that everyone can access. This positioning guide helps inform the work of marketers, sales enablement, and many other customer-facing teams. To ensure alignment we work closely with these other teams, such as sales enablement, to build assets like “Demo Like a Pro” that carry our positioning and messaging and transform it into an actual sample demo from a sales rep. This is just one ...Read More

Generally, product marketing creates messaging guides for new products, features, pricing, campaigns, company positioning, etc. While develop the messaging guide, we typically solicity input from other teams and individuals including product management and other marketers like communications/brand, demand gen and marketing leadership. As the messaging gets near final we do a final review with sales enablement, our sales advisory council (a handful of individual reps and saleas managers) and fina ...Read More

In my view, the whole point of messaging guides is that they are shared as widely and as openly in your organization as possible. We actually keep a "launch tracker" document (google sheets file) that has the latest on every launch we're planning. This document is publicly available and very widely distributed. We link to the positioning guide for the new product or set of features there. In addition, we've built really strong relationships with counterparts in Sales, Marketing, and Customer Suc ...Read More

We are still working on refining our process here, however, our usual process is to attend the commercial team all-hands to notify them of any new messaging guides and materials and then we record a more in-depth Loom video that walks through the messaging in more detail and with more nuance. We house these looms in a Sales Library in Notion. By recording it, reps and CSMs can review it more than once if needed in their own time. It also doubles as great onboarding material. We have a system to ...Read More

One thing I try not to do is share content or messaging without walking the person I want to get feedback from through the context and purpose live on a call/zoom. Sending something over for feedback without the right context can be disastrous...especially if they share with others and expand any confusion/dissent to others.  I will typically walk them through a google slide or doc with what we're trying to move towards and then offer them the opportunity to provide feedback live or in the doc o ...Read More

What I’ve learned from great leaders who are able to inspire and motivate is to gain consensus before you walk into the room. This is pretty much how I have shared messaging guides internally to ensure alignment. If you are really starting from scratch, hosting a workshop to hear everyone’s opinions works well. If you are adding value to something that already exists, have 1:few meetings to get specific feedback on voice, tone, choice of words, etc. Then, share it more broadly at a team meeting. ...Read More

I mentioned in another post that I have come up with a structured process for messaging development. with my team of product managers and product marketers, I work through a series of questions that force us to define and articulate our differentiation. This results in a number of messaging framework and source messaging documents that we hand off to the Marketing and Sales teams. We see these types of documents as foundational - the North Star for how we tell our story. Other marketing teams ex ...Read More