What are the biggest obstacles you typically encounter in implementing new messages for a product or service?

In the B2B space, getting Sales to fully adopt new messaging is almost always a challenge, especially for a product or service that has existed for quite some time. In many cases, you’ll find that even after extensive training, they may end up reverting back to their standard discovery and pitch. Old habits are hard to change but there a couple of tactics that typically work out well: Ensure you have alignment and buy-in with Sales leadership. Sales reps trust their managers and leaders more tha ...Read More

What has been challenging for me in the past is not having a ton of reference customers and/or data to back up messaging for a new product launch. This is a delicate balance between making sure that you have product-market fit before a major launch, having those reference customers with some data and wanting to wait before you have "enough." Depending on the market conditions, you may just need to ship and launch and then work to really target early adopters, get some good data validation and th ...Read More

New messaging for a product is always both challenging and fun. But the obstacles tend to be unique to each situation. Let me explain through a few scenarios. Evolving product line: Your product used to be a widget, but is now much broader with a lot of new features that were added along the way. The biggest obstacle is to put new contours and define this product. Everyone agrees it isn't just a widget anymore, you need new positioning to stop looking like a niche player in the market. The bigge ...Read More

How I think about it.... The biggest obstacle isn’t one thing – it’s the gap between what sounds good internally and what actually works in a conversation. That gap shows up in a few ways: sales falling back to old habits messaging without real customer proof unclear positioning behind the scenes You close that gap by: building messaging with sales, not for them testing it early in real calls tightening it based on what buyers respond to If you do that, most of the “adoption” problem goes away o ...Read More