What are the different ways of testing the customer profiles and messaging for each profile?

I have NOT found success testing messages out of context, like in surveys. It’s hard for respondents to truly put themselves in a buyer’s mindset. I’d recommend putting messaging into practice, in context, in ways that you can test and iterate.  For example, look at lift in conversion on landing pages, ads, or emails with messaging A vs. messaging B. Put pages up on sites like UserTesting.com to hear first-hand from potential customers (I’ve found a lot of success with the screeners they offer).  Ask sales reps whether they’re having success with your materials, and where they’re hitting friction.  

As you learn what works, you should feed that back into your understanding of the customer.  Did the messaging that flowed from your customer profile resonate best?  If not, why not?  Reach out to a few more customers or throw some more tests up on UserTesting with specific questions, and continue to iterate from there.

I don’t count internal debate/discussion or “inside the building” opinions to be testing per se, so I assume you mean external validation. In the realm of enterprise software (which is where I’m coming from), I’ve found 4 ways (best run in parallel then rationalized) to test messaging once you have some initial draft/hypothesis messaging to test:

1. Hopefully your company has some sort of beta/early access program to validate new capabilities and products - usually managed by product. What customers say organically and unprompted during this beta/early access process (what actual words they use to describe what problems they’re trying to solve, how your solution works - or doesn’t - and how it helps them - or doesn’t) is the single most useful signal I’ve gotten for crafting messaging, particularly for something new. So as a PMM, join all of the calls and just listen. Don’t put your draft messaging in front of the customers for feedback, just listen carefully to what the customer’s going through and how they describe it. Chances are, their words (when rationalized across a handful of beta deployments) will give you the foundation you need to write compelling messaging for launch.
2. If you have budget, contract out for market research to be done with target personas in which the problem statement, solution/product description and value proposition is presented (even without screenshots or any type of demo) then ranked/scored both with and without your company name being attached to it. The key here is ensuring that the customer panel is selected correctly (this is super easy to do wrong and thus invalidate the entire exercise) and the information presented is clear and differentiated enough to provide specific feedback (so don’t ask about overarching things like “digital transformation” - get specific).
3. If you don’t have budget - and you sell enterprise software through standard procurement processes - get your hands on as many RFPs as possible and read them carefully. Make note of how exactly customers talk about what they need and be sure to make note of words and phrases that show up over and over again. You’re probably obscuring the value of what your product actually does in vague descriptors or cliches. What you pull out of reading a bunch of RFPs will improve your messaging, no doubt.
4. Again, this is more for enterprise software, and I know this might seem like a no-brainer, but reach out early and often for feedback from industry analysts (Gartner, IDC, Forrester, 451, Red Monk, etc). They talk to customers and likely every one of your competitors, plus most have practitioner backgrounds, so they know their stuff and have ideas to share. Lots of vendors make the mistake of treating analysts transactionally and developing adversarial relationships around rankings and such. That’s a huge mistake and, if that’s where your head’s at, change it today. If you genuinely approach analysts for their thoughts and ideas (so present for 10% of the time, listen for 90% of the time) you’ll be surprised at how frank many of these analysts will be and how helpful their feedback can be. Don’t take it all for gospel - be sure to triangulate and synthesize - but it’s a great input when gathered correctly.

This is the same as generally testing your messaging, but just segmenting your tests per audience or persona.

• a/b testing emails and landing pages
• using an agency to survey audiences for large brand campaings
• direct user interviews
• interviewing your frontline teams
• competitive research

Sometimes you don't have time to do all of the above and you have to go with your gut and then evolve it over time as you get to know your product, users, and market better.

When testing messaging, I like to start simple and practical by first talking to the people closest to the customer. That could be a sales team or a partnerships team. I typically bring hypothesis messaging to these experts and evaluate if changes need to be made for a given customer segment. 

After working with internal experts, it is usually time to bring messaging to customers. This often takes the form of interviews with target customer personas to get reaction to website / product copy. If your product has a B2B sales component, you can also do live testing of messaging in a set of client meetings. This approah is typically low cost (just editing some slides) and gives you data on whether or not your messaging works in the real world. With any customer test, I recommend that prior to any testing, identify the metrics or data you will use to make a decision about if your messaging is working. This will help you stay objective in your analysis. 

After user research, Alpha Testing / Pilots are a way to see if your messaging holds up in the real world. Can you actually get customers to use your product / commit to your pilot? If not, it may be back to the drawing board.