What process can we put in place to guarantee that sales use the official product message, rather than crafting their own variation?

Guaranteeing every person the sales team uses "official" messages is a sisyphean task; when you step back to look at benefit vs. effort, it's probably not worth the effort. Instead, here's where I'd focus my time:

• Tier new messaging/resource rollouts like you would any launch – focus time, training, and effort on the most critical resources. For that content, gain buy-in from sales leadership to enable every team, including pitch certifications, on-demand resources including videos of salespeople tailoring the content to specific customers.

• Ensure the content is highly discoverable. Get in front of teams, join QBRs, highlight new content at SKO, and "promote" it within your sales tools to make sure it's easily findable by sales people who are juggling many responsibilities. If they can't easily find it, they're likely to assume it doesn't exist.

• Provide guidance on "key" slides/messages at the beginning of the deck. We include a single slide on most decks that tells the why behind slides and highlights the most critical slides in the deck as guidance for how teams might customize the content.

• Provide talk tracks that are customizable/focus on key messages rather than how you'd say it verbatim. Every sales person is different and no matter the role, every presenter has a different way of communicating ideas. Offer bullets with key messages and allow them to customize the talk track for each slide around those key messages.

• Monitor sales intelligence tools for gaps in understanding – and partner with enablement and sales leadership to revisit content and trainings.

Here are a few winning strategies to keep sales on message including:

• Sales often crafts their own variation of a product message to fill in gaps when the official version falls short or is incomplete. Ensuring that you've got clear, strong messaging that is up to date and readily accessible for reps to see helps prevent this from happening.

• Prioritize the single most critical message(s) and make sure reps are hammering it home.

• Learn from rep behaviour and adapt accordingly. Reps going off message can help identify hot spots that need better enablement, messaging, positioning, or even updates to the product itself. Harness this feedback loop.

• Make the official version the most attractive version to use by backing it up with strong product claims, 3P validation, case studies, and data driven insights. Make it the path of least resistance.

"Guarantee" is tough one, but a good way to make sure the official product message sticks is to make it stupid simple. I like to keep it to a 3 statement message. Early on when I worked at Oracle, this was a core rule for all PMMs, all our messages must follow a 3 pillar approach. And it all layered back up to the core 3 pillar Company message. So for my product, and this is YEARS the message was Scalable, Reliable and Secure. Then you think back and remember, ok how is it scalable? The story there was that our databases could handle more data than anyone, and grow, so the product could be used for years to come = a good investment.

Reliable - That one was easy, when you sell to DBAs, they want to make sure they didn't make a mistake choosing your product. Their core job depends on data being available when you they need it. This message reminded the sales team to talk about everything that helps makes sure the DBA did not make a mistake choosing Oracle.

Secure- This one brought the sales team's minds back to everything we offered from a security aspect. The fact that we had an Identity Management solution, firewalls, our vault product etc.

Thus by breaking down key value props you want the sales team to remember, having them categorized into 3 pillars and then expanding on them helps tremendously. I know because I would sit down with the teams and drill them and when they got stuck, I'd go back and say what were the 3 pillars, if you can't remember anything, just focus on the three pillars. From there they can get their brains turning and remembering all the core stories and messages we wanted to say. To this day, I still follow this concept and while it hasn't been a "guarantee" it's been pretty close.

I wouldn't focus on mandating that your sales team use the official product message word for word. Each sales rep has a style and way of delivering content that feels natural and confident. If you try to box them into a script, it will sound scripted and inauthentic.

Instead, give the sales team a framework of the message and the value points that they should try to touch on during each conversation. You may need to repeat these to them a few times (bonus points if you can share case studies and win stories that align with the points).