What strategy do you use to ensure everyone internally agrees on what differentiates you from competition?

There is a difference between having alignment on "what's different" between you and your competition and "what differentiates" you from your competition. The latter is really about getting strategic alignment on 1) what your ideal customer profile (ICP) is, 2) who your real competitive threats are, and 3) which value props / feature sets are the ones you'll lean into developing and messaging to the market.

Because this work is all about making sure your ICP chooses you. And they will choose you because you're good at conveying you're the best at the things they care about most.

So, you need to align on those 3 things:

1. The ICP

   • Who are they? Demographics, firmographics

   • What do they care about? Top challenges, top benefits they're looking for, outcomes they're trying to drive

2. The real competitive threats

   • Are you playing for the high-end of the market? The low-end? Somewhere in between?

   • Who are the competitors in your ICP's consideration set?

3. Value props you'll lean into

   1. What are the top things your ICP cares about most that you do better (or aspire to do better) than your competitive threats?

We actually just went through a corporate messaging alignment exercise at SurveyMonkey, and these are the steps we took:

1. We did an internal survey with leadership to gauge alignment on some critical elements of our corporate strategy: who our ICP is, the top challenges we solve for, why we win, where we fall short for customers, etc. We found out we weren't as aligned as we thought we were.

2. We did some extensive ICP analysis:

   • Where are we currently seeing success? We looked at revenue, retention, LTV, AOV, win rate, etc. cut by department, level, industry, company size, use case, and more

3. We first got exec alignment on the ICP (this took a few rounds of debate)

4. Once we were aligned on the ICP, we did research on what the ICP cares about

   • We ran a product value prop MaxDiff study with our ICP to get a stack ranked order of importance, and we also validated things like top challenges, benefits, and ultimate outcomes

5. We crafted corporate messaging that went through a few rounds of executive-level feedback

6. We rolled it out to leadership first, then the entire company

7. We ensured the go-forward strategy was embedded in the company-wide approach to annual planning

Some learnings & tips if you want to do something similar:

• Get executive-level buy-in. In this case, our global head of marketing drove the effort with PMM & Brand, with CEO sponsorship.

• Make sure your recommendations are backed by data. It will be easier to get alignment across functions if you can point to data showing that these are the things our customer cares the most about

• Don't rush it. You can move fast, but you'll want to save room for feedback & iteration before company-wide roll out.