Whats your advice for rolling out a messaging/positioning shift to the business?

Work closely with the Sales team, particularly Moneyball Reps, Turnaround reps and Sales Managers, getting these stakeholders on board makes it easy to drive adoption across the wider organization. 

As PMMs, we (hopefully) have spent hours researching our target persona, how they would use the product, and our competitive differentiators before launching new messaging. We are convinced our iteration solves every weakness of the old messaging, but then we are shocked...SHOCKED, I TELL YOU, SHOCKED, when the sales team doesn't immediately adopt our new messaging house and just uses their familiar talk track. This isn't an accident. Take it from a former Account Executive; your sales team doesn't adopt your new messaging because when 50-70% of your compensation is variable, you stick to what you know. Anything new, including messaging, is scary because it threatens your livelihood.

That said, salespeople also love to emulate what works, so as a product marketer, if reps aren’t adopting your messaging, the best thing is to provide hands-on coaching to 1-2 reps and even help them navigate deals yourself to show them it works. The ideal state is working with a “Moneyball Rep” - a top performer with an early adopter mentality that other reps will want to emulate.  More often than not, reps happily volunteer when PMMs offer to help them with a sales pitch.  But if you can’t get Moneyball Reps to adopt your product enablement, the next move is to go to the “Turnaround Rep =” The Turnaround Rep is someone struggling to make quota; they are usually looking for any help they can get. If the Turnaround Rep increases quota using your new messaging, the rest of the sales team will sit up and notice.

That said, in larger organizations, sometimes not everyone responds to incentives, and there needs to be accountability, and that's where front-line managers come into play. I've launched products, messaging, and sales plays; some have succeeded, and others have not. But every failed launch has one thing in common: some stakeholders - senior executives, sales leadership, myself - expected PMM to "play traffic cop," - driving messaging adoption and holding sellers accountable when it’s not used. This is a recipe for disaster. It's just not in the job description and creates an adversarial relationship between sales and marketing that is the stuff of Corporate Bro videos. That's why manager enablement is essential. PMMs should preview messaging with sales leadership and align with them on a mechanism for holding front-line managers accountable for certification or adoption. At Outreach, we recently made executive deal support contingent on certification. PMMs should then meet with Management regularly to understand why sellers aren't adopting to provide necessary coaching.

All this being said - don't be afraid to adjust your messaging if it's not being adopted! Yes, there is a change curve to manage, but systemic non-adoption of messaging means there's something wrong with the messaging, not the team. Don't be so focused on ensuring the messaging is adopted that you don't listen to feedback from the team. The team may have given the messaging their best effort, but it didn't resonate with customers. When it comes to negative feedback, everyone has an opinion. One opinion is a data point, but multiple data points are a trend, and if you start to hear consistent reasons why the team is not adopting your messaging, it might be time for a change.