Messaging

Identify the best storytellers in your sales team, make them the hero by scaling their approach, and bring data from customer research to create credibility and alignment...

The top three mistakes are: using too many words, not talking to customers to validate messaging, and spending too much time on the messaging document rather than getting...

Be bold and specific — go after a focused niche with highly personalized, authentic messaging, and build a loud chorus of customer advocates who speak on your behalf. Th...

Use AI for testing and research — not for creating messaging — including building persona-based GPTs to pressure-test drafts and using AI to rapidly synthesize customer i...

Use a message house framework, but shift toward mocking up messaging in real-world formats (webpages, press releases) rather than treating it as a purely abstract documen...

This is such an important question right now. The biggest mistake I see: companies positioning AI as the benefit/ value of a new feature release. It’s not. AI is the mech...

A strong messaging framework should create clarity, force prioritization, and make execution easier across teams. The key elements I always include are:1. Problem stateme...

I always start big. I zoom out and ask: what’s happening in the market right now, and what is the customer actually struggling with today? What pressures are they under? ...

If you have the budget, platforms like Wynter and others make it incredibly easy to pressure test positioning with your target audience and get feedback in 24 hours or le...

My biggest tip: don’t just mash two value props together and call it “better together.” That falls flat every time.Great 'better together' messaging comes from finding wh...

What your buyers care about changes as your product matures towards market leadership. At the earliest stages, you show the vision and sell ‘possibility’. Then comes cust...

Here are a few ways you can test for message market fit before investing heavily in campaigns:Hire a research firm to do message testing with your ICP through interviews ...

This is the process I have usually followed:Get all your key stakeholders on a call and align on the objective first. What would success look like? Is there a metric that...

A/B testing is difficult in B2B as sales cycles are long and more often than not, there’s not enough volume to prove statistical significance. Even so, here are some thin...

Compelling messaging sits at the intersection of deep market, product, and customer understanding.If I were sitting down at a blank page & needed to craft compelling ...

My biggest advice is to do a bit of research to make sure you even need differentiated messaging in other markets before going through all of the trouble.Things you shoul...

Yes, the approach to creating messaging can vary for channels (website/email/paid social, etc) and altitude (product launch vs brand campaign) but only slightly. You stil...

Frankly? Don't. :-|Messaging doesn't exist in a vacuum, and at the very least you'll want to do some light research to gut check against existing messaging (if launching ...

Consistency in messaging across channels is something we’re still actively working to improve. Right now, we provide detailed messaging resources to our internal marketin...

Sales is a Reality Check.If there is a gap between Marketing messaging and Sales needs, it’s usually because Marketing is writing for the Product, while Sales is talking ...

At Etsy, competitive analysis plays a key role in making sure our messaging truly differentiates us in a crowded e-commerce landscape. Etsy stands for something truly dif...

Customer feedback is central to how we shape messaging at Etsy. We use feedback channels not only to decide what we build and communicate, but also how we communicate it....

Differentiation isn't about proving your product is 'better.' It’s about proving your understanding of the customer is deeper. You do that by speaking their language and ...

There is a trap in 'Category Creation' where we convince ourselves that because we are a new category, we are the evolution of the old one. But often, the 'Old Solution' ...

When strategy discussions attract too many opinions, progress slows because messaging becomes a debate over preference rather than a decision about outcomes. The most rel...

Strong content sales-enablement programs work because they help buyers make decisions faster and with less risk. In my experience, the most effective PMMs anchor enableme...

Here is how to create storytelling for b2b companies with multiple personas. Creating one broad persona for multiple audiences rarely works. Generic messaging doesn't add...

There are 5 things that marketers can do to make their messaging impactful to prospects, customers and their sales teams. Understand the problem your messaging is solvi...

Well first of all, it’s always tough to be a team of one. You are definitely going to have to ruthlessly prioritize and as a team of one, it can be easy to get stuck as t...

I mentioned this in an answer above, but AI has completely changed my workflow. It's really sped up the process, mostly in the research you're able to do on your market s...

Yes — and the biggest mistake I’ve seen is treating re-storying as a creative exercise instead of an organizational one.The danger isn’t saying something new. It’s saying...

I assume AI will make “fine” content cheap and everywhere. That means originality has to come from somewhere else.For me, that “somewhere else” is proximity to real momen...

I don’t start with slides. I start with listening.Before trying to align anyone, I talk to sales, product, and execs separately and ask the same simple questions: why do ...

Short answer: long enough to make one clear point, short enough to keep momentum. For most platforms, that usually means under a minute — but clarity beats duration every...

I’m pretty skeptical of fully automated messaging pretending to be personal. People can feel it, even if they can’t articulate why.Where AI has helped most for me is behi...

Distilling complicated tech into simple stories can be challenging, but I've relied on one of the most basic frameworks to do this since I was a junior PMM, and it consis...

I’ve been guilty of this myself: using data as proof before the audience understands the problem.What I’ve learned is that data works best when it arrives late, not early...

The biggest shift for me was realizing most decks fail before slide one. They fail because no one agreed on what decision the deck is meant to drive.I’ve learned to force...

I’ve never seen storytelling stick because someone declared it important. It sticks when people see it work.In one org, we talked endlessly about “better narratives,” but...

The biggest mistake I see is treating launches as surprises. Buyers hate surprises.In one release cycle, we seeded the problem months ahead — blog posts, sales conversati...

PLG taught me humility. You don’t get to explain yourself.In sales-led motions, storytelling can unfold over time — discovery, objection handling, reframing. In PLG, the ...

I don’t start with a framework. I start with discomfort.In one role, our “enterprise story” kept falling flat. When we listened to actual calls, it became clear we were a...

Consistency doesn’t mean sameness. I learned that while working on a global product where EMEA, APJ, and North America all insisted they were “totally different markets.”...

I learned this the painful way early in my career. We once jumped straight into storytelling — beautiful decks, customer quotes, polished narratives — without alignment o...

The gap usually isn’t technical knowledge — it’s proximity. PMMs don’t need to become engineers; they need to get closer to where decisions are actually made.The fastest ...

I’ve lived in two different worlds when it comes to validation.At Google and DocuSign, we conducted formal external research. We could do maxdiff studies and run conjoint...

A great marketer reads the room and understands what the customer needs. For every customer presentation, I always create a bespoke presentation for them. The main narrat...

I'd argue that the story should not differ internally versus externally. I've found that if you're using inconsistent terminology or language when describing your brand o...

I mostly use AI tools to conduct research, refine copy, and create visual assets. Sometimes gen AI is still a hit or miss, but it works much more reliably when you've con...

There's two place I usually go to for inspiration:The customer baseGreat storytelling examples far away from SaaS marketingYour customers are going to have very specific ...