Alissa Lydon

At its most basic, messaging is about answering 3 key prompts: * What is the problem facing the market today? * What solution (generally) will help solve this problem? * What does your product do to help solve it? To me, competitive falls squarely underneath that third bullet point. It's one thing to list the entire list of features for your product, but the real exercise in messaging is to find the differentiating features (i.e. what makes your product different from "the other guys"). Therefore, it's important to map your key capabilities with the competition to understand where that white space is, because that is where your messaging focus should live.

I've read a couple of great books on building messaging. The two I enjoyed the most were: The Aha Moment by Andy Cunningham. She has worked with some of the most iconic brands in tech (including Apple during Steve Jobs' heyday). She provides a great framework for understanding what she calls "your positioning DNA." And she not only presents her concepts in a very straightforward way, but she also supplements them with lots of great stories from her experiences. Storynomics by Robert McKee and Thomas Gerace. This is a book that gets detailed regarding the anatomy of good stories, and how these building block fundamentals used by writers can be used for both brand and product messaging in the corporate world. It's very rooted in the psychology of storytelling and is also filled with lots of great case studies and real-world examples.

Almost everything I learned about messaging I learned by watching other companies who do it really well. These can be similar players in your space (even competitors), or even products/brands you really admire. What are the things that they talk about that help them stand out, and how can you apply it to your own product/industry? I've also read a few good books on messaging, which I address in another question below!

For new products and major features, I find it invaluable to go through a complete messaging exercise. This is an iterative process that involves collaboration with Product, Marketing, and Sales. I've developed a template for this over the years that combines the things I liked most from the past messaging exercises. While this list is not exhaustive, these are the things I have found are most valuable to building messaging that resonates not only externally, but also internally with the teams that need to market and sell the product: * Define worldview - What is the problem we are seeing in the market that necessitated the creation of this product/feature? * Define solution - What have we built that helps solve the problems defined in our worldview definition? * Positioning statement - How are we differentiated from similar players in the market? * Competitive value - A deeper dive into the competitive landscape, how we compare at the feature level, and our differentiated value. * Messaging matrix - This is the holy grail of how to message to various personas. This includes a mapping of value props, key messages, and features/use cases to the challenges faced by different personas. I often abstract this out into its own asset (which I call the Value Framework) that acts as a kind of cheat sheet on how to message to various personas.

When I am looking for messaging and positioning validation from outside the org, I find that people engage more with a story than with a static framework. And as far as stories go, everyone much prefers pictures to reading dense Powerpoint slides! To that end, putting together a solid "marketecture" is a great place to start. This allows you to paint the picture of not just your product, features and functions, but you can also start assigning value and differentiated messaging to each of them. I find this especially helpful with current users/customers. They know the technical details (i.e. architecture) of your product, but might have a different opinion on the value. Showing them that overlay in a visual is a great way to start a conversation, and get some really rich insights. While Product Marketing should own the messaging/positioning framework, its success hould be measured by everyone in the marketing org (again, this is all a team sport!). A successful messaging strategy affects every stage of the funnel - from awareness to advocacy and beyond. Therefore, I believe there are plenty of opportunities to measure its success. For me, the real question I want to answer is, "Am I enabling everyone on my team on this message, and do they feel empowered to deliver it in market?" That requires close collaboration with various stakeholders, deciding on shared objectives and results, and committing to continual improvement.

Let the data tell the story of your ICP! Use your existing customer base as a starting point. Take your best customers and look at them in aggregate - what patterns emerge across industries, company size, tooling adoption, maturity indicators, etc.? From there, you have a great base to help inform outbound targeting efforts. If you're starting from scratch, then lean on internal expertise across the org (Sales, Product, Exec) and market data to build your hypothetical ICP. From there, you can validate with external research, or test via ABM programs. In either case, it's all about finding a diverse set of data sources, letting that data guide you to a hypothesis, and continually testing and iterating.

For organizing and keeping track of launch activities, I created templates that I have carried with me from company to company. They contain all of the best elements from past launches (both my own and other PMMs I have learned from). And frankly, there is nothing fancy about them - they are mostly just spreadsheets! It's not to say that there aren't tools that can help streamline processes - I've seen launches effectively organized in Trello and Asana, for example. But what I like about my collection of self-made templates is that they are easily customizable and flexible to fit my immediate needs. I also feel connected to them, which helps me feel confident in implementing them. However, as important as templates are to provide a single source of truth, I believe that the real trick to ensuring continual alignment is to find spaces for constant communication. For many PMMs this usually means weekly (or even daily) launch standups. For me, I've found success in ritualizing a weekly "What's Shipping" call with all of the key stakeholders in the org (Product, Sales, Marketing, Success, etc.). This is a standing meeting where we check in on all launches in flight, review the launch plan spreadsheets, perform retros post-launch, and more. If we don't have any launches to talk about, we don't have the meeting. But by creating a constant touchpoint, it builds a habit within the org that we are always thinking about launches. As a result, everyone feels more confident with how launches is progressing and can pass on relevant information to their teams so everyone is in the know. In short, it's all about constant communication!

Messaging is made up of two equally important components - Brand and Product. Brand messaging encompasses the product, vision, market, customers, culture, and more. It can be much more aspirational and future-facing. This is normally owned by corporate marketing, or maybe you have a specific brand team that cultivates this message. Product messaging (as you can probably guess) is solely focused on the product. More specifically, it speaks to the problems your product is solving, who you are solving it for, and the impact it has on those personas and their business. While there is some room for future-facing vision, it is much more grounded in reality than a brand message and is often connected to a roadmap. This is what Product Marketing typically owns. For Product messaging, there are several frameworks you can use. But the best that I have seen start telling a high-level story, and then drill down into specific personas, pain points, features, and impacts. To keep it easy, think about what you want your website to look like. What are the top value props you would want on the home page? And if someone liked what they saw and clicked on your product page, how would you go one level deeper? What use cases would you want to showcase? Which features speak best to that use case that you can show in a short video? Rather than throwing everything into product messaging, you can get more bang for your buck by focusing on these key stories and then building from there.

There are two levers I think about when deciding how we should measure launch success: * Are users successfully adopting the product/feature? * Are we successfully attracting users to adopt the product/feature? The first bullet point is all about the product experience, and speaks to the partnership PMM must have with PM to effectively measure usage and engagement. Product might have north star metrics that you can align with, or sometimes it requires identifying new usage metrics and partnering with PM to instrument them. The second is all about marketing and sales, mainly how PMM enables those teams to create and execute campaigns that resonate in the market to meet revenue goals. There are a ton of metrics you can attach to (website visits, trial sign-ups, conversion/win rates, number of paying customers, etc.). You can see how all of these KPIs would get overwhelming, so I don't recommend trying to attach to all of them in a launch. This is where launch tiers can help guide you. Is this a major new feature that we think will open up new personas, use cases, etc.? You'll want to prioritize KPIs around funnel metrics and ARR numbers (new business, upsell/cross-sell). How about a smaller update that improves the user experience? Rotate more towards product usage and adoption. Of course, these are simplistic examples. But sometimes it's good to start from that perspective, rather than try to boil the ocean with too many KPIs for a launch.

Just like in marketing, sales enablement is all about knowing your audience. At the top level, that means understanding what motivates them (i.e. closing more deals, expanding existing customer base, etc.), and tailoring your enablement to help them understand how a new product/feature will help them achieve those goals. To refine this, I like to bring sales stakeholders into the enablement creation process so they can advocate for their team's needs. The side benefit of this is that it gives your enablement program a better chance of success. Additionally, remember that there are different audiences within a revenue org. It's not just salespeople, there are often technical sales and customer success personas. In some cases, I find it helpful to break enablement into those smaller groups to cater to their specific needs. For example, sales aren't as interested in the technical nuts and bolts of a product or feature, but for technical sales it is crucial they understand the inner workings to build effective demo stories. For that reason, I often have separate "technical enablement" sessions to best meet those needs, as opposed to trying to lump everything together and risking the chance of losing people along the way. Finally, I think we sometimes forget that humans all learn in different ways, and none of us fully understand something the first time we learn it. For those reasons, I try to find ways to present information in different ways, and not be afraid to repeat myself in various forums. For example, some people might learn best visually with slides, others might be auditory learners and love a podcast-style training session. And no matter the mediums you use, be sure to share them widely across various channels (email, Slack, sales enablement platforms, etc.).