Aliza Edelstein

* Ensure you have leadership buy-in * Roadshow it across teams in the company, starting with those that will be using it on a regular basis * Get your leadership team to amplify it—everywhere (town halls, all hands, internal emails, etc.) * Ask customer-facing teams to include it in various public places, like their LinkedIn profile description

I recommend creating an internal glossary for your company so everyone shares the same understanding. Here's how I think about it: * Features - Specific functionality of a product. * Core differentiators - What are the 3-5 unique capabilities you have that separate you from the competition? What are you better at? * Solution - What problem do you help your target customer solve? A solution completes the sentence: “We help you…” * Benefit - What overarching benefit do you deliver for your target customer solve? A benefit completes the sentence: “[We help you X,] so you can...”

The key to keeping messaging initiatives on track is to ensure internal stakeholders are bought in and represented throughout the process. In addition to making sure they feel heard, your messaging, launches, and campaigns will be better with their input because they bring different perspectives to the table, and diversity of thought does two wonderful things: 1. Helps you see things differently 2. Surfaces blindspots in your thinking In terms of specific questions, for a messaging initiative for example, I’d recommend 2 things: 1. Start broad. Ask what challenges are they facin...

I view the competition as a distraction. Depending on your company’s space, new competitors will pop up every day, or existing ones will launch something new that surprises you. As a PMM, it’s your job to know about this—and if you have a lean team, I recommend you closely partner with Sales Enablement, or User Research, or Product, or some team that does have the bandwidth to always keep their ear to the ground and inform you. My advice is to identify your top competitors and be sure to get agreement from leadership that these are the competitors you actually care about (i.e., secure agre...

I see three prongs to creating good messaging: understanding the customer, understanding the market, and understanding the product. I’d recommend the following to coach a new product marketer: 1. Listen to customers. Join sales calls, set up new calls, listen to recordings, or read transcripts. Learn their pain points and listen to how they speak. 2. Know the market. Understand what competitors offer and how they’re positioning it. Read their websites, search for them on Google to see their SEM ad copy, read review sites. See how they position themselves so you can di...

I see three parts to driving alignment, both with execs and among all other stakeholders: 1. First, bring them along for the journey. Messaging cannot be done in a silo, and it’s difficult to properly adopt if not everybody feels bought in. Interview your execs and stakeholders to learn their perspective, where they feel the company or product is differentiated, what customer pain it solves, what benefits it delivers. The answers will vary and will be meaningful inputs as you craft and test your messaging. 2. Second, set regular check-ins and milestones with execs a...

I think about PMM messaging and positioning more as the internal reference by everyone in the company to ensure a common understanding and language of who we build for, what we build, and why. Brand converts that into how you say it out loud. PR and Comms further translate this for different audiences (press, media, analysts, etc.).

At a high level, for product messaging, you should have these things: * Elevator Pitch * Unique Value Proposition * Competitive Positioning * Supporting Proof Points For persona messaging, add: * Buyer Personas/Ideal Customer Profiles * Top Use Cases For Elevator Pitches, I like to structure them as follows (you can massage these so they don’t feel too rigid, but this is the gist of how you set up the story): * Challenge * Solution * Benefit For the Unique Value Proposition*, I like to structure them as follows" * Who is our primary audience? (buyer or user) * What prob...

Oh, this is a fun question! The best successes, for me, have been when our metrics have improved as a direct result of the messaging (which you can determine through testing and isolating the variables to just the messaging. Two successes stand out to me: 1. At SurveyMonkey, I had the privilege of working on corporate messaging that tied together our self-serve product and our eight B2B products in one cohesive, overarching narrative. When we tested the new messaging, we saw a statistical performance increase in SEM ad click-through rate, which translated to a significant...