Div Manickam

Our messaging and positioning starts with this framework below. We combined messaging and positioning into one document and have it built out for each product, solution, and industry. We engage with product management to start and confirm the value proposition, key personas and their pain points based on current learnings from customers. Then we validate our messaging with sales, presales to gain insights into prospect conversations.  This has become the guide for the content/editorial team and the other teams in marketing to help articulate business value. undefined [https://i.imgur.c...

Our team, Portfolio Messaging (product, industry and solutions) are part of the Product organization (I report to the Chief Product Officer) to help build synergy with Product Management and solutions team. We work closely with Product, Marketing and Sales to meet business needs. We have the process and team interlocks across Boomi from Demand Generation, Sales Enablement, Business Ops, Sales Ops etc. Here is a good read for the holidays on how to think about where product marketing would sit. It depends on the company needs. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/2019/...

When we had one product marketing manager (2015), we had the product knowledge to articulate business value and simplify technical concepts. With addition of solution and industry marketing managers, we evolved to product and solution marketing(2017), and we started to focus on buyer personas and customer pain points. This led to the evolution of portfolio messaging as the anchor for our team to help showcase our value and differentiation as compared to product management or marketing, where we own product, solution, and industry messaging. Today(2019), I am honored to support a team of 12 ...

This is something we would like to get better at within our team. We aspire to be persona-led and data-driven, but don’t have processes/tools in place to perform the right testing for messaging and positioning. Today, we are able to test messaging and positioning with the sales teams(joining customer calls for customer feedback), Customer advisory board. We have identified champions across sales, presales, etc. for focus areas or use cases (by solutions/products/industries) to help us test the messaging with biweekly guild meetings. We would like to put more processes and conduct surveys to...

Category creation is a unique messaging and positioning initiative when your startup is providing a differentiated value that doesn’t exist in the industry today. When I think about new markets like the subscription economy or SaaS platforms, these categories didn’t exist a few decades ago.  Every startup should look at existing categories and NOT try to fit into a category if that isn’t the value for customers. Often times, customer advisory boards help guide and share perspectives on the ecosystem and act as a sounding board for value creation for a new category.

It is recommended to start with one segment to test/iterate, to completely understand the buyer needs/value proposition and then build messaging for the other two segments. If it’s not unique for each segment, then it will be hard to position one overarching message. It will be challenging at first, but once you have the value proposition for each segment, you will naturally see the synergies and patterns. If the message is too broad, it wouldn’t mean anything to any specific persona. Always test the message with Competition. If you change your company to a competitor, can they say the sam...