Eric Bensley

There's no perfect way to do this. People hate when I say this but when it comes to messaging, I'm much more into qualitative feedback vs. quantitative. If you similarly hate me, feel free to move on. If not, here are a few qualitative measures I use: * Can your sales team remember it and pitch it on calls? If you use call recording software with your team, take a listen. If your sales team is pitching it, it's working. If not, it's not. * Do a webinar or event and ask for feedback after. Incentivize response with free swag. Session scores call tell you a lot about how your messaging landed. * Is more work "falling out of it"? What I mean by this is whether other people are building on top of it. ARe they thinking about it could be used for their segment and iterating on it. The best messaging becomes an organic force at your company.

This is a fun one that I've spent many hours chatting about with folks. Positioning is more of a high level concept about where you fit into your target audiences head in a different way than anyone else, Messaging is more about how you say that position to the target audience. Let's take a made-up example: Let's say I market an organic dog food that has no processed ingredients and sustainable packaging. (there's an eating your own dogfood joke here but i digress) Positioning = The only dog food made of all organic ingredients and sustainable packaging. Messaging = Your best friend deserves only the best. All Organic. All Substainable.

Call me old school but I think positioning statements do this VERY well. Here's an exercise I've used and seen success with in building alignment on the "Why" of a company or brand. 1. Create list of key stakeholders who have a say in your value prop (think like key sales leaders, product, marketing, etc) 2. Create a meeting for the entire group to get together and work through the value prop. 3. Assign homework in advance: everyone send you a completed version of the positioning statement for your company or product 4. Meet live to discuss the differences and align on each line of the positioning statement In my experience, the biggest challenging behind creating a value prop is not writing words...it's getting clarity around the problem you're solving, the market, the competitive landscape, etc. Our job in PMM is to elevate this conversations to drive clarity. I like positioning statements to do this quickly. If you're not super familiar with positioning statements, I really like April Dunford's book called Obviously Awesome.

I think it's very helpful. For those reading this that haven't read Clayton Christensen's work, here's a good summary of the concept of "jobs to be done". When we create messaging, we need to be focused on what problem we're solving. I'll give you an example of when I worked on GoToMeeting. This was early days and not many people used online meetings, way before Zoom. If you think about what job GoToMeeting was solving, many thought the problem was better collaboration. You get screen sharing and video conferencing, that's better collaboration/communication right? Yes....and no. That's not the job people were hiring GoToMeeting to solve. People were hiring GoToMeeting to help them not travel as much. That's a much more specific job. Based on that, we created the marketing campaign with this line - "Do More. Travel Less." This was a highly successful campaign because it spoke to the job folks where trying to solve with GoToMeeting.

Sellers are coin operated by nature. They have to deliver $$$ to the business to be successful. I'm hesitant to say you want to change their behavior. I think a better way to say this is you need to align product knowledge and sales technique to their objective: hitting quota. How do you do that? * Showcase account teams that are seeing success with deep product knowledge or a specific sales technique. I like videos most for these to really communicate the process and impact. * Make it easier to use your materials. Shorter, more compelling content. Always ask how an asset could be shorter. * Bring in outside experts from the sales community who can do coaching from a sellers perspective. Sellers sometimes struggle with taking selling advice from people that haven't sold before.

It should change when you position is significantly impacted by: -the market changes (ie new tech emerges - social, mobile, AI, etc) -your competition changes (ie your key competitor introduces low price offering) -the macro economy changes (ie recession, inflation) -your customer base changes (ie new target customer profile aligned with leadership) The way it should be addressed with stakeholders is they should be part of creating it. And if they can't prioritize being part of it, maybe it's not important enough to update it. I find significant company-wide efforts (kick off, campaign, event, etc) are the best forcing function. Messaging is almost impossible to update without a compelling event because you don't get the stakeholder enagement you need to make it great and amplify it.

The key here is aligned metrics. Pipeline is the only one that spans all stakeholders and therefore is a higher priority. More detail here: 1) PMM WITH SALES KR = Pipe. Created and influenced. Deliverable = Selling content, sales plays, sales programs, sales enablement 2) PMM WITH CSM KR = RETENTION AND EXPANSION. COMPANIES MEASURE THESE DIFFERENTLY. Deliverable = Content (decks, one pagers), enablement 3) PMM WITH MARKETING KR = impressions, leads, pipe Deliverable = key messaging, campaign content 4) PMM WITH PRODUCT KR = market penetration, impressions on key product news, pipe Deliverable = business/customer insight to drive roadmap, product launches, product GTM assets/pdfs

I'll list out things I always look for and example questions that help me answer: -Key partner alignment - who are your most important stakeholders in your current role? How do you manage the relationship? -Content quality - what work are you most proud of in your career? Can you send me a link to it after our conversation and walk me though why you're so proud of the work? -Collaborative disposition - [insert question you're currently thinking through in your day to day] See what it's like to talk through a challenge with the candidate.

Ability to get stuff done while also driving strategy. To me, a PMM leader still needs to roll up their sleeves and driving a keynote deck, create foundational messaging for a team, get in front of customers. The messaging/positioning muscle atrophies fast. When interviewing potential leaders, I always probe into recent projects to understand how hands on they are, what they actually did vs directed, and if they have passion for the discipline. Good PMM leaders will always need to get hands on for key projects and not all of them are great at jumping in.

There's a lot of ways to do this but the one you MUST do is win loss interviews. Focus group testing and stage presentations do not validate you have a differentiated value prop compared to competitors. If you're strapped for people resources, there are many companies out there that can do win loss interviews for you. These interviews do a few things that you can't get elsewhere: -Raw answers and insights, not influenced by any agenda other than being honest. -They are timely and change based on the given quarter's macro environment. -They're hard to argue with and stand out from the various opinions we take internally.