What are some strategies that you've used to share messaging guides internally and ensure commercial team alignment?

At HubSpot we have a “master” positioning guide that exists for every core product and is shared on a central wiki that everyone can access. This positioning guide helps inform the work of marketers, sales enablement, and many other customer-facing teams. To ensure alignment we work closely with these other teams, such as sales enablement, to build assets like “Demo Like a Pro” that carry our positioning and messaging and transform it into an actual sample demo from a sales rep. This is just one example, but we typically carry this across departments to ensure messaging stays consistent.

Generally, product marketing creates messaging guides for new products, features, pricing, campaigns, company positioning, etc. While develop the messaging guide, we typically solicity input from other teams and individuals including product management and other marketers like communications/brand, demand gen and marketing leadership. As the messaging gets near final we do a final review with sales enablement, our sales advisory council (a handful of individual reps and saleas managers) and finally with sales/revenue leadership.  

We then roll-out at one of our weekly or bi-weekly all sales meetings and/or share at the team lead meetings for more in depth Q&A and objection handling. Typically, the messaging guide comes with supporting customer facing slides, talk tracks, etc. We re-inforce through an on-line learning tool to make sure folks internalize the messaging.

I mentioned in another post that I have come up with a structured process for messaging development. with my team of product managers and product marketers, I work through a series of questions that force us to define and articulate our differentiation. This results in a number of messaging framework and source messaging documents that we hand off to the Marketing and Sales teams. We see these types of documents as foundational - the North Star for how we tell our story. Other marketing teams extend that messaging into demand gen campaigns, and our Sales teams pick up our pitch decks and marketing collateral to present to prospects. Ensuring commercial team alignment is tricky because it's fundamentally about dissemination (Confluence, newsletters, G-Drive, etc), training (both live and on-demand), and repetition (going on sales calls and using it over and over again). Messaging guides are a critical product marketing deliverable - they are foundational -- but a series of hands-on training and reinforcement on a per-deal-level are required to get a larger organization on-board.

In my view, the whole point of messaging guides is that they are shared as widely and as openly in your organization as possible. We actually keep a "launch tracker" document (google sheets file) that has the latest on every launch we're planning. This document is publicly available and very widely distributed. We link to the positioning guide for the new product or set of features there. In addition, we've built really strong relationships with counterparts in Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success, so we are regularly communicating across a wide number of forums (team trainings, slack channels, in person meetings with leadership, etc) and share or point to key documents like messaging guides in these meetings. Unfortunately, in my experience, there is no 'silver bullet' to communicating to large audiences - having lots of channels and repetition is really key. 

I think the other thing to keep in mind is having your messaging guide be a format that is really easily digestible. We use a format that actually summarizes the goal of the campaign or launch really nicely upfront, then gets into the messaging, and towards the bottom goes into more of the nitty gritty research on the market, trends, competition, etc. We've gotten good feedback that the format is pretty easy to consume, and I think that goes a long way in getting the message out there. 

One thing I try not to do is share content or messaging without walking the person I want to get feedback from through the context and purpose live on a call/zoom. Sending something over for feedback without the right context can be disastrous...especially if they share with others and expand any confusion/dissent to others. 

I will typically walk them through a google slide or doc with what we're trying to move towards and then offer them the opportunity to provide feedback live or in the doc once they've had some time to think about it. 

Always try to prove why the messaging you're recommending is the right approach with proof points...these can be based on surveys, customer/analyst feedback, A/B or some testing framework, market movement, etc. 

If your internal teams see the context for why you're moving in a specific direction and the proof points that support what you're trying to do then it will go a long way in getting their support/alignment. 

What I’ve learned from great leaders who are able to inspire and motivate is to gain consensus before you walk into the room. This is pretty much how I have shared messaging guides internally to ensure alignment. If you are really starting from scratch, hosting a workshop to hear everyone’s opinions works well. If you are adding value to something that already exists, have 1:few meetings to get specific feedback on voice, tone, choice of words, etc. Then, share it more broadly at a team meeting. Then share it with all leaders in Rev org. Then share it with C-level, backing up how much consensus you’ve already built and the alignment that’s been established.

We are still working on refining our process here, however, our usual process is to attend the commercial team all-hands to notify them of any new messaging guides and materials and then we record a more in-depth Loom video that walks through the messaging in more detail and with more nuance. We house these looms in a Sales Library in Notion. By recording it, reps and CSMs can review it more than once if needed in their own time. It also doubles as great onboarding material. We have a system to ensure everyone consumes the content.

I have my clients create a team responsible for positioning a B2B product and seeking input and feedback throughout the process from key stakeholders - especially sales. Once the team is confident that key stakeholders have bought into the message strategy, the final step is to get management approval. By doing so, management team members are more likely to use the message strategy rather than winging it like they usually do.