Building Your Narrative with a Message House

I can’t tell you the number of times I have worked with organizations that struggle to align their product to market fit. They spend months comparing features and functions and try to figure out what the unique capabilities are and attempt to build marketing and sales motions around that. Having been a long-time product professional and marketer, I can appreciate the excitement about the technology. But ultimately what buyers truly need help with are outcomes. As a mentor once told me “A fool with a tool is still just a fool unless she knows how it can be used to drive outcomes”.

How can you help drive conversions? What about revenue, cross-sell, and retention? What I uncover in the process is before you can run effective marketing campaigns that deliver sales pipeline, you need to nail the value prop first. Create the narrative, the story, and organize it in a way that is buyer centric, simple to articulate, and consistently delivered across all functions of your org., well beyond the sales teams.

I am a firm believer in the message house concept. A message house is an organizing framework that can be used to build and disseminate your narrative. Ensure you have that rooftop message nailed. What is the unique topline, single sentence that everyone can repeat? Is it compelling and catchy? Does it incorporate the broadest vale prop across all your solutions? How differentiated is it from the competition? To support the rooftop concept, you need to create three pillars below that. The three pillars are three mega challenges that you solve for but reworded in a way that are focused on solutions. Under each of the three pillars you should include three capabilities that support those pillars. I am all about the rules of three! Fleshing out the capabilities and then distilling them back down is an art and requires constant revision.?

Finally, we need the foundation. No structure can stand on its own without a solid foundation. The foundation are the key metrics, results, benefits and customer stories that support the overall value prop and pillars. This is rooted in real world outcomes and ROI from your solutions. This is perhaps the hardest part to perfect, as it requires stakeholder insights and customer permissions. There is an art to gathering this info that I cover in a separate article.

Once you have the message house fleshed out and refined, it should be shared around the organization and used as the single “hymn sheet” for all functions. Consistency on story across functions is critical. Ensure you also include services and support; they often are left out of this equation. If you want to dig in further and start talking messaging, positioning, and narratives, I would love to chat with you!?