Go-to-Market Maturity Model Pillar 2: Messaging

What model do you provide for your salespeople's conversations?

In my first post in this series, I introduced the GTM Maturity Model. This post will dive deep on the second pillar of the framework, messaging.

The takeaways from the first post are:

• Many organizations aren’t intentional about building their go-to-market engine. Rather, they fix the issue of the moment without building for scale. This eventually results in companies hitting a wall on their growth curve.
• There are 4 key pillars of the go-to-market engine, as shown in the graphic below
• These pillars are multiplicative, not additive. They need to evolve in lockstep with each other and reinforce each other.

Now, on to the focus of this post: Messaging

Messaging is one of those concepts that can mean a lot of different things to different people. For this post, I’m focused on messaging as the way a company gives its salespeople a model for how they should communicate with customers in meetings or calls. Think of a standard first-meeting deck, for instance. The best teams have content that provides a model for each significant meeting and each persona across your sales process. For instance, you might have a first meeting deck focused on a director-level persona and a C-level deck designed to secure executive sponsorship midway through the sales cycle. By design, these are very different meetings.  

The model you provide is simply a starting point. Of course, your best AEs are likely to modify any official decks you provide, which allows them to not only tailor the content to a specific situation but may also be a helpful source of ideas for the next version of the official deck. What you don’t want, however, is for every new rep in the company to have to pull together their talk track for a meeting from scratch. If you want to have any hope of your team executing key meetings to a consistently high standard, you need to give them a strong starting point.

This type of content must be developed as part of a close collaboration between sales leadership, frontline sales staff, and marketing. Each has a role to play:

• Sales leadership is often best placed to know what the story should sound like. However, senior sales leaders who typically get most involved in executive meetings often lack context from the front lines of discussions with more junior stakeholders.  
• Well-regarded individual contributors bring this front-line perspective. Their involvement in the process, and buy-in on the content, also dramatically accelerates the adoption of new messaging.  
• Marketing, on the other hand, often lacks context on the actual sales interaction. However, they bring important experience about telling a compelling story, customer and market insight, and a rich understanding of the company’s product strategy and aspirational positioning.

Messaging evolves on two primary dimensions as a company matures:

1) Vendor-focused → Customer-focused

2) Product-oriented (what) → Value-oriented (why)

There are four stages of messaging maturity:

1. Focus on your product
2. Put the product in the context of a “big wave”
3. Focus on actionable customer challenges
4. Bring insight into your customer’s challenges

In this post, I'll cover the stages of messaging maturity, some guidelines for developing the content, and then share some common pitfalls.

Stages of messaging maturity

1. Focus on your product

When innovative customers meet your sales people they want to know: do you actually have a solution to my problem? Or will you let me down like all the other vendors?

Early company pitch decks are often heavily focused on describing the magical product the company has produced. Initially, this can work well. Geoffrey Moore's classic Crossing the Chasm explains how companies sell to different buyers at different points in the company’s lifecycle. Innovators and early adopters tend to be very product-savvy. Imagine the people who camped out in front of the Apple store when the first iPhone was released, waiting to get their hands on this new product. If you interviewed those people, they could probably tell you each spec of the device—from the size of the screen, to the resolution of the camera, to the speed of the processor—by heart.

In the B2B world, innovators and early adopters are educated buyers who have tried all the other products on the market. They know what those products don’t do and they are desperately seeking something better. When they meet your seller, they want to quickly get to the point - do you actually have a solution to my problem? Or are you going to let me down like all the other vendors I’ve tried have?

When you are very early, it’s OK to qualify out people who don’t already intuitively understand the problem space. If you are talking with someone who doesn’t quickly appreciate the need for your product, you likely aren’t talking to a true innovator. You likely have a long sales cycle ahead of you, with low odds of success. Better to focus on finding the next innovator, assuming you have enough inbound demand to efficiently find them. If not, you are ready to take a step up the curve.

2. Put the product in the context of a “big wave”

Big wave messaging is great for building rapport with a customer. But it needs to pivot quickly to specific, solvable issues the customer is facing

Many marketers recognize the importance of placing their company’s innovation in the context of a larger trend. For instance, at Responsys we talked about marketing in the age of the mobile device, and for a time at MuleSoft we talked about the increasing fragmentation of the IT landscape. This is a helpful step in the evolution from being purely product-focused to ultimately telling a more customer-centric story. There are two main risks associated with “big wave” messaging:

• You likely aren’t creating urgency. Big waves, especially if they are not already wreaking havoc on us, can seem distant and easy to ignore. Consider how we talked about the fragmenting IT landscape at MuleSoft. Most senior IT leaders would nod their heads in agreement that the application and data landscape was rapidly fragmenting. But this didn’t present an existential threat to them. It was an interesting point, but not one that they were going to spin up activity to solve.
• You’re probably telling the customer something they already know, which is a sure way to cause them to tune out. Most companies overestimate how insightful their Big Insight truly is. How many CIOs did not already appreciate that they had a lot of SaaS applications in their companies in 2015? And how many marketers weren’t aware that mobile was a pretty big deal in 2011?

“Big Wave” messaging is helpful as a way to build rapport with the customer, and mutually acknowledge the existence of a trend that is likely causing the customer some angst. The key is to then pivot to describing specific, solvable issues the customer is facing and then illustrating specific solutions to those problems.  

To illustrate this, imagine two different scenarios for a company that sells vitamin supplements. Both stories begin by talking about the macro trend of people working longer hours, exercising less, and sleeping less, resulting in poorer health. If, in the first scenario, the story then flips quickly to the benefits of their vitamin, how would you react? Even if you agreed to the macro trends, you would probably find reasons they don’t apply to you personally. It is unlikely that you purchase the vitamins.

On the other hand, imagine if the salesperson started the same way, but instead of shifting to talking about the product asked if you were experiencing any of the macro pressures. She then asked you a few questions to diagnose your personal health situation. She is able to uncover that you do indeed have a vitamin deficiency as a result of your lifestyle… one that studies show leads to a significant risk of complications as you age. She also credibly describes how her product will remedy the deficiency. In this situation, the odds are that you buy her product without questioning the price tag. You also walk away feeling appreciative of her time and feeling as though you learned something important. This leads us to…

3. Focus on actionable customer challenges

A seller's first mission with a mass-market buyer is to help them recognize that they have a specific, actionable, and critically-important need

Let’s go back to our iPhone adopters and think of the other end of the spectrum. When your mother or father bought their first iPhone, could they tell you any of the specs? If your parents are like mine, it took years of talking about how the product would make their life better to convince them to pay for a monthly data plan. We talked about how Google Maps would help them more easily navigate new places, and how FaceTime would let them video chat with their grandchildren. They bought based on value after an extended period of consideration.

Mass-market buyers—the ones you desperately need to fuel your hypergrowth ambitions—have a very different set of needs and perspectives than early adopters. Their initial assumption is that you are probably going to waste their time and that they don’t need what you are selling. Your first mission is to help them recognize that they have an unmet need that relates to something that is really important to them. This need must be very specific and actionable. Only when they buy into the actionable need do they become open to exploring your product in any detail.

As you begin to talk about the product, it’s critical to tie product functionality directly back to the problem solved. “Cool” features aren’t enough for these buyers. The features must remove the buyer’s pain, and, in doing so, create value.

4. Bring insight into your customer’s challenges

To close a 7-figure deal at MuleSoft, we had to help a CIO recognize that 'boring' integration was actually a major bottleneck to the business

As outlined in Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson's The Challenger Sale, the best sales messaging brings insight to the customer. Not only is insight interesting for the customer, but it is also the key that unlocks action. If a rational person knows she has an important problem and knows how to solve it, she’ll act on that. Often, the customer either doesn’t recognize the problem, doesn’t value the problem, or doesn’t believe it can be solved.

For some very lucky companies, the “insight” is simply that they have a viable solution. This was the case at Snowflake. A huge number of customers were already highly frustrated with their existing data warehouse solutions. Snowflake has a relatively simple job of showing those customers that their product would remove those frustrations. This is one reason the company is growing so quickly.

Most companies face a higher bar. At MuleSoft, we sold integration software, something that, for years, was regarded as an uninteresting and mature product space. It was the last thing most IT executives wanted to talk about. For us to close a 7-figure deal with a large company, we had to help the CIO recognize that integration was actually a major bottleneck to the pace of innovation in the business. In doing so, we taught the CIO something that he/she didn’t fully understand about his/her own business. Only then did we earn the right to teach the next key insight, about our solution: how our unique combination of API and integration technology could reduce development time for new initiatives.

This insight serves a very specific role: it helps the customer turn a general need into an actionable need (credit to Neil Rackham for this concept). Imagine I want to get into better shape. If I talk to a personal trainer, she’ll first need to help me identify more concrete goals. Do I want to lose weight? Build muscle mass? Run a marathon? “Better shape” is too generic for her to help me with. But if I tell her I want to run a marathon in less than 4 hours, she can give me a plan to help. In the MuleSoft example, we turned a general, but not actionable, need about faster IT project delivery into a very specific, high-impact, actionable problem to which we offered a proven solution.

To use a different example, think of the number of companies in the sales tools or marketing automation space that promise “more pipeline”. Nearly every sales leader wants more pipeline. But what, specifically, will a vendor do to help? And, of all the things I could do to increase pipeline, is the vendor going to help with my number one priority? If so, I have probably already reached out to them. If not, I won’t pay much attention… unless the vendor can help me recognize that, in fact, the problem they solve should be a top priority and that they can readily fix it. This type of insight is tremendously valuable to customers.

Developing your messaging

One reason companies struggle to develop effective messaging is that the knowledge required rarely resides in a single individual... it is spread across people from many functions

Before a company can produce effective messaging, it has to understand—and write down—a few key points:

• Why are customers frustrated with the status quo? What negative impact does the status quo solution have on their business?
• What do we do that creates the most value for customers?
• What specific features and product capabilities enable us to create this value? Of those, which are truly unique to us?

These questions sound simple but can be shockingly difficult for many companies to answer. A few issues tend to get in the way:

1. Lack of true customer context and understanding 

Often, companies don’t spend enough time understanding their customers. This is especially true of “headquarters” staff who are not continuously in front of customers. Instead, they hope that the priorities and pains they have imagined are true. One of the things that impressed me while I worked at Salesforce is how much time their product marketing team spends in customer focus groups. The SVP of Product Marketing who had responsibility for the MuleSoft acquisition was interviewing customers about their integration pains long before the deal had closed. This is not to say that customer feedback should dictate product roadmap… but it can make sure your message resonates.

2. Too much focus on vendor benefits vs customer pain

The first question above, about why customers are frustrated with the status quo, is 100% customer-focused. Most vendors, enamored with their product and operating in their comfort zone, prefer to focus on themselves. Aside from running towards your wonderful, ground-breaking product, what is the customer running AWAY from? If you can’t tap into this pain it will be much harder to translate interest in your product into closed deals.

Uncovering and tapping into latent customer pain are the focus of all key sales methodologies, but they are shockingly absent from most product marketing organizations. Consider:

• Force Management emphasizes understanding the negative consequences of the customer’s current state before discussing the business benefits of the future state
• Challenger Selling focuses on offering the customer unique insight into their current problems and systematically demolishing the status quo as a viable solution before moving on to the proposed solution
• Sandler, SPIN Selling, Value Selling… all start by uncovering customer pain

Unfortunately, however, the team tasked with developing sales messaging in most companies is called Product Marketing. The name alone seems to instruct these teams to focus on talking about the product, which is what many official “corporate pitch decks” do. It’s also why many of these decks are not used by their best salespeople.

3. Inability to link specific features to the bigger value story

Most companies can tell a good, 40,000-foot story about the immense ROI they can drive for their customers. But they struggle to directly link the ROI to specific product features. Without the linkage, several things happen:

• The bigger value story is discounted and ignored—it just sounds like hollow marketing
• Customers—and your Solutions Consultants—don’t know what parts of the product to focus on in the evaluation. Deal cycles turn into feature/function knife fights because nobody knows what matters. Product demos are mind-numbing “harbor tours” and POCs never seem to end
• It’s difficult to provide sales teams with specific (i.e. useful!) competitive guidance. You beat competitors when you can connect the dots from feature to impact—showing that the customer will not be able to achieve a critical business objective without your demonstrably better capability. Talking about features in isolation, or about business value without something you can evaluate, doesn’t work.

One of the reasons companies struggle to do this is that the knowledge to do it rarely resides in a single person. While a technically-minded individual will understand the specific product features and how they are different from the competition, someone with a broader business context may be required to understand how the benefits those features create support more significant company objectives. The best solutions consultants or solutions engineers can bridge this gap. Enlist their help, or else pull together a knowledgeable group to figure it out. At Responsys we were able to very clearly articulate how specific product features led to increased revenue for our customers. Getting to that point required input from sales, our VP Strategic Services, our VP Solutions Consulting, and product marketing.

A few common traps

The specific purpose of this content is to provide a model of a conversation between your sellers and your customers

1. Senior leader bias

One of the big traps when companies think about messaging is a senior leader saying “Of course our messaging is great. Whenever I talk to a customer, they get it completely”. What this misses, of course, is an understanding of how a typical salesperson understands and can communicate that message. Is it:

• Written down (even in simple bullet points), recorded on video, or otherwise documented in a way that is accessible to the AE? Or does it only exist in that executive’s mind?
• Appropriate for the audience that a typical AE regularly interacts with? There is often a big gap between the conversations that a CEO / Founder / CMO / CTO engages in and the actual discussion had daily by the sales team

2. Sales messaging isn’t a keynote

The second trap is to recognize that sales messaging is a different animal than corporate messaging or keynote presentations. Remember, the specific purpose of this content is to provide a model for a conversation between your salespeople and your customers. Keynote presentations need to be aspirational and inspiring. While the best sales conversations are inspiring, they are also firmly grounded in the customer’s reality. Unlike a keynote presentation, they are interactive dialogs designed to move a customer through a specific phase of their buying journey. Sending the field out armed with the CEO’s most recent keynote is almost always a recipe for disaster, even if it was a great presentation.

3. You are modeling a conversation, not a presentation

Research by Gong, a software company focused on applying analytical approaches to understanding sales calls, and others have quantified what sales leaders have long known: the best salespeople get the customer to do most of the talking. It is by talking that customers engage their minds to better understand their problems and to make sense of your solution… otherwise, they are simply passive participants. Of course, when a customer talks, the salesperson usually learns something valuable as well. Why, then, do many companies still certify their salespeople on delivering a memorized, one-way “pitch”?

I see two drivers for this, both of which relate to the mindset of the people who create the content:

• A misguided belief that the purpose of the content is to talk about the vendor’s features, as discussed above
• A lack of understanding about how to build that interactivity into the material in a natural way

It’s another reason that Sales staff must be intimately involved in creating all Sales messaging.  

Conclusion

To recap, you will have reached a commendable point of maturity in your sales messaging when the following are true:

• You have created models for each key conversation your salespeople have over the course of the buying journey, with messaging customized to the target stakeholder… not just the first meeting
• Your content shows how to have an interactive conversation… not just a one-way presentation
• Your materials focus on the customer’s challenges and the benefits the customer will receive from your product… not only about your product itself
• Customers can see clearly how the specific capabilities of your product will solve tangible problems and create meaningful business impact

In a direct sales model, there are few more powerful ways to improve performance than by improving the actual customer conversation. Sales messaging is the platform to do that in a scalable, consistent way. Getting it right will not only improve win rates and increase deal sizes but also significantly decrease the time required to ramp new salespeople.

I'll publish the next installment, about using your sales process provide a roadmap for what the selling team needs to accomplish at each stage of the customer's buying journey, in two weeks.

To read more, see the other posts in the series:

• Introducing the GTM Maturity Model
• Pillar 1: Targeting the right customers
• Pillar 3: Sales (& Buying) Process
• Pillar 4: Accountability