Strategic Communication: How to Develop Strategic Messaging and Positioning

PART 2: Is your messaging effective?

The symptoms of ineffective messaging aren’t easy to spot. Organizations collect and analyze almost every imaginable metric, but how do you know your messaging is working? It is impossible to say that your sales process is prolonged by X% because prospects are too confused about your offerings. But there is a qualitative way to analyze your current messaging.

One of the main attributes of strategic messaging is consistency. Effective messaging is always simple and consistent. The best way to evaluate your current messaging is to look at how consistently your organization talks about your products and compare that with how your current customers talk about your product.

Effective Messaging = Simple + Consistent

Does everyone in your organization communicate the same product value?
Do your customers and prospects understand the value and utility that your product provides?

Here are just a few questions that you can ask your team, and then compare the answers. The simple exercise that we are about to discuss can be done quickly and the insights will help you understand the health of your messaging, so you can spot small issues before they grow into large problems.

Start evaluating your strategic messaging inside your company.

Internal Evaluation
This quick, 20-minute exercise will help you understand how your own team talks about your company and product. Get all your sales reps, marketing, and product people (ideally, encourage all of your organization to participate) in one conference room, and ask them to write answers to the following questions:

• 1 sentence company pitch (What we do?)
• 1 sentence problem pitch (What problem are we solving?)
• 1 sentence competitive pitch (How are we different from our competitors?)
• 1–3 bullet points of values we provide for customers (Why should customers buy from us?)

These are very basic questions that everyone in your organization should know the answers to. To make it even more interesting, you can also ask your team about the company vision — Why we do what we do?

This exercise shouldn’t take more than 20 minutes. If the answers you receive from the internal survey are fairly consistent, the next step will be to talk to your customers. The problem is that you might have a very consistent, but still ineffective message. Your message might be consistent and still not resonate with your customers. This is why the next step is to understand the value and utility of your product by interviewing your current customers.

The answers you receive in the internal survey from different teams and even from members of the same team are often so different it will convince your organization to take messaging seriously.

When conducting one-on-one interviews with salespeople at one company, I was shocked at how different the product pitch and company description was from one interview to another. I interviewed one sales rep and then heard a polar opposite pitch from the next sales rep. In this extreme case, almost every sales rep had their own sales decks. I then shadowed their live sales calls with customers to compare what they said during interviews and how they presented to prospects. Some sales pitches were so far apart that if you didn’t know the company name, you would think the pitches were for different products.

But let’s imagine your internal message is reasonably consistent, then the next step in evaluation is to interview a few customers and compare how they perceive your product and your company. Remember, strategic messaging and positioning are all about the perception in your customer’s mind. So your messaging could be simple and consistent but still doesn’t match the perception in the mind of a customer.

External Evaluation
External evaluation of your strategic messaging can be done in two ways: 1) customer interviews; 2) with a survey. Surveys are quicker and easier, but interviews are more valuable. If your internal evaluation was enough to convince your team to review your messaging, you probably don’t need to do an external evaluation.

You will talk to your customers and prospects when you start designing your new messaging. It would be very inefficient to interview your customers once for evaluation and again when you are designing the new messaging.

To understand how customers perceive your product, ask questions like these:

• Why did you buy our product?
• What problems were you looking to solve?
• How do you use our product?
• What do you like most about our product? What do you like least?

During interviews, the customer may respond that he/she likes or dislikes the product because of one feature it has. Always follow up with “Why?” questions. It is never about the feature of the product, it is about how this feature impacts their daily work and what value and utility it provides.

Now compare what message your organization communicates and how customers perceive your product. Most companies are very shocked to find out how far apart their internal messaging is from their customer perception.

Even though it’s difficult to calculate the ROI of effective strategic messaging, it’s important to realize that messaging has more of an impact than almost anything else in the business. In the following sections, we’ll learn more about strategic messaging and positioning. We’ll also find out why they are essential to your business and how to design your own strategic messaging.

PART 3: What is strategic messaging?

Strategic messaging is a value-based communication framework that companies employ in all interactions with stakeholders — employees, prospects, customers, partners, and investors. Strategic messaging communicates product value to the customer by describing the solution to a problem.

As discussed earlier, the goal of marketing is all about controlling perception and changing behavior. Strategic messaging is an essential part of this goal.

The Goal of Marketing = Controlling Perception + Changing Behavior

Strategic messaging is an extension of your company’s vision. A vision starts with “why”. Simon Sinek popularized in his book, “Start with Why”, the idea is that to be successful, companies have to start with “why”. Why does the organization exist? Why-driven vision leads to the next question of “how”. How does the organization do what it does? And finally, only after an organization is clear on “why” and “how” does it answer the question of “what”. What exactly does the organization do and what products and services does it provide?

LEARN MORE: To refresh this idea of The Golden Circle watch this TED talk by Simon Sinek.

Now, let’s apply this framework to strategic messaging. “Why” communicates the vision for your organization and manifests itself in taglines, slogan, vision statements, and in short descriptions of a company. “How” is explained through your value proposition, problem description, and positioning through the eyes of your target customers. “What” is described through your product and service descriptions, features, case studies, and other product and marketing-related content.

Effective messaging is similar to a fine story, it puts less emphasis on what happens than on to whom it happens and why and how it happens. (8) Strategic communication (or strategic messaging) covers why, how, and what a company does.

Designing strategic messaging starting with why creates a deep emotional connection with your audiences. Our feelings and emotions precede our judgment and reaction.

Every form of communication from the message on your homepage to the “About” section on your press releases, sales decks, paid acquisition campaigns and content strategy should align with your strategic messaging framework.

3.1. The Biggest Strategic Messaging Mistakes or Why Most Companies Are Failing in Designing Strategic Messaging

Before we jump into a specific real-world example of how to create a strategic messaging map, let’s first highlight what makes effective strategic messaging: why certain messages are effective and others aren’t.

Messages should be consistent
Consistency reduces opportunities for miscommunication. Consistent messages are more likely to become memorable. Consistency improves message effectiveness, that’s why advertising works — it consistently repeats a simple message over and over again.

Brevity and simplicity leads to clarity
Avoid fancy words and use more conventional language. There is a place for longer product copy or longer content, but strategic messaging is not that place.

Our consciousness consists of the thoughts, feelings, and sensations that we are aware of at any given moment, and it represents a very limited view of reality. We can’t consciously pay attention to every detail, so the brain takes all the words and implied meanings and summarizes them into a momentary thought.

When too much information is communicated, our unconscious process arbitrarily chooses which words seem most relevant in the moment. Most of us believe it’s best to give more detailed descriptions, not realizing that the audience can only focus on four tiny chunks of information and for a very brief period of time. Irrelevant speech disrupts patterns and interferes with judgment and learning. (5)

Define, don’t assume
Don’t assume that your audience understands the terms that you use in your communication. Companies live in bubbles, employees use the same terms, and very often the meaning changes from one company to another. Define terms that you use internally, and when necessary define them for outbound communication. Even simple terms such as “analytics” can have multiple meanings and interpretations.

Startups often make the mistake of creating positioning and messaging based only on their internal expertise and product features. This approach entices founders to describe their products using industry jargon, complicated technical details, or buzzwords.

Often we don’t know the difference between AI and machine learning, but these words are often used as if everybody understands them. And how about “cloud-based” and “big data”? Do your customers actually know what they mean?

Avoid superlatives and buzzwords
You would think that in 2016, companies would realize how big of a turn-off superlative words are — “state of the art”, “best in class”, “world-class”, “leading” — but many don’t.

Don’t change the message too often, preferably never
This is related to consistency. You can’t release a new strategic messaging framework every 6 or even 12 months. It’s okay to test new messaging ideas in the field, but anything that impacts the brand as a whole needs to be done incredibly carefully. The perception of your product and company aren’t easy to change. Position your strategic message for the long term.

You know the vision but customers hold the perceptions.

PART 4: What is positioning?

Out of all the pieces that constitute “How” a company explains its vision and value, positioning is often a forgotten strategy in the tech industry.

Al Ries, “the father of brand positioning”, in his book “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind” describes the basic approach of positioning as not a process of creating something new and different, but a way of manipulating what’s already in the mind, to retie the connection that already exists. “The goal is to position the product in the mind of the prospect.” (1)

This is the main reason why startup founders often present their ventures as “Uber for X” or “Airbnb for Y”. Our attention span is short and investors are no exception to this rule. It is critical for founders to explain their ventures quickly so that investors and prospects understand what the company does and whether they are interested in learning more.

“The best approach in over-communicated society is the oversimplified message.” — Al Ries

Positioning does not explain all the details of what a product does and especially how. In fact, positioning is not even about your product, it is about the perception of the prospect, customer, or investor regarding your product. This is a critical point: the answers to a positioning problem are outside of your product and even your company; they are in your prospect’s mind. In other words, the way you describe and position your product should be dictated by your customers and prospects, and not by product features or internal expertise.

Let’s look back at our example. Investors are very familiar with Uber’s business model, so when a founder describes their venture as “Uber for laundry”, it quickly resonates with investors. They make a clear connection by applying Uber’s business model to the applicable business, in this case, to a laundry business. Uber is already positioned in the mind of investors; therefore, connecting a new idea to an existing perception allows the receiver of the message to understand the new concept with limited use of mental energy.

Positioning is a simplified concept that translates an oversimplified message to penetrate your prospect’s mind and build certain perceptions about your product.

Positioning techniques are widely used in politics. In every race, opponents take positions on the opposite side of the issue or on the opposite side of the solution. Let’s look at the example of “pro-choice” vs. “pro-life” positions. Which position is better framed? Pro-choice implies the opposite position against choice or anti-choice. Pro-life implies the opposite position against life or anti-life. Since our perception views life as more important and more valuable than choice, we subconsciously perceive the pro-life position as a stronger argument.

One of the most successful examples of positioning in tech was accomplished by

. Salesforce — not software! This absolutely brilliant idea by Marc Benioff led to complete domination in enterprise software marketing for the last 16 years. And the concept is still working well to this day.

is another great example of positioning. Slack positioned itself from the beginning as an anti-email app instead of just another enterprise communications tool. , the founder of Slack, doesn’t actually believe Slack will replace email but his beautiful positioning strategy has forced people in tech to talk about Slack and take sides. You know your positioning works when major publications are writing headlines such as “How E-Mail Killer Slack Will Change the Future of Work”.

There are different techniques for positioning: against a competitor, a market leader, a follower, product attribute/benefits, users, etc. In some cases, you can create a perception of the product by focusing on just one word or phrase. To fully explain positioning, we’d need at least another article and more likely a book. Meanwhile, check the reference section for great books and resources on the topic of positioning.

PART 5: How to design strategic messaging

Let’s assume for the purpose of brevity that you’ve thought about and developed the “why” vision statement for your organization. After that, the design process for strategic messaging can be broken down into a series of discovery-validation feedback loops.

First, you have to pick a set of tools that you will be used consistently throughout this process. You will need to select a target customer profile and a strategic messaging framework. The target customer framework will ensure that you record initial discovery interviews in a consistent and structured way. We’ll discuss this in more detail later.

Based on your initial discovery interviews, you will develop detailed target customer profiles with a set of values that correspond with each target customer profile involved in the buying process. The rest of the process involves careful fine-tuning of your value statements by validating your assumptions with another round of interviews. Only when your value statements are finished can you move on to designing higher-level messaging such as your positioning statement, 25-word description, and tagline.

5.1. Pick Target Customer & Messaging Framework

Before you start with discovery interviews, you need to choose a framework that you will consistently use during the interviews. The framework is just an Excel table or Word doc that you will use to summarize every interview.

In my article on lead scoring and lead nurturing, I described how FIT and PAIN framework applies to the target customer profile. So let’s break down what constitutes FIT/PAIN characteristics of the target customer.

There are a few value messaging maps you can find online. There is no right or wrong framework. You should aim to find the one that fits your company's purpose best or you can modify an existing one. I took a few ideas and created my own version of a value messaging map that fits SaaS companies with multiple target customers in the buying process.

This is what a final strategic messaging map looks like. The order in which you fill it out is important, so we will come back to that later. In the meantime, let’s define each item in the strategic messaging map (see table below) :

5.2. Discovery

The goal of the discovery process is to create a detailed target customer profile by collecting as much information about your current customers and prospects as you can. Create a list of questions for each person you are planning to interview to ensure quality feedback.

Interview sales reps
Pick the top 5–10 sales reps to interview. The number will depend on the size of your organization. Sales reps will do almost anything to close deals and great salespeople are very aware of the problems that prospects have.

• Ask them to identify a target customer
• Ask about the easiest deals they’ve closed
• Ask about the biggest deals they’ve closed
• Ask about the toughest deal they’ve closed
• Ask about a recently lost prospect and the reasons
• Ask them to state the pain that most customers have
• Ask what questions they ask prospects to identify their pain
• Ask what customers they have the best relationship with (these are the customers you will be interviewing later)

Tip: make sure that you interview sales reps one-on-one. You want to avoid groupthink and prevent group leaders from influencing the rest of the team.

Interview the product owner and a few customer success managers
Interviewing sales reps is a must, but interviewing the product manager and customer success manager can give you a different perspective. Focus on questions that help you understand how customers talk about the product and how your team talks about the product with customers. Keep questions open-ended and record responses.

Listen to the prospect (shadow sales calls)
Shadowing a sales call with a prospect is the best way to get close to your target customer. Prospects have had few interactions with your company and product and their original perception about the product isn’t yet changed or influenced. The questions prospects will ask and objections that they will voice are important indicators of how they perceive your company and product. Also, take note of the words they use. One of the easiest ways to improve messaging is to simply use the same words your ideal prospects are using. If you do this, you are sure to focus on the most important points.

The feedback you will receive from shadowing sales calls with prospects will often differ from what sales reps communicated during the one-on-one interviews.

NOTE: I strongly believe that shadowing sales calls with prospects should be a must for every new employee onboarding process, regardless of their title. There is no better way to learn about your product and how customers perceive the product than shadowing a real sales call with prospects.

Interview the last 5–10 lost prospects
Ask your sales reps to give you a list of 20 prospects that fit your target customer profile but for some reason, the deal was lost. Send a quick and personal email to the lost customers asking to interview them for 10–15 mins to understand what played a major role in them going the other way. Give them a $20 Amazon or Starbucks gift card for taking the time to talk with you.

The goal of interviewing lost customers is to understand the main reasons why they didn’t buy. Maybe they are not quite the right fit. Maybe the pain that your product solves isn’t big enough for them. Maybe they thought the price was too high. Maybe a competitor product fits their needs better. Ask them about their buying process and who was involved in the decision-making. Ask lost customers to share the one thing that was a deal-breaker.

Interview the newest 5–10 customers
Since these companies just became your customers, the interactions that they had with your team and your product during the buying process are still fresh in their memory. Ask recently won customers the same questions you asked your lost prospects:

• What they thought about your product
• What problem did they want to solve?
• What are the biggest challenges they are facing?

NOTE: One of the most important questions to ask is the one about their biggest challenges. During the discovery process, ask this question to your prospects, recent customers, renewed customers (someone who has been a customer for over a year). If your product is not solving one of your target customer’s top 1 to 3 pains, then your product doesn’t provide significant value. It is a nice-to-have rather than a must-have. If there are ever any changes to their budget or the economy, then your product will be on their short-list for cancellation.

Interview customers that have been using your product for more than 1 year
If your company is lucky enough to have been in business for at least a year, you should have customers who have renewed and those that have churned. Interview a couple of them with a focus on understanding why they use your product, how often, and what they like most about it.

Interview industry experts/analysts
If you are a larger organization and your product fits in a well-established industry you would benefit from reaching out to Forrester and Gartner researchers. Interview researchers and analysts but take their knowledge with a pinch of salt. Most of the large research companies only release one or two reports a year on any particular industry. The market changes faster than that, and by the time a report is released, it is outdated. Also, big research firms mostly concentrate on getting feedback from large organizations, so the findings in the report will be skewed toward large players.

It is important to point out that if you do consult with researchers or analysts that you avoid the temptation to create a message based solely on their findings or knowledge. Many teams fall into the trap of creating analyst-speak messaging as an (apparently) easy solution, but this is a big mistake because such messaging very rarely resonate with buyers.

Another way to conduct a few interviews outside of your organization is to find a company and person that fits your target customer profile but who isn’t a customer but is considered an industry expert. Find a way to have a 10–15 min discussion with at least a few industry experts that have something to do with your company or product.

Review competitive messaging and 3rd party resources
You should have a shortlist of competitors against whom you want to position your product. Review their messaging and record in detail how they talk about their product and company. Quora is an incredible and very underrated resource for enterprise companies. If your product is more technical, check out Stackoverflow. Find a place or a community for your target customer and review topics and discussions. Note which questions are most popular in the community.

What if you are an early-stage startup?
Reading thus far you might be thinking “wait, but what if I don’t have a sales team yet? What if I don’t have customers that I can interview yet alone customers that have been around for a year?”. What can a small, early-stage startup do to design strategic communication? The answer to this is: focus on interviewing your prospects. Make a list of companies and people who might be interested in your product or idea. Do whatever it takes to interview them. Pay attention not only to the challenges they describe but also the terms they use. Carefully record your conversation. Position your conversations as discovery, where you truly want to know about them and their challenges, and not as sales pitches. Even if you have a product, refrain from sales pitches it can turn off your interviewees. The goal is to learn about your target customers and figure out strategic messaging and not to sell them on your product at this time.

Also, keep your eyes and ears open; you might come across someone in your target audience who can be a great mentor or advisor to your team. You can’t overestimate how helpful an advisor who fits your target customer profile can be early on.

Summary:
Carrying out initial discovery interviews is probably the most time-consuming step in creating a strategic messaging map, but it is the most important one. Your strategic message needs to connect with your target audience (prospects and customers) and there is no better way to find out how to do this than to ask them directly. It is critical to keep a detailed record of your interviews so you can identify certain patterns. The next step after your interviews are completed is to start filling out your target customer profile and the values that correspond with each profile.