Three questions to help you sharpen your messaging

Having a differentiated message for your solution is critical to your success. It allows you to win your share of the deals, assuming your sales organization is choosing the right battles.  Having your message further sharpened to reflect why the customer needs to buy your product now is even more important in these times, when the budgets are tight.

A message house (collection of key positioning messages for your solution) is the starting point for all your marketing activities.  Once constructed, it helps your corporate marketing, field marketing and sales position the solutions consistently and correctly in all they do - their PR activities, customer conversations, sales pitches, industry presentations and collateral.  So much is written about the frameworks to create a message house, but they all go something like this:

• Who: who are the key personas you are targeting?
• What: For each persona, what are the key problems you are trying to address (in context of your solution)?
• How: For each problem defined above, how does your product address the issue and what are your key proof points.
• Unlike: How do point solutions, legacy solutions and other competitors try to solve the problem and the limitations in their approach

The important thing to remember is that messaging framework should allow you to answer two important questions – Why buy and Why buy mine?  But do not forget to answer the third question as you build your messaging framework – it has always been important, but is even more important now when customer budgets are shrinking – Why buy now?

So, make sure your messaging framework answers these three questions.  One test – after you have written your positioning messages, replace your company/product name with the name of your competitor/their products and see if the messaging statements still hold true.  If they are, then your message is too generic and does not capture the true value proposition of your products and solutions - you need to revise them.

If your sales team can articulate the answers to these three questions to the satisfaction of their prospects – why buy, why buy now and why buy mine, they can dramatically increase their win rate.  And, as a product marketing person, that is your challenge.