Craft Messaging for Rapid Growth

Great messaging is the difference between only a few people being able to describe well what your company does versus something that everyone in your company and community feels comfortable delivering to any audience. It convinces your audience to want to learn more.

Great messaging differentiates your offerings as not just better than competitors, but taking a different approach. It captures and amplifies the founders' vision versus "messaging by committee" that comes across as bland, "me too" wording, that minus the company name could apply to competitors. Great messaging powers marketing operations that cost-effectively scale outreach to your target accounts.

There are many variants for white-boarding a messaging pyramid. The image above shows the model that I've found helpful in work for B2B tech companies. What's important are three underlying concepts:

1. At the top of the messaging pyramid you start with the answer, and then lay out questions and supporting details in a logical order;

2. There is consistency and reinforcement from each level to the next; and

3. After you present the brand and elevator pitch, you customize what you say next based on audience (persona, job title, use case, business or technical audience, industry vertical, technical architecture, etc.), while remaining consistent within the overall framework.

The top of the pyramid answers: what problem does your company solve, how are you disrupting existing approaches, and why should I care? Then, for each supporting idea, you break that further into more ideas or supporting evidence. As noted by McKinsey, this pyramid principle teaches that “Ideas at any level in the pyramid must always be summaries of the ideas grouped below them.”

The best narratives define a new market category that is not only better, but more importantly, different from other offerings. At Tableau, self-service visual analytics represented the next generation of business intelligence with a fundamentally different approach than the 1st-gen offerings that required IT departments to configure dashboards. Zuora isn't just an easier-to-manage billing system, but a platform for new subscription-based businesses.

Journalists will recognize this as the same inverted pyramid approach they use to write press articles: at the very beginning summarize what's important and newsworthy, and then each subsequent paragraph adds details. If the reader only has 1 minute, she gets the most important information at the beginning.

This pyramid approach works particularly well for a multi-product platform. The initial elevator pitch covers the customer benefits of the complete platform, followed by breakouts for the features of individual products and services.

A good place to start is to write, refine and validate an internal shared doc that runs a couple pages in length. If you are familiar with the book Play Bigger or the strategic narrative services by Andy Raskin, it's a similar process that those excellent consultants use. Hiring an external consultant can be particularly helpful if you find it difficult to get internal alignment on this messaging across your executive team, board of directors, or other stakeholders. Filo CEO and co-founder Matt Compton describes this well as "medium form writing".

The desired end result from this messaging pyramid exercise is a narrative that fulfills the characteristics that Chip and Dan Heath describe in Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. The narrative should be:

• Simple;

• Have an unexpected surprise;

• Have concrete details that help people understand and remember;

• Be credible, with sufficient external validation; and

• Have emotional consequences that make people care through appeal to the audience's self-interest or professional identity.

Variations of this narrative will appear on your website home page, initial slides of a sales deck, and the script that your sales development reps (SDRs) tell prospects on phone calls. It's how your employees will explain your fantastic company to their own family and friends. It's the narrative that explains why your company exists and why prospects should want to work with you or buy from you.

One approach is to define the story in narrative form first, then pull out the messaging structure and hierarchy from that. Alternatively, I've also worked with some startups where white-boarding a messaging pyramid was helpful as part of crafting the narrative and getting buy in from diverse internal and external stakeholders.

Either way, the end point is the same, to have a compelling narrative that transitions from an elevator pitch for all audiences to effective breakouts by persona, industry and use case that remain consistent to the overall story.

Create a Lightning Strike instead of a Mild Drizzle

There are some excellent external vendors who specialize in startup messaging, including the previously mentioned Play Bigger authors and Andy Raskin.

From my own experience, however, it's best to lead messaging in-house. The risks with an external vendor include that they lack the requisite industry domain expertise, and may not have the relationships with sales people, customers, industry analysts etc. to vet the draft messaging. In the 5 years I served as a Gartner senior analyst, I listened to over 5,000 vendor slide decks and product demos. Very few of these were memorable or differentiated.

All too often, the result of the external vendor exercise is more of a "soft drizzle" than the Play Bigger "lightning storm" best practice. The vendor produces their work, the wording goes onto a press release or website text etc., and then external or internal stakeholders raise questions or objections.

The CEO, VP of marketing or VP of sales then says "You're right, we should change that". This then leads to a never-ending set of incremental changes versus a "lightning strike" of clear, powerful messaging that has been adequately vetted and evangelized by industry domain experts.

Brand

Too many startups fail because they take an inward approach, saying things like "We're building a Ruby on Rails platform for predictive analytics". That's great, but what's the customer benefit? Start by defining what you are solving from a customer perspective. If your technology or service has multiple benefits, synthesize them into wording a single problem area that you are solving.

A common mistake at early and mid-stage startups is spending too much of your initial thought process trying to come up with a catchy tagline or one sentence on an introductory sales slide. The problem is that the tagline or one sentence will rarely make sense without a corresponding elevator pitch and the subsequent levels of details.

It's like trying to understand the sci-fi classic Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by jumping to the end and reading that the answer to life, the universe and everything is "42". The answer is meaningless without the context of the book. Your branding starts not with a tagline or sales slide but with what problem you are solving for customers.

Branding is about a lot more than just your company name, logo and tagline. It’s about the accumulated experiences by customers and prospects, directly by using your products and services, and indirectly through the influence of marketing, design and media commentary.

Branding also encompasses your company culture; what is your organization like to work with? How are your employees perceived? What kind of community do you have with customers, prospects and influencers?

Voice and tone are an important extension of your brand. The right voice makes people feel safe—because you’re speaking their language. Salesforce content follows three principles:

• Action- and goal-oriented: Content that helps people do something that’s important to them.

• Less is more: Content that is quick to consume.

• Easy to understand: Content that uses everyday language, and it breaks new concepts and tasks into approachable chunks.

At Datadog, we prioritized a content voice that is enthusiastic, humble, open and precise.

• Adopt a voice that’s friendly and avoids jargon to be inclusive of people at all levels of experience with the topics we write about

• Speak honestly and allow the fact that we are humans writing content to shine through

• Do deep research on topics that are new and evolving and ensure content is always educational, direct, authoritative and interesting.

The goal is to produce content you can’t get anywhere else by putting a lot of effort and energy into researching and writing it, to advance the state of the art of technology adoption and industry best practices.

Elevator Pitch

The best elevator pitches invoke an aspirational theme that represents a new market category, so that you are not only better than most of your competitors, but more importantly, you are different from them.

You may remember the story of Benjamin Franklin flying a kite in a thunderstorm and inventing the lightening rod. In 1750 Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter describing his electricity experiments and mailed it to a member of the Royal Society in London. Franklin excused the length of his report by writing:

I have already made this paper too long, for which I must crave pardon, not having now time to make it shorter.

The same can be said of an elevator pitch. What starts as a one hour (or longer) presentation needs to be distilled down to several paragraphs that grab the audience's attention, present and solve a problem, visualize the successful consequences, and provide a call to action for how the audience can get started. The process for developing this messaging takes time, expertise and a programmatic approach.

The best elevator pitches start with why — why should the audience care? The benefits should include not only business return on investment (ROI) metrics but also the emotional element — how will your prospect become a hero by buying your product?

And the best elevator pitches are designed for any audience — business or technical, prospect or existing customer, etc. What you say next after the elevator pitch should reflect the customer segment, personas or titles of people in the room, ambiance of the event (board presentation or beer & pizza meetup), etc.

But the elevator pitch stays the same. Fitting any audience means that you need to avoid jargon or acronyms.

Who You Sell To

You want to identify the characteristics of your ideal customer, and focus your marketing on the groups of people who have these characteristics. For B2B startups, your segmentation may include size of company (Fortune 500? Global 2000? Mid-size enterprises? Small businesses?), industry verticals, technology platforms (companies that run on AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure, etc.), and / or other attributes (early adopter of new technologies? late adopter?).

Buyer and influencer personas can help you visualize who is important in the customer's buying process.

For an early-stage startup, you may want to run campaigns that focus on a single segment or a single buyer persona. Salesforce built much of its business focusing exclusively on sales people, before expanding to marketing, IT service and other departments. Just because your platform, product or service can help different segments or personas doesn't mean that you should automatically devote your marketing efforts to all of them.

One advantage of this messaging pyramid structure is that you can run campaigns that target an individual segment or persona, or very specific customer pain point, while retaining the broader corporate messaging about the range of different customers who benefit from your offering.

Under personas, you can list, test and refine job titles. For sales enablement, over time you will want to build out resources that address influencer objections, such as for example from a large enterprise's security, procurement and legal departments.

How You Reach, Educate and Inspire Prospects and Customers

Following the segmentation and personas covered in the previous section, one worthwhile step is to think through and validate what are the top 5 to 8 reasons, in order, why people buy your products or services. This then becomes a valuable way to group content and themes; the top of your home page hits the #1 reason, followed by sections that cover each subsequent reason individually or in groups of three.

For many startups, small changes can make a big difference in improving SEO for organic search. You can always aim for further SEO refinements, and consider hiring an SEO contractor or firm as needed, but you want to get the basics done first.

Marketing campaigns integrating four or more digital channels outperform single or dual channel campaigns by 300%, according to data from marketing automation software provider HubSpot.

According to Forrester Research, 86 percent of marketing decision makers see integrating multiple channels—both online and off—under one single integrated marketing strategy as critical to their success. What this means in practice is taking a major campaign theme and running in through multiple channels — home page callout, a webinar, a blog, paid keywords, display ads, conference presentations, and in-person field events.

When it comes to paid keywords and display ads, my advice is don’t assume that a marketing channel is or isn’t a good fit for your business until you have tried it. Test with small budgets. If a particular ad channel or campaign works well, you can consider increasing your spend, while ending it for those that fare poorly.

If customer community is important to your brand (and it should be), make sure that it is reflected in your marketing. For example, are you encouraging friendly customers or partners to organize and run meetup groups in cities where your company may not have an office or employee presence?

Are you providing an online forum where customers can ask questions not only with your company but also with each other? And are you creating a certification program whereby customers can verify their product knowledge and list your company's offering on their LinkedIn profile's professional skills?

Product, Partner and Solution Marketing

Product marketing translates features into benefits. One way to think of these is a one-two punch. For every bottom punch you make about a feature, there should be a corresponding top punch about the customer benefit.

One common mistake for startups is to equate the level of software development time and resources with the level of customer benefit. Prospects don't care how many software engineering people-hours it took for your startup to build a feature. What they care about is what will make them successful as an individual (for this job or their next job), what will make their team or business unit successful, and what will benefit their company.

Another essential part of product marketing is defining the fit within an organization's enterprise architecture and business processes. What alternative offerings or vendors does your product replace? What are adjacent technologies that are the most popularly requested integrations? How does your offering affect or improve workflows such as DevSecOps? How do you handle information security and data ownership?

What prospect objections can you anticipate and have answers ready? For competitors, what aspects of your offering are particularly relevant or disruptive compared to competition from existing systems, open source, or other third-party vendors like yours?

Ease of use is important, at every stage of the buyer journey, deployment, renewal and expansion. If you are hard to work with, customers will make the easier choice, even if some parts of the products or features are sub-standard. For example, I love using On24 as a high-end video conferencing and webinar program, and even once bought it as a marketing VP at a 15-person Series A startup for use with a webinar series. That said, many companies continue to use video chat and video conferencing systems with weak features or erratic service because those vendors make the purchasing and deployment process as seamless and frictionless as possible.

And of course, prospects care how much your product costs. As your startup grows, you may find it beneficial to post list pricing on your website. Every prospect will ask about pricing, and prospects will readily share what you tell them with your competitors. So you might as well simplify your sales process by posting list pricing.

Or, as an alternative, at least put sample pricing in your standard sales deck, ideally toward the beginning, so that presenters are not always having to jump past worthwhile content to get to the pricing information requested by an impatient person in the room.

For software or software as a service (SaaS) startups, it can be helpful to differentiate between platform and product marketing. Relevant details about your platform may include unique intellectual property, how the platform is built, information security, and the development and operations (DevSecOps) that make it reliable.

The applications that run on top of your platform — which is what most users will see and consume — drive your product marketing. Both platform and product marketing are important.

For a Seed or Series A startup, it may be too early to think about or execute partner or solutions marketing.

As your startup scales, partners will become an increasingly important part of your go to market, particularly when it comes to presenting an end-to-end solution to a customer problem, and to take advantage of partner's bigger marketing budgets with joint go-to market activities such as joint webinars, getting included in their email blasts to their customers, and holding regional field marketing events that stay true to your startup's brand while including budget sharing with one or more partners.

Validation

Validation takes many forms, from customer references and industry analyst citations to your product's technical documentation and product roadmap. Validation is where you offer convincing details, references and data that back up the claims you make in your elevator pitch and marketing campaigns.

Validation is not a single level of messaging, but rather a compilation of increasing levels of detail, using a pyramid approach to organization. For example, your technical documentation may start out with broad categories under which is grouped a tree-and-branch breakout of more and more granular product specs, user tips, integration code examples, etc.

That validation is shown at the bottom level of this article's messaging pyramid does not mean that it should be hidden or hard to find on your company website. Just the opposite. Website readers look for validation early and often. Customer success stories and industry analyst report reprints may rank among your best performing campaigns.

B2B buyers are waiting later in the sales process before wanting to talk to a salesperson. The implication is to make as much validation as possible available externally for prospect self-education. For example, in addition to the call to action of requesting a custom demo, provide one or more recorded demo clips on your website or YouTube channel.

Most importantly, validation by a community of customers, press and industry analysts are often fundamentally important for category creation, to define a new market segment, evangelize it and dominate it over time.

Pulling it All Together

It can be daunting to look at a messaging pyramid as a whole and realize how much work is involved. Fortunately as part of a programmatic approach you can start small, flesh out draft messaging, and then incrementally test and refine.

Eventually, you will be able to translate from a messaging whiteboard to a single summary document — ideally one that is external-facing, such as this PDF which at the time for Tableau Software was a summary of the elevator pitch, top 6 reasons why customers buy Tableau, and supporting validation from customer and analyst references.

You'll also want to ensure that your executive team, sales, marketing and other stakeholders are all on board and are using the same consistent and effective messaging.

And it's not a one-time exercise. As your competitors co-opt your category name, broader business and industry themes emerge, your messaging will need to evolve. For many startups, every few years you may benefit from a major messaging relook in the same way that every few years you go from making incremental website updates to envisioning and publishing a brand-new corporate website.

Feel free to add comments about messaging approaches that have worked well for your startup.

Brett