Five reasons you should run a strategic messaging workshop

How clear is your messaging?

Companies that dominate their technology category have learnt something. They know that to beat revenue goals and increase shareholder value, they need to deliver clear believable messaging. Messaging that strategically positions them while at the same time, their messaging must resonate with their customers.

The absence of a clear messaging strategy has the opposite effect. It leads to poor positioning, which, in turn, contributes to a lack of customer engagement. This lack of customer engagement leads to low close rates, long sales cycles, and weak channel take-up. To make things worse, it creates tension between the sales, the marketing, and the product teams.

Running a strategic messaging workshop will deliver 5 key benefits:

  • Aligns the company for faster growth
  • Drives a deeper understanding of what the customer cares about
  • Increases the return on investment in sales and marketing
  • Helps sales close deals faster
  • Guides the product teams on future development strategy
Alignment:

Have you ever heard from sales that they aren’t getting enough of the right leads from marketing? Or heard from marketing that sales aren’t able to follow through and close good leads? Or, how about from product management that sales and marketing don’t understand what the product does and how to position it?

When there is a lack of alignment between sales, product marketing, marketing, demand generation, product management and other departments on what your core messaging is, bad stuff happens:

  • Sales get poor leads,
  • sales cycles are extended,
  • and valuable leads get dropped.

A strategic messaging workshop brings together key parts of an organization so that together they can clearly define who the customer is, what is the problem facing the customer, why the current solution doesn’t work and what the value proposition of your solution is.

Understanding what the customer cares about:

Messaging to what a customer cares about, accelerates business.

All too often technology companies start with their product, why they believe it is unique compared to others in their category, and then they build messaging around that. The problem is the customer may not care much about that point of view so the messaging falls flat and doesn’t produce good content or quality leads.

 A strategic messaging workshop starts with an outside in view. Who are the customers? What are their real concerns?  What are their desired outcomes? How is the customer currently addressing the problem you solve? This takes time but the results will deliver messaging that resonates with customers and it leads to effective content for sales and marketing.

Increases the return on investment in sales and marketing:

Creating content for marketing and sales can be very long and tedious. Everyone seems to have a different opinion on what it should be, who it should address and what the main product features are.

As part of this workshop, a messaging document will be developed that aligns with what matters to the customer. Plus, since it is developed by the whole team, it has buy in from sales, marketing,  product team and leadership. This document drives content that customers care about including videos, business briefs, blogs, webinars etc. Having a pre-agreed messaging foundation enables the production of content that is consistent, is quicker to produce, and more effective.

Helps close deals faster

Through the process of understanding who the customer is, what the customer cares about and then producing the content to match, the resulting content helps drive faster sales. 

The messaging framework allows marketing to produce compelling content for the economic and technical decision makers. Not only are sales able to get to the right decision makers faster, they will have the right tools to address all the buyers and those who influence the purchase. 

No longer is it left to the technical buyer to translate the technicalities into business benefits the economic buyer can understand, the content is ready and available as the messaging has already been thought through.

Guides the product teams on future development

The strategic messaging workshop starts with the team examining a number of customer scenarios so they can select the top strategic use case. Choosing the top use case involves discussing the market readiness and impact of all the use cases. This process has a great side benefit in that it will reveal where the product gaps are for each use cases. This process can uncover big market opportunities that the product or solution could be a fit for but were not being considered but maybe only needed some small product changes.

These use cases can then be turned into a product road map for future product development. Having clearly defined use cases from the customers point of view helps  the product team develop winning products. 

Contact Us Today To Arrange Your Workshop