Workbook 5: Sharpening up your product messaging

The work you’ve done reconfirming your Value Proposition will almost certainly mean that your existing market facing messages will need to be updated. This would include your website, your sales deck and indeed any content that customers might read. It’s vital that there’s message consistency everywhere so let’s look at how you should go about this and why it’s so important.  

Your first job should be to create or recreate a compelling company mission statement. 

Creating a market defining Mission Statement 

Shortly after we sold our business, 4th Contact, to the MessageLabs Group, we were asked to join the Senior Management Team for a meeting at Cowley Manor. The content of this meeting has always stuck in our minds. 

We were about to launch MessageLabs on the world, an idea that was originally dreamt up via a drawing on a pub wall in Cirencester – I think the drawing might still be there! MessageLabs was to become the world’s first Internet level antivirus scanning tool and had been dreamt up by brothers Ben and Jos White and the incredible brains that had created Star Internet with them in the late 1990s.  

The product had been created to prevent harmful viruses being spread via e-mail, using a heuristics engine (latter Day AI) called Sceptic. The platform would interrogate every e-mail message before it reached an employee’s desktop. Rather than receive an e-mail containing a virus, you would instead receive a message saying that Sceptic was concerned about the content and ask you to check it before it was fully downloaded. Five years later this concept turned into a $700 million business, ultimately acquired by Symantec on the evening before the enormous stock market crash of 2008. It had literally been sold just in time. 

The meeting that’s stuck with us however, was being hosted by a brand consultancy and the topic for debate was what the Mission, Vision and Values should be for this brand new business. To get our minds thinking in the right way we were shown some famous mission statements from other highly successful businesses. We reviewed dozens, but one in particular stood out for me due to its simplicity and clarity.  

Ritz-Carlton’s “We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.” Just nine words were needed to capture the essence of the way the staff intended to treat their customers and also what sort of customers they were focussing on. There’s also just a hint of how they expect their staff to be treated in there too. Genius. They pledged to provide the finest personal service and facilities and an experience to enliven the senses.  

The greatest mission statements capture everything a potential customer needs to know about an organisation within just a few words. Tesla’s is “to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy,” Ted’s is simply to “spread ideas”” and LinkedIn’s is “to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.” MessageLabs ultimately came up with the brilliant strap line “Be Certain” surely one of the great mission statements within the world of B2B SaaS. 

It’s vitally important therefore that you and your team come up with your own Mission Statement and make it as concise as you can. We’ll explore the importance of product messaging later in the book but for now, this will form the bedrock of all your messaging moving forwards.  

The importance of message clarity 

It’s hard to underestimate the importance of clarity when it comes to thinking about how you’re going to market your business. For most software businesses, the flagship message is the company website, and here’s where we hope you’ll permit us a moan.  

We’ve looked at hundreds of B2B SaaS websites over the years and we can’t tell you the number of times, even after 20 minutes, we’ve still been unable to decipher what the benefit the business provides, let alone the problems it solves.  

You’ve invested quality time confirming your Value Proposition, defining what your ‘middle of the dartboard’ customer looks like and who the buying persona is. You’ve also tested your thesis with target customers (and others) to ensure the pain is real and your solution is the answer. So, you know you’re solving a mission critical problem with your solution – that’s gold dust. But all your work to date will be for nothing if you don’t re-message your product with absolute clarity. You now need to take everything you’ve learned and refresh your website, content, sales collateral and indeed anything that faces the market. 

There’s a simple truth in business and Donald Miller in his book “Building a Storybrand” gets it bang on. To paraphrase Donald, ‘customers don’t buy the best products – they buy the products they can understand the quickest’. He’s right – because the perfect feedback we’re looking for once a prospect lands on our website or reads our content should go something like this. “I like the way they empathise with our challenges, and they are speaking in our unique language. I admire the insight they clearly have for our industry, and they’ve absolutely nailed our pain. I understand how they can help us in an instant – I think we should find out more about these guys.’  

There are metric tonnes of research out there about how many seconds you have to get your message across on a website, but let’s for now say we have about 30. What I can say for sure is that beautiful websites don’t sell things – words do and that’s why getting the messaging right about your product is so mission critical. As Robin William’s inspirational teacher said in Dead Poet’s Society, ‘Words and ideas can change the world.’ This has never been truer in business to business software.  

Check in with your Messaging today 

It’s a great exercise to take a dispassionate look at not just your website but all your market facing collateral as it exists today and question whether it truly reflects the pain and solution messaging you’ve now clearly evidenced with your interviews. To steal Steve Jobs’ message, can a seven year old understand what you do, who it helps and how? Is it possible your website is talking more about you and your heritage than your customer’s pains and challenges? Miller again, “Customers don’t generally care about your story – they care about their own. Your customer should be the hero of your story not your brand.” Have you been guilty of falling into this trap? 

Donald Miller goes on, “No-one will listen if your message if isn’t simple, no matter how expensive your marketing. Simply stated, the human brain is driven towards clarity and away from confusion and we’ll always lose to competitors if what they offer is communicated more clearly. The overriding function of the brain is to help an individual survive and thrive and hence humans are constantly scouring their environment for information that will help them with this most primitive need. Processing information demands the brain burns calories. Don’t make them burn too many trying to understand your product.”  

Your messages, across every piece of collateral, has to be simple, relevant, and easily repeatable and our prospects need to leave our website satisfied that they’ve found a business that properly understands them.  

Get some branding help 

It’s almost inevitable that when it comes to re-messaging your Value Proposition you’re going to need some outside help. We knew we had to back in the day, and it was the best investment we made.  

In the late 1990s we took the decision at our financial services consultancy that we had to re-message our proposition. At the end of the day, we were selling life and pensions policies to high net worth individuals often based in the City of London. We were Independent Financial Advisers – there’s literally nothing sexy about that.  

Our marketplace was incredibly congested by far better funded competitors such as St James’s Place, Equitable Life, and dozens of insurance companies’ direct sales forces. Despite being cash strapped, we took the unusual step of employing a brand agency called WhatIf? who came with an eye watering invoice and highly unusual ways of working. When we first met them, we were ushered into a room full of bean bags and the floor was scattered with various projectiles including tennis balls and hacky sacks. These we supposed to help you think clearer and ‘pass’ ideas around. The partners at WhatIf? had a bean bag each and we were invited to join them. We were dressed in suits, and they were wearing black T-shirts ripped jeans, open toed sandals and had the coolest sunglasses you’ve ever seen, perched jauntily on their heads.  

We weren’t totally sure what world we had entered, but we began to examine the industry we worked in and were asked probing questions about the reality of the lives of our customers. We talked about their aspirations, hopes and fears and profiled what the perfect customer would look like to us.  This was at least two years before we set up our first software business and those sessions blew our minds. We’d never really examined specifically  who we were and what our customers really wanted, and we’ve carried the lessons of what we learned in that room right the way through to the present day.  

In the 1990s, in a pre-internet era, marketing was largely focused on direct mail – that was the only way we could really get our customers attention. Their output was remarkable, and they came up with several ideas of things we could send our customers in the post that might make them more likely to interact with us than the competition.  

Three stick out in my mind. One was to send them their Daily Bread, quite literally a loaf in the post emblazoned with our corporate logo and telephone number explaining that we could help them with all their financial concerns. Another was to post prospects a lottery scratch card and a letter that said, “we hope this ticket answers all your financial problems but just in case it doesn’t, please give us a call”. I also remember helium balloons in boxes being suggested which once opened by our prospects at work, clearly displayed our call to action messaging. I can’t remember how many of these strategies we adopted, but that’s not the point. WhatIf? got us thinking in a different way. We had to be more approachable, make our customers smile and send a message that was instantly understandable. By the end of the year 2000, we were one of the highest producing IFA businesses (per capita) in the UK. 

I can’t remember how much the invoice was from WhatIf?, but I do recall it being way more money than we could afford at the time. But it was a game changer for us, and I thoroughly recommend you making a similar investment. If nothing else, buy their book called Sticky Wisdom – another to add to your Mandatory Reading list. It’s packed full of great ideas. You might like to read Pat Cash’s book too called Humanising B2B. 

Download your own team’s genius 

There are dozens of great design agencies out there who are simply superb, so find one and get ready to pull up a bean bag! Ask friends family and anyone else in your network who they’ve met who may be able to help. Or if the budget for an agency is not available right now, use the resource is at your fingertips such as your own team who you’ve undoubtedly hired for their genius. Have another whiteboard session, bring pizza and beer if that would help. Get people to think outside the box and explain the rule that no idea is too stupid. Re-watch the videos you’ve made interviewing your clients and ask people (stealing from Apple) to Think Different. Through testing your thesis thoroughly you’ve built up an enormous bank of data and evidence and this feedback should be invaluable when you’re considering how you should message your solution moving forwards. 

We implore you to be brave here because fortune will favour you. Through all the work you’ve done so far, you know you have a genuine painkiller on your hands. You now need to voice it properly and to create a compelling message set that really makes your market stand up and listen. It might just be that your team has the answer. Run a competition if you need to for who can come up with the best strap line. 

What is important though is that within five seconds of looking at your website, a customer must be able to answer three questions.  

• What do you offer 
• How would it make my life better  
• What do I need to do to enquire further 

You must define something the customer wants and make it simple and relevant. Of course, the message could be all about saving time and money, but I’m not convinced anyone believes that anymore, and many customers have been stung by the time and money it’s taken them to implement software in the past.   

Make the new messaging personal 

Again, go to the very top of Maslow’s hierarchy of need and think about self-actualization. Make the pain messaging personal and play right into the frustrations they have with the status quo.  

Add a hint more of the emotional than the factual. Make them in an instant understand that you empathise with them and that you’ve worked with their peers in different businesses to solve this very same problem. They should feel safe, happy, and strong within your website and keen to reach out and find out more.  

Don’t forget that your prospect has ambitions of their own. Could implementing your software help them get promoted or at the very least, receive recognition across the organisation that they had helped solve a very real challenge? Might the CEO knock on their door and say thank you because you brought a slick, invaluable solution that’s improved the lives of not just fellow employees but outside partners as well? All this needs to be contained within your new message set. 

Finally, if you can play to the desire for Meaning whereby your prospects can participate in something greater than themselves, then you really are onto a winner. They have a genuine desire to leave the world – or at least their department – in a better place than they found it. 

The more we talk about the problems our customers experience, the more interest and trust they will have in our brand. But you need to get right to the heart of the challenge. Frustration alone is not the enemy here, find out what the root source is. 

Get everyone speaking the same language 

You’ll find this revised messaging will percolate across your organisation instinctively. But in case it doesn’t you absolutely need to re-educate your team about how they speak to customers and with what tone of voice. They need to internalise these messages and become empathisers and storytellers. 

At MessageLabs we used to run a competition called Pitch Idol whereby each month, five members of staff from across the business would be selected at random. In front of the whole company at the next All Hands, they’d be required to pitch our core message set. Points were awarded for both levels of inventiveness and entertainment, but mainly for how closely they’d stuck to our new voice. In this way, everyone in the business had to get intimate with the way we wanted to face the market and the winner was given a weekend away for 2 in a country house hotel. It was the perfect way to ensure cross company continuity of message. 

The Marketing collaterals you’ll need to change 

The short answer here is everything and if you have a Head of Marketing, they will be invaluable here.  

From the meetings you’ve had with the team, and ideally a whole tonne of refinement and distillation, you should now have built a sharper message set that plays directly to the market pains you’ve identified and verified.  

Draw up a list together of every piece of market facing content you currently have and work your way through it.  

• You might want to start with your website and consider how can it become more compelling 
• Do you need a total rebrand or does just the messaging need to change?  
• Do you need extra landing pages to represent different verticals?  
• Might a 90 second video help project your core message set? 
• Your sales facing PowerPoint deck will almost certainly need a refresh and will need to include your new Pain Statement.  
• Take a look at your Inbound content too and see if you need to be writing blogs and white papers that are more relevant to the pain you’ve evidenced.  
• Everything will need an update, a refresh and a sharpen. 

Workbook Actions 

• Be hard on yourself – does your website, your sales decks and any other marketing messaging accurately and consistently reflect the pain you solve for your customers? 
• Now you’ve evidenced real customer pain amongst your target Buying Personas, there’s little doubt you need to update ALL your marketing collaterals. 
• Your voice needs to play directly into the visceral pain being felt by your Buying Persona and explain that you have a solution. 
• Use an external brand agency if you can or leverage the genius of your own team. 
• Start with an over-arching Mission Statement that clearly identifies who you’re FOR 
• Make sure your messages percolate across the whole business and check in with your team to ensure it has landed. 
• Build a list of all the collaterals that need to be updated and get started! 

So what’s next?  

With a refreshed, consistent and revitalised message set, let’s now take a look at how light up our 240 target customers and what marketing tactics we need to adopt.