Messaging isn't a sexy topic. But poor messaging is likely why outbound doesn't work for you.
Common messaging mistakes:
⛔️ Creating outbound messaging in a silo
Mistake: A lone BDR leader, sales exec, or marketing exec creates all the cold call talk tracks and email sequences by themselves.
Impact: Messaging sounds generic and has too much personal bias.
⛔️ Marketing or product creating outbound messaging
Mistake: A PMM or marketing leader writes all the outbound messaging
Impact: Since they've had little (or zero) conversations with real customers, the messaging is super generic
⛔️ Product voice: feature heavy messaging
Mistake: Messaging focuses on how the solution works, specific features, etc.
Impact: This might work on a webpage, but not in a cold email. Messaging feels super salesy and isn't appealing to execs.
⛔️ Not "chunking up" to business outcomes
Mistake: Messaging addresses all of the pains of the user, not the decision-makers
Impact: Reps get delegated down to product users and struggle to start sales conversations at the exec level
⛔️ Not leveraging customer conversations
Mistake: Not using recorded customer conversations to inform messaging
Impact: Messaging doesn't use the customer's language and feels generic.
What to do instead:
✅ Build a messaging team
Get no more than 10 of the best people together to build common messaging. This should include a few of the best AEs, marketing, customer success, sales leaders, product specialists, etc. And make sure to assign a single person to own messaging.
✅ Live workshop messaging by persona/vertical
Run live workshops to work out messaging together. At a minimum, messaging should be created for each specific persona. For enterprise, messaging should be created by persona AND industry.
A healthcare security leader speaks a different language than a SaaS security leader.
✅ Build a messaging matrix
This is what the end product should look like:
Personas → Priorities → Current Solutions → Problems/Impact → Desired Outcomes
Now you have something that can easily be repurposed into talk tracks and emails.
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If 2024 H2 pipeline is looking thin—and outbound isn't producing results—get back to the basics and start with great messaging.
Marketing should NOT own sales messaging. Sales needs to own sales messaging. And everyone needs to collaborate together for great messaging.