Messaging Continuity
Saying the Right Thing to the Right Audience is Key
A company has many ways to communicate – from PR and the CEO to sales and marketing teams. Each speaks to its audience in a specific way to accomplish specific goals. Sometimes the goal is to sell more products, other times the goal is to bolster confidence in the trajectory of the company in relation to its market.
Delivering the right message to the right person is essential. The person in the middle of the buying process wants to know everything you can do to make their life easier and to help his company succeed. The lead wants to know how you differ from your competitors. A current customer wants to know what is on the product roadmap to improve her experience with your platform.
How often, though, is messaging analyzed across teams? If you want to focus on the GTM team’s messaging, it’s relatively simple if there are automations in place. Through testing outbound emails and marketing copy across channels, you can get a better understanding of the successes and failures.
For example, take a cadence from an SDR with a series of four to five emails and look at the specific wording about features, differences, and reasons to use your product. Then compare it to the copy used by the marketing team on channels like LinkedIn and Facebook. Value comes from knowing what is working to get a lead in the door to talk with your sales team, and figuring out what moves that person from a lead to a prospect after the demo or first call.
Typically, automation software provides analytics that show the success rate (open rate, click through rate, etc.) This can be very helpful for the quick and dirty ways to update and revamp messaging, however it does not translate across teams and leaves out most of the other communication from the company.
Imagine the scene, now, with every member of the sales and marketing teams sitting in your biggest conference room with a giant white board. People begin throwing out phrases and words that have worked within their systems (quantitatively), and it becomes a free-for-all. One group is set on how it is working because it is working. The other team is set on their efforts because it is working too. Can there be coherence, or will the words be wildly different?
There are ways in which different messaging works across the phases of a deal, and across the lifecycle of someone moving from lead to prospect to customer. Questions come up during the process which don’t fit a singular narrative, and intricacies are discussed when it comes to specific use cases. Even with this reality, having a holistic view of messaging means that since the product is more or less the same (as a broad generalization), the same questions get asked and the same answers work to close deals or bring in leads.
The reality is often more time constrained than anything else. When you get that late-night email from a prospect about a feature, the easiest thing to do is to blast an answer that has worked in the past. When the deadline for a campaign comes up, words fill in content boxes without hours of looking back on previous examples – it’s knowledge gained from experience. Deadlines move things along faster and the consistent ticking clock of the month or quarter demand speed rather than historical analysis.
Looking back on previous success and failure allows teams to update what can become stale – the same three one-liners recycled for years because that is how it was done in the past. Sure, revenue might be growing, but what are you missing if you don’t know what is changing on the other side of the table?
By putting yourself in the shoes of your customer (or future customer), you can target what you should be saying. What gets you in the door for a meeting or breaks through someone’s constantly filling email inbox? What draws their attention while scrolling social media? Knowing these answers and sharing them across teams provides data that will be used to improve the flows company-wide.
Marketers market, salespeople sell. Two funnels roughly the same flow together in a cohesive way if things are going well, moving from the lead to the close. What fills the funnels are up to you and your team, but having a basis of knowledge from the entire team drives valuable information into each phase of the process. If you’re consistently learning you can optimize based on an ever-moving set of variables, both from internal product updates and from external shifts in the marketplace.
Cue cute Facebook ad here meant to get you to stop reading…
Cue short, to-the-point email telling you about how we went to the same school and our product solves all of your needs forever…