How to Build Messaging Muscle: Beefing up Buyer Knowledge

This blog is for marketing managers and marketing communications managers who need to create audience-centric messages and content targeting technology buyers.

Building a bridge of message relevance to a buying audience takes deep skill in four areas, which I call pillars. These pillars interplay in the discipline of messaging.

Cultivating an Audience-Centric Mindset

In my first article in this series, I described an incident that happened early in my career in which my manager took over a presentation I was working on because I failed to identify or convey the value proposition of the program I was marketing. To give a little more context, it was a program that was going to change our partners’ contractual relationship with us. We needed to position why the change would be good for our partners. I, instead, created content focused on the program. I didn’t know any better.

I managed to achieve some success in that partner-program role, and was promoted into a different job focused on marketing professional services for security solutions. I needed to create messaging, content, and collateral, and integrate content into product launches. One big challenge was that the source content available from upstream sources was so complex and company centric, it was difficult to understand what we were marketing, let alone why a buyer would care.

Because I had writing skills and technology knowledge, I was able to make the content clearer. But I hadn’t yet learned to cultivate an audience-centric mindset.

Fortunately, I had an experience that changed my perspective and, in turn, the trajectory of my career.

I had the opportunity to attend a week-long, intensive program at a university’s business school. Over a week of 14-hour days, we evaluated several MBA case studies. One that stands out in my mind is the Harvard MBA case study about Black & Decker’s turnaround of DeWalt power tools, which Dan Stiff sums up nicely in this Credibility Branding Blog. Black & Decker turned the brand around by deeply understanding customers.

I brought what I learned during that week of saturation in an audience-centric mindset back to my job, and began orienting everything I did from a customer point of view.

I started to create messaging and collateral that other marketing teams took notice of. This led to creating processes, templates, and training to scale my methods across the professional services business. When the company redesigned its professional-services portfolio from the ground up, I worked directly with service product managers to gear the messaging and content with customer centricity. I went on to lead many messaging and content initiatives over the years.

Thinking back to the presentation that was pried from my program-centric fingers: I was surrounded by a program team focused on operational concerns, and took on their perspective. To be successful in messaging, I need to have an audience-centric focus. I need to stand strong as the advocate and voice for the audience, even if I’m the only person in the room doing it.

Cultivating an audience-centric mindset is to building messaging muscle as having a good diet is to having a healthy body. What you put in affects what you get out. You have to take responsibility for doing it because nobody is likely to lead you there. I recommend finding and taking an intensive course of study that will ingrain a customer-first marketing thought process, if you’ve never taken one.

Closing the Chasm between Solution Centricity and Outcome Centricity

If you consider the focus on content marketing and buyer personas today, you might believe that the world of technology marketing is completely on board with this movement. What I see is traction at the brand level, where companies market broad themes to the C-Suite. Beneath that level, where companies market solutions to line-of-business buyers and IT buyers and the focus becomes more technical, I see aspiration. Traction comes in fits and starts.

Marketers targeting beneath the C-Suite need help to shift from an inward focus on solutions to an outward focus on customers. Marketing leaders want to change this. Yet, people struggle with how to do it.

I see a chasm between the solution-centric mindset of line-of-business-level marketers, and the outcome-based mindset of customers. This chasm also stretches between the ideal of content that is persona-aligned and search-engine optimized, and the reality of overcoming ingrained legacies of product-centric orientation.

A more effective transaction needs to occur between solution marketing professionals and communication professionals to close this chasm.

We Need to Talk More about Buyers

When a company brings a new product or solution to market, or runs a campaign, marketing teams have weeks and weeks of meetings. Discussions center mostly about programmatic concerns: How much collateral will be created, and will it be ready on time? Do we have customers for the PR plan? What’s the social plan? The campaign lead creates a messaging narrative; commonly, almost every statement within it leads with the name of the company or the product.

In these meetings, teams rarely if ever talk about buyers, the problems they have, and why they care.

As marketing communicators, we need to understand the customers who buy solutions. Yet, paradoxically, we are often shielded from access to them. So our most commonly available route to understanding buyers is to talk with subject matter experts who actually work with them. These might be sales people; delivery experts; solution architects; or product, solution, or portfolio managers.

A Method for Closing the Chasm

To close the chasm between a solution orientation and what a buyer wants to know, we need to align product value propositions to what buyers are trying to accomplish, with great accuracy and specificity.

Overall, we need to know:

• Who the buyer is
• Attitudes the buyer has about our company
• The buyer’s initiatives and desired outcomes (for example, establishing predictive maintenance is a buyer initiative, and more production uptime is an outcome)

A good, accurate buyer persona profile will take us this far. The gap I see is at and below the level of the initiative statement. Initiatives are sometimes expressed cryptically, in a way that may be open to interpretation. And, I’ve never seen anybody offer up information below this level that would shed light on a buyer’s pain and happiness.

So, I created a way to acquire it.

Going Beyond the Persona

Buyers’ initiatives represent projects or ongoing work efforts they’re focused on. These are the things they’re trying to accomplish, which a company’s solutions help them do. For each initiative, we need to know:

• The buyer’s mindset, status quo, and pain
• What success looks like, in the buyer’s voice
• What obstacle keeps the buyer from achieving success
• How our solution helps the buyer overcome the obstacle better than any other solution the buyer might choose

To lead subject matter experts through this work of transferring their deep buyer knowledge effectively, communications professionals need strength in the other 3 pillars of messaging. We need a method for capturing the right information in order to make the work effort quick, efficient, and productive. We need business and technical knowledge, which I’ll discuss in a future article. We also need to be exceptionally strong at writing so we can bring clarity to content. I discussed an important step toward strengthening writing skills in my first article in this series, which focused on the writing pillar.

I devised a method for leading subject matter experts to uncover the substance of the conversation we need to have with buyers and applied it at the Fortune 100 technology company I worked at for 15 years. As part of the method, I designed a template, which I call the “Conversation Roadmap Template”. Following is a snapshot of the table at the core of the template; beneath the heading row, I create a row for each customer initiative:

I work with an interview team through a series of messaging sessions 60–90 minutes long. For each hour I spend with the team, I spend 3–6 hours independently synthesizing their input. I describe this independent activity in each “interim step” below.

Before or during the first session, I show the team examples of what the outcome will look like and give an overview of the process. I set a time limit of 3–5 minutes per cell. This sends a signal that the work will be handled efficiently. It also aids in keeping the work on track. We move down the columns first, not across, so we can quickly identify recurring themes and opportunities to consolidate. I record the conversation because it usually flows faster than I can type, and so I can focus on critical listening.

Step 1

I have the team describe the buyer’s status quo for each initiative. As an example, the team might say “predictive maintenance” is an initiative. The questions we want to answer include: what is the customer’s status quo with respect to “predictive maintenance”? (For simplicity I’ll use the pronoun “he”.) Is he succeeding? Is he coming up short of his goals? What does his reality look like? Remind the team not to talk about their company or products, but to focus on the customer’s world.

Interim step: Separate wheat from chaff and flag opportunities to consolidate initiatives that emerge as duplicative.

Step 2

I have the team describe the buyer’s desired business outcome for every initiative. Even if the interview team has already stated the desired business outcomes, I lead them through this step. The reason: More likely than not, the existing language used to describe the outcome (even if it’s in a buyer persona profile) leans toward being corporate-speak. We want emotional language, often referred to as “human” language.

This is the most illuminating, fun, and revealing part of the process. I try to schedule this conversation for a time when the interview team will be relaxed. I tell them:

“Imagine it’s a Friday afternoon and you’re out for a beer or cocktail with this buyer. He just had a great week or quarter, or a great performance review, because he was successful at whatever initiative we’re talking about. They buyer is grinning ear to ear, and you ask him what he’s so happy about. What does he say?”

With rare exception, the answers to this question will be a radical departure from corporate-speak. This approach will get you away from emotionally void language like “I achieved predictive maintenance” to an emotional statement like, “I’m in control” or “I can schedule the shutdown”.

If somebody says something that sounds like corporate-speak, I ask how the buyer would say that after having a beer. Usually the interviewees will start speaking with slurred speech, have a good laugh, and restate the reply in more emotionally-laden terms.

Interim step: I synthesize input, flag corporate-speak, flag gems, identify themes.

Step 3

Now that we know what makes the buyer happy, we dig in to understand the obstacles that prevent him from achieving success with each initiative. Remind the interview team not to talk about their company or its solutions.
Interim step: I synthesize input and identify themes. I do significant pre-work to prepare for the next conversation, in which we’ll start to discuss how the company’s solutions address the customer’s obstacles in a differentiated way. Pre-work includes:

• I review each offering in the portfolio the company is positioning and concisely summarize the value it delivers.
• I make a preliminary determination of how the portfolio’s solutions align to the obstacles.
• I list all the portfolio offerings in a table and place that table beneath each initiative we’re working through. I put an X next to each offering that I believe aligns to a given initiative. This is a simplified example of the table I use:

I sum up what I believe we do for the customer based on my analysis. In the main table of the template (the white table above Step 1 in this article), I plug the summary into the “Our Differentiation” cell for each initiative.

Step 4

For each initiative, I ask the interview team how the portfolio we’re marketing will uniquely help the customer overcome the obstacle. I have them review and validate my summary of what we do. We revise my summary as needed. Then I ask them to take this a step further by saying what we do to enable the customer to achieve the desired outcome that no alternative solution can do. Ultimately we will use these differentiation points in a positioning exercise that I’ll discuss in a future article.

Interim step: I synthesize input and identify themes.

Helping Teams Message Value

Sometimes an interview team has trouble distinguishing between the capabilities of a portfolio offering (features), what the capabilities do for the customer (benefits), and what the capabilities ultimately mean to the customer as a business outcome.

I’ll provide an oversimplified example: If we are marketing network optimization services, a portfolio manager might say that automated data collection, analysis, and correlation or expert engineering is a statement of value, because that is a fancy feature that the portfolio manager prizes. In truth, this is a capability that the offering performs. The benefit (I’m simplifying here) is that it improves reliability. Ultimately what it means to the customer — what makes the customer smile — is that the infrastructure is finely tuned and can handle new technologies and applications.

I created a simple table for sorting capabilities, value statements, and outcomes; I use this to help teams who are having trouble distinguishing the nuances between capabilities and why customers care:

Nearly every subject matter expert I’ve worked with knows the answers to the questions about the buyer that need to be answered. The art is to get the information we need quickly, accurately, and completely.

I’ll address more about the Audience Knowledge pillar in future articles.

Originally published at www.linkedin.com.