4 Tips on How to Build Product Messaging & Positioning That Stands Out | Salesforce on Salesforce

Okay, let's hop right in. Messaging and positioning are often used interchangeably. Messaging and positioning. Positioning and messaging messagening. But they are in fact two separate things. And as confusing as this might sound, everyone should always start with defining product positioning before messaging. Let me explain. Hey, I'm Ali and I'm here to talk to you about how we use messaging and positioning at Salesforce to tell captivating product stories with a little help from our customers. Welcome to Salesforce on Salesforce, an inside look at our marketing, sales and service businesses with helpful tips on topics like how to create a product demo, how to manage your sales pipeline, and how to deliver omnichannel service and so much more. Now, while you're here, check out our blog and trailhead. Quick look for this episode linked in the info icon and be sure to watch the other episodes in the series. Positioning is the internal framework you use to shape your message and set the strategy for your product. It's how you intend to describe your product to your buyers based on their discovered pain points. Messaging, though, is the external facing result of all of that hard work you've put into the positioning framework. It's the words and copy you put in market, on your website, in emails, in other content to help you explain that product positioning to your customers. Positioning fundamentally should never change. But your messaging, on the other hand, will most likely change a bit over time, depending on current trends, world events, a b testing, and even tailoring it for new audiences. All right, now that we have the basics covered, why is this so important? Well, messaging and positioning should serve as the North Star for your company, helping you stand out from your competition, win customers and and have a positive influence on the bottom line. It can also help you build your brand and attract and retain top talent. Now, with all of the changes in our world over the past couple years, we learned that it's never been more important to cut through the noise with the right message to the right people, at the right time, on the right channel, because people have less time and a lower tolerance for lofty language. So yeah, it's that important. But how do we know if your messaging and positioning is top notch? Well, solid positioning requires a deep knowledge of your customer, market and competitor. You must know your customer inside and out, their wants, their needs, sometimes even before they do their pains, how they measure success. Now you must also know your market, what's happening in the industry, regulations that are changing trends. And lastly, you must know your competitors, their products, their pricing, the way they talk about themselves. Now, great messaging. On the other hand. It's simple. It's differentiated, memorable, and incites action. It's the billboard you see on the freeway that you find yourself thinking about days later, or the email you receive from one of your favorite brands that feels like they're talking to you personally. It makes you lean forward, perk up, click that link, buy the product, and sometimes, if you're a softie like me, maybe even shed a tear. Now, here at Salesforce, our secret sauce and key differentiator is our customers. Our mission since day one has been to help our customers connect with their customers in entirely new ways. And this means we listen to our customers constantly. And it's this listening that influences how we talk about our company, our products, and everything we do. Now, here are four tips to help you tell captivating product stories through your messaging and positioning and how we've put them into practice here at Salesforce. Know your stakeholders. Now, it's common to have a lot of cooks in the kitchen, but laying out a process up front will do wonders for you down the road. Who is needed to collaborate on this? At what point do your stakeholders want to provide input? What format do they prefer? Creating a timeline and a workback plan with a Raci model will help you stay aligned throughout the entire process. Now, if you're familiar with Salesforce Einstein, you might know it's our brand for all things intelligence here at Salesforce. But what you probably didn't know is that when we launched, the business had two general managers. That meant that every time we had new messaging, we knew it would need to be vetted with both of them. And so we built that into our work back plan. And oftentimes we actually tried to get both of them in the room together so they could hear each other's feedback. And this was so helpful. Tip number two, do your homework. I said it before and I'll say it again. Great. Messaging and positioning begins with listening. Listen to your customers, pains the market, your competitors. You'll want as much information as possible to create the most relevant and differentiated messaging and positioning. Now, before we launched Einstein, we conducted a listening tour with potential customers. This took the form of countless focus groups, surveys, and message testing to help surface use cases describe key benefits, and even to help us come up with product names that resonated. All of this helps shape the overall strategy for a product that our customers love. Tip number three, Tailor your message. Once you have that blessed positioning framework, you can begin crafting your message. This is a chance to show how you know your audience. How do they want to be spoken to. What channels are they on? What do they care about? This is the fun part. And sometimes you'll have different flavors of your message depending on the audience and the channel. But as long as it always ladders up to that positioning framework, you're golden. For a product like Einstein, AI and analytics can be used to help every business, but they're really complex topics and we needed it to be tangible for our customers. So we worked hard to have tailored messaging for every Persona, role and industry so that we could address the specific pain points and speak the same language of our customers. This meant we had many permutations of our message. But like I said earlier, our positioning never changed. Tip number four Know you're never done. It's important to take an iterative approach with your messaging. You need to be testing, getting feedback, and listening to your customers. It should be a constant evolution based on this feedback, plus new product launches, market conditions, competitive offerings, and so much more. At Salesforce, we like to say better better, never best. And this is the perfect mindset to adopt when approaching messaging and positioning. So one last example. When we launched Einstein, we had a pretty technical message. It was all about our AI models, how we approach machine learning differently, and it was very under the hood. We quickly learned that Salesforce users like sales reps, service agents, and marketers like myself, we just wanted to know how AI could help us work better, smarter and faster. So we made the pretty drastic decision to overhaul our message about six months after we launched, and we switched to much more of a pain solution framework. With use case Centric messaging, we noticed a drastic change in how our message was absorbed. Well, there you have it. A lowdown on messaging and positioning and four tips to help you get started. Click on the links on the screen and check out more resources down in the description. We'll see you next time.