BACKGROUND
I've led and executed many messaging and positioning exercises throughout my career and learned a tremendous amount from companies like Microsoft and Salesforce. The most important lesson I've learned is that the most impactful positioning and messaging is highly informed, differentiated, and inclusive. Marketing leaders who understand the critical steps involved in building impactful messaging and positioning realize they need time, cross-functional alignment, customer and market feedback, and validation. And, they need to be great at a simple skill: listening. Those that do reap the rewards in everything from product launches to marketing campaigns.

The first key to success is building a tight relationship and cadence with the Product organization. It's critical to walk alongside the team that is building products for specific audiences that have very specific challenges, assist with market and competitive intelligence, and to help articulate how the solution being built will address the needs and deliver value -- and do it better than alternative approaches.

The second key to success is focusing deeply, in a non-trivial way, on the target customer and user of the product or solution. Depth of empathy is needed to create meaningful messaging and positioning that resonates. As Product Management creates hypotheses about products and features that it wants to build for a specific customer and pain point, Product Marketing should be there right alongside Product Management to help with efforts like Customer Development and listen to direct customer feedback, reactions, and the way they articulate their needs, which is critical to establishing Product-Market Fit (PMF). The best organizations carry through the lessons learned in those efforts to inform messaging, positioning, narrative development, and all downstream activities that rely on that messaging.

Once positioning and messaging are built, it's important to remember that the first drafts are just a hypothesis until they're validated in market.

So the third key is to validate it the Sales / Revenue team, with customers, with prospects, and with industry / technical analysts. Validation is a critical step that ensures all downstream investments (marketing programs, salesperson effort, everybody's time) are optimized to realize the product or solution's full potential. And there's nothing more exciting for a cross-functional team than to see that their efforts are being rewarded in the market.

Select messaging & positioning exercises I've led:
* Marketing applications in Microsoft Dynamics CRM (product)
* Microsoft Dynamics CRM (product)
* Salesforce Sales Cloud Einstein (product)
* Salesforce Boost Sales Productivity (solution)
* Talend Data Health for Customer 360 (solution)
* Talend Data Control & Compliance (solution)
* Talend Data Fabric (product)