Your messaging (probably) sucks
Your messaging (probably) sucks
Anthony Pierri shares his framework to fix messaging
👋 Hey, Toni from Growblocks here! Welcome to another Revenue Letter! Every week, I share cases, personal stories and frameworks for GTM leaders and RevOps.
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We recently had a fantastic conversation with Anthony Pierri from FletchPMM on our podcast on why early-stage companies get messaging wrong. You can listen to the whole episode here.
In today’s Revenue Letter, I asked Anthony to break down the framework and give us some lessons on how companies can do better.
A big reason why so many startups fail is they can't get the messaging right.
Even if you have a great product, in a great market, with a killer sales process… if the message you’re delivering is irrelevant to the prospect you won’t get many meetings.
The two reasons why messaging sucks at most companies:
They’re too focused on outcomes
Founders try to pass off their vision as product marketing
Past that, multi-product/multi-segment companies struggle to nail their messaging strategy.
In this article, we’re going to break down what the common problems are, and present 3 strategies on how to take on a multi-product approach.
2 problems that lead to bad messaging
1: Always focussing on outcomes
“Don’t sell the feature. Sell the benefit.”
“Nobody buys products. They buy outcomes.”
If you’ve ever been part of the website-building process or worked on messaging, you’ve probably heard a version of these statements before.
The idea is that we’re selling to humans, so the H1 should reflect what humans care about. And that’s what this product will let me do.
In B2B SaaS, the outcomes we’re usually talking about come in 3 forms:
Reducing cost
Reducing risk
Increasing revenue
So what happens? A lot of companies (especially those in a crowded market with similar offerings) end up having those 3 phrases, worded in 10 different ways, on their front page from end to end - all without actually saying how they do that.
The big problem with that? These companies aren’t Salesforce. They aren’t Hubspot.
Major market leaders like them can claim on their H1 that they can “make sales grow faster.” There’s a level of credibility already established without seeing a features list.
Let’s take Pipedrive, for example.
They're in a tough market for CRM software, competing with big names like Salesforce and HubSpot.
Pipedrive tells people, "Our CRM drives business growth." But that's not a standout claim because Salesforce and HubSpot can say they do the same thing.
So, if someone is thinking about which CRM to use, they might wonder, "Why should I pick Pipedrive over the others?"
Pipedrive's answer is basically, "Because we help your business grow!" But that's what every CRM claims to do.
It's a bit confusing because everyone is looking to buy a product for the results it can give, not just the product itself.
Yet how a product gets those results, what it does, and how it does it, are super important to customers.
It's not enough to just say your product can lead to growth. You need to be clear about what makes your product different and why it might be the better choice for certain businesses.
So, when you're trying to stand out, sometimes it's better to focus on what your product does differently than just the end result of using it.
2: Founders communicate their entire vision to customers (who couldn’t care less about the vision)
If you're struggling to get good product marketing and messaging as a founder, there's only one place that you should look to find the source of the problem. The mirror.
The reason many companies can’t get messaging right is because founders are holding on to their vision too much and presenting it as their overall message.
And it comes from a good place. You want your company to be great, and this vision is what got it off the ground. But the founder's vision and good product marketing are on two opposite ends of the spectrum. They’re almost never the same thing.
Your 5-year roadmap, the industries you’ll dominate, and your plans to change the world are great for investors and recruitment.
But your prospects don’t care.
They want to know what your product does today, what features you can deliver now, and does it solve their problems right now.
Only one of those messaging tracks will book you meetings.
3 ways to sell a product suite
Early-stage companies often get caught up with being everything to everyone. This is especially true for the multi-product crowd.
If you’re in this group, there are 3 different ways companies tackle the idea of selling a product suite. Depending on your product marketing strategy, you can generally move up the ladder eventually, but the higher you go, the more risk you add as a startup.
Sell One Wedge
If we look at Stripe as an example, they still lead with one thing: Payments.
But Stripe actually has 19 different products. Products that span many use cases and customer segments. And they’re currently valued at around $50bn — not bad for a private company leading with one use case.
The folks at Stripe know that it’s hard to get a spot in people's brains, and it’s not easy to be remembered.
Stripe is like a band that got popular because of one song, and that’s the entry point to the album. And just like some founders, there are plenty of artists who get sick of their hit — simply because they’ve got so much more to offer.
For Stripe, their one hit song is “payment processing.” And they’re fine with it because it’s an entry point to their broader product suite.
So if you take this route, be ok with being known for one thing. Then push the rest of your products below your H1.
This approach is the least risky method.
Sell multiple wedges
The next way is when you want to show you’ve got multiple products for multiple segments.
In this case, let’s take Rippling as an example.
Rippling has many different products, and they have a menu to point you to the relevant solutions.
This strategy is a bit riskier, but it works for them because of the way they built the product suite. They had individual product teams go out and try to achieve product-market-fit with each point solution. Once they found PMF with that specific product, it was added to the broader suite.
So the likelihood of someone coming to the homepage looking for any one of those is pretty high. That’s why they use their homepage as a “channel changer.”
They’ll help you find the right product, and when you get to that product page, it becomes super specific to that software's features and outcomes.
Sell as a bundle
This final type is one of the riskiest strategies for startups. But it works very well for incumbents.
Essentially, you try to sell the entire product suite all at once. A perfect example of this is Microsoft with Office 365.
Microsoft has spent the last 50 years evangelizing that your document creation, presentation, and Excel-type software should live together in one suite — Office 365.
It became such an accepted grouping of point solutions that Google could come out and say, hey, we're releasing our competing suite, and it has the same identical products but from Google.
The problem for pre-PMF companies that try to do the Microsoft strategy? They try to sell the entire suite at once when no one really cares about the individual solutions.
It’s like the same band from earlier trying to get famous from an entire album. It’s just that much harder.
This method usually only works if you’re the market leader and there is a big demand for a suite of products. It’s super dangerous for anyone else to bundle it all together.
Keep Reading
Follow Anthony Pierri on LinkedIn for more of his thoughts on messaging, as well as what his team does at FletchPMM.
Need advice on your SaaS homepage? Anthony recently wrote a step-by-step guide on Growth Unhinged with Kyle Poyar. You can read that article here.
Listen to Anthony on this week's episode of The Revenue Formula (Or watch it on YouTube)
PS. Now that you’ve solved your messaging, what about the current problems in your revenue engine? As the first RevOps platform, Growblocks lets you see problems in your GTM before they affect the rest of your funnel. Book a demo to learn more, or email me directly, and I’ll walk you through it.