More than just talking: messaging and positioning

We’re joined once more by Yoni Solomon, CMO of Uptime, to discuss messaging and positioning. They sit at the core of all marketing, so of course, fall under the responsibility of CMOs to develop, rollout, and manage. That's why it was one of the first things Yoni had to tackle when he stepped into the CMO role, and why we spoke with him on a recent episode of CMO Diaries about the process he's used, to help other CMOs get a handle on their messaging and positioning.

You can find the episode of CMO Diaries here, but read on for a write up of what we discussed.

Why is messaging and positioning important?

Today we're talking about messaging and positioning, a big part of the CMO role is identifying how those functions work, how you adapt those things to the business.

To start off with, why do you want to talk about messaging and positioning today? What's the reason behind it?

There are many things that you're responsible for as a CMO, you're here to grow demand, grow the brand, launch new products, and find every opportunity to essentially fuel the next stage of whatever the company is going to be.

But the really important caveat here is that none of that fancy stuff with brand and content and demand and partnerships and launches, none of that happens without fundamentally understanding and nailing down our story.

And that starts with product marketing, which is my background - messaging and positioning. We've absolutely got to get that stuff down so that we can rebrand a company if need be so that we can launch new products with consistent messaging and positioning and storytelling.

So that we can train our sales teams and our field teams to speak the right languages and framing around our products and capabilities.

And so I would argue that of all of the responsibilities that you have as a CMO, some strategic and some tactical, being the owner and the vanguard, if you will, of the company's core selling narrative is probably the most important thing that you can do.

What is messaging and positioning?

If it's something that's so important that covers so many things, it probably makes sense for us to roll it back, go right back to basics. What is messaging and positioning?

It's one of those terms you hear a lot in marketing, and you hear it paired together a lot as well, so what is messaging and positioning? What are the differences?

Yeah, so it's sad for me to even think about this idea that messaging and positioning can be a buzzword because really, it's the fundamentals of your company. It's very clearly who you are, why you do what you do, what you offer, how are those offerings are different, what problems do they solve? And how do they help people?

And so really, it's ultimately your core story. And a pet peeve that I've always had around messaging and positioning is actually the fact that it's called messaging and positioning, I've always thought it should be flipped.

I think it should be positioning and messaging because to me, positioning is going to be your internal message houses, and we can talk a lot today about foundational messaging, but that's going to be your value propositions. Your core umbrella statement of who you are, and then the value propositions and proof points that support that core statement.

And then essentially, you can build what we in product marketing like to call the entire messaging neighborhood of your core positioning as a company. And then if you have four specific products that you sell, each of those should have a core positioning document as well.

And each of the features underneath those products should have a core positioning statement as well. So you're essentially really building a series of Bibles in a sense of how you're going to talk about every single component of your company.

All of that work is done internally and is then mapped over or translated into messaging. And that's the fancy stuff that everyone loves to see. It's going to be the ads that go online, it's going to be commercials that run on TV, it's going to be billboards, it's going to be everything in between.

But before all of that messaging can happen, you've got to get your positioning down and so it's really not messaging and positioning it's positioning and then messaging.

It's that dang alphabet getting it the wrong way round.

Absolutely.

How to identify your organization's positioning

So that must have been something that you had to get to work with straight away when you started your new role. How did you go about that? Do you have a process when it comes to identifying positioning that works for you and that should work for other CMOs?

Yeah, absolutely. I have a five-step process actually that I can walk you through step by step.

Let's do it.

Upon coming to Uptime, especially this is a new company for me, an entirely new product, I was going from a company at G2 that was selling reviews and buyer intent data and content to a marketing and sales persona. Now I'm moving over into the IT space where we have this wide breadth and depth of monitoring checks and alerts and status pages and reports that we're selling to IT buyers and Site Reliability Engineers.

They could not be more different. And so for me, if I'm going to write anything, I first need to understand what the heck I'm talking about. That begins with messaging and positioning.

That's why I'm so glad that the first few weeks that I spent at the company, were spent doing nothing but research and nothing but writing. And so to start, we knew at Uptime that what we're missing here is essentially our core story.

I think across the board, when I was looking at our website, our sales materials, we were doing a great job of describing the what that we do, which I think many companies do a pretty decent job at. Feature-driven, but what's missing is the why. I understand that it's monitoring software but why are we here? What's the value that we're truly providing to people?

And so I started by first listening to every single call recording I could, jumping onto customer calls when I could, and reading every single case study, review, testimonial, and interview, I could find on Uptime on the internet everywhere.

I actually built them into this giant messaging document where I started to literally write out, transcribe all the reviews, all the quotes that I thought were really impactful. And then I started to sort them into specific topics.

One topic cluster, in particular, was people kept talking about how we provide peace of mind, peace of mind, peace of mind. So I started to find these proof points, I found 15 different reviews or statements that illustrated that. People love to talk about the reliability of our alerts, I started to essentially funnel all of my reviews and proof points into there.

Essentially, I organized every bit of customer feedback into five different topic clusters that became the core of our messaging and positioning, they became our value propositions.

From there, before you know it, we now have exactly the way that we should be talking about ourselves, positioning ourselves as a company in terms of our why which is to provide peace of mind to everyone who needs to monitor the health and performance and downtime of their websites.

And then we were able to really analyze the what in terms of the wide breadth and depth of our monitoring checks, the reliability of our alerts, the customization of our dashboards, all these things I didn't have to make up myself, I found them in the evidence, in the proof points of our reviews, and then mapped out our positioning from there.

So it's the customers telling you what the story should be, is that an approach you always go with? Is that something you've done before or is it just something you were able to do at Uptime because you had access to this kind of data?

No, I've been following this blueprint for the last 10 years, if we're doing our job right in marketing, we're listening to what our customers are saying, how they're describing us, the problems that they're trying to solve. And we're building our messaging around that.

I shouldn't be out here in a silo trying to write messaging freehand for people or for markets that I don't understand. So all of this is straight from the words and the voice of the customer. It's just my job to polish it up, make it sort of fit into this formulaic messaging and positioning framework that we have, and then move forward.

Communicating messaging and positioning internally

So you've got this framework then, you've put it together and you've polished it all up, how do you then communicate it to the wider organization? How do you get everyone on board with what the position is and what the messaging is going to be?

A great question. Really, step one is doing the dirty work. Really assessing messaging and positioning, making sure that you have your story down. And then step two is building consensus. This is incredibly important, especially when you're coming into a new company as a CMO. I had my consensus-building meeting, I think, in week three, very early.

But I brought in the co-founders, senior leadership team, and we essentially had what I would call a three-week check-in where we looked at a couple of different things.

For starters, I shared with them an assessment of the market. What are our obstacles? What are our opportunities? What are the pain points that we're feeling today? Maybe we're not differentiated enough, we're struggling in a highly competitive and crowded marketplace, and our core story is still missing. What are the opportunities for us? Huge TAM.

And all of these things to help us really get into the frame of mind of Okay, what's the situation that we're dealing with here? Then we did the customer voice analysis, started to look through and I literally showed them these different topic clusters of what the market is saying about us, how people perceive us, what people like about us, what people don't like about us, for the people who don't even know us, what are they missing?

And then, at the very end of that presentation, after I laid out the state of the market and the state of our customer voice, I actually led a bit of a storytelling session.

I walked them through a formal pitch of our new brand story and vision ending with our new big messaging statements, and how exactly we're going to map that out to a rebrand. But it's certainly not enough to just do the dirty work and get your messaging a position down, you then do have to build that consensus, you have to win people over.

And the only way to do that, in my opinion, is to get in front of people and really tell that story, pitch it. Luckily for me, I did that and we got a consensus, and now we're full steam ahead on our rebrand.

Were there any misconceptions that other people had in the company that you had to dismiss as part of building that positioning? Did they have any preconceived notions about what their position should be and you were able to show them, "no, this is actually what our position should be"?

Yeah, in the first two weeks, I interviewed everyone across the company and I would end my interviews, just my meet and greets with these people with a quick question of "I'm just curious, between us, what's your quick elevator pitch for Uptime?" Everyone was always kind of caught off guard, there may be people talking internally like, "Wow, Yoni's poking around asking everyone what their pitch is".

But I took the three or four most, what I would call common pitches that I got from people, from co-founders all the way to the people on the front lines in sales and support and I put them up on a slide.

And so for instance, one of the descriptions I got from someone was, 'We provide excellent monitoring tools and features at a great cost'. Okay, that's a great what, but what's missing there's the why.

And then on the very next slide, I showed some of my favorite nuggets from these customer interviews and these reviews where one of them was 'Uptime gives me peace of mind so I can go to sleep at night. You guys are our eyes' these really high EQ emotional statements.

I compared one to the other like, "Look how we describe ourselves. Great Uptime monitoring tools and features at a great cost versus this person who's literally saying you guys are our website lifesaver. That's powerful and different".

So we smashed those misconceptions right off the bat by showing the differences between our describing of the what versus the people who we literally support giving us our why.

Features vs. value

Is there ever a time to crow about the features and all the core functions you've got? Is there an audience where you can talk about that and get engagement? Or does it always have to be this emotional messaging?

I always remember Steve Jobs when he launched the iPod when he got up on stage, he wasn't talking about this is how much memory you've got this is how clear the music is, all these functions and features, he was like, 'This is 1000 songs in your hand'.

1000 songs in your pocket. That's it. Yeah.

And that's just a great messaging for it and that works for the wider audience. But then, for the tech crowd, they want to hear those functions, they want to hear about all these features and stuff. Is there a time to have that as your positioning?

Yeah, and that's why when I described the messaging neighborhood before when you're establishing these core messaging documents, that's why everything needs to have its own messaging statement.

So really, I would say your larger company, your top-level messaging documents for who we are as Uptime, and why do we do what we do, I think that one should lean more into the emotion and in the value propositions, you can tee up some of those features.

But really, if you're doing your job, right, as a marketer, your core products, your core features will all have messaging statements as well, so that you can start to pick and plug things.

So you can start to take maybe an amazing headline that does immediately elicit an emotional connection, and then use some of these value propositions you've already approved for your very technical features and slot them in there.

So all of a sudden, you're hitting a landing page that says, 'We are your eyes', and then underneath, you can highlight the specific products and features that allow us as a monitoring solution to be your eyes, and make that EQ and IQ fit together in a single story that makes sense.

And that will probably keep the dev team happy as well, who are so proud of all the functions and features, they want to boast about this. They don't want to hear from marketing "No one wants to hear about the functions and features", they want to know that there is a place for that. So you can keep people sweet, keep people happy to collaborate with you.

Yeah, I don't think it's one or the other. I think it's both. I don't typically like messaging that's too feature-focused and has no value propositions in them. But at the same time, I've come across many companies who've overdone it on the value and EQ story and I hit these websites, and I can't actually tell what they sell.

So you do need a little bit of both to make that story make sense.

What to do with your messaging

So where does the messaging go once you've identified it? Once you've got the messaging in place internally, how do you start distributing that externally? Do you have a stage by stage, like, start with the website, then move on to the social media, then move on to other kinds of external messaging? Or is it just everything all at once?

Yeah, I think it depends on the project. So if I was a product marketer, and I was working on a launch, this message house, this one page Bible on a given product or integration that I'm writing would be then mapped over to a punch list of items, whether that's going to be copy for a landing page, for Google ads, PPC stuff, display ads, some social media posts, perhaps a one-pager or some slides.

And all in all, you have that consistent messaging story across the board because it's sourced from the same style guide, from the same messaging document, so you know that you're going to be good there.

As far as a full rebrand goes, I think my preference here is actually to take that foundational messaging and then use it to actually write the website. The website is going to be your most important selling and positioning tool, period.

Especially if you're a company like us and you're product-led, we need to make sure that website is optimized for discoverability, it's clear, it's concise, and we're going to drive as many leads as we need to from it.

Once we have the site down, I think everything else starts to make a lot more sense, I would want to take that same story and narrative and bake it into a pitch deck that we could start to arm our sales team with for outbound campaigns. Into email messaging and everything like that.

So I would say in all if you're relaunching a new brand, and it's going to culminate with a new site, let the rest of your materials take the cue from the story and the framing that you deliver on the site first.

It's interesting you mentioned the pitch deck because when a lot of people think about messaging and positioning, particularly when it's through the marketing department, all they think about purely is about the marketing; inbound marketing, outbound marketing, what have you.

But then the sales team is just as important, and also the customer service as well - how your customer service speaks to people, how they respond to calls. How much influence does the CMO have over that? Or is it more about you talk to the head of sales or the head of customer service, and they communicate that down?

I would say, as a CMO, again, you're the vanguard of the story and the messaging and the positioning of your company, you have to have influence over all of it.

And so again, it's not just the website you're launching, and it's not even just the pitch check that you're giving to sales. It's the training and enablement that you're giving sales as well, to make sure they truly understand the story, the strategy behind these tools that we're giving you one-off.

It's taking a look at the customer success emails, whether they're triggered or automated through some sort of system to make sure there's messaging consistency there, that we're referring to things in the right ways, that we're framing things the right way. We're also providing them the training that they need.

I would say across the board, your job as a CMO, sure it's technically the chief marketing officer, but every facet of your company's experience really ties back to that core story. And without that strategy, that messaging and positioning in place, everything else falls flat.

In my experience, when we have good messaging and positioning in place, it keeps employees fired up, they understand the mission, whether they're in sales, support, product, etc. It keeps the executive team aligned because that messaging and positioning is essentially our strategy.

It's where we're trying to go. It's why we do what we do. It attracts investors, investors love a good story. So if you're trying to fundraise start with really nailing down that compelling story.

And finally, it's going to absolutely influence the way that we build our products because we're gonna build products in support of that story, it's going to obviously influence the way that we market and it's going to influence the way that we sell. So it's across the board. Everything takes its cue from that core story.

Evolving your message

You've got that core story in place, you've got buy-in, you've got consensus from all these internal factors, you've done the full rebrand, you've transformed your messaging, is it set in stone, then? Are you stuck with that messaging forever?

Never. It's fluid. As a CMO, you should be continuing to read reviews, look at NPS if you're collecting feedback in that way as well, reading new case studies, you're gonna be launching new products, entering new markets.

And also the market that you're in, and the people that you service, their needs are going to change. I would say if we're still talking about message houses, and messaging neighborhoods, I like to call it spring cleaning.

And in theory, I would say spring cleaning needs to happen like maybe once a quarter or twice a year, somewhere in there, depending on how fast your product roadmap is specifically. Because more often than not, I think it's the new capabilities or the enhancements that might change your messaging and positioning a little bit.

But you've got to keep those messaging houses and positioning frameworks up to date. They should be fluid. And also always keep an eye out, especially in customer interviews for those nuggets in these one-to-one conversations.

Sometimes the customer will just say something about your company or your product, and you're like, "Whoa, that's where we need to go". And so I certainly don't think you should marry yourself to messaging and positioning, you should expect it to be fluid and expect it to change.

But then at the same time, you can't just go changing it every five minutes, can you? You need to be consistent and you need to make sure that your team and the rest of the company are on board. If you're changing the messaging every five minutes, just because you've had a bad day in terms of conversions or in terms of click-throughs, that can't be effective.

Oh, absolutely. I think in theory, top-line messaging, your core company messaging, that is going to be the one that stays a little bit more static, though again, we have to keep an open mind if in six months, 12 months, or plus it's time to pivot, we can't be afraid to do that.

But all in all, I think those slighter tweaks and maybe the more agile approach to messaging, those tweaks will happen a few levels under the fold of your messaging neighborhood. More of your products and your feature-specific stuff, that stuff you should be tinkering with constantly.

Because the product itself, the roadmaps that you're dealing with more often than not, are moving so quickly, that if you're not careful, six months will pass and the message house that you have for Uptime's alerts, for instance, is totally out of date, because there are three new things that we've added since you wrote that message house and launched that landing page that is just not reflected there anymore.

Standing out vs. meeting expectations

You've talked about building it around what your customers are saying, what about your competitors? How important are your competitors in building messaging? Should you be reacting to what other people are saying or should you just ignore them, and do your own thing?

I'll give you my five steps when I'm working to launch a product because that messaging tends to be a little bit more fluid. And that's where I think competitive differentiation maps in a little bit more.

But if there's a new capability that comes across my desk that I need to launch, I'm going to start with a product demo, I want to look, feel and experience whatever this thing is that we're about to roll out.

Then we move into phase two, which is general market analysis, understanding the buyer, understanding the companies as a whole.

And then stage three is actually competitive differentiation. So once I understand the product, once I understand the market it sits in, I really want to understand what competitors are offering and quite tactically how their capability compares to this capability.

Really, it's not for trying to copy or imitate, because I think that just leads to bad marketing that doesn't convert, I would say, most of my competitive research is done to try to poke holes in those stories or in those products.

I think more often than not, that research serves less as messaging that makes it up to a website and it's more internal nuggets that are then armed for sales and support, to put them in a better position, to combat competitors when they run into them in the field.

But when it comes to defining your core story, and your company messaging and positioning, don't follow anyone - do something new. That's hard and it's scary and it requires a willingness to take risks.

But I would not look at your competitors as the true north for your company's brand mission and company vision, because it assumes that they know what they're doing any more than you do. That's not necessarily true.

Plus it means if you start off in a reactive place, then you're always going to be reacting, you're always going to have to be changing based on what your competitors are doing. Some of the best brands are ones that are doing completely new stuff within their space.

We've talked in the past about how much we like Gong as a brand, and they're doing completely new stuff compared to their competitors. Do they even have competitors in terms of how well-branded they are? They've done a really good job in terms of their positioning and messaging.

And the last thing that you want to do is sit in a category where if you took 100 people off the street and blindfolded them and read everyone's websites to them, they wouldn't be able to tell them apart.

Just yesterday, I was looking at three companies in my space that will go unnamed, but I looked at their messaging statements, their header statements on the homepage of their website, quite literally the first thing that people see when they hit the site.

And there were three competitors who had almost the same messaging statement, basically, web monitoring made easy, just three times said in slightly different ways on three different websites. I was like, "This is why we can't look at our competitors".

Because at the end of the day, everyone just starts saying the same thing. And then before you know it, you've commoditized your industry. If everyone has the same story, and everyone has the same features, then all of a sudden, the only thing people can negotiate on is price. And it becomes a race right to the bottom to see who can offer the most for the least amount of money.

If you look at something like the luxury travel industry and every single luxury travel company seems to have the same kind of messaging, same kind of tone of voice, and it mainly becomes a race to see who could describe a marble bath in the fanciest way.

There's nothing exciting, nothing new, and then it just comes down to price, which is a very boring way to be a marketer. That's not what people get into marketing to do.

Right, there's very little flexibility there to do anything and people at the end of the day, justify their purchases with logic and reason, but they buy based on emotion. I think we're very quickly entering the kind of technology landscape where everyone's tools are going to work really well.

They're going to have the same integration ecosystems, they're going to have a high quality of product. Everyone's roadmaps are revving. We're pushing software faster than we've ever pushed it before. It's becoming harder and harder to really build tools that are substantially different from one another.

When I entered software in 2011/12, I think the average software company had two competitors. And then as of 2015/16, the average software company had nine competitors. I'm sure in 2021, it's even more.

So really, if everyone has the same stuff the only differentiator you're gonna have as a marketer is the ability to tell a better story. That's what's gonna win people.

Building emotional connections

It's also what customers and audiences are looking for, that emotional connection with brands now. Particularly in the wake of the pandemic, people are responding more to their emotional connections to brands, they're being more conscientious about which brands they want to work with.

Even in the B2B space, that emotional connection's become a lot more important, and a lot more of community building, as well. Is that a big part of messaging and positioning? Or is that something that comes a bit later, that community?

Community is hard. Very rarely in B2B do I see community really, really done right. I think, for starters, you need a humungous user base to do it. And I think a lot of that community building from my perspective is done around a passion for the product.

So I think it's partly tied in with the brand, but at the same time when I see the most passionate communities out there, they are people who live and breathe the product. Some of the early examples of excellent community B2B brand builders that I saw, were actually the marketing automation tools.

Marketo and HubSpot in particular just raised a fan base of people who absolutely loved working and tinkering with the product, the message boards that spun up, how people began to engage with one another, quite literally answering each other's questions and helping QA different things that people were trying to figure out.

I implemented Marketo back in 2013, for an old company of mine, I've made friends, it sounds weird, on some of those Marketo Help Desk message boards as we're all trying to figure outflows together. So I do think community building is tied in with the brand, of course, but I also think it's brought in with just rabid users and passionate fans of the product.

And where those two things meet, if the brand can build enough awareness and a place for these people to be, and the product can be the thing that they all share in common, yeah, you can build a really kick-ass community from there.

Then once you've got that community there, you've got those rabid fans talking about how much they love the product, you've got people who can help inform your positioning, to take it full circle.

Absolutely. Totally. Those are the same people who are participating with testimonials, the same people who are leaving reviews, the same people who are coming to speak at your user conferences. And in a sense, talk about CMOs being the vanguard of messaging, they start to share in that with you, which becomes really, really special for a company.

It might feel a bit like you're letting go of control a little bit when it comes to the messaging if you're giving it too much to the customers to push it forward. But at the same time, having that collaborative storytelling building, it's got to be a way of getting fans more engaged with the product, they'll be less likely to abandon the product if they felt like they've had a hand in building the brand.

Totally. And first and foremost, I think our job as marketers is to listen to the market and what they're saying. Again, we're not taking things that are verbatim, unless they're really, really good. More often than not, there's a layer of polish that we're providing.

But I think the worst thing that we can do, especially as marketers who work for companies that they themselves wouldn't use as a product, the worst thing that we can do is assume exactly what these personas and businesses would need.

I've never worked in IT a day in my life, I have to listen to my customers to get a better understanding of what we should be building and how we should be talking about it.

It's definitely an experience every marketer should have is working in an industry that they're not familiar with.

But that experience of getting to know customers that are outside of my experience really helped my progression as a marketer and helped me build better stories as a marketer and helped my career as a whole. It's something that every marketer should do.

It's really humbling, right? I found that coming from G2 where I spent all these years in reviews, I was a B2B marketer, the messaging came much easier to me, the stories came much easier to me because I was living and breathing this persona. I was a G2 customer before I got to G2.

Coming in here, yeah, I totally agree. If you are a marketer that's really looking to put your chops to the test and especially coming in as a new CMO to see if your playbook around brand, messaging, positioning, everything that you really pride yourself on.

If you're curious to see if it really works, go work for a company that markets a product that you've never used to a segment that you've never worked in, and then see if you can make that work and fit.

Marketers have to be curious by nature as well. That ability to get to know things that you're unfamiliar with has to be at the core of being a marketer. It's essential. When marketers start to think that they know everything is when they start to make mistakes, they start to assume, to make an ass out of you and me.

They don't do their homework on messaging and positioning and before you know it, you're rolling out landing pages and ads and things that are just not converting. No one's getting it.

Yeah, you're taking things for granted, you're taking your customers for granted as well. If you're telling your customers what they should feel, they'll start to feel that you don't care about what they actually think, and you'll start to lose those customers.

100%.

There's a study that shows roughly 68% of B2B buyers will go elsewhere if they feel like a company doesn't care about their business. And the best way to care about the business is to show that you're listening to them, is to put out messaging that is informed by them.

Yeah, it's curiosity and then empathy. If you can nail those two things in your brand and in your messaging and positioning, you're going to be great as a CMO anywhere.

And it's not just about looking at data as well, it's as you say actually listening directly to customers because you get those nuggets of wisdom that can help inform your positioning. If you just got a list of data of how many customers are happy with the product, that's not helpful data.

But if you've got all these transcripts of calls, you've got all these actual reviews of your product, you can find cool quotes that you can pull out and put together messaging around.

Totally. I always say that the best messaging and positioning, it's a 50% three-way tie, if you will. It's equal parts experiential, it's your ability to feel and see whatever this product is that you're marketing.

It's analytical so there is an element of data, looking at your own CRM to understand segments and market opportunity and all of that good stuff. And then finally, it's anecdotal. It's customer interviews, it's reviews, and everything else.

5 lessons learned from establishing messaging and positioning

What are the five big lessons you've taken away from building this messaging and positioning at Uptime? Especially coming in there as someone who's unfamiliar with the audience and the product?

Yeah, of course. First and foremost, assume nothing and stay curious. Come in, humble yourself right off the bat to say "I actually have no idea what I would write if I really needed to". Start first and foremost by admitting that you don't know. That's going to open up your curiosity and empathy to try to learn.

Number two, start directly with the voice of the customer, through calls, through interviews, and through reviews.

Number three, start to bucket these commonalities or through lines between different themes of messaging because you're gonna be able to use that to actually build out your entire messaging and positioning framework from top to bottom.

Number four, be comprehensive, don't just work on core company messaging and positioning, see how that core messaging and positioning would factor over to the main products that you sell, the main features that you offer, the main integrations that you support to make sure that from top to bottom, your messaging is consistent everywhere. It's much more than just a company messaging statement.

Then number five, build consensus early and immediately.

Because before you can move forward with taking all that messaging and translating it into web copy, and ads, and all of this stuff that's going to go live, if you don't build that consensus from the get-go, someone is liable to drop right in the middle of your website relaunch and be like, wait a minute, this page doesn't make sense. And before you know it the whole process has come to a stop.

So build that consensus early, put yourself on the line in front of SLT, pitch it in yourself and make it count.

Need advice when it comes to messaging and positioning? Do you have a specific process when it comes to identifying them? Share with the CMO Alliance Community!