The Shift: From Weak Positioning to Clear, Compelling Language-Market Fit
Learn how achieving language-market fit can accelerate your business growth by aligning your messaging with your customers' natural language and...
Learn how to hit the messaging bullseye in SaaS success with on-target strategies. Understand the impact of accurate messaging on engaging buyers and driving conversions.
This article was first published on LinkedIn.
How important is getting your go-to-customer message strategy right?
Let's use the archery target as a metaphor and explain the impact of on-target messaging.
The innermost yellow ring (the bullseye) is worth 10 points—the highest possible score in archery. This message perfectly resonates with your buyers' struggles: It can represent a 10X or even 100X increase in Website visitors, lead flow, and revenue.
Archery target and scores
As we move outward from the centre, the point values decrease, just as the effectiveness of your messaging diminishes as it becomes less relevant to the buyer's needs:
In archery, arrows that miss the target score zero points. Similarly, messaging that fails to connect with your audience's needs or interests is a wasted effort. This might include:
Your goal in crafting effective messaging should be to focus on the progress customers are trying to make in the primary jobs they are trying to get done. It should resonate with their desired outcomes, capture their struggling moments, and highlight the impact or value of a new approach. The closer you get to the bullseye, the more likely you are to engage your audience, build credibility, and drive conversions.
We’ve been in plenty of inside-out messaging brainstorms, where product, marketing and SMEs craft the company messaging, and most of these outputs struggle to score more than a 3/10. This is the state of play in most technology companies before we are engaged to help. We are brought in to help solve a sales performance problem, and invariably, the problem is upstream in marketing, where a go-to-customer strategy is failing.
The place to start is to interview ten of your ideal customers who acquired your product or service in the prior year, and preferably the buyer who was most involved in the decision. These customers love your product/service, are happy to take reference calls and can clearly articulate the value they gained from switching to you.
You will conduct customer "Switch Interviews" lasting 40-60 minutes, and ask up to 25 questions to uncover their challenges, motivation for change, desired outcomes, and achieved value.
From these interviews, you can create a dossier for each customer. This dossier will help sales, marketing, and customer success teams communicate more effectively with buyers from their first visit to your website to their enthusiastic support of your product or service.
Table 1 below shows the content of a recent Switch Interview Dossier. This content is valuable for anyone who is customer-facing and will help redirect the go-to-customer strategy so that you, too, can hit the messaging bullseye and accelerate growth.
Table 1
If you would like to see the actual content in a typical dossier or if you need help to refocus your go-to-customer messaging so that you hit the bullseye and begin to see a drastic uptick in Website visitors and conversions, please add your first name and email below and your request.
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