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.
Hitting the Bullseye: On-Message Communication
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
Bullseye (10 points):
- Your message directly addresses the customer's struggling moments and shows you understand the job they are trying to get done.
- It demonstrates a deep understanding of their needs and clearly articulates how your solution can help them achieve their desired outcomes and the impact they can expect from change.
- Your Website Hero message captures the progress the primary job customers are trying to get done and resonates with the buyer's motivation to visit your website for the first time.
- Your social media campaigns are centred around your customers' needs, resulting in higher engagement and interest in the content you share.
- Your SEO is working around the primary keywords your buyers are searching for.
- Your company is focused on helping your customers achieve their goals using your products/services.
- Your Customer Hero Stories capture a real customer's experiences and their struggle to overcome the forces that resist change to achieve better outcomes for themselves and the business.
- This message captures attention, builds trust, and motivates action.
Outer Rings: Drastically Decreasing Relevance
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:
Red Ring (5 points):
- Messaging closely aligned with customer needs but may not use the right language-market-fit.
- It's still effective, addressing your target audience's specific challenges, but it creates a different connection than a bullseye.
- Your Website HERO message isn’t quite right.
- This messaging resonates well but clearly illustrates how minor tweaks in language can double conversion.
Blue Ring (3 points):
- This represents messaging that touches on general industry challenges but doesn't specifically address the unique struggles of your target audience.
- It's somewhat relevant and shows an understanding of the broader market, but not compelling enough to drive strong engagement.
- Buyers might recognize the issues discussed but won't feel a personal connection.
- Case studies will almost certainly be chest-pounding narratives about how great the company, the products and the technical people are compared to ideal customers' needs.
Black Ring (2 points):
- Here, we're firmly in product feature-and-benefit territory.
- The messaging primarily concerns your solution but isn't tied to customer needs. It may interest the 3% of buyers already in the market for a solution and know what they are looking for. (No one cares about your features and benefits until they are in decision mode and are making trade-offs vs. your competition.
- A few quotes from customers, but weak social proof.
White Ring (1 point):
- The outermost ring represents messaging that's almost wholly off-target.
- This is where product blather often falls. It's focused entirely on your product's features or company achievements without any apparent connection to customer value or struggling moments.
- It might sound impressive internally but fails to engage potential buyers. This could include technical jargon, irrelevant product specifications, or marketing speak that means nothing to the customer.
- In this scoring system, the gap between being on-message (10 points) and the next best option (5 points) is more pronounced, emphasizing the critical importance of crafting messaging that precisely addresses your buyers' struggles.
Missing the Target Entirely:
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:
- Focusing solely on your company's achievements rather than customer value
- Build-it-and-they-will-come: technical explanations of the products/services the founders are proud of.
- Making claims about your product without supporting evidence or relevance to customer needs.
- There won’t be any case studies as they haven’t got many customers willing to talk about using the products.
The Impact of Accurate Messaging
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.
How to Develop Accurate Messaging
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.
What's in a Jobs-to-be-done Switch Interview Dossier?
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.