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iSPIRT Playbook Roundtable: Positioning and Messaging – Lot of it is common sense!

If your grandmother does not understand your message, then you might as well not communicate is the crux of what was discussed during this Roundtable facilitated by Shankar Maruwada and Nandita Sinha.

This roundtable discussed the ‘What’ of the positioning and messaging and not the ‘how’ of the positioning. There was very little theory except perhaps setting the context and the entire session was practical.

To illustrate the significance of positioning and messaging, one of the participating companies gave an elevator pitch thinking the rest of us are his prospective customers. Then people spoke about what stuck in their minds about the pitch. It varied from ‘I lost him’ to ‘I was thinking of a completely different business model’. The person who gave the pitch looked at all the responses to understand if there were any surprises and what needs to be the part of their messaging.

Discussion on the first pitch led to the understanding of the following:

  1. The curse of knowledge forms a part of all the messaging – what is easily understandable for us is not understandable for the market.
  2. Often times, people start to have internal chatters – they start to think even before the pitch is complete and the attention span is just about 30 seconds.
  3. Most messaging is at a conceptual level and addresses the left-brain of their audience, which does not persuade people to make decisions. Try addressing to their emotions, their right brain and the easiest way is to do these through stories.

Using the first pitch as an example, Shankar explained what goes into creating a tight message and it was

  • Identify the customer segment. You can have one overall messaging of your offering and can have multiple messages for multiple segments
  • Setup is the context of your offering. It can be some challenges that your customer segment faces or the industry faces. There can be multiple setups to your messaging
  • Explain the benefits of your solution. How your offering is unique to the customers need will be the persuasive part of your pitch. Setup combined with benefits is what would make the message that you communicate
  • Features and supporting credibility will have to come after this phase of setup and benefits

After this, one more exercise was carried out where all the participating companies were asked to write down 3 setups and 3 benefits while avoiding features. All the pitches were discussed at length and I am sure all those who attended the Roundtable went back a lot wiser about messaging.

Shankar emphasized on a very important fact that you may not crack your messaging in one sitting and it has to be an iterative process. He also asked people not to think in words and instead begin with stories, then move on to thoughts and then switch to words. This is the best way in which you will get to do your messaging right.

This Roundtable was attended by 9 companies with 12 participants and 2 facilitators. This roundtable kicked off to a hilarious start, during the introductions most people in the room claimed that their Saturday night favorite drink was either butter milk, tea or coffee.

I am looking forward to more such sessions.

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Where is my story?

Most startups talk about product features and how they are better than their competition in terms of their offerings. They really don’t tell stories, however people remember stories for long and not the facts and figures. Most often than not, people say we are a startup, we don’t have paying customers and we do not have stories to communicate. The fact that they are developing a product itself is towards addressing a market gap that the incumbent solutions are not addressing – product creation story. Why don’t you communicate that as a story?

Let me give you a couple of examples.

I was consulting one of the product startups in the education space, which provides smart classrooms. They also were communicating features, benefits as a part of their communication, but they realized that they wanted to do stories. I asked them, why did you choose to develop this product and how did you go product startups about doing this?

In fact, when they wanted to develop their product, they understood the gaps in the market and they had an idea about how to address the gap but they weren’t very clear. In order to get the clarity, they interviewed hundreds of students and hundreds of teachers from across the country before beginning to design their courses. These interviews provided them with a clear idea of the instructional methods followed and what was lacking in it. With this, they started to develop the courses and after about 36 months of work, they have more than 6000 classrooms using their product. This is their product creation story, which they started to communicate very efficiently.

They also prided themselves on the usability of their product and its intuitiveness. I asked them, what does your customer feel about the usability of your product? They said that they are completely positive about the experience. I persisted, what do your prospects who are evaluating the product feel about usability? They weren’t very sure about it. That’s when, we wanted to influence their perception and we decided to do this as a story as well.

We decided that we would not demonstrate the product to the prospects; instead, we will install the setup and get a couple of volunteers from the school to play around with the product. Once they did that, they understood the usability experience, they felt a part of the experience and they started championing the product sales, which resulted in improved conversions.  This became their usability story, which is a part of their pitch now.

These examples are only triggers for you to identify where your stories are. I am sure that this would act as a starting point for you to find your stories.

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3 Reasons why stories will help you win business

Your product does something unique and interesting and you tell people and they go …. Oh well, that’s great and walk away. Would you agree that they just do not get it? All of us have faced this problem sometime or the other.

Let me emphasize this with an example:

A large company was pitching to my customer for a partnership deal. Four French guys and I represented my customer. Into the presentation, they used words and phrases like propensity, appetite, whole nine yards of solution, womb to tomb, boil the ocean, and sweating the assets among many other jargons. In 20 minutes, couple of French guys almost started dozing off, one of them started fiddling with his blackberry, and the other one started ferociously working on the laptop. Obviously, there were not any questions from our side at the end of the presentation as they lost us much early in the pitch. The partnership talk also did not move forward.     

This anecdote emphasizes the fact that higher order words and phrases should not be a part of your vocabulary, as it does not let you connect with your audience. How do you go about connecting?

  1. Stories are a brilliant way to connect with your audience. They help people understand, remember, and re-tell them and this is how Dan and Chip Heath define sticky communication in their book, ‘Made to stick’.
  2. Human beings remember the narratives better than remembering unrelated stuff. This is what we have been doing right from childhood.
  3. Use stories to substantiate your product positioning – A positioning statement per se is a placeholder in your website, presentations and other collaterals. Beyond that, it actually does not do anything unless stories substantiate them.

Now, how do we go about creating stories? Isn’t that an artistic pursuit and a rare skill that only a few have? This is the common belief about creating stories, but in reality, you do not have to be a master storyteller to create your product story. Product creation itself is a story and you are addressing a need or a gap in the market. This would provide the benefits that your customers would get out of your product.

Your product stories ought to have the context defined, action performed by your product and the results expected from it.  Why don’t you start defining the context, action and results of your product and write down everything that comes to your mind? Put them together as a story once you have all the information. It’s that simple!

I would be sharing tips in the subsequent blog posts on what makes a great story, what do good stories have in common, how you can use your personal stories and how you can use stories in your pitch.