Intercom on Marketing

Every step of the way is an opportunity to help people feel good about the decision they are making and each requires a different set of specialized skills.

Great messaging is simple, compelling, specific, differentiated and defensible.
Simple. It’s easily understood by current and prospective customers.
Compelling. It describes something that is interesting or desirable to them.
Specific. It captures what your product does, not an overly abstract statement of it.
Differentiated. It includes something that makes it unique among peers.
Defensible. It shouldn’t be easy for your competitor to adopt/copy your messaging.

Create your story in isolation of product, and customers who might be interested initially will be ultimately disappointed. Get your marketing and product teams in sync, and you’ll have created an advantage that nobody else can copy.

Features can often connect the dots and put a story into a greater context. They do this in two important ways:
Justification: In B2B SaaS, you’re stressing “bottom line” results that can be achieved by applying your product’s features to solve a particular problem. If you can demonstrate that the customer will be a hero because your product will save their company $120,000 a year and help them achieve better results, you’ve got an excellent shot. Show them how customers like them have actually achieved those results with your product.
Differentiation: In a crowded market, your features can help you stand apart from the competition. Take our conversation ratings feature, which is our way for businesses to measure and understand customer satisfaction. What’s most compelling to a buyer isn’t how they can measure customer satisfaction, but rather how they can take specific actions (or not) based on that insight. They can set new messages to be triggered based on a customer’s satisfaction level, or decide to put customers who are dissatisfied at the front of the queue. Features help us back up our story in a compelling way that our competitors can’t do.

People don’t care about you, people care about themselves and their problems. A good story is a lot like the strings on a piano: When it hits something of the same frequency, it resonates and your story sticks.

People don’t typically discover and buy a product just because of its features. They buy a product because it solves a problem for them and delivers value in doing so.

No matter how good your product is, if you can’t tell a cohesive, compelling story about it, you’re going to have a very hard time getting people’s attention when you actually do take it to market.

Companies like Amazon understand this well and are rightly famous for their “work backwards” philosophy. You start by writing the press release, to articulate how the world will see your product, and then work backwards until you get to the minimum set of technology requirements to achieve your goals for the product.

A lot of startups spend untold time and resources cooking up some fancy marketing matrix when in fact you just need to have lots of real life conversations with like-minded people about their problems, and mutually explorate how you can solve them. If your product is in the vicinity of a real person’s real problem and you have a pitch that resonates, you can’t go too wrong.

I didn’t send one size fits all emails asking people to give us their credit card details. I’d always remind the recipient of how we met and explain why I was emailing them, and then I’d mock up a screenshot of how Intercom would look if they started using it and tailor the message to their use case. If they were a product manager it would be about helping customers to use a feature more. If they were the CEO it would be about helping to activate customers who were slipping away.

You have the time; you’ve just decided that these tasks are lower priority.