When You Have Too Much To Say…Try this 3x3x3 Messaging Grid Rubric!

Many of us just don’t know when to stop.  We have product messaging overload.   We are so proud of our babies and the myriad of features and amazing benefits we can talk, or write forever. But what we say doesn’t stick!

SO STOP.

Your listener only can remember so many things. There is a reason why phone numbers are only 10 digits long!

Messaging that breaks through needs discipline.  Structure can force this on you.  Try this simple structural rubric to ensure meaning and breakthrough:

Product Positioning Statement

  • Value Statement 1
    • Sub-bullet 1
      • Feature/proofpoint 1.1 , Feature/proofpoint 1.2, Feature/proofpoint 1.3
    • Sub bullet 2
      • Feature/proofpoint 2.1, Feature/proofpoint 2.2, Feature/proofpoint 2.3
    • Sub bullet 3
      • Feature/proofpoint 3.1, Feature/proofpoint 3.2, Feature/proofpoint 3.3
  • Value Statement 2 ….

Then repeat the above structure for Value Statements 2 and 3.  THAT’S IT! 

3 Benefit statements, 3 sub-statements for each, and 3 features for each.

So that’s still a lot, that’s 9 benefits and 27 features.

I’ve always said, messaging and positioning is as much about what you say as what you don’t.  Buyers can’t remember more than 9 things about you anyways.  The rest is all about filling in detail to support the 3 main bullets, which is the value you deliver that matters most anyways.

One of the reasons you need to spend time doing value filtering like I teach in my LinkedIn Learning course and write about in a whole section of Launching to Leading is to find the right 3 main messages.

So do the hard work, force yourself into this 3x3x3 messaging matrix and you’ll say less, but what you say will matter more and stick much better.

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A Theory of (Competitive) Relativity

(If you want be in on more of the Competitive Marketing Conversation, I’ll be talking all about this and more at the day 2 Keynote of the Competitive Marketing Summit in Denver on October 23-24th.  For  the next week, the organizers are letting me offer a 50% off discount to the event, email me at ken@kjrassociates.com to get your offer)

Albert Einstein thought about big things; space and time, the size, origin, and destination of the Universe. Most of us B2B marketers are a bit more limited.  Customers and competitors, the size and future of our market share. But one thing is pretty clear, it’s all relative.

Relativity teaches us the connection between the different descriptions of one and the same reality. – Albert Einstein

Markets are Conversations as the saying goes.  The talkers are are buyers, sellers and interlopers.  When buyers and sellers converse, they talk about the exchange of value.  As I wrote about here, sellers bring a chorus of voices to this value conversation; marketing talking about the possible, sales about the powerful and customer success about the practical.

One critical aspect of any conversation is the setting.  And how I talk and how I am received is determined in a large part by the setting or context.  Mettalica, if your taste allows which mine does, may sound great to you in a large stadium concert, but if they brought the same sound and equipment to a coffeehouse you might just go deaf, and you’d almost certainly run out of the venue quickly.  As Einstein is also quoted as saying, “If you sit with a nice girl for 2 hours it seems like a second, if you sit on a stove for a second it seems like an hour, that’s relativity!”

Value conversations are all RELATIVE to the buyer, not the seller.  The local setting, while part of the space-time continuum of the universe, lives in a problem-solution set of coordinates.  What are the problems that matter most to the buyer, and what are the known solutions that exist to solve them.  Competition then, is all about being relative in and to that problem-solution continuum.

The KEY to competitive marketing then, is connecting to and influencing the problem-solution frame of reference of the customer.  The first obvious answer is to have intimacy with the customer’s world.  YES.  However, the bigger win is by marrying that customer intimacy with your uniqueness, and actually SHIFTING the customer’s frame of reference.  Challenger Sales methodology talks about “commercial insight”,  while I personally prefer my Viewpoint Storytelling approach, but either way, the goal is the same, to shift the playing field away from competition and to you.

Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity states that large objects warp the space time continuum and draw other objects toward them; we call that gravity.  My much more humble theory of Competitive Relativity says that great stories warp the Problem-Solution continuum and draw buyers to your solution, a kind of competitive gravitational pull.    Engage your customer in their context and pull them to your uniqueness and that 2 hour sales lunch will feel like a hot second!

 

 

A Chorus of Value Voices

“But we sell to a technical buyers,” she said, “why do I care about the story?”

“But it’s easy to use, why do I need to invest more in customer success?, ” he asked

“It’s just about differentiation!,” they all said.

Like a loud bar, I was having a hard time keeping the discussion straight in my head.  The VP of Customer success only cared about THE PRACTICAL even if it wasn’t powerful.  The Head of Sales only cared about THE POWERFUL, even if it wasn’t possible. And the Marketing Director only cared about the Possible, even it wasn’t practical.  WOW.

Then the lightbulb, I realized that the listener cares about all of them, the Possible, the Powerful and the Practical.  And we have great Voices to describe each of these, marketing, sales, customer success.  And each of those Voices had a different impact that they wanted to achieve with the listener, the buyer.  The Marketer talks about the Possible to achieve Attention.  The Salesperson talks about the Powerful to achieve Action, and the Customer Success Owner talks about the practical to create achievement. These topics or motif create our chorus of value voices.

With that in mind, the bar chatter starts to sound like a well orchestrated Chorus which sounds beautiful and coordinated, and on paper looks like this:

Like a chorus, these voices need to be tied together with a single theme.  And that theme is VALUE.  Our Value conversation is like a chorus.  When we align the voices, the possible sets up the powerful, the powerful is supported by the practical. We can get the attention of buyers, motivate them to take action and reinforce their action with achievement.  If not aligned around common Value, our conversations sounds like a disorganized barroom.  But when we do, well, it can be beautiful music, a Value masterpiece.  Welcome to the #ConversationEconomy !