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175: Marketing messaging is not sales messaging · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Sales Bluebird podcast, where we help cybersecurity companies grow sales faster.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Whether you're a seller, marketer, leader, or founder, we give you tips, tricks, experiences, examples, ideas, and inspiration from people who know a thing or 10 about building great cybersecurity companies.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Andrew Monahan, and today we're talking about messaging.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: So, messaging, what do you say to get a conversation with someone and how do you have that conversation as a salesperson?
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what I would say is that too often people confuse marketing messaging and sales messaging.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: I was talking to uh a potential client a few weeks back, and um they showed me some work that they've been doing with a marketing consultant around messaging.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: And it was great messaging, but for marketing.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: It was uh one-liners and ways to say things, and I could see how some of it would be perfect on a website or perfect in, I don't know, some sort of data sheet or white paper or something like that.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: But it's not words, they weren't words that a person, a human being, would use when talking with another human being.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: In its essence, that's what selling is all about.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: I encourage you, try looking at any website and imagine having a conversation with someone using the language that's on the website.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now, especially in cybersecurity, right?
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Buzzwords everywhere, acronyms, buzzwords, the whole thing.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's just not how a human being would usually talk to another human being.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: And you see this sometimes when the SDRs are reporting into marketing and not into sales.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: So they're they're what they say and who they target and all the rest of it is all governed by marketing leadership.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes what they allow to happen is the marketing messaging they're really trying to desperately get out there and get the company known for ends up being taught or being told to SDRs to go use.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: And it makes for a very awkward conversation when you've got someone who's usually very junior in terms of an SDR, talking to someone very senior in terms of the target personas they're after, using a whole bunch of buzzwords and slogans and things like that.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't go very far.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: And the other way that you're a seller, you might have experienced this is when you get the a deck or you get some messaging from marketing.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: And this is how we have to describe ourselves.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this is when someone says, What do you do?
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what we say, and you say what you're supposed to be saying, and at the end of it, you have to say what this really means is, right?
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: You say, We're a leading company in this space and we do these things with AI and all the rest of it, and you stop and there's kind of silence, right?
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: And you go, Well, what that really means is that we do this, this, and this, right?
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know your messaging is missing from a salesperson perspective when you have to say what this really means is, and then you use what any human would say to another human at the end of that.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: So, what are the real differences between marketing messaging and sales messaging?
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: The first one, and the I think pretty obvious one is you know, marketing is one to many, and sales is one to one, or at least one to very, very few.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: Marketing's all about saying, well, you know, how do we get as many people as possible to, in our target personas anyway, understand what we do, hear about us, get name recognition that we can send emails to, that we can invite to events, things like that.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: When is in sales, if we're doing prospect things, it's just one-to-one, right?
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: We're sending an email or making a call, and it's the one single person.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: Or if we're actually in a first meeting, second meeting, or in a sales cycle, it might be one to very few.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: It might be one to one, it might be one to three or four.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we've got a finite number of people that we're working with.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, we're doing when we're working with human-to-human contact, we need to talk like humans talk to humans.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and very aligned to that is the idea that uh in marketing messaging, you tend to have to be higher level, right?
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Tends to be a bit more general messaging to a persona or a type of company or a vertical or something like that.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas in sales messaging, it's personalization, right?
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if we're doing our job properly, we should be really personalizing to each individual that we're targeting.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not that we're targeting CISOs at financial companies.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's the fact that we're targeting Jim Smith, the CISO at this exact company.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then we're gonna personalize for them.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: Another way to think about it that I think is broadly true, is that in marketing, they tend to lead with the message.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: So lead with the, this is what we do, lead with the the words, the slogan, the whatever it might be, the category name they're trying to create.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas in sales, we tend to lead towards that.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: If we lead with we're this, it tends to put people off.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: But if we kind of tee up a little bit the you know, why we exist, the problems that we solve, and then we call it something, then we lead towards the message.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that's something that the broadly holds up.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: You know, in marketing, they lead with the message, whereas in sales, we lead towards the message.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: This whole idea of you know being general versus personalization goes into when we think about the idea of being having superficial messaging versus in-depth.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: If what you're doing is trying to communicate things on the above the fold in a website, then there's only so much you can really do, right?
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas if you're in the sales world, you know, we're talking to potentially multiple personas and we're talking to them for long periods of time.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we're talking to them for half an hour, an hour, or over a sales cycle, it might be many, many, many hours, right?
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: And we need to have enough depth in what we give the sales team and the messaging that we talk about and how to have conversations that it so it is a conversation.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's tailored for the types of prospects that we're going after.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: And it might be job title personalization or in-depth buy, or it might be stages of maturity, right?
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: They're really early into trying to understand our submarket inside cybersecurity, and therefore we need to talk to them a certain way.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas if someone who's been in that submarket for five years, we don't need to treat them like they're just learning about this for the first time.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: So there's all sorts of nuances to doing this.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now, one thing to keep in mind sales messaging and marketing messaging should not be completely different, right?
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that marketing talks about selling coffee and and sales people go out and sell tea, right?
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's not that.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's just the we've got to take a lot more to it to be able to use the messaging in front of another human being.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: And what companies realize um pretty quickly is they need some sort of translation person.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's probably the best way to put it.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not talking about languages, right?
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not talking English to French or anything like that.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: What I'm really talking about is from marketing to sales.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: Often the messaging starts with marketing, but we need someone in our company, working with our company, to translate that into sales speak or not sales speak, but uh more so that two human beings can communicate with each other.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't do that, then you're gonna lose sales, right?
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna have, you know, put your team in front of people and they just simply will not connect with them.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: If this does not happen, they'll walk in there and use words that are stupid to use in front of another human being, and they'll lose them very quickly.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: You won't have the credibility to keep a conversation going, and you'll find that you don't get very much past either a cold call or past that first meeting.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: And it the worst thing that happens is you know, first meetings are so hard to come by, you're gonna waste these meetings by not having this translation process in place.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: So who's the best place to do this translation for you?
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: I think one of the obvious places people turn to is product marketing.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's often one of the earlier hires at a startup, which is good.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, that person is oriented around the practical.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: They're oriented around what does the product actually do?
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: How do we describe it down to quite a level of detail, right?
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: So they're actually a natural place to turn to say, well, we need to have the sales version of the messaging.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: What I found though is that very few, but there definitely are some, but very few, have actually got the experience of sitting in front of a prospect and sold, or even sat in front of a prospect with a salesperson and had the selling experience and knowing how the conversations go and don't go, to then be able to go and and give the translation or do the translation for the sales team to help them have a conversation.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's very hard if you haven't spent many, many hours being in amongst these conversations to know how they go and and the flow and words that are used and the types of things that each side's trying to do, it's very hard to then tell the salesperson how to go have that conversation.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well, very smart in ideas about how to do it, but until you actually know how it has to go in real life, then you don't have someone with the credibility to go and tell the salespeople what to do and what to say.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes what happens as well is even with the best intentions from the PMM, they're diluted.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they they come up with the, let's say, uh, some sort of persona document.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we're gonna meet with these three or four personas commonly, and then you know, they take a lot of input on that, and then they kind of run it up the chain a little bit.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: And before you know it, the CMO or other people inside the organization have started diluting it and saying, we you know, the sales guys need to talk more about this and more about that.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not how we describe what we do.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's gonna be more like this.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: And suddenly you're kind of filtering in all the less useful ways to have a conversation.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: So the PMM could be the right person to do it, but be very careful that they have the right experience to be able to do it.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: The other group is the salespeople themselves and the sales leaders themselves.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now, here's the reality is that they're gonna be very good at it, right?
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because they do this again and again.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: This will not be the first time they'd like to take materials from other people inside a company and figure out how to use them, how to translate them for their own good.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: Happens all the time.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: All the time.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: The first thing that happens when they get the latest pitch deck is is they look at it and go, okay, what realistically can I use and say in front of a prospect?
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: First thing they do when they'll get, I don't know, a battle card, classic example of the battle card, right?
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: Is okay, what do I digest from this and turn this into something that I can ask questions about and also position effectively.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: They're doing the, these people are doing this translation already.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: However, salespeople being salespeople, right, that they're good at doing it for themselves, but they're very bad at creating something that's good content for the rest of the team.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: They've got their own way of doing these things.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's not necessarily the best way, but their own way of doing it.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: And they'll do it probably a little bit ad hoc, and it won't be laid out in a way that can be easily given and trained on to the rest of the sales team.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that's for the sellers and for the sales leaders, they will absolutely know how to do this, but they just don't have the time, right?
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: They'll do it maybe on the fly a little bit in meetings, they'll they'll do what they can, but they just don't have the time to sit there and say, okay, how do we create a sales structure, a sales process, a sales playbook for the rest of the team and as we scale the sales team?
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: The third group to think about is enablement.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: You know, many, many companies have enablement people.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: Usually they're a little bit bigger than a pure play startup.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this is a good place to go, but be careful.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: Make sure that your enablement person or team has someone who has sales experience, or at least a lot of enablement experience to really know what sticks and what works with salespeople.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: That sort of person will be really good at it, right?
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: If they've got some prior sales experience, they're doing enablement now, so they understand what happens day to day.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: They can often make a really good person to translate marketing to sales.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't say be careful because there's a lot of enablement folks that are great program managers.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: They're great at organizing training, they're great at getting subject matter experts in to do training, they're great at organizing people inside the company to come and do training, but they're not the best people to then take a program manager role and turn it into a content curation or creation role, which is essentially what this becomes.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: You're essentially taking a bunch of things from other people and distilling them into assets and sales tools that the salespeople can actually use.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: The fourth group, which some people don't think about, is you don't have to actually go hire a full-time person to do this.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: Many of us don't have budgets for FDEs for enablement, especially if you're a seed or A or B even B stage company.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there are people like me out there who do this for a living.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: Myself, there's a bunch of other people that do it.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: We work with earlier stage companies, we work with actually more mature companies as well who want to bring in someone who's got real expertise in doing this.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: Commonly, when you do that, it will be less than the price of hiring an experienced full-time person to do it, a full an FTE, but it's on a monthly basis, right?
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: So it's probably less or about the same as an experienced FTE, but you don't have to hire them, bring them on the staff, take them on for you know quite a while and worry about riffing or making changes if things uh don't go the right way.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: So you have the flexibility of bringing someone on a contract basis to do that.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: And the people out there that do it like me, they're experts, we're experts in what we do.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: We've done it many, many, many times for companies and uh different types of companies.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: So, for example, my business, unstoppable.do, we only work with cybersecurity companies.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: And almost all our cybersecurity companies are startups.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: So we got the experience of knowing the market pretty well, knowing what it takes to sell.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: I used to sell for 20 years cybersecurity solutions.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, we got the idea.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: And there's others out there like me, right, that do this.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it's often a great way to have someone come in if you don't want to allocate the budget for an FTE to go do it yourselves.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: So there's four options for you to have that translation happen.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: Product marketing can do it, salespeople slash leaders can do it, bringing on enablement people can do it, or you can look externally for consultants to come and help you do it as well.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: For those of you who do want to reach out, you can reach out to me at 303-956-0024, or you can reach me by email at andrew at unstoppable.do.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: HW do the dot do at the end and not.com.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: And with that, I'll see you next time.