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Messaging shouldn't feel this hard.
If you’re staring at a complex product, an oversaturated market, and a mountain of conflicting opinions from stakeholders, you aren’t alone. Whether you’re a founder trying to find your voice or a marketer struggling to align multiple buyers, the "messy middle" of messaging is where most brands get stuck.
On Better Messaging, Emma Stratton, author and B2B messaging expert, is pulling back the curtain on how to turn technical complexity into clarity. Drawing from a decade of experience partnering with hundreds of tech companies, from seed-stage startups to global household names, Emma shares the practical frameworks and real-world lessons needed to make people actually care about what you’re building.
[00:00:00] Emma Stratton: I’m Emma Stratton, and this is Better Messaging. If you want to stop second guessing yourself and start writing better messaging today, you’re in the right place. I was recently running a training for individual marketers that I do through the Maven platform, and it’s always really fun to get about 20 marketers from all different types of companies together into one group, and it definitely turns into a therapy session at times. And one of the product marketers asked me a question that I hear quite a lot. And our question was, how do I go about getting internal alignment and buy-in from stakeholders on my new messaging, especially when it’s a really diverse group of stakeholders? Really, this is, I would say, one of the hardest parts of messaging work. And it really has very little to do with actual messaging and writing. It’s all about the alignment piece and getting stakeholders on board and getting everyone to agree on what to say and what not to say.
[00:01:09] Emma Stratton: As I’m sure many of you have probably experienced in the past, it can be tough and it can be daunting. Now, I am officially by trade a messaging strategist, but I would say a more accurate description of what I am when I consult with clients is an alignment strategist. The biggest part of the work I do in coming into a new company and helping them create company messaging or big platform messaging is to get everyone to agree and everyone on board with those new words and that new message. And it’s definitely been something that I’ve learned over the years. So I’ve been doing it for about 10 years now. I’ve created some processes and techniques that I’m really excited to share with you because these have been battle tested and for the most part are quite successful. I remember a couple years ago working with a sales tech company, and this is a hot company really at an exciting time in their journey and really looking for messaging to take them to that next level.
[00:02:20] Emma Stratton: And as part of my work, when I do a messaging engagement, I create a cross-functional team that goes through the whole process. And so I usually think about eight people is great, right? Eight people, maybe nine, get leadership in there and a couple people representing some departments and they make up the core group. And the idea is to have diverse opinions from across the company, but not so many people that it gets hard to move forward. Well, this company, they said we’re all really passionate about the product and messaging and we all want to be involved. And so there’s going to be 17 people of us showing up in this cross-functional team. So I hadn’t officially capped it with them. Now I do cap it, but I was like, okay, sure. The more the merrier. So I had 17 people and leading up to it, I did question whether I was going to be able to pull it off.
[00:03:16] Emma Stratton: Would I really be able to get all these people on board with the same message? And sure enough, in the first session, I saw some of these strong personalities, sales, very strong personality, product, very strong personality, CEO, marketing, everyone had opinions, but everyone cared and everyone was really focused on this task of getting the new messaging through. I ran through my process of what I do to get alignment and lo and behold, it worked with them. I did have to put one extra session in, but I was able to align the whole team. I did this by bringing everyone in on the journey. So since there were 17 people involved and they were all heads of different parts of the company, by the time we got to the end, when I presented the messaging and it was built on everything we had kind of worked on together, they were all on board and they actually started to go back to their team and start naturally organically using the messaging.
[00:04:20] Emma Stratton: And the CMO shot me an email and was like, “This has never happened before. People are already organically using this messaging in CS, in sales, in marketing, and I haven’t even officially operationalized it yet.” I don’t think we’d even fully, officially signed off on the deliverable, but people were just using it naturally. It was already starting to become part of the company’s story. And that really is the beauty of an inclusive, somewhat collaborative approach to messaging development. So that’s what I want to talk about today is give you just some advice on how to tackle this because depending on where you work, depending on the folks you work with, depending on your position and role within that organization, it can be more daunting. This idea of trying to get alignment, it could seem harder, or it might be something that you can do quite well with just a few tweaks, but I want to kind of talk about all the different ways it can go.
[00:05:22] Emma Stratton: So the first piece, which I just talked about is getting a cross-functional team together. So I am a big fan of getting a group of people together to go through the messaging process. Now, they don’t go through the entire messaging process. I’m not asking people what they think in the beginning. I take them on an accelerated journey so that they can collaborate and align in a short amount of time. So what that means is I’m doing the heavy lifting in the messaging development, and then I bring people in to the journey and into key moments where we need to make a decision and get alignment. So what that looks like when I do messaging engagements is I have my cross-functional team together and I’ll do a kickoff input session where I’ll gather all the stakeholders in a session and it’s an open session where I ask them questions so I can get their hypotheses, I can get their insights, their perspective on the product, what’s hard about messaging, what they think we should be messaging, just an opportunity to get all of their thoughts.
[00:06:32] Emma Stratton: What do they think customers value the most? What do they think we should be talking about? And it’s that forum, like here’s the place for everyone to bring in their ideas. Now, this is a great place to ask people if they have any messaging ideas or headlines that they might be holding onto. Don’t know if this has ever happened to you. This has happened to me many times before where someone in the group is kind of holding onto like a tagline, like they have this tagline that they’ve been thinking that they think would be awesome and they’re kind of holding onto it like a baby and they kind of bring it out later and maybe want it to be part of the messaging. And it’s rarely a headline that you want to use. This happens a lot. I think it happens because I think everyone secretly dreams of being the one who came up with the cool headline.
[00:07:22] Emma Stratton: That’s what I think. I don’t know if that’s true, but this happens. So in the beginning of this input session, when you’re kind of asking everyone their thoughts, what do they think? Here’s the time to also say, does anyone have any thoughts on messaging that they would like to share or any ideas or any messaging that you’re mulling over? So the idea is just let’s get it all out on the page so that it’s out and then we can move on and look at new things because people can kind of hold on to ideas like they’re waiting for the perfect time to reveal it to the group. Say it’s the CEO and they have a headline that they really want to use and they hold onto it until the very last session when you’re sharing recommended messaging and they’re like, “But wait, what about this headline?” So we don’t want that to happen.
[00:08:12] Emma Stratton: So invite people in that first session to really just give a brain dump of their ideas, but also what they think. This is where people are getting heard. It’s so important that people feel heard in this process. I think that is almost the motivation behind it. So having this open forum where you ask people these questions, what do they think we should be messaging about? What do we think customers value is a really great place to start and also asking people to let go of their headline babies that they want to bring out at the perfect time. So that’s the first piece. Another thing you want to do, and you could do it in that same session, is just make sure everyone is on the same page about what this messaging is, the goal of the messaging development, the refresh, or the new messaging, what messaging actually is.
[00:09:09] Emma Stratton: I know that sounds maybe silly, but I have noticed that sometimes people will have different understandings of what messaging is or isn’t, and that can create problems as you get into the process. But also, I think it’s helpful to just have everyone focus on the north star of why we are doing this in the first place. What is the ultimate goal? Why are we doing this? So for example, maybe you’re a product that has a very passionate, niche audience, but you’re trying to go up market and speak to a more general, broader audience that don’t understand you as well as the first audience, and that’s why you’re doing new messaging and positioning. You want that to be really clear because later in the process, when people might throw out ideas that are taking you down a completely different path, you want to be able to point to that objective and say, “But remember, is this going to help us achieve X?” And the answer is no, you move on.
[00:10:10] Emma Stratton: So really just making sure everyone is clear, what is messaging, why are we doing this now that will really help, really setting that objective. So now that you’ve done that first session where you’ve gotten everyone’s input, you may need to get some other people’s input. Sometimes there’s like a person in the company who’s really important to have their input, but maybe they’re not right to be in the cross-functional group. They don’t have the bandwidth to be in all the sessions or they’re not really suited for that, but you do want to hear from them. So just schedule some separate one-on-one calls from them so that way you can hear from anyone who needs to be heard. No one really enjoys getting messaging handed to them that they’ve had no input in or no say in. So by getting input from people, people feel heard and then they’re going to feel more a part of the messaging process and more receptive to it.
[00:11:10] Emma Stratton: So once you’ve had all those input sessions, then it’s time for you to go away and do your research and do your thing on your own. So this is what I do as well. After I have that kickoff call, I will start fact finding. So the first thing I do is I will talk to the sales team. So I will get a group call with a couple of great sales folks and I will ask them questions because salespeople just know what’s going on. They’ve got their finger on the pulse of what prospects are thinking. They know what messaging is not resonating. And also they know about messaging that is resonating because let’s face it, they’re doing their own thing. They’re doing things in outbound, they’re trying things. So that’s one of the great things about talking to sales. They’ll kind of give you a straight up look at what prospects care about and the state of play with messaging.
[00:12:05] Emma Stratton: So I love talking to sales. So I do that next. Then I do my market research. So looking at the space that you’re operating in, looking at competitors, direct, indirect, alternatives, and I will do a high level messaging audit so I can get an understanding of how are people positioning themselves? What are the main messages? What’s the old worn territory that everyone’s saying? What are some potential opportunities of where we could say something different? Where’s the white space? These are the type of things I look at. And then I speak to customers. So customer research is a huge part of what I do. And getting customer research is your tool in your tool belt to help you achieve that alignment and deal with pushback, which could happen in later stages. So I like to speak to customers on the phone. That’s a great way to get qualitative insights.
[00:13:00] Emma Stratton: You could send surveys, but anything that really helps you understand where customers are at, how they think about the product, how they think about value, benefits, pain points, all that good stuff. And then I will kind of synthesize all of those things and figure out what is the general direction we want to go in. I will figure out what are the potential ways that we could move on the positioning? What does that look like? I’ll look at potential value propositions and key messages based on that. Then I bring the cross-functional team together. So I do it in two working sessions, but you can do it however you want. But here is the working session, the collaborative session where we get the group in together, but you’re not going in cold and you’re not going in with a blank whiteboard. You are going in prepared and with a plan.
[00:13:50] Emma Stratton: So you’ve already done the heavy lifting. You already have a sense of the direction that this messaging needs to go. And so here’s where you take everyone on an accelerated journey of what you’ve done, i.e., Summarizing the findings, the feedback from customers and drawing out the themes and all that good stuff. And then you show them options and ways we could go forward. Now, a big piece of showing options and ways we could go forward is making it visual for people. Okay? So here’s the thing. As marketers, we understand marketing. And so when we talk about how a headline could change or benefit could go up or down in altitude or something like that, we know what we’re talking about, but for other folks who aren’t marketers, it’s not as clear. And so one thing I’ve noticed is that when it comes to weighing up options for different value propositions or different directions we could go in messaging, it really helps to see an example because it’s a lot easier to react to words on a page than it is to react to just an abstract comment.
[00:15:05] Emma Stratton: And so options are your friends. So when I come to, let’s say, figuring out a value proposition, like what is our ultimate value proposition for the company going to be, I come with options, typically four or five options that are viable that have slightly different angles or directions. So one might be about ease, one might be about productivity, one might be about real time. So see how these are different angles. Now me, I can imagine what a headline that talks about one of those angles would look like, but other folks would find that hard. So what I do is I write a sample value proposition for each direction. So I say, “Here are four different directions we could go with different focuses for our value proposition, and here’s a sample of what that headline might look like. “ And I always stress might, but by putting actual value propositions in front of folks, they can start to articulate what they like and don’t like and what feels right and wrong and why.
[00:16:09] Emma Stratton: And this has been just a lifesaver because I can have all those conversations that might happen previously when you share the messaging for the first time, all like the nitpicking and questioning and all that. Well, now we do it in the context of a collaborative working session. So big fan of showing options of value propositions and let people talk about it and really get some kind of consensus towards the end about which aspects they like and why. Usually by the end of that session, I know pretty much what the value proposition is going to be. I just have to wordsmith a little bit. So give options whenever you can. When it comes to positioning shifts, sometimes I work with companies where it’s a larger shift that needs to be made. I will show them examples of positioning slightly different from where we are today, positioning from like medium, from where we are today, and like positioning a huge leap away from where we are today.
[00:17:11] Emma Stratton: And that can be a great way for people to really align on what’s correct. Sometimes people come in and they’re like, “Yeah, we want to totally change our positioning for how we’re going to be in the future, this big vision.” But then when I actually show them what that looks like in terms of like a headline or the top of a website, they’re like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, we’re not there yet.” So using copy examples to illustrate different kind of volumes we can use on messaging or how broad or narrower positioning could be, giving people examples is the way to elicit real feedback. And that’s how you can get the feedback and hopefully achieve some consensus by doing it that way. So that is a big piece around getting alignment. For me, I really want to reach kind of like, yes, we generally like this alignment by the end of those collaborative sessions.
[00:18:10] Emma Stratton: So I have two working sessions. I have about two days in between, one or two days, so we still make progress, people get a little break, but we don’t lose momentum. And by the end of that, I kind of don’t end it unless I have that high level understanding of the direction they want to go in all the different pieces of the messaging. So it really all happens in those working sessions. And then afterwards, the beauty of it is when you present the first round messaging, it’s not out of the blue. It’s not stuff they’ve never seen before. It’s things that they’ve been a part of deciding. And now they can say, “Okay, well, I do like that word or maybe a different word for that, but we’re not going back and questioning the strategy.” And this brings me to one of my final points.
[00:18:59] Emma Stratton: Maybe I’ll have another one, but there are times when you have to kind of be strong and point out when things are shifting strategy. So messaging is the manifestation of strategy. This is why people pick apart messaging so much because any lack of strategy or lack of alignment in a strategy comes to light in messaging. Sometimes people don’t realize it’s happening until we see it articulated on a page when we’ve been asked to write something about a strategy that maybe isn’t fully sound. So sometimes you might get pushback or comments about the messaging when really it’s about the strategy behind it. And something actually needs to happen behind the scenes to sort that messaging piece out. I see this happen all the time. Now I know I work as a consultant, so I’m an outsider coming in, which makes it easier to tell people what to do.
[00:20:06] Emma Stratton: So I acknowledge that it might be uncomfortable or might feel downright impossible for you, but there are times when feedback on messaging actually goes against strategy or points at a deeper issue that needs to be solved in order to make the messaging successful. And when you see this happen, you got to call it out and folks need to address it because messaging can’t fix a poor strategy. As many of us know, many of us get asked to message a so- so strategy. But I think being able to really say, “Hey, we need to figure out X, Y, and Z before we go forward is a really good thing to do. “ So a little bit more about pushback I just want to talk about because that does happen. So you can still take everyone through this nice cross-functional journey and you could still have pushback, right?
[00:21:08] Emma Stratton: What do you do when you get pushback? Well, this is where customer data is your friend. Sometimes when I recommend potential options or ways forward, I will include a customer quote below on the slide that illustrates that point. Always backing up with the customer is just the way to do it. Well, here’s what customers said, right? Customers said this. Customer insights, customer quotes, customer data is the best way to kind of deal with pushback. Sometimes people will push back for emotional reasons. I once worked with a company where they wanted to reposition their product. They had to, because in a year and a half, Microsoft was going to catch up with what they were doing and they would have no business. So they needed to make this meaningful step forward and everything had been going great with the cross-functional team. Everything was right on track.
[00:22:07] Emma Stratton: The first session went awesome. We had kind of figured out this exciting new direction to go in and the CEO was on board. I was like, great. Then we had the next session and the CEO shows up and his whole vibe is different. I swear, it was like there was a cloud over him. His body language was different. He just seemed more closed off. And when I got to the recap, sort of recapping where we ended at the last session to go into the new session, he was like, “I don’t know. I don’t know if this is right anymore. I’ve thought about it and I don’t know. I’m not sure. I’m really worried that if we make this change, we’re going to alienate our existing customer base and it’ll be terrible. And yeah, I don’t think we should do this. “ Now this is the founder CEO who’s got a lot of sway and I listened to him, but I wanted to really understand what was going on behind the words, what was going on with his body language, what was happening.
[00:23:06] Emma Stratton: I could tell he was scared. He just had the vibe of being scared and I asked him, “What scares you about this? What really worries you? What really scares you about this potential change?” And he said, “Well, I spoke to my investors yesterday and I just got really worried about losing existing pipeline and what if the new audience doesn’t work?” And he just kind of blurted out all of his fears that had obviously been kicked into high gear from this meeting with the investor. I turned to the CRO who was on the call and I asked the CRO, “Do you think that if we take this change and change the positioning that it’s going to alienate our existing customer base, that we’re going to lose sales like that to risk?” And he said, “Absolutely not. This is not going to alienate our existing kind of audience, not at all.
[00:24:06] Emma Stratton: And this actually helps us enter the story at a little higher altitude, which we’ve needed to do anyway, and it opens us up to new audiences as well. So I think it’s great. I’m excited to do this. “ And you could just see the CEO like, “Relax.” Sometimes fear comes up and fear is why people are resisting the messaging. Now again, as a consultant, it’s easier for me to ask the CEO like, “What are you afraid of? “ So I know it might not be easy, but often fear can drive decisions in these meetings. And I think it’s important to name that if you can, to call it out, to give it space and to address those fears. And that’s why I went to sales because if sales and the CRO feel confident in this shift, then that’s likely going to allay a lot of those fears.
[00:25:00] Emma Stratton: That’s another thing is kind of knowing when there’s something emotional behind it that’s threatening to throw a wrench in it all. And often it’s because someone is scared and there’s good reasons to be scared. I mean, there’s tough business out there, but you don’t want your messaging to be driven by fear. You want it to be driven by faith in what you know about your customers. So that’s really everything I got on how to reach alignment. And I will say that there are times when all of these techniques and the best will in the world won’t work. I got to be honest, it might not work. It doesn’t always work because nothing is completely 100% guaranteed, and especially when we’re working with people. People are people and they’re different and they’re going to do what they’re going to do. And so a lot of this comes down to the team dynamics and leadership and personalities and things like that.
[00:26:03] Emma Stratton: Sometimes you’ll have a CEO who is holding onto a headline and doesn’t matter what you’ve aligned on and decided that headline is what’s going to show up on the website in the following weeks. Sometimes people don’t want to kind of agree on just one thing, and so you have to smoosh three things together in one headline. Sometimes that’s just how it goes. But I think recognizing that sometimes you’ve done your best, but it’s out of your hands, can’t make it happen, and then that’s okay. The important thing is not to take that on yourself and to think that you’ve somehow failed because you’ve done your best by bringing people together, bringing them on the journey, helping them to visualize trade-offs and what decisions could actually look like, backing everything up with customer data, making sure everyone’s heard. If you’ve done all those things, you have done your best with getting that buy-in and alignment.
[00:27:09] Emma Stratton: And sometimes it might not be possible. And that’s okay. That’s okay because there’ll always be another opportunity perhaps with another company or with another project where you’ll have that group of people and it’ll just click. I’ve had a few tough ones where we haven’t really 100% nailed it, but I would say 95%, maybe 98% of the teams I’ve worked with have been able to achieve that buy-in and alignment. And when you do, it just feels good. Everyone just feels really confident and positive in the messaging. So I really hope that these tips and techniques have helped you. If you’re in it right now, definitely try them out. I would love to hear how it goes so you can connect with me on LinkedIn and let me know how some of these alignment tips and techniques are going for you. In the meantime, best of luck with all of your messaging work that you’ve got going on.
[00:28:06] Emma Stratton: And remember, you have got this. Thanks for joining me for this episode of Better Messaging. If you like what you heard, go ahead and subscribe, leave a review and share it with a friend. You can also follow me on LinkedIn. Until next time, keep it Punchy, my friend.