The Business Issue

The best product is not necessarily the market leader. In today’s hyper-competitive markets, it’s the company with the best product positioning, marketing communications and sales execution that typically out-distance its competition. Business-to-business marketing organizations must continually refine their product positioning and key messages due to multiple buyers in the sales cycle, constantly shifting market dynamics and competitive landscapes, not to mention shorter overall product life cycles. Given this environment, one of the most difficult tasks to accomplish is developing and delivering crisp elevator speeches, value propositions, product differentiators and competitive positioning through multiple layers of distribution.. As soon as a message begins to work, the competition puts a new spin on their message, and businesses are forced to adjust.

Market-leading companies view product positioning and related messages as important assets, yet even in the most progressive organizations, the process of message development and deployment is chaotic and uncoordinated. In most companies there is no established process or best practice system for developing positioning and keeping messages up to date and constantly in front of all the sales channels. This results in Marketing and Sales becoming mis-aligned and less coordinated in the way they operate and interact. In some cases sales are actually lost because Marketing was not clued in on a competitor's latest tactic and sales people and resellers lacked the latest competitive spin.

This reality, as frustrating as it is, creates an opportunity for forward-thinking companies to implement best practice systems for product positioning and message management that leverage best marketing practices and better align marketing and sales and synchronize their efforts. Those companies that do will dramatically increase the effectiveness and leverage of product positioning and messages, and ultimately drive increased sales results.

The Message Life Cycle

Most marketing professionals are familiar with the standard product life cycle in which revenues follow a traditional bell curve from product inception through market acceptance and finally to product maturity and its corresponding phase of declining revenue. However throughout the product life cycle there are multiple "positioning and message life cycles" as positioning and messages are continually refined. As the following chart depicts, these short message life cycles offer a significant revenue opportunity for companies that manage them in a timely and effective manner.

As you can see, during product launch and decline, the positioning and messages are the most dynamic with shorter message life cycles. This is due to the fact that Marketing and Sales are going through an aggressive learning curve during product roll out, and are scrambling for every last nickel during the declining revenue phase.

The product launch phase is particularly important from a positioning and message standpoint. It can make or break a product and has the greatest potential for generating large increases in revenue. Recent studies of product launches by University of North Carolina found that:

• 100% of Sales & Marketing executives felt their product launches were ineffective
• Two out of three product launches failed to meet expectations
• Most launches had no formal sales feedback process
• The critical success factors were:

• Clear concise positioning and messages
• Business oriented value propositions
• Competitive differentiators that reflect business value
• Effective needs based qualifying questions

These studies show that tighter alignment and synchronization between Marketing and Sales is required to get maximum R.O.I. from product launch efforts.

The product positioning and message life cycle contains three distinct phases that feed one other in a closed-loop process.

1. Initial Creation
2. Message Deployment & Feedback
3. Message Refinement

Marketing departments face major challenges throughout the three phases of the message life cycle. For example:

1. Great positioning and messages don’t just happen. They are the result of much thought, give and take, and sometimes great moments of insight. Any best practice systems that support message development and ensure alignment with market needs, will improve the message quality and sales results.
2. Today’s emphasis on one to one marketing makes it tougher. The requirement to sell to multiple buyers in a complex sales cycle demand continual message mapping to insure that messages are targeted at the right buyer pains.
3. The rate at which messages need to be refined or changed has accelerated exponentially. This is due to shorter product development cycles, advances in information and communication technology, and increased competition. This is especially true during product launches where messages need to be constantly tested and refined in real time.
4. Multiple tiers of distribution combined with multiple marketing communications vehicles, aimed at multiple buyers tend to diffuse and dilute messages. Ensuring all sales channels and marketing communication vehicles are in synch with the most current messages so they are delivered in a consistent fashion to multiple audiences is challenging, if not impossible, without a well-disciplined message management and deployment process.

Product Positioning & Message Management Systems

Product Positioning & Message Management Systems are best practice applications for marketing organizations that represent the next generation of marketing automation software. Their focus is more on improving total marketing quality and marketing effectiveness than simply improving marketing efficiency. The functionality of these applications is usually a component of a more complete sales coaching, best sales practice and sales intelligence application. These powerful workflow applications become the glue for establishing tighter alignment and synchronization between marketing and sales and provide a company with a significant sustainable competitive advantage.

A Product Positioning & Message Management System employs relational database technology to create and manage a central message and best sales practice knowledge base. Wrapped around this knowledge base is a workflow system with a closed-loop methodology that reinforces the best practices for the development, delivery and continuous refinement of key product positioning and marketing messages. This creates a common framework for building, consistently refining and dramatically improving key marketing messages like elevator speeches, value propositions, key product differentiators, and competitive positioning and knock-offs.

The central knowledge base that is created as a by-product becomes a highly leveraged marketing and sales asset that can be effectively used as the foundation for all marketing and sales collateral, and support and training materials to ensure consistency and maximum market impact. In addition, this knowledge base can be used as an interactive knowledge transfer vehicle to inform and "coach" the sales channels on message delivery and best sales practices. Finally, since the knowledge base contains a company’s most current messages and proven best sales practices, it becomes the ideal foundation for all of the company’s interactive selling and other "customer facing" systems that are delivered over the Internet.

The Critical Elements

To be most effective, a complete Product Positioning & Message Management system must include the following key functionality:

1. A central message and best practice framework built on a relational database that can be customized to reflect a company’s marketing philosophy and strategies, its sales processes and its communication style. This relational message and knowledge model must reflect the unique positioning, value propositions and differentiators of specific products as well as how these attributes are linked to customer needs and requirements, the capabilities of competitors, and the best sales practices that reinforce the most current product positioning.
2. An authoring workflow system for building and maintaining messages and positioning that simplifies the message creation process and improves overall message quality. The authoring system must be easy to use to ensure that product managers and product marketing professionals are not overburdened and actually save time that is now spent on tactical activities like reactive sales support.
3. A ubiquitous message delivery mechanism that can be accessed through multiple user interfaces (i.e. Web, Lotus Notes, Client Server, Hand Held Devices) for deploying messages and best practices to a variety of audiences, including the direct sales organization, indirect sales channels, other employees, and the marketplace in general.
4. A closed-loop feedback system from the sales channels that allows for continuous message improvement and refinement. Sometimes the best wisdom and insight on positioning come from the sales people and resellers.
5. An open architecture with programming interfaces that allow other sales and marketing applications, like an opportunity management system or interactive selling system, to leverage the positioning and message knowledge base.

Benefits for Marketing

Product Positioning & Message Management Systems create a tighter alignment between marketing and sales organizations. This is because, for the first time, both organizations agree on a common communication framework for positioning statements , key messages and best sales practices. This framework becomes an explicit definition of Marketing’s deliverables and creates a clear set of requirements for measuring success. The marketing organization that implements and embraces a Product Positioning & Message Management system will gain the following benefits:

1. They will roll out new products and marketing programs faster and with better results.
2. They will improve message value and delivery consistency.
3. They will significantly reduce their basic sales support load.
4. They will free up time for more strategic marketing activities.
5. They will get faster and better feedback from sales.
6. They will have a better understanding of the competition.

Benefits for Sales

The Best Sales Practice and Sales Coaching component of an effective Product Positioning &Message Management System delivers several benefits to the Sales organization including:

1. Reduced new salesperson and reseller ramp up times
2. Faster revenue from new product launches
3. Reduced sales cycles
4. Increased competitive readiness and sales credibility
5. More consistent application of a solution-based selling methodology
6. Improved ability to recruit as candidates perceive the value in the system

Is a Best Practice System for Marketing Right for Your Company?

Product Positioning & Message Management systems are all about quality and effective knowledge sharing, and are geared toward companies that believe their messages, positioning, and best sales practices are a critical corporate asset. These companies firmly believe that these messages need to be crisp, current, and consistently and effectively delivered by sales. Any company that is in a competitive, rapidly changing marketplace can benefit from a Product Positioning & Message Management System. Large companies whose market share is slowly whittled away by niche vendors are great candidates for these systems. This is because niche vendors can easily get the large organization’s sales people to play a "features game," straying from the "value proposition game" where their broad product line and stability may be a distinct competitive advantage.

The move toward Product Positioning & Message Management is similar to the Total Quality Manufacturing movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Today, best practice applications for marketing organizations are being deployed at progressive companies that want to maintain a competitive edge. Over the next few years however, companies who don’t invest in an organized process and system for managing positioning and messages and best sales practices may well find themselves lagging behind the competition. This is déjà vu all over again and creates a situation similar to the American automobile industry when Japan adopted Demming’s principles on quality as a fundamental management discipline. The lesson is not new. Organizations who learn it and apply corrective measures ahead of their competition will gain sustainable market advantage, and be in the driver's seat leading to the 21^st century.

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Bob Schmonsees, founder and CEO of WisdomWare, Inc., has over 27 years of experience running successful sales and marketing organizations. Bob has led Sales and Marketing teams in several successful start-ups as well as publicly traded software and services firms with revenues in excess of $500 million.