changing messaging every few months

also: competing with Excel, messaging update in 1 hour, and results

Author

Pavlo Cherniakov
June 23, 2024

Hey,

Selling to referrals is easy. They come pre-sold — all you have to do is not sabotage yourself.

Selling to someone who’s seriously evaluating competitors is way harder.

Selling to them without meaningful differentiation is unnecessarily hard.

When I asked Federico Jorge—who’s been delivering strategic competitor-focused assets for B2B SaaS for years at Stack Against—what founders and marketers should know about messaging, he said this:

The one thing I wish founders knew about messaging is that your product never exists in a vacuum. There’s always a current solution that customers are using to solve their problem. It’s generally one of the following:

- a similar product

- a big platform that solves the same problem as part of their offer

- a manual approach connecting multiple tools

- Excel (which can be used to solve all problems in life)

You need to have a very clear understanding of where most of your customers are, once they decide to come to you. Your positioning and messaging can’t be the same if you’re competing against the status quo, a heads-to-head competitor, a bigger product (think Salesforce) that somehow overlaps with your solution, or Excel.

Based on your customers’ current solution, they’ll have a different “hell” they’re trying to escape. You have to figure out what that “hell” looks like and promise a “heaven” that matches what they’re looking for. And the more the “hell” they’re in is directly related to a specific competitor, the more you should position your product as a challenger brand that re-shapes the category.

Federico Jorge, Founder at Stack Against

This is one of the most bizzarrely-unacknowledged things I’m seeing on a lot of B2B SaaS websites — even if the messaging kinda says what the product does, they often say it like they’re the only ones on the market.

And when the marketer—not the salesperson—is asked why a customer should go with them instead of the competition, half of them pull the surprised-Pikachu face and have a mini identity crisis.

(Don’t ask how I know.)

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Sure, differentiation isn’t exactly easy — it has to account for:

  • who you’re marketing to

  • what they’re after

  • which features and capabilities they care about

  • what they’re comparing you to

  • what the competitors are saying

  • what your product can deliver

…all of which can change multiple times per year.

At the same time, your differentiation doesn’t have to be perfect on the first go. Or on the tenth, for that matter.

I’m a firm believer in iteration — done is better than perfect, and the next one will be better than this one.

This is why I recommend doing this exercise at least twice per year to my clients. Not just because I want repeat business—you can easily do it without hiring a messaging consultant—but because six months from now, some elements of that canvas will definitely change, and so should your messaging.

Iterating on it doesn’t have to be a long project — this hero section re-write for Relay.app took me an hour.

Does it work? A few people told me recently that just updating their messaging led to “wonders for their pipeline“ and “a massive increase in demos“:

If you want to do messaging work in-house, reply to this email or DM me on LinkedIn with the main reason why you haven’t done it yet — and I’ll try to offer some advice on how to navigate that. For free, of course.

If you’re looking for someone to own this messaging project for you, tell me more here. (I’m booking August right now.)

Thing I found for you

Meme of the week

B2B SaaS: "We're the all-in-one solution!"

The all-in-one solution: