I lead marketing
Your message is only as good as the field's version of it.
- You own
- Pipeline and conversion.
- It rides on
- The message surviving the first call.
“… your strategy is only as good as your go-to-market team’s ability to express it.”
Fran Orlando, Head of Marketing, Energage
“And the Conversational Messaging Guide has brought together - by virtue of creating the Conversational Messaging Guide, bringing together leaders from across the organization - drives alignment, so that there's a consistent customer experience, as well as a shared language for how we approach messages starting with marketing, through sales, and all the way through customer success.”
What you are actually measured on
You will be asked about volume. You will be judged on these.
- Whether meetings become opportunities, which is where a message either works or does not and is the last number anyone credits you for.
- Whether the differentiation you built is being negotiated into the buyer's decision criteria, or is being read aloud from a slide.
- Whether the field uses what you produced, which you cannot learn from a dashboard and can only learn from a recording.
Where it usually breaks
Three things, and the middle one is yours. The other two decide whether yours was ever winnable.
You are building programs against a market nobody agreed on
Your programs describe one company, the investor model describes another, and the territory map describes a third. You feel it as cost: CAC climbing, payback stretching, and a spend conversation where you are defending efficiency against a target that was never actually set.
The split that ends the argument is win rate in targeted segments against win rate outside them.
Until someone can produce it, every program you fund is a bet on a segment definition your own sales leadership has not signed.
The message was built out of ideas a live conversation cannot use
This is the one that keeps marketing leaders up. The message is not wrong. It was built in a language that works in a deck, at a pace that works in a deck, and a first meeting has neither. So the rep drops it under pressure and reverts to the demo, and the differentiation you spent a quarter building never reaches the moment it was built for.
The number is the share of your deals where the buyer confirmed, in their own words, a required capability you are differentiated on.
If nobody tracks it, you have no evidence that your differentiation converts, and the next budget conversation is about volume again.
There is a second cost, and it is the one that actually hurts. When marketing and sales are misaligned, marketing becomes liars. Credibility goes, and the pipeline goes with it.
A message is a behavior, and behavior decays
You relaunched. Everyone was enthusiastic. Two quarters later the old language is back, because a message is not a document that people read, it is a thing people have to say under pressure to someone who pushes back, and nobody was enforcing it in the one meeting where it could have been enforced.
The spread between your top quartile and your median rep is largely a messaging spread.
Your best people are doing the translation live. Everyone else needed the translation done for them, in advance, in their buyer's terminology, and then coached until it held.
Where people in your seat start
“Every seller and CSM tells a slightly different version, so buyers hear whichever one they got.”
Conversational Messaging →
A guide your field can actually run, built with your leadership team in your buyer's terminology rather than mine.
“Everyone who gets it loves it, and getting them to get it is the problem.”
Strategic Narrative Development →
One short account of why you exist and how you deliver, in your own voice, that a stranger follows the first time.
“There are sixty things on the go-to-market priority list and all of them are important.”
GTM Diagnosis and Focus →
Structured interviews across leadership and every go-to-market function, reduced to the few initiatives that move the needle. A day, a week or a month.
What becomes true
There is one message foundation, built once by your cross functional leadership team: the problems you solve, whose problems they are, how you solve them differently, and why someone will believe your new rep. Brand content, the sales conversation and the product all draw from it, so the three stop needing to be reconciled later.
Your differentiation shows up in the buyer's own decision criteria rather than in your slides, which means it is defended by the buyer in a room you are not in.
Marketing spend converts, because the field can use what marketing produced. That sentence is the whole job, and it is the one you have never been able to prove.
The numbers
- 36
- companies whose go-to-market transformation workshops I facilitated
- 9
- named sellers whose behavior changed inside one coaching cycle
One engagement, from your seat
At Energage the conversations stayed at the survey and the product level and never reached business impact, and there was an acquired product line nobody knew how to open a conversation about. From a marketing seat that looks like a message that exists and is not being carried, which is exactly what it was.
The Conversational Messaging Guide was built with cross functional leadership, in the buyer's terminology rather than mine, so it was the leadership team's own story rather than a document handed to them. Then it was taught in the room, coached against live opportunities with the managers on the calls, and finally encoded into AI that coaches from call transcripts, so the standard could be inspected across everyone's calls instead of whichever ones somebody had time to review.
Documented behavior change across nine named sellers within a single coaching cycle: product led discovery became problem led, and assumptions became buyer validated facts.
What you are probably asking
We finished a positioning project last year. Is this the same thing?
A positioning project produces a document that is correct. What decides whether it reaches a buyer is whether a rep can say it under pressure, in their own mouth, to someone who interrupts. That is a different artifact and a different build, and it is built with the leadership team who has to live with it rather than delivered to them. If your positioning is sound, it is the input, not the thing being replaced.
Will it be your message or ours?
Yours, in your buyer's language rather than in mine. I have built all three of these in a career: Golden Circles and message houses for IBM Watson Commerce and FPX, the Energage Conversational Messaging Guide, and messaging frameworks for 36 companies whose go to market transformation workshops I facilitated. What I bring is the structure and the questions. The words that survive are the ones your leadership team argued about and agreed on.
Is this not sales enablement's job?
Enablement can distribute a message. It cannot make one true, and it cannot make a leadership team agree on it. That agreement is the part that has to happen first, with your CRO, your Chief Product and Customer Officers and you in the same room, because the offering has to be able to keep what the message promises. Enablement then has something worth distributing.
Everything above belongs to Align, which is your whole go to market telling one story. It is your goal. My expertise is in the helping.
You can tell me what your message says. What I would rather know is what your median rep says in the first ten minutes of a first meeting, and how close the two are.
It takes three calls to find out, and it is the cheapest piece of evidence available to you.
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