[Product Marketing] Using Gong to Craft and Measure Messaging that Resonates

Victoria: Hello Gong, I'm Victoria and I'm a director of product marketing. Today I'm going to share a core product marketing workflow around creating and rolling out new messaging and how Gong is crucial throughout that process. Now, I know I said product marketing but this is actually really relevant to any marketer creating messaging. So Gong has given me and marketers that use Gong the most important superpower that any of us could dream of as marketers. That is the ability to get closer to the customer. But why is this important? While every marketer knows that getting closer to the customer means getting closer to the revenue and the best messaging is rooted in customer research. Messaging won't resonate. It won't drive leads or help your field teams close deals if it's not rooted in customer reality and great messaging basically identifies and names a customer's pain, whether that's a known pain or latent need. What's even more powerful is if we use their own words in naming that pain. So we all know this as marketers but getting that face time with customers to achieve that can be extremely challenging and oftentimes you're relying on a very small sample set to inform your work. I have to confess that I have taken shortcuts in the past, before Gong. Now Gong gives me the ability to hear directly from dozens of customers at two X the speed, very convenient. So essentially it's been a game changer for my work as a marketer. Not only does it help me better understand my target audience and their pain points but I also get to hear unfiltered feedback on my messaging. So let's dive into the workflow. How does marketing create messaging? What happens behind the scenes? I know you're all dying to find out. So first before diving in a bit of context, I'm going to show you a couple different scenarios for new messaging. First, building out messaging for moving into a new industry, a new segment and then secondly, how we rolled out use case messaging. So first back up, when I say messaging, what does that even mean? So marketers create a document that we call the positioning framework, which really serves as a blueprint for any materials we build out from there. That really informs the enablement, go to market enablement, marketing campaigns, the decks we create, landing pages, demos, everything comes from this single source of truth. So as you can imagine, you have to nail this document. I'm going to now show you the process that we go through to craft this type of messaging. This is pretty much a four step process where there are four big rocks in the process. The first is that research and discovery phase, especially if you are speaking to a new customer segment, really understanding that new segment. Second is developing the actual messaging and going through that whole review process and I'll talk about that a little bit later. Third is then testing it in the field and just really iterating a ton. Then finally, it's rolling it out to the field and reporting on how it's performing. So Gong actually helps with three out of the four steps in this crucial process, the research, that testing and iteration and the rollout and reporting. I'm going to talk about how I've used Gong to do each of these three. So first let's start with the research. Again, this is a really important process for understanding as much as I can about the customer. For example, let's say I'm building out messaging for new industry that we haven't historically sold into. I would search for calls with companies in that industry to really start to understand what's going on in the micro level, even on the macro industry level. Let me hop into Gong and show you how I would do that. From the calls page, I would start searching for companies that I already know are in this industry. For example, here we have access information management. Let's say we're trying to understand the security industry, net new industry for us, one we haven't historically sold into very much in the past. I would search for all the calls that I know happened with this customer or the prospect. Then I would actually zero in, in the discovery stage. That's because I know that's where I'm going to get a lot of really great nuggets around how they describe their business, how they describe their industry and the pain points that Gong could potentially solve for. It's super important for me to actually hear them describe those in their own words, because again, using their own words is huge. As I go through a few of these early discovery calls, I'm going to start moving down funnel. I'm going to start to understand who the key stakeholders and champions are. Those are folks who are really going to sell Gong internally for us. So at that point, I'm going to go to the account page for this industry and let's say I know that Elaine, who's the Vice President of Strategic Operations, has been crucial in really pushing Gong internally, she gets the value props. She's a champion, she's been convincing other folks to get on board so I'm going to filter to calls only and actually just hop into the calls that Elaine is hosting internally. This is really a gold mine for me because at this point I not only get to hear how she describes Gong benefits to others and which of those benefits actually resonate but I'll even get to hear how she deals with internal objections. So as she starts pulling in more folks, what are the questions that are coming up and how is she addressing those? This is all super unique to this information security industry and obviously very specific to this company access information. But the power of Gong is I no longer have to over index on one company. I can continue to do this with a handful until I start picking up on cross industry trends. So next step, finish with my research, just did a ton of research. I've actually started to become a bit of an expert in this security industry myself. Then not going into a lot of details here but the development stage is really putting together that position statement and then going through my review and approval process, which by the way is extremely painful. So if I have any marketers listening out there, you will know what I'm talking about but the great news is that now I have some legit backing for my positioning. All of my positioning is rooted in real customer research from the mouth of the customer and you can't really argue with that. You're bringing objectivity into something that historically feels very subjective. So, that's good news there. From development, then I moved to my third stage, which is testing and iterating. I'll go back into Gong to see how my messaging is doing in the market. Now this was a game changer for me. Instead of relying on reps tagging me in calls or just getting their version of the feedback, I was actually able to pinpoint the exact moment when my messaging was being used. For example, we rolled out new use case messaging a few months ago and with that use case messaging, we had new slide decks. So what I can do now, again, going back to the call page is I can actually search for my slides in calls. Here I have gone for coaching. That's a very important slide in my coaching deck and I can go ahead and jump in and listen to all the instances when my slides were being used. So this is huge. This helped me iterate on my messaging because I got a sense of what was resonating or not with customers and actually got some really great ideas from the field on how they delivered this messaging with their own flare. I was able to go back and iterate. Finally, after much iteration, thanks to Gong, I was actually able to partner with a lot of cross- functional folks, roll out the use case messaging, train the field. It was great and that's where Gong was actually really crucial in helping us track field adoption of messaging. So for this, we used trackers to benchmark week over week adoption from sellers and the trackers we set up captured key phrases that were part of how we trained folks to frame the problem around use cases. We were really able to use these early insights to determine if we were on track to meet the end of quarter adoption goal that we had set for ourselves. Actually we found out pretty early on that we weren't on track so actually I want to show you, this looks very similar to the slide that I would prepare for leadership every week to report on field adoption. This went out to our executive sponsors as well as our core launch team. I would take a screenshot of the calls page that showed you if adoption was growing over time, as well as how many percentage points we moved from the previous week. And because adoption was below our goal, we had to dig in a little bit further to figure out what was going on. And again, Gong was super helpful because I was actually able to use the filters in the tracker section, in the team tab to zero in on individual teams and from this I found that certain sales segments were adopting better than others. I was able to flag this data to the frontline manager so they could help with reinforcement but I was also able to zero in on where I should get feedback from the field on the messaging to truly understand why they were using it and why they weren't using it. And so again, this reporting helped us really zero in on what we could do better and how we can reinforce in the field. All right, well that is it. So hopefully this demystifies how marketing creates message for all the non marketers out there. So just to give you a summary, I covered a few key milestones in message development and rollout all the way from the beginning, research and discovery phase through post rollout and reporting. Gong is crucial in three out of the four of those milestones. So now I'll just leave you with one last best practice for marketers who want to use this workflow, use those search filters. Once you've identified which customer segment you want to research, use as many filters as possible to find the most relevant calls, whether that's the opportunity stage, certain keywords you want to hear, the sales segment, et cetera. There's a lot in there so just play around with the filters. All right, well, thanks for listening.