Properly executed, value messaging can make your sales, marketing, and service teams more productive, improve customer interactions and go-to-market synergy, and increase overall closed deals. That’s why it’s so important to establish standardized value messaging tailored for each stage of the customer journey.

An interactive workshop is, I believe, one of the best ways to create effective value messaging. Not only does it harness the power of the departments involved, but it brings more key points to light than would otherwise be possible. Employees leave the workshop more in sync on the value proposition, making your team more consistent on how they speak to buyers and customers.

Below is a step-by-step guide to running a fast-paced value messaging workshop to strengthen messaging, enable sales and guide company-wide interactions.

How to Run a Messaging Workshop

Value messaging is the core way in which you communicate how your product or service solves your target audience’s problems. And your sellers should be able to consistently and effectively tell your story, as well as align your product strengths to a buyer’s personal, technical, and business challenges.

It’s not just sales, everyone in your organization can benefit from improved messaging. Distilling what your core values are can help your company gain more customers if you deliver messaging that resonates and is compelling to your target audience.

Here are some tips for making your value messaging workshop a success:

Select a moderator, and a couple folks who will take notes.

Involve people from every department that touch prospects and customers (Sales, Marketing, Product, Engineering, Services, Success, Design etc.).

Host multiple sessions with different teams — We typically break this into 3–4 core groups.

Always record the session and send to transcript companies like REV.com. This will come in handy at a later date.

Goal: identify common patterns that people say or perceive about the value of your product and the impact your product or service has on customers.

Step 1: Lay the Groundwork

When running a value-messaging workshop at Copper, we started by asking some vital questions to lay the groundwork for understanding the strengths, gaps, and the value we bring to customers’ day-to-day lives. Then, we probed further to uncover and understand the value and future business outcomes of using our product by role, scenario, and initiative.

The first questions you should ask your focus groups are:

What business initiatives does your product support?

Who are your 3 to 5 ideal buyers?

What business problems or issues do you solve for your customers?

How does your company’s product or services specifically solve these problems?

How are your solutions different from and better than the competition?

What proof do you have in terms of metrics and validation?

Now that you’ve identified the benefits your products and services provide your customers, it’s time to think about the actual people you want most to buy what you sell.

Step 2: Create Three to Five Buyer Personas

The only way to be sure that you’re promoting the right benefits and features is by getting to know your potential customers. That’s where buyer personas come in. I’m a fan of “five” because there are always influencers in organizations that we neglect to market to. So, start by identifying up to five people who represent your target customers. Identify their roles, responsibilities, goals, initiatives, and their biggest problems and headaches. You can dig deeper and note their industry, region, company size and other relevant factors.

Here’s how I handle creating buyer personas:

First, understand your customer. Compile research and gather data about existing customers. Segment the data into categories, such as industries, departments, challenges, business goals, etc.

Second, determine which categories and profiles drive the ideal customer. What customers stick around the longest and are most successful with your product? Finding these attributes helps flesh out what is your ideal profile you want to target.

Third, consider additional characteristics not already represented in the data. Are there other supporting groups of people who face challenges that your product or service can help to overcome? For instance, say your existing customers are salespeople, but you believe your service is also relevant to marketers. Add them into your mix.

You should have enough information by now to build out personas. But I like to go a few more steps further.

Fourth, and most sales professionals know this, but it’s important to map out what roles are Champions, Decision Makers, Economic Buyers, Supporters or Users. It’s critical that you map out the roles to succeed in your value messaging workshop.

Finally, build a “negative” buyer persona. While knowing your ideal customers is crucial, it’s just as important to understand who may be a bad fit for you. Exclude those who require burn cycles with your team, lack funds for or resources to purchase, those who have business objectives and systems that are incompatible with your product or service, and those who are simply difficult to work with — a favorite of every sales team.

Step 3: Dig Into Buying Scenarios

Once you’ve got your five target customer profiles established, it’s time to dig a bit deeper to uncover value messaging for each persona. The size and scope of this interactive exercise depends on the structure of your company and who’s available at any given time. I recommend you keep this to 1:30 to 2 hours max. In my experience, people burn out after an hour and a half.

Here’s the approach I like to take:

Divide workshop attendees into teams or focus groups.

Assign each group a target persona and/or customer profile to focus on.

Ask each group to complete the following:

Identify their assigned customer’s top five company initiatives and goals.

Identify and link Business, Technical, and Personal goals related to their top five pain points (by persona, customer, or industry).

Identify and quantify the top five metrics your company supports. Make sure you can validate these metrics by a 3rd party (customer, partner, analysts).

Identify the top three most common objections and develop responses to handle these objections.

Identify how a champion or decision maker would communicate the value of your product or service to their peers or buying committee. This is always very difficult in my experience.

Then have everyone come back together to present and discuss their findings, one target customer at a time. It’s critical to ask probing questions to get to the heart of understanding the motivations, challenges and obstacles each target customer faces. Create an open environment where no answer is wrong.

Let everyone know that you’re there to learn about what they hear from customers and prospects to find themes and similarities. This sharing of tribal knowledge can help improve sales enablement functions.

Step 4: Align Initiatives With Buyer Personas

Aberdeen Group research found that marketers who use personas and tailor content to buyers’ customer journeys saw 73% higher conversions, which underscores the importance of aligning marketing and sales initiatives around buyer personas.

For example, if the marketing department is working on an integrated campaign, they should tailor their messaging, design, and content to target existing personas. Similarly, if sales is promoting a campaign to customers, reps should adjust their pitches depending on which persona customers fit.

Goal: Drive more business by targeting the right customers at the right time with the right message.

Here are a couple of tactics I use to align initiatives around the personas established so far during the workshop:

Start by discussing each potential customer’s day-in-a-life challenges. Ask your customer-facing employees to openly talk about prospect’s priorities as you probe with open-ended questions to gain a deeper understanding. It’s important for the group to put themselves in the customer’s situation to better understand their persona pains. Listen carefully and take notes.

Find out how your potential customers accomplish their goals today (without your product or service). Do they use another solution? What are the challenges they face when using this alternative? This will expose how severe their challenges are and if there is a real need for your product.

Break down prospects’ challenges into business, personal and technical categories. These categories will help sellers and markers adjust different messaging and value points depending on the pains. It will also help sharpen your messaging across several channels.

Step 5: Focus on Pain Points and Objections

Identifying customers’ pain points helps you understand what may cause them to seek out your product or service as a solution and in the end creates an easier dialog for any seller. Knowing what’s causing customers pain and frustration helps your salespeople better articulate your value.

When focusing on pains during value-messaging workshops, I make a point to:

Break down the challenges identified in the last exercise into three categories: business, personal and technical.

Answer the question, “What happens if prospects do nothing?”

Figure out the cost of doing nothing (beyond the pain point). Can they quantify this?

Ask them to list objections they commonly hear from prospects.

Find out what objections they would have to a new solution like yours.

Ask them how they would present your solution, or talk about your service to their peers, economic buyer or buying committee.

Find serious pain points that you should center your messaging around and identify common objections you can mitigate.

Step 6: Align Your Benefits with Their Pains

Once you have a solid grasp of the pain points, it’s time to turn your attention to the benefits and the value your company offers to alleviate them. This phase is typically a little bit easier than the others.

Customer-facing teams know how customers benefit from your solution. So ask them to share the positive feedback they’ve heard, including how customers think your company does X, Y and Z better than the competition.

Refer to your past interviews with prospects, customers and partners, noting the benefits they recalled. Add them to what you learned from your customer-facing teams. You can also comb through review sites to find trends related to what benefits people get from your product. A lot of times it’s quite surprising what customers will say the benefits are vs. the internal teams.

In this phase, it’s crucial to keep the group focused on the buyer personas you’re developing messaging for, since there is a tendency to revert to generic value propositions that don’t apply to the role at hand.

Goal: Determine exactly what sets you apart from your competitors and why your buyer personas would choose you instead.

And Finally, Activate the Value Messaging

Value messaging is a communications framework that can guide your marketing across every piece of content and every channel. Value messaging also boosts sales enablement by empowering sales teams to win more deals by bringing insightful perspectives to every customer interaction.

It’s important to follow-up the workshop with providing the end results in a consumable format for your customer facing teams to easily access. Because the teams have been a part of the process and participated in the creation they’ll be more bought into the output, and ultimately you’ll have better adoption of your value messaging company-wide.

When all is said and done, effective value messaging only works when everyone on your team is in sync on the message and your prospects and customers have consistent conversations across every interaction.