Sridhar Ramanathan at The Pacifica Group writes very compellingly on his blog on “The Power of Excellent Messaging.” In the post, he compares messaging statements from two CRM solution providers, Salesforce.com and Siebel On Demand, and highlights the very striking differences between the two. (No prizes for guessing which company did the better job.)
What does messaging have to do with direct marketing and demand generation? Plenty. If you don’t know who you are, what you do, and why that matters (to quote Sridhar), demand generation will be an uphill battle at best.
A highly recommended read from a consultant whose work I know and respect.
Howard, you could argue that the three-question “who are you? what you do? why does that matter?” framework could even be simplified to *one* question:
“Why does your company *need* to exist?”
Answering this one question not only answers the three questions noted above, it *prioritizes* those answers.
I.e., your target customer only really cares about the “why does that matter?” — if you can’t do that, no one’s going to care about who you are and what you do.
So when you frame your messaging challenge as answering the question “why does your company *need* to exist?,” your answer automatically focuses on the “why does that matter?” And then the who you are and what you do naturally flow from there.
Thanks for sharing Sridhar’s excellent post.
Thanks Howard for sharing this article.
Cheers
Vaibhav