By: Mark Hurkamp, leader of Marketing and Communications at Acentia.
If you work for a Federal Government contractor, you know that a business development “best practice” dictates that your critical selling tools should be free of unsubstantiated claims and full of verifiable data and discriminators. Winning proposals, presentations and resumes tell customers how selecting you will benefit them, and they draw the data-driven conclusions you want the evaluators to reach. This best practice takes on even more significance in an age of sequestration, where every dollar counts and every deal takes on greater importance.
In some quarters, Marketing may get a hall pass from this dynamic.
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Marketing content on websites and collateral is often assumed to be “fluffier” than the language used in Sales.”
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As someone who has led BD, Bids & Proposals, and Marcom for several industry leaders, I would submit that the very elements that make a winning resume or business proposal are the basis of great marketing. The key is leveraging the assets you have—meaningful content—to tell a great story. One that is memorable and one that answers: Why you?
I recently developed a robust Messaging Architecture for my company, a leader in both health and civilian markets. Our work is mission essential to major federal IT modernization and transformation initiatives. My goal was to better position the company as we look to aggressively enter new markets in 2013. Tactically, I also wanted to accomplish the following:
- Recapture the vision, mission, and positioning elements from the company’s well-publicized rebrand in 2011
- Incorporate the engaging value proposition from a recent merger
- Construct a sound hierarchical structure to provide over-arching themes that clearly articulate who we are, what we do, how we differ from the competition, and most importantly, why anyone should care.
The target audience for the deliverable was internal, but the message needed to be designed for the re-telling—to customers, partners, potential employees, investors, and other external stakeholders. For the casual reader, the take-away could support or validate a simple elevator pitch; however, for the company’s management team and our business developers, the messaging had to include highly detailed and trusted copy that could be tailored and re-used almost as boilerplate for proposals, data calls, presentations, and many other forms of communication.
The biggest challenge was to create a structure that made it easy for the reader to consume the content—first in small bites, and then in expanded waterfall messaging. In our case, the small bites were easy. They were a direct outcome of the company’s rebranding, when new vision, mission, and value statements became the basis for the company’s name and tagline.
I crafted thematic positioning pillars as the foundational basis of the architecture. In early drafts, I treated these as “win” themes for the company—similar to our process for writing a business proposal. As the document draft evolved, the positioning pillars became more definitive statements capsulized by a single word or phrase, such as “Measureable Value.” I ultimately chose five positioning pillars, and I built a separate section entirely for win themes, linking each one back to a positioning pillar. The key difference between the two sections was that each positioning pillar had a list of “proof points,” substantiating the claim, whereas, each win theme had a list of “benefits,” revealing value to the end customer.
A key “lesson learned” is that if you look in the right places, you will find more proof points and benefits hidden within your company’s recent repository than you ever expected. It helps if you have a history with the company and an obsessive-compulsive nature like me. Once you start with a solid framework, the hunting and gathering of hard evidence is the heavy lifting. It’s time consuming, and it can become addictive if you are passionate about what your company does for its customers and employees.
I expected to create several bulleted examples for each thematic element, but every data point I found was better than the next. I had to have them all, and that’s exactly what I ended up with. For better or worse, my Messaging Architecture became a small book, albeit one where the reader can easily trace back the numbered proof points and benefits to corresponding themes, and then pick and choose which ones to use based on relevancy. To use a football analogy, start with a simple offensive playbook. If you’ve been in the league awhile, it will take on a life of its own.
The sources are many. CXO communications. Past performance and case studies. Bids and proposals. Program awards, recognition, and customer kudos. The trick is collecting the good stuff, validating the content, and stacking it up in the framework context that you have already created. When it doesn’t fit…you have to ask yourself…adjust the pillar, add a new pillar, or discard the artifact as a one off?
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At its core, a Messaging Architecture should provide thematic avenues for initiating a conversation in ways that allow your company to proudly address its most important advantages.”
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The things that matter most. I recommend you focus early on developing the positioning pillars. Those become the conclusions you want the reader to take away. The proof point and benefit details will flow, and they can evolve over time. Every new award and every future press release will provide potential new content, and your Messaging Architecture will become the preferred central repository to capture it.
The framework for your company’s story should link the issues your customers care about to the things that you want them to know about you. The story must be clear, concise and consistent—focused on unique aspects without losing sight of how each building block connects to the big picture and the larger narrative. Whether the elevator is going to the first floor or all the way to the top, your ultimate goal should be to give your company’s employees the confidence and freedom to tell the high level story in their own genuine way, with enough evidence to make it credible and relevant.
