What Your Message Is Missing

The three-part framework that can help you move beyond "me-too" marketing

The Three Rooms

A few years ago, our team at ParkerGale built the nerdiest March Madness bracket of all time, using books instead of basketball teams. Aaron' Ross’s Predictable Revenue was my #1 seed. It’s a GTM classic. But his newer title (Impossible To Inevitable - co-authored with SaaStr co-founder Jason Lemkin), might be even better.

My favorite part of the book contains one of my favorite marketing frameworks, and reveals how the founder of Zuora divides up their marketing messages using three distinct categories.

From the book:

“Zuora’s Founder and CEO Tien Tzuo encourages companies to picture a three-room environment — sort of an art gallery, where you walk from room-to-room seeing different things, but all the rooms share a common theme.

In this metaphor, ‘Room 3’ houses your product or service. It shows off all its features and functions. ‘Room 2’ is the home of your customer’s feelings, needs, pains, both business and personal. Usually, CEOs and revenue leaders spend most of their time in Room 3, and the rest in Room 2.

‘Room 1’ is the biggest missed opportunity in marketing and sales. Tien estimates 99% of company leaders and salespeople ignore this room. This room deals with evolving trends in the world, and how businesses need to adapt. CEOs need to connect the Room 1 topics to what’s in Rooms 2 and 3 in a way that makes sense to prospects.”

I like this framework not only because of its logic, but because it illustrates the central problem with most of the marketing in my world: Most software marketing people are completely stuck in rooms 2 and 3. They spend all of their time on positioning and messaging that sounds like this:

“Here’s our product. Here’s what it does. Here’s why it’s better. Want to buy some?”

Getting that part of your message right - the Room 2 and 3 stuff - is important. But it’s table stakes. Even with this part nailed, you’re still going to sound pretty much like everyone else.

That’s a problem. And guess what? If you’re a marketer, it’s your problem to solve.

How To Build Your Room 1 Message

The secret to upleveling your messaging isn’t refining the words to describe your product or even your customer’s pain points. You can nail those pretty quickly, assuming that you’re actually talking to the people that buy your stuff, listening to what they have to say, and then synthesizing what you learn. Good positioning is discovered, not decided. But it doesn’t take that long to do the work.

Here’s the less-traveled path to standing out. It isn’t about being clearer. It’s about thinking bigger.

It’s getting yourself - and your messaging - out of Rooms 2 and 3 and into Room 1.

There’s a simple reason most people don’t get there. It’s harder. Building a Room 1 message is a more complex, more creative job. It involves asking squishier, higher-order questions, taking your company blinders off, and getting in touch with what resonates with you and your team.

Forget about your product for a second. This is what you need to examine:

• What’s changed out there in our market?

• What are the evolving trends?

• How are those trends manifesting themselves?

• What new things are possible?

• What are the innovators out there doing?

• And most importantly, how can you avoid being left behind?

An important detail about that list: Notice that there’s nothing in it about your product. Nothing about how its built. Nothing about its features or benefits. That’s intentional. Have patience. You’re going to link all this back to what you sell soon enough. But before you do that, you need to take a stance. You need to manufacture a point-of-view about what’s going on and how the people you sell to should be responding. What you’re going for here is a unique angle, built from your own experience, and translated into the authentic handwriting of your team.

When you have that point-of-view constructed, then and only then do you link it ever-so-subtly back to the thing that you sell.

Not before.

Why This Works

When constructed properly, a Room 1 message makes customers anxious to learn more and builds immediate credibility. You’re not just listing features and benefits here. You’re talking about trends that apply to companies just like theirs, frameworks that help them make sense of the trends, and the actions they need to take to harness the power contained in both the trend and the framework.

When you do this right, it can become a sneaky competitive advantage. Room 1 messaging is hard to fake. Building it requires expertise, customer intimacy, and a view on a market, which takes time to unpack and assemble. Since doing this is hard, most companies stick to the typical Room 2 and Room 3 stuff, repeated below for emphasis.

“Here’s our product. Here’s what it does. Here’s why it’s better. Want to buy some?”

Look around at a few software websites. It’s a shame how common this refrain is.

And if you’re willing to take a chance and move beyond it, you sort of can’t help but stand out.

That’s because Room 1 messaging is not only different. It’s rare.

Other smart people seem to agree. Some of my other favorite sales and marketing thinkers have also (independently) seized upon the power of “Room 1” messaging. Here are two examples from two of my favorite GTM authors.

April Dunford in Obviously Awesome:

“Once you have determined your market context, you can start to think about how you can layer a trend on top of your positioning to help potential customers understand why your offering is important to them right now. This step is optional but potentially really powerful — if you go about it carefully. A trend helps customers see your product as an urgent or strategic (or dare we say it, cool) purchase.”

Pete Kazanjy in Founding Sales (Ch. 2 — Baking Your Product Narrative):

“What has changed that enables your new solution?: Typically in product innovation, and the associated selling of those products, something has “changed” that enables a new solution. It’s important for you to understand the underpinnings of the change, because your narrative will need to explain it. In fact, that change will be crucial to how you frame the new opportunities that have opened up for your would-be customers. For instance, in sales CRM, the rise of ubiquitous web access and browser technology provided an opportunity for Salesforce to create a SaaS offering that was far less clunky than traditional on-premise CRMs, accessible from any web-enabled client, and always up-to-date with the latest features.”

Final Thoughts

Yes, customer pain matters. Yes, knowing your product matters. Yes, articulating the features that set you apart matters. You should spend time on those things. You should be able to absolutely nail them.

But don’t stop there. The benefits of knowing your customer and your product multiply when you wrap that knowledge inside a compelling story.

A story that explains what’s going on in the world around you. How things are changing. And what’s possible now that wasn’t before.

Start telling that story, and pay attention to how customers respond.

Don’t be surprised if they want to hear more.