Messaging

How To Develop Messaging That Resonates

Building positioning and narrative that buyers find self-evident, not clever marketing copy, but words your prospects will repeat to their boss.

The Answer
Messaging that resonates starts from primary buyer research, names the pain and challenge your buyer already feels, frames a credible way to solve the problem and proves the outcome with customer evidence.

Overview

Messaging that resonates starts with one uncomfortable truth: most messaging is written for the seller, not the buyer.

Founders & Sales leaders fall in love with their product’s features, marketing dresses those features up in great sounding adjectives, and the result is a deck that prospects politely sit through and never quote internally.

Messaging that resonates does the opposite. It hands buyers language they steal and use as your champion to sell your product internally to their own organization.

The best B2B messaging is built from primary-source buyer research, not internal whiteboard sessions. It names a specific, status-threatening problem the buyer already feels, frames a credible mechanism for solving it, and proves the outcome with evidence.

Done well, the message becomes the sales process — qualification, discovery, demo, and close all flow from the same narrative thread.

Steps

  1. Interview 10-15 recent buyers (half closed-won, half closed-lost) and ask about the moment they decided to evaluate, what they typed into Google, and what they told their boss to get the budget approved.
  2. Identify the recurring ‘trigger event’ (org change, missed number, audit, new exec) that puts your category on the buyer’s roadmap.
  3. Name the enemy. Every great message has an antagonist — a status quo, a legacy approach, a painful workaround that your solution disrupts.
  4. Articulate the ‘old way vs. new way’ contrast in one slide and one sentence. If you can’t say it without buzzwords, the messaging lacks clarity.
  5. Build a proof stack: 3-5 customer outcomes, each with a name, a number, and a timeframe.
  6. Pressure-test the message with 5 customers and 5 prospects before rolling out. Ask them to repeat it back in their own words. If they can’t, rewrite.
  7. Codify the message in a one-page narrative document that every rep, marketer, and exec works from.
Pro Tip
The ‘Mom Test’ applies to messaging too. If your mom can read your homepage and tell you what you do and who it’s for, you have a chance. If not, you have homework.
Watch Out
Avoid the ‘Frankenstein deck.’ Most messaging dies because it’s stitched together from product marketing, sales enablement, and the CEO’s last board prep. Pick one owner and one source of truth.

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About The Author

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Nate Broome
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Nate Broome
Founder
Nate Broome is known for building high-performing, operationally rigorous sales teams—and for the journey that shaped how he leads them. Starting as a top-performing individual contributor, Nate quickly learned that personal success doesn't scale. His transition into SDR leadership taught him how to coach, create structure, and drive consistency across a team. As a sales leader, he developed a deep appreciation for process, pipeline discipline, and cross-functional alignment. And at the executive level, he's learned that the real leverage comes from setting vision, building leaders, and creating systems that scale beyond any one person.
Along the way, Nate has been mentored by and learned from industry leaders like Manny Medina, Mark Kosoglow, Harish Mohan, and Anna Baird—shaping his perspective on what it takes to build modern, high-performing revenue organizations.
With leadership experience at companies backed by Sequoia, Accel, ICONIQ, Greylock Partners and other top tier firms, Nate has operated across every stage of growth—from early pipeline generation to enterprise-scale revenue operations. He's been described as "process-driven leader who knows how to get big things done" and "a visionary sales leader who always sees 2–3 steps ahead."
A University of Washington alum based in Seattle, Nate founded Tech Sales Coach to pay forward the insights and mentorship that shaped his career—equipping sales leaders at every stage with practical, field-tested coaching to build high-performing teams and evolve into impactful, scalable executives.
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