Lesson 1 - Learn Your Messaging

Get the companion study guide for all episodes — packed with practical assignments, templates, and key takeaways at thedailyquota.com

In this lesson, you’ll learn the foundation of effective selling: mastering your solution’s messaging. We’ll guide you through answering three essential questions: Why does your solution exist? Who is it for? And how is it being used? By understanding these, you’ll gain clarity on what makes your product valuable and unique. Your assignment will challenge you to explore resources like corporate pitch decks, customer reviews, and even AI tools to craft your own authentic, personalized messaging. Share your answers with your manager or mentor for feedback and start building the confidence to connect with your prospects.

Transcript

0:01

Welcome to the daily quota. My name is Nicholas Hill, and I'm going to be your host and your instructor for the entirety of the course. Now, I have almost a decade of sales enablement experience, enabling over a thousand salespeople when it comes to tech and specifically SAS products. But ultimately, this course can be used for any sales of any kind. Um, we will be giving examples from SAS, from tech. Um, but you'll be able to kind of extrapolate those for, for your own needs. Now, the course is meant to be short, practical, concise, actionable, um, which means I'm going to structure this in a way where you learn everything that you need to learn, um, as fast as possible, right? I'm not going to, uh, script myself out. I'm basically just going to talk off the cuff. Um, for everything that we talk about, but following each video lesson, you'll get a structured notes on everything that we covered. You'll get a full study guide assignment that walks you through, um, practical step by step actions that you can take in order to make this, uh, more applicable to your daily life. Now, ultimately, this course is going to be more beneficial if you're already in some sort of a sales role where you can apply these assignments, but if you're not. And you're just trying to get into your first sales role. Um, that's okay too. And, and you can, uh, you can use chat GPT and different AI tools to kind of set up examples for you along the way. Um, a couple of other things I am, uh, basically just talking informally here, which means occasionally you'll see me grab a glass of water. Um, I'm going to look over at my notes on the left hand side to make sure I don't miss anything. Um, and, uh, I'm just going to keep it like that because otherwise I'll, I'll never record the damn thing. Right? So, um, cool. So let's go ahead and dive in, right? You didn't pay to hear me talk about myself. Um, let's start with lesson number one. Lesson number one is all about getting to know your messaging. This is the first thing that you have to do for anything that you sell. Um, you need to understand what is my core messaging. Now, ultimately what this comes down to is you need to answer some fundamental questions about your product. First, why does my product exist in the first place? And when you're asking that you need to be thinking about what was the, what was the situation? What was life like? Before my product got here. Um, what was the problem that my product came along to solve? So let's think about, uh, let's think about Slack and zoom for, for this, for this lesson, we'll just use these two as an example, when you think about Slack before Slack came along, there were messaging apps. People were using, uh, like Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams. Um, people were able to send each other messages asynchronously. Before slack existed, what slack did was it created way better organization. Um, slack made it fun, right? You have emojis, you have reactions. You, uh, slack also made it to where you can reply in threads to one another. Slack really came along and, and made people excited and engaged with using Messenger. The other thing Slack did really well was it added channels and it added the ability to upload files into a channel and create these kinds of project specific channels that people were all engaging with and reacting to. And people really, really latched onto that. So when you think about the problem that Slack solved, It didn't come in and, um, create a new messaging category for companies. It came in and it created an engaging, organized, structured, um, you know, robust set of functions and features that made that messaging category. Great. So when you, the first question you need to ask yourself for the product that you're selling, whatever that is, Why does it exist? What is the problem that I am actually solving for people and a good way to answer that is to is to say to yourself, what sucked before my my solution came along and and if you're talking to somebody and you're giving an elevator pitch, you should usually you should start that with something like, hey, doesn't it suck when X. Doesn't it suck when Y. Z. Right. You need to be telling them this is the problem that my solution exists to address. So you need to answer that fundamental question for yourself first. The problem that we're solving, why my solution exists. Now, if you joined a company, they may, they should already know that information, right? And we'll talk about some places that you can go to get that information. Um, here in just a minute. The second thing that you should be asking yourself, and let me look at my notes here, right? Make sure I'm not missing anything. Um, who is my solution for, so you need to be thinking about personas. If your solution is made for everybody, then it's made for nobody. Right. It's really hard to just sell something to everyone, right? That's an incredibly intimidating sales tactic. So you need to, at least in the beginning, understand your core audience. Who's your target audience? Who are the people that you really want to address? Now for slack, they started with, um, tech workers, right? Slack didn't say, Oh, well, everyone in the entire world can use a messaging application. Maybe that's who they're for today. Um, but when they were founded, when they first started out, they were thinking about Okay. Who are the people most likely to be working remotely? The people that are most likely working on multiple projects, people that need that asynchronous lightning quick communication, and they landed on, on tech workers, typically B2B tech workers. So the first thing, the second thing you need to do is you need to understand. Who is my solution? And in future lessons, we're going to actually start to write that down. We'll write down demographics and all of that good stuff, but you need to understand who's actually going to buy this so that you can tailor your messaging in that, in that direction. So, um, the other thing, uh, some other kind of traits you can think about, um, what are their titles, what teams are they on? Are you selling to like engineering, manufacturing, product marketing? Um, are you selling to social media teams? Are you selling to construction teams? Um, think about industry. Are you selling to pharmaceuticals? Are you selling to tech? Um, are you selling to financial services firms, right? What are the industries? What are the teams that are most likely to benefit? Are there geography constraints, right? You want to be thinking about, am I selling specifically to Amer or a Mia or APAC, right? Asia Pacific time zone. Um, think about the core customer base that you're reaching out to. And then you want to think about what are the typical challenges being faced by those personas today? So if I go to myself and I say, okay, I'm selling, uh, let's use zoom as an example, zoom, obviously an incredibly popular video conferencing tool. Zoom probably came in and said, okay, we are going to sell our tool to remote teams who need a way to collaborate over video. Um, they need it to be reliable. They need it to be high quality. Um, they need a variety of ways to participate in video conferences. So Um, and they start writing down the list of problems that the personas that they're selling zoom to are going to have. So asking yourself, why does my product exist? Who am I selling my product to? Number three, you want to think about what we call the jobs to be done framework. What are the specific tasks that people are completing with your solution? So to simplify that, like if I'm selling a lawnmower, The jobs to be done is mowing the lawn, right? So if I'm saying, Oh, I'm, I'm selling a lawnmower and the things that people are doing with this lawnmower, they are mowing their lawn. They are doing basic landscaping. They are, you know, edging, uh, uh, gardens. Um, I don't know what lawnmowers do. Can you tell? Uh, but basically you need to come in and say, These are the jobs to be done that this, this, uh, product solution is meant to accomplish. So if I'm selling, um, sprout social media software sprout, uh, I'm going to be your salesman for a second. Uh, if I'm selling sprout social media software, I might say, okay, the jobs to be done here are People are going to post, uh, across a variety of social media accounts. People are going to schedule social media posts for the future. People are going to, uh, record the number of engagements and replies to each of these posts. People are going to synthesize the types of responses that they're going to get on their posts. Um, people are going to direct message those that are engaging with them on social media. So what I've done here is I've said, okay, these are like the five or six jobs to be done. Um, that someone is going to, uh, be working towards with their solution. So those are the three big things that I want you to think about first. And the reason for that is because these are the three questions that are going to lead to your corporate pitch. When you get in front of a customer, you need to be answering those questions for them right away. What do we do? Who are we for? And what are you going to do with us? And if you can answer those questions really well, then chances are they're going to say, okay, well, yeah, we do actually have that challenge. Yeah, we do actually need to do those jobs. And yeah, we are those people, right? And then they can start to really see themselves. Using your solution. So those are the three questions you need to answer. Now, as for where to find the answers to those questions, if you're creating a product yourself, if you're watching this video as an entrepreneur or maybe an independent salesperson, um, then you're going to have to answer those and you can use AI to help you. You can describe your product to an AI tool and have it help you with that answer. Um, but ultimately you need, uh, if you work for an organization already, they probably have this answer. So go ask your manager or your mentor or your new hire buddy, um, where you can find your corporate messaging. Do we have a corporate pitch deck already? If you do have a corporate pitch deck, practice it. You need to pull it up. You need to listen to it as if you were a customer. If you can, you need to find someone who's presenting that corporate pitch deck on a recorded customer call. Listen to how they present it. You need to write down speaker notes for that deck in your own words, not in marketing's words. If you just parrot marketing's words, you're going to sound like a robot. The customer's not going to buy that shit for a second. So you need to be understanding in your own words, who is my product for? Why does it exist? What are they doing with it? Do that through the corporate pitch deck. If you don't have a corporate pitch deck, you can also look at your organization's website. Chances are your marketing team has done some of this work for you, right? So look at the marketing website, understand, um, you know, how are they talking about the product? What are the problems that they're addressing? Um, Who are the personas that they mentioned the most? Look up third party reviews for your product. You can start to understand how do other people, what titles am I seeing most often? Um, what are other people saying about the jobs to be done that they're doing with my product today? Um, look at your CEOs or your founders website. Uh, or sorry, your, their LinkedIn profile. Right. If you look at their LinkedIn profile, chances are they've written under there about me or under their headline, a brief description of what the solution they found it or head up does. Um, and so you can, you can steal that information as well. Right. So corporate pitch deck website. CEO founders, LinkedIn webpage, you can ask AI. I'm going to be talking about AI throughout the entire course, by the way. And basically I'm just going to say, go ask AI. What I mean by that is go to chat GPT or perplexity or one of these other tools. Give it the context. Here's, here's who I am. Here's the PR the company that I work for. I need you to help me understand what my product is, who it's for, what solution it solves, the jobs to be done to do it. And if you do that, AI is going to give you some pretty good answers. If your product's been around for awhile and if it hasn't, then again, you're going to have to brainstorm this yourself. Cool. So that's your assignment for lesson one. You need to write down in your study guide, your study guide will help you through all of this. Um, write down what your product does, who it's for, what problem it solves, jobs to be done. I'm trying to see how many times I can say those four things in one lesson. Can you tell? Uh, let me check my notes to make sure I haven't missed anything. We talked about, uh, we gave a couple of examples, talked about LinkedIn, third party reviews. Definitely a good way to do it. Corporate pitch deck, definitely a good way to do it. That's it for now. That's it for today's lesson. Um, on the daily quota and, uh, yeah, check your study guide. It will walk you through it and we'll see you on the next one. Thanks.