How to Keep Your SaaS Teams Aligned on Messaging with ClickUp

You’ve achieved product-market fit, congrats!

Your product works like a well-oiled machine. Your customers rave about it, spread the word, and the organic growth feels great.

But after a while, you reach a plateau.

When it comes to attracting new customers you don’t see the same excitement and engagement. Your marketing falls flat, your conversion rates are not where you’d like them to be, and the few new customers you get have the wrong expectations. Something’s missing…

You might not have message-market fit.

It’s the missing piece for a lot of startups on their go-to-market (GTM) journey.

You’ve achieved message-market fit when you have the right positioning and you communicate it with the right language, to the right people, at the right awareness level (thanks for the brilliant definition, Daphne Tideman).

Lots of rights to get right, right?

Unfortunately it’s not as easy as conducting a couple of customer interviews to understand their pain points and motivations. Although not understanding your customers is a big part of it, there are other culprits.

Peep Laja, founder of Wynter, a B2B SaaS market insights platform, ran a survey to identify the top 3 challenges for these companies when it comes to their GTM strategy.

At number 3, we find “Lack of alignment and internal understanding”. As Peep states:

“There is a clear correlation between the challenges of internal alignment and ineffective marketing and sales efforts. Need better internal communication.”

When your marketing, sales, product and leadership teams are not on the same page about what you do, who you do it for and how, your marketing suffers. And the people who could benefit from it, aka your customers, can’t see what’s in it for them.

On the other hand, when everyone is crystal clear on the value your product provides, for whom, in what unique way—and you can communicate it effectively:

You get more trial sign ups, purchases or demos booked
Your Return On Ad Spend increases
Your Customer Lifetime Value increases
Your customer retention increases

Better and more consistent messaging throughout your customer lifecycle means clearer expectations and easier-to-extract value from your product. This is how you get the nice side benefit of more organic word of mouth.

Make sure everyone on your team is on the same page on messaging and keep this as a key priority in 2024.

A big part of it is managing projects and internal communication efficiently.

Where to Start: Setting and Tracking Objectives

A message-market fit project can feel daunting. And if not managed properly, can spiral into a massively painful and never-ending slog.

Your teams are already busy doing their job, so before you ask everyone to help you with something they’re not directly responsible for, make sure you have your goals and KPIs in place.

What’s your purpose for embarking on a messaging project? And where are you starting from?

Depending on any previous work you might have done, you could set several goals, for example:

Identifying your ICPs (Ideal Customer Personas) and getting clear on the motivations, pain points and jobs to be done for the segments you’ll tailor your messaging
Aligning product with marketing and making sure your customers understand your product’s value proposition
Aligning sales with marketing to establish consistency between what you know about your ideal customers and how you speak to them
Creating feedback loops and putting together systems for collecting continuous feedback from your target audience
Copy testing different messages to determine which resonates best and sticks the most
Optimizing conversions and setting benchmarks to increase sign ups, demos or trials
Getting consistent with your branding and messaging across all marketing channels and customer touchpoints
Tracking and analyzing key performance indicators (KPIs) to gauge your level of message-market fit
Creating an iterative optimization schedule to review and improve your messaging over time

To make it easier, platforms like ClickUp give you everything you need in one place for everyone in your company.

Want to collect specific market data such as “Customer Pain Points,” “Feedback Sources,” and “Market Segments”? With Custom Fields, sales teams could log information directly from customer interactions, while marketing teams could input data from their customer research.

Or if your goal is to “Increase trial sign ups by 10% in Q2”, with the Goals feature, you can break it down into measurable targets for each team.

For example, the content team could set a target based on conversion metrics from campaign responses, while the product team could focus on user activity within the app.

Use ClickUp Goals to define your objectives and key results, i.e., measurable targets

And when it comes to collaborating on research data and contributing insights, you could use Docs to create a live document called “Customer insight repository,”. Team members would be able to add insights from social media, customer interviews, or support tickets.

Then you could use it as reference to identify common themes or gaps in your current messaging.

Rich Formatting and-slash commands-in-clickup-docs — Format all your product management documents with ease using ClickUp Docs

Moving to drafting your message and to validating it? Create a “Message-market fit strategy” document to include different message versions, outlining the narrative for customer personas, or creating your brand voice and tone guidelines.

Communicate Better, Faster

When your marketing, sales, product development, and customer support teams use different tools and processes for communication, that’s when all your hard work goes out the window.

The feedback your support team collects is trapped in a ticketing system, out of your product team’s reach. The golden nuggets your sales department gathers from the frontlines, are buried in spreadsheets or emails that marketing rarely checks.

And marketing launches campaigns based on last year’s data—while the product team prioritizes features based on guesswork rather than real user pain points.

In order for your messaging project to succeed and for you to keep everyone on the same page, you need to create a single communication channel.

With tools like ClickUp it’s easy to build that into your workflows.

Imagine a customer mentions a feature they’re begging for, on a support call. The support team could quickly spin up a Chat view in ClickUp, tagging someone on the product team.

They’d check the chat, understand it’s needed now, not tomorrow, and follow up with a comment on that specific task to ask for more details. The time from feedback to implementation is cut in half. And everyone is magically in-the-know.

Another example: let’s assume your marketing team has been working on a new campaign.

They could use Assigned Comments to delegate tasks directly within the project’s context. Someone else could be in charge of refining a value proposition, and once done, they could mark the comment as resolved and ready for review.

ClickUp Comments — Plus with the Proofing feature, you could solicit and manage feedback on any creative assets like wireframes, sketches or mockups. Each piece of feedback would be tracked and assignable, so nothing slips through the cracks.

That’s how you keep your messaging work consistent and always evolving as you iterate.

Work together more efficiently

Now that you know your goal and have ways to communicate across departments when it matters, let’s see how you can collaborate on messaging more effectively, too.

Let’s say you’re launching a new feature. It’s Marketing’s job to share the big news across channels—email campaigns, social media, and maybe your blog. A great way of doing it is to create Templates and standardize the communication format.

This makes sure the people in charge of spreading the message convey the key points. Also, it’s how you keep your brand voice consistent across all platforms. Try to prevent different teams misinterpreting and fragmenting your message.

Anytime you plan new product updates, it’s also important to integrate any customer feedback (from the Support team for instance) directly into the product roadmap.

The more this happens in real-time, the better for the Product team, so they can prioritize releases based on actual user needs. It’s this alignment that makes your messaging accurate and highly relevant for your customers.

A great way to do this is to integrate customer feedback into your roadmap with ClickApps.

Let’s not forget about your Sales team. They’re on the front-lines, getting first-hand customer feedback, and they need to be able to route it to the relevant teams. With a quick ClickUp Automation in place you could make sure the whole process is streamlined and everyone can adapt on-the-go if needed.

Whether it’s fixing a bug or adjusting any marketing messages, and no matter if you’re remote, hybrid or distributed, your teams should be able to work together and keep messaging aligned—at all times.

Keep in touch with and learn from your customers

Being aligned internally doesn’t guarantee your messaging will be effective. It’s not enough to be able to get on the same page about what you do, who you do it for and how.

You also need to have a consistent flow of insights coming in – from your market – if you want to keep speaking in a way that resonates.

A great way to make sure you’re always actively listening to your potential customers, is to create feedback forms and “inject” them at strategic milestones in your customer and user journey.

For example, after releasing a new feature, you could create a form with specific questions about usability, effectiveness, and user satisfaction. Then, share it with your audience through your email newsletter, social media, or in-app notifications.

With Clickup for instance, you can:

Create custom feedback forms: Tailor questions to specific product features or services. Example: A project management tool can ask about the ease of tracking tasks
Track feedback progress: Use custom statuses to monitor feedback from reception to resolution. Example: Mark feedback as ‘Reviewed,’ ‘In Progress,’ or ‘Implemented’
Organize feedback by categories: Implement custom fields to classify feedback by type, like ‘Feature Request,’ ‘Bug Report,’ or ‘User Experience’
Analyze trends: Look at your survey responses through custom fields to track and analyze common issues or popular feature requests
Grow your knowledge base: Update FAQs and knowledge base articles based on recurring searches. Example: Address common installation queries in the FAQ section

You can get started in seconds using this handy template.

Information is great, but what matters is that you and the rest of your team take action on it.

Use the insights from your feedback forms to actually make changes in your business. Things like improving your products, services, or upgrading your customer support systems. With ClickUp, you can easily create tasks related to any of these changes and assign them to relevant team members to implement.

Just like that, you went full circle: from real customer feedback to launching a new feature.

Test, Validate, Repeat

Let’s recap:

You’ve picked a goal for your messaging project
You put systems in place for how you’ll communicate on it
You’ve planned how you’ll work on it with your teams
And you’ve prepared to collect audience feedback on autopilot

The last step before deciding what messages you’ll need to align on, is testing and validation.

Even with your research and plan in place, it’s easy to let confirmation bias cloud your judgment. And maybe you decide you need to focus on a particular Job To Be Done, or feature to highlight, when in reality it’s not what resonates the most, or you’re using the wrong language to describe it.

So, what do we do? We sit quiet and let more data – and our customers – tell us.

At this stage what matters is to gauge the clarity and impact of our new messages.

Here are a few ideas for using project management tools like ClickUp, to gauge the performance of your messaging:

Run a usability test, 5-second test or preference test: Use any usability testing platform and then get into your project management tool to organize, assign and schedule tasks, collect and analyze data in a central hub, then collaborate on it
A/B test your copy: Track different versions of your marketing messages (like email subject lines, value proposition headlines, calls to action). Analyze response rates and customer feedback to identify which version resonates best
Re-launch customer surveys: With the new strategy and copy ready, create forms to gather direct feedback on specific messages or campaigns
Run a “Build-a-box” workshop: I’ve learned this fun exercise from the team at Olivine. It’s a great way to get the whole team aligned on your messaging for landing page, sales deck, announcement copy, and more
Refine and iterate: Use ClickUp’s collaboration tools to brainstorm, refine, and review messaging strategies with your team in real-time
Prioritize your revisions: Use ClickUp to prioritize which messages you’ll be revising and improving, based on the feedback you get and on your post-launch analysis

There are also a couple of more “indirect” ways to understand if you’re hitting the spot. For example you might use ClickUp’s real-time Dashboards to track the time spent on customer support inquiries and identify which features generate the most requests for help.

These would be clear signals you need to do a better job at either communicating and setting expectations through your messaging, and/or go back to the drawing board with product development. Or you could use reports to look at the response rates to your marketing campaigns. This will let you pinpoint which messages resonate best with your target personas.

A few others:

Track support time: Monitor how long support teams engage with customers on specific issues. For example, high interaction time on a new feature could indicate a need for clearer messaging or more training materials
Analyze campaign response time: Track the time invested in different marketing campaigns and correlate it with engagement metrics to identify the most effective messages
Create development efficiency reports: Use time tracking to measure the efficiency of development cycles, helping to prioritize features or improvements based on customer feedback
Pay attention to resource allocation: Analyze where most resources are being spent (support, development, marketing) to better align with the demands of your market

Bridging the Gap Between Your Teams and Your Customers

At a SaaS company you have a lot of touchpoints with your audience. Let’s try and list the most common:

Search engine results and ads
Social media posts and ads
Influencer marketing campaigns
Blog content
Digital billboards
Reviews on sites like G2 or Capterra
Testimonials and case studies on your website
Website copy
Onboarding emails and in-app guides
In-app notifications and tutorials
Webinars and virtual communities
Sales, account management and customer support calls
Referral programs and rewards
Online and offline conferences and events

And this is not even a comprehensive list!

Why does this matter?

Because with every touchpoint comes a chance to communicate your positioning and value proposition. Read: get more customers.

Studies have shown that aligning teams in an organization can significantly impact sales and conversions. Organizations with aligned sales and marketing processes have been found to have at least 17.9% higher win rates and 11.8% better quota attainment. What about generating up to 208% more marketing revenue. or improving customer retention by 36%?

You get the gist. Unless your messaging is consistent throughout the entire customer journey, across all channels – you can’t be as effective as you could at speaking your audience’s language. And the lowest hanging fruit you can go after, is aligning your teams internally.

When everyone across your departments knows where you stand and how to talk to or write about what you do, who you do it for and how—that’s when the rest gets easier.

Guest Author

Chris Silvestri is the founder and chief conversion copywriter at Conversion Alchemy. Since 2016 they’ve been helping SaaS companies understand their customers better than they know themselves. So they can reach message-market fit, increase website conversions, retention, CLTV and ROAS.

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