SaaS Website Messaging That Added 3M Orders at Deliveroo (Breakdown)

I'm on a quest to uncover the secrets to crafting the perfect SAS website. In each episode, I talk with product marketing professionals, sharing their hot takes on the future of B2B websites, as well as tactical breakdowns on how to understand your customers and activate buyers faster. Today, I'm joined by Alicia Carney, a marketer with over 10 years of experience, previously the head of B2B product marketing at Deliveroo and now the head of marketing at Ravio. In this episode, we discuss website messaging with Alicia running us through a case study of her time at Deliveroo and sharing some useful frameworks to help you create better and differentiated messaging that is going to capture the attention of your ideal customers. Let's jump in. Okay, Alicia, let's talk messaging. So, I know you wanted to walk through a presentation. Let's let's crack on. Cool. I know what everyone everyone loves slides, but hopefully they'll be useful and we'll go through some examples. So I will start very briefly with a pop quiz. Although I know this is an audience what how would we describe our value proposition? We'd usually talk about uh the technology that we've built or what it can do. But there's actually only one answer which is who is it for and who are you talking to. The way that you describe your value proposition is highly unlikely to match the way that your ideal buyers would describe it. And our job as product marketers, as growth marketers, anyone who is building customerf facing content and messaging is to speak their language first. Faster growth, accelerated sales cycles, building a pipeline, building momentum. It all comes down to positioning yourself correctly in the right competitive landscape and then messaging in the language of your customer. All we won't talk about how to get uncomfort identify the right customers or even how to build positioning in this presentation. This is more focused on how do we then create a deliverable that speaks the language of your customer and I'll talk through an example of how I did that at deliver. Last kind of theory piece here.

This isn't just about messaging on your website and it's not just about messaging in your sales deck. messaging needs to be a consistent thread that is woven through every single component of your business. The input metrics that funnel through, you know, what you've built and what it does are interviews with customers, non-C customers, people who you've lost in a deal cycle, product feedback, competitive landscape analysis, market research, and also your own internal assumptions and intuition. And then that all flows out and affects your messaging and your priorities across these different areas from how to build qualified buyer personas organized by pain points versus job titles alone. What you choose to prioritize and how deep you go in different areas of your road map, the messaging on your website and sales deck. Yes. And that's really where your kind of messaging might live and iterate, but it has to be woven through all these different pieces from your customer support experience to every touch point has to have this kind of so what component of your messaging. So I'll just quickly talk through an example of how I did this at Deliveroo. I joined Deliveroo back in 2018 and I launched an ad platform in like my second week there which was no pressure at all. And there was a lot of momentum and expectation and pressure around this project. It was expected to uh be a huge growth driver for the business. But what I noticed as well is that there was a lot of kind of commentary and concerns around the business that it was going to be bad for restaurants. Restaurants didn't want this. Why did we choose to prioritize building, you know, a discount offer for restaurants? They don't want that. Um and a lot of that was because no one understood what it was or who it was for. So my job as a product marketer was to take this piece of technology uh and position it and message it to the right types of restaurants with the right mindset who actually wanted to see value out of it so they could create their own promotions and discounts for consumers. And this is in a nutshell how you build messaging. You start with a product. So for delivery it was an MVP product of an ad platform that was discountonly offers. I cannot tell you how much negative uh concern there was across 12 global markets coming at me a week into this job saying this is going to fail, but also then pressure from senior leadership for this to be a monumental almost like a new business unit, like a new growth driver for delivery. And there were also a lot of internal assumptions about who it was best fit for. We want KFC, we want McDonald's, we want Nandos as just generic examples of restaurants that can make this really successful for us. And all of that was looking at messaging the ad platform in terms of our best interests and not in terms of the right types of restaurants that would actually value this tool. So, I went out to uh talk to restaurants of all these different shapes and sizes from small mom and pops on the high street to talking to massive group uh chains in Dubai and and in Italy and Singapore and just trying to understand and there was this really obvious reality which is margins for restaurants are so incredibly thin whether you're a massive conglomerate or a small mom and pop. I talked to one restaurant where they're making choices on a weekly basis about whether they stock ketchup or mustard because they couldn't afford both. Similarly, like on the other end of the spectrum, there's huge financial concerns and this was all pre-inflation and and precoid. Um, so the reality is that margins are razor thin and we're saying, "Hey, here's a discount offer mechanic." So already I have objections then and the lack of understanding of the value of this product and I haven't connected the product to what's matching them in their world and their reality.

So the objection that I needed to consider in my messaging is that growth is not the number one focus for every restaurant. Some restaurants don't want to double their site count or don't want to expand into a new market. They're just trying to get by. Um, so that allowed me to then narrow to narrow my audience to focus on growthminded restaurants at any size of scale. I could be more agnostic on the the scale piece, but it was any restaurant that was interested in growth. So, I went from talking about this um I can't remember the exact language, but it was this really technical like a uh offer. I can't remember, but it was all jargon. It was just a jargon pile. And I was able to position that as a way to grow your business and attract new loyal customers and transform the way that you're engaging with your customers online. And I started to see some resonance with that. And I started to see um restaurants engaging with the tool. Um and so that allowed me to then build a whole go to market strategy just talking to this segment. I had 100,000 restaurant partners in the portfolio. I cannot do a big blue ocean approach to messaging to all of them. I had to find the right audience, find out what they care about, find out what they're scared about, and then connect them to that value. And that worked. So, this was when this was to the left of the the the line, the 2020 2019 line was our launch period where we launched the ad platform across 12 different markets. Um, I didn't know if I'd survive it, but I did. And then um when I actually launched a go to market strategy that just focused on this growth message for a particular cohort, we were able to grow from 200,000 orders to 3 million incremental consumer orders over the first 16 months. And then a million incremental orders uh over the first 18 months resulting in I think by the end of the first 18 months we it was about uh 10% of global order volume was attributed to a marketer offer. So, it's a story that by narrowing down to your best fit customer, speaking their language, getting ahead of their objections, you can find a way to speed up that path to growth. Cool story.

Yeah. Um, so I think obviously re research is like a huge part of this. Um, what we covered in in episode one, we covered jobs to be done, research. Um what what would you say are some sort of common mistakes you see that either founders or well anyone within a company anyone who's sort of involved in the messaging process what what would you say are some common mistakes that they make? Yeah. Number one is talking at the wrong altitude and talking about features. When I talk about altitude, Emma Stratton talks a lot about this as well and um certainly me and my co-founder um James Domenpipe have have experienced this in many many different consulting projects over the years. Everyone speaks at the lowest altitude which means you're talking about what it does and certainly that's a component of messaging but it leaves way it leaves way too much room for so what? Why should I care? If you think about your buyer, like they are not thinking about your problem or your product as much as you are. They've got probably a stack of problems that they're solving. So your job isn't just to sell your solution.

It's to sell why this matters and why you should solve it now. So there's an urgency component. If I go to any B2B task website, I would bet eight out of 10 their websites are just talking about what they do. they're not elevating it to that right altitude. So, it talks about why this matters. Um, similarly, and actually a huge mistake that me and James made back at Kayako, which is a customer service platform, we worked together back in uh 2016 to 2018 is we got it wrong the opposite direction. We went way too aspirational in our messaging when we we were launching. Uh so we had this on premise customer support software solution that was really successful and very profitable. We built a SAS version of the tool which actually meant we fundamentally changed our target champion buyer from this very technical kind of IT focused persona to a more modern customer service customer success manager different needs different positioning but we were way too high in the sky way too aspirational with our messaging that was like why this matters and what's you know what's all good in the world that was way too detached from what you actually get and why uh and and what it does for you and how it connects to your jobs to be done.

Uh, luckily we were able to turn that around um through aggressive customer research and market research and repositioning and remesing. Um, but you can avoid those mistakes by getting the right altitude right. Nice. Uh, yeah, I haven't I like the um concept of altitudes. what what are your thoughts on so the way I try the frame in which I try to think about this um and credit to the guys at Fletch PMM for this is through capability messaging um so the feature is like a technical aspect of your product a capability is essentially what your product does like the fun functional element of it like the steps or the action that somebody takes inside the product and then I think if you pair that with an implication So what you know perform this action so that you can achieve the outcome or achieve some kind of benefit. Do you think that's a good sort of meet in the middle of altitude or are there sort of other ways you you you think about that?

Big yes absolutely. And that's really similar to Emma Stratton's uh VBF framework that I've uh unknowingly practiced for years as well. VBF is value benefit feature. And that actually is this this template that I can show you in just a second created by Mick Pono which is first of all the hard work is understanding what your customer values what is value. Yeah that's a whole exercise figure out and then our job as as marketers as product marketers is to connect okay this is the value they need to achieve these are the benefits of achieving that value and here's the exact features that will allow you to complete that. That is in our in our product marketing course GTM playbook. We call it a value nugget. Don't know where that came from. I don't know. But yeah, Emma calls it the VBF framework. The Fletch guys call it uh capability messaging. It's all kind of the same thing. It's a formula and there's a connection. And I think the going back to your original question, most founders founder messaging especially is just that bottom component. It's not that complete holistic um Yeah. packaging. Yeah. I like that. Yeah, let's jump into the resource. Um, and and perhaps this is going to answer my question, but this and I feel terrible that I haven't I'm not familiar with this VBF uh value benefit feature, right? Um, is that is that like um is that a framework for which you communicate product capabilities or so you start with the Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Yeah, it's exactly what you just described where you're saying this is my end outcome so that I can do this by achieving by doing this. So it this kind of you can kind of piece together a sentence basically. Yeah, it's a um an exercise for building messaging because I think and I I'm certainly, you know, have experienced this myself, but building messaging is quite hard because you're not only trying to balance everything you've learned from your customer interviews, but you often have a whole committee of people around you putting pressure on you to use specific language that we think is on brand. I have a whole list of words that I I try to never use like next generation better. I hate seeing the word better in messaging because it's often a crutch for the absence of understanding of what better looks like. Usually on the other side of better is an articulation of value. Yeah. But we haven't figured out yet. Um so yeah, and I have certainly fallen uh victim to uh you know messaging by committee as well. It can be a really difficult thing to stay hold true to conviction of like this is what customers care about. This is what the way we're talking in very plain language without all the jargon. So I empathize with everyone. Anyway, this is a framework from Mick Pono did not create this but I have used this since 2016 2015 and it's absolutely brilliant. We give it to all of our students in GTM playbook. Uh and I I use it all the time myself and this is all you need. And I think we're hearing this is being kind of recreated in all these different formulas and versions, but this this to me is everything. You need topline messaging that is a quick summary of your value prop. You can kind of think about this as your elevator pitch. An overview of your benefits, listing them out one, two, three. A positioning statement, which I have feelings about positioning statements. I think they're a little bit outdated, although they do have a purpose. And then what you get.

And then we go down here into your target customer section. So this top section is quite agnostic and maybe needs to encompass all of your champion buyers. Sorry, all of your buyer personas including your champion. Even people who are uh I call them like anti personas or um I think other people call them uh I can't remember the term. Someone else used something on LinkedIn, but someone who could potentially thwart your deal. Yeah. And also the budget holder. You want to list out all of your different personas here. And then we go down into your value messaging section. And this is effectively an old school version of the VBF framework or capabilities messaging, which is your value statement, the the the bullets that bring that to life and then what your product actually does. Uh and then some proof points. And so I've used this back from you know uh delivering both the B2B and the B TOC propositions. I use it at early stage zero to one startup. Um, and I I used it at Ravio as well. And you can have, you know, as many value statements and pillars as you want. I try to keep it to three because what this turns into, this is kind of the blueprint for your messaging. This is all very internal, but it's much easier to organize your elevator pitch, your sales narrative, um your website messaging, any collateral kind of comes all comes out of this particular document.

Yeah, good stuff. This is this is super interesting. Yeah, it's great. Cool. Okay. Um is does it scroll deeper? It looks like it goes further. No, that that's kind of it. I just I wish I wonder if I have a filled out version. I don't know if I have a filled out version that I could share. Um, no worries if not. Um, did you did you want to then show the um I think it was going to show the website example. Yes. Um, so let's say in this target customer section, you have two different champion buyers, which is quite common. You know, in an ideal world, I don't know if I've ever actually experienced this, but in an ideal world, your your founder and your leadership team are are bullish on one particular niche in the market. They see an underserved need. They're going after that. There's one champion buyer. You know exactly who you're talking to. You're good to go. The reality is that that's not often the case. So, uh, you would have both those champion buyers here. But at Ravio, I recently, well, about a year ago, redid all of our messaging and I'm going through a a repositioning refactoring process right now. So, this will all be refreshed really soon. Um, but I just want to show you how I use that template and kind of brought it to life here on the website.

So, here, this is kind of that. So, what one thing I wanted to mention, one other resource I can share is the B2B uh elements of value. It's a resource out of Bane and it shows you actually do you mind if I pull it up? Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, this is also one of my favorite resources. This is the B2B uh elements of value from Bane. And this effectively summarizes all the different ways that B2B buyers perceive value. Most companies, as I talked about the right altitude for messaging, are communicating down here. See if I can get a little closer. and the ease of doing business value. They're talking about time savings, reduced effort, um cost savings, opportunity for increased, you know, topline growth and so on. But that leaves way too much room for the buyer to be like, uh, so what? Why should I care about this right now? There's no urgency here. It's not to say this isn't an important component of your messaging. It certainly is important components to include, but it shouldn't be the end- all beall.

Wherever possible, some of the best messaging will work its way up the pyramid into personal aspirational value. And that not, you know, every single startup is going to be selling vision, hope, and social responsibility. But the more you can do to make a buying process and a sales narrative feel personal to the buyer. Help them see what's in it for me, you are going to accelerate your sales cycle. very common components here are reputational assurance, reduced anxiety. Um, design and aesthetics are very important as well. These are all things that help me see what's in it for me. And that's a really important component to have in a sales narrative if you're trying to speed things up in your sales cycle. Um, it also just kind of gets into that like what what is aspirational? what is aspirational value beyond you know time savings and uh that more fundamental components and so when I was building Ravio's messaging I went out and did about 20 interviews with different customers I talked to people ranging from complete compensation noviceses and I should have mentioned Ravio is a B2B platform that that's helping to um connect compensation professionals to global kind of real-time benchmarking and also a suite of tools to manage compensation um at scale So, Ravio um has two different champion buyers.

And when I went out and interviewed folks ranging from complete noviceses all the way through to compensation experts, I noticed that there was something that kept coming up, which is people are putting their own reputations on the line when they are uh sharing a benchmark with their CEO, when they are putting an offer out to a candidate that they really need to win. and compensation. When you don't have data that you can trust, it feels really painful and really personal because this is a really emotional topic. What people get paid is is a really personal thing. And so I kept hearing this concept of confidence coming up in interviews. People saying, um, I need to stand behind the data if I'm going to justify it to my CFO. I don't want to get overridden by someone else's opinion. It's frustrating when hiring managers don't trust the data or challenge it and they need to have confidence themselves if they're going to be kind of facilitating compensation decisions across a business. So that's helped me get that right altitude. What we do is total reward benchmarking, market trends, compensation management, but I wanted to c capture some of that mindset piece. And that's why what we stand for um and the aspirational value that we're we're delivering that's shared across my champion buyers is bringing confidence to compensation.

Here you can see I'm I'm doing that classic piece of you know here's what we stand for. Here's who we're for. Uh trust is is that kind of mindset piece as well. And then here's what we do. So this should give you all the components to help qualify a prospect. But then you might notice as we scroll down, we have a problem statement that speaks to both a comp novice and a comp expert. Um, we have uh a few pieces that I where I'm trying to kind of mitigate our objections. But what you might notice here is that we have different solutions pages. And this is where it's really good to split out your positioning for your specific champion buyers. though for a compensation novice more likely a people or HR person where comp is one of a million things that they're doing and they don't have the domain knowledge or the expertise to do it really well or to even give a lot of time to it and we have to acknowledge that that we're not the top thing that they're thinking about in fact it's a good thing we should be able to get it off of their plate because they've they're like oh I'm using Ravio it's sorted I can focus on the million other things I'm worried about so the messaging I have messaging I have here is compensation managed.

Managing compensation with confidence with instant access to reliable real-time benchmarks all in one place. And this is from that champion persona. Ravio brings credibility to every pay decision even for the most nervous of managers. Like there's no next generation. There's no um uh you know any sort of technical jargon. I can I can assure you there is plenty of technical jargon in the compensation space. It's quite a uh technical uh field. But this has to feel easy, fast, you know, we're gonna we're your partner in compensation. We're going to help you through this, which is pretty different from how we communicate for our comp experts where they want to get underneath the hood of compensation. And when I say one of the questions that I ask in my interviews with customers, and I I'll be sure to share the interview guide with you, is if you've had the worst day in the world and you want to throw your laptop out the window, what has happened during that day? and they have usually described something along the lines of I got overridden by my CEO because they didn't trust the data. I need data confidence, data confidence, data confidence, data confidence. It kept coming up. And so there is both confidence on a reputational level, but then there's data competence almost on a statistical level, which is, you know, this data needs to be reliable enough to be powering compensation for our employees and the next next group of uh people we bring into the business. So I'm using a little bit of a buzz word here that I need to stamp out, which is best-in-class. I don't think that I should be using that. But um all the way that we position the problems, the problems are different. The problem for a compensation expert who has been living and breathing in traditional oldw world solutions for their entire career is going to be totally different than the problem statement of someone who has never seen a a traditional static uh salary survey in their life. So we have different problem statements, we have different value pillars. These are the value pillars that I talk through on that worksheet. Um every decision made easy. Monitor compensation automatically explain the why. So, we're trying to be your partner. Whereas on the comp expert page, it's all about going under the hood and going into way more detail and kind of taking your already higher baseline to the next level. Nice. Yeah, this is good. Um because I think we'll have the audience will be um ranging in you know sort of experience when it when it comes to product marketing. So, you know, even like for example, you know, I speak and work with people who sort of don't don't understand what a champion is, you know, what a champion persona is, like how how did you decide who to speak to on the homepage versus what to have on like the the secondary solution pages? Yes. So in that initial initial template where there's the overarching messaging of your value prop and your benefits and that's kind of like the top of the messaging house to use an old school term and then I kind of break it down into value pillars.

Your homepage is almost the top the cover sheet. So you're kind of speaking to both. And this is why I organize my champion buyers by a common denominator of pain versus their job title specifically. And what I mean by that is whether you are a total comp novice and you've never, you know, touched comp before in your life or you've been doing this for 20 years, they actually, what we learned is they have the same jobs to be done. They're trying to attract and retain the best talent to grow their business. They're trying to navigate um building a leveling framework and setting getting their bands right to make sure people are paid fairly. There's very similar jobs to be done. So your homepage speaks to that higher level of value. Um and then the solutions pages are those specific deep dives of like what is particular to that champion. And I was able to identify those champion buyers by doing about 10 to 20 interviews. People often ask like how many interviews do you need to do before you have a qualified buyer persona? I generally find you'll start to see trends coming out after like 10 interviews. you start to see people are kind of saying the same things. Um, and then you do an exercise called pain mapping where you take the transcripts of all of those interviews and pull out different themes and map them by their pains, gains, aspirations, and triggers.

And you'll start to see there's there's trends that group people by their pain points. And so the the common denominators of pain for our two champion buyers are comp is one of a million things I need to do and I'm losing talent and I'm I'm um you know have high attrition and I don't know what I'm doing. Um that's kind of our our people generalist. And then we have the comp expert where they are being held back by old school solutions by salary survey. So in one side we're competing with doing nothing and the other side we're competing with the old world traditionals generally and they're trying to kind of achieve a more sophisticated kind of take to the next level set of uh comp practices. So um that all came out of yeah doing about 20 interviews. Nice. I like the that this has been like a bit of a peak under the hood because it's it's sophisticated stuff like um like I said we're probably going to have like a broad audience who watches this. Um, some have in-house product marketing expertise, maybe they're a product marketer themselves, but I think we'll also have an audience that's trying to go from like 0 to one.

And um, I'm not sure if I think you work with companies who are going like 0ero to one as well, but sometimes, you know, I think more often than not, how a lot of startups approach messaging is actually they just start on the website. They just start writing copies, you know, random headline variations. And I like how this peak under the hood has like showed just how sophisticated this is, how you're thinking about at the end of the day, it's words on a screen, it's pixels, but the process to get there. Uh, it's painstaking. It's a lot of research. It's a lot about understanding the customer and understanding the patterns. Um, and I think this is like a good reality check of what it takes to create good messaging. Um, a lot of moving parts what you talked about like I think you call it pain or problem mapping. Yeah. Um, with everything that's gone on in the world over the last one to two years, sort of advancements in tech, you know, are you use any any specific tools or workflows to to make this easier? Because, you know, when you're having dozens of interviews, it's it's a lot of information. Is there any any tactics or tools you're using there just to speed that up? I have a really really basic muro board. Um, and I might have Yeah, we're thinking about some startup startup ideas on this. H okay. No, no.

Um but for me it is quite painstaking and to be honest I hate this part of I hate this part of the interview process. Um however I do find it's quite formative and like for me building my confidence and understanding the qualifi I'm still in the as a human I'm still making the decision on like seeing the trends I suppose. So certainly I use I use grain or gong to um record the calls and that pulls the transcripts. I'll clip things that were memorable and then I'll kind of pull all those transcripts out and try and identify themes. That's one component. You can absolutely use chat GPT to do all that stuff. But I often find unfortunately that I get a better result keeping that actual raw data and kind of like doing it quite manually. Um, which I know is not a very like sexy answer, but yeah. Yeah. Um, uh, it generally pays off because I think too much gets diluted when it gets processed by any sort of kind of AI tool. Um, and it's usually those raw tidbits that are the most memorable. Like someone saying um, uh, you know, oh my god, this is a gold mine. Finally, I can go justify myself to my CEO. That has stuck. That was two years ago and that has stuck in my head. Um, and so it's those little little tidbits that I think make messaging feel really human.

Um, and bringing those as much forward into your website, which sometimes can feel counterintuitive, and I don't quite know why. Like sometimes we have an aversion in tech to using just plain language. Maybe it feels too simple or too pedestrian or something, but at the end of the day, we're selling to humans. We're all time poor. We're all pretty tired and we can't re like no one's like, "Oh, I can't wait to learn about like this B2B tool and invest like a half of my day into evaluating this." No, we have seconds to work with. So, we have to speak human language if we want to speed up sales cycles. Nice. I like it. Um, you know, I think with I mean LLM or various tech being hot topics at the moment, it's easy to get FOMO and use them. But I like how you're you're sticking to uh test and tried methods. As long as as long as you get the the outcome you want. I can relate to how sometimes an LLM like chat GPT or Claude whatever you use will it will oversimplify oversimplify things. And when particularly when it comes to messaging, I've found as well I call this like message mining where you're kind of mining for those golden nuggets.

And sometimes it it really is just those one or two words, those off-hand comments that people make, right, that just accurately describe the problem you're solving or, you know, how they would describe your product to their friend or whatever. So, I can totally relate to like keeping it raw rather than these oversimplifying things. 100%. And one thing that I have absolutely loved and cherished about Ravio is that, you know, I've worked in environments where there's a there's not as much reverence for those little tidbits or consideration for who we're selling to. And at Ravio, we have that. It's almost like a cultural mindset. So, we brought in we had a last on-site a couple uh months ago, and we brought in a champion buyer from one of our big customers to just talk to us about her day and like the problem she has and what she sees for the future and just get closer to her her um world. And I had multiple people from the CEO down to AEES and people in engineering slacking me little tidbits that she was saying, "Oh, that was really good. Oh, that was good." and we will bring them we bring them straight into our website because there's no better messaging to be crafted than what your customers are actually saying. Um so the more we can do to just keep it human and use human language like it's just Yeah, it's way better. Sweet. 100%. No, no further comments to be added to that. And was there anything else you'd like to show or or should we wrap it there?

Um no, that's cool. I'll send you um I'll send you as well my interview guide uh where it's intended to help you not you know ask for direct feedback on what do you think of my product. It's uh to distill value and understand what's going on in your world and that's how I've been able to uncover a lot of insights about what's how do I meet your your buyer where you are. So I'll send you that interview guide and then I can also send you my quite rudimentary pain mapping uh template as well. Did my internet break up? No. No, we still got you. Yeah, sounds good. Lots of resources to share. Sweet. Okay. Um, we'll leave it there then. Awesome.