Grow Revenue Faster with Messaging Chapter 6 Alignment, Playbooks, and Onboarding Salespeople ramp faster, sell bigger deals, and close deals faster when they hear one another pitch and share best practices amongst their teams. Messaging Alignment Messaging alignment starts from the top. When Jim Steele started at InsideSales.com, the first sales enablement initiative he did was get every customer-facing employee to record their two-minute elevator pitch. He did his first. Here’s the scorecard he used to get everyone on message and aligned in a time frame of hours versus months: 1. Start with a catchy opening or industry stat. 2. Have a clear what-we-do statement. 3. Demonstrate value. 4. Share a compelling customer proof point. 5. Close with an open-ended question. 6. Keep it short. Jim Steele instantly aligned his entire organization and created a culture where sharing best practices was encouraged. Magic. Another executive and friend of mine, Bob Horn, joined a startup named Cognitive Scale. I’m inspired by the innovative work he did to crowdsource Cognitive Scale pitches and messaging. Starting with the CEO, every executive recorded an elevator pitch. Again, we see that messaging alignment starts at the top. Then, every product manager recorded how to sell the product. The short videos were shared with everyone in the company. Everyone reviewed the videos and shared their thoughts on the content. The short videos, along with peer reviews, made it fun, educational, and engaging for the whole company. The videos then served as templates for everyone to follow. In a matter of days, Cognitive Scale had crowdsourced new innovative messages, while getting the whole company on the same page about how to pitch and how to position each product suite. The other benefit of this method is that everyone practiced their pitch and improved together. This is the kind of knowledge sharing and learning culture that wins, every time.