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Mark Evans: It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark. In a crowded SaaS landscape where new products literally launch every day and attention spans are shorter than ever, strong messaging isn't just important, it's essential. The best product in the world won't succeed if customers don't quickly understand what it does, why they should care, and as important, how you're different or better. That's where Chris Silvestri comes in. Chris helps b to b SaaS companies refine their messaging so they can stand out, connect with the right audience, and drive real business results.
With a background in copywriting, UX design, and conversion optimization, he blends psychology, storytelling, and strategy to craft messaging that resonates. As the founder of Conversion Alchemy, he works with startups and growth stage companies to turn confusing or forgettable positioning, and there's lots of that out there, into clear, compelling narratives. If your messaging isn't working as well as it should, Chris has some great insights on how to fix it. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Chris.
Guest: Hey, Mark. Thanks so much for having me.
Mark Evans: You started your career as a software engineer before moving into conversion copywriting. It's an interesting career shift. What sparked that transition, and how has your technical background shaped the way you approach messaging and positioning for SaaS companies?
Guest: How did I shift from software engineering into marketing, basically, and copywriting and messaging? What a lot of people think when they hear, are you a software engineer and transition to copywriting for SaaS specifically? They think you know the software space perfectly. The SaaS space is where you were living before. The thing that a lot of people don't know is that my type of software engineering was in a totally different field.
It was software engineering in industrial automation. So think of those automatic assembly machines that assemble components in factories. Right?
Mark Evans: Mhmm.
Guest: I used to program those so that operators could use these machines and and and basically replace human labor. That was my job. I was programming this. It was mostly logical programming, lots of sensors to wire with the software to understand how those sequences moved and combined. The way that I shifted from that was totally random.
I wanted to play more with my band. I'm a drummer. I decided, let's look for something to make money online that's flexible, that allows me to travel, and I don't have to wait three months to take time off to to go on tour. And I stumbled on copywriting. The thing that I enjoyed most about copywriting was the psychology behind the decision making process.
It's not only about writing words or designing websites. It's about understanding people as the thing that actually grabbed me still to this day, makes me passionate about it.
Mark Evans: You got experience working with more than 50 b to b SaaS companies like Moz. What are some of the biggest mistakes that you see companies making with their messaging? From the outside looking in, and someone who spends a lot of time focused on positioning and messaging, there is an awful lot of confusing, generic, undifferentiated messaging. And I wonder how could a company operate like that in an ultra competitive landscape? How could the head of marketing, or the CEO for that matter, live with messaging that doesn't differentiate, that doesn't motivate or inspire prospects to at least check out what they're doing?
Instead, they're running with one hand tied behind their back. You can run, but certainly not as fast. Why do they struggle with bad messaging? Is it ignorance? Is it they don't care?
Do they think that their product is good enough? What are the reasons behind bad messaging?
Guest: Why they struggle with bad messaging? It's a great question. I think it's very nuanced, contrary to what a lot of people think. You mentioned, are they passionate about their products, their messaging? It's actually the opposite.
A lot of my clients are super passionate about their products, whether it's the marketing department, sales, or the founder especially. I think the main problems that I'm seeing, it's first, there's a lack of alignment between teams. So whether it's sales teams, marketing, founder, sometimes support as well. There's a lack of alignment in terms of messaging. And this I can tell you an example of this that happened recently.
So I've been working with this SaaS based in France, but they recently got acquired by the by a private equity firm. So you can imagine someone comes in, basically buys them out, and now you have two completely different teams that need to synchronize and agree on how to say what they do and for who they do it. So our job as messaging experts, copywriters, it's to come in and and show them and and have all their knowledge come to the surface, bubble up to the surface so that everyone in the team realizes, oh, is this really what we're about? Okay. This is the way that we should say it.
Because otherwise, teams have a hard time communicate that someone says what they do in a completely different way than someone else, so you need that kind of alignment internally, I think. Another reason it's which actually stemmed from this is the they don't have a clear positioning and messaging strategy. A lot of people think about copywriting as just, okay. I'm gonna sit there. I'm gonna write or I'm gonna use this brand voice guidelines, and that's done.
But the thing is, yeah, unless you do the work at the surface, which is the positioning strategy, which is basically saying what you do, who you do it for, and how you do it in a unique, better, differentiated way. Unless you know that, everyone in the team knows that. And unless you turn all of that into a messaging framework, which is how then you say all of it, You writing copy, it's impossible, or you're just guessing. Right? Or you're just prompting ChatGPT asking, hey.
Write me this landing page. I think that's Right. That that's what a lot of companies are doing nowadays. They need that kind of foundational work. Another reason is they're copying competitors.
So it happened a lot of times when I jump into new projects. For example, I had this in a very crowded space, the data data integration quality space. This company, I jumped in, and they showed me, okay. This is our v one beta messaging that we think of using. Right?
Then I go and look at all their competitors. We usually do a competitor analysis to contrast the different messaging, and it was exactly the same claims. And then we going into the positioning and messaging work that I've described before, that's when you actually realize, okay. All of the other competitors are saying the same thing. So how are we different?
Right? So that's the other thing. Finally, probably one last mistake that I see them making, it's that they're even if they have a good positioning messaging strategy, that's set in stone, which means that they don't rework it when there are certain triggers, which I think you should typically revisit, rework your positioning messaging strategy either when there's a major major market change or maybe new competitors pop up, or you have a product Pivo that you want to look into and adjust for, or worst case, like every six to twelve months, you should probably revisit your strategy.
Mark Evans: Great advice, and something that I advocate for because positioning is very fluid. It's very dynamic, and same for messaging. It's not written in stone. Just wanted to circle back with your comment about competitive undifferentiation, and the tendency to say what every other competitor is saying. And there's the old saying that it's a lot of It's easier to run with the buffalos, and run off the cliff, than it is to stand up by yourself.
It's hard to zig when everybody else is zagging. No one ever made a mistake buying IBM. There is less risk involved when you're not saying something different. Your CEO is not gonna point to the head of marketing and go, what are you doing? Everybody else says this, and you're saying that.
Is it a fear of risk? Is it a lack of being courageous, or creative, or bold? What undermines companies when it comes to their messaging and the fact that they sound like everybody else? And I run into it.
Guest: The reason or reasons why a lot of companies tend to copy their competitors is, yes, some of it, I think it's they don't want to risk it, especially, you know, in b two b, you might think, oh, yeah. It's all about the company. It's all about, like, logically, but it's also about, like, the personal side. You know, like, you you might risk your job if something goes wrong. So that's that's one factor.
But I also think it sometimes what I'm seeing, it's lack of knowledge about how to turn a lot of the research data into actual differentiated, crystallized messaging. Because a lot of the clients that I'm working with, when I ask them, hey. Can you share past research they've conducted? A lot of them have really good survey data. Maybe they have a lot of sales calls or recordings or Gong recordings so we can look at those and understand.
But they don't actually put all of that data into practice. They don't they don't operationalize the data, which is a shame because when we jump in and we listen to all those sales calls, it's gold. Every everything that customers say on on calls or interviews that we run, you can extract a lot of great voice of customer that you can use to to actually do that differentiation work that competitors are probably not doing.
Mark Evans: The other challenge for a lot of B2B SaaS companies when it comes to messaging is that they're trying to appeal to decision makers and end users. Often, they have different mandates. A decision maker, for example, is looking to scale or reduce expenses. Bottom line matters to them. The user, the person in the trenches, is looking for something that allows them to do their jobs easier or faster.
And sometimes their goals are different. They're trying to work towards this common good, but their goals are different. How do you create that message market fit where what a company says can appeal to different audiences, different types of people within the buying process, but aligns them in the same way. It's a challenge to make sure that people get what they need, but there's a common story that they're telling to the marketplace.
Guest: How do you get to message market fit? The the way that I define it, it's joining the conversation already happening in your prospect's mind, which is it's contrary to what a lot of people think. People don't land on your website and want to know exactly what you do. They they already have some kind of conversation or ideas or pain points, desire outcomes in their minds, and they want to see those matched on the page as soon as they land. And then, okay, if that works, then they're gonna scroll.
So in order to find that out, I always say the biggest component of a messaging project, which sometimes startles clients, is that is 70% of the work is the research. So the way that I divide, actually prioritize research, so I actually have a system for prioritizing research for my clients, it's dividing it into three layers, let's call it. We have the first layer, which I call the the the surface layer, let's say. It's what what users say. And if you don't have this data, it's the easiest, fastest data to collect, which is looking at review websites online, looking at other competitors' websites.
Maybe you have already have surveys, NPS surveys that you can look at. So anything that's already available that tells you, okay, this is this is how our customers, whether it's end users or decision makers, this is how they speak. And we could use it mirror mirror it on the website. That's already a lot of the good work. The second layer, it's the kind of the structural layer, let's say, which in my case, I really associate with the UX work that I do.
And this is what users do on the website. So to understand this, you look at how they navigate through the website, maybe you have heat maps, user interaction data installed on websites so you can understand the the patterns that they go through. You can understand the the user flow through the website pages, so that's super important as well because you have to know when to present what content to them. The final layer is the deeper layer. This is why users act.
And you get this data by doing the hard work, which is interviewing customers or running your own surveys. But but there's also nuanced aspect to this, which is not really asking them about when you do interviews, you you don't ask them, hey. What do you like about this product? What could we do better? Okay.
That's all good. But what you need to understand here is the decision making process. And that's Mhmm. What tells you, okay. This is where we need to differentiate our messaging for daily users, for example, from check signers or from managers.
So all of those little nuance differentiations, you understand them by doing by going through these three layers that give you much more insightful and useful data that you can use.
Mark Evans: Great insight. One of the things that I am really curious about when it comes to positioning and messaging is understanding why someone would change how they're doing their jobs on a day to day basis, because change is challenging, it's daunting. Some people look at change and simply say, I don't wanna change. I like the tools that I have, even though they're not perfect. In fact, they could be far from perfect.
And change is intimidating because it means learning new ways of doing things. I guess one of the obvious questions here is how do you inspire, encourage, educate someone that about what's possible, and that change can be a a very positive thing as opposed to something to be afraid of.
Guest: For example, we write a page for a website. There's a couple of section, kind of a specific flow that we go through, and always towards the end of the page, I always think of it as the anxiety reducing section of the page, which helps, Jessing, exactly as you said, the the shifting costs, the shifting costs that people incur in obviously considering another solution. And to understand that, obviously, in our research customer interviews, we ask those questions. Like, we ask when you were evaluating to current customers. When you were evaluating the product, were you considering alternatives?
What did you like about those? What you didn't like? And then after you picked the product, were you still evaluating those to understand what the retention patterns are as well? So that's super important. And a lot of the the work that you would do in that anxiety section shift switching cost reduction section, it's also including social proof.
They need to identify with the exact social proof that you place on the website. So if they see that you are writing for a CMO, if they see a testimonial from another CMO or a case study that speaks to the exact either use case or specific problems that they had, that's super helpful. But another thing is going deeper into, for example, the use cases. So if they see that they can realize a specific use case that they need much better with this, with your product than they can do with their current solution, then the switch almost becomes automatic. Right?
If the price makes sense, like, those come later at the stage. But, yeah, I think it's super important. It's a great point to make sure that you address those switching costs.
Mark Evans: I wanna go back to a point that you made about research, and that 70% of the work that you do is behind the scenes.
Guest: Yeah.
Mark Evans: It's grunt work, it's necessary work, but often companies will look at a positioning or messaging exercise, and they'll see the deliverables, and a reaction may be, that's it? That's all I get? You're charging me all this money, it takes all this time, and at the end of the day, the deliverables appear to be minimal. Don't mean to undermine what we do, but a lot of people are looking for outcomes and results, and they often think that I'm gonna get this big deck with lots of great insight, and my website's gonna be completely overhauled, and it's gonna be amazing, but often that's not the case. How do you educate customers and prospects about your process, and the fact that a lot of the stuff that happens is sort of operates underneath the surface?
It's kinda like watching a duck on a lake. The duck looks really calm, and cool, and collected, but underneath the surface, it's furiously moving its feet because there's so much happening. So what is that education process when it when people ask you how you work and what they get?
Guest: Yeah. So how how do I educate clients on my process for positioning and messaging? I actually it's actually interesting that a client mentioned to me the the duck syndrome speaking to one of their customers so the the their customer's situational problem. But yeah. So the the biggest thing, I think, it's actually making it clear from the get go that and I always do it.
Like, I always tell them, we are going to get to the positioning exercise probably after, like, in a month and a half after we've done all the research. And before even sending them doing the positioning exercise, we deliver a research report or report of findings and insights so they they can see the work that we've done to get to that point. But the other thing, it's also making it clear that there's a great book that I one of my favorite books that's called The User The User Illusion. And a phrase in the book says, making things easy is hard. Clarity requires depth.
And that's the that's the gist of the whole positioning exercise. In order yeah. It's a one pager at the end of the day, but those words are are basically the the words and the structure that's gonna carry you over through all the work that's after, whether it's the messaging framework and the copy that comes after. So once you have that clear together with the team, that's the the the plus value. It needs to be clear to everyone, and that's what what's missing in most companies.
Once that's clear, then writing comes almost natural.
Mark Evans: We've talked about how a lot b to b SaaS messaging is generic, uninspiring, looks and feels like every other competitor in the marketplace. One of the challenges that a lot of companies have is trying to define differentiation. In ultra competitive marketplaces, differentiation is crucial. What strategies do you use to help brands stand out, and avoid sounding like everybody else? How do you help them discover how they're unique, or different, or better?
And what are some of the challenges that you run against when you present an idea of differentiation, and a client will go, no, that's not us. We don't operate like us, because they're so inherently biased. They've lived with their messaging for so long that they have a hard time seeing what's over the horizon.
Guest: The way that I help my clients understand their differentiation, it's first, just the the simple fact of being an outsider helps me and them get more of an objective view on the company, the product, the customers. That in self is super valuable, I think. But the other couple of things that I do, one is understanding and kind of extracting from them because sometimes they keep it hidden, extracting their point of view, especially from the founder. If the founder scratch their own itch or they've been in the industry for a long time and they have a very strong point of view or insight into the industry that's super valuable to differentiate the the messaging. A lot of times, the product might be pretty much the same as other companies, but what differentiates it, it's the approach and the point of view.
Where are they coming from? How are they delivering their product in a way that's different from other companies? Sometimes it's very subtle, but if you can find it, it's very helpful. The other thing, it's finding their unique voice. Sometimes what resonates is not really what you say, the features, the benefits, but it's simply the style, the different voice in which you say it, especially if it matches specific values that your customers share with you.
Another thing, you're looking at competitors but not copying competitors. The way that we do it, we do competitor analysis, and we analyze website competitors' websites messaging, dividing it into these three areas. This the last one. But before that, you have the value section, and then up above that, the motivation section. Understanding websites this specific way is how you understand what level of awareness and sophistication are my competitors targeting.
Should we target that same angle with our messaging or maybe slightly different? Even if your product is not that different, selecting a different approach or targeting mechanism for your messaging can help differentiate you. Finally, probably the easiest thing is that a lot of companies either don't do or don't do well, it's using voice of customers I mentioned. So looking at reviews, looking at your customer interviews, any specific messaging that sounds sticky, let's say, messaging that sounds like an headline that you could just take verbatim and use. That's super helpful because a lot of company just use the usual jargon, especially enterprise company.
So when you start writing conversationally in b to b, which is much less common than b to c, then you have a much easier time differentiating.
Mark Evans: It would be remiss if I didn't ask you about AI because it seems to impacting everybody everywhere, and it's certainly changing the way that content and messaging are creative, and for that matter, a lot of website content, you can tell, is being generated by ChatGPT. How are you leveraging AI tools to enhance your copywriting and conversion strategies as well as the research that you do to sort of underpin the work that you do for clients?
Guest: So how do I use AI in my work? I say everywhere. I've I pro I started probably two years ago when chat GPT three was out. Start experimenting from the get go, seeing what I used to get, understanding at the beginning that it sucked, didn't work, then slowly integrating it into my processes from every area, research, strategy, writing. A lot of people say that AI can't write copy, but the the reason is that AI doesn't have the context.
The things that I think are more important for you to use AI for messaging copy is to give the AI as much context as possible right from the beginning of the project. When I start a project, for example, for a client, I use a couple of different tools, but everything that I share with the clients, so even even the first strategy session before signing the proposal, I shared it with AI. From that, we I shared the proposal, then we go into kickoff call. All the transcripts I shared with AI, obviously censored anything that needs to be covered. As long as I go through the project, the AI knows everything about the project, and I can ask it questions.
I can strategize with AI. So it starts building up a knowledge base that it can use almost as if you were an assistant. Right? So that's one way that I use it. Then the other way typically happens at the end of the project.
Once I have the strategy in place, all my documents crystallized from real research, then I create a separate, yeah, your chat that could be considered almost a simulation of a customer persona. A lot of people call it synthetic personas. There's different ways of calling it. The useful thing about this is that, especially if you're a startup, maybe you don't have a lot of research data, you don't have the time or the money to conduct a lot of research. Using an AI persona like this, as long as you direct it with some of the strategy work that you've done, it's really helpful because even if you don't get to a 100% accuracy, you can at least get to that 80% that can inform an initial strategy or copy, and then you can iterate from there.
You can literally have a conversation with AI like as if you were having, like, a focus group with a customer. So you can ask question about, hey. What objections would you have if you stumble on this piece of copy? Or you stumble on this headline and these bullet points. What do you think?
Tell me your thought process. And then you can adjust based on what they say. You can literally simulate the AI going through an entire page of copy. And the feedback is pretty accurate if you do all the work upfront.
Mark Evans: I think we have similar approaches. I mean, I'm I've been writing. I'm a writer, a reporter for a long, long time, and I have an antagonistic or a ambivalent relationship with AI because people think that AI replaces writers. And in some respects, AI is getting smarter and smarter, and it it will replace a lot of the writing. There's some writing that AI will not be able to replace.
But over time, over the last, since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, I've become more comfortable with it, and embraced it as a key part of how I do my job. Like you, I do a lot of customer research. I do customer interviews, listen to Gong calls, talk to Everything is documented, and I will feed it into a custom GPT for every client. I've got a living, breathing creature that knows my client inside out. When I asked for strategic and tactical guidance, it's not going out into the ether.
It's, in some respects, working off the documentation that It's I've given almost like Frankenstein. You're trying to control the beast. So it's a really interesting battle. Admittedly, as marketers, we have to embrace AI. We can't fight this fake battle and recognize that it's gonna do a lot of the work.
I don't think it's gonna replace marketers, but it'll be a great tool as we move forward. There are, however, some marketers that feel that AI generated content lacks originality and emotional depth. How do you balance AI driven insights with human creativity to craft messaging that converts and resonates?
Guest: Yeah. So I think as I as I said, the the way to actually have AI write well is to actually give it all the context that it needs. The way that I do it, for example, once we have all the strategy documents, we share them with I typically use Cloud, which is much better at writing. Think it's more human sounding, let's say. With the team, we use another tool.
It's called TeamGPT where we can collaborate. We can share chats with the same project knowledge so that we can basically have the same voice. I could literally give it to a client, and and they could write the copy that that I write sometimes. Thing is if you don't do the work at at the source, AI will always write content that's jargon, AI jargon, JCPT jargon. The way that I see it is having that human in the loop in the sequence that always knows what stage you're at at the project, can intervene, and can edit.
Almost our jobs as copywriters have become almost more of like editors rather than writers. A lot of the first drafts of AI is pretty good at giving them, but then you have to jump in with your own knowledge of the research and and know where to edit, what to edit, how to edit. That's key. The next step is going to be agentic workflows. For example, having an entire team of agent, every AI agent will probably do a specific targeted job, which helps a lot with the limits that current commercial AIs like Jajapiti, Cloud have limits in terms of context response limit.
That's probably gonna be the next step. I'm already kinda working on it, on implementing some of those.
Mark Evans: Wanted to ask you about usability. We can craft words and messaging that say the right things, that make an impact, that capture people's attention, and show that we're empathetic to their goals and challenges, but obviously, UX plays a important role in getting people to take that next step. Making them Making it clear that here's what we want you to learn, but now here's what we want you to do, which is the one two punch of messaging and conversion. How do usability and conversion go hand in hand? How do you incorporate UX and usability testing into your messaging process to ensure there's a seamless experience for prospects?
Guest: Yeah. The way that I integrate UX with copywriting messaging, it's it actually stems from my work. I use I also used to work at a usability testing startup. I did that for two years as a UX lead. So and actually, now that I think about it, a lot of the work that I used to do as a software engineer, I used to design this the the human machine interfaces.
Right? So the this touch screen displays that operators use to command the machines. So from there, I think I learned a lot of putting yourselves in your customers' shoes or in your users' shoes. And I started applying usability testing not only for understanding how people use a product, but more towards the website, actually, website experience. How do they consume the copy?
Yes. You can you can do it looking at heat maps, user recordings with something like Hotjar. But with usability testing, especially if you can find the right tester pool, so people that are pretty close to your target audiences, demographics, and psychographics, then you can ask questions about, okay, I hey. Are you where would you go to find this specific information? Or everything about expectations.
So what do you expect to happen before you click this button? And then when they click the button, ask them, do you think that the experience matched your expectations? So all of that work actually not only helps you helps inform the way that you lay out the website design, but also the way that you lay your copy out on the website. So a lot of the work that we do is wireframing. So we turn, for example, copy that's in Google documents into wireframes, sometimes even clickable wireframes so the clients can navigate through the Figma files.
They can see, okay. From this page, I'm clicking this button. What's the next page? It's the is the UX It's called the UX sent matched from where they are to where they land. And especially when you have a lot of pages for b to b SaaS, you have you can have a lot of use case pages, solutions pages.
It's important to understand the decision making process and the dynamics of all different users, as you mentioned, the the users, the decision makers, check signers. How do they go to a web site? What pages do they need to see, and in what sequence? So we try to understand all of those with usability testing.
Mark Evans: Earlier, you mentioned The User Illusion as a must read book. Are there other books that you would recommend? I'm curious about your toolset. What software do you use to do your job? I think a lot of people are curious about trying new things.
What books do you read, or would you recommend people read, and what tool would you recommend I as have one.
Guest: One second. Is a really good book that I started. It's called The Economic Naturalist. Why Economics Explains Almost Everything. And it explains all the different ways that simply framing things influences our decisions and how it's already happening all around us.
It's a really good one. I've never heard a lot of people talk about. I think it was recommended by Rory Sutherland, Ogilby, UK. As far as tools for AI, one, not a lot of people know or use. It's Gemini 1.5 Pro, but I don't use it through the normal interface.
When you Google Gemini, you get to a normal interface, which is kind of like ChatGPT. I use it through Google AI Studio. You can use Gemini, their paid model, 1.5 Pro, their two flash. You can use it for free with Google AI Studio. I've been using it for free for a year and a half now, which is crazy to me.
The great thing about that is the huge context window, which is 2,000,000 tokens compared to JCPT who's got 200,000. You can literally upload dozens, hundreds of transcripts, interview transcripts, all the the research documents. I the maximum that I've reached for a client project was 700,000 over, like, the 2,000,000 total. So Mhmm. I didn't even use half of it.
So that's a good tool. The other one I mentioned, TeamGPT, but recently, it's only enterprise. I don't know why they shifted their model. The other one, yeah, I would recommend Cloud. If you want to start writing with AI, create a Cloud project inside Cloud with your research documents.
It's not a huge amount of space. But if you have good synthetized research documents, then it's pretty good at maintaining the same voice and tone.
Mark Evans: This has been a great conversation. We've covered a lot of ground. Where can people learn more about you and what you do?
Guest: You can find me on conversionalchemy.net, which is our website. I have a newsletter and a podcast as well, you want to check those out, and I'm mostly on LinkedIn if you want to connect.
Mark Evans: Thanks, Chris, and thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you found this conversation valuable, let's keep the momentum going. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Drop a quick rating, and share it with your network. Your support helps more people discover the show.
Running a b to b or SaaS company with a million to $10,000,000 in revenue and looking for strategic guidance that fuel your growth? Let's talk about how I can help you sharpen your positioning, optimize your marketing, and scale with confidence as a fractional CMO and strategic adviser. Reach out via email, mark@markup.ca, or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you soon.
