The Messaging Canvas: How to Build B2B SaaS Messaging that’s Impossible to Ignore

"I don't care what the website or your messaging guide says. Here's what works with customers..."

That's your top sales rep, taking their precious time to explain why the enablement materials they asked for are collecting dust. 

And they’re not alone in doing it by feel: your customer success (CS) team has invented their own explanations for features, and your product team just launched another update that nobody knows how to talk about.

Meanwhile, marketing is judged by revenue while being given little to no control over what buyers end up hearing during the sales conversation. (This results in them getting yelled at, on occasion.)

Sounds familiar?

And marketing didn’t even get the worst deal. Your buyers did.

Your buyers are the ones forced to do all the hard work of piecing together what you sell and how it fits their needs. (If it does at all.) 

Instead of experiencing a coherent story across the 100+ touchpoints in modern B2B sales cycles, they see a jumbled mess. Your brand makes one promise in your ads, a handful of different ones on your website, and none of them match with what your sales team says once a prospect actually books that demo call!

No wonder deals take forever to close. Your prospects are spending half their time trying to figure out if your colleagues are talking about the same product or work at the same company because the language they’re using is all over the place. They’re confused by the mixed signals.

Sure, you’re getting by, and deals get closed. But it all works despite the misalignment. Before you know it, you’re knee-deep in mutual frustration and marketing’s rocking the "woo-woo button pushers" label. 

We’ve all chuckled at a “marketing doesn’t impact revenue haha” joke at least once. (I know I have.) Except most people’s close rate would dip if you removed all the brand, website, content, ad, and email work. (Much like poverty, it hits slowly, then suddenly.)

Why Marketing Fails to Bridge the Gap

Marketing has the skills to bridge the gaps between the departments and unify the messaging, but they're not enabled to do it. 

Other customer-facing departments are enabled to do the talking to the buyers, but without a coherent messaging strategy, buyers end up hearing different things at every new touchpoint. 

Customer-facing people don't see the problem because their own messaging works in their wheelhouse, and other departments aren't their problem. (Not really.)

And even if it was, it's not like CS gets a say in sales talk tracks anyway.

This isn't just a communication problem. It's a revenue ops problem.

Most B2B SaaS companies don’t explicitly develop messaging. Instead, they cover themselves in honey, then roll in a pile of competitor websites and not-always-sound copywriting advice. 

Some end up saying the same thing to such a degree that you can’t tell if they’re bad on purpose. Chances are, you know at least two of your direct competitors claiming they’re “number one” or “industry-leading.” (Ironically, the actual number one doesn’t even see them as competition.)

The companies who do work on messaging often assume that whatever gets onto the website will automatically:

• resonate with their ideal customer profile (ICP) 

• get universally used across all company departments.

Neither should be taken for granted. 

But since many marketers in charge of messaging suffer from the getting-yelled-at PTSD, they’re under pressure to please their boss, not their buyer. 

So sales, product, and retention enablement materials—the ones with the “looks good” stamp of approval from the higher-ups—get weird looks from the only people at the company talking to buyers every day.

Sales and CS aren’t “being difficult” for not using the marketing materials marketing gives them. They’re optimizing for what they know, and most are not enabled to change the messaging outside of their domain. (This is why marketing is its own area of expertise, rather than a sub-function of these other departments).

Marketing isn’t entirely at fault for it, either — they’re under pressure to impact revenue when given few tools to influence it directly. (Else they get the hose again.)

Still, marketers aren’t helpless the victims of the circumstances they’re being painted as.

Turning the mess of a word salad across your marketing into a coherent messaging that’s proven to resonate is very much doable. 

All it takes is a bit of empathy for your brothers and sisters in B2B, and for your buyers.

The Real Test of Good Messaging

Here's a radical idea: anyone who approves messaging should be required to go on a sales call using nothing but those messaging guidelines as their reference.

No improvising. No falling back on product knowledge. Just the approved language that's supposed to resonate with customers.

My guess: most executives would fail this test spectacularly. They'd stumble when a prospect asks a basic question not covered in the polished, executive-approved talking points. They'd realize that saying “supercharging revenue through the best-in-class synergy with AI” isn’t making people reach for their wallets, but run for the exit.

This is why we need a better process. One that creates messaging that works in the real world, not just in make-believe conversations. So anyone in your company—from the C-suite to the fresh-and-hungry SDR—could hold a sales conversation without confusing buyers or needing more therapy themselves.

The Messaging Canvas Framework

What we need to align our messaging is a framework that:

1. Forces you to build messaging from your customer's perspective, not yours;

2. Creates natural alignment between departments because it's built on evidence, not opinions;

3. Produces language that actually works in real customer conversations,

The Messaging Canvas is a four-part framework that does exactly that. It breaks down into four steps:

1. Define your ICP with uncomfortable specificity;

2. Map their activities and associated pains;

3. Connect your solution directly to those pains;

4. Prioritize value propositions based on data, not preference.

Section 1: Defining Your ICP

Most ICP definitions don't go deep enough. "B2B SaaS companies with 50-200 employees in North America" tells you almost nothing about who will buy your product and why. Chances are, the criteria above can mean any of these:

• your own company;

• your ideal buyers (some of them anyway);

• most of your direct competitors (good luck selling to those);

• some of your worst-fit customers;

• at least 13 companies that will never have a problem your product is solving.

The Messaging Canvas gets much more specific—9 required parameters across 3 groups—none of which involves their favorite pasta recipe or STD test results of their high school crush.

Here’s what you specify instead:

• Company type;

• Champion;

• Problem.

Company Type

You need to define:

• who you want to sell to (in specific terms);

• who you DON'T want to sell to (because it’s a waste of time);

• the unique qualifier that separates them.

For example, a B2B SaaS analytics platform might complete this section as:

"We want to sell to B2B SaaS companies with $5-50M ARR doing both PLG and SLG and struggle to connect product usage data with sales activity."

"We don't want to waste time selling to early-stage startups without established sales processes or enterprise companies with dedicated data teams building custom solutions."

"The unique qualifier is growing companies where the RevOps team is trying to create a unified view of customer behavior across product and sales interactions."

This level of specificity might feel uncomfortable—you're explicitly excluding potential customers—but that's exactly the point. You can’t develop effective messaging until you’re very specific, picky even, about who you’re trying to talk to.

And unless you enjoy talking to the Cult-of-the-TAM investors more than the customers who you want to ultimately fund your bottom line, you may find that filling the “who we don’t want to sell to” box has a freeing, or even therapeutic, effect on you. 

Champion

Next, identify exactly who at the company you're talking to:

• their job title/function (what they’re in charge of);

• the specific job they're trying to do (a literal line on their job description);

• how they're currently doing it.

Using our B2B SaaS analytics example:

"Our champion is the Head of Revenue Operations."

"Their job is to enable sales and success teams with actionable insights about how customers use the product, to help them prioritize accounts and improve conversion rates."

"Currently, they're cobbling together data from their product analytics platform, CRM, and customer success tool, usually in spreadsheets that are outdated as soon as they're created."

The main challenge is finding someone with enough empathy for the problem your product solves AND enough weight in the buying committee to advocate for you. 

If you go too high up the chain, you risk picking someone with a lot of deciding power, but the problem your product is solving isn’t high on their to-do list. That means that you don’t want to be picking the CEO as the champion in most situations.

If you go too low (e.g. individual contributors) you’re almost guaranteed to be talking to someone deeply impacted by the problem, but with little to no weight in the buying process. They may submit your product to the consideration set, but that’s where their power to influence the purchase decision ends.

Problem

The mistake many marketers make is reverse-engineering the problem statement from what their product does. Which is about as effective as trying to win the lottery, except the ticket is your engineering costs and the “jackpot” is winning a deal that doesn’t even cover a single developer’s salary. 

Instead, you should look at what you and your team know about the person you’ve just picked as your champion. This is the part where you:

• find the sales call recordings with these people;

• ask your customer-facing teams about them;

• go find the memes these people are finding funny (or sad).

Most importantly, imagine your product doesn’t exist yet. Because this isn’t about what your product is solving, it’s about where your ICP is hurting. 

Now define:

• how their current approach fails them (no sense in selling to them otherwise);

• why it fails (can’t be the champion’s fault!);

• what they end up with (the negative outcome).

Continuing our example:

"The problem is that data lives in different systems with different structures and no single source of truth."

"This happens because the company has added tools organically as they've grown, and each team has selected tools optimized for their specific function, not for cross-functional analytics."

"They end up with sales teams that can't prioritize accounts based on product usage, customer success teams that don't know which features to promote to which customers, and executives who lack visibility into the end-to-end customer journey."

Wrapping up Your ICP

A sample ICP section of your messaging canvas.

You've done real work!

After you make conscious decisions about describing the 9 facets of who your ICP is—or isn't—and what miserable situation they want to get out of, you're much better equipped to develop messaging that's clear and compelling to that specific audience.

But we're just getting started. Most companies stop here, pat themselves on the back, and then wonder why their messaging still falls flat with customers. But this isn’t your full messaging, it’s just a foundation for it.

Section 2: Mapping Activities and Pains

Now it's time to get your hands dirty. If Section 1 was the diagnostic, Section 2 is where we cut into the patient. (Metaphorically, of course!)

Your champion doesn't just have "a problem." They have specific, daily frustrations that make them want to slam their laptop shut and become a part-time chicken farmer in rural Estonia. They have activities they hate doing. They have workarounds they've cobbled together that barely work.

Your job? Extract that information and turn it into messaging gold.

Create a table with four columns:

• Activity (what they do);

• Current way (how they do it);

• Pain (what's frustrating);

• Severity (1-5 scale).

A sample blank table for recording activities and pains.

Now, break down their job-to-be-done, that line in their job description that you picked in Section 1, into 4-6 core activities that your champion does or is responsible for. Doesn’t matter if they do it daily or quarterly, as long as it’s relevant to their success in the role.

Next, imagine you’re on a long discovery call with that champion, who works at the company you would love to have as a customer. You know it’s a fit because they’ve just described themselves and it’s word-for-word what your ICP definition says.

“So, you’re probably doing a lot of [activity], right?”

“Correct. Right now we do [current way] but it’s not great because [pain].”

Take the person who spends the most time talking to your champion—probably your top sales rep—and let them fill the table. Marketing can watch, but unless they’re spending as much time talking to prospects as Sales, they’re not making edits here. (Sorry, Marketing.)

A crucial part of this table is the Severity ranking. To make sure your new messaging resonates, you need to do your best to accurately estimate how badly that specific champion at that specific company is hurting from each pain.

Not how you or Marketing think about these. Not even how Sales or CS perceive this. But how the person on the other end of the conversation would rank this. Because remember, these scores reflect your customer's perspective, not yours. A 5 means “this keeps me up at night” — not “we think this is important.”

Also, it will serve you well to ruthlessly prioritize the scores. When we go through this part in the workshops with clients, the question that gets most people unstuck is:

“If you couldn’t repeat the scores, and something had to be a one, what would it be?”

If everything is important, nothing is.

Finally, the more direct customer quotes you use in this table, the better your messaging will be. Have your call recordings at the ready.

This is how the table can look like for our B2B SaaS analytics example:

Sample of what a filled out activities and pains table could look like.

Wrapping up Activities and Pains Map

This exercise forces you to think from your customer's perspective. You're not starting with your product features - you're starting with what your customer is trying to accomplish and what's getting in their way.

Your goal is to make this table painfully relatable — so much so that your champion would start frantically looking for the “I’m in this photo and I don’t like it” button if they saw it.

Are you feeling bad for your ICP yet? Don’t be. You’re about to save them from these woes.

Section 3: Mapping Your Solution

Only now—after deeply understanding your customer's world—do you bring your product into the conversation. In your new messaging, the product exists in service of the ICP and in response to their problem.

Your product isn’t the hero. Your product is Thor’s Mjölnir, it’s Corwin’s Grayswandir — your ICP is the hero wielding your product to overcome the obstacles in their way. 

Create a table with three columns:

• Feature

• Capability

• Wow factor

Blank table for mapping features and capabilities.

To fill this table, you have to continue the imaginary call with your ICP a bit further (or have a real one). For each activity and pain in the previous section, identify ONE feature that solves it:

“So, you’re probably doing a lot of [activity], right?”

“Correct. Right now we do [current way] but it’s not great because [pain].”

“That sounds… frustrating. With [feature], you can do [capability] without having to deal with [pain]. Would you like to see how?”

Just like the Severity ranking in the previous section, you want to assign the Wow factor scores based on how impressed your champion is when they see it, not how many digits are in your OpenAI/Anthropic invoice. 

At this stage, you can hand over the keyboard to marketing — they tend to have an eye for more concise and palatable ways to explain things. But whoever suggests using “supercharge” or “synergy” has to buy everyone pizza. (Yes, even internationally.)

Here’s what the table can look like:

Sample of what a filled out solution map table could could look like.

Wrapping up Solution Map

You’re almost done! You've shown exactly how you solve real problems. When prospects see this referenced in your messaging, they don't just understand your product—they feel seen.

This is the difference between “messaging” that sits in a forgotten 37-page PDF and messaging that closes deals. Your champion should think you've been shadowing their workday because you've nailed their struggles with such precision.

Now that you've mapped your solution to your customer's pains, it's time for the moment of truth — prioritizing your value propositions based on evidence, not opinion. This is where the framework truly shines.

Section 4: Prioritized Value Propositions

Now for the most powerful part, where you don’t do any of the work anymore. (Except elementary school math.)

Add the Severity score to the Wow Factor score, and you get a list of the most painful problems your product solves most impressively:

1. Churn Prediction Engine: 5 (Severity) + 5 (Wow) = 10

2. Unified Customer Data Platform: 4 (Severity) + 5 (Wow) = 9

3. Identify ready-to-expand accounts: 5 (Severity) + 3 (Wow) = 8

4. Feature Impact Analysis: 3 (Severity) + 4 (Wow) = 7

5. Customer Journey Analytics: 2 (Severity) + 2 (Wow) = 4

The highest-scoring combinations become your core value propositions, written in this format:

"You can now do [capability] using [feature] so that [good outcome] instead of [bad outcome]."

For our example:

"You can now identify at-risk accounts 90 days before renewal based on usage patterns using the Churn Prediction Engine, so that you can proactively intervene with struggling customers instead of relying on gut feelings and missing early warning signs."

This value proposition:

• Solves a real, painful problem (severity 5)

• Highlights a capability customers find impressive (wow factor 5)

• Uses simple, jargon-free language

• Connects to outcomes the customer cares about

Most importantly, it's not based on what your marketing team thinks is cool or what your CEO wants to emphasize — it's based on what your customers care about in real life.

In this final section, your job is to pick three top-ranking value props, and that’s it. (Well, mostly.)

As you rank your value propositions, watch for these common patterns: 

• Sometimes closely related features can be combined into a single stronger proposition. 

• If your numbers highlight a feature nobody's excited about, revisit your scoring — you've likely overindexed somewhere.

Wrapping up Prioritized Value Propositions

A sample value propositions map of your messaging canvas.

You’re done!

You’ve just successfully turned what you and your team know about your buyers into a set of coherent, clear, and compelling value propositions. And you did it without giving in to or bruising anyone’s ego.

How To Use The Messaging Canvas

After you’ve gone through this exercise, you’re looking at a slightly messy but glorious document with tables, boxes, and arrows — now what?

Before we think of the next steps, let’s remind ourselves of what we possess now.

First, you now have a detailed definition of your ICP that is:

• easy for anyone in the company to understand;

• intuitive to tweak in response to product/market changes;

• purposeful in each of its 9 facets.

Then, you have a map of your ICP’s core jobs-to-be-done that lets you:

• understand what your buyers prioritize when looking for solutions;

• spot the gaps in your product offer;

• avoid the tunnel vision of living in your product’s little bubble.

Next, you’ve reflected your ICP’s needs in your product’s features, with each one:

• certain to be in service of your ICP’s needs;

• paired with a clear and desirable capability it grants;

• indicating your ICP’s interest in the feature instead of your own.

Finally, all that work resulted in a set of value propositions that are:

• clear and compelling to your ICP;

• exactly the ones your product excels at;

• ready-to-use in literally any marketing context.

Phew — you did that. Well done.

View fullsize

How the messaging canvas fits together… isn’t this cool?

What now?

Here are some things my clients did with their canvas in the past 6 months alone:

• update their website—homepage, pricing, demo request page, etc.—with the new messaging, pre-qualifying the good-fit leads and disqualifying the bad ones

• add this messaging document to content briefs, enabling writers to produce content so good you’re linking to it away from the homepage 

• create new feature-specific landing pages using mostly the contents of the canvas, showing and framing core product features in a way that their ICP cares about

• use the verbiage from the messaging canvas inside LinkedIn ads, making their ICP in a very serious vertical feel seen, and getting them to engage

• produce conference booths that use the same messaging as the new website, grabbing people’s attention with clear and compelling promises instead of “supercharging”

A few peers have adapted the canvas to their own needs — a fractional Head of Content friend is using this very exercise to deliver hyper-aligned content programs, and another friend has used the canvas to fix social selling messaging for his clients.

Do you see a theme? Anything that your buyers can see from you across those 100+ touchpoints can work way better if everything’s pushing the same angle instead of a dozen different ones. 

And you’ve just created a perfect vehicle to enable your team to do all of the above, and more.

If you want to give this a go at your company, here's how to make it work:

1. Get the right people involved. You need input from someone who knows your buyers well, and someone who knows the product well. This may or may not be the same person.

2. Base it on evidence. Bring customer interviews, sales call recordings, support tickets, win/loss analysis. I’ve never seen a company find better verbiage than their customers use.

3. Be honest about what's working and what's not. If your current solution isn't solving a problem well, acknowledge that. If some features aren't that impressive, admit it.

4. Update it regularly. As your product evolves and market conditions change, your messaging should too. Revisit the framework quarterly. 

5. Use it as your source of truth. Your website, sales decks, email campaigns, product marketing – everything can pull from this document. If it's not solving one of the top pains you identified, question why you're talking about it.

Final thoughts: The Real Impact

The Messaging Canvas works because it prioritizes your customer's perspective over internal opinions. When everyone in your company uses the same customer-focused language:

• your buyers feel understood instead of marketed to

• your teams stop chucking the hot potato of blame around and work together instead

• your deals move faster because you're addressing actual buying criteria

Most importantly, you turn messaging from a woo-woo, “I heard it from a woman on the internet” thing into a clear, repeatable process.

Now, your turn — grab the template here and give it an honest shot.

If you like the way I think about messaging, consider hiring me to run a messaging sprint for your own B2B SaaS brand. I make even more (bad) jokes on calls!