Adaptive messaging

Adaptive Messaging

What this skill does

When a competitor moves, market shifts, or buyer language changes suddenly, the messaging response usually arrives too slow and too inconsistent — sales reps improvise, marketing scrambles, and three weeks later there's a battlecard nobody remembers.

This skill implements a 4-step framework — Detect → Decide → Draft → Deploy — that compresses competitive response from days to hours by clearly dividing labor between the PMM (judgment, strategy, sign-off) and AI (gathering, drafting, formatting).

When to invoke

• A direct competitor has launched a feature, pricing change, or campaign that affects your positioning.
• A market shift (regulation, technology, customer behavior) is changing buyer language.
• Sales is reporting a new objection at scale and needs a consistent answer fast.
• A PR/analyst event has shifted how your category is discussed.

Prerequisites

1. Read pmm-context.md first when available. If it is missing, offer to run pmm-context. If unavailable or declined, collect a minimum brief covering product, affected audience, current positioning, competitor or market event, proof points, claim boundaries, and voice. Mark assumptions and continue.
2. Check for existing positioning artifacts. If positioning was recently done (see positioning skill outputs), reference its unique attributes and trade-offs.
3. Ask the user: what triggered this? Get specifics: which competitor, what feature/move, what messaging they used, what your sales team is hearing.

The framework

Step	PMM action	AI role
1. Detect	Define the threat: what changed, why it matters, who is affected.	Inspect supplied evidence and public competitor pages when tools and permissions allow; summarize messaging, review/social reactions, and changes from prior positioning with sources.
2. Decide	Choose response posture: ignore, acknowledge, counter, reposition. Set boundary on what's true vs. spin.	Generate decision options with trade-offs. Surface internal context (recent positioning work, existing claims, customer commitments).
3. Draft	Approve angle, voice, claims. Sign off on accuracy.	Draft battlecard sections, objection handlers, sales talking points, internal FAQ, customer-facing statement (if needed). Generate variants by audience and channel.
4. Deploy	Brief sales/CS leaders. Decide cadence and channel. Schedule follow-up review.	Format for Slack, sales enablement tool, deck slide, email. Generate a 60-second video script for the sales kickoff video.

Workflow

Step 1 — Detect

Capture the trigger event in structured form:

## Trigger event
- **What:** [exactly what happened — feature launch, price change, repositioning, etc.]
- **Who:** [which competitor / market actor]
- **When:** [date, freshness]
- **Source:** [URL, screenshot, sales call recording, analyst note]
- **Their messaging:** [paste their words verbatim — do not paraphrase]
- **Reach:** [is this a soft launch or a global announcement?]
- **Strategic intent (your hypothesis):** [why are they doing this?]

Then ask: what's our exposure? Specifically:

• Which of our personas are most affected?
• Which deals in pipeline are at risk?
• Which of our claims are now harder to defend?
• Which of their previous weaknesses did this fix?

Step 2 — Decide

Choose a response posture. Show the user this matrix and ask them to pick:

Posture	When to use	Cost
Ignore	Their move doesn't actually affect your value or your ICP	Free — but only if you're right
Acknowledge	Their move is real but doesn't change your differentiation	Low — internal FAQ, light battlecard
Counter	Their move attacks your value; you have a defensible answer	Medium — battlecard, sales talk track, possible blog post
Reposition	Their move neutralizes your core differentiation	High — invoke positioning skill, this is no longer a messaging exercise

If user picks Reposition, stop this skill and invoke positioning. This skill handles the first three postures.

Step 3 — Draft

For Acknowledge / Counter postures, generate the response artifacts:

A. One-page battlecard

# Battlecard: Response to [Competitor] [Move]

_Internal use only — last updated [date]_

## The move
[2-3 sentences: what they did, when, why it matters]

## Our position
[Single-paragraph statement of how we frame this. Defensible, accurate, on-brand.]

## Talk track for sales (when a prospect brings it up)
- **Acknowledge:** "[Empathy + short factual recognition]"
- **Reframe:** "[Pivot to your unique value]"
- **Proof:** "[Specific evidence — customer story, metric, capability]"
- **Close:** "[Forward-motion question]"

## Top 3 objections + responses
| Objection | Short response | Deeper response |
|---|---|---|
| | | |

## What we DON'T say
[Important — explicit guardrails on claims that aren't true or that overclaim]

## Proof points to cite
- [Customer logo / quote]
- [Metric / data point]
- [Third-party validation]

## Escalation
[When to bring in the PMM or product team — e.g., "if prospect has signed POC with competitor"]

B. Sales Slack message

A 100-word post for the sales channel. Tone: confident, plainspoken, action-oriented. Includes link to battlecard.

C. Internal FAQ

5-8 questions sales/CS will get internally. Short answers, with links to deeper docs.

D. Optional: customer-facing statement

Only if the move is public and customers will ask. Keep short, factual, non-defensive.

Step 4 — Deploy

Tell the user the deployment checklist:

1. Brief: 15-minute call with sales/CS leadership. Walk through battlecard, take questions, get sign-off.
2. Distribute: Post in sales Slack, attach to relevant CRM deals, upload to sales enablement platform (Highspot, Seismic, Showpad).
3. Train: 30-minute optional drill on the talk track with 2-3 reps before scaling.
4. Track: Tag deals where the topic comes up. Review hit rate in 2 weeks.
5. Refresh: Schedule 30-day review. Competitive responses decay fast.

Outputs

The user should walk away with:

• Filled-in trigger event capture
• Chosen response posture with rationale
• Battlecard (markdown, ready to paste into sales enablement)
• Sales Slack post (copy-pasteable)
• Internal FAQ
• Deployment checklist with owners and dates

Quality bar

• Speed over perfection. A B+ response in 4 hours beats an A+ response in 4 days. Sales is already improvising.
• No spin. Anything the PMM wouldn't say to the competitor's face is removed. Sales reps lose trust in battlecards that overclaim.
• Sales-first language. This is internal copy. It must sound like how reps talk, not how marketing writes.
• Trade-offs visible. Always include "what we DON'T say." Reps need to know the boundary.

Anti-patterns to refuse

• Generating a battlecard before identifying response posture (skip step 2 = wasted effort)
• Generating customer-facing public statements as a default (only when truly warranted)
• Writing battlecards in marketing-deck voice instead of sales-conversation voice
• Skipping the "what we don't say" section
• Treating every competitor move as an existential threat