Don't Launch a Sales Messaging Initiative Without This List
Categories: Sales Messaging
At the end of a quarter, you are either feeling great about how your sales teams will end up or your struggling trying to pull anything you can out of the pipeline. If there is room for improvement, you may have a group of salespeople that are challenged with:
- selling on features rather than business value.
- inability to differentiate from the competition.
- selling too low in an organization.
- discounting in the final stages of the opportunity.
A well-defined sales messaging strategy drives these types of conversations, and ultimately results in overall sales productivity and bottom-line revenue impact. Without a framework to implement your sales messaging strategy, you run the risk of lagging sales, quarter after quarter.
Don't go another year dealing with the same problems. Instead, develop a framework that provides your sales team with the ability to call higher in organizations by effectively articulating value and differentiation. Here are six components that every sales messaging framework should have:
1. Value Drivers
Buyers want to know that their needs are understood and that you can provide them with the best possible solution. An effective messaging framework outlines the driving reasons a customer would choose to purchase your solution and aligns your company behind that value.
2. Differentiators
To truly differentiate your offerings from competitors, your sales reps should be armed with tools that help them clearly speak to your company’s differentiation in a way that maps to the desired buyer outcomes. A framework with well-defined differentiators helps your salespeople clearly articulate how you solve buyer problems better and differently than the competition.
3. Ability to Quantify Business Pain
Opportunities are won or lost on the ability for a salesperson to effectively uncover business pain and impact. When your salespeople ask the right questions, they'll be able to guide the sales conversation in such a way that the buyer can see how their admitted problems will be addressed. A sales messaging framework gives your entire team a valuable tool to quantify business pains by helping them execute an effective discovery process. This ability will enable them to call higher in prospect organizations.
4. Measurable Outcomes of Your Solutions
For a buyer to be truly convinced that your product or service can alleviate the business pain, he/she needs to be assured of the positive outcomes that come from working with you. If you’re going to articulate to buyers how your solution is better than your competitors, you need to make sure your proof points are solidly in place. A sales messaging framework should include these valuable references and make them consumable for the entire sales team.
5. Useful for the Entire Organization
An effective sales messaging framework should drive message consistency across the organization. . A framework that is customized and built with the right inputs intrinsically aligns your entire organization behind those value drivers. For example, your sales team will leverage marketing more because their collateral is built with the same customer language. Your services department better understands the promises made to the customer in the sales process
6. Reinforcement
The framework is only as strong as the leadership’s ability to reinforce it. An effective sales messaging framework should have a plan for executives to drive adoption and front-line managers to reinforce the concepts.
You can have all the pieces in place - a way to understand buyer pain points, a way to sync problems to solutions, a repeatable process for every member of your sales organization - But, without leaders who are willing to drive adoption of the framework with the sales team, then nothing will stick and any hope for sales results will fall flat.
