We’ve been sharing articles on the key components of any successful sales system … this month our focus is on your messaging. It doesn’t matter how many cold calls you make, how much you spend on marketing, or how many presentations your sales team makes – if your sales messaging isn’t relevant to the prospect and doesn’t clearly explain the value your product or service delivers, you won’t close any sales.
Your sales messaging plays a few roles, clearly explaining:
- What you do
- The unique value that you offer your target customers – (value proposition)
- How your company/product/service is different from the competition
- And, what to do next.
Your audience needs to view your product or service as both important to their success and unique. It should Illustrate how no other company can provide the value that you do. Finally, this messaging needs to be simple, memorable and presented from the customer’s point-of-view.
That’s a tall order, but if you get the messaging right, it will increase your conversion rate, shorten the sales cycle, eliminate the competition from contention, increases the average dollar sale, improve gross profit margins, and increase your sales team’s productivity. That’s what we all want, right?
Sales and Marketing Need to Work Together
An important thing to remember is that your sales messaging and your marketing messages need to work in concert. Why? In today’s internet environment, your customer has the power to control his or her own buyer’s journey. They conduct research, read reviews, watch videos, educate themselves on alternative solutions, and read comparison articles all before ever talking to one of your sales people. In fact, it is estimated that most buyers are 70-80% through the buyer’s journey before they ever talk to someone from your sales team.
This means a few things. First, you need to start the selling process online. Have you updated your website? Do you have content for every stage of the buyer’s journey available on your site, your blog, or social sites? If they can’t find you when they do a search for a solution, you may never be considered.
Second, the Internet is jam packed with information. It’s hard to get noticed with all of the clutter. The only way to stand out and attract the attention of your ideal target customer, is if your messaging is simple, relevant, and memorable. Your prospects need to feel like you understand their needs and can solve their problems.
Third, if you want to attract more prospects and fill your sales funnel with new leads, your marketing messaging and sales messaging need to be the consistent. Work together with your marketing team on the marketing and sales messaging to ensure that the prospect is exposed to your unique value from the awareness stage, all the way to closing the sale.
How to Define Your Unique Sales Messaging
There are a variety of methods and tools to help your organization define its unique value proposition. One of the sources I found incredibly useful is the book Conversations that Win the Complex Sale, by Eric Peterson and Tim Riesterer.
Building on some of the ideas in that book, I walk my clients through the following questions to help them arrive at their uniqueness.
- Who are your largest competitors and what are their strengths and weakness?
- What are your industry’s perceived standards?
- How does your business compare to these standards?
- How would your top customers describe how you rate against these standards?
- What clearly differentiates you or is there something you are working on that will differentiate you further in the near future?
- What three outlandish things can you do in your business that would “blow people out of the water?”
Use these questions with your Executive Team, as well as marketing and sales team, to identify your organization’s unique strengths and brainstorm ways to make your product or service even more valuable.
Once you have your unique value proposition defined you can start to craft your sales messages, remembering to answer what you do, who you do it for, why you are different, and how that helps them.
Want more insight and tools to help you identify your unique value proposition and turn that into more consistent sales opportunities?Give me a call at 630.649.4943 for a free, no obligation 45-minute consultation.
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