Sales Messaging Effectiveness
Challenge
When a sales team is challenged with a small pipeline, has deals that are getting “stuck”, or is suffering from a high loss rate, these problems are often blamed on “poor sales execution”. However, when you look deeper, it often turns out the problem is not actually execution related - e.g. the sales team is NOT guilty of a lack of activity, poor follow-through, or other effort-related issues. Instead, we often find the cause to be poor sales messaging. The sales reps are not engaging the right buyers with relevant and compelling value propositions, and are not prepared to clearly differentiate their solution from the competition.
Opportunity
Sales messaging is not a "nice to have"; it is core to sales success. Yet many organizations focus on branding and corporate messaging, but overlook the need to provide the sales team with sales messaging required to engage the right buyers with the right value proposition at the right point in the sales process. Sales messaging has a significant impact three key areas:
- Creating Opportunities: Delivering compelling value propositions to business leaders, especially at the C-level, can create new sales opportunities, accelerate existing ones, and overcome obstacles generated by lower-level buyers.
- Winning Sales: Understanding the relative strengths and weaknesses of both your own and your competitor's offering is important, but it is even more valuable to be able to connect them to a specific competitive strategy. And implement the strategy by influencing decision criteria and setting traps for the competition.
- Changing Behavior: One of the most overlooked aspects of deploying effective sales messaging is the impact on selling behavior. By preparing reps to have conversations with business buyers and to differentiate the business impact of their solution, they are able to lead a completely different sales process. It becomes much easier for reps to take a consultative approach, build a business case, and establish a strong negotiation position.
The value of strong sales messaging cannot be ignored. Even a modest investment in developing and deploying sales messaging will yield significant sales results.
Assessment
If you think ineffective sales messaging may be impacting sales performance, the good news is that it can be addressed relatively quickly. Below is a brief diagnostic survey that can give a quick sanity check on your sales messaging, and provide some recommendations on how to address the most critical gaps.
Answer the questions and press Submit, and you will immediately see the results and recommendations.