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Does Sales Messaging Fuel Your Product Life Cycle? It Should.

Written by: Michael Cannon

Article Overview: Business-to-business marketing professionals who create sales messaging for each stage in their product’s life cycle reap great rewards – consistently attaining 5% more market share, 5-10% better margins, and the bonuses and promotions that come with these numbers. However, many marketing professionals fail to optimize messaging for each phase of the cycle – rendering their sales tools and promotions ineffective. This leads to underproduction in Sales, as Sales must re-create marketing materials in order to sell. Closing the gap between Marketing’s offerings and Sales’ needs is easy if Marketing uses proper sales messaging.

Does Sales Messaging Fuel Your Product Life Cycle? It Should.

Most B2B marketing professionals know that their product has a life cycle. However, only a few adjust their sales messaging to reflect their product’s stage in the cycle Those who do create sales messaging for each stage in their product’s life cycle reap great rewards – consistently attaining 5% more market share, 5-10% better margins, and the bonuses and promotions that come with these numbers.

**The Gap**

The Top Three stumbling blocks that keep marketing professionals from adjusting their sales messaging to reflect their product’s place in the life cycle are:

1) A failure to differentiate sales messaging from other messaging types – such as brand messaging, positioning statements, value propositions, or product messaging.

2) A lack of knowledge about their buyer’s primary buying questions for each stage of the product life cycle

3) Not having the key skills to execute the messaging suggested by points one and two, as these concepts are not included in the curriculum of most marketing courses

These issues create a gap between what Marketing produces, and what Sales needs. In order for Marketing to become more relevant to Sales, and thus a key contributor in the revue generation process, this gap must be closed.

**The Impact of This Gap**

A Chief Marketing Officer Council Study recently revealed that:

“As much as 40% of a sales rep’s time is spent creating presentations,
customizing messaging and preparing for pitches.”

The implications of this are staggering. If marketing professionals don’t fill the gap – by creating great sales messaging and the associated tools – the sales team is literally forced to spend one to two days a week trying to close it themselves. We know this is true because sales reps are revenue optimized. They only spend time on tasks that they consider critical to getting an order. So, if they’re spending their time on recreating marketing messages and materials, then it’s because the materials as they stand don’t help them sell.

**The Value of Closing the Gap**

Many good things occur when you reduce or close this gap:

• The effectiveness of the sales team increases dramatically, often more than 15%. This is because Sales has more time to spend on selling – and the quality of the messaging is better, rendering it more effective.
• The effectiveness of the marketing team also takes a big leap forward, often more than 25%. This is because Marketing is spending more time on things that contribute to revenue generation and producing marketing collateral, training, and sales tools that Sales considers useful.
• From the combined affects on Sales and Marketing, it’s easy to see how closing this messaging gap can increase your market share by 5% or more, and improve your margins by 5% to 10%.

Sound too good to be true? Consider this report from a marketing peer:

“Great sales messaging increased our win rate by 30%, and reduced the time we spend
supporting the field by around 50%, for the product family I support.”
Nigel Mott, Product Sales Manager, Agilent Technologies, Inc.

**Strategies for Closing the Gap**

Sales messaging is defined as providing a compelling and persuasive answer to your buyer’s primary buying question for each of the products or services you offer. As the product or service moves through the sales cycle, the primary question will change – and your answer must shift to accommodate it, so that the right message is delivered at the appropriate point in the product life cycle.

Defining sales messaging in this way differentiates it from all other messaging types. (To learn more about this differentiation, download the free article The Messaging Mess: Billions Wasted Annually on Bad Messaging from the Silver Bullet Group’s online resource center.) For example, when you apply this definition of sales messaging to the early-market stage of a product’s life cycle, you find that the most important buyer question is likely to be “Why should I change what I currently do and buy a product or service like this?” The answer to this question has very little to do with your company. The primary goal of your sales messaging, at this early stage, is to create demand by articulating a compelling reason to change from the current solution to a new or better solution. The primary concern is creating buying events, the secondary goals is creating orders for your firm.

In the late market stage of the product’s life cycle, when market demand is more established, the primary buying question shifts to, “Why should I buy your solution rather than a competitive option?” The answer to this question must focus on competitive differentiation. The primary goal of your sales messaging is to create a compelling reason to buy the solution from your company, rather than from the competition. The goals, at this later stage, are to find buying events, and then to create orders for your company.

The cellular industry recently provided a great example of life-cycle appropriate messaging. The introduction of cell phones with cameras generated a lot of advertising, all focused on educating consumers about what they could do with these new phones. The advertising was an excellent answer to buyers’ primary buying question in the early stage of the camera phone’s life cycle, implicitly answering the question, “Why should I throw away my current phone (old solution) and buy a new phone with camera (better solution) – why change?”

At the same time, Cingular was running an aggressive campaign to grow market share, touting itself as “the most reliable network,” according to a third party study. This advertisement was excellent answer to the buyer’s primary buying question in the more mature stage of the cellular network’s life cycle – “Why should I put my phone on your network, rather than on the competitions – why buy from your company?”

Before you put this article aside, think about one of your products and where it is in the life cycle. Then, look at your product brochure and ask yourself, “Does it provide a compelling answer to the buyers’ primary buying question?” If the answer is “no” or “not really,” then you have a great opportunity to increase your market share by 5% or more, to improve your margins by 5% to 10%, and to get the bonuses and promotions that go with those improvements.

Related Articles
  Five Ways to Test Your Sales Messaging for Greatness
  The Messaging Mess: Billions Wasted Annually on Bad Messaging Separate Your Messaging to Dramatically Improve Sales and Marketing Effectiveness
  The Top Ten Principles of Great Sales Messaging
  Sales Messaging Must Fuel Your Sales Cycle: Does Yours?
  Answer Your Buyers’ Key Questions & Make Your Sales Messaging Great

Article Tags: sales, sales messaging



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