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Guest post by: Michael Cannon Become an Author

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It’s commonsensical – your sales messaging must support your sales cycle. Yet, upon closer examination, it becomes clear that the majority of companies, and the Sales and Marketing executives that run them, don’t follow this “common sense” principle. They don’t align their messaging with the phases in their sales cycle.

The good news is that this is changing rapidly. Thought leaders in Sales, Sales Operations, and Marketing, are finding that this shift improves their competitiveness and market share by over 15%. Unfortunately, those who fail to change are leading their firms into decline – and will soon be replaced. The logic of the idea and results it produces are just too compelling to ignore.

**What You Need to Know**

There are four things that you need to do to align your messaging with the phases in your sales cycle. They are:

1) Define your sales messaging and identify how it’s different from other messaging types like brand messaging, product messaging, etc.
2) Understand the phases of the sales cycle for each of your products and services
3) Appreciate what the primary goal is for each phase in the sales cycle
4) Know the buyer’s primary buying question in each phase of the sales cycle

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 right point in the sales 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.)

Use the table below to help you gain clarity on the typical sales cycle phases, as well as the primary goal and buying questions for each.

**Buyer Questions in the Sales Cycle for an Early Stage Product or Service**

**Sales Phase - Primary Goal - Primary Buyer Question**
One - Create a Meeting: Why should I meet with you?
Two - Create Demand for Your Company’s Offering: Why should I change-out my current solution for a new solution?
Three - Create an Order for Your Company: Why should I buy your solution rather than a competitive solution?

As you can see, the sales cycle has distinct phases, each with its own goal, and buyer question. For an emerging market product, the first-phase goal is to create a meeting. This is achieved by providing a compelling answer to the buying question, “Why should I meet with you?” Clearly, this is a critically important question – as most sales cannot occur without a meeting or conversation. Yet, most companies do a terrible job of answering this question. They try to create meetings by saying something like:

“Hi, this is Michael Cannon with the Silver Bullet Group. We help companies dramatically
improve sales and marketing effectiveness by implementing great sales messaging. I’d like
to schedule a meeting to talk with you about this innovative service. When would be a good
time to meet?”

Sound familiar? Let’s look at this from the buyer’s perspective. What they hear is: “I’d like to take an hour of your time to tell you all about what we do and ask you a bunch of questions to determine if you’re a good prospect for me.”

This is not a compelling answer to, “Why should I meet with you?” But, when we understand what the key buying question is, we might say something like:

“Hi, this is Michael Cannon with the Silver Bullet Group. We have helped hundreds of companies
profitably increase sales by 15% or more through the implementation of great sales messaging.
So, I thought you might want to evaluate this idea and determine for yourself if you could
create similar results for your company. When would be a good time to meet?”

Do you see the difference? The buyer learns exactly what they will get for their time – an opportunity to evaluate an idea which has produced quantifiable results. The point of view shifts from “What Can the Buyer Do for You?” to “What Can You Do for the Buyer?”

**Great sales messaging is strategic when it supports the phases in the sales cycle**

Once you’ve created a meeting, the next phase in the sales cycle is to create demand for your offering by answering the buyer question, “Why should I change-out my current solution for a new solution?” The answer to this question has very little to do with your company. The primary goal, at this early phase, is to create demand by articulating a compelling reason to change from the current solution to a new or better solution.

With demand created, the final phase of the sales cycle is to create an order for your company by answering the buyer question, “Why should I buy your solution rather than a competitive option?” The answer to this question must focus on competitive differentiation. The primary goal, at this later phase, is to create a compelling reason to buy the solution from your company, rather than from the competition.

**A Real World Example**

Let’s contrast the principle that sales messaging must support the phases in the sales cycle with the messaging in much of today’s marketing collateral. The example below is a product description of McNetwork’s Gallant, which says:

Today’s growing enterprise needs to reduce costs and make the best use of storage equipment
—and they must find new solutions to simplify diverse storage networking environments. The
Gallant delivers the solution. The Gallant acts as the “backbone” of the enterprise data
center—it delivers the unmatched availability, performance and scalability you need to support
your most important data and carry the highest data traffic. With Gallant’s MaxPar™ technology
(hard partitioning), you can consolidate your multi-vendor fabrics while maintaining secure
separation by data, management and Fibre Channel Services. With “carrier-class” availability,
dynamic port allocation and intelligent fabric services, it’s the ideal backbone for your
enterprise.

What buying questions is this paragraph trying to answer? Below, this product messaging blurb is parsed into its component parts:

Some of the messaging seems to be answering the question “Why Buy a New Network Storage Device?”
• Reduce costs
• Make the best use of storage equipment
• Simplify diverse storage networking environments
• Consolidate your multi-vendor fabrics
• Maintain secure separation

And some of the messaging seems to be answering the question “Why Buy a New Network Storage Device from McNetwork?”
• Unmatched availability, performance and scalability
• The highest data traffic

Then there are more messaging statements that didn’t seem to answer either question. They seem to fit best as features in a Product Description, such as:
• “Backbone” of the enterprise data center
• “Carrier-class” availability
• Dynamic port allocation
• Intelligent fabric services

As product messaging, it’s a pretty good description. It includes a feature and benefit overview of what the product does, and contains some decent statements about the value the buyer might get by buying.

From a sales messaging perspective, it’s not so good. The answers to the buyer’s key buying questions are scattered across the paragraph, making it hard to follow and comprehend. And, when you gather up all the answers to the buying questions, you can see that the answers are not compelling.

This is a representative example of what most companies produce today, and why most sales teams consider 50% or more of collateral produced by Marketing to be useless. As Sales and Marketing executives, we MUST make sure our staffs are creating compelling answers to the buyer’s primary buying questions, and then aligning these sales messages with the key phases in the sales cycle. The results are better alignment with the buy/sell cycle, better communication with the buyer, and dramatic improvements in sales and marketing effectiveness.

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
  Does Sales Messaging Fuel Your Product Life Cycle? It Should.
  The Top Ten Principles of Great Sales Messaging
  Answer Your Buyers’ Key Questions & Make Your Sales Messaging Great
  Twisted But True: High-Quality B2B Marketing Messaging Dramatically Reduces Sales and Marketing Effectiveness - Assess Your Messaging with This Five-Point Checklist
  How To Assess Your Sales Intelligence Quota
  What is an Injection Pump?
  The Real Problems with Today’s BtoB Customer Messaging and How to Solve Them
  Fuel Injection 101: How Fuel Injection Works in Diesel Engines
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  Easy Way to Shorten Your Sales Cycle
  6th of the 10 Kurlan Sales Competencies that are Key to Building a Sales Culture
  Why Salespeople Have Trouble Closing
  Why B2B Messaging Quality Is So Abysmally Low: Marketers Need a Better Way to Be More Relevant to Customers, Sales and the Growth of Profitable Revenue and Market Share
  Sales VP's and Marketing VP's - Should the Roles be Combined?
  Fuel Injection in Diesel Engines
  Gold and Silver Bullets: Critical Messaging for Successful Investor-Funded Firms
  Why You Should be Scared When Your Salespeople are Closing Lots of Business
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