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The Real Problems with Today’s BtoB Customer Messaging and How to Solve Them

The Real Problems with Today’s BtoB Customer Messaging and How to Solve Them

Numerous studies bear out that business-to-business (BtoB) companies lose billions of dollars each year because of ineffective customer messaging. What are the key factors that contribute to this messaging mess? Most companies and their marketing firms:

• Produce only company, market, and product customer messaging
• Do not have a methodology or the skills necessary to create more effective customer messaging
• Do not have an objective set of criteria to evaluate customer messaging effectiveness prior to market testing or launch

As a result, sales and marketing effectiveness is reduced by about 25% and costs U.S. companies over $100 billion every year.

For example, most BtoB messaging, like company messaging, market messaging, product messaging, and even most value propositions, is descriptive. It provides a description of what the company does, the customer served, the products and services offered, the features of each offering, and, if done well, a little bit about the benefits of doing business with that particular company and the benefits of buying its offerings.

What prospective customers want most, for each offering, is a great answer to such key buying questions as:

• “Why should I meet with you?”
• “Why should I change-out my current solution for a new solution?”
• “Why should I buy your solution rather than a competitive alternative?”

What Sales (inside, field, and channel) also want most is to have, and to provide customers with, persuasive answers to these same buying questions.

You can see the gap. Most of the messaging provided to prospective customers and to Sales is descriptive company messaging, market messaging, and product messaging, none of which provides persuasive answers to the key buying questions. What is missing is persuasive sales messaging. It’s the missing messaging category in almost every company’s customer messaging platform.

**Sales messaging is the missing messaging category in almost every company’s customer messaging platform.**

The impact of not providing customers and Sales with persuasive customer sales messaging, or not answering these key buying questions, is enormous. It’s the main reason why most customer messaging is ineffective and can be substantiated
in market research studies like these:

“Over 65% of sales leaders feel they’re losing business because
they don’t have a compelling value proposition.”
Miller Heiman, Sales Best Practice Study, 2006

“80 to 90% of marketing collateral is considered useless by Sales.”
Proceedings of the Customer Message Management Forums,
published by the American Marketing Association, 2002 and 2003

“As much as 40% of a sales rep’s time is spent creating presentations,
customizing messaging, and preparing for pitches.”
CMO Council Study, 2004

As you can see, marketing and sales effectiveness is significantly reduced when Marketing produces only company, market, and product messaging.

The good news is that when Marketing does provide customers and Sales with both descriptive messaging and persuasive sales messaging, great things happen fast. Consider these reports from your peers:

“The competitive sales messaging, with supporting customer videos and presentation, helped us take 15% off
our key competitor’s market share and win an incremental $1M in revenue in just 7 months!
It also reduced field support issues by around 75%.”
Angelo Umali, SAD, Sales and Technical Support Engineer, Agilent Technologies, Inc.

“The impact on the region was immediate. The first time the new sales messaging and strategy was used, we closed
a $100k sale to a F500 company in less than 60 days. Sales in the region increased approximately 35%.”
Barbara Wehrle, Director, Western Region, SilverStream Software, Inc.

These significant improvements in marketing and sales effectiveness consistently occur when Marketing provides persuasive answers to the customer’s key buying questions and enables Sales to do the same.

Here are some of the key departmental improvements that can be expected when more effective customer sales messaging is integrated into your customer messaging platform:

The value to the product development/research and development team is that:
• It increases customer focus, meaning that there is better alignment of new product investment
with the solving of valuable customer problems.
• It results in more competitive products.
• And it results in higher margins.

The impact on the product marketing team when it implements customer sales messaging is that:
• It increases the percentage of deliverables (that is, training, collateral, and sales tools) considered useful to helping Sales generate revenue and to helping prospective customers make good buying decisions.
• It increases Marketing’s ability to market solutions.
• And it creates faster penetration of new and existing markets.

The result of implementing sales messaging for the sales operations team is that:
• It increases the effectiveness of the product training, sales opportunity training, and competitive training, and traditional sales skills training for both direct and partner sales channels.
• It increases time-to-channel effectiveness by reducing the amount of time it takes the field to successfully start selling the value of new products.

The impact of adding sales messaging for the inside, field, and channel sales teams is that:
• It increases the size of the sales pipeline.
• It improves the win/loss ratio, or the proposal-to-order ratio.
• It increases the average order size and it reduces discounting.

It’s simple and powerful. Use customer sales messaging as a tool to improve the quality of your customer messaging and you will make dramatic improvements in the effectiveness of all your sales and marketing investments. This messaging strategy works like a “silver bullet” to help you accelerate revenue, market share growth, and your career.





The Real Problems with Todays BtoB Customer Messaging and How to Solve Them - To learn more about this author, visit Michael Cannon's Website.

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Are your sales where you want them to be? Will you be one of the few who achieves sales or business success or one of the many who have failed to change? Are you tired of being told you are like everyone else? Then you may find my first book on sales of interest. Be the Red Jacket in the Sea of Gray Suits, The Keys to Unlocking Sales available at Amazon or at http://www.processspecialist.com/red-jacket.htm. This book is a reflection of my no-nonsense approach to improving sales to overall business results. If you are truly committed to making sustainable changes, then I can help you secure a positive return on your investment because I focus on executable solutions not telling you the problems you already know you have. From training to corporate (group) coaching to executive one on one coaching, my approach is to assess, create awareness, build a goal driven action plan and then execute. The bottom line question is "Not do you or your employees know it, but do you or they want to do it?" Please call for a free strategy session at 219.759.5601. - Visit Leanne Hoagland-Smith's Website

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David Acheson
David Acheson is the founder of DCJA Consultancy. DCJA Consultancy is a management consultancy business specialising in B2B sales consultancy. They offer bespoke and packaged sales consultancy including Sales Optimisation Review, Interim Sales Management, Sales & Marketing Review, 1:1 Sales & Management Staff Analysis, Management Training, Solution Sales Training, Creation of New Pay Plan, KPI's, run Customer Feedback Campaigns, assist with Recruitment, Coaching, Appraisals and set up Strategic Marketing Campaigns.  David spent his early career in accountancy and then moved into sales in 1982, working in Office Equipment, IT, Advertising, Training, Outsourcing and Consultancy. He has held many Senior Positions in SMBs and Global Organisations including Head of Sales Operations & Head of Business Development. His knowledge, skills and great experience of the Sales Industry has led to David making keynote speeches and running educational sessions to key businesses through organisations including The Chamber of Commerce and Business Link. - Visit David Acheson's Website

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Michael Cannon
(Visit Michael's Website) Michael Cannon is an internationally renowned sales and marketing effectiveness expert and a best-selling author, most recently coauthoring with Jay Conrad Levinson ("Guerrilla Marketing"), et al., "Marketing Strategies That Really Work! Promote Your Way to Millions." An expert in working with B2B companies to increase marketshare, revenues, and profits, Michael has assisted hundreds of companies, as big as AT&T and as small as a one-person startup, to increase revenues up to 1,300%! Michael is Founder and CEO of the Silver Bullet Group and creator of the hugely successful Silver Bullet Sales Messaging™ System, a proven, proprietary methodology for dramatically improving the quality of B2B messaging. Michael was featured on the front cover of Self-Employed America magazine and has addressed numerous audiences around the world, including Entrepreneur Magazine Sales and Marketing Radio Show, the American Marketing Association, and Vistage International. For more information, visit www.silverbulletgroup.com or call 925-930-9436.

Michael Cannon is a Gold author on EvanCarmichael.com
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