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Guest post by: Michael Cannon Become an Author

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It’s no secret that companies proficient in the development and deployment of great sales messaging do achieve a substantial competitive advantage. According to a recent CSO Insights study:

Companies that describe themselves as world-class in terms of consistent customer [sales] messaging [that they’ve] provided effectively to sales, and with collateral driven by market segments and customer needs:

• Outpaced other firms in quota achievement by 25%
• Had win rates that were 20% higher
• Were three times more successful in proposal closing
• Were five times better at eliminating excessive discounting

To obtain results like these, your organization must have the knowledge and skills both to develop and to deploy great sales messaging. The additional rewards are more-effective demand generation and accelerated pipeline growth, all of which lead to increased market share, revenues, and profits of 15% or more!

In prior Silver Bullet Group articles, the focus has been primarily on what you need to know to develop great sales messaging. Here the focus is on the implementation side: reviewing common deployment blunders and what you must do to avoid these drains on your resources and results.

Blunder #1: Giving the Feature/Benefit “Forest Tour”
These tours are often given in demos, presentations, proposals, and printed and emarketing collateral. It’s the classic tour of all the trees in the forest, i.e., “let me show you or tell you all about my product or service”. The features and benefits presented in this manner are typically not in context of how they solve the customer’s business challenges or how solving those problems produces true business value for the prospect.

You know you’re giving a feature/benefit tour when you review or provide a list of the top 8 or more features and benefits of your product or service. The impact on the audience or readers is that they become overwhelmed. It’s too many data points to digest and correlate to their challenges, so they tune out, or worse, move on.

What to Do Instead:
An alternative to the feature/benefit tour is to first organize your messaging into three higher-order value statements or the benefit of the benefits, then combine them into one. For example, these three benefits…

• Fewer tools to buy, learn, and integrate
• Developers have only one language to learn for all tools — Java
• Less time spent developing and testing applications to ensure scalability, performance, and reliability

…can be summarized into one primary benefit or business value: “You can bring your applications to market and revenue 2–3x faster.”

**Organize your messaging into three higher-order value statements.**

This change leverages a proven fact — people absorb and remember best things that are presented in groups of three and certainly no more than five. Since studies have proven that the human brain works in this way, you must optimize your sales messaging for maximum results by organizing your features and benefits into three to five key value statements…or “Silver Bullets”!

Blunder #2: Offering Data Dumps
The best examples of a data dump are the 5- to 50-page white paper, application note, and 50- to 100-slide PowerPoint presentation. These are long-winded versions of “let me tell you all about my baby” — what it does, how it does it, why it does it this way, etc. and so forth, with the benefits and value of the offering sprinkled throughout the document and usually buried at the end of each paragraph or section. The reality is that most buyers have neither the time, the inclination, nor the attention span to read a marketing document that is longer than one or two pages. And, when they do, it’s usually quite late in the buying process when they have pretty much already decided to select your company’s offering.

What to Do Instead:
The solution, however, is not to throw the baby out with the bath water. The most effective way to deliver your messaging is to summarize it on one page and reference or provide a link to the white paper for the details. Alternatively, you can create an executive summary as the first page of your tome.

**Make your offer no longer than it needs to be to keep the buying process moving forward.**

One page is an excellent rule of thumb for most B2B marketing documents. This length greatly increases readership, comprehension, and retention by presenting information that is easy to digest quickly. When preparing a sales message, ask yourself this: What is the least you can say about your offering and still get the prospect to the next step in the buying process? That’s the fine art of deploying great sales messaging.

Blunder #3: Serving Up Mostly Potatoes and Little Meat
Do you believe the following?: Buyers don’t immediately believe your marketing claims or sales messaging. While most marketing and sales professionals would agree with this statement, it seems most don’t really incorporate it into their thinking. How else does one explain the dearth of testimonials, case studies, and third-party endorsements in most marketing collateral, which contains instead mostly claims (or potatoes) and little proof (or meat) that their claims are true.

What to Do Instead:
Buyers are inherently skeptical. To overcome this challenge and to gain more credibility that your claims are true, you must provide lots of evidence or proof points to support your claims. The more proof you provide, the more your buyers will believe your claims. The most effective proof points are customer testimonials and case studies. The principle here is that if you say it’s true, then it’s a claim; if a customer says it’s true, then it must be true. The second-most-effective proof points are from independent third-party organizations such as the market research firms, Gartner Group or JD Power and Associates. The third-most-effective proof points are product demonstrations and proof-of-concept.

**Use proof points and use them effectively.**

Your proof must support your sales messaging. For example, if a sales messaging statement focuses on having the highest product reliability and the testimonial touts on-time and on-budget delivery, a costly mistake has been made. And be sure your proof points are compelling statements that include measurable results. Here’s a good example of a strong proof point from Oracle: “Nine out of ten of the world’s largest financial institutions run Oracle applications.” That’s a powerful way to answer “why select Oracle?”.

Related Articles

  4 Deadly Sales Training Blunder You must Avoid
  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
  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
  The Real Problems with Today’s BtoB Customer Messaging and How to Solve Them
  Gold and Silver Bullets: Critical Messaging for Successful Investor-Funded Firms
  The Knives Your Sales People Should Have
  The Mistakes to Often Made in Sales
  Does Sales Messaging Fuel Your Product Life Cycle? It Should.
  Communication
  Seamless Integrated Communication
  The Top Ten Principles of Great Sales Messaging
  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?
  Face Off: Value Propositions vs. Sales Messaging - Why Your Value Prop Is Losing and What to Do About It
  Give Your Sales Effort a Kick in the....Brand
  Going Beyond the Sales Lead
  5 Steps to the Most Influential Customer Communications: Create the Right Messaging First
  Why Aren't People Buying From You?

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