---

Guest post by: Michael Cannon Become an Author

Tweet

---

5 Steps to the Most Influential Customer Communications: Create the Right Messaging First

Engaging your customers with more influential communications is a great way to increase the effectiveness of your marketing and sales efforts. This post shows you how to define and create the right messaging, and then use it as a catalyst to engage customers with the most influential content and sales conversations, more consistently, across more touch points. This post was first released in "42 Rules of Product Marketing," which was published in March 2012. It’s full of great advice from some of Silicon Valley’s best thought leaders. NOTE: To view the article with live hyperlinks, please visit the Resources section of the Silver Bullet Group website.

Nine Silver Bullets to Increase Marketing’s Relevance: Enabling Greater Competitive Differentiation and Faster Revenue Growth

Gain insights into such matters as the true cost of ineffective marketing content, the categories and types of messaging required for market success, the setting of priorities, and a new product development paradigm.

The Secret Ingredient to Achieve the Best Demand Generation Results: Marketo's Thought Leadership Interview with Michael Cannon

One of the greatest opportunities to generate more revenue from one’s marketing and sales investments is to improve the nurturing, scoring, handing off, and tracking of leads as they move through the marketing and sales funnels. The secret sauce for dramatically improving the results of these demand generation activities is a new category of Sales 2.0 software called marketing automation, of which Marketo is the fastest-growing. In this interview, Jon Miller, Marketo’s VP of Marketing, talks with Michael Cannon, CEO of the Silver Bullet Group and an expert on messaging effectiveness and on how companies can use sales messaging to get the highest ROI from their demand generation investments.

The Principles of Highly Persuasive Messaging: Create Your Most Effective Messaging with These Objective Evaluation Criteria

Sales and marketing professionals must learn and apply new tactics when it comes to messaging if they want to have more influence on the customer’s decision to buy. This critical requirement is the crux of the Silver Bullet Group’s tool, “The Principles of Highly Persuasive Messaging”, which features 20 objective evaluation criteria for creating clear, concise and relevant messaging.

Solving the Six Biggest Problems with BtoB Sales Support Training

Companies both large and small realize the absolute necessity of having a top-notch, high-functioning sales force and spend a great deal of time and money in training and motivating their sales teams. It stands to reason that those companies’ sales training regimens should be every bit as good as they want their salespeople to be, yet way too many fall short. Identify and solve the six biggest problems with sales training to enable Sales to win more deals, faster.

Twisted But True: High-Quality B2B Marketing Messaging Dramatically Reduces Sales and Marketing Effectiveness - Assess Your Messaging with This Five-Point Checklist

Does this sound familiar? Your company has spared no expense in training its sales force and providing it with a slew of slick, detailed marketing materials. Yet your highly motivated sales team keeps missing its revenue, profit and market share targets. Well-conceived and -executed marketing messaging can actually reduce sales and marketing effectiveness. Many companies fail to meet their objectives because their marketing initiatives are lacking one essential element: persuasive sales messaging. When giving their brand, company, and product messaging an analytical look, companies often quickly discover that their messaging to customers is mostly descriptive, rather than persuasive — a vital ingredient in closing sales.

Predictions: What Lies Ahead for Sales and Marketing

Over the last several decades, corporations have implemented sets of best practices and software automation tools for some of their key departments - Manufacturing, Finance, Operations - to allow those departments to measure their efforts and attain maximum effectiveness in helping their firm keep its competitive edge and grow revenues, profits and market share. But what about two other critical groups: Sales and Marketing? This article examines the current push by many boards and CEOs to create a more formal set of best practices and software solutions for their Sales and Marketing departments and then outlines the steps many companies are taking to develop and automate a set of best practices for Sales and Marketing.

Gold and Silver Bullets: Critical Messaging for Successful Investor-Funded Firms

Too often, companies use the same set of words and ideas in their attempts to win buyers as they use to win investors. But this approach fails to address key questions — and can cause firms to flounder. There is an efficient and effective way to increase profitability and avoid dissolution — through the use of Gold and Silver Bullets. The Gold-and-Silver-Bullet methodology demands clear, separate, and fully articulated answers to different types of stakeholder-questions. This helps companies gain secure footing with investors and customers alike, increasing valuations and accelerating sales cycles. Cannon offers groundbreaking advice and practical solutions that help firms evaluate and adjust blurred me

Five Ways to Test Your Sales Messaging for Greatness

What grade would you give yourself on the quality and effectiveness of the sales support messaging and materials you prepare for your staff? Not an “A+”? Don’t feel bad, you’re hardly alone. According to a recent poll that appeared in BtoB magazine, some 70% of the marketeers polled gave themselves “D’s” and “F’s”. This article gives sales and marketing executives and their staff a sure-fire way to doublecheck that their sales messaging is working to maximum effect, and, if not, ways to improve it.

Fire, Hire, and Repeat: Is There a Better Way to Improve Sales Performance?

Fire-hire-repeat is a classic management tactic and a major drain on productivity and profits. The time and money spent seeking out, interviewing, and training new hires alone should be enough to dissuade anyone from this tactic as their primary route to improve sales effectiveness – but the “body wars” are all too frequently considered the best way to improve sales. There is a better alternative. It is the sales and marketing system, not the sales team, that is most often responsible for the disconnect between sales goals and sales results. And addressing the breakdowns in the underlying system is a more cost-effective, less risky way to improve results and break the vicious cycle of fire, hire, and repeat.

• Page 1 of 2
• 1
• 2
• Next
• Last

Share this article. Fund someone's dream.

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Cleavage in the Boardroom

The Biggest Obstacles I Had To Overcome

Are Sales People Born or Made?

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.