Effective Messaging Will Accelerate Closure Rates

Your Current Market Message is Probably Hurting Sales and Revenue Growth

An interesting discussion thread recently appeared in LinkedIN’s CEO Forum. A sales person asked this question of CEOs:

"What bothers you the most in sales people trying to sell to you? What would you tell them to do instead?"

Almost unanimously, CEO’s said the sales person needs to listen before pitching. Good advice, but the problem goes far beyond the sales person’s listening skills. Let’s take a closer look at this issue;

Marketing develops key company and market messages for sales to position on calls. These messages are usually incorporated into the Product Manager’s product launch with the product’s features, functions and benefits. i.e. “Launch kit”

In the scenario of a sales person meeting with the CEO, the sales person listens and then positions the company, market presence and finally, a product overview including of course, features, functions and benefits. Some discussion is exchanged however the meeting does not go well.

What happened?

1. Product Managers are usually from a technical background; CEO’s generally are not– the sales person and the executive are not speaking the same language. Senior Executives don’t care about how the product works, they care about what it does, measured by business value received.
2. The CEO does not see value because the seller’s messages describe the company, market and product but do not speak directly to the CEO’s business requirements.

We always want sales to “call higher” yet if the sales person can not speak to each buyer’s requirements, getting to executive levels is not possible. This is the job of marketing, not sales.

Let’s look at a simple example starting with a basic premise about buyer-types: executives seek business value (lower costs, increased revenue), directors and middle managers seek advantages, influencers and recommenders seek benefits and end users seek features and benefits.

Going back to our sales call between the sales person and the CEO, we now see two problems: their language is not the same and the CEO cannot determine business value as a result of their meeting. A sale is not made and repeat access will not be granted.

For our CEO call, let’s try the sales call this way, “…and while we’re very proud of the technology breakthroughs we’ve achieved, not to mention industry recognition and 5 new patents, I believe we can help your company be more competitive for two reasons…first....”

If we accept that Marketing provides descriptive company and market messages, then we need only to add another dimension of messaging, buyer requirements, to solve this problem. Buyer requirements are persuasive messages, not descriptive. They speak to the buyer’s requirements by aligning your company’s value proposition to each buyer-type: Executives, Directors/Middle Managers, Influencers and End Users.

Oh, and as for the LinkedIN article? We responded by suggesting that each CEO who responded should check their own web sites to find examples of messaging that speaks to their ideal buyers. In most cases, those messages aren’t there. So the question then becomes, are your own sales people effectively reaching key executives on their sales calls?

Probably not.