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Sales Message Audits Prepare
Sales Teams for Winning Season after Season
To maximize the success of your sales team, they should be trained in the following:
- How to use systematic customer-centric language to skillfully differentiate products and services from the competition's products and services.
- How to expertly listen to the customer and ask systematic customer-centric questions.
What does the customer value--precisely--not generally?
To obtain the specific language that customers use to describe why, when and where they want to have a relationship with a company and/or the service or product, commission an independent Sales Messaging Audit on an annual basis.
Three Primary Objectives of a Sales Messaging Audit:
- Why to buy: Identify the sales messages that prospective customers need to hear that will motivate them to buy your product or service. Understand their specific wants or needs and what these wants or needs mean to them, along with the messages they are hearing from competition.
- When to buy: Identify the best timing/circumstances for prospective customers to hear the sales messages. Understand the specific circumstances that would cause them to step aggressively into the buying cycle.
- Where to buy: Identify the best places for prospective customers to hear the sales messages.
Understand where customers are influenced--in their purchase and decision to buy.
Two Secondary Objectives of a Sales Messaging Audit:
- Identify what prospects currently use and why
- Identify potential sales leads
One does not jeopardize the primary objectives to obtain the secondary objectives, however, the secondary objectives can frequently be achieved.
To avoid disappointing results and wasted resources, any sales, marketing or outbound campaign should not begin until the above type of work has been completed.
Unless they perform in unison, sales and marketing efforts are going to be doomed to mediocrity.
In a military campaign, artillery of some sort is usually launched first, often paving the way for human involvement. A successful first deployment facilitates human involvement, to gain ground and hold it. Given the choice, few military leaders would deploy humans without excellent artillery support and few CEOs send a sales force into the market without effective marketing support. Yet, we do observe sales professionals working with little or no marketing support.
When marketing and sales are strategically integrated, sales outcomes are accelerated.
To take sales one step further and to defend current customer relationships against competitive poaching, systematic customer centricity can build customer intimacy and help sales or account teams develop a resilient pipeline of business.
Independent third-party interventions in the form of customer interviews unearth gems that expand business success, accelerate sales and develop customer resilience. (For a few specifics, please visit our Case Studies.)
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