It is important to understand that marketing messaging and sales messaging are not the same thing, but they do correlate. Marketing messaging is broad and focuses on a strategic path, while sales messaging essentially starts with the marketing messaging and tailors it to the individuals they are talking with.
There are no shortcuts when it comes to building your messaging framework. With the right collaboration between sales leaders, marketing leaders, and executive leaders, with time, this framework will guide your communications team to higher-quality deals and ideal revenue.
5 Steps to Create Your Own Strategic Messaging
Step 1: Overview of Current Circumstances
Take a step back and identify key threats and opportunities. Here are some essential questions to ask yourself. Write down your answers and share them with the group to see how aligned your answers are.
- How well do we understand the specific business threats and opportunities of our customers?
- How is a customer’s business actually transformed by doing business with us?
- What are the specific elements of our value proposition, and are they truly defensible?
Step 2: Complete a Before and After Exercise
As a group, take a pulse of the potential state of a customer or a prospect before doing business with you and how their business will be impacted by partnering with you.
Here are those discussion points:
- Make a List of Concerns “Before Doing Business with Us” (Business Issue)
- Make a List of “Business Impacts or Consequences” (If They Stay With An Inadequate Provider)
- Make a List of Benefits “After Doing Business with Us” (Customer Benefit)
- Make a List of Results “Positive Business Impact” (If They Decide to Switch to Us)
Step 3: Establishing a Value Menu
Create a coherent list of all the positive business outcomes from the before and after scenarios. Essentially, we are taking these outcomes and transforming them into sales propositions or “value drivers”. This is a point where some organizations stop the messaging development, but the next couple of stages is where the magic comes out!
Step 4: Poking Holes Into Value Drivers to Strength Them
An important rule for landing quality leads is “show, don’t tell”. That is where proof points come to play and the importance of building an infrastructure that can maintain those proof points.
Step 5: Establish Defensible Differentiators
The final step of developing your messaging framework is to identify and define a set of differentiating qualities of your company that is credible and defensible. When a prospect is evaluating the proposals from others, we want to make sure we can shift the conversation to a value-based dialog and make the decision-making process a simple one for the prospect.
Unique differentiators:
The presence of a value-based capability that is not available for any competitive offering.
Comparative differentiators:
Value-based capability that is superior (in some specific way) to comparable capability of a competing offering.
Understanding your value driver messaging is important but also understanding which value drivers are superior to others is a valuable tool when it comes to securing a large new account.
Start Using Your Marketing Messaging Framework for More Targeted Sales
Whether you are revisiting an industry that you have targeted in the past or starting fresh into something new, having these five steps nailed down for each segment of the business that you wish to grow is crucial. It helps ensure your communication with the outside world is not erratic but aligned. It will help stack the deck in your favor to grow with ideal new business.
We have successfully guided multiple Value Messaging Workshops with clients and it regularly sparks a new passion for growth and team unity that can push the bounds of any well-established culture.
Looking for a more in-depth walk through of the Value Messaging Workshop?
Lets connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilynovotny/
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