'Roll Your Own' Selling – Ad Hoc Sales Messaging

There’s a growing trend in the sales kingdom. It’s ad-hoc sales messaging. Not necessarily bad if you’ve got a hot and compelling product. Certainly some sales teams can still be successful while they vary in their adherence to the purity of whatever target sales messaging was produced by Marketing. It’s like winning a game with a team of great athletes in spite of a less than coherent game plan.

The problem catches up to you eventually. Wide variations of a team’s sales messaging (direct, phone or email) will leave openings for the competition to exploit if they’re better at this than your team.

There are 3 keys to effective sales messaging:

1. Audience Specific Targeting
2. Clarity of Market Trends, Audience Objectives and Challenges
3. Short and Long Sales Talk Tracks, Questions and Visuals

In the absence of effective control of these, any sales team will “roll their own” – that is, they will create their own versions of scripts and emails and anything that they believe they need to be successful. Sometimes what they create is worthwhile; many times it can be quite ugly. Multiply this across an aggressive and frustrated sales team and you have a recipe for confusion internally and in the marketplace.

The fix takes work and involves (re)alignment or sometime wholesale (re)creation. It’s critically important though to avoid an ad-hoc sales organization.

Do you have an ad-hoc messaging, ‘roll your own’ sales team?