Sales Messaging Madness
In traveling to Asia Pacific, Europe and throughout North America, we work with sales teams with various approaches to effective sales messaging.
Some teams use extensive but tired scripts to deal with prospecting and getting past gatekeepers. Some organizations use messaging focused heavily on product feature sets and customer benefits. Other teams simply leave it up to the sales rep and their own good judgment per the selling situation.
Consequently, the result is a hodgepodge of sales messaging effectiveness. In fact, it is sales messaging madness.
Best practices today in effective sales messaging – anywhere in the world by the way – involve the following:
• Short & Long Elevator Speech – Salespeople need a crisp but well crafted “elevator speech.” No less than 20 seconds; no more than 40 seconds. The framework is modular for any environment, fully natural, not canned. An excellent elevator speech (pitch) contains content geared specifically to trigger a response from the customer/prospect and is made up of components that can be interchangeably used anywhere.
• Value Statements – Who you are, What you do, How you do it, Where you’ve done it, Why they care. There is a series of questions that you can address in a 1 to 2 minute conversation that highlights what your business provides to customers. The flexible mastery of this information is crucial for all salespeople. Not to be confused with the elevator speech.
• Customer Talk Tracks – Knowing market trends that impact your customer audience (by title), as well as their business objectives and specific challenges they face make up a calculated “talk track” that gives salespeople confident guidance in all conversations. So-called Challenger reps don’t know everything – they just know talking points really well.
• Executive Whiteboard – Great salespeople paint verbal pictures and can literally draw a powerful storyboard flowing with compelling logic and simple depiction of the customer’s current dilemma and potential rescue. A great Whiteboard is a powerful interactive tool for excellent sales discovery.
Is your sales messaging sane?
