Sales-Ready Messaging and Business Success

In Review & Outlook The Panic Stage WSJ 01/19/08, the Wall Street Journal predicts not only market volatility, but also, as a point of encouragement, says that financial institutions are in the middle of a repair process that will prevent systemic failures that have happened in past decades, and that the Fed has proven more credible in managing and has room to maneuver.

The article says, "In his book "Manias, Panics and Crashes," the economic historian Charles Kindleberger describes the stages of financial boom and bust. Students of the good professor will recognize where we now are in the current credit crisis: the panic stage. It isn't a pretty sight, but a crash is far from inevitable if political and economic leaders keep their wits about them and focus on the proper remedies."

In order to respond to the "early stages of this repair operation", I believe that business organizations will be responding by downsizing their R&D, marketing, and labor - the non-revenue producing components of their business in favor of resources that can grow, or at the very least maintain, current revenue levels. This means that sales will need to become more strategic, and marketing will have to become more tactical.

Things that have routinely worked best for me to more effectively integrate the best of marketing and selling (for the past decade at least) in companies I worked with, especially in selling new products to new customers:

1) Marketing (my team) worked with account managers (myself and other sales managers) to develop "sales-ready messaging" (Ch 8, CustomerCentric Selling, Bosworth):

a) Marketing messages were consistent with sales messaging, and focused on helping the sales force consistently communicate where the products and services solved the problems and objectives that the buyer was facing.

b) Marketing made a list of goals and problems based on feedback from customers. Usually this feedback came from the sales and customer support teams. These needs were matched up with products and services we provided – and focused on the "whole product", not just the features and benefits of components – e.g. customers wanted "clean water" not just the parts of a municipal water treatment system; or they wanted to know who called in the last hour, not just the components of a CRM system.

c) Marketing developed a standard series of questions / conversations / presentation topics that moved the buyer to position the offerings as a solution and uncover the buyer's needs and problems – specific business issues that could uniquely be solved by our company.

I believe in a dialogue model (through integrated and interactive messaging and conversations), facilitating customers and partners to discover their own reasons for using the company's products and services, and therefore owning the results. I focus on working with partners and customers to transform their concerns into shared goals.

This standard "scripting" (consistent messaging throughout all the sales tools and marketing literature, ads, website and other communications) helped sales account managers with consultative selling to help the buyer develop a vision in favor of our offerings – sales staff learned to converse with the buyer and listen for needs, rather than simply describe what the prospect needed or talk about features and benefits of our products or services. It helped us develop buyers, regardless of any previous or ongoing relationship, because we had cultivated mutual respect through discussing how to solve a problem that they had expressed.

2) Filling the sales funnel was approached proactively and systematically.

a) Proof of demand was developed before the product was developed, through market research as well as actual orders. We had buyers who not only expressed need, but committed to purchase (at an initial discount for new buyers who also agreed to serve as references). This also served to build a sense of urgency in the company to design and build the product and services, and minimize the "time to market", while meeting the interests for quality and features with current customers. Through this process, we also gained innovator partners who helped us refine the products for the broader market.

b) As head of marketing, I focused company resources on initially achieving a strong loyal following with a single industry, or based on a single buyer issue that was to provide a solid foundation for strong demand growth, i.e., developed a solid and successful "beachhead" to leverage in other markets. This was extremely important, but also very difficult – many opportunities came our way, but each one was evaluated on how much it would take from building the base vs enhancing the foundation. This was critical in conserving company resources for building a strong, supported leveragable base of customers.

c) Everyone in the company was responsible for ongoing prospecting and filling the sales funnel, especially sales people. Sales didn't just rely on new leads provided by marketing – though marketing had a big part in generating new targets. Customer service also was integrally involved in providing new sales opportunities.

d) Buyers were targeted who were not necessarily ready to move toward change. Through market research, I estimated that less than 10% - often closer to only 1-3% - of a market were "qualified" in terms of having a need, money, and interest in a specific solution at a given time. Only targeting "qualified leads" with sales efforts leaves too many potential buyers out of the sales funnel. Due to this, as the marketing strategist, I developed methods to engage a broader group that had a mutual issue, problem, or goal, such as via workshops, trade shows, virtual focus groups, marketing communications campaigns using a variety of media and interactive messaging, etc.

e) Information was gathered through surveys or conversations with current successful accounts, leading to developing messaging and sales literature that featured those customers, issues and solutions.

f) I also worked to get peer-reviewed articles in industry journals and online where the customer target groups would see them.

3) Marketing and sales worked together to develop a quantifiable process that account managers could follow and uniformly forecast where they were in the sales process.

a) The process allowed account managers to determine whether a particular sale was costing a lot of time and resources while not likely to be a worthwhile effort either leading to a sale, or a high cost customer after the sale in terms of resources or negativity. i.e. sales were not only processed, but were also evaluated for resource expenditure - usually in monthly group sales meetings adding group perspective to the account manager's assessment.

b) Ideally, with the best sales managers, the agenda of the sales process was focused on the customer's interests, not just the process.

c) Though each sale was unique in many ways, many common steps made in the sales process were more like project management, whereby the executive and sales teams could follow the process, and the account manager could get the decisionmaker / buyer / buying committee to agree on the steps / deliverables / dates for evaluating the product or service we were offering. This gave us a more reliable timeline and ability to determine sooner whether the selling effort was worth the resources.

4) Satisfied customers were involved in generating demand in workshops, advertisements, email, blog postings, all other types of marketing and sales efforts. This partnership secured these customers' ongoing support, as well as building new demand.

5) C-level executives were targeted initially to establish common goals, and the need and money for our products and services.

a) Usually initial meetings were held with C-level executives to determine the buyer's needs and get a commitment to proceed. These meetings or workshops often involved many of the stakeholders (operations, administration, finance, external partners) to the buying decision.

b) Marketing and sales executives led executive seminars, focused on CFOs and CEOs, or other political and business decisionmakers, with high-level topics and issues they needed us to solve, and co-led by satisfied buyers who could share their experience with mutual problems and goals. The customers helped to start decision-makers down the path to considering the change and investment needed, getting commitment and revenue for the project at the outset. These C-level executives were in an environment where our account managers could engage in conversation with current customers and prospective buyers about mutual company goals, successes, and uncover business issues that we could solve.

After using this process successfully for the past 15 years or so, I finally found a book that articulates this sales process in a way that it can be used as a rulebook or guide for developing a great sales mentality in both the marketing and sales divisions of an organization: CustomerCentric Selling by Michael T Bosworth, Published 2004, McGraw-Hill Professional. I highly recommend that anyone in sales and/or marketing get this book, read it, and keep it handy.