How Much does Poor or Inconsistent Sales Messaging Affect Your Business?

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I was inspired by one of Tamara Schenk’s latest articles called “The Inability To Communicate Value Messages – Biggest Inhibitor To Sales Success 2014” – http://blog.tamaraschenk.com/?p=1622.

Tamara is one of the Research Directors for Miller Heiman, and in her article she states that over the past three years Miller Heiman Research Institute has asked the question: “What are the biggest inhibitors to sales success?” and what came back was: “the inability to communicate value messages.”

According to Michael Cannon (www.silverbulletgroup.com): “U.S. companies alone waste more than $40 Billion every year by confusing sales messaging with other messaging types. On the flip side, innovative companies routinely see a 15% to 25% improvement in market share, revenue and net income when they implement great messaging.” In a study by CSO Insight, 86% of value propositions sales people present are not relevant enough to get a customer to take action. In fact, Sirius Decisions found that the #1 inhibitor to a salesperson’s success is their inability to communicate their value message in a compelling and confident way.

One of the things that negatively affect most sales organizations is that their people tend to lead with their products or solutions first. Tamara Schenk writes: “Executive buyers in particular are not interested in what a product is and what it does; they need to know what it means for their business and their desired outcomes.” This is an excellent point, and today people don’t buy products, they buy outcomes! So, too many times sales people tend to lead with their products hoping to find a problem that the prospect will identify with, and their value message tends to be around their products and not the prospects problem or outcome.

Your sales message clearly needs to be anchored around a problem that the prospect has and needs to fix now, and can’t fix it himself and needs your help to fix it. Otherwise, your message isn’t being heard by your prospects; it just becomes more noise to them because they don’t relate it to an outcome they desire.

Sales and Marketing teams need to collaborate and create more effective messages that center on customer problems and their positive outcomes, rather than the products or services they sell, if they want their sales people to really connect with their prospects. At least that’s the way I see it, what say you?



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