Bridging the Gap between Your Sales Message and Your Buyer

Probably one of the most frustrating issues facing sales people today is being able to deliver a compelling sales message that reaches the right audience with the right message.

Oftentimes sales people are presented with the “Corporate Sales Message” that was created by someone in the Marketing Department, and chances are the person who created that message never had a real one-to-one conversation with a prospective buyer. The biggest problem with that is you never know if your message is the right message or not, because those messages aren’t vetted and tested before they are given to the sales people to deliver.

So, this creates a gap between the sales message and your buyer, and that makes it difficult for the sales person to get those buyers to respond to their requests and meet with them because the buyer didn’t connect with it.

All too often the sales message has the wrong focus. It focuses on your company, your products and solutions, its features and benefits and not the buyer. Those don’t provide the sales organization with what is needed to engage in meaningful and relevant sales conversations. As a result of this disconnect, the sales reps are left to figure out sales messaging by themselves. That leads to inconsistent messaging, with little control from corporate as to what is being said or presented. Those trial-and-error methods are an expensive proposition. Much of this is clearly due to the age-old, ongoing disconnect and misalignment between sales and marketing, which creates the gap between the sales message and the buyer.

There are a couple of approaches that could clearly resolve this problem, but it takes time and patience on the part of both sales and marketing:

1. The first approach would be to survey your current customers and find out what it was that caught their attention about your company. Then see if there is a consistent theme that reoccurs. Next, provide them with a number of messages to see which ones they would react positively to and then develop your message from those.
2. Conduct a LinkedIn or Survey Monkey survey targeted at the market you want to pursue and see what their responses are and what they find most valuable and compelling in a message.
3. Use Social Media to see what people are interested in, need to solve and respond to, and then create your message around that.
4. Last, but not least, go directly to your sales people and find out from them what is working and what isn’t, and then don’t be afraid to incorporate those into your sales messaging. Those are your frontline eyes and ears. They are the ones who have won or lost an opportunity to engage a buyer based on the success of the message that they used.

Since delivering the right message, to the right audience, at the right time, is paramount to gaining the opportunity to engage your targeted buyer. It is extremely important that you spend the right time to craft that message, so there is no buyer gap. At least that’s the way I see it, what say you?