If you and your sales teams are still using old scripts, your sales messaging might be in dire need of a refresh. The primary problem when your messaging is stale is that you won’t be addressing what your ideal audience is really looking for that they might actually find in your products and services. Additionally, if your audience is getting the same-old, same-old, they can lose interest very quickly. Let’s took at the top ways you can refresh your sales messaging to bring in more leads.
Review What’s Working & What Isn’t
The first crucial step that many businesses miss is the importance of looking at what their data is telling them about their sales messaging. Often times, we get focused on the aesthetics of our sales messaging that we forget that what matters is whether or not it’s actually effective at, well, pushing sales. Always go back to the numbers. How many leads were gathered via a particular piece of messaging? How many actually converted into a sale? Are people even responding?
The answers to these questions are your guide to understanding just how effective your sales messaging is or how much improvements need to be applied. When doing a review, go through your entire funnel and leave no stone—or script—left untouched and unreviewed. It might take time but it’s worthwhile given how much insight you can gain that can go into improvements that will only benefit your sales teams and their efforts.
Move Towards Becoming Customer-Centric
It’s only really natural that much of any business’ sales messaging focuses on the company and its business. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with that—you are trying to sell you, after all. The problem, however, is that this situation doesn’t make for a great customer experience. While you might be touting all those buzzwords like “best in class” or “number 1 at whatever it is you do”, your potential customers are wondering what you can actually do to solve their pain points.
So how do you become customer-centric? Think about what customer problems your products and offerings are supposed to solve and talk about that. The most successful B2B businesses out there are those that go straight towards addressing common pain points right from the get-go—with the buzzwords and other claims coming later. When you do so, you create a strong connection that you can build upon as you nurture your customers.
Focus Your Messaging on Providing Value
Of course, if you’re focusing on your customer, odds are that your competition is doing the same. This is particularly true in cases where the products and solutions on-offer are pretty general or common. So you shouldn’t stop with just shifting the messaging towards addressing your customers’ needs. You would do well to now focus on what you can offer that differs vastly from the competition. Note that this isn't the self-aggrandizing marketing blurbs and cool, catchy sales talk.
“Value” can be something tangible like a discount given a particular set of conditions, a cut-down price for longer engagement with your company and the like. Value should also include the particular advantages, benefits, and merits that set you apart—the key is to be specific and back your value claims with data. You say your product and service is faster—what makes it so? You say you provide a more secure experience—how do you go about doing that?
Create a Style/Script Guide for Consistency
Finally, if you don’t have one yet, you should create a style guide to ensure that no matter who is in charge of pushing your sales messaging out—everything is aligned across the board. Consistency matters insofar as what you might offer a client/customer or what claims you ultimately make. When you aren’t consistent, your credibility and authenticity takes a hit. So you really wouldn’t want sales rep to be saying something another will ultimately contradict.
There are no hard fast rules to creating a style guide for sales messaging. It can be as simple as a few scripts and guidelines, but you could also go so far as to define what particular terms should (or should not) be used, what tone should be undertaken in particular forms of communication, and even who is in charge delivery one message or the other. The key is that you should make it easy to understand and, ultimately, implement.
Give Yourself an Edge
Sales messaging, of course, is one aspect of a bigger picture. In order to elevate your sales efforts to success, you have to factor in and work with a lot of other things. Intent data, for example, will help you identify who is most inclined to convert to a paying customer based on interactions on your website and even your content. Effective lead generation, on the other hand, can get you contact details of potential customers who meet your criteria for an ideal client.
At Internal Results, we’re all about providing you everything you need to up your chances of closing a sale.
