Your company brand message tends to be all about you. It tells the story of who you are, what you do, who you’ve helped, and how you’ve helped them. Sales professionals learn the corporate story and then go tell it to prospective customers. You assume that if your prospects knew as much about your company and solutions as you do, they would buy from you, right? Unfortunately, that’s not the case.
There should be a difference between your brand message and your field message. Your field message should be about who? That’s right – your prospect. Not a big deal, you say? Well, actually it is. Your brand message is most often communicated through the written word – things like your website, brochures, advertisements, white papers, analysts’ reports and even PowerPoint slides (which are written words projected on a screen). Field messages are customer conversations, most often delivered through the spoken word – a completely different dynamic.
The Dating Game
To get a better understanding of this, go back to the time in your life when you were dating. Think of your brand as the clothes you wore, your hairstyle, the perfume or cologne you spritzed on, or perhaps the car you drove. Collectively they represented your brand and were designed to attract that other person into a relationship with you. Your corporate brand has the same purpose.
Now what happens to you when you go out on your first date and your brand message does not turn into a field message? He or she will later tell their friends, “What a conceited, self-centered, egotistical person. All they talked about was themselves. There would not be a second date. Yet, this is exactly what salespeople are forced to do when delivering a brand message that’s all about your company.
Everyone Lives in a Stories: Even Your Buyers
Why is it important to translate this brand story about you into a story about your prospect? The answer lies in how the human brain works. Humans live in story. Your story is the window through which you look at your world. Your story affects how you make decisions. Developmental Psychologist refer to this concept as your “schema.”
Your story needs to be translated into your prospects’ world. What top sales performers have figured out is that everything you do must be translated. From the written word to the spoken word. From a story about you to a story about your prospect!
You job is to take the story that you tell and make it a story about your prospect that provokes them to see the world differently, while also being a story that makes them feel that moving forward with your solution is the surest and safest thing they could do. Just like in a court of law, whoever tells the best, most believable story wins.
Want to learn why stories work and how to use the Power of Story in your messaging? Watch this instant webinar: The Power of Story: How to Tell a Story that Sells.
[...] Imagine them getting all dolled up, go out on a date and at the end, all that their poor companion for the evening is able to tell their friends is “What a conceited, self-centered, egotistical person. Not interested in anyone else but himself!.” There won’t be a second date. Well, the same holds true for your brand message. When all you do is talk about your own company, your prospects will be turned off by your self-centeredness and won’t respond in return. This is why more often than not, why your brand message does not convert into sales. [...]