Category Archives: Sales and Marketing Alignment

You Can Lead a Horse to Water…

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It’s kickoff season and all through the office nothing is stirring except for the marketing department. They haven’t slept for weeks. All the planning, coordination and presentations must come together to energize the sales force for another year.

Let’s see what should we talk about? Hmmm….how about last year’s performance milestones? That should make them feel good. How about a pep talk from the president? Maybe the CFO should talk about our financials. We’ve got lots of product folks who will want to talk about what’s coming. Of course, marketing will talk about all the cool things they are doing to make our lives easier. Who has climbed a mountain or gone into space recently that we can get as a guest speaker? Sales management will want to rollout the new price list and compensation plans. Anything we’re forgetting? Oh yeah, the awards banquet!

Sales Meeting Attendee:
Yippee – another great venue for the sales meeting. I hope I’ll get outside the hotel this year. Three days of death by presentations. I’m not carrying all that paper with me. They better ship it home or it’s going to stay in the hotel room. I wonder who will get stuck with the bar tab this year? Oh great, another incentive program that’s trying to take money out of my pocket. Would someone please remind me why I’m doing this?

You’ve heard the English idiom, “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.” Sales people and sales meetings are a lot like that saying. You go to great lengths to prepare content that should be thirst quenching and, yet, it is received with a lackluster attitude. Why? Aren’t sales meetings supposed to be fun and exciting? Aren’t they supposed to make “the troops” reenlist for another year? They really need all this content, don’t they?

As a consultant with Corporate Visions, I get asked each year to speak at a number of sales kick-offs. They represent a change from my standard workshop delivery, and they are great confidence boosters. I often have enough preparation time at the event to allow me to sit in on a few of the presentations. While the company names change from week to week, the content rarely does. For the most part, the content is really good. It’s exactly what the sales organization should hear to get them ready to go out and do it again this year. The fault I find is in the delivery. I’m not referring to the speaking skills of the presenters. I’ve seen many presenters who had poor speaking skills, yet could deliver their message in a captivating way. How can you get sales people to “drink” in your message? You can lead a horse to water and make it drink! How? You salt their oats.

Most of the content I see presented at sales meetings is not perceived by the salesperson sitting in the audience as relevant to their success. If the content is important but not being interpreted as such, then there could be a problem with your delivery. You’re not salting their oats.

Prior to one company’s kick-off, I had the privilege of working with a Vice President of Marketing, whose challenge was to roll-out a new set of sales messages. I asked how he would serve up this “sparkling water” to his “thirsty horses.” He told me that he would explain to them the process that his people went through to identify and create their messages. Then, he would tell them what the messages are and hand out a document that describes them in more detail. That sounds like a logical approach, but my comment was that they will probably not “drink.” The reason is that you’re preparing an “intellectual” exercise for your sales team and you haven’t salted their oats.

“What are you talking about?” he asked.
I said, “Well, your content is good, but you’re serving it up in a dry format, and it’s all about you and not about them.”
“What do you mean? Of course it’s about them.”
No, I said, it’s about what you did, what you created, what you want and why you think it’s important. You’re not delivering theses messages from their point-of-view. How about starting your presentation by asking your sales audience what they think are the biggest challenges facing their prospects? Then ask them the question, ‘What if you had a set of solutions that could address the most critical customer challenges in a unique way? Would that impact your success in 2007? Now imagine if you had a set of sales messages that would clearly articulate this unique value to your prospects. That’s exactly what you will see in this presentation. You will leave here today with a set of simple sales messages that will define a battle ground that you alone can win on. Would you like to stay and see them or should we break for lunch early?’

The next time you’re asked to deliver a piece of content via a presentation, ask yourself; Am I delivering this content from my audiences’ point-of-view? Am I delivering it in a way that makes the value of this content come alive to them? Am I salting their oats?

-Dean Schantz, Corporate Visions’ Consultant

 

Fueling Personal Success

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Steven Sprenger, President of Strategic Knowledge Sciences, credits Power Messaging as a catalyst for creating value propositions that helped him secure strategic partnerships and get CEO traction in large Fortune 100 accounts.

Steven explains, “Over the course of my 25 year career in the IT and enterprise software industry, I have seen countless inefficiencies in the way companies go-to-market and track, measure, and improve their most critical business process to survive. Many companies operate similar to 19th century medicine, lacking diagnostic instruments and crude ineffective treatment modalities. I founded SKS in September, 2003 to provide a Six-Sigma approach to re-engineering and improving sales and marketing business processes to help clients move the sales needle. The Power Messaging® concepts I learned from Corporate Vision was the catalyst. Power Messaging helped me build the vision for my new company, and helped me communicate my message in a compelling way.

Three Deadly Sins of Sales

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Picture your last sales presentation or demonstration. How much of the material presented actually needed to be there? How long did it take to present? And what was your reason for presenting that way?

“It’s a technical presentation and they NEED to see it all” or “..they WANT to see it all.”
“It’s what Marketing gave us to present.” Our favorite:  “Stop me when you see something you like!”

In the age of information, it is easy to overwhelm your prospect with content not even relevant to the sale and actually make their decision more difficult.

Help yourself succeed by avoiding the most common Deadly Sins of Sales Presentations:

Deadly Sin #1 – Too Much Information
Dimming the lights and letting Power Point, (loaded with content your prospect is inclined to read), lead the way — takes the attention off you. Presenting features and functions is like explaining the material used in phones, rather than what a phone can mean to your life. What your solution IS and DOES, has much less emotional impact than what it MEANS to them. Rather than go through the engine – give them a test drive and ask them what they think and how they see this working in their world.

Deadly Sin # 2 – Not Presenting from the Buyer’s Point of View
Look again at your Agenda. Is it all about the customer and how their problems can be solved using your solution? Or is it about you: how long you’ve been in business, office locations around the world, etc.? Agendas set the tone and focus of your presentation. They work best when they alert your prospect that you are there to solve their problems first.

Deadly Sin # 3 — Not Telling Them What is Different about You
It is hard enough for prospects to make intelligent choices, don’t make it harder. If you cannot prove the difference between you and your competitor – how will your prospects? Make it easy for them! Spend time solving their problems, with clear and compelling reasons why they should choose you.

Exchange the 3 Deadly Sins for the 3 Ways to Win:

1. Keep your Presentation Simple and focused around three key relevant value propositions that are unique to your solution and important to this buyer. Highlight the unique value your solution and company alone can bring them. Make your unique value come alive in their world using tangible, concrete, simple and visual examples.

2. Know your Solution Story and be able to tell it with passion and proof. Focus the presentation on 3 to 5 problems/challenges you know your solution can uniquely solve. Use Customer Stories that highlight the before and after contrast as proof that your solution works.

3. Present from your Prospect’s Point of View, so they can imagine how your solution will benefit their business, financial and personal life. Build your Agenda around their needs, pains and desires. Seek to understand how your solution would work in their world. Ask for their feedback whenever you notice a peaked interest.

Follow this simple formula and your conversations will help both you and your buyer WIN!

Messages Move Markets

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“Translating a strategic vision into something the field can execute on is a secret to winning. They cannot execute simply from the strategic vision. The staff needs something more concrete. Messaging is the link that guides operations on how to implement strategic vision into a revenue generating reality. It takes all three to be successful: a great strategic vision, operational excellence, and great messages.”
Nick Earle CEO StreamServe

Products don’t sell themselves.
Companies grow when someone sells something, creating revenue streams. Sales occur when the right story and message compels your buyer to purchase. These messages are as fundamental to your company as oxygen is to life. Products live and die based on the message, how it is delivered, and how it is perceived. Your product gets positioned in your buyers mind through your message and how you present it. This distinction is similar to the songwriter who writes the song and the singer who sings it. Your product message is the ‘song’ and your salespeople are the singers.

Messaging is the art of telling great product stories that move prospects to buy.
How your product will uniquely solve a buyer’s problem, improve their life, and help them achieve desired results — is what sells. Your product message and how it is delivered will determine the success of your sales. Every product, even the paper clip, has a message that tells a story. People do not buy paper clips for what they are (a folded piece of metal)… they buy them for what they do (hold paper together). Even at such a small level, for a small product, the message or story is what sells the product.

With complex products and solutions, the message becomes even more important. It determines which product they buy, and which they don’t. Great messages delivered well, stick with buyers, are easy to remember, and change buying decisions.

Each department has a piece of your great message
Product Development understands capabilities, Marketing understand buyer trends, Sales are intimate with individual buyers and competitors and Executives are aligned with the corporate vision. Utilizing the synergistic creative intelligence of all these groups is invaluable in developing a message that sings a song your entire company and the market will embrace. Every one of these functional groups should contribute to message development – not just marketing. This is critical.

With the same product, same sales team, same prospect base, but a new compelling “song”, your sales team will drive new revenues, sustain happy customers, support a vibrant brand, and enjoy an easier time selling. Nothing changed — yet everything changed. Customers now know you by the message of what the product will do for them…uniquely do for them.

Three Rules for Great Sales Messages:

  • Create clear separation between you and your competitors
  • Convert features into personal, business, and financial value
  • Alter the buyers decision criteria

Once you know where your clear advantages are, you can compete on your strengths, and literally change the buying criteria to favor your product or solution.

-Chuck Laughlin
Author of Samurai Selling
Founder of Corporate Visions, Inc.