Desktop computers, fax machines and the floppy disk drive – at one point each of these technological advances were fundamental components of our daily lives, but now, most are considered archaic.

The same may be true for your classic 30,000-foot brand messaging. It’s obsolete.

The proliferation of new media channels and mobile devices creates buyer demand for information and insights that are relevant to them and their needs, when and where they need it.  They don’t have the time or the inclination toward the big, bad company-centric branding campaigns of the past. It’s now a 3-foot brand message – the distance between your customer and their digital access screen of choice – that counts.

Unfortunately, the coolness factor associated with the technology involved has skewed some of the focus toward the medium, but it’s still the message that really rules. And, it requires you to re-think your brand messaging development approach.

Insights not Promotions

People want ideas. They want to be inspired. Insights are for sale in this new messaging environment where re-tweeting stuff that impresses you is part of the daily routine. Unfortunately, research shows that your prospective decision-makers believe only 10-14% of company selling messages offer anything unique or relevant.

That means 90% of the stuff you put out is seen as the same as your competitors. After a while, your prospects and customers will just tune out the blah, blah, blah. And now you are faced with breaking through a physical barrier more difficult than penetrating the earth’s gravitational field.

Make your Brand Live Inside Your Customers’ Story

Here’s how you do it. Instead of telling a brand story that is all about you, translate your messages to live inside your prospects’ and customers’ story.

All 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 refers to this concept as your “schema.”

Pretend for a minute that you are a sea captain living in the early 14th century and you believe that the earth is flat. Your long-range planning tool is a spyglass – a little telescope that you can pull out of your pocket and extend so that you can see far distances. This is your risk avoidance tool. It helps you determine where the earth “ends” so you don’t risk falling off.

Now imagine that there’s an inventor who happens to be living during the same period. He has discovered a great new navigational technology – the compass. He brings it to you and says, “With this new invention you can sail your ship due West and discover the other side of world.” Would you be sold? Probably not. Why? Because you live in a “flat world” story. You believe if you buy this technology, it will kill you as you blindly sail off the edge of the earth.

This analogy holds true today when your sales and marketing team tell the brand story about who you are and what you do. Your story needs to be translated into your prospects’ world. What top companies have figured out is that everything they do must be translated from a story about you to a story about your prospect. Otherwise, your brand risks becoming archaic like the desktop computer, fax machine, floppy disk drive and the spyglass.

Learn how to tell a story that sells watch – The Power of Story.

Yet, most organizations are still trying to get the recipe right.

Is your company best-in-class when it comes to getting these two functions working together, and holding them accountable for their performance?

This question is the basis of a new benchmark report published by Aberdeen called Sales and Marketing Alignment: The New Power Couple. Here are three highlights to help you nail the alignment challenge this year.

1. Hold Your Marketing and Sales Messaging Accountable for Driving Revenue

Previously, Aberdeen has shown that best-in-class companies recognize that marketing and sales alignment is driven by effective customer conversations, so are significantly increasing their investment in training their marketers and salespeople to create and deliver great messaging. They realize that it’s not only about where you show up… it’s about what you say when you get there.

This year, Aberdeen found that best-in-class Marketers are being kept up at night by the same challenge as their Sales counterparts: increasing top-line revenue. Every investment in a new marketing program or sales enablement initiative is evaluated with the question: “Is this going to have real business impact?”

It’s challenging enough to measure the impact of marketing campaigns. So how do you tie something as intangible as a change in your sales messaging to quantifiable results?

Philips Respironics proved it could be done. After realizing that a combative relationship between their Marketing and Sales organizations was dragging down their performance, they aligned both departments behind a new message (developed with the help of Corporate Visions), and then brought in the 3^rd party measurement expert Beyond ROI to measure its impact on their business. The $7 million in net-new business and $2.5 million in up-sell revenue they found that had been significantly influenced by their initiative caught the attention of Aberdeen, who featured the story in their recent report.

Tying your new message to top-line revenue is possible. If you want to find out more about how your organization can replicate Philips’ success, attend one of three upcoming live, regional 2-hour roundtables featuring Philips, Aberdeen and Beyond ROI.

2. Get Marketing and Sales Aligned around Common, Quantifiable Goals

In 2010, we surveyed Marketing and Sales leaders at our annual Marketing and Sales Alignment conference. We found that:

41% of organizations set Sales and Marketing goals in a cross-functional process with both departments involved.
Only 21% of those leaders said that those goals were well-socialized across the entire organization.

According to Aberdeen, best-in-class companies rally Sales and Marketing behind each other’s goals.

This doesn’t mean that your Marketers need to crash your company’s annual sales kick-off (though at Corporate Visions, that’s what we’re doing as you read this). But they should be indoctrinated with the same sense of urgency salespeople have on hitting quarterly and annual numbers. And salespeople should be educated on the importance of following up on leads in a timely manner, and giving Marketing credit where it’s due for their pipeline opportunities and won deals. Check out our recent post on developing a joint Marketing and Sales Service Level Agreement to build accountability in both departments.

3. Get Sales Involved in ‘Voice of the Customer’ Research

Aberdeen also found that 71% of best-in-class Marketing organizations involve Sales in obtaining voice-of-the-customer input.

One point you need to understand here is that getting ‘voice of the customer’ input should not involve torturing your customers with 20-question inquisitions to identify what challenges they know they’re facing, and then tying your message back to those preexisting pains. Customers aren’t necessarily going to feed you pains that are big enough to cause them to switch to a new solution. Corporate Visions takes a different approach that focuses instead on identifying and amplifying the immediacy and magnitude of problems they may not even realize they have in the first place. Teach them something they don’t know!

While these message development efforts are often driven by Marketing, you need representatives from Sales in the room. After all, who knows better how well a new message will resonate with the market than the salespeople who talk to your customers every day?

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.