What does Dwight from NBC’s The Office have to teach us about messaging?  In the thirteenth episode of the fifth season (“Stress Relief”), Dwight tries a unique tactic to teach fire safety (don’t try this at home… or the office).

Watch as much of this clip as you can handle:

You clearly don’t want or need to go to extremes, but creating urgency with context is the key to driving home your point.   How many times have you simply tuned out an alarm because you figured it was just another drill?

As I’m writing this, it’s Saturday in my small suburban community and the siren is going off, signaling it is noon.  But, no one gives it much attention in my house, or neighborhood.  It’s just the “noon whistle.”

Since I live near Milwaukee, WI, tornadoes, hail, and the ominous storms with “damaging” or “straight-line” winds can occur suddenly.  Interestingly, the siren that signals it is noon on a Saturday is the same one my community uses to signal a severe weather emergency.

The siren that is ignored on Saturdays at noon when the weather is nice can clear an entire park within minutes on a threatening summer Saturday.  I’ve heard that the only time the “noon whistle” does not happen is when the weather is bad.  Why?  The Public Safety department doesn’t want people to mistake it for a real emergency.

In other words, the siren uses the exact same sound, but you don’t know what it means without putting it in context.  The siren on a sunny Saturday at noon means nothing.  The same siren with dark clouds or wind means “take shelter now!”  Context gives the message its meaning.

Context Creates Urgency

It’s the same with your company’s marketing messages or value propositions.  Context creates urgency.  It’s what causes your prospect to take action versus listen passively to the same blah, blah, blah they’ve heard 100 times.

Many companies tell their story in a generic way, often comparing themselves to their competitors.  Hoping the prospect will care.  But, there’s no reason for a prospect to do anything different, if they don’t understand the potential impact on them.  Just like the siren during the sunny day vs. the cloudy day.  You need to clearly show your prospects the potential upside or downside of responding to or ignoring the challenges they face – not the features you offer.

This has never been more important for Marketing and Sales leaders to grasp.  As the economy struggles to escape the grips of a recession, you will be working harder than ever to create demand and create urgency — versus trying to beat competitors — just to build a respectable pipeline.

Sales Can’t Wait for BANT-qualified Leads

I recently spoke with a VP of Sales at one of the biggest software companies.  He said that his salespeople are spending significantly more time on “deal creation” than running traditional competitive sales cycles.  “Otherwise, they’d have nothing to do,” he said.

“Unfortunately, it’s the part of the job where they have the least messaging and least training,” he added.  “But, they know they have to do it if they have any chance of succeeding.”

Today more than ever, your marketing and sales efforts need to create opportunities before your prospects have determined a budget.  Why? Because there aren’t enough deals happening fast enough on their own to help your company make its number.

If you wait for Marketing to create awareness and then demand, and focus your sales people exclusively on managing BANT- (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing) qualified leads, you are going to hear a lot of crickets chirping on your pipeline calls.

One superstar salesperson recently told me, “If I had to feed my children based on waiting for Marketing leads, they’d starve.”  That’s why he approaches demand generation as a significant part of the job.

The Challenger Model

So many companies get their underwear wadded up over the competitive matrix.  You know the chart I’m talking about.  The one with all the competitors’ names and the images of half moons, quarter moons and full moons to show where you are different from your competitors.

That’s all well and good when you are buried deep in the weeds of a “competitive bake-off.” And you have all you can handle keeping up with RFP’s (requests for proposal).  But those days are a distant memory.  And, they aren’t coming back anytime soon.

You know what else has disappeared?  The days of the elongated, expensive dog-and-pony demo parades.  Prospect decision-makers are telling researchers they want a different kind of engagement with sales people.

According to the Corporate Executive Board’s Sales Executive Council (SEC), the sales profile most likely to succeed today is something called “The Challenger.”  Decision-makers tell SEC they prefer conversations with companies where they, the prospects, learn something new.  They want their sales interactions to provide a new, fresh insight by challenging the status quo and showing them a better way to do something.

Most companies struggle to equip their sales people to have these types of interactions.  Why?  It goes back to the initial premise of this article.  You have the context all wrong.

A company-focused context that emphasizes your product features and tries to take out your competitors on a competitive matrix has nothing to do with what your prospects are looking to accomplish.  You are arguing in your context, but the prospect is living in their context.

The real winners create and deliver messaging in a customer-focused context that points out problems and pitfalls that are threatening your prospect’s ability to meet their objectives, and then aligns your solution to their context.  You also show them how you can help avoid the landmines and pains others like them have experienced.

By getting into your prospect’s context, creating urgency to solve a problem, and showing them how you can uniquely help, you will significantly increase the chances they will care enough to start a buying cycle with you.

And, after all, that’s job #1 today.

- Timothy Riesterer
CMO and SVP Strategic Consulting at Corporate Visions Inc.
Co-author of Customer Message Management

Three Rules to Help You Create Preference, Not Parity

According to a survey of 9,000 companies by the Corporate Executive Board’s Marketing Leadership Council, only 14% of the so-called unique benefits companies choose to promote drive enough preference to have a commercial impact. This means that 86% of the things companies claim as unique features and benefits are not perceived as significant enough to get customers to consider doing anything different.

The video below illustrates what can happen when your latest and greatest product offering isn’t a whole lot different from what’s already available and you are not connecting your differentiation with the customer pains you solve better.

The bottom line is that most companies overestimate the uniqueness of the benefits they promote. The failure point, according to the Corporate Executive Board, is proximity. Companies are too close to what they do and lose sight of what is relevant enough to drive customer preference and compel them to take action.

Here are three rules for creating preference vs. parity in your value propositions:

Rule #1:  No context. No value proposition.

Due to Marketers’ proximity to their own company and products, they overestimate the uniqueness and relevance of the benefits they choose to promote.

One of the biggest problems with proximity is mistaking customer “touch-points” for value propositions. Companies like to tout such things as customer service as a differentiator. But, the research shows that decision makers see these types of “touch-point” activities as marginal or poor drivers of preference.

Meanwhile, what really gets customers excited is hearing about clear, unique benefits attached to their business needs. Strategic agenda items such as “streamline my supply chain” or “help me get more out of my existing capital investments” are what people will pay you for because it’s relevant to their responsibilities and how people hold them accountable in their organizations.

Rule #2:  No contrast. No value proposition.

Value lies in the contrast between the pain and the gain.

Brain research proves that humans make decisions that are more adaptive than rational. They need to see a change in their environment that makes the status quo no longer acceptable. They need to see that change is coming now and fast. And, they need to see your solution as critical to their survival.

In fact, emotion needs to be injected into your messaging. Even in B2B, you have to get decision makers emotionally invested in the decision. They will justify with facts, but they will buy based on how this will impact their success or failure in their jobs.

Rule #3:  No corroboration. No value proposition.

The third rule pertains to proof points. Most Marketers think of proof points as quantifiable validation of the value you provide. This is true. Actually, it’s partially true.

When you are trying to get prospects to care enough to consider a change and choose you, proof points must corroborate your solution on two levels:

First, you need proof points that will corroborate or turn up the heat on the problem. “Amping up the pain” as we like to call it. Notice at the beginning of this article, we told you that 86% of unique benefits cited by companies don’t create preference. Did it get you thinking about your own benefit statements and value propositions? It hooked you into the story and got you to care about a potential solution.

Second, you need proof points that will corroborate your claims to be able to solve the problem in a meaningful way that eliminates the pain and brings measurable gain around the strategic agenda item you are addressing. Do you have documented results that validate what doing something different tomorrow will mean to your customers – in terms they care about?

Use these three rules when creating your value propositions and you will discover the difference between preference and parity.

To learn more visit this instant webcast:

http://www.brainshark.com/corpv/PP

Imagine for a moment that you’re a street musician.  Your meal ticket is selling your performance.  So, you’re playing your heart out, vying for the attention of prospects as they pass by.  You catch someone’s ear, and they wander closer.  They’re reaching into their pocket when suddenly, lo, instead of the sweet sound of a shiny coin landing in your tip jar, you hear an ominous tune picking up on other end of the square.  Is that your competition, stealing your prospect’s attention away just as you were about to win their patronage?  You play louder and harder to try to gain them back.  But from your prospect’s perspective, the square has become overloaded with conflicting noise.  Deafened and irritated, they walk away and on to their next errand.

Who won this battle of the one-man bands?  Not surprisingly, the answer is “no one.”

The same thing happens in real-world sales cycles.  You and your competition are blasting messages and new products into the marketplace, hoping something sticks.  The moment you announce a new product, your competition is meeting (and beating) your innovation.  You shout louder, they shout even louder.  You get the picture.  You’ve been there.

Companies create war rooms and fight plans and all kinds of competitive battlefields.  In fact, the competitor can begin to consume your attention.

If you stop and think about it…who is missing in action from this battle?  Only the person that matters most — your buyer.

What is your war with the competition doing to your prospects?  Confusing them, that’s what.  The amount of information your prospect must sift through to find the answer to their problem is increasing by 33% every year.  They are already overloaded with information, and the incessant battle of the competitive bands is only contributing to their malaise.  It’s no wonder you and your competitors all begin to sound the same.  It literally becomes a din of noise.

You can’t cut through the clutter by adding to it.
It doesn’t take “more power” to win a deal.  It takes a simpler, well-placed message that stands out from a crowded, noisy marketplace.

Where has your message gotten too complicated?  Where can you cut back on the noise and focus on that simple story that sets you apart?  How can you make it easier for customers to choose you?

Never become so infatuated with your own performance in your industry, or what your competition is up to, that you forget to make it easy for your prospects to buy from you.