When was the last time you heard someone say, "I'm going to buy from XY and Z Company because they are on Twitter" or "You should by from ABC Company because they have a Facebook fan page, or a Google+ page"? It just doesn't happen that way. Platforms and mediums will change and shift, what goes in them is great stories. So it's important to invest more in your story or message than just in the platform.
In today's highly competitive world, brands are becoming more and more commoditized. Companies need to differentiate themselves from their competition - or they will lose out. But, it's not about the medium like most people would tell you. It's not about being on Facebook or "being present", it's about being engaged, and being engaging. Rather than sell your own corporate story or brand message, you need to engage your customers in their stories and join their conversations.
Who better to talk about creating an engaging conversation than Erik Peterson and Tim Riesterer, authors of Conversations that Win the Complex Sale? They have been developing and honing their powerful sales-ready messaging techniques for more than 20 years, working with companies such as Dell, GE, ADP, Philips, IBM and more. Using their power messaging approach, Erik, Tim and their customer messaging company, Corporate Visions, create more opportunities, differentiate their clients solutions, and close more deals. We asked Erik and Tim the following questions about the power of customer messaging:
What is Customer Messaging?
The single biggest thing that separates successful companies is the story you tell when you are in the buying cycle. There is a real challenge we call the "status quo barrier," and it keeps your prospects from wanting to change. You need a message that will not only differentiate you from competitors or alternatives, but convinces the decision-maker they need to do something different in the first place. Your message needs to be about the customer's story (not yours) and it must be compelling, relevant and unique enough to create commercial impact. The kicker is that you often need to tell the customer something they don't know about a problem they didn't even know they had to break through the status quo barrier. In that way, your customer or sales messaging needs to be a little dangerous and fearless instead of safe and self-satisfying, if you want to move market share.
How is this different than brand positioning?
Ah, that's what's meant by "safe and self-satisfying" in the first answer. Brand positioning is typically about what we feel our brand should be, what we want to be known as, why we come to work each day, what we promise to do for the customer, and what customers like about us. Companies tend to "we, we, we" all over themselves when they create brand messaging. It's 30,000-foot hyperbole that rarely separates you from your competitors, is difficult to translate at the 3-foot level where a customer conversation takes place, and almost never compels a customer to do anything different. Companies test whether customers' like their brand position, but they don't test whether it will actually get them to do something different. I like the way Sergio Zyman, former Coca Cola CMO and author of The End of Marketing as We Know It says, "We can't live on virtual consumption." He said this after his brand advertising won many awards, but failed to change their market share.
How does your customer messaging affect sales/profitability?
Customer messaging is the content that goes into demand generation and sales training and selling conversations. This is the message-critical point where your company is participating, and looking to take the lead in the customer decision-making process. These are easily tracked and measured events. We've been able to demonstrate improvements in response rates, pipeline size, deal size, and closed business. You need a compelling story to go with the consistent processes and coordinated systems that drive these activities. I'd argue that the compelling story is often taken for granted as companies focus on their products and features, their demand generation and lead management process, and their marketing and sales automation. The one thing that dictates whether all this programming is successful or not is whether your story is potent enough to create commercial impact or too impotent to get noticed or move the needle.
How have things changed?
There's a bullseye on Marketing's back. Now that senior management knows that these things can be measured, there's no room for subjective or top of the funnel measurement. It's not about followers, or clicks, or impressions, or opinions. It's not about the volume of sales materials and training you put out. It's about revenue performance and the metrics that matter to the bottom line. The best Marketers are aligning with sales-driven objectives. The rest are Wooly Mammoths walking through the La Brea Tar Pits... it' just a matter of time before the inevitable. The best Marketers are taking more responsibility for the size of the pipeline and conversion to deals. And, it's at that point that it's no longer about Marketing or Sales. It's about relevance vs. irrelevance... and, you can recover more quickly from bankruptcy than you can recover from irrelevancy.
What advice or tips would you give to companies that are looking at re-doing their customer message?
You must have a distinct point of view. The "status quo barrier" is your biggest competitor. You need to overcome it. Here are four challenges creating the status quo barrier that you must confront with your message... and none of them allow for you to play it safe. You must literally arrest the attention of your marketplace:
- Attention Economy - it's almost impossible to get people's attention, so you need to be provocative, getting them to the edge of their seat and telling them something new and fresh
- Change Burden - customers' loathe change, so you need to show them the pain of not changing is worse than the pain of change management
- Risk Aversion - people respond more to the threat of loss than the potential of gain, so make sure your ROI story includes emotional messaging that speaks to the risks that must be avoided
- Entrenched Competition - whether it's a traditional competitor or in-house solution, no one is standing still, so you clearly have to contrast your approach and show differentiation to prove value
I want to thank Eric and Tim for taking the time to answer our questions. Be sure to check out their book on amazon or their messaging feed blog for more original sales and marketing messaging ideas.
View original blog post - Reality Check: It's Not the Medium it's the Message!