How very true, Scott. "Tapping" into your source of wisdom again, most marketing messages "fill a much needed void".

Marketing is set up as a broadcast medium but messaging shouldl be more pointcast. So what's the fix?

I do think it will be a while before many marketing and sales organizations (yes, many sales orgs ASK for standard product messaging) wean themselves from standard product-oriented messages. And worse, standard "product powerpoint presentations".

I do believe that, if well-crafted, some "solution messages" can provide a useful starting point as building blocks or templates for someone doing marketing or sales to a particular customer or segment.

Perhaps marketing's messaging role (since it can't be in every account, lest it just become "sales"), could evolve by working with sales and customers to collect customer-specific examples of where custom "messaging" captured interest and ultimately won deals -- and where it failed, and why. Depending on the solution area, a collection of these would likely uncover useful recurring themes while also highlighting the critical differences that preclude a "one-size-fits-all" approach.

Dave, as always you've provided very insightful comments and raised some very good questions. Here are a few points to your response.

1) Broadcast v. pointcast medium. We completely agree with you. This is one of the three major paradoxes that prevent sales, solutions, and marketing integration. We call it the paradox of context as marketing is designed to promote a few polished messages to a large audience wheras sales is set up to communicate many different messages to a relatively small audience. These disparate communication objectives are at the heart of some of the problems you raise. I'll post more on this later as we are finishing up some graphics to help communicate those ideas.

2. Sales people ask for product messaging. I think this is a core problem too. Marketing as a function will not be able to add value if they are supporting too many different agendas. When we speak with VP's of sales, they all tell us they want the materials marketing provides directed at their better reps, with customer problem oriented messages. However, marketing asks individual sales reps what they want and its "leads" and "one pagers I can give to customers". This is another pardox - the paradox of design. Many in marketing believe that to show results, you need to have a lot of usage of a tool or program. However, in reality, 80% of the revenue is driven by 20% of the sales force. The ability of a sales force falls naturally into a normal distribution (bell curve) and investements for improving sales performace have far greater returns if they are focused on: helping the "A" reps be more productive, moving "B" reps to "C" reps, and moving "C" reps to "B" reps. Marketing investements focused on the bottom part of the curve (D&E reps) never provide a return. Another area where marketing can contribute is in shortening the ramp up time of new reps. I think you are right that in the current way of thinking, change will come too slowly. However, focusing efforts where an impact can be made has a duplicative effect. First, tangible evidence of marketings contribution to sales can be show. Secondly, sales leadership will finally have a structured way to scale and repeat success.

3. One size fits all messaging. Again, you raise another point that is near and dear to my heart. Most people inside a company simply do not have the requisitite empathy to create customer relevant messaging. For example, one company I worked with (no, this isnt your firm Dave) had an Infrastructure Planning offering that was more or less an assessment and a roadmap to helping the client build a best practice adaptive infrsatructure. Following the old addage "we need to sell higher", they actually tried to create positioning statements for the CFO. Here is an actual (I kid you not) example. (This is laid out in a two column table with the first colunm labeled "problem" the other "solution" - here is one line for the CFO.

Problem - Need to improve margins
Solution - Infrastructure planning offering (name deleted to protect the innocent) help improve margins.

That's it.

No explaination. No context. No relevancy.

Only someone who has never met a CFO could create such an awful and niave "value statement".

We've been getting a lot of traction on the idea of creating an inventory, or database of possible messages that are: timely (based on their buying cycle), relevant (to the topic at hand) and In Context (to the individual stakeholders roles and responsiblites). If you do not have all three, the likelihood of a given message reasonating with a target prospect are extremely low.

We also believe that messaging is just one attribute of the overall content problem. Content is the fuel that runs a sales engine and currently the fuel companies are providing creates far too much waste for today's leaner, more effiecient sales engine.

We'll exapand on some of these ideas in future entries.

Scott-

Thanks for pointing out these problem areas. I would like build on your 3 points, from a sales person's perspective. In speaking with hundreds of sales people on their views, the resounding feedback is the wish for marketing to get ‘down to the street level’ with them. Sales people would welcome marketing support while they engaged with the customer nose to nose during a pursuit, where marketing is typically absent.

This would help solve one big frustration for sales people today: getting “bogged down” during moments of truth in a pursuit. This means that could become stuck in gaining access, validating and advancing an opportunity, communicating value, and closing. We call this undesirable sales frustration ‘maybe-land’ (maybe they will move forward and maybe they won’t).

This is where Marketing can step in and save the day. By helping sales person stay out of ‘maybe-land’ during moments of truth in the sales pursuit.

However, this is not happening. As you point out (above), I would say the marketing efforts having typically been based on ‘combining and aggregating’ information to tell the sales person a rich amount of information. With oceans of information from the marketing stratosphere, the sales people find little value in this and sometimes feel overwhelmed. So in the salesperson’s point of view, “To Aggregate” is “To Aggravate”. To no surprise, as AMA points out, 90% of marketing materials go unused by sales people.

The answer: Transform from "Aggregating” into “Distilling" marketing approach
While marketing has been busy creating “aggregate messages for the masses”, sales people yearn for “distilled points of intelligence” during a few key moments of truth in a pursuit – which they can USE. This means that marketing needs to think about how to organize their tribal knowledge into them into ‘meaningful strategic corporate assets’ to be used during specific sales moments of truth: gaining access, validating and advancing an opportunity, communicating value, and closing.

Only marketing has the discipline to organize this – we sales people don’t. So it’s up to marketing make this move, which is not easy. If done, I would predict that sales people would NEED marketing more to sell more.

As a buying manager in a previous job, vendors' value propositions generally seemed to be way over the top and unrealistic to me. Why? Because I knew my problems better than anyone else. So how could a vendor tell me they had the solution without even spending time trying to understand my problems? Because they generalize.

Look, I think you generally have 2 types of vendors that you deal with. One type is the commodity provider. You generally want the best quality for the lowest price, and in many cases, the least amount of hassle. If a commodity vendor can do it hassle-free, you might even pay a bit more. Their value to me is that they provide a product or service that is differentiated from other commodity vendors by their price and ease of acquisition, implementation, usage and/or maintenance. The value proposition statement from this vendor, then, can be very simple, but its impact to me is nothing more than an opening statement, an eye-catcher.

The second type demands a more complicated relationship, and thus, a more demanding value proposition and interaction. This type is for the solution provider. My problems are unique, therefore my solution will be unique, therefore I expect the prospective vendors to spend some time learning my problem and earning my trust. In this case, the value proposition is not only an eye-catcher or opening statement, but also something that I expect the vendor to tailor to my situation.

To use Scott's earlier examples, as a buying manager, I don't really care if a vendor says they are more scalable, truly global, or more adaptive unless they can demonstrate:

- that they can scale in my environment based on my business's growth projections
- that they can operate in the markets that my company operates in and plans to operate in in the future
- and that they can adapt to the multiple factors that affect my company

To do this, that vendor must spend time. Vendors can provide you references, show examples of other installations and relationships, and demo their product or service. If it is a commodity buy, this may be enough to make a decision. However, if it is a solution provider, there needs to be enough time for me to develop a level of trust in them. For me and most of the buyers that I have dealt with, that comes from knowing that the vendor has and will continue to invest the time it takes to understand my world, then prove that their value proposition is more than words.

To sum it up with my own Nigel analogy (forgive me, Scott) - I don't need my commodity vendor to go to 11, but my solution provider needs to go to 11 and take me with them.

Hey Scott… First of all no self respecting “head banger” would ever fumble the name of the lead guitar player for Spinal Tap. It’s Nigel Tufnel, not Huffen. The lead singer however was David, St Hubbins whose last name was derived from the patron saint of quality footwear!

The quote is right on however, and your synthesis of the marketing and sales messaging problem shows once again that while Rock & Roll trivia isn’t your game, your insights on messaging & positioning are right on the mark.

The truth is that companies with complex products and services have been wrestling with this problem over the last 20 years now as customers were becoming a whole lot smarter about what they need and how to buy, offerings were getting more and more complex and less differentiated, and sales people were being told that they needed to “sell solutions”.

Today, the Marketing and Selling of complex products and services requires a bilingual approach to positioning and messaging. In order to truly sell solutions, sales people, as well as the company they represent have be perceived as problem solvers and this means that sometimes, they as well as marketing, need to communicate in what I call the “Voice of the Problem Solver” (customer-centric, outside-in, narrowcast) as well as the “Voice of the Product Seller” (product-centric, inside-out, broadcast).

To accomplish this, product and strategic marketing organizations need to develop a systematic process for organizing the key facts, insights, and opinions that support both problem solving discussions and problem solving messaging collateral that support a product centric as well as a customer centric communication model and answer the following critical customer questions.

1.Do you really understand my critical business needs as well as the underlying issues that drive those needs?

2.Why is solving these needs and issues an urgent priority for both my company and me as an individual?

3.How would we actually use your solutions and capabilities to solve these specific needs and issues?

4.How are you different than your competition; and what additional value does that differentiation provide me and my company in the context of these specific needs and issues?

5.What proof do you have to support this?

The big problem is that coming up with good answers to these questions is not easy. They are scattered everywhere and represent the Marketing & Sales DNA of an organization and collecting this DNA takes a systematic process, collaboration between sales and marketing, and most importantly, a way catalogue and store this DNA in a knowledge base so it can be retrieved according the specific customer need or selling situation.

In “Escaping The Black Hole” I call this process Value Mapping. And with the right collaboration and message development tools, building customer centric Value Maps can be the Holy Grail that aligns marketing and selling around what the customer really needs. When simple Value Mapping tools become available (maybe even later this year) this best practice will be come as ubiquitous to product and solution marketing organizations as forecasting is to sales.

Bob. Thanks for demoting me from "head banger" status and relegating me to the comforts of Zamfir and the magical pan flute!!!

I plan on having more enteries about Value Propositons and how to create ones the actually reasonate with specific accounts and specific people.

I recently wrote an article for CRM Guru called "Its the Conversation, Stupid" that addressed the need to be focused on your audience.

A great discussion on a very interesting topic.

A point that is worth looking at closer here is the paradox presented by the fact that if you are successful and able to establish and communicate a unique value proposition, your competition can and often does try to copy this value proposition and use it. Or as Scott states above:

Anything you can say on your website, your competitors can say as well.

The question to me then becomes: “assuming that the competition will likely follow a similar strategy with respect to positioning, how can we show a true differentiation?”

To me, part of the answer comes down to execution, results and customer value. As we all know, customers are interested in solutions to issues that impact their business. They must be relevant and address a business driver. If your company is able to deliver the results and create value while your competition is not, then that represents a clear opportunity for the customers and your organization to see the true differences. If on the other hand, the competition is able to deliver the value then your unique proposition is not as “unique” as you thought and you must then seek to find other areas or dimensions of differentiation.

Regards

Luis

Scott - very interesting thoughts. I will share mine. First off, I agree with the comments regarding 'solution' selling versus 'commodity' selling when it comes to technology. Going to eleven when selling a commodity is ok, selling a solution it will have limited success unless you segment. Take Law 1:

Customers buy solutions to their problems, they do not buy products.

In my opinion this is an absolutely true statement. However, something to consider - do all VP level IT professionals have the same problems?

The answer is no, not really. However, as you segment your target customers you find that VP of IT within a market segment has much more in common with each other. For instance, unlike most VP’s of IT a VP of IT in the healthcare (hospitals) field is primarily motivated by saving lives, not ROI or reducing their total costs. Saving money & reducing costs is not really even in their top 3. I would say their second motivator/concern is delivering high quality customer care and their third motivator/concern is meeting strict government guidelines regarding issues like compliance/recording keeping/customer confidentiality (IMO). The point is that while no two IT Directors problems are exactly the same - as you begin to segment your prospective clients they start to become much more similar. Using hospitals as an example, I believe 60%, 70%, perhaps even 80% of their concerns are exactly the same. Then the question becomes - can I create a customer message that 'goes to eleven' if I take a segmented approach to attacking the market? – you can and you should. Or a least, you can come much closer to having a broadcast message that works consistently if you segment your message. As a career sales & sales management professional I have always felt the best sales professional’s design their solution to each customer….that’s why they are the best. They build and deliver a solution based on the clients needs……and depending on the industry or market segment a majority (60 – 80 %) of the IT directors critical business issues can be identified prior to the sales person walking through the door.

The problems with not having segment messages are twofold: -

1. To be frank, not all sales people are motivated or talented enough to create their own segmented message when solution-selling. Some good sales people try and flop all over the place thus they have limited success. They do not do the research and study necessary. As a career sales person (not a marketing person) I will say that most good sales people are fairly straight-forward. They are asking themselves the questions – what’s my goal and how do I get there? They just want to kick ass. They got into sales to make money and to execute. They need help from Marketing and Product Management.
2. The sales professionals that are capable will create their own message tailored to each prospect. The problem with this is there is no consistency across the organization. Who are you? What do you stand for? It can become a real mess when your entire national sales team are communicating different messages to each client. Then the company becomes known for what? No uniformity, no consistency. Branding and reputation are keys to success and longevity.

Hence, this is where Marketing/Product Management must manage the comprehensive selling strategy of the company. The better job the company does in segmenting its approach in order to solution sell each relevant vertical (financial/healthcare/technology/ midsize / startup / Fortune 1000 etc. etc) the more productive its sales force will be. When a sales person is asked the question by a prospective customer: Who do you work for and what do you do? The answer should always vary depending on who is asking them. The better job marketing and sales management does to create and communicate these different messages to its sales force, the more the sales force can focus on execution ( KISS – Keep it Simple Salesperson). This is still ‘solution-selling’; the perception to the customer is that you are providing a very customized solution. The reality it that your solution is only 20% customized. The more variables that can be taken out of the equation by marketing/PM, the more productive the salesforce will be AND the happier customers you will have. Just my two cents….

As a sales professional selling and delivering ValueSelling Methodology Training and helping sales operations teams improve performance while decreasing sales investments, I run into this problem in virtually every industry. One of the most challenging concepts to get across sales reps, managers, marketing teams, etc. is really embodied within all three of the 7 Irrefutable Laws that you espouse in this entry. That concept is differentiation.

People invariably try to differentiate what they’re marketing/selling from other products and services IN THEIR OWN PORTFOLIO – both at a marketing message level and during a sales person’s individual conversations with clients and prospects. For example, a new member of the marketing team at a large computer hardware company told me just last week, “I look at our material and I see features, speeds, and feeds and how these are different/better than our other models.” He went on to wonder where the customer was in all this; unlike his peers, he realizes this is a problem and is looking for ways to fix it.

So what’s wrong with this approach? Well, it makes everyone’s product material look the same. This invariably leads a customer to the instant conclusion that the products are a commodity. Even when they are, there are better ways to present your capabilities to the market which just might allow you to differentiate yourself and stand out from the crowd; to articulate your business level benefits. Re-read that last sentence because therein lie the keys to the Emerald City: you must define your product’s business benefits and then communicate those benefits to business people. Even if the sale is ultimately to an IT constituency, you must help IT speak in terms of business contribution.

Now many companies claim to incorporate their clients’ points of view into their product marketing materials – they do focus groups, they do interviews, they pay lots of money to market research firms who specialize in this kind of thing. But this approach is fatally flawed – especially in the technology industry! Invariably the overwhelming majority of the attendees are IT people who work with technology all day and have little to no understanding of its impact on business – from a business person’s perspective.

Companies in general, and technology vendors in particular, need to develop differentiation on two levels:
1. marketing material must be tailored to roles and must emphasize business value for business roles, highlighting any supportable mid/long term unique capabilities of the vendor
2. sales materials must be tailored to roles and include a healthy dose of unique (in the marketplace, NOT in your own company) product/service capabilities that are both relevant to that role and provide quantifiable business benefit

The key in both cases is perception of uniqueness from everyone else in the field. That perception, like the solution itself, is only in the mind of the buyer so, to your point, “global reach” is not a differentiator since everyone will claim to have it.

Oh, and the quantifiable business benefit – again it’s all about the perception of the buyer and it’s got to be relevant. If the value of your solution is to save a client $100,000 per year after the first year, then the potential client has to be able to clearly see that and you best not be trying to sell to an F1000 CEO (because of course that’s not enough to mean anything to him/her).

Feel free to contact me with any comments - jim.roche@customersincorporated.com or jim.roche@valueselling.com

Thanks for your insight Scott. I'm going to pass this article along to a few people who need to read it. I guess we're all a little guilty of trying to go to 11.

I love what you are posting to this site. It is rich with valuable information for anyone in selling.