The Key to Being Seen, Heard and Understood

Marketing’s task is usually to get new opportunities and leads for Sales. Your messaging and customer offer need to talk directly to what customers are saying to themselves to do this. Marketing needs to be able to understand their customers’ problems and the language they use to create a customer or value proposition that catches their ideal client’s attention. 

The thing is, it is extremely hard for Marketing to write a message that their prospects can easily understand if they don’t have direct feedback from Sales about what problem the customer is trying to solve. As a result, I see a lot of ‘me, me, me’ messaging, which is all about products and services, not about their customers? 

In turn, it is Sales job to contact those prospects and turn them into customers. Not so easy if you have not got a clear, simple, and compelling message to share with them. What’s your company’s message? Is it simple and repeatable? If you went out with your sales team, would they all say the same thing?  

Sales need to have a message that makes sense to their customers that they can easily understand. Otherwise, their customers will not hear them.  

It is a bit of a vicious circle, isn’t it? So how do you bring Sales and Marketing together? Getting Marketing & Sales working in harmony is key for me when I am helping my clients double their revenues.  

I have got three top tips to get Sales and Marketing working together on this and to their strengths to make sure you’re seen, heard, and understood consistently. Once you have started to do this it will lead to more opportunities, leads, appointments, quotations and so more sales. 

• Firstly, I strongly recommend that you use Sales to gather feedback from the customers about what it is they really need. I am doing some of this with new biz development teams, which is powerful because they are talking to the customers who are in the market now, looking for a solution to their problem.  

Account Managers can have valuable conversations with their existing customers too. By discussing the work they have done together they can identify what’s worked well and what else they need to help achieve their objectives.  

Often, salespeople find asking the right questions the tricky bit. If you would like to make it easier and more successful for them, try giving them my Value Proposition Questionnaire. This gives them a set of questions which I guarantee will give them the confidence to start even more great conversations. You can download it by clicking here  

• Secondly, give the raw feedback data from Sales back to Marketing. They’ve got the skills to distil the key wording and messages that have come direct from the customer’s mouth. From this they can then build a simple yet compelling value proposition and that your customers can understand and will cause them to come to you for help. Your salespeople can use it too when they’re contacting their prospects. It’s a win-win situation.  

A word of warning – be vigilant that no one is changing the words your customers are using! I see it all the time where a customer says one thing and the message back uses different language. 

• Then it’s time to test your proposition and message with your customers. Feed their own words back to them and see if it makes sense. Remember, you are not the customer! So even if you think it’s great, your customers might not! It might not make them see you as the first port of call to help them solve their problem. You’ll see the truth in your marketing and sales numbers. 

The good news is testing isn’t difficult. There are lots of ways to test your proposition and messaging. Sales can feed it back to the customers to see if it hits the mark. They can do this as part of a sales presentation for new customers or a business review with an existing customer. You can even make your customers part of your project team so you can serve them even better in future.  

You’ve only got to ask them, “Would this solve the problem you’re facing?” or, “Is this the company you’d want to work with?”. Customers tell us they love being listened to and involved in this way.  

Marketing has lots of opportunities to test the new proposition too. Having a high converting lead magnet is one of the best ways to get new opportunities. For it to be high converting it needs to contain relevant and compelling messaging that causes your prospect to take action. If you have a lead gen department or agency, then that’s another opportunity to test the new messaging. Get them to use it at the start of all their calls. Response and conversion rates compared to previous rates will soon tell you if you’re on the right track.  

Once you’ve got Marketing and Sales working together on this you can continually test and refine your message to your market. It will help you continue to grow and evolve in a rapidly changing economy and keep ahead of your competition. 

If you’d like any help bringing your Sales and Marketing teams together to build your customer proposition please do contact me and we can work to produce your blueprint for success.