Experienced chefs don’t need a separate recipe for each menu variation they create. For example, once they have learned to cook a risotto, they can create lots of different variations with ingredients such as mushrooms, pumpkins, zucchini or spinach. They simply adapt the basic principles. Sales enablement leaders must define the principles of how to create value messages. Then, salespeople can adapt specific value messages (recipes) to suit the individual buyers’ contexts and concepts.
The inability to communicate value messages is a key inhibitor to sales success.
Three years of surveys have shown that this is the top inhibitor to sales success. Improving the ability to show strategic value is now an urgent sales management effectiveness priority, according to our CSO Insights 2015 Sales Management Optimization Study.
Organizations still struggle with value messaging. Value messaging training is not ranked very effective, according to our CSO Insights 2015 Sales Enablement Optimization Study: 53.4% reported that value messaging training needs improvement or major redesign. Also, messaging guidelines seem to have similar challenges regarding effectiveness: 52.6% reported that messaging guidelines need improvement and major redesign. It’s interesting that the training services and content types we’ve all known for decades, such as product training, process and methodology training, product sheets and brochures are ranked as much more effective. While the results might reflect respondents’ “comfort zones,” there is no doubt that organizations have challenges providing and executing effective value messages.
Value messages are only effective if they are designed from the customer’s perspective and tailored to different buyer roles and customer’s journey phases.
Buyers are not interested in getting information on something they already know, such as features and functions. Instead, they want value messages that focus on their issues and business goals, messages that create value by highlighting how they can achieve their business objectives better and faster. But it is precisely this “customer-core” approach to value messaging that remains a challenge for many organizations.
Many organizations are still designing around products. This leads not only to product-focused content (and training), but also to a situation in which product management and marketing teams compete against each other to get the sales force’s attention, not to mention the customers’ attention. In these inside-out, product-oriented environments, it’s difficult to drive change towards a customer-core approach, and to create value messages based on the customer’s journey, the related buyer roles and customer business challenges.
There is no “one size fits all” value proposition – value messaging goes dynamic
Customers decide how they want to connect and collaborate with salespeople, and they also decide how to calculate value, their value. In a nutshell: every customer makes every decision differently, every time. Consequently, we cannot expect to be successful with “one size fits all” value propositions. Instead, in our customer-centric world, organizations need dynamic value messaging frameworks that consider the relevant messaging criteria and different focal points and goals in different buying situations throughout the entire customer’s journey. Examples of messaging criteria include the relevant buyer roles, the different phases of the customer’s journey, the customer’s context, the buyers’ different approaches to how to tackle the issue and the desired business results and wins.
Furthermore, value messaging also depends on the specific buying situation. If a customer is in a renewal situation, they know exactly what they want and don’t want. But if they have to tackle a challenge they haven’t dealt with before (such as buying their first virtualization software, or their first business process outsourcing), they will need different value messages, and they’ll need them earlier along their customer journey.
The value messaging types along the customer’s journey are value hypothesis and value propositions in the awareness phase, specific value propositions in the buying phase and value confirmations in the implementation and adoption phase.
Building a dynamic value messaging framework
The enablement effort to design, create and deliver dynamic value messages must not be underestimated. The complexity of various elements that impact the different value messaging types (as defined above) can be overwhelming. The core idea to drive efficiency is to create messaging modules that can easily be tailored by salespeople. A few criteria help enablement leaders to build their messaging framework initially:
- Enablement production process as a foundation: Such a process defines how and from whom value messaging content is designed, created, localized, provided and tracked.
- Defining messaging modules: The most important buying situations and buying roles should be identified to increase the value of modules and limit the number that need to be created.
- Consider the organization’s business and sales model: The more vertical the business, the more likely messaging modules by vertical will be needed even if the organization’s products and services are horizontal in nature. Campaign, territory or account-based sales models have to be considered as well.
- Establish a process of trigger events and feedback loops: Establish a messaging lifecycle process to keep the value messages up-to-date. Such a process should include trigger events such as new products, changed buyer behaviors, feedback from salespeople and their managers, and regular check points.
The “right” design for the value messaging framework and for the value messaging modules depend not only on the various value messages that are required along the customer’s journey, but also on the specific selling and buying context and on the design of the sales organization.