Messaging and sales qualification
Much of my consulting revolves around messaging, and in particular the need to have multiple specific messages for multiple audiences. Increasingly often, I find myself discussing that in terms of sales qualification, because there’s a strong duality between message crafting and qualification:
- The goal of message crafting is to find the right message(s) for particular audiences.
- The goal of qualification is to find the right audiences for particular messages.
Recall the layered messaging model, whose wording I’ll update to:
- Differentiated business benefits …
- … which are achieved because of …
- … superior technical features or SLAs,* …
- … the differentiation of which is achieved and sustainable because of …
- … fundamental product design.
A good messaging stack works well on all five of those layers.
*Service Level Agreements, aka speeds or other metrics.
The messaging/qualification duality is straightforward on the business, features and design layers alike. The messaging–>qualification direction looks like:
- When qualifying you check to see whether the prospects have already determined that they agree with some of your messages.
- You further check to see if, upon thinking about it, they quickly come to agree with (more of) your messages.
- If neither happens, you surely don’t qualify them as a good prospect.
The qualification–>messaging link starts with:
- If “Do you have application need X?” is a reliably good sales qualification, then “We’re uniquely good at meeting application need X” will surely be a good marketing message.
- If “Do you have feature need Y?” is a reliably good sales qualification, then “We’re uniquely good at providing feature Y” will surely be a good marketing message.
- If “Do you have SLA need Z?” is a reliably good sales qualification, then “We’re uniquely able to ensure SLA level Z” will surely be a good marketing message.
- The same goes for any product architecture hot buttons.
In summary, then:
- In one direction, the message of this post is that you should observe which messages work well in specific sales situations, then emphasize those in your messaging.
- But it goes a little further than that, because hopefully you have a (semi) rigorous process for setting sales qualification criteria.
- Conversely, your first draft of sales qualification criteria should be to take each of your individual marketing messages and append “Do you care?”
Of course, there’s a second set of qualifying questions that boil down to “If you decide you want this, do you have the money and ability to actually buy it?” But I don’t have anything special to say about those at this time.
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