Modern Marketing Engine podcast hosted by Bernie Borges
Bernie Borges - Host of the Modern Marketing Engine Podcast
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The Sales Messaging Playbook that Converts Prospects to Conversations
Sales messaging is a vital part of a sales reps’ daily work. It’s how they engage with prospects and it can make a big difference in their results. While the perfect sales message will connect and engage the buyer (eventually leading to a sale), a weak sales message will just be ignored, or worse, will damage the reputation of your company. In this article and episode of the Modern Marketing Engine podcast, my guest, Mario Martinez Jr., CEO and Founder at Vengreso, discusses what marketing and sales leaders need to know about sales messaging and some actionable tips you can start implementing today. Plus, he announced a new tool Vengreso created to help your sales team deploy a consistent message throughout your sales organization. Now, it is self-evident that sales messaging is crucial for sellers, but why is sales messaging important for marketers? Mario says that marketers should be supporting the sales team with all of the right messaging, from the Go-To-Market messaging to the messaging to engage with buyers, including messages for social media and sales enablement content such as playbooks, sales cadences, case studies, ebooks, blogs and the like. At the end of the day, there is just one type of messaging: messaging designed to attract your buyer, not sales or marketing messaging. Today, the modern marketer is more integrated in the sales ecosystem than EVER before, so it’s imperative that marketers have a defined sales messaging strategy. Things Every Sales Messaging Strategy Needs Automation in sales and B2B marketing has made life easier for our teams in many regards. But it also has reduced a lot of the personal touch we used to have in sales messaging. That’s why at Vengreso, we teach our sellers to leverage personalization and hyper personalization in all their sales messages. In fact, we created a sales methodology with the foundation of hyper-personalization. It’s called the PVC method, which stands for Personalization, Value, and Call to Action. The PVC Sales Methodology focuses on prospecting, from the “pre-hello” to the “hello.” The purpose of this methodology is to help salespeople who are having a hard time connecting with potential customers, create more conversations with their targeted buyers. And the best thing is that the PVC sales methodology can be used in inbound or outbound sales, when writing an email, a text message, a LinkedIn message, or making a phone call or video conference via Zoom. No matter the medium, every effective sales messaging strategy needs to be personalized, valuable and contain the appropriate call to action for the situation. “Sales messaging should be structured around PVC to attract our buyers, not detract or distract them,” Mario says. “Never before has the buyer been so digitally connected, socially engaged, mobile-attached, and video hungry. And salespeople must be as well, becoming video producers to create engaging video messages.” Mario says that in the new normal, sellers will be remote 60% of the time. In fact, according to Gartner’s Future of Sales research, by 2025 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels. Why? Because 33% of all buyers desire a seller-free sales experience (44% for millennials). There is no going back to a sales rep that is 100% of the time in the field. That’s why we must teach sellers social selling skills, including how to personalize their messaging, bring value and add the right CTAs to their sales messages. At Vengreso, we offer virtual sales training programs in modern selling skills, such as Selling with Video, Selling with LinkedIn and more. Now, let’s look at the PVC components in more detail. Components that Every Sales Messaging Framework Should Have Let’s talk about each of the components of your sales messaging framework: P – Personalization V – Value C – Call-to-Action Personalization is more than just using the prospect’s first name. If possible, sellers should take the time to research the prospect’s social networks and find shared experiences or recent events or news related to the prospect’s company that they can mention in the sales prospecting message. When creating a sales messaging strategy (whether cold calling scripts or video messages) make sure the sales message brings value to the conversation. Adding value may sound like a cliche, but we must realize that each buyer has an individual business pain, and if our messaging speaks to that particular pain, we’ll have a greater chance of getting through. So, how do you bring value? With content that helps solve their problems, especially related to the solution you are selling. It can be a webinar, a report or a relevant blog article. Provide value instead of just asking for a meeting. Instead of asking for a meeting, add a call to action that keeps the sales conversation going, such as asking a question for them to respond or inviting them to an event. Sales-Ready Messaging vs. Marketing Messaging What’s the difference between a sales-ready message and a marketing message? Marketing messaging is generally one-to-many. For example, marketing will create an email drip campaign to take leads, convert them to MQLs, then to SQLs and finally hand them over to the sales organization. Sellers do the same thing but instead of one-to-many, they do it one-to-one. That is why sellers have to deliver hyper-personalized messages. Marketing can’t create messages the same way. Marketing messaging is focused on the buyer persona, trying to hit the pains of that persona. In sales-ready messaging this can also be the case if the seller doesn’t have enough information to personalize the messages, as in a cold email or cold call. But the ideal sales-ready message is hyper-personalized to the individual, not the buyer persona. The seller must be able to find out details about the prospect, such as interests, particular needs, and other background information. For example, when Vengreso sellers reach out to sales leaders, they do it through video, holding a whiteboard and writing the prospect’s name on the board. They find bits of information to use in their sales-ready messages such as an interesting LinkedIn post or a recent promotion. That way, they can personalize their messages with phrases like “I saw that you posted….” or “Congratulations on your recent promotion to…” Now, who’s responsible for writing these sales messages? Marketers usually cringe at the idea of a seller writing a message. And, in general, you don’t want salespeople writing messages if they are not writers, as it would take them too long to write and may not be as good as the text from a trained copywriter. Mario says that the responsibility for writing these messages falls on the shoulders of the Sales Enablement team -- or if you don't have one, the marketing team. “But the marketing team must be in tune with what is happening in the field before writing. We have our marketing team listen to sales calls weekly so they can structure sales messaging. They must understand the sales process in order to create messaging that attracts buyers and sells more.” What is a Sales Message vs. a Product Message? Another important distinction we must make is between a sales message and a product message. In short, while a sales message includes the PVC components discussed above, a product message centers around features and functions. Product messaging should always reside inside of marketing. The idea is to take the features and what the products do and translate them into benefits, into how they solve real-world problems. Sellers are usually trained on products to attract a potential customer, but they are sometimes not trained in communicating how the product solves actual problems. From our experience, if you were to ask 100 sales reps at a company to tell in one sentence what business problem they solve for their customer (the value proposition), 80% would not be able to answer consistently. Marketing must be able to articulate in one sentence the business problem that the company solves and sales leaders should make sure their sellers know it well so that they are all communicating the same message. For example, at Vengreso we know that VPs of Sales have two common problems: a) they want to increase the number of sales conversations that their sellers are having and b) increase their sales pipeline. So, a message to that buyer persona (if the seller doesn’t have details to personalize the messaging to the individual) would start by asking if they have one of those two problems. If the answer is “no,” they would just stop reading. If the answer is “yes,” they’ll continue reading. In that case, the sales-ready message should provide value before introducing the solution. For example, the sales-ready message could say: If you have any of those two problems, here are two resources that can help you out: I encourage you to watch this webinar [ADD LINK] with your team in your next one-hour call. It will take you through two things your sellers can do right now to create more sales conversations on LinkedIn. Read this blog article [ADD LINK], which tells you five things you can do to improve your sales video messages. Do you see what we are doing here? We are providing value, which is what a good sales message will do. Once a conversation is started with the prospect, product messaging comes in. That’s when the seller goes deep to explain the product features and translate those features into business benefits. How to Develop Sales Messaging The PVC method will help you develop your sales messaging with the right elements. But how do you deploy those messages so your team can use them? Usually, the marketing team would create a “42-page document” with the messaging, upload it to a local server or the internet and
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