What if your reps have 1,400 sales assets to choose from – but no core message? According to Forrester, this really is how many sales assets the average company has. (Not to mention who-knows-how-many different marketing assets.) Even if you’re a mid-market B2B company, you probably have more sales decks, one-pagers, playbooks, and online content than your teams know what to do with. So, it’s hard to imagine anything could possibly be missing in your messaging. But for B2B companies with complex offerings, something often is. And it’s usually the core.
Too much messaging, not enough core
Without a single, strong core running through all your B2B messaging, your buyers will see lots of individual capabilities and features, endless details about different products and services, and so on. But, they won’t see any central themes that tie it all together … and differentiate your company … and drive home the value. It’s too much for buyers to take in. And too hard for sellers to use. So, everyone ends up lost in a sea of complex, déjà-vu, and mixed messages.
You see this in selling situations all the time. One client recently told us that, prior to finding their message, their sellers had been getting on calls with prospects and going straight to the product demo. They weren’t explaining the value of their solution or what made it unique. Prospects were shown plenty of features – but no core takeaway.
The symptoms are painfully obvious
It’s easy to spot the fallout from a missing core message:
- Prospects are confused by different or even conflicting messages
- Sellers are talking capabilities, but not connecting them to value in a way that’s meaningful for the buyer
- Conversion rates from the first selling conversation to the second aren’t what they should be
- Customers are paralyzed by information overload and can’t see the difference between you and your closest competitors
- Cross-selling is difficult because people don’t see the natural links between your offerings, much less between different business units
- Post-merger integrations are bumpy at best, with neither your employees nor your customers understanding how everything fits together
- Employees can’t articulate the real value that your company brings to the world
- Too many sales stall because the buyer can’t or won’t make a decision
And by the way, we’re talking mostly about fallout from the “organic growth” of your sprawling message estate. If you want to see the problem scale really fast, watch what happens when you dump in a truckload of new messaging from the company you just acquired or merged with.
Meanwhile, your sellers may be inadvertently making this worse. Since most of them have a hard time navigating all these messages, they often create their own narrative their own way – without tying it into anything else you’re trying to say to your market. When there’s no core to work from, even your marketing agencies and professional content creators are likely to create “off-message” messages that just add to the confusion.
Everyone gets lost in the words
This is even a challenge for your executive team. Recently, the CEO of a 50-year-old company who came to us for help with their missing core message said, “I even found myself on many occasions being confused about what the message was. And if I can’t get it right, then I can’t expect the rest of the company to get it right.”
With this kind of message sprawl, everyone gets lost in the words. It’s harder to see what your company really stands for. Sales cycles grow longer. And a lot of your value is obscured. It’s the last thing CMOs and sales leaders need – especially now that B2B buyers are slow to act on anything that’s difficult to understand or doesn’t instantly communicate major value.
That’s why you’ve got to find your missing core message. And you’ll see how to do it in Part 2 of this series (coming soon), The Missing Core Message: How you can find yours.
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