Sellers are the closest to your buyers. They are the ones who speak to buyers daily, and have the greatest understanding of what resonates with buyers and what doesn’t.
Typically marketing teams painstakingly focus on feature descriptions, crafting content and design with great attention and effort. Yet marketing often overlooks the positioning on how the product transforms buyers’ lives. Sales takes one look at it, gripes that it won’t work with their buyers, and never touches it again.
The challenge becomes clear: your sales team is not bought in on your messaging and doesn’t believe it will help them succeed. Marketing may have research on the larger market context, but they must pair that with direct intel from buyer-seller conversations and sales leadership.
How to get sellers to buy your messaging.
Align your messaging directly to customer needs:
Gain empathy for buyers’ pain points and the nuances of sales conversations. Work with sales leadership to provide opportunities for marketers to regularly attend or watch recorded sales calls, and understand the sales team’s methodology.
Cultivate leadership buy-in:
When sales leadership actively endorses the messaging, it reinforces its importance. Invite sales leaders to provide feedback on early iterations. By involving leaders in the development process, they are more likely to organically advocate for it amongst their sellers. Further, include sales leadership in the messaging rollout to the sales team to present a united front, and arm leadership with talking points to continue championing the messaging over time.
Turn a top seller into your messaging success story:
Go a layer deeper beyond leadership buy-in, and get peer support. Work with an engaged and friendly seller to use your messaging. They can then act as your on-the- ground champion to speak authentically to other reps and encourage adoption. Record their customer calls and share with reps to show how top-performing sellers successfully use the messaging to support buyer conversations. This will also create a competitive spirit, making sellers more inclined to adopt your messaging.
Set up continuous feedback cycles:
To optimize your messaging, it must be honed and continually revised based on direct feedback from sellers and buyers. Pilot your messaging with select sellers to see how it performs in real-life situations before the formal launch. Lastly, schedule regular touchpoints and sessions with the sales team to gain insight on what’s resonating and what isn’t, so you can further adapt messaging and materials.
Iterate, iterate, iterate:
Nothing is set in stone — messaging must always be tweaked and adjusted. What works today might need to be adapted for tomorrow. The market, customer needs, and competitive landscape are always evolving. Your messaging must do so as well. Adjust just as you do with a social ad: you closely analyze every week and continue to optimize based on learnings (whether that’s editing copy, visuals, targeting, or placement). Regularly evaluate your messaging effectiveness through performance and sales data, such as what assets receive the most buyer engagement and views, as well as qualitative feedback.
Show data-driven proof points:
Connect your marketing messaging assets (e.g. pitch decks, one-pagers, ebooks) to win rates and revenue. Uncover insights into which specific assets influence the most revenue and share proof points with sellers to drive adoption. Highlight this data with sellers to show how the messaging can help them close deals.
It’s time to build trustworthy relationships with sellers.
Out-of-touch marketing messaging created for sellers is all too common and costs companies potential revenue, due to a lack of understanding real customer problems and irrelevant context. By creating a cycle of continuous feedback with your sales team to better understand how marketing messaging is being received by buyers, marketers can confidently adjust messaging and sellers can close more deals.
Your marketing team may be up against this challenge — and other obstacles — that prevent messaging alignment with sales. Check out our article “Stop fumbling the buyer journey – equip sellers with tailored marketing assets” for advice on how to tailor your marketing assets for every stage of the buyer journey.
