Three Reasons to Audit Your Sales Messaging

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Improving the quality and completeness of sales messages delivers hard ROI. Here are three reasons you should review the content your sales teams are using and take a diagnostic approach to assess the effectiveness of your sales messaging:

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Three Reasons to Audit Your Sales Messaging:

1) Reduce the time required for achieving channel effectiveness: 

  • Channel effectiveness occurs when the average salesperson can cost effectively close the sale. Eventually the sales channels [and customers] will learn the value of the differential being offered, but while the market is still learning these values, the effectiveness of the sales channels is reduced. It is difficult to close the sale when the customer doesn’t know the value of the differential being offered, and the sales channels has not been provided with the values, calibration, and evidence needed to convince them.

2) Increase sales capacity

  • Sales capacity is the number of salespeople [or outlets] that are effectively selling your products and solutions. Retail uses a term “self ware” to refer to products that are sitting on the shelf but aren’t being bought. Having salespeople that are expected to sell the product but can’t/don’t is the channel equivalent of shelfware. Frequently this occurs when the skill required to sell the product exceeds the skill available in the channel. So the top 10% of the salespeople can sell the product, but the average salesperson can’t. Poor quality sales messaging is frequently the cause of product shelfware.

3) Reduces the cost of sales

  • Improved messaging increases the close rate and reduces the number of sales calls required to do so because the customer value being offered is clear and with evidence.

Use a diagnostic process for more consistent implementation

  1. Review the “top 10” sales messaging deficiencies to see if the issues are identified.
  2. Check the material being sent to sales people –  before it is sent!
  3. Use a checklist to ensure the quality and completeness of the information being provided.

Make certain your content and messaging is sufficient for the average salesperson to cost effectively close the sale. Would you like a copy of the checklist? Check out the 9 Sales Enablement Content Imperatives.

Here is another article by Bud: 10 Message Deficiencies.  Contact us to schedule a discussion.

This is a guest post by Bud Hyler – a member of the Revenue Architects’ expert network.

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What Amazon means for Whole Foods’ core values (and how it’s connected to the Washington Post)

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In 2013, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. (Granted, he bought it personally instead of via Amazon, but it’s still relevant to the Amazon/Whole Foods story.) At the time, the paper was facing a steady decline and staff layoffs, as most newspapers were, and its online presence was stagnant. Bezos got involved with the business side and its technology—no surprise there—and he didn’t interfere with editorial direction.

Nieman Lab has a transcript from an interview with a Post staffer who talked about the bots they now use to help run the business, deliver news, provide information for stories, and even automate the writing of basic stories. The content management system they built works so well that other news outlets license it from them. And there’s an energy in the Post’s reporting that I haven’t seen in a long time. This is cool stuff.

Web traffic doubled and 1,200 stories are posted per day—500 of them original— outpacing their competitors, including The New York Times.

I think Bezos’s game plan for the Post hints at how Amazon will manage its new supermarket chain.

Refocusing on consumers

Bezos has told staff at the Post to “focus on the reader.” Whole Foods could stand to remember its core shoppers, those consumers who are drawn to Whole Foods’ core values. Some long-time fans feel that the chain has catered too much to a broad market and made less visible their adherence to the core values of environmental protection and support for organic farming. The New York Times wrote about this worry 10 years ago, when Whole Foods had become a “mega-chain” of 303 stores (which has now grown to 431), with “gelato stands, chocolate fountains and pizza counters.”

Legions of shoppers live within proximity of Whole Foods stores but have an aversion to their prices. Clearly, Whole Foods has tried to cater to this audience but delivered mixed messages. They have alternately highlighted the reasonable prices of their store brand items while also creating high-quality, indulgent offerings for those who are indifferent to prices. That juxtaposition has made it hard for shoppers to believe the low-price message.

I believe Amazon will re-focus on Whole Foods’ core values, making noticeable changes in its product assortment to win back true believers who have become alienated. At the same time, they will look closely at the offerings geared toward consumers looking for a more general grocery offering. Can they offer delicious food while respecting the company’s core values, at reasonable prices?  And without a doubt, Amazon will reinvent the supply chain — more on that soon — and Whole Foods’ IRMA system, the back-end technology that is universally despised, not unlike the back-end systems at most supermarkets.

How should Whole Foods’ suppliers position themselves for the changes that are bound to happen?

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