Know Your Prospect and Speak to Their Concerns

We’re pleased to feature this guest blog by our partner, Campaign Stars. In this article, they discuss the importance of ensuring sales teams effectively articulate the right messaging and ABM strategy throughout the sales cycle. 

Last month, we discussed “Data and the Future-Proof Marketing Machine,” and how finding the right buyer reliably and repeatedly can feel like a full-time job. We laid out how to get your prospecting data in fighting shape, and shared several key tips and strategies on how to identify the right buyers for your business.

So that leaves one big question: Now that you know who to talk to, how will you engage them?

Know Your Buyer, Engage More

This is where the importance of well-defined, well-articulated messaging becomes clear.

Your first step is to define your buyer personas. Well-research personas give you a better understanding of buyers’ responsibilities, needs, challenges, goals, and KPIs–so that you can engage with them more effectively with fine-tuned messaging.

Messaging Framework

Understanding personas and taking the time to flesh them out based on your market knowledge and experience will help your team create content and messaging that resonates with buyers, helping ensure, for example, all public-facing content uses your buyer’s language: that is, communicating about challenges that your buyers face in their jobs every day.  This makes the content not only easier to understand, but also enables buyers to see value in your offerings more easily.

Messaging Enablement for Sales Teams

Now that you’ve identified your buyers, and you’ve placed yourself into their world by fleshing out personas, how do you make sure your sales teams effectively convey the messaging every time, and to every customer?

The problem is that salespeople often talk about product features while neglecting the personas who are going to use them; it’s a common trap that is prevalent among junior or unsuccessful reps. Fortunately, sales enablement platforms like Allego make it easy to coach your sales teams on the needed skills, knowledge, and messaging.

These platforms enable you to train and enable your sales force more effectively, while providing sufficient “gamification” to stir their competitive instincts and reward them for success. Features like video coaching and practices, micro-learning Flash Drills that offer “pop quiz” –style reviews, and just-in-time playbooks separated by persona all help you ensure your messaging is being shared and used.

Especially useful, too, are the options for sharing newly learned best practices from the field and comparing each team member’s pitch. It’s important to step back frequently and ask, “How did my reps perform, and what are the best ones saying?” Perhaps they’re sharing your company story in a clever way, or in some better way you hadn’t considered. This is because messaging, like the market in which you compete, changes all the time, and you need to learn from your best reps continually to stay ahead of the competition.

You must constantly evaluate, refresh, and update your messaging. At Campaign Stars, we recommend performing this exercise every three to six months. Tools like Allego help build in this critical feedback loop into your messaging, so you can not only standardize, but also continually optimize how you engage your customers.

Conclusion

You’ve identified who your buyers are. It’s time to engage them with consistent, effective messaging.

To do that, you must equip the people who articulate that messaging – your sales teams – for ongoing success with the right tools, guides, and solutions.

And to do that, you need to constantly refresh, update, and reevaluate your messaging each quarter to ensure that all newly learned best practices have been taken into consideration. Your messaging always needs to reflect the latest realities of the market.

Then it’s time to start thinking about content and campaigns.