value-based messaging

Want Increased Sales? Learn to Love Value-Based Messaging and Understand Your Customer Better.

If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it 100 times: every company is in the communications business. And communications is key because successful businesses use strong communications to connect with prospects—enter: the concept of value-based messaging.

The benefits of value-based messaging are clear. The right message helps us connect more efficiently with potential clients and shortens our sales cycle. When you tell a consistent story and communicate your company’s values clearly, you attract prospects who identify with the problem you solve and value the solution you’re offering.

However, we’ve also seen companies make the mistake of focusing so much on articulating their own values that they forget to consider their customers’ needs. Without this all important “gut-check,” a brand’s messaging can feel at best, disconnected and at worst, downright narcissistic. Taking a broader understanding of value-based messaging reveals benefits far beyond connecting with prospects and making sales.

Follow the step-by-step process below to begin developing your brand’s identity, retain your most valuable clients, and become increasingly valuable the longer you work together.

Step-By-Step Process for Effective Value-Based Messaging

Value-based messaging is all about how well you understand your customer and her needs. Once you are clear about those elements, seeing your business grow is a matter of aligning your offerings with what your ideal customer needs and delivering on the promises you make.

So what is the most effective way to get to know your customers? It all starts with simply asking them.

increased salesStep 1. Discovery

During this stage in the process, your goal is to collect as much information as possible about your current customers, prospects, and competitors as possible. This critical step is the beginning of understanding your customer lifecycle and buying process. You will use these early conversations in building customer profiles.

  • Interview sales reps: Great sales reps know what questions to ask in order to get closer to closing a sale. Ask them about the easiest deals they have closed, as well as the ones that they struggled with. Ask them what message they think resonates with your customers. Ask them to list customers with whom they have the best relationships and who would be the best ambassadors for your product or serve.
  • Shadow sales calls to learn about prospects: Listening in on sales calls is a great way to gather information about potential customers. You can quickly learn about their challenges, what makes them buy, how they understand your product, as well as pinpoint their biggest sticking points.
  • Interview lost prospects and current customers: Interview your last 5 lost prospects, the last 5 customers you won, and 5 customers who have been using your product for at least a year. Send a quick email asking if they will spend 15 minutes on the phone chatting with you. If you need to offer an incentive, we’ve seen a $25 Amazon gift card do wonders.
  • Interview industry experts and analysts: Large corporations have access to full time marketing researchers who gather all kinds of useful data, which is hard for the rest of us to get our hands out. Our recommendation? Select a company who would be a great customer. Add them to your customer profiles. Positioning yourself as someone looking for expertise, reach out to them for an interview.

Step 2. Build Customer Profiles

When building customer profiles, industry, revenue, number of employees, and whether a company is publicly traded are important pieces to the puzzle. But when it comes to really understanding your customers in order to create a value-based messaging strategy, what you really need to know is what values and benefits individuals are looking for in a product or service like yours.

In order to get to the heart of the matter, create the following items for each customer profile:

  • List of daily activities
  • Goals and responsibilities
  • How does she measure success?
  • What are her biggest headaches or problems?
  • What role does she play in the buying process (decision-maker, influencer, user)?

Once this picture is clear, you can consider targeted companies and how your customer profile fits into the larger organization. Now you have your ideal customer profile. You want to understand the kind of companies you sell to, who uses and buys your product, what motivates them to buy, and what issues do they want to solve.

Step 3: Create Value Statements

Having gone through the first two steps above, you are in a great position to begin creating value propositions. Start with categories of values (or pillars), then create value statements for each category.

Example:

Value category: Revenues

Value statement: Reduce lost opportunities for increasing revenues by proactively monitoring website and email conversion rates.

The key when it comes to creating value propositions is to focus on actual values, not features of your products or services.

Step 4: Review

Once you have brainstormed value categories and value statements for each one, you are ready to review the messaging framework with your team. This can be a daunting task especially if you have dozens or even hundreds of individuals on your team. The easiest approach is to design a simple questionnaire to ensure that information remains consistent and well organized.

Here are some further tips for the review stage:

  • Identify the best members of each group from which you’re seeking feedback. For instance, if you have 30 inside sales reps, choose the best 5-7 to interview.
  • Create 2-3 rounds of interviews and make sure each round includes a representative from sales, from manufacturing, from sales engineering, and from the c-suite. After the first round, analyze and make adjustments to your questions if necessary, then again include representatives from each group.

This comprehensive approach allows you to get measured feedback across all departments. It helps you avoid interviewing your entire sales force. And it prevents you from making changes that are unacceptable to executives or won’t work with your product map or other strategies.

Benefits of Value-Based Messaging

Follow the above process and you will be in an excellent position to develop high quality, targeted messaging along the following lines:

1. Shape your value proposition to your customer’s needs.

When speaking with clients, investors, and other stakeholders, do you understand their challenges well enough to explain how you can help them? For example, suppose your firm sells consulting services, in addition to a software solution. How do you identify prospects who are in need of consulting services versus those in need of the software solution? Which current customers are likely to bite on a promotional offer for a service they aren’t buying from you now?

By shaping your value (or unique selling proposition) to your customers’ needs, you have essentially primed the pump for your sales team. If your sales reps understand how much it costs a prospect to adopt a new software product, they can shape the sale as a means of cost avoidance via reduced risk, lower long-term cost, 24/7 support vs. hiring another employee, etc.

2. Position your company as the expert in your industry.

The more often you help prospects and customers with problem-solving around their biggest challenges, the more likely your brand becomes synonymous with expertise in your industry. And after the research and interviews there is a good chance, you will have the goods to start creating valuable thought-leadership content.

Here’s another example: let’s say you work for a publicly traded company. How much does it cost (in time or dollars) your shareholders or potential shareholders to evaluate a new stock for their portfolios? If you understand their portfolio goals and evaluation process, you can explain easy ways to save them time in terms that will resonate.

3. Show how your product or service saves your client money.

Finally, understanding how much your customers spend on acquiring new clients or servicing existing clients, etc. will help you position your company as providing cost savings. If your product or service can save them money or help them increase the number of clients the acquire for the same amount of time or dollars, that’s a win and shows the value of their investment.

Keep in mind in all three situations above, while facts and figures can reinforce a point (we’ve posted about the virtues of numbers before), leading with them is rarely persuasive. If you want to connect with potential clients and investors, which is the whole point behind value-based messaging, it’s crucial to activate their emotions.

That being said, it’s also important to note that we’re not saying you need to be everything to everyone or that your broader strategic message should change when you speak to different customers. We’re suggesting simply that you understand their key challenges/goals and tailor your messaging accordingly.

At Audacia Strategies, we are masters at helping clients tailor their messages to resonate with key audiences. And you don’t need to worry about sounding like you’re pandering or fitting into a cookie-cutter mold of some company you never wanted to be. We are all about helping you find your strategic, authentic voice. Let’s discuss how we can collaborate with you.

Photo credit: pressmaster / 123RF Stock Photo

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