Most marketing teams believe they have a messaging problem, when in fact this is a symptom of their flawed operational delivery.
Clever market positioning will not fix a broken sales process. Creative brand messaging is not the province of the creative type; it is the enforced architecture designed to support your pipeline and ensure that your messaging aligns to the marketplace.
Why Bad Messaging Loses You Money
The majority of industry professionals believe that having clear mission statements, brand pillars, and core values are essential. However, the data tells a very different, much more urgent story.
The majority of B2B organizations are losing between six and ten percent of their total annual revenue simply because there is a lack of alignment between their internal teams around what is being sold and to whom it is being sold.
While an estimated 58 percent of organizations report having a documented messaging framework, only 22 percent of sales teams use that documented framework throughout the entire buying process.
This is a significant disconnect between what is preached/what is marketed as a theoretical best practice and the practical reality of the sale; the lack of consistency here significantly hampers buyer confidence.
Now the majority of buyers in the B2B space (83 percent) of the time spent purchasing will find data about your company through their independent research.
When that independent research reveals a different story than what your website says, or what your sales team says, or what is found material about your product, the buyer will abandon the deal.
Of the B2B teams that are able to maintain greater than a 75 percent consistency level between all of the platforms, the greater than 50 percent consistency will generate 2.3 times the number of qualified leads than those teams with less than a 50 percent consistency.
Reconfirming your narrative is a business obligation, not a marketing option.
How Confused Buyers Hurt Your Sales
In B2B technology companies, we regularly see leaders blaming external factors (e.g., market conditions, budget cuts, poor lead qualification) for stalled deals.
This often leads them to overlook the fact that most stalled deals have at least one confused buyer at the centre who is experiencing multiple value propositions from each touchpoint.
Consistency throughout the entire sales cycle is the only method for developing trust in a complicated sale cycle.
What Consistency Looks Like
The majority of B2B technology companies never achieve greater than 75% narrative alignment across their sales, marketing, and product teams. Companies that achieve this threshold realise significantly greater financial rewards than those that do not.
In more complex sales processes, where multiple stakeholders are present throughout the buying process, buyers will depend upon the repetition of an accurate narrative that defines the compelling need to buy your product, in order to successfully incorporate your position as an interesting solution to their problem.
If your demand generation ads are promoting an enterprise level benefit, but your discovery calls go back to a generic technical feature dump, then established trust will immediately be eroded.
Consistent use of brand messaging will produce up to a 33% increase in annual revenue; however, it is only through the elimination of the buyers’ mental drag created by trying to decode your category that this can happen.
The issue starts at the top of the organisation.
All too often, senior executives will demand that different audiences hear different messages from their organisation, without developing any core baselines to establish their brand message.
Writing Down Your Rules
Documented frameworks create alignment within your organisation. Organisations that document their frameworks to create alignment experience a win rate increase of 31% on deals in excess of $100,000.
As a result, the second your salespeople do not have to guess how to explain your product to a potential customer, they will spend significantly more time managing the sales cycle and managing objections from potential customers.
Currently, only 34% of sellers can accurately communicate their company's overall value proposition without first being prompted to provide a response.
This message is stating that if a sales representative cannot describe their company and what the company does without using a slide deck, the potential buyer will have zero idea of the company’s value or how to utilize the solution (product/service) to solve their problem.
Parts of a Good Message
It is more than just a generic template that outlines an organization's vision, mission, and values. The messaging architecture is functional, in terms of business, to a buyer's pain and for the unique go-to-market (GTM) strategy that will allow you to close them.
Define the Enemy and the Outcome
A narrative without conflict (and resolution) will be ignored by busy executives. Your modern-day branding must allow you to define a specific enemy to your buyer.
That enemy is often not simply another organization; however, it is typically the "old way of doing things" that does not effectively resolve the buyer’s pain.
You need to define the specific pain within the buyer's current state, e.g., spreadsheet chaos, manual entry of data, or siloed communication to demonstrate contrast with the "promised land".
The promised land is the end business goal that a buyer will achieve when they eliminate their enemy through your organization. Without defining the old vs. new state, buyers will have no sense of urgency to change.
By creating this brand messaging structure, you are instilling tension within the marketplace.
The tension created forces a choice and increases the speed at which they move through the sales pipeline.
Matching Your Message to the Buyer's Journey
Do not think of your core story as static. You must have several variations of your core story that match the demand state of the buyer at the time of contacting your business.
Sales teams that utilize demand-state messaging to engage potential buyers have a close rate that is 27% higher than sales teams that use a static value proposition document of one page.
You need core message variations for potential buyers that are unaware of their pain, those that know their pain and those that are aware of a solution, but not necessarily the best solution.
Within a rapidly evolving marketplace, technology products need to create a "magnetic" message that allows buyers to clearly identify their category and understand how their solution can solve the pain they are currently experiencing.
The "early" message will help to prepare the buyer for the "late" message, which is focused on risk reduction, compliance, and time to implement.
Building Your Message
In order to build this architecture, a proven approach is required. There are multiple models available that have proven successful to date, but the internal implementation and enforcement process will have a greater impact on the success of the individual model than the name of the model.
The Magnetic Framework
The Magnetic Messaging Framework focuses on differentiating your solution from other products within the same category.
The framework avoids "all-in-one" messaging that has become commonplace in the SaaS market, and instead the entire narrative is based upon the "villain" framework that was previously discussed.
By showing how your product is the "guide" through the transformation from chaos to clarity in a buyer's state, the framework allows your sales team to tell a story about your solution.
This provides a natural structure for handling objections during the B2B sales process.
By providing this type of framework, your sales team will not be comparing features versus features, but rather will be competing against your competitors based upon the results that your products provide to your buyers.
Message Houses
Message Houses are used for internal alignment, and the Message House provides a clear and consistent visual depiction of the overall claim or value proposition versus the competing value propositions.
The roof of the Message House contains the overall claim. Supporting pillars identify the core benefits.
The foundational elements include effective proof points, data, and the values of your company. Alternatively, Geoffrey Moore's positioning framework forces teams across disciplines to create one precise, succinct competitive positioning statement.
While the older model helps identify conflicts and disagreements at the executive level quickly, if your leadership team cannot come to an agreement on one Moore statement, then you do not have a brand messaging strategy.
Checking and Measuring Your Work
If your framework sits in a shared cloud folder, then it's useless to you. If you do not govern and measure verbatim your team's word usage, you will see brand drift immediately.
Naming an Owner
Messaging needs to be dictated. While 29% of companies have a named owner who has cross-functional authority for message governance, the rest do not.
In the absence of an owner, new jargon gets created by the product team for the next product release; the sales team does not use it because it sounds contrived to them; and marketing will be using advertisements that do not include the new jargon.
The owner must have the political clout to hold sales personnel accountable to the master narrative when auditing their language on sales calls and demanding they make corrections.
The owner must serve as a bridge between the strategy of marketing and the sales team's operational reality.
Governance creates consequences.
33% of companies make it mandatory for sellers to pass a messaging certification before having live conversations with prospective buyers.
Updating Your Rules Regularly
As the marketplace continually shifts at an increasing rate, and competitors utilize the best claims you have developed, your position must be audited, re-framed, and refreshed based on a strict schedule.
Research conducted by AI has found that 42% (i.e., almost half) of B2B tech companies haven't updated their messaging in at least 30 months, leaving them susceptible to being replaced by new market entrants.
For those B2B tech companies that do refresh their messaging at least once a year, their pipeline velocity is 19% higher than their stagnant competitors that have not refreshed their messaging during this same time period.
To determine the adoption of a core narrative, you should track the frequency at which this narrative is used in sales intelligence software and measure when a new rep achieves proficiency in selling the product.
A documented and trained messaging framework can reduce ramp time for new hires by an average of 23%.
Artificial Intelligence and Search
Artificial intelligence and cognitive technologies have changed how customers perform research regarding a specific business-to-business (B2B) technology solution, as well as how firms develop content for their customers.
Therefore, the need to develop a unique and consistent brand messaging position for your product has never been more critical.
Search engines are rapidly developing B2B technology companies' ways to find the most relevant suppliers; however, new biases in the search engine results pages have severely limited the available options for customers to discover new products.
For example, now only 17% of the customer journey is spent interacting directly with the suppliers; the rest is taken up with independent research, with much of that being done through AI-based search engines.
In addition, search engines aggregate and summarize all of the category-specific information into a few clicks and many of the suppliers' templated pages are ignored.
Content structure around third-party benchmarks, standard definition, and proprietary information is referenced approximately 4.1 times more often by search engines.
To be successful, you must build a benchmark hub and answer general questions about your industry in an unequivocal and authoritative manner; therefore, you should integrate your company's perspective in the definitions in which AI uses to educate your customers.
Using vague buzzwords in your message will get your message filtered out entirely by artificial intelligence.
Controlling AI Copy
The internal threat is just as serious. Currently, 54% of marketing leaders see machine-generated content as one of the biggest threats to brand consistency.
When anyone uses generative tools to increase the volume of emails and blogs being sent out, and there are not strict guidelines, the result is a flood of off-brand generic content that is impossible for consumers to relate to.
Hyper-personalization at scale is moving marketing from a broad segmentation model to an individualization model.
As a result, your core messaging guardrails need to be very rigid in order to survive being remixed by machines thousands of times per day, in much the same way you define the words you will not use as clearly as the words you must use.
A Real-World Example
Theory doesn’t mean anything if you cannot see how the narrative pivot works in a real-world market environment to understand its impact.
Moving Beyond Basic Features
Consider a mid-market compliance software firm. At the time of launch, their homepage led off with "The all-in-one compliance automation platform."
This is a weak, feature-based assertion that gives little value to busy executives. It is just one of ten others that make the same claim and count on the buyer spending time on the website to find real value.
The successful pivot requires identifying the enemy and identifying the outcome. The new narrative focuses entirely on "audit-season chaos" and the specific pain of managing compliance with multiple spreadsheets scattered across the organization.
The old way was to manually and frantically collect data, resulting in the potential for significant fines. The new way is to achieve "continual compliance."
The promised land is a state in which a company is always "audit ready" so that executive-level anxiety as a result of being in a chaotic, manual environment is eliminated.
When this transition is made and enforced across the sales deck, your win rates against specific legacy competitors immediately increase.
The product didn’t change, but the way in which your company framed the issue completely changed the way buyers perceived value.
Check Your Sales Calls Today
Take three random discovery call recordings this week from your middle-performing reps and compare how their opening pitch matches up to your homepage.
If you don’t have a perfect correlation between the narratives, then you’re confusing buyers and leaking revenue. Fix your internal adoption today rather than waiting to invest in external market acquisition.