U.S. companies alone waste more than $40 billion every year by confusing sales messaging with other messaging types. On the flip side, innovative companies routinely see a 15% to 25% improvement in market share, revenue and net income when they implement great sales messaging. Here are a couple data points to consider:

"80 to 90 percent of marketing collateral is considered useless by sales."
- Proceedings of the Customer Message Management Forums, published by the American Marketing Association (2002 and 2003).

"Graphic communications is a $100 billion+ industry."
- National Association for Printing Leadership (2004)

Even if you reduce the percentage of marketing collateral that Sales considers useless by half, or to 40%, it's still a $40 billion dollar problem annually. And, that's just the money being wasted on the creation of graphic communications.

The bigger cost of confusing sales messaging with other messaging types is lost revenue. For example, how much lower are your win rates as a result of using poor sales messaging? Nigel Mott of Agilent Technologies recently asked this question for the product he supports and determined: "Great sales messaging increased our win rate by 30%."

Another big contributor to lost revenue and higher costs is the amount of time your sales team spends creating the sales messaging and tools they need to succeed. As reported by the Aberdeen Group (Wellesley, Massachusetts: 2002) in Bridging the Great Divide: Process, Technology, and the Marketing/Sales Interface, "salespeople spend typically 30 to 50 hours per month searching for information and re-creating customer-facing content." Think about what Sales could accomplish if this wasted time were spent driving deals into and through the sales pipeline.

Sales Messaging Defined
How do you know if your sales and marketing organization is suffering from bad messaging? The first thing you need to understand is what sales messaging is and how it's different from the other messaging types. Let's start by clarifying what "messaging" means and then define the common messaging types.

Messaging is the information you use to position your company and your products or services in the minds of the people you are trying to influence. It includes brand messaging, company messaging, product messaging, market messaging, application messaging and sales messaging.

• Sales Messaging: At its core, sales messaging is persuasive. It provides compelling and persuasive answers to your buyer's primary buying questions like, "why should I meet with you?", "why should I buy this?" and "why should I buy this from you?" for each of the products and services you offer. And it delivers these messages at the appropriate point in the product life cycle and sales cycle.

Sales messaging is the fuel that powers all your sales and marketing engines.
The higher the octane, the better the performance.

Now let's compare sales messaging to the other messaging types.

• Company messaging: At its core, company messaging is descriptive rather than persuasive. It's a description of what your company does, your capabilities, the products and services you offer, the markets you serve and the applications or solutions you provide. Done well, it also describes the value that someone would receive by doing business with your firm. Company messaging is typically the content you see in a company brochure or website.
• Product Messaging: Product messaging is a sub-set of company messaging and it's also descriptive. It describes what the product does and how it does it. It includes a listing of features and benefits and specifications. Done well, it describes the value someone would receive by buying. Product messaging is what you typically see in a product brochure. In my experience, most market and application messaging is implemented as a variation of product messaging.
• Brand Messaging: Brand messaging is usually the tag line associated with your company logo. For the Silver Bullet Group, it's "The Best Way to Increase Your Sales." What you want brand messaging to do is to create a Pavlovian association between your company name and tag line. The goal of branding is to create awareness and consideration in your market.

No conversation about messaging would be complete without mentioning value propositions. Most value propositions are a variation on company messaging. They are usually a 1-2 line description about what your company does and the value someone would receive by doing business with your company. Some people may consider value propositions to be a messaging type too, but in my experience, they are usually more informal. They are created by the sales organization at the point of need, and are used in voicemails, emails and meetings. Rarely are they documented and leveraged as a corporate messaging asset like these other messaging types.

What To Do Next
Now that you have a sense of what sales messaging is, how it's different from other messaging types and how expensive it is to confuse them, it's time to determine how badly your firm is suffering by doing a quick collateral audit. Start out by having your Marketing Department collect all the collateral and tools they created and ask Sales three questions:

1) Where do you use this (each piece) in your sales process?
2) How useful is it in helping you sell?
3) How much time do you spend creating messaging and tools you need to successfully sell?

If your firm is like most, i.e. 50% or more of the collateral is considered useless by Sales, then estimate how much money you are wasting/losing.

Next, let your competitors, who have not read this article, continue to make the expensive mistake of confusing sales messaging with other messaging types. Let them continue to get their butt kicked in the market, while you create a plan for how you are going to implement great sales messaging, which has been proven to increase market share, revenue and net income by 15% to 25%. Use the recommended resources below to help you create your plan.


Michael Cannon is Founder of the Silver Bullet Group and an internationally renowned sales and marketing effectiveness expert, dynamic speaker and best-selling author, most recently coauthoring with Jay Conrad Levinson (Guerrilla Marketing), et al., Marketing Strategies That Really Work! Promote Your Way to Millions. He is also coauthor with Brian Tracy, Mark Victor Hansen, et al., of the best-seller, Create the Business Breakthrough You Want, which has been endorsed by Harvey Mackay, Dr. Stephen Covey, and Ken Blanchard.