How To Differentiate Your Message
By Michael Bosworth and Deb Voigt Swann

Understanding how you "shine" as a company, or how you help your customers, and being able to convey that to potential new customers--your messaging--are critical to your success.   Let’s explore how your messaging may be perceived by your prospects and suggest alternative ways to communicate your uniqueness.

Does your Messaging Convey Your Differentiation?
What makes a prospect want to buy from you? If you can readily and accurately articulate what makes your customer’s experience “unique and sustainable,” then you have just differentiated your company’s offering. Think about it. Companies choose you based on the customer experience you architect; they remain with you because you sustain that differentiation.

A universal concern facing companies today is how to differentiate. Even if they can define how they’re unique, the critical issue is not what these companies believe to be true about themselves but rather what a prospect believes about them. So, how can you communicate your potential value to new customers and motivate them to buy from you? Your Web site, marketing collateral and selling tools are vehicles to make a connection with potential customers. Our philosophy is that messaging should focus on the customer, not on the seller. We want you to connect with a prospect by focusing on what your offerings do to help them in their businesses, not simply on what your products are. We also believe that sales people have the most direct influence on how your company is perceived by a prospect. Sales people can execute messaging, but most can’t create messaging.

So, ask yourself: Does your messaging clearly convey how you help your customers achieve their goals, solve problems and satisfy needs? Can this same messaging be used by your sales people to help prospects understand how, by using your products, they can improve their businesses?

Messaging Examples From Actual Web Sites (Yikes!)
To illustrate the point about effective messaging, we looked at Web sites to see if they readily conveyed the company’s capabilities. We wanted to see if a new sales person could go to your site to prepare for a sales call. Could they understand the business issues faced by your clients? Could they also determine how to position your products in a way to help address specific business situations?

We took actual content from the sites, typically from the home page, and incorporated it into a mock phone script that illustrates how your sales people might be introducing themselves. Let’s call this the “seller-centric” script. As we navigated through the sites, we got a better idea of what you do so we also incorporated our interpretation of your content into a mock phone script. Let’s call this revised version the “customer-centric” script.   Which version do you prefer?

Example #1: Hello, this is John Smith with XYZ Software. . .
Seller-Centric: At XYZ Software we “accelerate the development and deployment of operational excellence and real-time performance management applications providing global manufacturers a sustainable competitive advantage. ”

Customer-Centric: At XYZ Software, we help manufacturing companies meet production schedules, reduce inventories and reduce equipment maintenance costs. We do this by combining all of their supply chain data into a single Web-based view, so that they can act on the data more quickly.

Example #2: Hello, this is John Smith with CompanyX Software. . .

Seller-Centric: I wanted to let you know that “only CompanyX Software provides product development solutions, expert consulting and innovative technology. ” We empower small to mid-sized companies with the ability “to design innovative products, improve your engineering process and competitively manufacture in today's global economy. ”

Customer-Centric: Our software is used throughout the product development process to help designers create or modify designs more quickly and to reduce errors, so they can get products to market faster.

You may be thinking, “Our sales people don’t talk like that!” But, how do you know what the sales people are actually saying?   

Loading the Lips of your Sales People
As we’ve seen, messaging that appears on Web sites or in collateral may not be very helpful for sales people. We help our clients to provide their sales people with tools that highlight what to ask a prospect and how to effectively map your capabilities to the prospect’s business issues. Your prospects should be able to:

• Readily connect with your seller’s knowledge of the business issues and goals they face so their reaction would be: “Yes, I have that same problem. ”
• Visualize using your offerings in their own environment to resolve their issues so that their reaction would be: “Yes, I can clearly see how having that capability would help me resolve my problem. ”
• Understand why they should select your company over your competition so their reaction would be: “Oh, that’s what makes XYZ Software unique and the logical choice. ”

Does your messaging accomplish this? If not, what impact will this have on building your brand and compelling a prospect to choose your company over another? Effective sales messaging tools can help your salespeople uncover relevant business issues and position your offerings in a differentiated manner so that the prospect chooses you.

Michael Bosworth is founding partner of CustomerCentric Systems, LLC and is the best-selling author of Solution Selling: Creating Buyers in Difficult Selling Markets. Debra Voigt Swann is a licensed CustomerCentric affiliate.