How to Create the Best Messages for Long Sales Cycles - EP:095

One of the hardest things to figure out when it comes to marketing or sales messaging is what do you say to people when? Because sometimes the buying cycle takes a long time, particularly in B2B situations. So how do we solve for that? Well, the answer lies in tying red threads together. I'm Tamsen Webster of TamsenWebster.com, and that's what we're talking about this week on Find the Red Thread. If you think it's hard to structure your messaging over a long sales cycle, you're right. And a lot of times it's made even harder because we're trying to use the same materials and the same messages for from the beginning of the sales cycle to the end. That does a couple things. First of all, you as the marketer gets totally bored with it because you're like, what else can I say about this thing? And second, we run the risk of not actually answering the questions that our audience has. Now, we've talked about this before, but there really are 3 fundamental questions that people need to have answered before they will make a change. And it's not just in their comprehension, it's in Fundamentally, are they getting the right information that they need? Now, those 3 types of messages are why, what now, and how that match to those 3 fundamental questions: why, what now, and how. Why is, why am I not getting this thing that I want? Why am I struggling to achieve my goal? Why is there a problem that is getting in my way? That's why. Now, in the middle is something that I shorten to what now, but you can think of it as what needs to be true now, what has to be true now. So it's an additional piece of information or additional pieces of information that make the problem of the why impossible to ignore and that set up the change that the answer to how represents. Which brings us to how, which is if I agree with the problem, okay, I understand why, and I agree with what we need to do now or what needs to be true now, then I am myself going to move to the question, "Well, how do you do that? What does that actually look like?" And that's where the change and the actions, or in the case of branding and sales messaging, what products, services, steps in a process actually look like. Now, if we've got these 3 questions, then we also have, as I said before, messages and message types that match. But if we use the wrong message type in the wrong place, And then people don't get the answers they need. And if they don't get those answers, they're not gonna move forward. So what we need to do instead is structure a series of messages that answer the right question at the right time, even across a long sales cycle. Now, the good news is that you already have two formats to look at for what we're talking about. And both of them are probably in fairly active use in your organization already. The first format is the most common one that I see with clients, whereas all of their messages, all of their marketing materials are focused on how. And what I mean by that are things that are focused on, "Here's the product, here's how it works, here's the features and benefits." That's really coming at the end. So, first lesson here is you can't use those how things too early because they're just not answering that question of, "Why do I need this in the first place?" Now, to answer the question of why we need this in the first place, there are a number of approaches out there but they're probably best captured with what's called the Challenger sales messaging approach, where in order to answer that question of why do I need their product in the first place, they recommend that you spend a lot of time on defining a problem, and particularly a problem that your customer or client didn't realize that they had. Now that's incredibly important because we need to, as Challenger says, make the pain of the status quo exceed feed the pain of change. We have to make it uncomfortable for them to stay while still answering that question of why. But we can't keep using that approach all the way through the sales cycle because eventually people are like, "Yeah, yeah, I get it. Can you just tell me how the product works?" So, that's why we need to make sure that those two formats are separate. Now, in between, that kind of creates, "Well, what do I do in the middle?" But that's where the Red Thread can help you because whether or not you're using a product focus sheet or a problem-focused format with Challenger, underneath all of it still lies a goal, a problem, a truth, a change, and an action. Because each type of message always has all the pieces. So when you're trying to figure out, okay, I've got my early why type message that's meant to get people to go, oh, I need to think about the problem this way. The way you start that what now is with the goal of how do I solve the problem this way. And then through the problem, the truth, the change, and the action, you're going to get them to say, ah, we need to use this approach to solve that kind of problem. Great. Then your how sheets, your product focus sheets now say, here's how we solve that problem. Goal, problem, truth, change, action. So, by using the Red Thread to structure a series, you can make it super simple to figure out that series by making sure that the next message in the series always has a goal that was the change of the previous message. Now, I'll say that again, that in order to structure a series, so let's say you have message 1 that has a goal that leads to a change, message 2 should use the The first message's change has its goal, and that presents a second change within that second message, and that second change becomes the goal of the third message in the chain. And there you go, all along the line, as long as you need to until you've moved somebody forward. Now, you might say, well, do I have to make sure that somebody goes through each message? No, but if you have all those messages set up, then the buyer themselves will move when they need to, to the next step. So, they may start with the why and then ask you for the product sheets. That tells you that they have already made that connection. But when somebody needs to go slower or they need to get a lot of people to buy in, you need more time, you need more information and you need a structure that helps you make sure that you've got just the right information in the right order for the people you're talking to. And that's where the red thread in a series comes in. You just tie the red threads of each individual message together by linking the goal to the change and the change to the goal. That's this week's episode of Find the Red Thread. I'm Tamsen Webster of TamsenWebster.com. If you need help within your company, either an understanding, a new way to think about messaging, or an figuring out what your messages can and should be, reach out and look at what I do at tamsenwebster.com/consulting. Thank you.