(This post is the first in a three-part series about creating compelling sales messages.)

“I’ve tried everything with customers, I talked about their needs, I tried using smart questions, I pitched features & benefits of our offering, I even led with our company’s values…and no matter what, the conversation keeps coming back to price…”

This is an all too familiar challenge voiced by sales reps across company and industry.  There’s no debate that the world of business-to-business sales has changed dramatically in recent years. Companies are looking to sell bigger, more complex (and therefore more expensive) solutions…while customers are looking to squeeze every penny possible out of their suppliers.

The key question at play here: does a sales message exist for our company that can move customer conversations beyond price and position the buying decision in favor of our solution?

At the SEC we believe so, but you have to work to find it…

To build a compelling sales message, you need to understand what truly differentiates you as a supplier—those core competencies that the competition cannot easily imitate and which provide unrecognized value to your customers (at the Council, we refer to this as Commercial Teaching).  Armed with your differentiators, you’ll be able to leverage these in the sales interaction to positively change customer perceptions about the value of your solutions.

The Council suggests using a 3-step process to create this kind of sales message:  

1) Challenge Assumptions

2) Brainstorm Organizational Competencies

3) Identify Your Differentiators

A word of caution: it will be a rare sales rep that can figure these out on his/her own, so you’ll need to own this responsibility as a company.  Our suggestion is to get key senior sales executives, a few high performing front line managers & sales reps, marketing folks, finance folks (anyone that would and should have a say in this matter) together in a room and work to conclusion.

Across the next three weeks, I’ll cover each of these steps in turn. In this post, let’s talk about the first step – challenging assumptions.

The point of this first step is to uncover a lack of consensus regarding what differentiates your company in the marketplace.  It will also force participants to recognize their own siloed perspectives, breaking them away from their existing notions of company differentiators and opening their eyes to the value of the group.

SEC Members, download a helpful instruction guide to help you with this activity. This guide will provide a template for the meeting agenda and mission statement, as well as step-by-step instructions for the assumption-challenging exercise to run participants through.

In my next post, I’ll tackle the activities associated with the second step: brainstorming organizational competencies.

Related posts:

1. Creatively Using Price to Move Beyond Price
2. Want to Eliminate a Price War? Eliminate Your Competition.
3. The 3 Things Your Pitch Deck Should Claim (If They’re Actually True)
4. The 7 Essential Steps Of Sales Tool Design
5. Tailoring Green Value Propositions to Customer Stakeholders