How Are You Telling Your Story

Step 4. How Are You Telling Your Story?

Now we are getting to the sharp end of the Five Steps to Sales Growth where you design and execute your one-to-many market communications. If you have taken the opportunity to work through Steps One and Two and then Step Three, you will find you have all the material you need for Step 4: Telling the Story.
STEP 4: Telling the Story

• Create the messages – By now you will know who the buyers are within your target market and what’s in it for them. Focus on the pain, the gain, how you compare to competitors and what sets you apart. Why are you better and what’s your proof? Fold this information into all forms of your messaging and lock it in, creating your elevator pitch, tag lines, value proposition statements, branding, etc.
• The customer journey - Map the Common Customer Behaviours to a customer journey view, pre and post-sale. Consider also if there are different journeys for different segments or personas. This will guide you on when and where to use your different types of messaging, i.e. at trade events, when networking, when blogging, in email campaigns, etc.
• Create the ideal list of artefacts needed to communicate the story – This is the opportunity to get your marketing and sales functions to work collaboratively. The sales folks can bring real world, anecdotal feedback from customers offering advice from what works in the field. The marketing team can keep the focus on a one-to-many approach to ensure the message works at scale but can still be executed in the field in a one-to-one situation. 
• Align messages to customer journey stages - Designing a library of collateral and other artefacts with your sales team's input enables you to accurately map each sales artefact to the different phases of the customer journey.
• Where to place the message – With the clear understanding you gained from Steps 1, 2 and 3 you will be able to map why, how, where and when you need to communicate your message. This will also help you make sense out of the many options (online ads, social media, trade events, print, email, blogs, etc.) and the investment required. Now execute your plan!
• Communicating with your channels – The sales channels you use will need to understand your customer journey/s, messaging, etc. They may also need their own separate portfolio of messaging that is adapted to their sales needs i.e. localize language, pricing information and affiliated branding.

Once you have worked through the above issues you will have a considered set of communication artefacts that provide clear guidance for your sales teams and sales channels to use with confidence. Carrying out Step 4 thoroughly provides a strategic marketing framework that you can adjust as you receive feedback from real in market failures and successes. In my next post I’ll outline the final step, Step 5: It's Time to Start Selling.