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What is message tailoring in sales? How can it help you become a better sales rep?
Message tailoring in sales is when you make your pitch or message specific to to buyer you’re talking to. Message tailoring is an important Challenger Sales skill, since it allows you to directly address the customer’s concerns and needs.
Message Tailoring for Resonance
The trend of complex sales or solutions selling has been accompanied by an increase in consensus buying—a company’s desire for consensus throughout its organization before going ahead with a purchase. Message tailoring can help you build this consensus with your customer.
As a result, being able to tailor your message to your audience (the second pillar of Challenger sales) to each stakeholder in order to build consensus is a necessary skill for reps. It’s a skill that “natural” Challengers understand and excel at.
CEB researchers found that widespread internal support for a supplier was the top thing decision-makers (senior executives and procurers) cared about when it came to the sales experience. They didn’t want reps making pitches to them without first having established consensus—they saw that as wasting their time. Price and customization were significantly less important.
This runs counter to traditional sales training that says reps should connect directly with the senior decision-maker (believing that person is key to closing the deal). Instead, research shows that reps need to earn the decision-maker’s support by building stakeholder support first.
Building Consensus
Since stakeholders play a strong role, it’s useful to look at the data on what drives their loyalty toward suppliers. Knowing this is key to enlisting their support.
Research shows that stakeholders look for the following in a sales rep:
- Someone who’s professional
- Someone they can believe and trust to deliver
- A rep who will offer useful perspectives and educate the customer.
This means that the way to build consensus across an organization for your solution is to teach individual stakeholders something new and valuable. Yet many reps traditionally have done the opposite—rather than offering insights, they’ve sought to extract information or insight from stakeholders to help them persuade higher-level decision-makers to adopt their solution. This is where tailoring your message to your audience comes in.
To build support with stakeholders, reps need to focus on giving rather than getting info. And they need to have something compelling to share. In essence, this involves a Challenger Sale with each individual stakeholder.
Tailoring the Message
The requirement of consensus-building means reps have to talk to many more people than they did in the past to close a deal. In addition, they have to tailor their sales message to many different stakeholders so that it resonates with each.
Message tailoring involves four levels, starting with the customer’s industry, followed by company, role, and individual.
To start with, a supplier’s marketing experts can add significant value by helping to tailor the sales message to the industry and company levels. Numerous sources of information are available, many of them free. Marketing can determine:
- What’s going on in the industry, including trends and current events?
- Has there been a merger or has a major player recently failed?
- Is the customer’s market share growing or shrinking?
- Are any regulatory changes impacting the industry?
- What do the company’s press releases and earnings statements indicate about its priorities?
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Here's what you'll find in our full The Challenger Sale summary :
- Why the best salespeople take control of the sale and challenge the customer's thinking
- How to package your company with a key insight to spark an "a-ha" moment
- How to get the organizational support you need to maintain your sales edge
