Your value propositions determine conversion rates. And delivery of your value propositions requires effective and compelling messaging that creates interest by being well aligned to each buyer's requirements.

1. Are Your Marketing Messages
Hurting Sales?
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"What bothers you the most with sales people trying to sell to you? What would you tell them to do instead?"
This great question was posted in a LinkedIn CEO Forum by a sales person in May, 2011.
Almost unanimously, CEO’s said the sales person needs to “listen before pitching.” Good advice, but the problem goes far beyond the sales person’s listening skills. Let’s take a closer look at this issue;
Marketing develops key company, market and product messages for sales. These messages are incorporated into the Product Manager’s Launch Kit along with other supportive collateral to support sales activities.
To this LinkedIn question, our sales person meets with the CEO. He describes his company, their major markets, and finally the features and benefits of the product(s). Some discussion follows however the meeting does not go well.
What happened?
1. Product Managers are usually from a technical background; CEO’s generally are not– the sales person and the executive are not speaking the same language. Senior Executives don’t care about how the product works; they care about how the product creates business value. How can you help me improve profits? Lower costs? Do more with existing resources?
2. The CEO understood the company’s descriptive messaging: Who we are, the markets we serve and the solutions provided, but that was not sufficient to understand the business value that might be derived. The salesman failed to use persuasive messaging that aligns value based propositions to the CEO’s interests around profits, operational efficiency or cost reduction.
We always want sales to “call higher”. However, if the sales person can not speak to each buyer’s requirements with persuasive messaging, access to executive levels is not possible.
Worse, consider the impact of ineffective messaging as this: “Your value proposition determines conversion rates.”
Now let’s look at a simple example starting with a basic premise about buyer-types: executives seek business value, directors and middle managers seek advantages, influencers and recommenders seek benefits and end users seek features and benefits.
Going back to our LinkedIn scenario of a sales call between the sales person and the CEO, we now see two problems: their language is not the same and the CEO cannot determine business value as a result of their meeting. A sale is not made and repeat access will not be granted.
For our CEO call, let’s try the sales call this way, “…..and while we’re very proud of the technology breakthroughs we’ve achieved, not to mention industry recognition and 5 new patents, I believe we can help your company be more competitive for two reasons…first….”

2. Use descriptive messages to describe your company, market and solution. Use persuasive messages to align value propositions to your customer’s requirements or issues – aligned by buyer type.
Oh, and as for the LinkedIN article?
We suggested CEOs check their own web sites for messaging that speaks to their company’s ideal buyers. In most cases, those messages aren’t there. So the question then becomes, are your own sales people effectively aligning your value propositions to each buyer’s requirements on their sales calls? Does your sales organization have repeat access to executive levels?
Probably not… 
Development of effective and compelling messaging is critical to the success of your company. It shortens the sales cycle and improves closure rates. It converts understanding to action. It creates interest and momentum – your value propositions determine conversion rates.
With effective and compelling messaging, your sales force is seen as being more relevant to the purchase situation as well as adding more value.