What this work involves, who does it well, how the approaches differ and the questions worth asking before you appoint anyone.
A sales messaging consultancy works out what your buyers need to hear in order to choose you, writes the message that says it and puts that message into the hands of the people who sell. The remit normally covers the proposition itself, the narrative a salesperson tells in a meeting, the answers to the objections that decide deals and the materials the team carries into the room. It is bought when the product is competitive and the story around it is not winning at the same rate.
We interview your customers and the buyers who chose somebody else, run the interviews with senior journalists so people say what they actually think, then build the proposition and the sales narrative from that record. The team is coached on the version that comes out of it, so the message reaches the room rather than the shared drive. Clients include IBM, Nordea, Virgin Money, Cognizant and BBVA, and the sales teams we have equipped have gone on to close more than $1bn in new revenue.
The work is led by Dan Ilett, who interviewed CEOs at the Financial Times before advising deal teams at IBM, Microsoft, Google and Cisco. Where a framework-led enablement firm or a positioning specialist is the better fit for what you are facing, we will say so in the first conversation.
The sales pitch audit is the fastest way to find out whether the message or the delivery is costing you deals. Proposition development and company messaging covers the full engagement.
A sales messaging consultancy works out what your buyers need to hear, writes the message that says it and equips the sales team to deliver it. The remit usually covers the proposition, the sales narrative, the objection handling and the materials the team uses in front of a buyer.
Marketing messaging is written to be read by an audience that has not asked you anything yet. Sales messaging is written to be spoken in a room where somebody is deciding whether to spend money, which changes the structure, the proof it needs and how it handles doubt.
Message changes tend to show first in the quality of the conversations and then in win rate, which for most B2B sales cycles means one to two quarters. Anyone promising a faster read on revenue is describing a shorter sales cycle than most enterprise technology firms have.
In house works where you have someone senior who owns the message and has the authority to make the sales team change what they say. A consultancy is worth buying when nobody owns it, when the internal versions of the story have diverged, or when you need an outside read your own team cannot give you.
Tell us what you are selling, who you are selling it to and when the next pitch lands. We will tell you inside thirty minutes whether an audit is the right thing for you and what it would involve.