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Published on: 6/8/2008
Last Visited: 6/8/2008
Michael Bosworth explains how to customize your sales story for every account
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"Typically, marketing and sales are separate silos in the company," says Michael Bosworth, a founder of Customer Centric Systems and co-author with John Holland of the new book CustomerCentric Selling: The Message Driven Sales Process (McGraw Hill, 2003).
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Michael Bosworth thinks it can.The solution lies in collaborating to make the messages generated by the marketing department more sales relevant.
Bosworth calls his system the "message-driven sales process" and says it is like a ladder.
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"The solution is to give companies a standard format of sales-ready messaging that their sales department would be willing to use," says Bosworth.
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To Bosworth it comes down to a simple scenario."Let's say a journeyman salesperson, a young guy in his twenties, needs to have a meaningful dialogue with a 55-year-old enterprise executive who is considering spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on technology that he doesn't understand.The message should allow the young salesperson to relate to this executive by his title and have a conversation about a specific goal that person would have."He emphasizes the word conversation, saying, "A good conversation accomplishes a lot more than a one-sided presentation."
Messages only resonate in the customer's mind if they are shaped in words and portrayed in images that the customer can understand.Bosworth gives the example of a salesperson presenting a CRM package to a VP of sales.
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Bosworth, the apostle of message management, emphasizes the need for meaningful conversation with the customer: "Salespeople who tell customers what they need are perceived as presumptuous.
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Bosworth suggests that salespeople should first establish a certain amount of rapport with a potential client, using early conversations to gather information.
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Bosworth emphasizes the need for value-added solutions.
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While Michael Bosworth originated the blueprint of the message-driven sales process, Ventaso provided the means to implement it, by developing a system called Customer Message Management that allows salespeople to tap into a sales and marketing intelligence center.
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Bosworth recalls a workshop where he asked a man who sold glue to tell him about the glue.A chemist by training, the man cheerfully went through all the properties of glue , talking about surfaces and temperatures and stickiness factors and completely going over everyone's head."He saw glue as a noun," says Bosworth."I asked him to use glue as a verb, and he immediately began telling me about things I could do with this glue.It was a much more compelling presentation."
The problem with marketing brochures, reports and white papers is that they're noun oriented," Bosworth continues.
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