Factors to Consider when Personalizing Solution Messaging

We hear a lot said these days about the importance of sales messaging. When we do, we also often hear about the various sales research data that points to sales reps’ inability to communicate value to prospects and customers.

What I don’t believe we see enough, is advice about how to personalize effectively or what to consider.

To offer some thoughts on this, let’s look again at something I've written about frequently myself… Customer Acumen… and go a little deeper. This will provide some additional factors to consider when personalizing solution messaging to create value for various buyers.

CUSTOMER ACUMEN

The first thing to concern yourself with, in determining how to personalize messaging, is how well you know the company you’re selling to, the buyers in it, and especially their situation, issues (challenges and opportunities), concerns, and goals.

To set yourself up for success, and prepare to deeply personalize your solution messaging by buyer, you should know:

Their Situation Assessment and SWOT analysis (Company and Buyer Persona or Individual Buyers)

The Implications of the Situation

• The Negative Consequences of Inaction (or the Wrong Action)
• The Positive Outcomes of Taking the Right Action

How the Implications Tie to Organization Performance or the Metrics That Matter and KPIs for the various Buyers:

• Increase Revenue
• Improve Profit or Cash Flow
• Reduce Costs
• Manage Risks
• Accomplish Goals & Objectives
• Achieve Mission & Vision

Beyond this, when working a sales opportunity, there are other things we should consider to get a fuller picture:

• Decision Roles
• Buyers Personal Needs and Motivators
• Buyer Perceptions (how they view us and our company)
• Organization Politics

Decision Roles

• What is their level of authority? Are they a decision-maker or influencer? In what way? Can they make a final positive decision (say Yes), be a blocker (only say No), influence the Yes or No decision, or are they part of a team that must reach consensus (more likely than complete agreement in larger decision teams).
• What is their level of involvement? Are they an active decision-maker or influencer, or someone who is not actively involved and rubber-stamps or ratifies, or worse, vetoes from behind the scenes?
• What type of decider/influencer are they? Are they an End-User of your product/service, a Technical or Functional Expert of some type (could include Procurement here or sometimes in Financial), a Financial or Economic decision-maker, or another executive decision-maker?

Buyer's Personal Needs and Motivators

Blending the work of David McClelland, Abraham Maslow, Charles Handy, and more recently, Dan Pink, I’ve started to use these as “personal needs and motivators:”

• Purpose
• Autonomy
• Mastery
• Order
• Power
• Belonging
• Achievement
• Recognition
• Safety

(Mnemonic to help you remember: “PAM Orders Power BARS”)

What are your Buyers’ primary needs or motivators? Sometimes, there are blends. For example, some people with Safety needs also crave Order or Belonging. Some with Power needs crave Autonomy or Achievement.

As much as possible, take Buyers’ Personal Needs & Motivators into consideration when diagnosing needs and messaging solutions. You don’t need to become an amateur psychologist to do this. Nor do you need your buyers to take validated psychometric assessments. Just do your best by asking questions and listening to answers and observing, as well as summarizing and ensuring good communication, while comparing their answers to the Personal Needs. (In other words, what you should already be doing anyway.)

It always helps to “peel the onion” or “drill-down,” rather than accept surface answers, and to understand what is important to your buyers, and why. This will generally provide enough cues and clues to help you position and personalize your solution messaging, for each buyer.

Buyer Perceptions (how they view us)

How people view us often depends on how much they trust us, believe us, and judge us to be meeting their needs (or trust and believe that we can and will, based on what we say).

Buyers, and people in general, are consciously or unconsciously judging two things (which I recognize that I am grossly oversimplifying here):

• Trust (are we a threat or not).
• Believability (can they believe what we say or not).

And based on that trust and believability, they are judging:

• How we are meeting (or will meet) their business needs.
• How we are meeting (or will meet) their personal needs.

Which all leads to whether they are a Supporter (of you, your company and solution), Neutral, or a Detractor.

Organization Politics

Organization politics are sometimes difficult to assess from the outside. You can observe and ask about it, both overly and subtly, but the more the buyer trusts and believes, you, the more they are likely to “let you in” to the “real situation” and coach you on politics, “who’s who” and their own agendas. This is a post in itself, so for this post, I’ll just mention it.

Factor for Personalizing: Example

If you don’t know the things we've been discussing so far (about your buyers), your ability to message your solutions will be limited. It’s a guessing game and will be far more generic than it could be. This is a large part of why reps aren't:

• Communicating enough value
• Impressing senior executive buyers in meetings
• Earning more follow-up meetings
• Overcoming the status quo more often (experiencing too many “No Decision” outcomes)

By way of example, I’ll modify a scenario I once created for another purpose. This will be a very basic example, but this should provide a start, which I will build on over time. I've been contemplating creating some fake customer and seller organizations for a while now, and using them for recurring examples… it’s really just a matter of having enough time. For now, here’s a quick example that is possibly too simplified, but hopefully workable for this post.

Situation

Medature, a manufacturer of highly-complex machined parts for robotic medical equipment is seeing much higher scrap rates for a key part in a new product line that has just gone to market. This is increasing costs for this new line, impacting profitability, and has also impacted order delivery (and caused payment delays) on a tight timeline, twice already. The Q3 investor call was very challenging, and several planned statements led to analysts drill-down questions about this new line, which led to more disclosure than was originally planned, since a solution is not yet clearly defined. Stock price slid afterward to pre-launch share prices, after a previous healthy inflation upon news of the launch and a few large orders.

CFO Business Need

• What: Get costs back in line and keep AR flowing.
• Why: Avoid EBITDA impacts (metric that matters) and reduce risk (organization performance).

CFO Personal Need

• What: Safety / Order
• Why: On the Q3 investor call, advised they’d hit the projected Q4 EBITDA this time, after a rocky 3rd quarter (different reason, but now… this happens).

CFO Decision Role

• Financial / Economic
• Ratifier: A direct report is involved with the committee that is evaluating solutions and will provide ongoing reports to the CFO and seek final budgetary sign-off.

CFO Buyer Perception

• It’s early, prior to a full solutions dialogue, but they generally know what you do, and you get the impression that he sees potential for meeting both business and personal needs, but is skeptical so far that it can be done (perhaps some trust and believability issues) and that your solution will provide a quick-enough Payback and ROI to matter for Q4. Neutral, at the moment, leaning toward Detractor.

----------------------------------------------------

VP of Manufacturing Business Needs

• What: Reduce scrap rates, meet delivery timelines.
• Why: Get large, short-term orders out on time, without delaying other order starts; meet customer and CEO / CFO /shareholder expectations.

VP of Manufacturing Personal Needs

• What: Achievement / Recognition.
• Why: Has a long history of on-time deliveries and low-scrap rates, and speaks at industry conferences on past successes and methodology. This situation risks damaging his reputation internally and tarnishing his industry status. Strong drive to achieve Goals and Objectives.

VP of Manufacturing Decision Role

• Part of the evaluation on committee with a strong voice.
• Could override all others with the possible exception of the CFO on final budget authority, so a strong business case and payback/ROI is required (in addition to his needs of reducing scrap rates to acceptable levels and getting complete, large orders out on time without affecting other deliveries).

VP of Manufacturing Buyer Perception

• Is considering outsourcing as a solution, in addition to your solution to upgrade several pieces of equipment and provide process consulting services.
• He has past experience with outsourcing and is concerned that your solution of upgrading some equipment will be more costly and difficult to sell to the CFO. He does believe that the process consulting might help, but is suspending judgment based on your upcoming fuller discussion about your recommended solutions and methodology. Neutral, at the moment, leaning toward Supporter.

As you may have gleaned from the above, your solution is an upgrade of a few related pieces of equipment, coupled with Six Sigma and Lean process consulting, to even further reduce error rates and speed order completion.

Given that, and the above, can you see how you might position your solution differently, for the CFO and VP of Manufacturing?

Technically, they face the same issue, yet the Implications of the issue affect them differently, professionally and personally.

You offer each the same solution, the same product features/benefits, the same costs, the same implementation team, and more.

Yet, their desired business outcomes and personal needs are different, and how you’d position your solution and it’s outcomes, should vary, based on their needs, roles, perceptions, implications (what they are moving away from and moving toward or outcomes).

Solution Architecture and Messaging

I originally planned to write some examples for this, but then had a better(?) thought while writing the post. Why not ask you?

Yeah, yeah, I know. I haven’t given you enough real-world detail. You don’t sell this product. You don’t have experience in this industry. It’s a crazy request.

Humor me.

Or, tell me exactly what you’d need to know that you don’t (and feel free to make up and provide that info), to close your perceived gap and offer an opinion about how to personalize.

I’d love to see what you come up with, and hopefully, your strong recommendations for how you would message and position your solution differently to the above two decision makers. I'll happily take either verbatim messaging or an explanation of your thought process. (Or, I’ll learn that this isn't how you want to engage, and will do something differently next time. Either way, it will have been an interesting experiment and learning experience.)

For those interested, here is some additional related reading…

Some Reading on Personal Needs

• https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/human-motivation-theory.htm
• https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMM_74.htm
• https://www.businessballs.com/charleshandy.htm
• https://psychology.about.com/od/theoriesofpersonality/a/hierarchyneeds.htm

Some Reading on Decision-Making and Decision-Makers

• https://www.inc.com/erik-sherman/which-of-the-5-kinds-of-decision-maker-are-you.html
• https://www.decision-making-solutions.com/business_decision_making.html
• https://career-advice.monster.com/in-the-office/workplace-issues/win-sale-engage-decision-makers/article.aspx
• https://www.millerheiman.com/Knowledge_Center/Knowledge_Center_Articles/Alumni_Materials/Blue_Sheet_Buying_Influences/

I look forward to your thoughts, opinions and experiences.

As always, thanks for reading, be safe out there, and by all means, let's continue to elevate our sales profession.

Mike

_________________________________________

Mike Kunkle

:: transforming sales results ::

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