Your Ultimate Guide to Effective Sales Messaging

Getting your sales messaging right is all part of what makes a winning sales pitch. You want it to be attention-grabbing, you want it to be impactful, and you want it to stand out in your prospect’s (probably very busy) inbox.

Get it wrong and you risk deleted emails, ignored phone calls, and maybe even some damage to your company’s reputation.

Perfecting your sales messaging strategy

The ideal sales messaging will depend on a few things – your brand, your tone of voice, your target audience, and where your prospect is in the sales process.

Sure, getting it bang-on every single time may take some experimenting.

5 must-have components in your sales messaging framework

Whatever your brand or tone-of-voice, you should maintain these five (non-negotiable) components throughout your sales message experimentation – whether for inbound or outbound sales.

1) Make sure you’re targeting the right audience

First up, you’ve got to make sure that your sales message is going to the right audience. That takes into account the kind of company that’s suited to your business, but also the role your specific prospect is in.

Don’t waste your time or other people’s time.

Research the type of companies you’re after – which is made easier when you have an ideal customer profile template, by the way.   Then, you’ve got to look into your buyer personas to work out who the best person is to speak to when you get a lead. (We have some B2B buyer persona templates for that too).

The research stage is essential to any sales process, and where a lot of you can fall because, yes, it does require time and effort.

One way to minimize the time and effort spent on your search for leads? Similarweb Sales Intelligence. You’ve got our Lead Generator tool with over 100 million websites, 16 million companies, and 400 million contacts. And that list of contact details can be downloaded directly into your Salesforce and Hubspot accounts, or into an Excel spreadsheet.

It’s the main non-creepy way of finding an email address – FACT.

2) Give it a personal touch

Another essential move is to make your inbound or outbound sales messaging as personal as possible.

Step away from the copy and paste – and the consequential panic of starting your email with the wrong name.

It’s not just about using your prospect’s first name though. And it’s not that impressive when you open your email with “So, I hear you’re the [insert role title here] at [Company X]”. That’s knowledge you can get through a couple of clicks on LinkedIn, and also two bits of information that they (should probably?) know about themselves anyway.

To make your sales message stand out (and make it the best sales message possible), you’ve got to put in a bit more effort than that and maybe hit your prospects with some hard truths.

Identifying problems and providing solutions is one way to grab their attention, and puts you in a good position – moving you from a typical (and potentially untrustworthy) salesperson to more of a consultant or advisor role.

On top of helping you with lead generation, Similarweb Sales Intelligence also provides you with an Insights Generator tool. This tool does exactly what it says on the tin: generates insights of interest which you can use in your sales messaging. That includes industry and competitor analysis, which is a go-to for salespeople who use our platform and want to hook in their prospects with the click of a button (and a well-worded email).

3) Provide value by proving your value

But hey, the proof is in the pudding (or the proof in the pudding is in the eating, as we found out recently in our post on corporate jargon that doesn’t make sense).

How can you prove that your solution works for the specific pain points you’ve outed? Well, a bunch of ways, including:

• Research results
• Statistics
• Forecasting (using these numbers)
• Awards and nominations
• Testimonials and case studies
• Industry comparisons

You can also go down the route of offering freemium or free trials. This product-led growth (PLG) method has a number of benefits, to both you and your potential clients. For you, it’s great for customer acquisition, as it’s an opportunity to show that your product is too good for them to live without – if you’re successful, and that’s an easy conversion. For them, they get to try out your product at no cost – and who can complain about that?

Whether you opt for a “try before you buy” method or just have the proof laid out in numbers or case studies, your sales messaging needs to highlight what value you offer this specific client and how you differ from what else is out there.

4) Keep it consistent 

We mentioned the potential of bad sales messaging promoting a bad rep for your company. And it’s true. Bad sales messaging can include anything from aggressive or forceful tones, to just plain awful spelling and grammar. All of which can become incredibly off-putting to prospects.

That’s why consistency across all company messaging is so important.

Just like your homepage, display ads, and social media, your sales emails need to be on-brand. Your marketing team works hard on finessing your branding and style guidelines – too hard for sales teams to use inconsistent phrasing, off-brand images, or bad spelling throughout the initial cold email.

Tools like Grammarly to help to make sure your spelling is on point. ✏️ And getting your marketing team to review email templates that are being sent out will work a treat, too.

5) Nail your call to action

Now you’ve created the perfect email with all these four points, how do you end the email?

When it comes to closing your sales email or phone call, you’ve got to make it clear what the next steps are. And make it easy (and fast) for your leads to give a direct response.

The more complicated the next steps are or the more time they take, the less likely you’ll hear from your prospects again.

The best email call to actions (including follow-up email comms) are quick and require very little thought from your prospect. Our personal suggestions? A link through to your calendar and a simple click to confirm that time, or a link to subscribe or sign-up to a specific webinar or event.

How to develop your sales message

Cool, so you’ve got those 5 must-haves – but how can you develop your sales messaging over time? Here are a few things to remember along the way:

1) Focus on the prospect’s pain points

When you’re selling a product, it’s easy to just talk about the product. But this would be where you’re going wrong.

For your sales message to appeal to a prospect, you need to make it about them. More specifically, you need to make it about their pain points because – as you can imagine – that’s at the forefront of their minds whilst trying to grow a business. What’s not at the forefront of their mind is a product they’ve never heard of, or don’t have the time to hear about.

But here’s the trick: make it worth their time. Your product = the solution to their (or at least one of their) problems.

Move from a standard sell sell sell to more consultative selling, becoming a trusted advisor with trusted data.

2) Prepare your qualifying questions

The more questions you ask, the more you can customize the sales process to meet with your prospects’ specific needs and interests.

You know – learn what floats their boat ️, tickles their pickle , bakes their cake , rocks their socks. Yeah, you’ve got the jist.

Adding a good dose of personalization into your sales process, from your initial sales pitch right through to closing the sale, will make it very hard for your prospect to say no.

3) Be ready for all objections

By preparing for common sales objections, you can really develop your sales messaging skills, confidence, and your conversion rate.

With the right research and responses ready to hand, you can bounce back quickly from any hesitation or “No, thank yous” that your prospect might be giving off. Because after all, the faster you get back with a valid response to their problem, queries, or questions, the sturdier your solution becomes to them – and that’s something that’s hard to say no to.

You won’t be able to prepare for every single possible objection, but you can get close to it. Hate to sound like a broken record but by knowing – and focusing – on the prospect’s pain points and listening to what they are looking for through your qualifying questions, you can form generic responses and mold them to fit (or closely fit) each objection. So yes, preparation is still key.

How Similarweb can help you with your sales messaging

We mentioned that Similarweb Sales Intelligence can help you with a few things throughout the sales process. Our platform’s main aim is to help you sell smarter, saving you time and effort (that you can put towards getting more deals closed).

Here are some of the features we have to do just that:

• Lead Generator: Search our database of over 100 million companies to create a list of your ideal prospects.
• Contact details: Find key decision-makers at the companies you’re after, and download them into Excel, or straight into your Salesforce or HubSpot CRM.
• Insights Generator: Boost your outreach emails with relevant (and extra engaging) data and insights for your prospects.
• Account review: Gain full insight into each account on your radar, including website performance and technologies they use.
• Sales Signals: Identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities, and potentially reduce churn as a result with account alerts.

Selling smarter sounds good, doesn’t it? Book a demo today.

FAQs

Why is sales messaging important?

Your sales messaging is important because it’s what informs customers about your product, and hopefully, convinces them to buy it. Consider yourself as representing the product and your company, whilst providing solutions for your target market.

What is the most important part of a sales message?

The most important part of a sales message is to combine all the must-have components we’ve mentioned in this post. Without one or the other, your sales messaging will be significantly weaker – and you don’t want that, do you?

What is the difference between marketing messages and sales messages?

The difference between marketing messaging and sales messaging is down to who the messages are aimed at. For marketing, you’ll find that they work closer with buyer personas, which you could say is more generic. For sales, the messaging is much more personalized to the specific individual they are reaching out to.

by Leah Messenger

Senior Content Marketing Manager

Leah is a Senior Content Marketing Manager with a passion for turning complex topics into engaging, educational content.