In a market characterized by increasing commoditization, it’s becoming more difficult to stand out and get the attention of prospective customers. What were once key differentiators, such as technology and product innovation, are no longer enough to set you apart from the crowd.

Without differentiation, it takes more time and money to show prospects why you are the best choice; as a result, you often end up competing on price – a difficult position to sustain over the long term.

One of the biggest issues facing sales organizations today is the simple fact that they are not engaging in enough meaningful conversations with executive-level decision makers. There are many reasons for this, but without the ability to clearly articulate what differentiates your solutions, you simply will not be heard.

Here are five thoughts on how to bring your uniqueness to life:

1. Above all else, know your target market, know their problems, and get crystal clear on the value you bring.
2. Sharpen your focus. Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Starbucks became successful because they focused on making a great cup of coffee in a unique environment.
3. Even if what you do for clients is similar to many of your competitors, how you do it and your unique expertise can offer rich sources of differentiation. One of Marketing’s original thought leaders, Theodore Levitt, asserted that every service is differentiated in some way. Don’t overlook exploring all the nuances that add value for your clients.
4. Be a thought leader, not a thought follower. Take a stand and offer a unique and compelling point of view on the problems your customers face. The recipe for a weak pipeline is “greater sameness”, so avoid sounding and looking like everyone else.
5. Look for longevity. For sales messaging to have impact, it needs to have staying power in the marketplace.

Identifying the distinct ways that your clients experience value and building your messaging platform around those distinctions will help you generate more initial leads and gain the attention of the decision makers you are looking to engage with.

How important is strong sales messaging that clearly differentiates?

CSO Insights, a research firm that conducts a yearly survey of sales executives from nearly 2000 companies, found that firms who excelled at creating sales messaging that clearly set their services apart from the competition had noticeably more reps achieving quota and achieved higher win rates.

One of our services is helping our clients craft their marketing and sales messaging to grab the attention of their target market. If you are not having enough valuable conversations with prospective customers because you can’t gain access to decision makers, let’s talk.

Why are sales people spending as much as 40 hours per month creating their own collateral and presentations?

Stats from the American Marketing Association reveal that 90% of the materials marketing creates are not perceived as useful….and that tell me there’s a big problem going unsolved in business today.

In a new webinar, Tim Riesterer, CMO and SVP of Consulting for Corporate Visions, contends we could address this problem if we stopped thinking in terms of collateral creation and started thinking about how to be successful at various “moments of truth” in the “customer buying cycle.”

First, it’s critical to recognize that it’s a “buying cycle” and not a “selling cycle.” Customers move at their own pace and have their own set of demanding decisions to address before moving forward at any stage in a larger purchasing process. The key is to have the right conversations and deploy the right sales enablement tools at each stage.

Second, it’s important to clarify and define these moments of truth.   Riesterer observes that companies tend to focus their time, effort and resources on the latter stages of a buying cycle — after a decision is made to proceed and begin comparing vendors.

At this point, the opportunity to help identify a business problem and frame a potential solution already has been lost. It’s too late to become the prospect’s “trusted advisor.” You are, at this stage, merely another hapless contestant in a vendor “bake off.”

Finally, it’s vital to tell  a compelling story. At each stage of the buying process, you are challenged to create not only compelling messages but compelling tools – website content, marketing campaigns, appointment setting guides, call prompters, solution presentations, confirmation letters, value-driven proposals. Each stage is a moment of truth. Your challenge is to tell a story in these moments — one that makes the customer the hero and addresses the questions that are now front and center. In some form or fashion, you must contribute to a narrative that addresses a difficult challenge and leads to impressive outcomes. But messages must be incorporated into actionable tools.

The question for us is:  What is the appropriate tool for the moment? What will help sales professionals provide valuable guidance? What will help buyers make smart decisions that propel them forward in the buying cycle? “Tools must be relevant to the task at hand,”  says Riesterer.

So what will it be? Bakeoffs or Big Numbers? This is your moment of truth.

It hit me tonight as I was developing conversation guides for a new lead generation campaign we will be kicking off soon how very little time we have to catch the interest of our prospects.

Bottom line, executives and decision makers are super busy, have more responsibilities than ever before, and are being pressed to achieve greater results in less time. We have to convince them to give us a precious slice of their time and attention, and we have to do it in about a minute’s time. More than that, you risk losing them.

So how do I do this? It helps to keep it simple. I want to say just enough to make them curious enough to want to hear more. Because truly that’s what we’re after, right? I’m not trying to convince them to buy anything…that would take a lot longer than the 60 seconds I’ve been given. I just want them to be interested enough to agree to further conversations…and that’s the goal. Plain and simple.

This morning I sent a client an update on our lead generation efforts for him. His response made my day…

Thanks Tonya for the update, these updates are helpful and I will indeed take a look.

I also wanted to give you some positive feedback; just had my second campaign-generated meeting this morning, with XXXX (name removed by me).  She was very complimentary of Monica in the way she was pleasantly and professionally persistent in her pursuit of a meeting.  These school Business Administrators like Jamie are very busy, so this sort of persistence is key.  Had a good 2hr meeting and we’ll see where it goes…  but this campaign is helping us get out in the marketplace which is the goal.

This is why we do what we do every day …making proactive, outbound calls to build market awareness for our clients and connect them with executive decision-makers with a need.

Great job, Monica! Thanks for all you do:-)

One of biggest reasons marketing efforts fail is a lack of clarity and focus on two important things: WHO and WHY….and a shot gun approach to sustainable revenue and market penetration rarely works.

So when we begin working with a new client, we develop what I call a Market Pursuit Plan to laser in on these two critical components to make sure our efforts hit the mark.

The first step is to identify a group of target clients who share a common problem that you can solve better or different than your competitors. This clarifies who you want to have conversations with.

You then identify who within those companies care most about solving the problem you fix. Which executive or executives derive the most unique value from your services?

We’ve now defined what companies and who within those organizations to contact.

The next step is the WHY.

Why would these individuals want to have a conversation with you? What value would they get from a 20-30 minute conversation with you?

This step is extremely powerful because it forces you to put yourself in your buyer’s shoes and really think through and clarify the unique value you can offer to his/her organization.

We can now craft several compelling reasons we’re calling the executive to secure a meeting. Think beyond just “we want to meet to introduce our services…”. Is there an event, an idea, or an opportunity that you can lead with? The last important part of the WHY is binding it by time. We’ve found we’re more successful securing executive meetings if we have specific dates (ideally a month or so out) we’re asking for.

Now the client’s work is done, and ours begins. After crafting each communication touchpoint (voicemail, email, intro script), my team is ready to pursue conversations that matter with specific executives within a defined market with focus, speed, and professional persistence.

I just came across a great blog post on the top 10 keys to creating strong brands (read businesses) in 2011.  #1 and #7 resonate most with me right now because these two directly impact the work we do for our clients:

1. Learn everything about your customers. Understand them at a deep level. Know what motivates them. Know what they aspire to and what they fear.

If you don’t get this one right, you can’t be relevant. If you aren’t relevant, your emails aren’t opened, your calls aren’t returned, and your pipeline is weak.

7. Know that mass marketing is gone forever. The name of the game today is one-on-one marketing or at least customer segment marketing.

This one is about relevance as well. You can’t be relevant to the masses.

Being relevant is like calling someone’s name in a crowded room. People tune out all the surrounding noise to focus on their own conversation. Yet, they tune in immediately when their own name is called from somewhere else in the room. To get a response, you have to be loud enough to be heard over the din, of course. But if you simply add to the noise, or call the wrong name, the person will not respond.

Another example – say you are selling bottled water. What’s the real value in a bottle of water? Not much if you are in the U.S. or another developed country. But, if you are one out of six people in the world without dependable safe drinking water, on the other hand, the value is significantly higher. So, how you would approach someone in the U.S. about buying our water would be very different than how you approach the one person in six who is concerned about staying healthy and free from unpleasant diseases.

It’s ALL about customer segmentation and relevance…and I predict that the marketing and sales organizations that create the tools and conversations that achieve relevance with each segment of customers will emerge winners at the end of 2011.

To read the other 8 keys from the blog post, click here: http://www.brandingstrategyinsider.com/2010/12/top-ten-branding-keys-for-2011.html

In a post for The Customer Collective, Kelley Robertson offers “7 Reasons Decision Makers Won’t Take Your Calls.” It’s a good list. Robertson introduces the perils of sounding like everyone else, using manipulative tactics and mistreating the executive’s assistant (never, ever do this by the way!).

But let me offer one very good reason why an executive will take your call:

You provide valued guidance.

It’s true that executives are busy people, drawn in many different directions by many different demands. They are difficult to reach and engage.

However, executives are also looking for new ways to drive up revenues and drive out costs. They have thorny business challenges they are struggling to address. With this in mind, they value new insights and perspectives that can help them approach these challenges in new and compelling ways.

In my experience, one perspective that executive buyers particularly value is an overview of how their peers are addressing particular problems.

• What investments have they made?
• What solutions did they adopt?
• What hurdles did they confront when rolling out new solutions?
• What results did they achieve?

If you can share this type of information, it goes a long way towards earning confidence.

But perhaps even more valuable is the perspective that a trusted advisor can provide regarding the implications of the executive’s current situation:

• What are the costs of doing nothing?
• What are the risks associated with the current course?

While such insights are generally gathered through deeper diagnosis and research, it’s your promise of gathering and presenting such insights that will encourage executives to take your calls in the first place.

Companies have fewer resources available these days to research and evaluate challenges that are increasingly complex and risk-laden. That is your opening and opportunity.

One sure way of not getting a returned call is pitching your services and sounding like a self-serving salesperson. Provide valued and reliable guidance, and you not only differentiate yourself , executives will welcome your calls.

It’s that time of year when we’re all assessing the strength of our sales pipeline in order to build our plans and budget for achieving next year’s revenue targets.

A critical factor that must be examined is not only the size of your pipeline (in terms of number and size of deals forecasted to close) but the true health of it.

Here are some questions to get you started:

How much of your current forecast is real and gives you confidence as you plan your budgets for 2011?

Assuming all forecasted deals close as predicted, how many more deals will you need to meet your 2011 numbers?

Assuming only 50% of forecasted deals close, what’s the impact to your lead generation plans for 2011?

According to CSO Insights’ 2009 Sales Optimization study of over 1800 B2B organizations, only 47% of forecasted deals actually close. This means that many companies have an over-inflated pipeline, providing false hope and an inaccurate assessment of what is truly required to generate the sales needed for next year.

Now is the time to drive out all subjectivity in order to achieve forecast and pipeline accuracy. A realistic diagnosis of the health of your 2011 pipeline is the foundation on which to base the critical budgetary and strategic decisions that you are making right now.

As we move into 4th quarter, go-to-market and strategic planning sessions for next year are well underway. For large and small organizations alike, this can be a lengthy and complex process…one that can be simplified by answering a few important questions:

• GE Healthcare will matter more to hospitals by helping them ensure nurses spend more time at the bedside caring for patients and less on everything else.

• Marketing Arts diagnoses why new strategies fail to produce expected revenue for some of the world’s leading technology companies. They create true value by staying in the game until the sales teams deliver the bottom line results needed.

• McMann & Ransford helps organizations go beyond solution selling to building customer intimacy as the pathway to sustainable growth. By getting in the trenches with their clients to accelerate the transformation, they deliver what’s needed most – not just expertise and ideas, but execution and outcomes.

• Jill Konrath, sales strategist and best selling author, recently launched a new initiative to help professionals laid off from work land new jobs faster. By sharing insights into personal branding and strategies to stand out from the crowd, Jill has carved out a unique place in the market to matter more.

Since I’m on the topic…how can my team and I matter more to you next year by delivering greater value? I’m all ears!

Some companies think of marketing as a series of discrete events called campaigns.  They move seamlessly between these events, judging them merely on response rates and investment returns. But perhaps such marketing approaches are not as seamless as they seem.

The trouble is you can’t truly capitalize on the learning and insights now being generated through customer outreach. Whether marketing activities are fully managed in-house or involve partners engaged in Client Discovery work, companies could turn this accumulating knowledge and experience into a powerful asset if they started to think of marketing as an ongoing process.

We see this in our business all the time. When our clients commit to an ongoing relationship, we are able to develop new and deeper levels of knowledge about their markets, customers and prospects. Our analysis and insights become deeper, more valuable and more actionable over time. We can provide guidance and feedback they can use to hone their messaging, strengthen their value propositions and maximize their sales results. We’ve certainly provided this level of value in the healthcare field where we have developed powerful insights into the buying processes and dynamics of hospital decision makers.

That said, we are committed to providing valuable market intelligence in all cases — even when our clients are merely interested in a brief campaign. But the intelligence we accumulate — an asset, to be sure — cannot be further leveraged if the objectives are merely short-term in scope.

So maybe it’s time to think beyond isolated campaigns and think more carefully about the value of rich and perpetual connections.  Deepen your connections with your marketing and teleservice partners and they can, in turn, deepen connections with your prospective customers. Deepen these connections and they can provide richer and more powerful insights.