CHAPTER

4

Crafting the Right Message

In Part I of this book, we explored whom to contact. In Part II, beginning with this chapter, we turn to engaging those right people with the right message (what).

Crafting the right message begins with recognizing that prospects exist at different stages of purchase intent in the customer buying cycle as illustrated in Figure 4-1. Effective messaging paves the way for authenticity, starting with initial contact to explore joint values and proceeding through product implementation, delivery, and finally postsale engagement and satisfaction:

  FIGURE 4-1   Stages of the Buying Cycle

In the first stage, the prospects are unaware of a problem standing in the way of their ability to increase profit, save time, reduce effort, or bolster their reputation. Moreover, at this stage, the prospects are likely oblivious or unconscious of the salesperson’s company and products.

In the second stage, the prospects are aware of, yet apathetic to, the problem as well as to the salesperson’s company and products.

In the third stage the prospects are interested in and begin to grasp the magnitude of the opportunity and actively seek more detailed information.

At the end of the fourth stage, the prospects are evaluating the magnitude of the opportunity and have a strong, though not yet complete, sense of the vendor’s ability to help. Since people are habitual, risk-averse creatures who resist change, the prospects in this stage engage in deliberate rational and emotional consideration, learning more about solutions from various potential partners. The evaluating stage can end with a decision to do nothing, to build, or to buy.

In the fifth stage, the prospects make a purchase and become customers.

In the sixth and final stage, the prospects seek information postpurchase to ensure they get a high return on their investment.

When making initial contact via phone or e-mail, a sales representative must understand and acknowledge the prospects’ current level of purchase intent and work to advance that intent one or more stages into the buying cycle. Since prospects contacted during an outbound campaign are typically in the unaware stage, messaging should focus on education directed at the problem rather than on the features of the salesperson’s products or the bona fides of her company. One may conjecture that inbound leads are aware, interested, or evaluating. However, all inbound leads are not created equal. While an inbound prospect requesting a demo will at least be interested, another prospect who merely downloaded a white paper on industry best practices may be just as unaware as a random outbound contact. Hence, both content and context matter in crafting messages for Predictable Prospecting.

Finding the Pain

Before we start drafting content for prospects at each stage of the buying cycle, we first need to develop a holistic understanding of the pain they are facing. McKinsey Consulting offers an excellent framework for gaining this insight known as an “issue tree.”¹ The first level, or root, of an issue tree poses a question at the highest level of business impact. For instance, a chief marketing officer (CMO) might ask, “How can we increase our return on investment (ROI)?” Most issue tree questions begin with how, though what and why are acceptable as well. These question starters are typically followed by “can” or “does.”

As prescribed by McKinsey, each subsequent level of the tree should articulate a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (MECE, pronounced me-see) set of issues—in the form of questions—at the next layer of granularity. Mutually exclusive means each of the issues are independent. Collectively exhaustive means every possible issue is explored at each level. Practically, we work hard to apply the mutually exclusive rule but relax the collectively exhaustive requirement to prevent the issue tree from becoming too unwieldy.

In Figure 4-2, the second level of the CMO issue breaks the ROI into its two components, revenue and cost, and the third level breaks those two components down further: revenue is equal to volume times win rate times revenue per transaction; costs can be controlled either by reducing spend on program and people or by increasing productivity.

  FIGURE 4-2   Issue Tree for a Chief Marketing Officer

Issue trees need not be “balanced”; it is just coincidence that the third level lists three items each. In addition, issue trees can, and generally should, go several levels deeper than the one shown in Figure 4-1. But to keep the tree manageable, we can stop expanding it vertically or horizontally whenever the issues are too granular to be of interest to the individual we are attempting to reach. If we were reaching out to a CMO, we would stop expanding early. However, if we were reaching out to a digital marketing manager with the hope of getting a referral to his CMO, then we would expand the tree even more. For example, the question “How can I increase volume?” leads to generating business through direct marketing (postal mail), digital marketing, and phone outreach channels. Digital marketing generates leads via paid traffic from search engine marketing, organic traffic from search engine results, and direct traffic to a website. Organic traffic can be boosted by increasing content volume, content quality, and search engine optimization. And so on . . .

Resources to Validate Prospect Pain

The old adage of measuring twice and cutting once works well here to illustrate our point. Since it is generally agreed that planning is cheap and execution is expensive, taking the time to validate the importance of any given issue is of the utmost importance. This validation step ensures that sales teams not only work the right issues but also express those issues as key in the language of the buyer.

If time permits, interview and survey prospects to validate the pain. In a pinch, the Internet offers countless free tools that provide nearly the same benefits in far less time.

The first set of resources is discussion boards, especially those on LinkedIn Groups and Quora. More broadly, sales professionals should search anywhere they know their prospects and customers congregate, such as blogs and industry and trade websites. Among all of the options, we find Quora especially useful because participants formulate issues in the form of questions that get Upvoted by other readers. Building upon our CMO example, imagine a salesperson focused on selling marketing automation solutions. Entering “marketing automation” in Quora’s search yields a link to the topic “Sales and Marketing Automation,” which has 8,800 followers. Since it is currently not possible to sort the page by the number of Upvotes, we must scan the page to find the most popular questions. The top five are as follows:

1. Are my marketing automation hopes too high? (64 Upvotes)

2. What is a good online marketing automation tool for B2C startups? (61 Upvotes)

3. What is the best marketing automation tool for small and midsized companies? (60 Upvotes)

4. What are some of the best sales strategies for software-as-a-service (SaaS) products? (47 Upvotes)

5. What is the best marketing automation tool for B2B lead generation? (42 Upvotes)

These five most popular questions are clearly being asked by prospects at later stages—interested or evaluating—of the decision cycle. We find the phrasing of the questions most valuable because it suggests audience segmentation. Notably, business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) prospects are in distinct segments as are prospects from small and midsized companies versus those from large enterprises. We also get a sense of two core issues: setting key metrics (from question 1) and lead generation (from question 5).

Outside of the most popular questions, many other key issues appear, including e-mail marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, and marketing automation process flows. When scanning the less highly rated questions, salespeople must be very careful to suppress the tendency to focus on only those topics of most interest to them. To overcome this phenomenon, known as confirmation bias, we recommend cataloging the questions in descending order by the total number of Upvotes each collected. That way you can rule out more esoteric questions such as, “What are some tools similar to Yozio?” (which was posed as veiled self-promotion by one of its cofounders, albeit with full disclosure) and rule in such questions as, “What are the key challenges in marketing automation?”

The second set of resources involves language. These are the words that marketers use to leverage the generation of the keywords used in search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM). There are two subsets of tools: the first suggests keywords using a website URL as input, and the second suggests more specific keywords using less specific keywords as input.

The Google Adwords Keyword Planner is a great starting point since it is a hybrid of both subsets and relies on an incredibly sophisticated algorithm. In its current incarnation, we entered “marketing automation” for “Your product or service,” “www.marketo.com” (a pure-play marketing automation vendor) for “Your landing page,” and “sales and marketing software” for “Your product category.” In ranking the keyword ideas generated from highest to lowest, and based on average monthly searches, the issues that bubble to the top include CRM software, e-mail marketing, demand generation, lead management, lead generation, lead nurturing, sales tools, lead scoring, and so on. As expected, these reinforce the topics we discovered on Quora.

Get a second opinion by using one of the countless Internet options by simply searching “keyword generator” (without quotation marks). Our favorite sites are Ranksonic.com, Keywordtool.io, and ubersuggest.org. We even built one of our own, which you can check out at keyword-oracle.com. In contrast to Google’s Keyword Planner, these tools are narrower in scope, allowing users to view suggestions after entering either a URL or a phrase.

The Compel with Content (CWC) Story Framework

The effective crafting of any content is highly context- and time-dependent. Though we are about to share best practices, frameworks, and a number of real examples, we encourage you to craft your own original content using our templates as starting points. With this caveat, let’s get started with the Compel with Content (CWC) framework developed by Marylou Tyler.²

The CWC framework applies classic storytelling techniques to Predictable Prospecting communications. As with any writing exercise, the CWC framework begins with planning. Our favorite planning method involves thoughtfully filling in the following blanks:

For whom? ________________________________

To do what? _______________________________

In order to? _______________________________

By what means? ____________________________

To illustrate, let’s pick the “How can I increase volume?” question from the issue tree in Figure 4-2. Our response is in Figure 4-3.

  FIGURE 4-3   A Response to the “How Can I Increase Volume?” Question Posed in Figure 4-2

The Trigger

Next, you must decide on the trigger (or tone) of the message you want to convey because the buying stage determines whether the trigger should be emotional or rational. Keep in mind that messages designed to move prospects from unaware to aware and from aware to interested are primarily if not wholly emotional. Messages designed to move prospects from interested to evaluating and from evaluating to purchase are predominantly rational.

The Three Os

As with many story frameworks, CWC relies upon a three-act structure with the handy mnemonic of three Os: obstacle, outcome, and opportunity.

Obstacle presents a single problem and/or challenge from the prospect’s perspective. Often, one can leap right into the problem; other times, a sentence or two is necessary to provide situational context.

Outcome presents the solution. Dramatic examples of how a salesperson has helped other customers turn their businesses around, particularly those similar to the target prospect, represent better solutions than product benefits.

Opportunity refocuses attention on the prospect and provides a single call to action. We emphasize single because sales professionals often cram multiple calls to action into a single e-mail or voice mail. As we will explore deeply in the next chapter, Predictable Prospecting involves many touches, providing ample time to try out different problem-solution sets and a variety of calls to action in front of any given prospect.

In an example of how this all comes together, the following e-mail was designed specifically to move a prospect from unaware to aware:

From Unaware to Aware

One of the biggest mistakes sales professionals make is assuming that prospects are ready to buy from the moment of first contact. These beliefs are reinforced by selective memories of one-and-done deals and by admonitions to “always be closing.” Over the course of several days, we saved and analyzed 281 unsolicited sales and marketing e-mails. Among those, 43 percent asked for a meeting! Although it is possible for individuals to skip buying-cycle stages, we recommend crafting Predictable Prospecting messaging with the goal of moving forward one stage at a time. To that end, we begin by crafting content designed to move a prospect from unaware to aware. This process, especially if it contains great messaging, increases the prospects’ awareness of the problem and their trust in the ability of a company and salesperson to provide a low-risk, high-return solution.

During outbound campaigns, the salesperson should start with the expectation that prospects are unaware or unappreciative of the problem or of the salesperson’s ability to solve it. When prospects are unaware, it is too soon to ask for a meeting. Instead, the relationship should be initiated by the salesperson by sharing resources that are brief, high value, educational, and product-agnostic such as blog posts, infographics, and video clips.

Personalizing Communication

There are three degrees of personalization:

Fully generic

Mass-personalized

Hyperpersonalized

The salesperson must rely on experience and intuition to accurately gauge the degree of personalization to apply. The more personalized the communication, the higher the likelihood of a response. It’s true that personalized communications take time to research and write, but with plenty of inexpensive and sophisticated e-mail marketing tools available, mass-personalized communications easily eliminate the need to ever deploy fully generic messages.

In the earlier stages of the buying cycle, particularly in the unaware stage, mass-personalized communications will almost always be optimal. The exception to this rule is when a salesperson is targeting a very limited number of accounts in the unaware stage. In this case, every communication must be hyperpersonalized. Regardless of territory strategy, the level of personalization must increase during the later stages of the buying cycle.

So, what does a decent mass-personalized e-mail to an unaware prospect look like? Here is a good example:

This e-mail demonstrates many best practices for engaging prospects in the unaware stage. We appreciate that the e-mail appears to have been sent by a real person: it has a nongeneric sender address, it is written in simple text without images, and it has a normal signature. Of the 281 unsolicited sales and marketing e-mails we received, 66 percent came from what appeared to be a real person’s e-mail address. The other one-third were the equivalent of presorted postal mail and faced the same fate of being sent straight to trash without a moment’s consideration.

We also appreciated that the e-mail was written the way normal people format their e-mails, in simple text. Of the 281 e-mails, 35 percent used simple text, 25 percent used enhanced text (distinguished from simple text by the use of bold, italics, color, or highlighting), and 40 percent used image-heavy formatting.

MailChimp, a popular e-mail marketing service provider, analyzed 40 million e-mails sent via their platform and concluded, “This might sound dead simple, but here you have it: your subject line should (drum roll please) describe the subject of your e-mail. Yep, that’s it. . . . When it comes to e-mail marketing, the best subject lines tell what’s inside, and the worst subject lines sell what’s inside.”³ We agree.

ReturnPath, an e-mail optimization and fraud protection provider, analyzed subject lines and the resulting read rates of e-mails received by over 2 million subscribers from over 3,000 senders.⁴ Here are ReturnPath’s most valuable key findings relevant to Predictable Prospecting:

Urgency is king.

“Subject lines that convey a sense of urgency were the top performers.” Effective keywords include “still time,” “limited time,” and “expiring.” Though ReturnPath did not comment on the word “urgent,” other studies confirmed it works well too.

Subject line length does not matter!

While the majority of e-mails have subject lines between 41 and 50 characters, there was no correlation between subject line length and read rate. The only noticeably bad length is anything over 100 characters. In our 281-e-mail sample, the average subject line length was 44 characters, and only 3 percent were over 100 characters—the longest of which, 115 characters, read as follows: “<Live Webinar> Must Sees at Dreamforce: The Latest Sales Effectiveness Insights and Trends from Smart Selling Tools.”

Prospects want new, fast, elegant, and easy but not cheap solutions.

The keywords “new,” “fastest,” “prettiest,” and “easiest” had a positive influence on read rates. However, almost every word describing price had a negative impact, including “cheapest,” “clearance,” “sale,” percent,” “$,” and “free.” As an unusual and unexplainable aside, “fastest” works, but “quickest” does not.

Prospects can smell clickbait from a mile away.

The provocative subject line “Shocking secrets you won’t believe” is about as ineffective as it gets because the words “shocking,” “secret,” and “won’t believe” all perform well below average. The only phrase of this ilk that works moderately well is “what you need to know,” probably because it hints at education.

Call-to-action words are effective.

Imperative words, such as “register,” “open,” and, to a lesser extent, “download,” have a positive influence on read rates, but “buy” and “call” have a negative impact and should be avoided.

Nobody wants to read about you or your news.

“Announcing,” “introducing,” “learn,” “read,” and “see” all perform poorly since they ask recipients to expend effort with little implied benefit, as do the personal pronouns “I,” “me,” my,” and “our.” By the same token, please do not send out press releases, which, fortunately, accounted for only 1 percent of the e-mails we analyzed.

Convey concrete, immediately actionable recommendations.

“Steps” and “ways” work better than “how to” and “why.”

ReturnPath’s findings are consistent with an earlier study by MailChimp analyzing approximately 24 billion (yes, billion) delivered e-mails.⁵ In addition to the findings above, MailChimp’s study also revealed the following:

Subject line name personalization, particularly using both first and last names, is highly effective. (Note: In our study of 281 e-mails, 89 percent had no subject line personalization, 5 percent included only one of our company names, 5 percent included only the first name for one of us, and 1 percent included both of our first names and both company names. None included both first and last names, suggesting this practice may have gone out of vogue. Another study by MailerMailer,⁶ however, found subject line personalization to be highly ineffective, so test carefully and proceed with caution.)

“Thank you” is highly effective, but this may be because the phrase is common in confirmation e-mails and therefore not appropriate for a first-touch e-mail.

Capitalizing the first letter of every word is better than capitalizing only the first letter of the first word. (Exclamation marks and ALL CAPS should be avoided at all times.)

“Sign up” is not effective. It implies effort with uncertain reward.

Subject lines that pose questions perform well.⁷

As with everything in the Predictable Prospecting process, “Always be testing,” because response rates are contextually dependent on the buying stage, vendor, product, prospect demographics, and so on. For instance, MailChimp found that first-name personalization in the subject line was highly effective for government recipients, but it was highly ineffective for legal industry recipients. In addition, ReturnPath found “last chance” had a positive effect while MailChimp found that same phrase had a negative effect. Making matters even more complicated, techniques rise and fall in effectiveness as they cycle through periods of under- and overuse.

Let’s get back to our sample e-mail. First off, we appreciated the personalized salutation, even if it was computer generated. In our sample, 59 percent of e-mails used the recipient’s first name.

The body of the e-mail is also well crafted. Rather than starting with the overused and ineffective “My name is <rep_first_name> from <rep_company>,” the text opens with value by offering exactly what we prescribe—a short, educational, and product-agnostic resource. The text immediately establishes the problem: “Nearly half of potential customers could be turned away if a website isn’t optimized correctly.”

E-mails to unaware prospects can certainly end without any call to action other than the link to the free resource. A good marketing automation platform will capture the click, migrate the prospect to the next stage in the campaign, and alert the salesperson; the click is a signpost that signals advancement to the next stage in the buying cycle. This e-mail even goes a few steps further in the event the prospect is already more advanced in the buying cycle. The final body paragraph applies the ubiquitous tactic of asking for a short call or a referral to a person who would benefit from solving the problem. Additionally, the postscript after the salesperson’s signature introduces the company and provides links to case studies without cluttering the body of the e-mail. These extras are not inherently good or bad; they should be A/B tested to determine their effectiveness.

Let’s turn briefly to hyperpersonalized messaging for unaware prospects. In broad brushstrokes, the e-mail should read as follows:

From Aware to Interested

During a prospect’s journey from aware to interested, she is willing to invest more time getting educated about the problem and any potential solutions. To meet her needs, the salesperson should serve up more detailed content, including reports on topics, trends, and best practices; product-agnostic webinars; information-rich landing pages; and diagnostic tools. Reports and webinars are well established so we need not expand on them here. Information-rich landing pages provide insights on trends and best practices. Diagnostic tools are a relatively new phenomenon, and the best ones offer compelling value to the prospect and are virtually free of cost to the vendor. HubSpot’s Marketing Grader⁸ is a frequently cited example, and it scans a website and then provides a prescriptive report on the site’s digital marketing effectiveness complete with actionable recommendations. Many companies are putting their high-value tools online to enhance lead generation.

The following is a good example of a mass-personalized e-mail designed to move a prospect from the aware stage to the interested stage:

This example has much in common with the unaware to aware e-mail. It delivers value immediately in the form of a research report from Gartner, a respected, independent, objective third party. Next, the body states the problem: “Expectations for growth and revenue have never been higher for sales teams than they are today.” With the problem established, the text shares that solutions are available: “Fortunately, the technology we now have available is making it possible for companies to have a predictable pipeline.” After setting up the problem and suggesting that various solutions are available, the e-mail has earned the right to highlight the company and the value proposition of its products: “<Company_Name> is revolutionizing the sales process by making the forecast more reliable, enriching data in the CRM, and applying smart analytics to define, align, and evolve.” Though the line “Find out how you can start closing 90 percent of your forecasted deals here” is unnecessary content-wise, it is considered a best practice to include links three times: once at the beginning, once in the middle, and once at the end.

To recap: Provide value, set up the problem, suggest the existence of multiple solutions, present the company and/or product and its high-level value proposition, and embed a single (although it’s fine if it is repeated) call to action. In all, the body of this e-mail is a mere 104 words. By comparison the average body length of the 281 e-mails we studied was 253, or more than double that.

From Interested to Evaluating

Once a prospect is interested, the salesperson has the opportunity to provide an array of resources proving the company’s differentiated ability to solve the problem. Effective assets designed to move a prospect from interested to evaluating include case studies, testimonials, product reviews, product-centric webinars, on-demand demonstration videos, comparison charts, and discovery meetings.

While messaging at this point should often become more customized, mass-personalization is sufficient if the salesperson has a large number of prospects. Here is an example of a mass-personalized e-mail we received that encouraged us to register for a product-centric webinar:

This e-mail applies many of the best practices we have already discussed concerning the sender address, the subject, and the body. However, the call to action appropriately shifts from product-agnostic to product-specific. The bulleted list reinforces and adds to the prospect’s understanding of the company’s ROI-driven value proposition. The last sentence engages prospects who prefer a personal touch, “If you’re not able to attend on this date, please reach out to me directly, and we can arrange a personal demonstration.” Asking for a discovery meeting is appropriate when moving from interested to evaluating, and this offer of a one-on-one product demonstration conveys a gentle means to that end.

From Evaluating to Purchase

Since this is a chapter on messaging in a book about prospecting, we will touch only briefly on communications designed to move a prospect from evaluating to purchase. As one might expect, e-mails and voice mails in this stage must be completely personalized and must offer superior value in the form of trials (free or paid), consultative diagnostics, ROI calculators, references, and, ultimately, proposals. Many of these assets are scarce, expensive, time-consuming, or all three. Hence, they should be leveraged only when a salesperson has a reasonably high degree of confidence that a prospect is near purchase.

The following e-mail is from a sales executive who completed a consultative analysis, an audit of inbound sales response effectiveness, for one of the authors:

While the sales representative who crafted the above e-mail started with a template, the e-mail is hyperpersonalized and offers tremendous value in the body and in the attachments (not shown).

Table 4-1 summarizes the Compel with Content (CWC) strategy by buying cycle stage.

  TABLE 4-1   The Compel with Content (CWC) Strategy by Buying Cycle Stage