What is Sales Messaging? 6 Steps to Create Your Own and Make it Shine

You could be selling the cure for hair loss to bald men, but if your sales messaging isn’t clear or compelling, you won’t earn a dime.

Which sounds more compelling:

“We sell an all-in-one sales CRM for SMBs.”

Or…

“Replace that endless Excel with a CRM that enters the data for you automatically.”

If you chose the second one, you’ve just experienced the power of effective sales messaging that resonates with an audience.

But what is sales messaging? How does it differ from brand messaging? And how can you set up a sales messaging framework to guide your sales reps to greater revenue?

Let’s find out.

What is Sales Messaging?

As Michael Halper, founder of sales messaging consultancy SalesScripter, puts it: “Creating a sales message is organizing the most important, attention-grabbing things that the company should be saying.”

Setting up a message that resonates with your audience means truly getting to know them, understanding what’s important to them, and adapting how you describe your product or service to fit their needs.

Sales Messaging vs. Brand Messaging: What’s the Difference?

While these two terms may seem interchangeable, they’re not: here’s why.

A brand message usually follows a storytelling format that evokes emotions and drives how people feel about and talk about your business.

Both types of messaging are important for B2B sales, and many times, the sales messaging will draw on what’s already been established in the brand message. But today, let’s focus on developing your sales message.

6 Steps to Develop Your Own Sales Messaging Framework

There is no shortcut to building a sales messaging framework. It will take some time to develop, and as a sales leader, you'll need to review it often to ensure the message still resonates with your prospects. Building this playbook will guide your sales team to higher-quality deals and greater revenue.

1. Build an Ideal Customer Profile

An ideal customer profile is your guide to truly understanding your customers. Analyze the customers that see the most success with your product, and build a profile that includes data such as:

• Business type and size
• Industry or niche
• Relevant department size
• Main goal or purpose for using your solution
• Roles or titles that champion your product
• Location
• Seasonal influences on the business
• Other technology they’re using
• Main pain points being solved with your product

When you understand how this data relates to your best customers, you’ll know the type of customers that you want in the future. Building an ideal customer profile is key to developing higher-quality deals and maximizing your pipeline.

Psst… don’t have an ICP yet? Download our Ideal Customer Profile Kit to get started:

But why is this such an essential step in sales messaging?

Here’s how sales consultant Jake Dunlap of Skaled describes it: “There are a million things that we could do, but what are the things we want to be world-class at? The more focused you get, it helps the business focus, the message focus, and ultimately helps your people focus because they know what they’re supposed to be doing.”

2. Gain a Deep Understanding of Your Audience’s Pain Points

Yes, pain points are a part of your ICP. However, it’s time to dig beyond the data.

You'll need to talk to your customers to get real insights into what’s bothering them right now.

Sales metrics and B2B data are great but don’t tell you everything. Having real conversations with customers (and potential customers) will tell you more about their challenges, the options they’re considering, and how these issues affect them personally and as a team.

You can also gather insights by:

• Leaning into customer support and success teams
• Collecting feedback with surveys
• Monitoring social media mentions of your company

Deep customer intimacy and understanding of their day-to-day lives will give you a much stronger basis for a sales message.

3. Segment Your Audience

You’re starting to have a clearer direction for your sales messaging. But you may also realize that one sales message isn’t quite enough—to resonate with your target audience truly, you’ll need more than one message to hit more than one target market.

For example, let’s say you’re selling a project management tool, and some of your best customers are a mix of engineering teams and marketing teams. Of course, how you sell your product to these different audiences will be much different.

So, look through the data you’ve collected through your ICPs and customer interviews. Segment your main audiences by:

• Industry
• Buyer type
• Persona
• Team or department
• Or anything else that makes sense for your business

Now, you’re ready to start building sales messaging that directly impacts conversion rates.

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4. Create Your Sales Messaging Document

Get out the Google Doc—it’s time to write stuff down.

Start by creating a separate document for each segment you’ve chosen. At this point, don’t create more than two; you can always create more later if needed.

At the top of each document, include the date and who’s helping prepare the messaging.

Next, pull information from your ICP research and write down some key pain points troubling your prospects. Take direct customer quotes from your feedback surveys and interviews that resonate most with the message you want to convey.

With this information gathered, you can start building a clear message to describe your product. Limit this to three sentences maximum.

After that product description, move on to other pieces of your messaging, such as:

• Your value proposition
• How you describe specific product features
• Quick sentences that explain how you compare to main competitors
• Proof that your product solves the main pain points your audience faces
• Demonstration of the value of your product for companies already using it
• Responses to common objections

Finally, include any relevant resources, such as case studies or testimonials, that prove the worth of your product.

Last but not least, save this document somewhere so that everyone can access it. It is the basis for your sales messaging framework and will be continuously used and updated, so your whole sales team should have access to it.

5. Develop Sales Enablement Content Based on Your Messaging

Sales enablement content is separated into two formats: customer-facing and internal content.

Let’s start with customer-facing content. Using the messaging you’ve developed, start creating:

• Cold email templates/B2B cold email templates
• Email sequences for inbound and outbound leads

These templates will help your reps by giving consistent, clear messaging.

Next, work on your internal sales content. This might include:

• Sales pitch scripts and cold call scripts
• Battle cards
• Sales objection handling messages

Remember that you don’t need to have everything all at once. If this is your first time developing a sales messaging framework for your business, start with the minimum viable documentation and work on expanding that over time.

6. Give Reps Easy Access to the Sales Messaging Framework

Don’t waste your efforts by hiding away this great sales messaging framework and enablement content in some Dropbox folder that no one else will ever find.

Instead, ensure that each piece of the puzzle you’ve created is easily accessible to your reps.

How? First, let them know that this is created. Add your sales messaging into the onboarding tasks for new sales hires so they can access it immediately. Load templates and scripts into your sales outreach tool, or use a sales enablement tool to store it all in one place (we'll discuss a few below).

Ultimately, deciding how this will work best for your team is up to you. Understand the tools they live in during the workday and how they prefer to work, and you’ll know where to deliver this messaging framework so they can use it effectively.

How to Make Your Sales Messaging Stand Out From the Crowd

Now that you’ve started creating your sales messaging, how can you ensure that it’s different from the next guy’s?

Focus on Value for the Customer

The main message of your sales conversations should be customer-centric. Focus on what your product does for them, not just on what it does.

Put Business Pains into Numbers

“Project managers waste a lot of time tracking what their team is doing. Buy our software to save time.”

Not very compelling, right? How about this:

“On average, project managers using our software save 10 hours weekly on task updates and check-ins. With the average salary for project managers hitting close to $80k, this could save your business $4,500+ per year just in time saved.”

When you put pain into numbers, the benefits are much clearer. So, include real numbers in your sales messaging.

Build Clear CTAs into Your Messaging Framework

Where do you want prospects to go next? When you’ve already built out a clear sales process, it’ll be easier to incorporate clear calls to action into your messaging.

For example, if the sales messaging is directed at a customer who normally purchases your software via self-service, build in a CTA to sign up for a free trial rather than talk to a salesperson.

With a singular, clear CTA as part of your sales message, both reps and prospects will have a clear view of where the conversation is supposed to go next—the result: shorter sales cycles and frictionless purchasing.

Tools that Will Help You Build a Better Sales Messaging Strategy

The right tools can make all the difference when it comes to building your own sales messaging strategy. You’ll need tools that:

• Give reps easy access to your sales messaging framework
• Make it easy to share the right message with prospects
• Save your team time while ensuring they always have the right words to say

Here are five tools that can help:

Showpad

This sales enablement tool includes both content management and sales training features and uses AI to recommend the right content to sellers based on their usage and closed deals.

This tool works as a home base for sales messaging by collecting and organizing your sales messaging content. The platform will also notify your team when content is updated and surface the content they need at the moment they need it.

Guru

Guru is primarily a knowledge base tool, but it is another great option for collecting, organizing, and sharing your sales messaging with the team and prospects. Plus, it integrates with tools like Gmail, Slack, Demodesk, Salesforce, and more to give your reps the right messaging no matter where they are.

TextExpander

This tool allows you to build keyboard shortcuts that expand into full messages. Start by preparing sales messaging for different situations in your team’s snippet library. Then your whole team can use the shortcuts to respond to common questions in email, send a quick social reply, or follow up after a meeting.

Vidyard

If your team uses videos as part of your sales messaging, Vidyard is a great option for storing and sharing those videos with prospects.

Whether your team is using prospecting videos for cold outreach or sending video messages along the sales pipeline, they can record, store, and share their videos multiple times from Vidyard. That way, the team saves time, and the message stays on-point.

Templafy

This tool works as a template management tool and offers quick document creation based on previously approved templates. It’s especially useful for external sales messaging content, such as proposals, contracts, pitch decks, and more.

Start Using Your Own Sales Messaging Framework for More Targeted Sales

Whether your reps are sending a cold email, responding to an objection on Twitter, chatting with a product champion via SMS, or leading a product demo, having a consistent sales message will keep them on track to better deals.

If you want to make a great first impression with your cold emails, our AI-based cold email generator can help you create compelling templates quickly and easily.

But sometimes, creating your own sales messaging framework can feel daunting.

If you’re reviewing the steps we’ve discussed above and feeling overwhelmed, it may be time to consider a sales messaging consultancy to help you develop and solidify the message you want to present to your prospects and customers.