Welcome to another episode of 7-Minute Marketing with Pam. My name is Pam Didner. I love sharing a little dose of B2B, digital, content marketing and sales enablement, seven minutes at a time.
Some listeners know that my 2nd book, Effective Sales Enablement, will be available in October. While working with the publisher on editing the manuscript back in May, I also started thinking about how I need to revise my value proposition. The value proposition, in this case, is ‘How do I differentiate myself from other marketing consultants?’ Until now, I’ve been focused on content marketing, or my value proposition or uniqueness being that I know how to help enterprises (not SMB) set up a process to scale content across regions. Not many people can do that, so that is unique to me. Now, with Sales Enablement coming into play, what is my new value proposition? How do I redefine what I can offer to combine my knowledge of global content marketing and sales enablement?
How to differentiate yourself
I started by identifying several unique strengths or experiences that only I can offer.
- 20+ years of corporate experience in various positions, from finance to accounting, from operations to product development, from marketing to sales enablement. I have a wide array of experience and understand how a company works.
- I have a unique process to teach people how to scale content across regions, that’s the 4 P’s of global content marketing.
- In addition, I understand indirect and direct salespeople. I have a unique point of view on what marketers can do to better support their indirect and direct sales team by evaluating the different marketing elements, collaborating on account-based marketing and more.
- I have steps that people can follow to map content between the sales processes and customer journeys.
All these points are unique to me. The next step is to distill all the uniqueness into one over-arching statement that I can say when I communicate FTF or on my website.
Testing the uniqueness
So I came up with 5 statements and tested each with different colleagues and clients. I am going to read them out loud and slowly, so you can think about them, as well.
- Align sales and marketing to deliver a seamless customer experience
- Grow business by aligning sales and marketing with global content marketing
- Increase conversions through content marketing and sales enablement
- Enable sales with integrated global content marketing
- Connect sales and marketing to engage and convert audiences worldwide
Here is my quick analysis of these 5 value propositions:
Conducting a quick analysis
Align sales and marketing to deliver a seamless customer experience: this statement is way to generic. It can apply to any sites. I crossed this one out right away.
Increase conversions through content marketing and sales enablement: Ok, this statement is way too specific. It focuses only on conversions, but sales and marketing alignment is so much more than that. Otherwise, I like the mention of content marketing and sales enablement in this statement.
Grow business by aligning sales and marketing with global content marketing: Actually, I thought this is not bad. It mentions global content marketing, sales, and marketing alignment, but puts a focus on using content marketing to align sales and marketing. My offering is broader than content marketing.
Enable sales with integrated global content marketing: This statement sounds like global content marketing is the only way to enable sales.
The last one is to ‘Connect sales and marketing to engage and convert audiences worldwide’. Ok, very few consultants can boast that they can work with sales and marketing to engage audiences internationally. This is certainly unique.
I ended up playing with the last one a little more and tried different combinations of words. Also, I decided to go with “Connecting sales and marketing to engage global audiences.” Of course, I need to test this statement online and get more feedback, but, at least, I have an overarching messaging to guide copywriting for my new website.
So, hear me out. With the new book, my audiences will be expanded to the sales side. Therefore, I want to make an effort to include the sales team as part of the value proposition. However, I am a marketer through and through, my intention is to educate marketing teams on how to better work with the sales teams. Consequently, connecting sales and marketing teams make sense. In addition, I want to play to my expertise of scaling content across regions, therefore, I want to bring global into the value proposition. So, here is the final value proposition for now:
The final decision
Connecting sales and marketing to engage global audiences.
You can see that on my new website.
I also came up with other copy such as ‘Helping sales and marketing connect the dots’ and ‘Align communications and resources to get things done.’ ‘When marketing is done right, sales and marketing can co-exist beautifully.’ I see these copy fit nicely under my over-arching value proposition statement.
With this start, I began to build out statements to explain my services and offerings such as:
- Pam can help you find commonalities in misalignment
- drive joint initiatives through account-based marketing (ABM)
- craft a messaging framework and map content between the sales processes and customer journeys
I started with one value proposition, then built positioning and proof points to support it.
Here is a quick summary.
My value proposition is:
Connecting sales and marketing to engage global audiences.
My positioning is:
- Find commonalities in misalignment.
- Proven structured methodologies to align sales and marketing
- Bring clarity and propose recommendations to complex digital marketing and sales efforts
My proof points:
- 20+ year of Corp experience.
- Deep understanding of MNCs (multi-national companies)
- Strong technical and marketing knowledge and ability to articulate marketing from the perspectives of finance, management, operations, business units, and other functions.
In a way, I created a messaging framework from the value proposition, positioning and proof points.
You can follow the similar thinking process to build your messaging framework. I have templates that you can follow if you want to try. Send me an email via my website, pdidner.wpengine.com and I’m more than happy to share them with you.
Please, send me your marketing questions and thoughts here or via Twitter @pamdidner.
Be well. Until next time.