If you’re like most B2B marketing leaders, you know how hard it can be to get the sales team to adopt your brand messaging. 

You can spend months of hard work crafting great messages, only to have salespeople completely ignore what you’ve done. 

The problem often starts with the messaging itself.

How you structure your brand messaging is a critical first step in getting your sales team to adopt it consistently. 

Here’s a simple approach to creating brand messaging that will resonate with your salespeople, unify marketing and sales efforts, and ensure you tell a consistent, compelling story to the marketplace.

Dive Into the Prospect Mindset

Before you start writing, get super clear about what you want your audiences to THINK, FEEL and DO once they engage with the messages.

You can do research to uncover this mindset, but keep in mind, no one knows this better than your sales team. Talk to them first. 

Take Prospects on a Journey

Your brand messages should take prospects on a journey to create urgency, capture your unique value, connect with prospects’ emotions and drive them to action.

Messages should give dimension to your brand story, but they need to go well beyond simply telling prospects about who you are as a company.

Four Brand Message Types

Your brand messages should bring audiences along on the journey:

1. The problem & opportunity
2. Your unique value
3. The functional benefits
4. The emotional benefits

Message Type 1: The Problem & Opportunity 

• Unpack the pain that the prospect is facing
• De-position competitors as the wrong choice for this moment
• Generate excitement about new solutions
• Create urgency and FOMO to drive switching

Message Type 2: Your Unique Value

• Introduce your philosophy, approach and mindset
• Empathize with the prospect’s challenges
• Reinforce your unique ability to continuously find and apply solutions that make life easier
• Show that you’re selective about partners 

Message Type 3: The Functional Benefits 

• Debunk legacy competitors as the real problem
• Reframe your brand as the antidote and the alternative to current offerings
• Identify key functional benefits that you know are drivers of choice

Message Type 4: The Emotional Benefits 

• Create an emotional connection with prospects as human beings with aspirations
• Unpack the impact they can have on their business
• Inspire them to help their people
• Inspire them to grow their business

Empower Your Salespeople

Lastly, if you want your brand messaging to get traction, don’t overlook the importance of engaging with your salespeople as the co-creators of your brand messages: 

• Invite them into the process of creating the brand story and messages
• Challenge them to challenge the messages that they’ll actually use
• Create a toolkit that they can and want to use on sales calls
• Partner with them to create compelling sales narratives, buyer’s guides, and talking points they can use to close deals