Are you using Words that Sell?
September 14th, 2007 posted by Chris HenneghanMarketing pieces (adveritising, direct mail, brochures, web sites) are supposed to be relationship starters. They grab attention, communicate your sales proposition to buyers, and drive buyers to take action. They motivate buyers to check out your web site or call you for a demonstration. In short, they produce sales leads and make it easier for your sales team to win business. Or do they? I have found that more often they do none of those things. Read the rest of this entry.
More often than not, marketers’ words fall on deaf ears. Like so many relationships today, the buyer relationship never got off the ground because it didn’t connect in the first place. To connect, your message has to speak directly to the needs the buyer. Most B2B marketing does not. This is usually because companies are too busy trying to figure out how to frame what they want to say to their “markets” to really listen to their customers’ needs.
In his compelling book “Words that Work”, Dr. Frank Luntz asserts a profound statement about communication, “It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear.” www.luntz.com. We marketers need to speak to those interests - what our buyers want to hear - in order to break through the clutter of the thousands of other messages thrown at them that day. I use that fact as a reality check every day. It motivates me to take the more difficult path of figuring out how my client’s products/services solve customer problems. This information isn’t easy to get, but once I have it I am armed with the words that get heads nodding and phones ringing.