Peter O'Neill here, now back in my home office after our successful  Sales Enablement Forum in Scottsdale, Arizona.  First, I must be totally honest with you, and selfish, my absolute highlight at the event was the day before when eight clients played golf with us on the famous TPC Stadium Course, which was where our event hotel was situated.

But the event itself was also quite spectacular for me.  I led a breakout track where we focused on how to create the right message for the target buyers you have in mind with your marketing and sales efforts. I had a great keynote speaker in Eduardo Conrado, from Motorola Solutions and I had my illustrious analyst-colleagues Laura Ramos and Sheryl Pattek as further guest speakers in the track to present other best practice examples.

Laura and Sheryl had also helped me to prepare for my own presentation which revolved around proposing a Message Framework and was based on the following agenda:

Ø  Buyer Expectations Are Different In The Age Of The Customer 

Ø  You Need One Consistent Message In Marketing Content And Sales Conversations

Ø  Your Message Must Stick In All The Right Places At The Right Times

Ø  So Pour The Message Into A Content Portfolio

Ø  Use Forrester’s Message Framework To Tune Or Rebuild Your Portfolio.

 

This framework enables marketers to plan, research, formulate, and document the most effective message for their company’s success in revenue acceleration.  Implementation of the framework will involve both marketing and sales activities and does more than align two organizations that have a tradition of misunderstanding each other – it treats them as parties in support of one process; which is also the buyer’s perception and expectation.  Each element in the framework provokes the necessary research, discipline, focus, and creativity necessary for an effective set of messages. 

I closed with a discussion around what I called “content governance” – how do you keep everybody on the same message track. That is everybody who creates your marketing content plus all the sales people and business partners who represent your offering to buyers in their conversations.  I introduced this checklist, one of a group, to indicates what should be considered when planning each content project or piece.  

This tool, as you can see it is Figure 7 so there is much more, will be published in my upcoming report “A Framework For Message Development To Engage Business Buyers” in a few weeks or so.  Watch this space or, if there are any other questions you would like to ask, just drop me a line.  Or place an inquiry with me already if you are a Forrester client.  As always, I’d love to hear from you on this and other topics.

Always keeping you informed! Peter