Is Your Marketing Message Too Boilerplate?

Selling software is hard work. Most segments are crowded with similar offerings and competition is fierce. That’s why it’s surprising that most software marketing messages are so generic and boilerplate that they do little or nothing to move the sale forward. Take the example of one CRM firm, whose marketing messages leave a lot to be desired. According to their marketing materials:

• Their product is easy to use.
• Their product will make you more productive.
• If you don’t adopt their product, your competition will, and you’ll lose business.

In addition, the marketing materials identified the following “user benefits”:

• Sales reps will close business faster and be able to handle more accounts.
• Sales management will have more productive reps and a more flexible sales process.
• This will lead to competitive advantage through high overall sales productivity.

The problem with these messages is two-fold. First, the “compelling case” is the exact same argument that’s been used for every software product since the 1980s. As such, it’s hard to imagine that there are any software buyers anywhere who haven’t heard the same story hundreds of times. Second, the “user benefits” are identical to the user benefits stated in the market materials for nearly every other CRM vendor.

This is not to say that those marketing messages aren’t true. However, the messages do absolutely nothing to differentiate the company’s products or make the company unique from its competition. Needless to say, they’re not going to do much to move the software sale forward.

Do your marketing messages suffer from the same lack of imagination? Here’s an easy way to find out. Simply take the top line messages in your marketing materials and replace your product name with that of your chief competitor. If the statements sound as if they’d be credible to your customers, then your marketing materials are too boilerplate to be effective.

If that’s the case, then you’re going to have to make sure that you don’t depend much upon those marketing materials when you’re in a competitive selling situation. Rather than exposing the customer to a generic marketing message, you’ll need to find something unique about your product or your company – something that will pique and hold the customer’s interest. Here are some examples:

• Emphasize your own experience and commitment to the customer’s success. If you can get the customer to see you as a unique and valuable resource, then you’ll end up on the inside track, especially if the competition is spouting generic messages.
• Emphasize the success of existing customers in the customer’s own industry. Software buyers are much more likely to accept the risk of a new software application if they know that other companies in their industry have had a positive experience with it.
• Emphasize some feature that’s completely unique to your offering. This is tricky because advanced features have a habit of quickly being implemented in competitive products. However, if you can convince the customer that a unique feature is a “must-have” today, you ace the competition out of the running.

Once you find a sales approach that works, you might consider sharing it with your fellow sales reps or with your marketing team. A word of warning, though. If your marketing team isn’t open-minded, they might get angry because you’re not adhering to the “corporate message” – however ineffective that corporate message might be.