Buyers in the advanced materials industry are a naturally skeptical bunch, so they need hard evidence that your products will solve their problems, offer technical benefits at reasonable prices, and reduce their exposure to risk.
That means your sales and marketing people need assets that enable them to explain the commercial value of your technical expertise in language tailored to specific audiences – primarily engineers and non-technical procurement officers – who decide whether to chose your company ahead of competitors.
To do that, you need a suite of factual, persuasive sales enablement assets that help your sales team shorten the sales cycle and get deals over the line.
My core service is to work with you to review the assets you have in an audit, then build an architecture based on the results for organizing your existing and new sales enablement assets. I then work with select members of your team to update existing assets or create new ones, and once the assets are in action, follow their performance, and optimize them based on feedback.
The four stages are:
1. Technical Sales Friction Audit
Over time, a business in the advanced materials industry can accumulate vast arrays of sales and marketing materials. With the best of intentions, some stray from the style guide. The website reads like everyone else’s. Brochures leave out key benefits, or hide them in tech-speak that misses the mark with buyers. Case studies describe products without demonstrating how they solved customers’ problems. Salespeople make up their own email prospecting templates. And so on.
So in an audit, I review the sales enablement materials—think
- website
- product and application pages
- brochures
- datasheets
- sales decks
- case studies
- email materials
- distributor materials, and
- existing sales tools
and interview selected sales, marketing, product, and technical personnel to identify
- generic value claims
- proof gaps
- buried differentiators
- message inconsistencies
- recurring objections, and
- missing tools.
What you’ll get is a prioritized diagnosis of where the sales system is losing clarity, credibility, consistency, or persuasive force rather than just a list of superficial copy edits. The point is to find where your company’s technical expertise doesn’t translate into clear, credible reasons for buyers to act.
2. Buyer & Seller Message Architecture
The goal here is to create a coherent sales narrative and source of truth for future content.
Here, we’ll define the commercial problem your sales team is facing, and identify the relevant failure modes.
Technical facts are then translated into consequences for specific stakeholders at your company and beyond
After that, together we’ll clarify how you currently differentiate your product/service from your competitors’.
The next step will involve identifying evidence, qualification requirements, and unsupported claims.
Finally, this is compiled into a framework for building out the sales enablement assets themselves.
3. Sales Enablement Buildout
This is where new assets are created and/or existing ones are updated.
Buyer-facing:
- product pages
- application pages
- case studie
- guides
- comparisons
- video scripts
- presentations
- brochures / trade show materials, and
- follow-up content
Seller-facing:
- discovery guides
- call scripts
- battlecards
- objection responses
- proof-point libraries
- email sequences, and
- playbooks
Only the assets justified by the diagnostic work are created or updated.
4. Adoption & Optimization
Once you’ve put your sales enablement assets into action, it’s time to track their performance and optimize them as to make the most of your investment.
- Review what your salespeople actually use and ignore
- Capture recurring buyer questions, objections, and evidence requests.
- Identify where your reps still improvise or create their own materials.
- Revise the assets based on actual use.
Ad-hoc Projects
Of course not every project is going to be a big one.
You might need a proposal slide deck for an upcoming meeting, a case study on a customer whose problem you just blew out of the water, a brochure for a trade show, or a battlecard for a new product.
Drop me a line to let me know what you need and by when.
What’s the Investment?
Every project is different, so before quoting we’ll have a free consultation to see if we’re a good fit together, and to discuss the scope of work. Once we’re both clear on that, I’ll prepare a proposal and quote.