Companies spend a tremendous amount of time trying to understand their buyers.
They invest in market research. They build personas. They conduct customer interviews and win/loss analysis. They gather account intelligence. In an ABM environment, they may go even deeper into the priorities and challenges of a specific account and individual stakeholders.
All of that work is important. But there is a layer that is often missing.
How do we translate what we know about buyers into the language we use to communicate with them? I call that missing layer the Buyer Language Strategy.
We Know More About Buyers Than Ever Before
Most organizations aren’t short on information.
They know a lot about their customers. They understand their industries. Their salespeople have years of experience talking with buyers. Marketing has research, data, personas and insights.
And yet, when you look at the messaging those same organizations take to market, something interesting happens.
They revert to talking about themselves: their solutions, capabilities, methodology, expertise, and differentiators. Sounds like they are talking entirely about themselves – and why not, isn’t that what marketers and sellers jobs are all about. Maybe that’s not the whole picture. Consider this: we do the work to understand the buyer, but we don’t always carry that understanding all the way through to the conversation.
That’s the gap.
The Missing Layer Sits Between Buyer Insight and Messaging
Buyer insight tells us what matters to the buyer. Buyer Language Strategy determines how we translate that understanding into language the buyer recognizes as relevant to them.
That distinction matters. Because buyers aren’t walking around thinking about our product categories or service offerings. They are thinking about the business problems they need to solve, the pressures they are under and the outcomes they are accountable for delivering.
They have their own language for those things. When our language doesn’t connect to theirs, we make the buyer do the translation. That’s work we shouldn’t be asking the buyer to do.
They have to figure out:
- What does this mean for me?
- Why should I care?
- How does this connect to what I’m trying to accomplish?
I’ve spent a lot of years working on value propositions with companies, and I’ve seen the same issue over and over. The problem isn’t that they don’t understand their business. And increasingly, it isn’t that they don’t understand their buyers. The problem is what happens in between. Somehow, all of that buyer understanding gets filtered back through the company’s own language before it reaches the buyer.
Buyer Language Strategy Is Bigger Than Messaging
This is where I think we need to expand the conversation. Buyer Language Strategy isn’t simply about writing better marketing copy. And it isn’t another name for a value proposition.
It is the discipline of aligning how an organization communicates with how buyers actually think about their business, their priorities and the decisions they need to make.
Done well, it becomes the connective tissue between buyer understanding and the many places where an organization communicates value. It sharpens your positioning – which makes your marketing become more relevant. Relevancy is the goal!
Sales conversations become less about explaining what you do and more about connecting what you do to what the buyer is trying to accomplish. And importantly, the language doesn’t live in one presentation or one campaign. It can be used by sales, marketing, leaders and partners to create a much more consistent buyer conversation and experience.
This Matters Even More in ABM and Engagement
This gap becomes particularly visible in Account-Based Marketing. We can do extraordinary research on an account. We can identify strategic initiatives, map stakeholders and understand what is happening inside the business.
But then we take all of that insight and communicate with the account using essentially the same language we use everywhere else. We’ve personalized the research, but not necessarily the conversation. For ABM to really work, and to impact engagement levels with targeted stakeholders, account insight has to change what we say.
It should change the issues we lead with. It should influence the questions salespeople ask. It should shape how we describe our value in the context of that account. Otherwise, we haven’t fully used the insight we’ve worked so hard to develop.
From What We Sell to Why It Matters
This is ultimately the shift I have been working on with organizations for years.
Moving the conversation from:
“Here is what we provide.”
to:
“We understand what you are trying to accomplish, and why it matters.”
While that may sound simple, it really isn’t. It requires organizations to get outside of their own terminology and understand the world from the buyer’s point of view. Then they have to deliberately translate their capabilities into language that connects to that world.
That’s the role of Buyer Language Strategy. And I believe it is the missing layer in far too many sales and marketing organizations. We have the ingredients: buyer insight and messaging. What’s missing is a stronger discipline and clear method to connect the two.
Because understanding the buyer is only valuable if that understanding actually changes the conversation.
Note: This piece came from a great conversation I had with Ashley Blount of Sales Gravy on her podcast. Here is a link to the episode if you want to hear more from that conversation.
