Sales Messaging Lessons from Brenden Dell: Best of CIENCE ESD Podcast

Our weekly CIENCE Enterprise Sales Development (ESD) podcast is an engaging space that brings together some of the brightest minds involved in lead generation, marketing, data, and technology today. Hosted by Eric Quanstrom, CMO of CIENCE, we introduce top-tier guests who share their experiences, insights, advice, and philosophies behind their success.  

In our Best of ESD series, we feature messaging expert Brenden Dell, president of Brenden Dell Inc. and best-selling author of The 12 Immutable Laws of High-Impact Messaging.

Brenden discusses some of the effective principles that he’s found to provide people with a rubric on sales messaging that will break through the noise and help engage high-quality prospects. Check out these great highlights from our featured podcast.

Meet Brenden Dell

Brenden has worked with quite a number of really interesting clients, from the big to the small and a lot of places in between. He was also a key member involved in the positioning campaign for Gong, an extremely well-established platform that focuses on accelerating B2B sales and marketing teams’ productivity. Here are some of our favorite moments from this episode:

Where Sales Messaging Consulting Begins

Brenden began the interview by talking about his experience as a messaging mentor. While most of his clients already have impactful B2B marketing campaigns on the run, they look for Brenden's advice to boost their return on investment (ROI), engagement rates, and other brand positioning metrics.

For Brenden, crafting the perfect message for inbound and outbound efforts is all about treating people as people, understanding their most profound pain points, and making an honest, easy-to-remember promise of how your solution might help overcome their current situation.

“What I do better than anything else is really listen to people. I can take something that a customer says in an interview, that they didn't even realize how smart it was, and bring that back out and resurface it.” —Brenden Dell

In Brenden's mind, the importance of messaging has to do with the possibility of changing a paradigm for potential buyers. Maybe they have done the same thing for years, deploying the same tools, and making the same decisions. In his experience, no change equals no sale, and no decision is the most common reason deals don't close.

Listen to the full podcast now:
Enterprise Sales Development with Brenden Dell

The Power of Branding in Sales

According to Brenden, the most compelling reason that gets people to buy something, especially B2B clients, is directly connected to the fame surrounding the brand, product, or service they wish to hire.

As prospects already know what they want, and the desire to belong to that specific tribe works with the best possible option out there, the brand or product has accomplished a certain degree of recognition. Pipeline growth becomes exponentially easier.

“One of the things I say to clients is that it's better that half the market loves you and half the market hates you. The biggest problem comes when people have no idea who you are, and they subsequently don't care and don't investigate and so forth.”
—Brenden Dell

Sales Positioning and Messaging 

What Brenden's team tries to accomplish while working on positioning and messaging is determining what the company is going to be famous for and that's the simplest way of seeing it.

According to his process, there are three core questions that need to be answered as the foundation of a messaging campaign:

• Who are you?
• Why are you different?
• And how are you going to state those things in an impactful way?

By defining your brand/product/service as a champion and investing in that fame upstream, companies get less price resistance as prospects start thinking that you are already the right decision.

Watch it now! See the Brenden Dell podcast on YouTube

Pre-Product vs. Post-Product Market Fit

To design solid messaging, companies need to figure out where they are standing at the moment. Brenden recommends thinking in terms of pre-product market fit and post-product market fit, as each variation needs to be approached differently.

In Brenden's words, if a company is early in the pre-product phase, it needs to determine what's the thing that they sell, what problem it aims to solve, and who cares about it. This stage is more sales-development grounded, and choosing what potential value props you want to get out there is all that matters at this moment.

On the other hand, the post-product market fit is more about enhancing the story that the brand is telling, systematizing and crystallizing it so you can flow into the market in a consistent fashion that people can connect with.  

“You need to help people to understand what is the change that you're promising, the pain that you're solving, the benefit you're bringing them, and deliver this message in a consistent way.” —Brenden Dell

Three Types of Customer Demands

Brenden strongly believes in getting your customer to use their words to describe their pain. This allows you to surface the insights that help you to identify what’s the thing in your product that they recognized as different and made them choose you over your competitors.

“Something that we always do with brands is ask their customers: ‘Bring me back to when you bought this thing, what was going on in your life? What was going on in your world? What influenced that decision to buy?’” —Brenden Dell

To start walking the path to fame, companies must determine what type of demand they aim to focus on. The three kinds of demands are:

• New concept. It’s an unexplored idea that usually involves the combination of two or more existing proposals in the market. People won't be familiar with the product, so sales and marketing teams will have to work hard to educate potential buyers.
  
• New paradigm. This is a retooling of an existing process. This is when you enter a product in a different market or with a different approach to its predecessors.
  
• Established category. There are other similar competitors in the market, so the value proposition is often related to better pricing or an upgrade in service and other processes.

High-Impact Sales Messaging

Brenden also talked about the first law explored in his book, The 12 Immutable Laws of High-Impact Messaging. These rules follow: Know who you are for and explore the notion that, especially in the B2B scenario, you will be selling to savvy buyers who know the landscape even better than the people trying to make a sale.

According to the number-one law, if you don't understand the person you're talking to, or you don't understand where they're struggling, that means that you can't message effectively. This means that marketing and sales teams might fail to understand the difference between pain relievers and vitamins, and B2B prospects crave the must-haves.

“If we take one principle of effective messaging away from any of this, it would be: How do you really focus on them and not on you?” —Brenden Dell

Find Enterprise Sales Solutions

Are you looking to accelerate your B2B sales and marketing results? Be sure to subscribe to the CIENCE ESD podcast. Take part in this weekly event where we explore the latest trends in technology, branding, and lead generation strategies. Learn from the best and stay ahead of the B2B pipeline growth game with CIENCE.