Customer Message Management: Increasing Marketing's Impact on Selling

Customer Message Management is an excellent resource for Marketing Communications professionals who are striving to truly deliver valuable tools to the sales organization. The approach outlined in the book is highly collaborative with the sales organization and other key stakeholders, engaging them in the process throughout which helps ensure the end deliverables are on target. The book provides a logical method for developing key messages as well as identifying the types of sales tools needed and effective deployment of those tools to the sales force. The authors promote a customer-focused, value-selling approach instead of the common features-and-benefits, vendor-centric focus. The best part about this book is that it doesn't just talk about what a marketer should do, it tells you how to do it. The overall methodology proposed is logical and solid, although it is somewhat complex, so taking the overall principles and simplifying the process and customizing it for your organization may be a better approach. Once you have completed your customer message maps, it's like having the answer to all the tests in your hands. The maps serve as the foundation for every customer touchpoint - brochures, websites, advertisements, sales scripts, sales training, ... When you get that last-minute request for a presentation, you won't ever have to start from scratch - you'll already know exactly what to say (and not say) based on your audience. While undertaking a message mapping initiative requires a significant amount of time by several people, in the end it will save you copious amounts of time and - better yet - will ensure that all of your communications are integrated and on-message. After reading this book, I undertook a customer message mapping initiative for one of the divisions at my company, which is a large global organization. It was highly successful and the sales organization loved it (they felt like they were finally being heard and given tools that would actually help them in their daily activities). The Sales VP for the division attributes the new tools with higher sales productivity and shorter ramp up time for new hires. A word of advice: it's critical that the head of the sales organization be completely on-board with the new approach and agree to champion it with the sales organization. Getting this alignment early on will make the overall process easier with higher quality outcomes, and it will help ensure all of your efforts are adopted in the field.

Just re-read Tim Reisterer's great book on CMM. While we've practiced many of his strategies in the past, decided we needed to sharpen the saw and revisit as we prep for Q2. Good practical strategies for connecting marketing with sales highest performers to tune messaging and content. More specifically, to provide just the right content/collateral with the right messages that sales will actually use and that will make them more successful with deals. And throw away the wasted 60% that no one uses. And skip the wasted time with the wrong messages. This book should be on any the bookshelf of all marketing/product marketing/product management professionals. I have also had the privilege of meeting and working with Tim. Very sharp guy and team. His depth of experience and years of practice in this area makes him a true expert.

The book is great. It truly depicts a typical business environment, relationship between sales and marketing, their miscommunication and describes how combining sales and marketing efforts can bring to a great result.

I loved this book. With 25 years of sales experience, I was struck by how little is provided to salespeople. When I pick up the phone, what do I say? This book does an excellent job of focusing on the critical conversations between a salesperson and a prospective customer.

This book presents sound principles for how marketing can better help sales in communications with customers. The detailed activity lists will be useful in putting a customer messaging program into action. However, the processes proposed by the authors are overly complicated and may be impractical for many marketing departments to implement. The book would also be more useful if it included attributed, real-life examples and results.