Give me permission to talk about my past for a minute. Because I have two great examples for you. I can assure you that you either need to hear this or somebody you know who needs to hear. So tune in carefully. 

 
The anatomy of a good message. I like to use the words, “I help”. And I've always tried to frame my message with those two words at the beginning. I help. In fact, it’s the only time I want to talk about me. It’s the only thing I want to mention about me. The less you say about you the more people remember! 
Actually, let that one soak in for a minute! 

The less you say about you the greater the chances are that they will remember what you want them to know. 

Side note I wrote “Help I’m Talking and I Can’t Shut Up!” to explain why sales reps fail in their presentations. More money is lost and more time is wasted because the person who is there to sell simply won’t shut up!

When someone asks, “Who was that guy?” If they remember nothing else, I want them to say, “I don’t know but he helps…” 

The next part of a great marketing message is the benefit to the other person. 

So let’s take two marketing messages in two totally different markets and see how that the message was crafted to convert move the the potential buyer from barely interested to a happy purchaser.

 I was a sales trainer in industrial sales where we sold spray equipment to the woodworking industry. We sold the equipment it had a brand on it. It came in a nice yellow box. It had a logo, a model number, a tagline, and all the stuff that is supposed to help you “brand” your business and make sales. None of that made any difference to the business owner at all. 

So how did I change my message there. 

Instead of talking about the company, the equipment, the warranty, the duty cycle, ad nauseam. Or even some lame attempt to talk about benefits. I choose to talk about results.

This is what that message became: 

I help shop owners (see how clearly I just identified my market). I don’t help everyone. I help shop owners. I’m talking to shop owners)! There’s no confusion about what I do I help shop owners) reduce the time from first coat of finish to delivery of product by a day and a half (this is a carefully thought out and a clearly demonstrable number) giving them back three and a half weeks of productivity time over the course of the year.

That's huge, right? 

Let's take a look at the anatomy of this message. I've identified my market. My market was the shop owner. The result that I'm giving to that shop owner is I'm going to help him to reduce his time from the first coat of finish to the delivery of the product. We're going to reduce that time by a day and a half. 

Now a day and a half is a lot of time when you're talking about shop hours. Paying people for shop hours; paying for the electricity; paying for the utilities, insurance and all this stuff that goes with that. Giving them back three and a half weeks over the course of a year. In many cases meant that they could do another job in that course of time. And another job could be anywhere from $18,000-$40,000 that's a big deal, especially, when we're talking about a piece of equipment that sells for around a thousand bucks.

That's a big deal. So the anatomy of that particular message was I help. So far I haven't told them what the product is because they don't care about the product. They care about their time and time is valuable to them. 

Being able to talk to them in terms of time, I call that dollarization. Now I'm not going to talk about dollarization today. I'm saving that for another time. I love to use the term dollarization. Some people talk about the value, I call it dollarization. Because the dollarization comes from a term used to identify US dollars and how that aligns with the foreign country's currency. And what we're doing in this sales conversation here is aligning those two things.

I'm aligning their currency conversation with my product. I help shop owners reduce the time (their currency) from a first coat to delivery of the product by a day and a half. Now I've just aligned my product with their currency. Their currency is time. 

Second one. I moved from the woodworking industry to the insurance industry. You talk about two polar opposites. 

So Eric, how are you going to be able to do this in the insurance industry because they have all of this stuff? It's tightly regulated and every message and every term has to be compliant, approved, and all of that. How are you going to handle that? 

In exactly the same way, I'm going to talk in terms of what's going to be the benefit for the other person. I’m still going to do that. I‘m going to be compliant. But, I'm going to talk in terms of what's going to be beneficial to them.

So this was my message in insurance industry. We sold employee benefits. Our market was employers. Right? This was my message. 

It took me forever to craft this message so it spoke clearly and directly to the totally uninterested “I’ve heard it all before” employer. This is the anatomy of a of that carefully crafted message. 

It starts in the same place. 

I help employers. (We’re in the employee benefits business. So I want to talk to the employer, right?) I help employers help their employees do these three things everyday be happy, healthy, and on the job so they can create a more productive work environment. 

Now, there's a lot of detail behind that. It sounds very simple. It sounds kind of quirky. It sounds like nothing you've ever heard about anybody who ever was in the insurance industry. 

But think about this… 

if I want to talk to you, Mr/Mrs Employer, and the first thing I say is, “I'm an insurance agent.” Immediately your mind shuts off, right. 

But if I talk about being a benefit to your employees which results in a more productive environment. Now I've got something. Does that make sense? 

That's what I want you to get from this. Make sure your message captures their attention and then gets them to inquire. You want the shop owner thinking, “what can I do with the day and a half? If I had a day and a half back? Could I go to the beach? Could I add another job? What could I do?”

The huge benefit to the employer and most understand this is “a happy employee is 55% more productive than an unhappy one. Think about that for a minute...55% more productive than an unhappy one. So, let's focus some attention on how can we make that employee happy because that creates a more productive work environment. 

Understand the the phrase; happy, healthy and on the job is loaded with plans to remove objections. I discovered what employers found objectionable and I planned that into my message. I learned that from talking to employers. The best way to deal with an objection is put it in your message. Right? Put the answer to the objection in your message so that it's been eliminated before it ever came up: happy, healthy and on the job.

And the healthy part was because we had benefits that paid if a person got certain things checked out: prostate exam, mammogram, screening for diabetes, those kinds of things would make a huge difference. The employer would say we've got 200 employees and we don't have anybody who has a problem with diabetes. 

“You want to bet? I can promise you six of your employees have diabetes right now and they don't know it. It's impacting their ability to work every day.” 

Really? Do you understand? You have to have thought behind the message. It’s not easy to craft a message like that. It requires some thought. It requires some research. It requires some background. It requires some study. It requires some understanding. 

That's what our business EricSaid does. We help business owners clarify their marketing message(s) so they can enjoy their share of the market. 

My message is this, Simple Makes Awesome Easy! because it does. We take complex things and make them as simple as they can be. 

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." -Albert Einstein 

We've discovered this, the average business owner does some amazing things in their business and they do a terrible job of communicating to the buying public. Because they do amazing things in their business and they do a terrible job of communicating it, the people that need to be impacted the most are never reached. 

Your message must solve real issues in the world. That’s the thing that grabs the potential buyer where they are and brings them to where you want them to be. 

I help employers help their employees be happy, healthy, and on the job so that, they can create a more productive work environment.

I help shop owners reduce the time from first finish coat to delivery by a day and a half, so that they can add three and a half weeks to their schedule every year. 

How powerful is that? That's a lot more important than, Hi I'm Eric, I'm with Turbinaire, I sell spray equipment. Or, Hi I'm Eric I’m with Real World Life Insurance Company we are the benefits specialists for working Americans. 

Talk like that and they're like, “sure we hear that all the time.”

 You want your message to be unique. You want your message to be specially crafted so that it captures the other person's attention and then leads them to where you want them to go, removing objections along the way. 

Right? Messaging is so important. That's the reason why I spend so much time on this. Messaging is extremely important! Get it wrong and you’ll severely limit your reach. Get it right and you’ll maximize your reach.