Every now and then, an idea strikes me as so brilliant that I wish I’d come up with it.
Today’s idea is the “Message Box,” which is articulated by Mike Gospe of Kickstart Alliance in his recently published book The Marketing High Ground.
Mike’s idea is also theoretically simple, so simple that I wonder why marketers aren’t using it every single minute of the day. Essentially, Mike says that marketing is all about story telling—not fibs and fabrication, but real, honest-to-god stories that mean something to a prospect. The Message Box leverages a four-stage formula found in best-selling fiction. Translated into business terms, the Message Box starts with engagement, moves to thought leadership, then to how and why a product or service works, and finally, its rewards.
Simple or not, using the Message Box effectively takes thought and practice, but once you master its simple concepts, you’ll have two great tools. The first is an elevator pitch that actually prompts a prospect to say “Tell me more” instead of edging away. The second is a message map that helps in creating the dialog that nurtures a prospect throughout each stage of the sales cycle.
The beauty of the Message Box exercise is that it doesn’t necessarily require a company to pitch out its existing collateral. There’s certainly a use for all but the worst of it. What it does do is require sales and marketing to think about where it’s best used and how integrate it into the sales effort, rather than expecting it to do the whole job.
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