Ten years ago, I had high hopes. I was going to take everything I’d learned from marketing and brand messaging and apply it to sales messaging.
And I struggled.
I struggled with what most salespeople struggle with, and that was anticipating objections.
After all, a grand and glorious aspirational brand message doesn’t always account for the actual face-to-face conversations that need to happen to get someone to literally and figuratively buy into something new.
But then I realized something very, very important: Almost every objection falls into one of three categories.
1. People don’t believe something is possible in principle—that whatever you’re saying to them, whatever product or service you’re pitching to them, will actually work. At all.
2. They don’t believe it’s possible in practice—that even if they believe something is possible in principle, let’s say for somebody else or in some other industry, they don’t believe it’s going to work for them, or it’s not going to work in this particular instance, maybe because of you.
3. They don’t believe it’s worth it. They don’t believe that the price is worth the payoff. They don’t believe sacrificing a previous relationship with whoever they’re working with now is worth it. They don’t believe that the effort that’s going to be required to make a shift to make a change is worth it.
Now, notice something really important. Those beliefs are beliefs—and it takes a lot of data and evidence to overturn a belief. In fact, data and evidence rarely overturns a belief.
Even when it does, it rarely happens in the span of time you normally have in a sales conversation, or as you’re flashing a message in front of somebody onscreen, or even during a 45-minute (or longer!) presentation.
This is where message design comes in.
Because to overcome the objection that something is impossible, we need to ensure that there’s enough information there for them to believe that something is. But data and evidence doesn’t do that alone. People have to understand in principle why your solution would work the way it does.
And the only way to do that quickly is to explain it using principles, ideas, concepts that they:
already know,
already understand,
and already agree are true.
Which is where the Core Case comes in.
It creates the conditions for someone to agree in principle:
What your approach is
What you claim it will do
Why they would agree it would work to do that
To get the conditions for agreement in practice, though, people need a little bit more information. They need to understand exactly what it looks like, what it takes, to implement your idea and validate their intuition that it’s important enough to do so.
And this is where some of that data comes in: to support the principle you used in your Core Case with concrete examples and evidence.
They also need to understand what it takes to actually put this into place. To do that, they may need some information about you, your product, your service, to really believe and to understand concretely what’s going to happen.
This is where your Core Story comes in.
But finally, we need to make sure that the conditions are there for someone to agree that this change in what they’re thinking or doing is worth it. And that’s where elements present in both the Core Case and the Core Story come into play.
The most important is making sure it’s all anchored in a Core Question: something that your audience already wants enough that no matter what, they will listen to a possible answer.
Now, will this make sure that they will absolutely agree?
No.
But it will create the conditions that make the likelihood that overcoming those objections is much, much more likely.