If it seems like your sales message is missing the mark, it may be time for a reboot. Even if your sales message worked well in the past, changing needs and interests may be driving your customers in new directions. When that happens, there’s nothing wrong with taking a long, hard look at your sales message, and deciding if it still speaks to the customers you’re targeting. If it doesn’t, there’s no shame in going back to the drawing board and redefining your brand. Rebooting your sales message can seem like a large commitment, but it’s a worthwhile investment if it attracts more high-quality prospects. Done the right way, rebooting your sales message isn’t that difficult, and should ensure that your new sales message stands the test of time.

Focus on What You do Well

One major problem with many businesses is that they try to be all things to all people. This ends up giving the impression that you may not do anything particularly well. Your sales message reboot should begin with a laser focus on your core competencies. Create a list of a few things that you excel at, and build the list out from there. Your sales message should focus first on those things you do best, then second best, and so on. This way, prospects that run across your sales message will see at a glance how you relate to their immediate needs. If this turns off some prospects, that’s a good thing-it means that you were attracting unqualified, low-conversion prospects to begin with. The few low quality prospects that you were able to convert probably weren’t worth the effort of dealing with all of the other prospects that didn’t convert.

Focus on Who You can Help

Once you know exactly what it is that you do, you need to identify who it is that you want to attract as customers. Your sales message must absolutely identify and target buyer personas. If you’re not using buyer personas, you’re simply firing into the darkness, hoping to hit any target out there. That approach isn’t cost effective, and wastes resources that could be used for pursuits that are more profitable. Imagine that your perfect customer walks through the door: what do you know about that person? What are their needs, interests, and goals? How do your products and services relate to them, as a customer? Build out from that ideal persona, and create other, less-ideal buyer personas. Remember, the farther they are from ideal, the less likely they are to convert. Focus your sales message on the idealized buyer first, and then move your message on to the less-ideal prospects.

Keep Your Message Relatable

Your sales message should be about generating interest and engaging with prospects, not pushing products on them. Prospects expect to be nurtured, and pushing sales on them too soon will drive them out of the sales funnel. Your sales message should focus on getting prospects into the funnel, eliminating poor prospects in the early, low-cost stages of the funnel, and pulling qualified prospects farther into the funnel. To do this, you need to provide information and content that is related to the needs, interests, and goals you identified in your buyer personas. Prospects that see you as a valuable source of relevant information will naturally be drawn farther into the nurturing process. When the time is right, they’ll gravitate into the sales process on their own. By that point, they’ll be highly qualified prospects who offer a high probability of conversion.

Respond, Instead of Reboot

Typically, a full reboot is the result of a failure to respond to market changes. Good data collection and analysis will alert you to changes before they hurt your bottom line. Your sales message can’t be static, it’s part of a constantly evolving customer landscape. To keep up, you need to identify, and respond to, the changing needs of your customers.