Naughty/Nice: How To Keep Your Customer Conversations On Santa’s Good Side

In the spirit of the holidays, here are some naughty and nice messaging approaches to ensure your best intentions are followed up by the right instincts in your customer conversations.

Good intentions are a nice start for staying off Santa’s naughty list this holiday season, but they’re no guarantee that you’ll end up with something better than a lump of coal in your stocking.

After all—as the man in the North Pole knows—good intentions have to be validated by good actions, kind deeds. There’s a parallel in business: Your best intentions won’t bear fruit if they’re not followed up by the right instincts, the right execution in the field.

There’s no shortage of sources prescribing marketing “best practices” as the cure-all for underperforming customer conversations. Since I’d like to stay on Santa’s nice list myself this year, I won’t be too disparaging about this kind of approach. But I will say some of the most touted marketing and sales best practices actually aren’t best practices at all—and there’s research that proves it.

In the spirit of the holidays, below are some naughty and nice messaging approaches to ensure your best intentions are followed up by the right instincts in your customer conversations:

Naughty: Respond only to the needs your prospects tell you they have.

Nice: Identify and introduce your prospects to “unconsidered needs.”

You’ll struggle to differentiate yourself from the competition if you’re not telling your prospects something they don’t already know about their business or their industry. Companies fall into this “commodity trap” when they base their message development on the typical “voice of the customer” approach—which is likely to produce the exact same inputs your competitors will be responding to.

A better way? Introduce your prospects to a problem or missed opportunity they don’t already know about—an “unconsidered need”—and then link that identified challenge to your unique strengths. A Corporate Visions study found that this approach—versus the typical “voice of the customer” messaging—is perceived as 40%-plus more unique by prospects. It also can give you a 10% greater impact in terms of persuading prospects to do something different than what they’re doing today.

Naughty: Create only risk with your insights message.

Nice: Create risk in your message, while also showing how your solutions resolve the business challenges you’ve identified.

Insights emerged as a selling force because truly good ones are great at creating excitement and urgency. But while creating risk can generate excitement, it may not be enough to get what you really want out of your message, which is to incite buyers to take action. That’s why you also need to show how you are qualified to resolve the business risks you’ve identified, leading your prospects to a better and safer alternative.

A Corporate Visions study found that creating risk and linking it to an alternative resolution scenario can give you a statistically significant edge in behavioral and emotional impact—two crucial areas of interest for inciting buyer action. Paired together, risk and resolution form the foundation of a compelling, insights-driven message—so make sure to include both components.

Naughty: Tout the most differentiated features and benefits of your solution to convince prospects to change.

Nice: Defeat the status quo by creating contrast between your prospect’s current state and a new and better future state.

Enumerating your most differentiated features and benefits is tempting, but using that as the basis of your change story could backfire and commoditize you—especially if those features and benefits differ minimally from those of your competitors.

A better way to create the urgency to change? Deliver a message that draws sharp, definitive contrast between the pain and struggle your prospects are experiencing in their current situation with the performance gains and upside they can enjoy by switching to a new and better solution. This messaging approach is essential for creating the context for change.

Research from Corporate Visions revealed that this approach can give you statistically significant messaging advantages in the areas of purchase intent, willingness to switch brands, buyer advocacy, and perceptions of innovation.

The messaging tips above—and the research supporting them—show there’s a tremendous upside in defying conventional marketing wisdom in your message and content creation. So to stay on the nice list this year, recognize that best practices aren’t always the best and that a tested and proven approach to messaging can be the key to unlocking differentiation breakthroughs in your customer conversations.