If you're like most marketing departments I see, sales is always yelling for more marketing collateral. Yet they never seem happy with what they get, and year after year you see your budget cut amid grumbles that marketing "isn't pulling its weight."

The reason could be that the sales force isn't leveraging your marketing collateral properly - or at all. According to the American Marketing Association, as much as 90 percent of the marketing material produced for salespeople is never used. This applies to everything from glossy product sheets describing the "speeds and feeds" of your product to case studies to glossy magazines describing cutting-edge trends in the vertical markets you're targeting.

The top 10 or 20 percent of your sales force may know how to use this material correctly, or are good enough sales people that they can wing it and still close the deal. But the other 80 percent either ignores or misuses the collateral you spent so much money and time to produce. Is it any wonder your business peers wonder if marketing (or PR, which is also under pressure to produce sales leads) are pulling their weight?

Working with marketing departments and their PR people we help companies produce "Sales-Ready Messaging" which focuses neither on technical features nor on traditional generalized "business benefits." Rather, it describes how the customer can achieve a goal, solve a problem or satisfy a need with your product or service. Here's how it would work for a hypothetical storage management software tool.

(Traditional messaging) EasyStor Software Co.'s StorEasy is a Web-based storage resource management solution that cuts the time and cost associated with creating and allocating storage volumes to applications, assigning LUNs (logical units) to ports and monitoring the usage of storage resources.

Not bad, right? Here's how we might translate it into Sales Ready Messaging.

After adding new disk hardware, would it help if the storage administrator could immediately allocate storage volumes to applications, assign LUNs to servers and monitor the use of storage resources, from their Web browser? If "Yes", then, How Much could you reduce your overhead costs?

As you can see, Sales-Ready Messaging uses a formula based on an event (After adding new disk hardware...) a question (Would it help if...) a player (the storage administrator) and an action (could immediately allocate storage volumes to applications, assign LUNs to servers and monitor the use of storage resources, from their Web browser.)

A common strategy for companies inventing disruptive technologies is to find a "guru" to endorse the technology, write a "white paper", hire a good PR firm and hit a couple of technology trade shows. "Sales" take off! Do you really think there was much selling (helping the potential customer visualize how he can achieve a goal, solve a problem or satisfy a need by using the new technology) going on, or were the innovators and early adopters at the trade show smart enough to figure usage out on their own? Sales-Ready Messaging can be used in anything from white papers, product descriptions and case studies to email newsletters, prospecting letters and telesales scripts to help buyers create a vision of how they can use your products/services to solve a problem, satisfy a need, or achieve a goal.

Further, in order for a salesperson to have the confidence to approach a conversation with business people, they must be prepared to engage in business conversations. A business conversation includes why the product is needed, how it would be used to achieve a goal, solve a problem or satisfy a need, and the cost versus the benefit of using it.

If you as a marketing or PR professional can deliver this material to your sales force and help them use it properly, you'll help them have better conversations with business level decision makers and make more sales more efficiently. And wouldn't that be a nice change from the usual grumbling?