What if you could understand your customer’s environment better than they do themselves — and teach them something they don’t know, but should?
That’s where insight-led messaging becomes powerful. If you want to create a competitive offer, you need to go beyond simply presenting a solution. You need to lead with insights, challenge assumptions, and help customers see their world in a new way.
In this article, we’ll show you how to unpack market insights so you can strengthen your sales messaging and create a more competitive offer. This is one of the topics explored inside the Partner Elevate Channel Enablement Platform.
For any partner organisation, winning new business can feel like a never-ending challenge.
Partners tell us every day that they are wasting time on unqualified leads, relying too heavily on current customers for new opportunities, and getting distracted by the constant pressure to find new lead sources. What they would rather do is spend more time converting qualified leads instead of qualifying them from the first touch. They also want their sales to come from a healthier balance of existing customers and new business.
Salespeople need the ability to spend time with the prospects most likely to buy. That means there is an expectation that marketing hands over leads that are already qualified and ready to move forward.
We know this is easier said than done. Creating a funnel that drives a competitive offer is no easy feat. It requires a clear approach to how you structure and deliver content through each stage of your funnel.
So, where should you start?
For most partners, coming up with an offer that aligns with the skills and capability in the business — and satisfies their “why” — is not the problem. You know your niche, who you want to work with, and how you want to deliver it. That is usually not the issue.
What we see more often is that partners use a spray-and-pray approach when taking their offer to market. They might define customer demographics such as role type, location, or industry, but they do not go much deeper than that.
The truth is, you need to understand your target market in much more detail before your offer will truly resonate with your ideal customer.
Understanding the unique requirements and challenges of your customer’s environment helps you bring more meaningful insights into your offer messaging. That can completely change the success of your offer. It also means you are not wasting valuable time, energy, and budget putting your offer in front of people who will never buy it.
Challenges are the things your customer is aware of but cannot complete because they lack time, resources, or the space to deal with competing priorities.
When you do not understand the challenges your core customer is facing, it becomes difficult to have meaningful conversations with them. It also becomes difficult to know whether what you offer is actually what they need.
If you understand the unique challenges your customer faces, you can change the language and structure of how you communicate your offer.
Your priorities are one thing. But if they do not align with your customer’s priorities, you are wasting your breath.
Uncovering the future vision — and the priorities that support that vision — helps you define an offer and an approach that supports real progress. This is not just about high-level goals. It is also about the priorities within the role you are targeting.
Requirements are the things your customer must do to operate their business. That could include meeting a security standard, satisfying a legal obligation, or maintaining a critical operational process.
Too often, when entering a new customer environment, we make assumptions about these requirements. That causes us to talk about offers they do not need — or do not need yet.
When that happens, customers struggle to connect what they actually need with what you are offering, and your offer falls flat.
What if you could teach the customer something about their world or environment that they do not know today — but should?
Then you could use those insights to make yourself more competitive and make your offer more competitive.
Here is how.
At Partner Elevate, we use a structure to determine and build relatable market insights about the customer’s environment.
The PESTLE analysis helps us examine the customer through six important factors: Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental.
If you want to use PESTLE analysis to improve sales messaging and create a competitive offer, answer these six questions in as much detail as possible.
Think about the customer’s industry and the political factors affecting it. Consider internal and external issues from a government perspective that may impact the customer or the industry, such as taxation or fiscal policy.
Here, the goal is to gather insights from the economic environment.
Think about inflation. Is there inflation in the country or in the customer’s industry? Could it affect supply and demand? What is happening with interest rates? What do growth patterns look like? Is the environment expanding or contracting from an economic perspective?
This includes lifestyle and social trends.
Think about factors such as population shifts, migration, or wider cultural changes. Are there social or lifestyle trends affecting your customer or their customers — trends they need to respond to?
Think about technology adoption, innovation, and how forward-looking the customer or the industry is.
How innovative is the customer environment? What is the level of tech awareness in the customer’s industry? What kinds of innovation are likely to shape the market structure over time?
This factor often overlaps with politics, but it includes both business legal requirements and government legal requirements.
Is there legislation currently regulating the industry? Could regulation affect the industry in the future? Think about consumer law, health and safety, labour legislation, or any compliance requirements that may influence the customer environment.
In industries such as tourism, agriculture, or farming, environmental concerns can have a significant impact.
What role do environmental pressures, regulations, or environmental credits play? How might these factors affect the industry and your customer’s decision-making?
Using this type of market analysis gives you a bird’s-eye view of the customer’s environment. It helps you understand their requirements and challenges more clearly.
That means you can move away from assumptions and become more informed about what makes your insights competitive. Those insights are often the difference between messaging that blends in and messaging that stands out.
If you have a sales or marketing team, complete this exercise together. That gives everyone a shared understanding of your customer and the environment they operate in.