Create Sales Messaging that Sticks: Examples & frameworks

Most sales messaging advice is as cliché as a bathroom sign that says “live, laugh, love”.

• Know your ICP
• Sell benefits instead of product features.
• Use a call-to-action.

If that’s all it took to close deals, every rep would have their own private jet.

The reality is buyers expect more today than half-baked sales messaging. They’re already dealing with lower job security, more scrutiny, and tighter budgets. We’re asking champions to put their neck on the line, which means great sales messaging has never been more important.

But when you listen to the Gong calls, you wince. Your sales reps are still committing atrocities. Feature-dumping, pitch-slapping, and reading from old scripts. How do we fix it?

Let’s look at how top sales leaders build, roll out, and optimize sales messaging to win more deals.

What is sales messaging?

Sales messaging is the talk track reps use to show they understand the buyer's business processes and know the best way to improve them.

Effective messaging isn’t about rattling off specific pain points in an outbound email or reciting the company sales pitch. It’s about concretely showing how the product improves their business and helping the prospect make a confident decision.

Buyers are inundated with so much information, and sifting through all of it is daunting. Modern sales messaging is about being direct and honest. Not just showing what the product does, but also who it’s for and who it’s not. 

That level of candor builds massive trust.

Kyle Norton, Former Director of Revenue & Merchant Success at Shopify and now CRO at League, calls it point of view positioning:

“This helps you really quickly let a customer opt-in or opt-out and qualify them upfront, and then build a lot of trust by saying, ‘Look, we’re not the perfect product. If you care more about [X], but if [Y] is your priority, then we’re the best choice.’”
— Kyle Norton, CRO, League

By clearly articulating the product’s benefits and tradeoffs in sales conversations, your potential customers can decide if your solution truly suits their priorities. This leads to faster qualification and a more effective sales process.

Sales messaging vs. marketing messaging

Your marketing messaging at the top of the funnel is like the orange chicken samples at Panda Express. It’s a hook designed to gain attention. It makes buyers aware that you exist and why.

As Peep Laja, Founder of Wynter and CXL puts it:

“By the time they’re on your site, they already know the why. They just need to connect the dots.”

In other words, website messaging explains why your product matters, who it’s for, and what it does, but at a broad level.

Sales messaging goes beyond the sample to sell the meal.

It dives into second and third-order benefits: the longer-term impacts of the buyer’s problems and the cost of inaction. Unlike marketing messaging, it dives into how the product solves the buyer’s specific problems.

This part requires digging into the buyer’s internal processes, tailoring our solutions to fit their needs, and making a clear business case.

A primer to sales messaging frameworks

Sales messaging frameworks are treated as the holy grail of sales enablement. While they are helpful, it’s easy to get caught up in the idea that following a framework will magically fix your sales messaging. 

Frameworks are a starting point. They help structure conversations and guide salespeople, but the real magic comes when we adapt them to our business, ICP, and use cases.

Here’s a quick look at three popular B2B sales messaging frameworks:

Gap Selling

Gap selling is my personal favorite. It focuses on uncovering the gap between a buyer’s current situation and their desired future state.

But there’s a lot more to it. I could try to explain, but Keenan explains it so well in this on-demand webinar from 30 Minutes to President’s Club that you should just start there.

The Challenger Sale

The Challenger framework urges reps to challenge customer assumptions, reframe how buyers view their problems, and present unique insights. It’s great for complex deals where buyers may not fully grasp their own issues.

Here’s a great article that sums up the “dos and don’ts” of sales messaging based on the Challenger Sale framework.

Value Selling

Value selling, or value-based selling, connects the product’s value to tangible outcomes like saving money, generating revenue, avoiding risk, or gaining efficiency. This often involves quantifying ROI or the “cost of the status quo.”

Sales messaging examples

If you look back at the definition I shared, it’s broad on purpose. Sales messaging comes in many shapes and sizes. I’ll share a few examples of what I’ve seen through experience and what I think is cool on the internet.

Beekeeper

I currently work at Beekeeper.io, a mobile-first platform that HR teams use to connect with workers who don’t sit behind a desk—think hospitality, construction, retail, manufacturing, and healthcare.

By the time our prospects get to a demo, we learn they’re dealing with manual, pen-and-paper processes or are stuck using outdated HR systems that are meant for office workers. 

The problem is: the market isn’t mature. Buyers don’t know what they’re looking for, there’s no line item for what we’re selling. So instead of starting with the product, we sell the use case.

“What does your onboarding process look like today? Are you able to tailor it to different departments?”

They’ll give us a peek under the hood. That’s how we uncover inefficiencies and help the champion understand the dangers of maintaining the status quo.

From there, we map out the specific processes we can help automate and calculate the business impact of digitizing them—whether that’s reducing turnover, improving compliance, or cutting onboarding time.

Then we share an ROI calculator that we build with a buying committee, helping quantify the value in more concrete terms. This method draws on all the frameworks we just covered.

Finding the gap, reframing buyer assumptions, and building a tangible case for change.

Chili Piper

When I was leading GTM for Distro at Chili Piper, it took time to refine our sales messaging. Competing with LeanData, a goliath in the space, we needed to differentiate while maintaining feature parity. The market was mature, buyers were used to having things a certain way.

What landed best was finding a nuanced user persona and showing how our product was more flexible and easy to use.

LeanData offered complex routing rules that appealed to revenue operations pros, but we learned that marketing operations leaders or one-person RevOps teams wanted simplicity.

Our messaging focused on questioning the status quo:

• “Do you spend more time managing your routing tool than routing leads?”
• “What’s the impact on SLA compliance when you’re stuck in workflows that only a Salesforce admin can fix?”

We leaned into how Distro reduced friction between sales and marketing, simplifying lead management and ensuring faster follow-ups via Slack or email—without needing to build out a complex setup.

This messaging helped us target time-strapped ops leaders who valued agility over complexity.

How to deploy an effective sales messaging strategy

Sales messaging strategy is more than just case studies, testimonials, and a CTA.

Building a narrative that’s rooted in buyer psychology and business outcomes takes a team effort. Especially if you want one that is personalized, scalable, and constantly improving.

1. Develop a nuanced understanding of ICP and buyer persona

Sales messaging shouldn’t “come from the product marketing team”.

Reps in the field hear objections and buyer questions firsthand—no messaging should be created without their input.

Product Marketing has the benefit of a bird’s-eye view. They run customer discovery post-sales, analyze competitors and market trends, and know how the overall value proposition will evolve based on the product roadmap.

Both perspectives are necessary to develop a deeply nuanced understanding of your sales ideal customer profile (ICP) and buyer personas. This isn’t just a checkbox exercise, it’s arguably the most important part.

As Chris Orlob, former Head of Sales at Gong and Co-Founder of Pclub.io, tells us:

“Sales technique is important. But the more fundamental piece of knowledge you can get is understanding your buyer so well that you can peer into their soul. If you can get to that point, everything becomes far, far easier.”

To reach that level, Sales and Product Marketing need to establish a feedback loop:

1. Product Marketing shares a summary of insights every month or quarter based on customer discovery calls, win-loss reports, and other inputs.
2. Reps validate or expand on these insights based on real-world interactions.
3. Product Marketing refines the key points to align with the latest buyer feedback.
4. Sales takes the updated messaging into demos, cold calls, and follow-ups to see what sticks.
5. Everyone analyzes what’s landing and what isn’t, documenting new nuances.
6. Rinse and repeat, ensuring your messaging never becomes outdated.

👉 For more Product Marketing and Sales collaboration tips, check out The Product Marketer’s Guide to Sales Enablement

2. Create personalized messaging

Personalization used to mean tailoring to a prospect’s industry, persona, or company size in a cold email.

Today, buyers expect more. They want to see exactly how you’ll solve their specific business pains. An operations director at a healthcare company needs to know you understand the ins and outs of their supply chain, not just that you “work with hospitals.”

If you rely on a generic one-pager or Excel sheet, your reps end up reinventing the wheel every time. This leads to scattered, inconsistent pitches. 

Instead, create templates that are 95% ready for each core segment or use case. Reps can then invest their energy refining the final 5%, addressing the specific details that truly matter to the buyer.

This is where Dock shines. 

Dock lets you set up customer-facing sales deal rooms for specific industries or use cases, allowing reps to easily select the appropriate template and do only minimal tweaks. 

If you don’t want to tailor the entire deal room template for each industry, you can create individual page templates, where a rep can just drop the most relevant content in for the buyer based on what they learn during discovery.

Your buyer champion then has a digital sales room that’s so specific and relevant, they actually want to share it with their team.

3. Get your sales team bought in

Let’s be real. The only reason reps don’t use the messaging they’re handed is because they think they can do better.

Maybe they have a “proven framework” from a previous role. Or found some template on LinkedIn. Or they tried the new messaging once, and the deal went sideways. 

Whatever the reason, it’s on us to show them why the messaging works rather than just telling them to “follow the script”.

Training and Onboarding

Dropping new messaging into a sales meeting and expecting people to use it is wishful thinking. We need to share:

• Proof: Show real deal wins. Let reps hear the recorded calls where the messaging converted champions and helped close big accounts.
• Templates: Instead of providing words on a page, guide reps on how to customize the messaging for each persona or use case in an actionable playbook. The less guesswork for your reps, the better.
• Ongoing support: Offering a wiki page is a start, but it’s better to embed the messaging into their existing workflows. It could be as simple as a shared folder with resources or a tool like Dock, which integrates the messaging directly into what the buyer sees.

Accountability and Consistency

As Chris Orlob says, “consistency is the key to running a sales organization.” How can we keep reps on the same track?

• Set clear expectations: explain where, when, and how to use new messaging.
• Bake it into existing workflows: use tools like Dock to ensure messaging is built into the sales process so reps don’t have to “go rogue.”
• Monitor engagement: track how prospects respond and identify what resonates versus what falls flat. Make data-driven updates rather than guesswork.

4. Evaluate and optimize sales messaging

No matter how solid your messaging is today, buyers change, roadmaps evolve, and new competitors emerge every day. So how do you keep your messaging fresh and relevant?

1. Track key metrics: Keep an eye on win rates, sales cycle length, and buyer engagement in your CRM. If deals stall or reps aren’t hitting quota, your messaging is probably missing the mark.
2. Segment your data: See how your messaging performs across different personas or industries. If the outreach is landing with CFOs but not with HR leaders, you know where to focus improvement efforts.
3. Test and iterate: Listen to rep feedback and hear what buyers have to say. Outbound sales is typically the easiest battleground for new ideas. 

It’s important to make tweaks, but Dini Metha, former Lattice CRO, warns us to avoid overhauling messaging all the time:

“When things are tough, as a sales leader, you want to make all the changes all the time…let’s change our sales process. Let’s change our messaging. Then let’s change the work structure…You think that’s the way to drive progress, whereas it’s just action for the sake of it.” 

It’s a delicate balance and requires dissecting deals to see if sales messaging is actually the problem.

Stop playing messaging whack-a-mole

Sales messaging can be your biggest competitive advantage or your biggest headache. 

Done right, it creates champions who push deals to the finish line faster.

Done wrong, you’ll keep hearing the same objections: “this isn’t a priority right now”, “how is this different from X?”, or “we’re not sure if this is right for us”.

But you don’t have to keep guessing what will work. By embracing a structured, collaborative approach, you can develop sales messaging that consistently delivers better results and higher conversion rates. 

By using Dock sales rooms, you can put templated messaging in the hands of your sales team—so you can achieve consistent messaging at scale.

That’s how you build messaging your reps and buyers can believe in.

Ready to get started? Try Dock out for yourself — it’s free for up to 5 workspaces.