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With steps 1 to 5 out of the way, you are now ready to start talking to your prospects about buying your products. If you are a monopoly or a dominant player in the midst of scarcity, you don’t have to worry about messaging, just make your product or service available and easy to buy, it will fly off the shelves. If you are in a competitive environment, or an undifferentiated product or service, or your product or service is not well understood, what you say is crucial, it could turn your buyers “on” or turn them “off.”

“Messaging” is a fine art and the higher the stakes, the more important to hire specialists to put it together. In addition to the choice of words, you have to determine the right frequency and the right channel. As we all know, “The medium is the message.”

Marketing automation can be used to deliver your message to the right person at the right time. Web sites can make your messages available 24×7, worldwide to anyone with an Internet connection. You can choose interesting formats like motion graphics or videos, or do it the old fashioned way via static text and graphics.

A good vocabulary and grammar are table stakes, knowing what to say is priceless. If you have a clear vision, the idea generation is usually effortless, but the actual process of assembling your collateral can be messy. This is not the time to be impatient or frustrated. It is hard to “take back” what you say and to change perceptions once they have been formed.

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Much of your strategy will remain under the covers and hidden from your customers. The only people really interested in your thought process will be companies that want a strategic partnership with you, the venture capitalists, the media, and business school professors who are writing case studies.

Your products, solutions, and services are what your customer will see, feel, touch, and buy. When he or she has a pain point, they will go shopping in the mall or browse the web. In reading about your product description, if the customer can connect the dots to their pain points, they will open their wallets.

Note that customers will look at the total cost of ownership of your products, solutions, and services, and not just solving the immediate pain point. They will look at terms, ease of installation, maintenance, after sales service, residue value, break-fix process, scalability, and a number of emotional factors such as the opinion of their peer group. Non-functional attributes, like color, play a role.

It is a deeply creative endeavor to design products that are a joy to purchase and use, and thus, a joy to make and sell.