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How clear, aligned messaging accelerates B2B sales and builds buyer trust 

Best enjoyed over a morning coffee or shared in team chats to inspire conversation. 

Imagine your sales representative confidently pitches a solution’s benefits, but the prospect responds with conflicting messaging pulled directly from your marketing materials. Unfortunately, this marketing nightmare scenario is quite common. In fact, 67% of B2B buyers cite inconsistent messaging as a primary reason for dissatisfaction with vendors. A far too common example of this is misalignment between sales and marketing teams which often frustrates prospects and prolongs sales cycles or stops them dead in their tracks.  

This article equips marketing and sales leaders with practical insights to help eliminate inconsistent messaging coming from marketing and sales teams and keep sales cycles moving forward.  

B2B buyer trust is built upon on understanding and consistency 

At Altitude, we believe that generating buyer trust can only occur if the buyer (or buying group) understands what you’re offering and its potential value to their organization.  

Consistency is Crucial: Any contradiction in messaging from sales, marketing, and technical teams can instantly erode that trust. 

Buyer Confidence is Fragile: Even minor confusion can cause prospects to withdraw, turning promising leads into lost revenue. 

Bryan Reid, CEO of Altitude, emphasizes: "We assume B2B buyers are essentially putting their future careers on the line when they make a strategic enterprise technology purchase. With so much at stake, any inconsistency in messaging can have instantaneous impact on the seller’s credibility. Consistent messaging is not optional—it's essential." 

What causes inconsistent messaging? And what can you do?  

We readily admit that we don’t have all the answers, but based on our 20+ years of experience, here are four of the main causes of inconsistent messaging that we’ve uncovered and our best advice to address them. 

Lack of sales involvement upfront  

In the interest of time and efficiency, it’s not unusual to work with a marketing team that is creating content for use by the sales reps, without involving sales teams upfront, to ensure it addresses their needs. The result? Sales ignores the content created by marketing and reps are forced to ‘go rogue’ and produce their own content to meet the demands of their buyers.  

When we have the opportunity to hear directly from top sales reps, early in the content creation process, there’s almost always an important revelation that results in either the content or the format changing significantly… and then the final asset is actually leveraged by the reps in their buyer conversations.  

Insufficient or ineffective sales training 

Enterprise B2B Sales reps are expected to know a lot about a lot of different solutions. Marketers don’t always take the time to create training materials that make it easy for sales reps to understand (and remember – see below) a solution’s key benefits, features and value messages. Marketers who treat sales reps as ‘buyers’ in their own right, create well designed intuitive training materials to ensure the right messages stick in the sellers’ minds.  

Ineffective sales enablement content 

Not every marketer creates the right content to empower sales to have productive, consistent conversations with their sellers. The ones that do work with sales to understand the types of information that buyers will want to know (and the level of detail they’ll require). Then they create clear, visual content designed to address those needs - in the best format - based on the context of the buyer interaction.  

We are not too proud to admit at Altitude that we often create ‘picture books for adults’, because that’s exactly what the buyer needs at that point in the sales cycle.  

Lack of sales reference aides 

Our clients readily admit that sales training is akin to ‘cramming for an exam’, and we all can relate to how much we remember a week after the exam. Sales reps aren’t superhuman. They are bound to forget things. Marketers who accept this reality can plan for it. We’ve recently created a series of short, highly visual reference aides, to help sales reps quickly remember the key value messages and talking points for a specific solution.

Creating sales ‘cheat sheets’ like those aides, can prevent reps from either:

a) incorrectly remembering what they were trained to say, or
b) making an educated, but incorrect guess when talking with a buyer.  

To recap, here are our key recommendations:  

• Align marketing and sales teams early in the content creation process to ensure the final assets will meet the needs of the reps. 

• Train sales reps effectively by investing in training materials that are easy for reps to understand and remember. 

• Support sales reps with the sales enablement content they need so they don’t have to create it themselves. 

• Remind sales reps of your key messages using brief, easy-to-reference content they can quickly scan before their next sales call. 

Thanks for reading. If you’re launching a new solution, or struggling with inconsistent messaging from marketing and sales, let’s talk about it. We’ll let you know how we can help, and you can decide if that’s what you need. 

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Frequently Asked Questions

Why is clear messaging important in B2B sales? 

Clear B2B messaging accelerates decision-making, boosts trust and reduces costly miscommunication. In fact, 67% of B2B buyers list inconsistent messaging as a top reason for vendor dissatisfaction. Clear messaging aligns sales and marketing, directly improving sales cycle length and customer loyalty. 

How do I know if my company’s messaging is confusing customers? 

Identify messaging confusion by conducting internal audits of marketing and sales materials, performing stakeholder interviews, and analysing customer interactions using CRM tools like Salesforce. Look for patterns such as frequent customer questions, stalled deals, or negative customer feedback. 

How soon can I expect results after improving our B2B messaging? 

Enterprise companies typically see measurable improvements in sales efficiency, customer satisfaction, and conversion rates within a three to six month period after aligning their messaging. Regularly reviewing clear KPIs ensures continual progress. 

Author Bio

Christopher Carson is a Certified Digital Marketing Professional and PMP® who leads marketing at Altitude. He specializes in simplifying complex messaging for regulated industries like finance and technology. When he’s not working, he’s tending a pollinator garden that the bees—and his neighbors—seem to love. Connect with him on LinkedIn and follow Altitude here.

The story behind Altitude’s brand evolution

Every successful journey has pivotal moments—today is one of those for Altitude Management Inc. After twenty years of working with our clients to make complex solutions easy to understand, we've launched a new visual identity that aligns with our story of collaboration and clarity.

Why refresh our brand?

Our rebrand is more than a visual update—it reflects two decades of evolving values and deep client relationships. In an early workshop, our team identified simplicity as key, captured best by a team member: 



We don’t just simplify messages—we empower our clients by giving them confidence in the quality of their content.

We’ve been helping our clients tell their challenging stories for years. We weren’t doing nearly as good of a job of telling our own!

How we did it

Translating abstract values into a concrete brand involved thoughtful discussions, voting, compromises, and strategic decision making. Here's how we did it:

• Assemble diverse stakeholders: We gathered diverse perspectives by including our CEO, marketing managers, designers, content specialists and former clients into the process.

  

• Distribute questions ahead of meetings: To encourage brainstorming, we employed questions such as:
  
  

  • "What core values authentically define who we are as an organization?"

  • "What specific client challenges are we uniquely positioned to address?"

  • "Describe our brand as a person—what personality traits would they have?"



    
    

• Focus on open-minded input: We explicitly communicated that all ideas were welcome and emphasized collaborative discussion.



  
  

• Prioritize authenticity: We sought to avoid generic or aspirational language (ex. Industry leader, world-class solutions). Instead, we focused on genuine, client-validated strengths that accurately reflect our capabilities.

  
  

The end result of this process was a new brand, values and guidelines that we feel confident we can stand behind. They are an accurate reflection of who we are, and the response from our entire team was overwhelmingly positive.

Building brand voice, vision, and core values

Our mission, vision, and brand personality statements define our purpose and actions. Each was thoughtfully chosen to represent our belief that clear communication is essential for organizational success.

We’re not ‘all things to all people’ and there’s no point pretending that we are. In fact, when we meet new potential clients, we often begin by telling them what they shouldn’t hire us for, before telling them what we specialize in. They nearly always find that refreshing, and we find it makes the meeting much more productive.

Our mission statement stays true to our core belief in the power of effective marketing and sales communications. Our vision statement, while clearly unachievable, expresses our desire to push ourselves to share what we know and learn - as much as possible - to improve the quality of enterprise communications.

We were adamant that the qualities by which we define our brand personality had to feel ‘real’ to both ourselves, and our clients. As a result, we chose precise descriptors like 'clear communicator' and 'collaborative partner' and defined each one in simple terms. This approach aligns with research showing brands perceived as authentic enjoy approximately 33% higher consumer trust (Journal of Consumer Research, 2022).

Unpacking our new logo

It was time to say goodbye to our old logo, that has served us well for over 13 years. We ensured our new Altitude logo follows best practice design principles, clearly visible where it’s most likely to be viewed by our clients—digital spaces, marketing collateral, and internal communications.

Our new symbol alludes to our previous mountain logo but is much simpler, bolder, and conveys an important message about our approach to the work we do.

Selecting our typography

At Altitude, we’re known for our focus on readability and clarity, so it only made sense that our typography reflects those priorities. We chose two modern sans-serif fonts: Geist, known for minimalism and functionality, and Instrument Sans, selected for exceptional readability. These fonts also complement our overall brand aesthetic to maintain visual consistency, which is crucial for audience engagement (Aziz & Gupta, 2024).



“Visual consistency significantly enhances consumer trust and engagement across platforms”

(Aziz & Gupta, 2024).

Our new colors

Color psychology significantly shapes brand perception, evoking specific emotions—for example, blue for trust and orange for decisive action (Labrecque & Milne, 2012).

At Altitude, we intentionally selected Navy to communicate trust and professionalism, Bright Blue for innovation, and Alert Orange to reflect action, clearly aligning our palette with values essential to our audience.

Color applications



Aligning our brand with a modern vision

We're excited to launch our new and improved visual identity that reflects who we are – an agency committed to improving the quality and impact of B2B marketing and sales content.

We welcome you to explore our refreshed brand on our new website. Follow us on LinkedIn for behind-the-scenes insights and subscribe to our newsletter for practical tips.

Stay tuned for Altitude Academy, offering expert-led resources for effective B2B communication.

Ready to move your B2B buyers forward?

When it comes to B2B marketing, we believe understanding leads to action. Contact us and together let’s find a way to make the value of your complex solutions easier for your buyers to understand.

References:

Aziz, R., & Gupta, M. (2024). Consumer attitude and engagement towards branding on social media platforms: Evidence from the UK and India. Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202405.1109.v1

Freire, R., & Barbosa, B. (2024). Effects of brand visual identity on consumer attitude: A systematic literature review. Journal of Promotion Management. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.23411.07204

Grobert, J., O'Connor, Z., & Schloss, K. B. (2024). Brand new: How visual context shapes initial response to logos and brand perception. Journal of Promotion Management. https://doi.org/10.1080/1553118X.2024.2352114

Khamitov, M., Rajavi, K., Huang, D.-W., & Hong, Y. (2023). Consumer trust: Meta-analysis of 50 years of empirical research. Journal of Consumer Research, 51(1), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucad065

Linearity. (2023). 45 logo statistics that every designer should know. https://www.linearity.io/blog/logo-statistics/

Singh, S. (2006). Impact of color on marketing. Management Decision, 44(6), 783–789. https://doi.org/10.1108/00251740610673332

Labrecque, L. I., & Milne, G. R. (2012). Exciting red and competent blue: The importance of color in marketing. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 40(5), 711–727. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-010-0245-y

Wheeler, A. (2017). Designing brand identity: An essential guide for the whole branding team (5th ed.). John Wiley & Sons.

Eiseman, L. (2017). The Complete Color Harmony, Pantone Edition: Expert Color Information for Professional Results. Rockport Publishers.