When marketing your expertise, you think and work in averages, developing messages that are tailored to the average of a market or segment. Your positioning statement or key value proposition are examples of such marketing messages.

When selling your expertise, however, you are in a conversation with an individual. And almost no individual in a segment is exactly like the average of that segment, no matter how large the segment.* So when you aim for an average, you hit approximately everybody in the group but precisely nobody.

For this reason it’s important to make the distinction between marketing language (crafted for common denominators) and sales language (bespoke to the individual). Because marketing is directed at a construct (an average of many) and sales is intimate (one-to-one), parroting marketing messages in a sale can make it seem like you’re not listening, that you don’t understand the client.

When we’re on the receiving end of marketing messages, we accept that close enough is good enough. But when we’re in a conversation with another human being, we want to be seen for who we are, for what makes us different from others rather than what makes us similar to others.

In your search for the right thing to say in the sale, the mistake is to fall back on generic marketing language and make claims of value creation.

Marketers make claims to averages of groups.

Salespeople converse with individuals.

Marketers use value propositions.

Salespeople use value conversations.

Don’t pitch your value in the sale. That’s marketing’s job. Your job is to uncover the value the client is seeking. Arm yourself with questions, not claims.

*Todd Rose’s excellent book The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness does a great job of driving home the tradeoffs we make when thinking in averages.