4 Pillars of Effective Sales Messaging
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http://www.salesnexus.com/webinars/4-pillars-of-sales-messaging/ - Michael Halper of SalesScripter.com discusses how to communicate Value, Pain, Build Interest, get past gatekeepers, overcome objections and grow your sales with SalesScripter and LeadFerret.com
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4 Pillars of Effective Sales Messaging
- 1. Welcome! Be sure to join the audio portion of the meeting. See Audio in the GotoWebinar control panel. Ask questions by typing questions in the Questions area of the GotoWebinar control panel. The Pillars of Sales Messaging that Drives Growth
- 2. Your Hosts: Craig Klein, CEO, SalesNexus.com 18 years as a sales executive. Hiring, training sales people. Developing lead generation and business development campaigns. Michael Halper, CEO, Launch Pad Solutions, Inc. Author of “The Cold Calling Equation”. 20 years as a frontline sales, marketing and customer service leader. Forest Cassidy, CEO, LeadFerret.com Millions of B2B contacts with emails, FREE
- 3. 2013 Sales Growth Webinar Series
- 4. The Pillars Sales Messaging Strategy Cold Call Introduction Email Networking Website Presentation
- 5. What is Value • Transfer of an intangible attribute from one party to another that has a positive net worth • Could be at a personal level: – Making someone laugh – Teach someone how to do something – Being a good listener – Providing security – Making someone’s day easier • At a business level: – Helping a business to save money – Helping a business to make money – Proving valuable information – Making someone’s day easier – Helping to save time • It is not your product, it is what your product helps your clients to do or to achieve
- 6. Three Levels of Value Personal Value • Income Increased bonuses, commissions • Career Recognition and promotions • Workload Decreased/increased workload Business Value • Revenue Improve revenue / market share / close rate • Costs Decrease cost of goods sold / labor cost • Services Improve delivery of services Technical Value Automation of manual processes • Processes Improve performance • Systems Decrease time to perform work • Employees Improve reliability
- 7. Identifying Your Value Step 1: Identify a product / service, or feature Product / Service Function Technical Value Business Value Personal Value or Feature Auto inventory replenishment
- 8. Identifying Your Value Step 2: Identify what your product does Product / Service Function Technical Value Business Value Personal Value or Feature Auto inventory Automatically submits replenishment orders to vendors based on inventory levels
- 9. Identifying Your Value Step 3: Identify how that helps from a technical perspective Product / Service Function Technical Value Business Value Personal Value or Feature Auto inventory Automatically submits Decreases time spent replenishment orders to vendors ordering based on inventory levels
- 10. Identifying Your Value Step 4: Identify how that helps from a business perspective Product / Service Function Technical Value Business Value Personal Value or Feature Auto inventory Automatically submits Decreases time spent Decreases staff and replenishment orders to vendors ordering labor costs based on inventory levels
- 11. Identifying Your Value Step 5: Identify how that helps from a personal perspective Product / Service Function Technical Value Business Value Personal Value or Feature Auto inventory Automatically submits Decreases time spent Decreases staff and Improves work life replenishment orders to vendors ordering labor costs balance based on inventory levels
- 12. Identifying Your Value Step 6: Repeat for additional products Product / Service Function Technical Value Business Value Personal Value or Feature Auto inventory Automatically submits Decreases time spent Decreases staff and Improves work life replenishment orders to vendors ordering labor costs balance based on inventory levels Predictive demand Predicts inventory Increases ordering Decreases inventory Improves end of year forecasting needed based on accuracy costs bonus historical data Management Provides visibility Decreases time Improves decision Improves promotion dashboard across inventory and gathering information making and bottom options orders line results
- 13. Identifying Your Value Step 7: Summarize to arrive at your core value Product / Service Function Technical Value Business Value Personal Value or Feature Auto inventory Automatically submits Decreases time spent Decreases staff and Improves work life replenishment orders to vendors ordering labor costs balance based on inventory levels Predictive demand Predicts inventory Increases ordering Decreases inventory Improves end of year forecasting needed based on accuracy costs bonus historical data Management Provides visibility Decreases time Improves decision Improves promotion dashboard across inventory and gathering information making and bottom options orders line results Inventory Manages inventory Improves the ability Decreases inventory Improves management levels and orders to manage inventory and labor cost compensation software potential
- 14. Qualify the Prospect • Assessing prospects in two areas: 1. How well they fit with what you have to offer 2. How likely they will be to purchase • All discussions should include qualifying questions • Soft qualifying questions – First contact – Determine if it makes sense to keep talking • Hard qualifying questions – First conversation/meeting – Determine if the prospect and lead is real
- 15. Qualified Prospect vs. Unqualified Prospect Qualified Prospect Unqualified Prospect Needs to be medium to strong in all Can have any of the following Need to Purchase No Need to Purchase Authority to Purchase No Authority to Purchase Ability to Purchase No Ability to Purchase Intent to Purchase No Intent to Purchase
- 16. 2 Step Qualifying Process Step 1 – Soft Qualifying •To make sure it makes sense to meet and keep talking •Takes place in first contact Step 2 – Hard Qualifying •Identify if you can consider the prospect and lead are real •Takes place in first meeting
- 17. What is Pain • Something not working well – Causing a negative impact • Something could be working better – Results are not as good as could be • Are things great, good, ok, or could be better ? – Great or good: probably no pain – OK or could be better: likely pain
- 18. Three Levels of Pain Personal Pain • Income Low bonuses, commissions, compensation • Career No recognition, no promotions / career path • Work Environment High workload, poor work–life balance Business Pain • Revenue Low revenue / market share / close rate • Costs High cost of goods sold / labor cost • Services Poor delivery of services Technical Pain • Processes Slow, broken, or manual processes • Systems Poor system or employee performance • Employees Lack of reliability
- 19. Four Tactics to Uncover Pain 1. Rating questions 2. Give pain examples 3. Wish list questions 4. Disqualify
- 20. What are Objections • A prospect’s best weapon – Mini stop signs – Used to take control of the call and take it in a direction of their choosing • Common Objections: – I am busy right now. – Who are you with? – What is this in regards to? – I am not interested. – Just send me some information. – We already use somebody. – We are not looking to make a change right now. – We do not have budget/money to spend.
- 21. Objections Handling Options 1. Comply 1. Overcome 1. Redirect
- 22. Building an Objections Map • Tool to build to use as a guide for dealing with objections • List out anticipated objections • Formulate best responses • Can include redirects and overcome responses
- 23. Build Interest • High level product/service details • Connect pain with value • Communicate ROI • Explain differentiation • Share client story • Paint a picture of the future state • Discuss impacts of doing nothing • Share company facts
- 24. Establishing Credibility • Name Dropping • Story Telling • Lack of Availability • Lack of Neediness • Picture of Consensus
- 27. If You Want More Help • The Cold Calling Equation – Problem Solved – Available on Amazon - $15.95 • 10 Week Sales Prospecting Training Program – http://salesscripter.com/products/sales-training/ – 50% off coupon code: success • SalesScripter – www.salesscripter.com – Walk-through services available • Send email to info@salesscripter.com
- 28. Access all Sales Growth Webinars here - SalesNexus.com/resources/webinars Complete the Scripter and get $250 off on any SalesNexus Quick Start Program!
- 29. Start Today! FREE for 30 days! Upload your own list with emails Get 500 contacts w/ emails from LeadFerret! Create templates and campaigns Send blasts (up to 50,000 each month!) Generate Leads! Close Sales!
Editor's Notes
- Before we go any further, let’s clearly discuss what value is specifically in the context that we are using it as it can mean different things to different people. When we talk about value, we are referring to the transfer of something from one party to another that has a positive net worth. Now, the important thing to get your hands around with this is that value is an intangible attribute. It is not something you can see or pick up, yet it is definitely there, has a positive net worth. And actually the transfer between parties can be visible when you are aware of the value that exists and you know what to look for, and that is what we will teach you hear today. Let me provide a little more color around that by sharing a few examples. First, it is important to note that value is something that is transferred everyday at a personal level between family and friends. For example, when you bring humor to a group or conversation and make someone laugh, you are providing value as you are improving the conversation from what it would be without that. Or by teaching someone something, being a good listener, providing security, or making someone’s life easier are all examples of providing value at a personal level. You are essentially giving something or contributing something to another person. Once we understand how we offer value at a personal level, we can better understand how we deliver value at a business level. Just as we can improve the lives and interactions with friends, we can do this for our clients as well by helping them to save money, helping them to make more money, by providing valuable information, or again making someone’s day easier. These are all examples of the value that we can transfer from us to our prospects and clients. One important thing to start to get your hands around is that value is not the same thing as the product that you provide. It is what your product helps your clients to do or helps them to achieve.
- The value that we deliver can typically impact our clients on three different levels. At the lowest level, we offer technical value. These are the benefits and improvements that we can deliver that make things work better and are realized in the areas of processes, systems, and people. Examples are helping a business to save time, automate certain tasks, improve performance, improve reliability, etc. As a business begins to realize value at the technical level, those benefits will trickle up and be realized at the business level and be seen as a decrease in costs, increase in revenue, or decrease in risk. For example, if manual processes are able to be automated, that will lead to a decrease in the labor that is needed and as a result, there could be a decrease labor costs and this is an example of realizing business value. When we help clients to realize business value, that can also continue to trickle up to impact the clients on a personal level and be realized in the form of recognition, compensation, decreased work load, etc. For example, if processes are automated and that decreases costs, that could lead to a promotion for the person that is responsible for that area. Or they could get an extra bonus for the year. Or maybe it means that they no longer have to work over the weekend and are able to spend more time with their family and this is realizing personal value. So when your clients consume your products and services, they are likely going to realize some sort of value and benefits in these three areas.
- As you can see, it can be easy to go down the wrong path when trying to write a good value statement. To help with that, here is a four step process that well you to build your value statement. It might not build the perfect statement for your situation, but it will at least get you going in the right direction. Step one is pretty easy and that is just to simply identify the main product or service that you are selling. Or we might want to get a little more granular and list out the actual features of the product that you sell. But for this example, we will just stay at the product level. For an example, we are currently selling inventory management software.
- The next step in the process is to identify the technical benefits that are provided by the product that you have listed out in step one. If we sell inventory management software, how does that help from a technical standpoint? If the software helps our clients to order more accurately and may be go through the ordering process quicker, than we could say that we help our clients to improve their ability to effectively manage their inventory levels. This is at the technical level because we are talking about processes and not getting into dollars just yet.
- Step three is to identify the business benefits that result from the technical benefits that are delivered. When we help to clients to improve their ability to effectively manage their inventory levels, what does that lead to? If there is less inventory sitting around, then help our customers to decreased the cost of goods sold. We also automate more and make things easier and this can help to decrease administrative time.
- Step three is to identify the business benefits that result from the technical benefits that are delivered. When we help to clients to improve their ability to effectively manage their inventory levels, what does that lead to? If there is less inventory sitting around, then help our customers to decreased the cost of goods sold. We also automate more and make things easier and this can help to decrease administrative time.
- There are four characteristics of a qualified prospect. Does the prospect have a true need to purchase what you sell? You may have a prospect that is very interested and excited about what you have to offer, but do they need what you have or do they want what you have? The more they need what you have, the more qualified the prospect. Does the prospect have the authority to make the purchase from a decision making power stand point? If we are a car sales person and taking someone on a test drive, but it is the spouse that is at home that would make the approval of the car purchase, we are not spending time with a qualified prospect. Does the prospect have the ability to make the purchase from a funding or money standpoint? If the prospect loves what you have but does not have any money to spend, the prospect is not completely qualified. Does the prospect have real genuine interest purchasing from you? Just because a prospect is talking with you does not mean that there is serious interest on their side. The prospect really needs medium to strong levels in all of these areas to be truly qualified. A prospect only needs to be weak in one area for their to be a concern and we will look at four different types of prospects that are good in only three of the four key areas as we look at four types of unqualified prospects.
- Hopefully by now you can see how important it is to screen and qualify prospects. Now let’s get into how to effectively do that. We provide you with a 2 step qualifying process. Step 1 is called soft qualifying and it is focused on primarily determining whether it makes sense to meet and keep talking. The main thing that we look at here is, at the most basic level, are there any level of open needs in the area where we have something to offer. We are trying to eliminate those No Need to Purchase prospects as if there is not even a need, let’s not waste each other time. This soft qualifying takes place in the first conversations with the prospect. For example, this level of qualifying takes place on the cold call, or could also be on an inbound call from a prospect, and we softly qualify to identify if it makes sense to continue talking or put a meeting on the calendar. Step 2 is hard qualifying and this is where you dig deeper to identify how the prospect measures up in of the four key areas. The ideal time and place for this is when you are in the first meeting with the prospect.
- Let’s discuss just what pain is in the context that we use it in. Pain is something that is not working well or could be working better for a prospect and this is causing a negative impact. We will get into much more detail and go into examples and we just want to introduce the concept at this point. But at the highest level, one question that can be asked to determine if there is pain is “are things great, good, OK, or could be better?” If things are either great or good, there might not be any pain, or at least not very much. And if things are OK or could be better, there likely is some sort of pain that the prospect is experiencing.
- Now let’s dig a little deeper into what pain can look like. There are actually three levels of pain. At the lowest level, you have technical pain. This is when things are technically not working well or could be better, and can be often found at the areas of systems, processes, or people. When pain is experienced at the technical level, that will usually trickle up and cause pain at the business level. This is where a prospect begins to feel negative impacts in the areas of revenue, costs, and the delivery of services. The pain does not stop their as it can continue on work its way up to impact your prospects at a personal level. This is when the technical and business pain starts to impact the individuals in areas like workload, compensation, job security, career growth, and even spill over into their personal life as well.
- Even though it can be tough to uncover pain while cold calling, it is not impossible. And here are 4 tactics that are very easy to implement and can have an immediate impact on your results. We will go through each one at a time.
- Before we go any further, let’s clearly discuss what objections are. Objections are a prospect’s best weapon when they answer your cold call. They are statements or questions that the prospect will throw at you and they are like mini stops signs that the prospect will hold up. They use to try to take a control of the call and take it in a direction of their choosing. And if they begin to feel like you are selling something when they are not looking to buy, they will want try to end the call and will use objections to get there as soon as possible. Now let’s take a look at common objections and ones that you are just about guaranteed to run up against. I am busy right now. Who are you with? What is this in regards to? I am not interested. Just send me some information. We already use somebody. We are not looking to make a change right now. We do not have any budge to spend. Those are eight objections that consistently come up. You could maybe tweak those for your situation, and add a couple that are specific to your products, you would have a complete list of objections to be prepared for. As part of this training, we will explain these one at a time and show you how to get around them.
- Now that we know what objections to expect, what are our options when the come up? Well, we have basically three primary options. We can comply with the objection, we can try to overcome the objection, or we can redirect the objection. Let’s go through each option in a little more detail.
- Now that we have outlined some of the objections that we are likely to face and we have talked about some ways to respond, we can now build a tool called an objections map. This is basically a document that lists out your anticipated objections and then shows you the response for each that has the best chances of keeping the call going. The tool basically can then be used as a guide or a map that tells you what to do when on the phone. This tool can drastically improve your results and it is pretty easy to build, just list out your anticipated objections, then formulate the best responses. And we have spent a lot of time talking about redirecting, but your objections map could also include responses to overcome objections in case there are times to use that approach.
- When a gatekeeper answers your call, he or she is instantly trying to screen you out and determine if you are a friend or a foe. A friend would be someone who is already connected with the company in someway like a current vendor or business partner and a foe would be someone who is an outsider trying to get in, like one of those cold callers that is calling to try to get in and sell something. What we want to do is try to get the gatekeeper to see us as a friend so they will less likely to screen us out and one very easy way to do that is to use a tactic of name dropping. For example, we can say something like, I spoke with Tom White in accounting and now I am trying to reach someone in HR. This presents the image that we are already engaged and not a complete outsider and this minor tweak can often be the difference in the gatekeeper letting you in. And if we have not met with Tom White in accounting, we could still name drop his name by saying something like, I am planning on meeting with Tom White in accounting and before I do that, I would like with someone in HR.” Nothing misleading there as we likely are planning on meeting with Tom at some point and by sharing his name and our plans, we give off the image as we are not a complete outsider. We can also name drop external clients that we work with to establish some level of credibility. That is not going to be as strong as sharing internal names and is probably only going to really help when talking with more senior gatekeepers like executive assistants.
- Qualifying is maybe one of the most important areas to grasp when trying to improve sales results. This is because the time that you have to work with during the week is limited and as a result it is extremely valuable. There are only 40 to 50 business hours during the week and there is nothing that you can do to increase that. One key to improving your sales results is getting as much out of those hours that you can and one important thing to focus on with that is spending as much of that time with prospects that fit well with you what you have to offer and that have a high probability of purchasing something. And also to decrease time spent or wasted with low quality prospects and qualifying will help with all of this. Another factor is that our control is somewhat limited. We cannot control the prospects that you talk to in terms of making the call you back or making them purchase. But what you can control is what prospects you talk to and spend time with and which ones you don’t. When you are more selective over the prospects that you work with, you will improve your ability to manage deals and your pipeline. In sales, knowledge is power. The more that you know about the prospect, the more powerful you will be. By qualifying, you will gather more information and knowledge and this will help you to uncover pain and generate more leads and better quality leads. Lastly, in sales building good relationships is key. When you qualify prospects, you position yourself to build better relationships with prospects as you will make a better impression when going through the steps of trying to qualify. You will decrease the prospect’s guard as you will present yourself as making sure they are a fit before you sell to them and having their best interest in mind. When on a cold call, asking some qualifying questions can make cold calls more conversational. And all of this will help to build rapport with prospects.