Everything you and your salespeople say when communicating with prospects is sales messaging. You have the choice to go with what naturally pops up in your head, or you can take a different approach.
Conventional Sales Messaging Approach
First, let’s look at a conventional approach or what many companies are doing for messaging before looking at some things to do with your sales messages. Often, most companies will train their salespeople in the following areas:
- Company: details of the company, history, number of offices, etc.
- Products: details of the products and portfolio.
- Functionality: what the products and services do.
- Features: the features that are available.
- Benefits: the benefits that can be achieved.
Often, these categories will be dominant in a new hire sales training program and most of the content on which a person is trained on.
What’s wrong with this approach? Answer: It’s an “all about me” approach. Basically, all these categories are about you, and when you train your salespeople on this, they’ll go out and have an “all about me” approach when communicating with prospects.
The challenge is when you’re at the very beginning of the sales cycle and prospecting in order to generate leads, you may not be at a point in which you’ve earned the right to talk about yourself yet. Or another way to see it is the prospect may not care yet about you or anything to do with you.
Alternative Sales Messaging Approach
It can be a simple solution to shifting the sales messages to focus more on the prospect if you agree it may not be best to talk so much about yourself when initially speaking with a prospect. So, how do we get this done?
The following are other categories that we can focus on when developing our own messaging or developing our sales training for new employees:
- Value: the value that’s transferred to the prospect when purchasing and using your products.
- Pain: the challenges that prospects are typically experiencing that you help resolve.
- Qualify: the questions which you should be asking your prospects to determine what’s going on.
- Objections: how you respond to the objections you’re guaranteed to face.
- Interest: what you say in order to trigger interest on the prospect’s side.
- Credibility: what you say will establish credibility as well as make you seem reliable and not such an outsider.
The majority of them are about the prospect, which is the main difference between these categories. How you help the prospect is value. The prospect’s challenges are pain points. Qualifying questions will definitely be about the prospect because they are questions directed specifically to them.
When incorporating these fundamental areas into your personal preparation or your corporate sales training, they’ll impact everything you say. Also, with these being more about the prospect and less about you, you’ll be completely shifting the opposite direction from an “all about me” frame over to one that’s “all about you.”
SalesScripter provides call scripts to help sales pros with sales messaging.