Your clients and accounts are in business to do something.
Manufacture something, get a product or service to market, deliver or design something, educate kids,service their clients and accounts. The people you sell to are in business to do something.
Remember this. If people don’t meet you, they don’t pick you over competing vendors, they choose to do nothing rather than buy…. ultimately it is because you didn’t give them enough reason to do so.
It is all about perceived benefits.
Bulletin for you. You or your company being able to save someone or a company money is a very very weak place to sell from. If you emphasize cost savings or heaven forbid that is the only benefit you are hyping, you are selling from a very very weak platform. The weakest.
Contrarian but true. Leading with or emphasizing cost-savings is the weakest way to communicate a benefit impactful to your prospect.
Let’s put this into perspective with some recent examples and personal experience.
Recent example #1: Coaching client flogging IT services. Prospecting script only mentions doing it for less. We reframe that to add in things like productivity gains, avoiding business interruption, increasing lifecycle and other “ultimate benefit issues” and the script is working. Lead generation took off gangbusters.
Recent example #2: Employee management HR services coaching client. Getting hammered. Croaking for opportunities. Prior focus solely “we can save you money.” When refocused to profit generating activities, better benefits, less liability and improving productivity… and with the addition of a WOW credibility statement (when before there was none)…total turn-around in results. Living in crank city.
Recent Example #3: Education Technology provider. Eating competitors alive well before I ever showed up to speak and train about 20 times. Was their messaging “The hunks of metal we will sell you are cheaper than the hunks of metal from competitors?” No. The messaging was always about ultimately what education professionals want to do with those hunks of metal. Improve test scores. Engage students. Improve learning for all. Make it easier for teachers to teach. Competing sales teams wear masks to avoid eating their dust. They do more business than next four competitors combined.
My own experience. I smiled and dialed my way to set more than 2,000 C-level appointments in diverse industries. Always mentioned three benefits. “Cost-competitiveness” was always the last one mentioned and never repeated. I always treated it as a throw-away. Something expected and perfunctory but not something that was going to help me win.
Why? The possibility of saving them a few shekels is the weakest point to sell from. That may or may not happen. There are transition costs and time investments needed to change vendors. There are risks to changing vendors. Many times those costs and risks don’t seem worth it to maybe save some money. Not the biggest impact.
But helping them to do what they are in business to do better and faster…. improve service to their customers, help them sell more, increase their productivity, cut the time to market, on and on the examples could go…. those “ultimate benefits” put images of grandeur and achievement in the minds of your prospects that dwarf the possibility of shaving some costs.
Those “ultimate” benefits lift the eyebrows of prospects and get them saying ‘Hmmmmmmmmmmm.” Get them curious. Gets them thinking about being able to do more of what they do. Doing it better. Faster. Sell more themselves.
So think about what you are saying. Write down the words you most commonly use. Punch up your messaging with appeals to bigger and more impactful benefits.
Put the “save money” benefit in its proper place and I can almost guarantee you that you will get more meetings with qualified prospects.
Go get em,
Scott Channell
Do you or your team need help with messaging or working a total coordinated prospecting process? Just call me. 978-296-2700.
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copyright 2012 scott channell
