Writing your sales scripts benefit statements.
This is the holy grail of writing sales scripts that work.
You must quickly communicate value.
If you communicate value, you can mess up a lot of things and still win.
Value breaks down doors.
True confession: When I was earning my cold call appointment setting PhD smiling and dialing my way to setting more than 2,000 C-level sales appointments in diverse industries… I used to pretend that the phone line was 3D and I could reach through it and club my decision maker with a 2 x 4. Not kidding.
All you have to work with on the phone is your mouth and your brain.
The 2 x 4 I used were the value and benefit statements conveyed. That is the type of impact you must communicate to have any chance of establishing a foothold in their minds, which leads to a meeting.
Tip: Do not confuse being direct and having impact with …
… being rude, unprofessional, pushy, too salesy (don’t get me going) or the famous “sounding like a telemarketer.”
You will never write telephone sales scripts that work by focusing on what you won’t do.
Using words with “impact” have nothing to do with coercing or trying to force a result on the phone. Some of the best appointment setters I have ever worked with are soft spoken and speak casually to an extreme, but their words impact like a 2 x 4 and they generate qualified opportunities consistently.
Laser focus on what you must do to craft and deliver sales scripts that work. Think only of those things.
Here are some template benefit statements and benefit concepts to get you thinking…
• Decrease cost of X by Y%
• Reduce cycle time by 31%
• Increase revenue by X%
• Increase revenue by X% within 6 months
• Decrease prep time by 1/3
• Competitive advantage
• Eliminate expense
• Eliminate _______
• Reduce X usage by 45%
• Customized solution
• Reliable and consistent
• Single point of contact
• Productivity gains
• Personal productivity
• Cost certainty
• Avoid business interruption
• Less down time
• Faster restore time
• Uniform standards of…
The list could go on and on. To have 30 or more benefit statements in your “pile of words” is not uncommon.
Play “which means what” for better benefits in your sales scripts
Here is a little exercise I recommend to generate impactful ultimate benefits that get the attention of clones of your best accounts.
Play “which means what.”
Take your generic vanilla sounding benefit and keep asking “which means what?”
Example: I did a training for a company selling laboratory equipment. They were an industry leader, great reputation, starting to feel the squeeze from lower-cost competition.
One of their benefits was “we thoroughly quality check our products.”
Which means what? Our customers don’t have to.
Which means what? They save money and increase their margins.
Which means what? Since they can skip the testing step they can roll out new products faster.
Which means what? Faster time to market gives them a competitive advantage over their competition.
Which means what? They get greater market share.
Which means what? Due to our superior testing, when they sell to their customers, there are fewer defects.
Which means what? Customer relationships are weakest when there are performance issues. Since there are fewer performance issues their client retention is higher and that increases profits.
Which means what? And on and on and on.
The point?
A plain vanilla benefit is now related to higher margins, improved time to market, competitive advantage and market share, client retention and ultimately saving the world.
Play “which means what” and see where it leads you. You will think of more ultimate bottom line benefits that matter to your prospects and your competitors are not mentioning. This exercise also helps greatly in fighting price competition by broadening the issues on the table, but that is a totally different topic.
Two super words you should include.
Options.
Strategies.
My experience is people want to hear about “options” and “strategies.” Use those words.
Words that should not be on your sales scripts benefit list
You might have noticed that there is one typical highly touted benefit that is not on the list.
Cost.
Lowest cost.
Inexpensive.
Cheap.
Save money.
Never ever use those words as part of a sales script benefit. It devalues you. It lumps you in with all the other worthless knuckleheads who can’t think of anything substantive to say, so they say, “I can save you money.”
Never lead with saving money. It is not what will get you in the door. Doing so attracts the wrong kind of buyers and positions you poorly for a value sale. It is kind of obligatory for you to make reference to costs, but my suggestion is that of the 3 benefits you mention in your script, that references to price, if made at all, be last.
Something like…
“… Companies like A, B, C and 1,500 others selected us as they get monster benefit A, colossal benefit B and competitive pricing…”
At most I recommend you reference “competitive pricing,” and mention it last. Contrary to popular belief, pushing low pricing this early in the game will cost you opportunities.
Tip: If people push you on pricing, here are 3 concepts you can use to reply and get the focus off price.
#1. Wear it with pride. “I’ll tell you right now, if you are looking for the lowest price and that’s all. We are not it.”
#2. I would have to be an idiot. “What an incompetent fool I would be, if before I met you, before I was informed about your business objectives, and what has worked and failed in the past for you, before I even knew if what we had would improve your business conditions, I tried to guess at what you need or pricing. Only the desperate or incompetent would do that.” (I loved saying that.) Great way to start casting doubt on the credibility of your lower priced competitors.
#3. All I can tell you is. “All I can tell you is that companies like International Amalgamated, Cheapskate Industries and Mega Corp., who check out every possible source on things like this before they commit, looked at all their choices and selected us. Them and about 2,500 others. There are good reasons that they did.” Then pause and let that hang in the air.
Then you continue to close on your objective.
There are a few reasons why you want your list of potential benefits to be as extensive as possible.
You sharpen them.
You get to pick the most powerful.
You are more prepared for “first meetings” and more conscious of all the reasons why someone might buy. So you engage in more effective interactions and close more.
All because you are more prepared.
This is an excerpt from my book ” 7 Steps to Sales Scripts for B2B Appointment Setting.” There are many more sample sales scripts and language suggestions that can stimulate ideas for your own scripts that will work. You can take a look at the book on Amazon here.
