Why I HATE Sales Scripts
Two people. On the phone, having a conversation. That's what people use phones for - to have conversations.
What happens in a conversation? One person says something. The other person listens, understands (or asks a question to make sure he understands), then responds appropriately.
The conversation moves from point A to point B because BOTH people are talking - and listening.
Now let's apply this to sales calls.
Yes, it is possible for a salesperson to have a conversation with a potential customer. But only if the salesperson:
- Is knowledgeable enough about his products to talk about them in a responsive, off-the-cuff way
- Actually listens to what the customer is saying
- Understands what the customer is trying to do
- Is selling something that really will solve the customer's problem
If all of these requirements are met, the conversation can (and will very likely) lead to a sale.
If, on the other hand, the salesperson is like most of the salespeople in the world, he has:
- Been given a script - and is judged by how well he follows that script
- Is not knowledgeable enough about his products to talk about them in a meaningful way
- Does not listen to the customer
- Does not understand what the customer is trying to do
- Will try to sell the customer on the product even if it is not appropriate for the customer.
The majority of these sales calls fail. They aren't conversations. They are self-serving rants, perpetrated by a salesperson who completely ignores what the customer needs, and what the customer is trying to find out.
I had this experience just the other night. I saw a late-night ad on TV while in a hotel room, for something I actually wanted to try. I don't normally watch commercial TV, and I think I last bought something from a TV ad in 1987, but in any case, there I was. I called the 800 number and a pleasant lady answered the phone. I knew exactly what I wanted to order - and what I didn't want to order (the $10 off the first purchase if you sign up for automatic renewal).
I made that very clear to the gal from the start: only this product, no other products, and not interested in the $10 off deal. Of course, that didn't stop her. She offered me 6 other products, as we "wrapped up" the call, including the $10 off deal.
She may as well have been selling to a recording. No matter how many times I told her what I wanted to buy - and didn't want to buy - she paid no attention. The Script Must Be Obeyed! She had to follow the script - for the sake of her job.
Her oh-so-smart sales manager was basically telling her to ignore anything the customer was saying, and, no matter what, to follow the script. What a joke.
Her oh-so-smart smart sales manager also left me with a very bitter taste after the call. As interested as I was in the product, I thought, "We'll see if this is any good - but I'm hoping I can get something similar from another company that doesn't use these techniques." So they won a small battle - and then lost the war.
When I ran sales departments, we had a meeting in the morning, every single day. The question was, "What's stopping you from making sales?" I then made sure that barrier - whatever it was - got removed, hopefully before the next day's meeting.
I also made sure that my people understood the product and could answer any questions effortlessly and accurately. That meant aggressive and endless training, focusing on the problems customers were trying to solve, and the best ways to help them solve those problems.
If you want to make sales - and win customers - ditch the script. And start training like crazy.
Subject Lines: Separating so-so leaders from great leaders
I'm running a leadership summit for a client next month, and have been thinking hard about all the things that make a leader great.
The bottom line: Great leaders are effective. Effective people get the right things done.
How much meaningful work does that person get done - by himself, and through others? How easy is it for those others to accomplish what they should, working for that person?
If you look at leadership that way, you can quickly identify the effective leaders in your company. They are facilitators. Their instructions are clear. Their intentions are clear. Their vision - their "roadmap," if you will - is clear. Those who work for them know what the goal is, and how their leader expects them to get there. They know what they must do.
Which brings us to the mighty email Subject Line.
Most work projects are initiated, discussed, and managed via email. Instructions are given. Supporting materials are passed from one person to another. Work is organized by subject line (and the names of attached files).
To work on a particular project, you go to your inbox, find the messages that pertain to the assignment, and then start to take the necessary steps.
Given the importance of subject lines, you would think that managers would pay more attention to them. Most don't. They and their people would get a lot more done if they used subject lines as they should be used.
I've seen top-level corporate managers try to kick off a major effort using a subject line that started sometime back in 2003, and was unhelpful even then: "Further thoughts" or "getting back to you." The message inside was long and rambling, a collection of threads between dozens of people. Finally the group had come to a consensus. In the "now it's time to get to work" email, the manager leaves the subject line as is, adds a few lines at the top of the message, and sends it out to everyone.
This isn't leadership. This is dereliction of digital duty.
A good leader would take the extra 5 - 10 minutes to create a NEW email with a NEW subject line: "Project XYZ kickoff: Roles, responsibilities, and deadlines." There would be no doubt in anyone's mind that THIS is the important email, because of the subject line. The effective leader would make sure it contained all the information everyone needed to get started. Everything would be spelled out, organized, prioritized, and clear.
And, it would be easy to find later - just sort by subject line, and there it is, right where you'd expect to find it. A good leader would then start the subject line on all other emails on Project XYZ with "Project XYZ" - so people could gather them all in one folder as new messages came in from the boss.
Businesses could take a hint from the military, which gives operations code names. If all of the emails about your company's website redesign started with "NewSite," it would be really easy for people to gather and use all the relevant material on the subject.
Attention to the right details makes a leader exponentially more effective. How great are your subject lines?
Why you need a social media firestorm policy - NOW.
Companies aren't really set up to interact efficiently with individual customers. Companies are organizations, filled with teams of people, doing their particular tasks.
Companies have lots of customers. Individual customers can, and do, get upset, when the company disappoints them.
Now, thanks to the many channels available to them, customers - even one customer - can make a big stink, in a big hurry. Marketers need to react quickly, and in the right way.
This is a big problem for everyone right now, particularly in marketing and customer service. Unfortunately, I see more "head in sand" behavior than a mature recognition that this is a problem that must be handled, and not just at the tactical level.
C-level executives aren't thinking of social media strategically, and they haven't thought through what they should do if they suddenly find themselves in a social-media firestorm.
Instead, they are thinking of social media as another marketing tactic, and assigning almost-intern-level people to the task of "listening and responding." It's all a bunch of chatter, and it's "out there," and it must be addressed/responded to, but that's about it.
Meanwhile, marketers know they're sitting on a digital volcano. They know they're not seeing all the mentions they need to see. Worse, they also aren't taking the lead in helping C-level executives think about this stuff strategically.
A social media policy needs to be drafted. It should contain all the "what if" scenarios, and how you should best respond to them. In other words, what could go wrong - and how you should respond when it does.
Categories of potential social media firestorms include problems with people, products, processes, and policies.
- Product problems could include something really terrible happening to a person who used the product.
- People problems include someone leaking information, or being "outed" for something they did or said.
- Process problems include frustrating or misleading website/ecommerce functions, and all of the ways your company interacts with the customer.
- Policy problems almost always involve a trust issue - such as privacy, security, or suppression of the truth.
One other category: An inflammatory accusation that goes viral. It's important that these issues be addressed immediately, and by the CEO. A tweet from the CEO, saying, "We're looking into it," can keep that volcano from going into full eruption mode. And then, of course, appropriate action must be taken and communicated.
Part of the policy should be that marketers have immediate access to the CEO in case of a social media firestorm, so the CEO and the marketers can decide on the proper course of action. With a policy already in place, they can do this in "social time" - fast enough to resolve the issue and take the heat out of the storm.
How to differentiate yourself
I have just finished interviewing about 25 top execs running system integrator companies. Some are doing well, some aren’t. But one thing they all had in common: a desire to differentiate themselves, and no clue as to how to do it.
With apologies to Seth Godin, it’s not enough to decide that you’re going to be a purple cow. When you’re selling complex, high-scrutiny, long-relationship technical services, being a purple cow can actually hurt you. No one wants to trust their entire logistics or security system to some strange-looking animal. The strangeness just adds more questions to an already long list of questions. It raises their high anxiety level even higher.
So what is a company to do?
First, don’t decide what you are by gazing intently into the mirror. We never see ourselves - the good or the bad - as our customers see us, anyway. It’s a complete waste of time. We think they hire us for X, when they really hire us for Y, and we barely even think about Y. We take Y for granted, because we’ve always been good at Y, and we assume everybody does Y.
If you interview your customers, however, you will learn that the other guys don’t do Y very well at all, that Y is really important to customers - something I call the “Critical Characteristic” in my upcoming book - and that you do Y pretty darn well. “Y” is why they hired you.
Then, make sure the right people in your company (or associated with your company) do the brainstorming about who you are and what you do. They should be big-picture thinkers, but also very grounded and totally connected to customers. They should not be the super-critical type, or the too-reactive type - those people who base their strategy on the last person they had lunch with or the last technical blog they just read. They should also be aware of what the analysts are saying, but not stuck on what they’re saying. Analysts have the nasty habit of pimping for the companies who pay them the most. They are not necessarily in sync with what real customers want - and are doing.
The meeting shouldn’t be a “creative” meeting. It should be a “logic” meeting. Lots of diagrams, organizing, and categorizing. Lots of characterization - who is our preferred/best customer? What is most important to them? What are we doing right - now - to meet those needs, and where are we falling short? What would it look like if we were doing everything right? How is the market organized? Who are the players, and who’s rising? Who’s falling?
The most important question: Where’s the biggest need, and how can we fill it most efficiently, given our core strengths? How do customers describe this need, and how can we best describe our solution as it relates to this need? This is your differentiation.
Once you have defined the best way to differentiate yourself, “writing the copy” is relatively straightforward - and will resonate with your prospective customers. If you have not defined your true value - as perceived by your customers - nothing you write will “work,” no matter how “purple” it is.
Plain old black and white works, if the solution you’re describing is the solution your customer has been seeking.
Is marketing copy becoming irrelevant?
Now that consumer-generated product information - mostly in the form of reviews - is overwhelming the web and dominating the customer's buying process, I have to ask the question: is marketing copy becoming obsolete? Does the very fact that a marketer wrote some copy make that copy less-believable, less-trustworthy, and therefore - dare I say - irrelevant?
Almost everyone knows that copywriters are paid to say nice things about the products they're describing. They say "our experts will have you up and running in no time," even if the process takes 6 weeks and involves IT, your webmaster, your legal team, and keeps you from doing anything else until the installation is complete.
Existing customers, however, writing about their experiences, would tell you that really happened to them. You might still decide to buy that enterprise-wide system, but you'd be going into the installation phase with your eyes open. You'd be better prepared. You wouldn't have that luxury if you had been blind-sided by the copy written by the marketer.
But there is a middle ground, one where the marketer simply tells the truth about what typically happens after the customer signs a contract, or the truth about the way a product is made.
"These shirts tend to run a little large, so you might want to order a smaller size," the marketer will write, helpfully. (Of course, the marketer has to know this - and that would only happen if the marketer interviewed customers.) Or, "The installation phase can take as long as 6 weeks; here's a step-by-step guide that will help you move smoothly through the process."
Marketers can, and are, also turning into managers of user-generated content. They are making sure that reviews show up wherever their products are sold. Management of this content includes inviting customers to write reviews; filtering out reviews that mention competitors (for a whole lot of reasons) or introduce legal issues; posting the reviews; and sending the reviews out to other platforms.
As with all efforts related to anything remotely social, all this takes a lot of work - but it is work that more and more marketers find themselves doing. Customer-generated content is definitely starting to eclipse company-generated content.
Comments
marketing copy is at least the starting point
This is a super question. Customers can now learn more about the real-world application and results of a product than ever before. Marketers won't be able to keep up with the multitude of avenues through which people share their good and bad opinions of a product or service. They don't have to worry about or rely on the claims of the seller.
But I think marketing copy will be necessary for many years to come. Of course, it could evolve, but it will still be around. The reason for this is that copy gives potential buyers a starting point to decide if a product is what they're looking for or not. The copy helps them determine if a product meets their initial screening criteria. Sometimes its feature-laden, sometimes ROI-driven, and plenty of times there's hype and spin thrown in.
After that, any third-party endorsements or poor reviews the buyer finds online or elsewhere then serve as aids in selection criteria. This is where they sift between buying this product or that one. And there are so many ways for buyers to research potential purchases before saying Yes that marketers will never be able to keep up.
But I think that marketing copy will exist indefinitely to "anchor" products and services in potential buyers' minds and create that starting point as the preferred choice.
minute to win it
Interesting post,
Now more than ever we must capture the voice of the buyer and clearly explain, in their voice, how we solve problems for them.
Buyer attention span is so much shorter and buyers do not desire to play “feature and benefit BINGO” trying to figure out what you do… as I discuss in my blog; you have a minute to win it .
Copy must clearly explain what your product or service does for your buyer.
Mark Allen Roberts
Comments
sales scripts
Amen!!!
Having led sales teams for over 25 years I can not agree more.
The trouble is when operation types try to lead salespeople ( never having done the job themselves) . So they create scripts to insure repeatable process and something they can "manage" the pieces of the sale conversation. As they record calls salespeople become gun shy and loose their authentic problem solving voice.
However, what your team needs is sales tools to keep the conversation flowing to a close, and they do not need you trying to "manage fruit ripe" as I discuss in my recent blog : http://nosmokeandmirrors.wordpress.com/2010/08/20/attention-entrepreneur...
Great post
Mark Allen Roberts
Practice makes perfect
Nice post, Kristin.
In my experience, scripts are OK as a starting point for training and ramping up. After that, you need to have the ability to have value-add conversations without them.
One thing that I have observed is that sales people don't practice/rehearse/role-play enough. As a result, you see them either wing-it, use scripts or use powerpoints with too many words. Predictably, they don't have value-add conversations.
Also predictably, the more you practice, the more knowledgeable, confident and conversational you become.
Managers can help by making sure that their salespeople practice, by providing specific, behavioral feedback and action plans to improve.
Great actors rehearse. Great athletes practice. Great sales people should do the same.
Hope you're having a great summer!
David
great summer
Thanks, Dave. Actually, focusing on getting the book finalized, thanks, and doing some wonderful projects for clients. Summer went by so quickly this year.
Your points are well-taken, I agree that salespeople tend to brush by the need to be prepared. But they do need to talk to real customers - otherwise there is the danger of them rehearsing things that customers don't care about. Work needs to be done "upstream" to make sure that they are saying things that matter - knowing the kinds of questions customers are going to ask. If there is rehearsing to be done, it's more about the conversations - answering customer questions - than the pitch. Agreed?