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Cold Calling Step 3: Creating the Presentation Script

July 14, 2010

When it comes to cold calling, there is tremendous value in organizing one’s thoughts in advance.

Doing so in writing has significant advantages including (1) being better prepared as to what you wish to convey, (2) thinking you are better prepared which translates into being able to speak with greater confidence, (3) establishing a baseline so that you can emphasize what resonates and eliminate what doesn’t and (4) being able to actively listen because you are no longer concerned about inadvertently not mentioning something important.

My mentor, Carl Epstein, taught me an exceptional scripting tool, which I would like to share with you in today’s post. There are several elements in the structure of this type of script. These scripts should be written in bulleted form so that it does not sound like you are reading it and because bulleted writing typically eliminates excess or needless words.

Here are the elements:

(1)    Introduction: This is simply an opening statement of courtesy and may be as simple as “We haven’t spoken in a while. I wanted to catch up with you and share with you what we are doing and see if we can help you advance your business.”

(2)    Vista: This section is where we bring in the business benefits. In essence, you are “painting the future” here. Effectively introducing the value that your product or service provides early on is critical in encouraging your prospect to invest more time in hearing the rest of your presentation. They choose to listen because your product or service may be addressing a real need for them.

(3)    Product / Service Information: This is where you speak in detail about the key elements of your service or product. The purpose of this section is to connect the business benefits to your offering. The prospect should be able to realize the direct relationship between your product and the benefits that he or she is hoping to receive.

(4)    Action of Buyer / Reason for Action: However, just in case the prospect can’t, it is critical to reintroduce the benefits and tie them tightly to your offering. Here you review what you offer and connect it to the business value.

(5)    Ask for the Order: It is here that you present the request for the “next step.” It could be the order or a meeting or a demonstration but, regardless, it is imperative that you be clear about what you are requesting and that you make a definitive request.

(6) Common Objections: The last element is to prepare a list of common objections and responses. Before you begin and even more likely, after you have made a few calls, you probably will be able to anticipate why someone may reject your offering (cost and time required to implement are some typical examples). You should anticipate these questions and prepare responses so that you are immediately ready to address these objections. Remember though – after addressing the objections, you must ask for the order again.

If you have prepared this script properly, you should be able to effectively deliver this presentation in two to three minutes.

A couple of additional thoughts:

  • The script that is written at the outset of an engagement always evolves over time. Each call allows you to tighten the language and become more succinct. Edit the script regularly until it is efficient and can be said more simply. (I call this “getting your voice.”)
  • After a while, you should discover that referencing the script is no longer necessary. The act of creating the script and repeating it frequently allows for a more natural presentation.
  • Of all the sections, the Vista section is usually the most important because if the business benefits are not clearly presented, the prospect will choose to end the conversation.

Fortunately, if you have followed Steps 1 and 2, you have a set of likely business benefit candidates upon which you can draw.

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Categories: Leadership, Sales, Strategic Plans, Strategy, Visioning
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Cold Calling Step 2: Understand the Product and Align Its Capabilities to the Business Benefits

July 12, 2010

All salespeople have a natural tendency to become very related to the products that we sell. This occurs because nearly all of our conversations within our company and to our prospects revolve around the product features.

We truly become immersed in what we offer the marketplace – and with all of these conversations circulating, we naturally assume that our prospects will have a native understanding of what we provide and why it makes a difference, simply by our verbalization. There is even a tendency for salespeople to assume that a cursory explanation of the product’s capabilities to a prospect will naturally evoke an understanding by the prospect as to how using the product or service will benefit them.

Experience, though, has shown this to not be the case.

Our task as effective salespeople is to connect the benefits and the capabilities for the prospect. Put it this way… Failure to do so should result in a prospect saying, “I understand what your product does; I just don’t understand the value proposition.” If only prospects were so open when this occurred because then we would clearly understand that we have not created the necessary linkage between benefits and product capabilities.

There are a few ways for us to become “smart” about what these benefits and their related capabilities truly are. Clearly, as we outlined in the first step, understanding the industry, target markets and their needs and relating them to the product or service is a terrific place to begin.

Many salespeople, however, fail to look at the messaging of their direct competitors. Competitors are typically not shy about posting about their value on their web sites. Facebook pages of competitors often enable you to discover, via testimonials and comments, what buyers truly value.

This is important because, as we shall see in future posts, simply because you believe something to be a benefit, your prospects and customers may have a very different take on what constitutes the true value.

Many, many years ago when I was first beginning my business career, my first company, Flash Creative Management, decided to sell a software development tool, MUPET (the acronym stood for Multi-User Project Editing Tool). It was my first foray into selling a product for software developers and it was a priceless education for my company and me.

We had articulated the benefits in advertisements, speaking engagements and a few other communication channels. Surprisingly, to us anyway, the people who bought the tool had very different intentions for its use. We discovered by the technical support questions we were receiving that people had decided to use it in very different ways than we intended.

In some cases, this worked out just fine as the product was capable of addressing these needs but sometimes the product fell woefully short of the value that our clients hoped to receive, because frankly, the product was never designed for this purpose.

So there are two takeaways in this portion of the discussion:

(1) It is your responsibility to connect benefits to product capabilities.

(2) Just because you or your competitor thinks that the true benefits have been identified does not mean that you have successfully done so.

This second point, and our next challenge in preparing a successful cold calling campaign, will be the subject of our next post.

Categories: Leadership, Sales, Strategic Plans, Strategy
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Cold Calling Step 1: Defining the Target Market and What It Values

July 8, 2010

Ted Williams, one of the greatest baseball hitters of all times, once said that the secret to good hitting was getting a good pitch to hit.

He could just have easily been talking about successful cold calling.

The first step in effective cold calling is segmenting the marketplace. Just as you need to know your strike zone in baseball so that you can swing at good pitches, you also need to know which prospects would need the benefits that your product brings. These prospects may be in a particular industry or they may cross over into multiple industries, but regardless, if you have targeted effectively you will connect with your prospect at a much higher frequency.

You’ll notice that I did not state that this conversation is about what your product does. For the most part, your product’s capabilities are irrelevant, except as it relates to the delivery of the benefits that matter to the prospect.

This is a very important distinction and the core component of effective cold calling, and, for that matter, effective sales. All too often, salespeople focus on features. Leading with the benefits allows the prospects to have context about the features and to measure your offering in the context of the value that they will gain.

Put another way, by focusing on value and benefit, you make the discussion about the customer and not about your company or product.

The challenge, of course, is about identifying those benefits. There are many ways that you can gain this wisdom.

The first is to read about the target segment and discover any industry wide problems, opportunities or trends. Does your product address any of these and, if so, how? What other benefits does it bring? Does it support a corporate strategy or goal?

For large sales opportunities or where you are targeting a particular company, reading the target company’s public filing will give you insight into things like turnover, attrition, and risks that are being managed. Press releases and newspaper articles also deliver insight as to triggering events that create a corporate need.

The key element of this first step is simply recognizing that it is only about the prospect and never about you and your product. It is the first key to “batting with a high average.”

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Types of Measures

February 20, 2009

There are three types of measures:

1. Activity measures

2. Output measures

3. Impact measures

Activity measures tells us how efficiently something was done. It answers questions such as:

  • How long does it take?
  • How productive is the department?
  • How many resources were used?

It focuses us on internal tasks, timing and resources but it is NOT about outcomes. As an example, profitability is an activity measure because it relates incoming revenue to internal operational costs. It measures the efficiency within which resources are utilized to produce income.

You’ll find activity measures are usually used with internal operations groups and frequently these are the measures used for multiple phases of processes

Output Measures emphasize the results of the work rather than the work activities themselves. Outputs tend to be physical products, services and communications that one group sends to another. These types of measures answers questions about what has been produced such as:

  • Does the product meet quality standards?
  • Was the product sent on time?
  • Was the product delivered on time?
  • Was the customer satisfied?

Output measures are about products NOT about production. They gauge quality, timeliness and evaluation by the CUSTOMER or USERS and therefore the measuring source is usually outside of the group producing the output.

Customer satisfaction is an output measure that requires obtaining feedback from outside the organization (this can be a customer internal or external to the organization.) Most output measures are using internal standards. These measures are useful when you are interested in whether the results meet certain standards.

My personal favorite is the last of our set and the one the President and our legislative leaders truly want to cause.

Impact measures ALWAYS require feedback or customer research to develop meaningful measures. So what is the difference between customer satisfaction measures and impact measures?

Customer satisfaction measures what the customer likes. Impact measures what the product does for the customer. It is all about value.

Impact measures answers questions such as:

  • Does the product make the customer more productive?
  • More successful?
  • Do the services make the customer more effective?
  • More influential?
  • Do the products help the customers reach their goals?

These measures require serious examination of the customer because there is no other way to get information about the customer’s productivity, success measures or goals without their input and evaluation.

Most important it shifts the focus to “What do you need from us to help you succeed on your own measures of success?” This type of measure alters relationships and makes what you achieve more valuable.

It makes you realize exactly what is the point of what we do.

Categories: Hiring, Leadership, Sales, Strategic Plans, Strategy, Visioning
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