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Increasing Brevity/Talking Less
FROM BULLETPROOF SELLING:
Because most of the talking that salespeople do occurs before a sales meeting, that’s where brevity makes the biggest difference. If we’re winging our conversations to drive more meetings, we’re relying on hope. That’s why the most helpful thing for brevity is a script.
The Bulletproof Phone Script System
Trigger: When preparing salespeople to make initial calls to cold prospects.
Bulletproof Impact: Having a shared script available to all salespeople across geographies that addresses best practices in getting a prospect’s attention and navigating commonly heard objections. Using a shared digital document also ensures that when an improvement is made or a salesperson discovers a new objection, it can be captured for the rest of the team’s benefit.
Unfortunately, most salespeople approach sales calls the same way they would approach a personal call. They may know the name of the prospect they’re calling, but not much else. Many salespeople assume they’ll just call to ‘check in’ and see what happens. That would be akin to a group of Marines knowing a building was occupied by enemy combatants and wandering through the front door shouting, “Is anyone home?”
While prospects aren’t our opponents, even junior salespeople have dealt with prospects that felt like combatants. Winging those interactions is not a recipe for success, for Marines on the battlefield or for Bulletproof salespeople.
That’s where call scripts come in. Like any tool, call scripts can accelerate progress or do damage. Damage occurs when a salesperson recites from the script during calls. Accelerating progress occurs when a salesperson utilizes the script as a roadmap. The type of call scripts we’ve guided clients in creating – using a system we share below – are three-dimensional maps for navigating the terrain of prospect outreach.
In the 21st century, there’s no excuse for anyone to print out a sales script and shuffle through its pages on a call. Unless your entire outreach script, discovery questions, and commonly heard objections can fit onto one sheet of paper, you’ll need more than one page in your script, which is why we advocate digitizing them into an online word document.
Systemizing Success with Bulletproof Phone Scripts
The best call scripts have two levels we’ll cover below: the first is the initial call flow to use in the opening seconds of the call, and the second level is systemizing responses to objections that guide prospects to the next step, whether that is a follow-on meeting with stakeholders or a sales conversation.
Here’s a simple template to use to build a call script for yourself and your team that mirrors the order of the micro-objectives outlined earlier:
Initial Call Flow
Goal: May be Identifying a Decision Maker or Information Gathering or Budget Qualifying
Step 1: Identify decision maker
Ways of asking:
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Who’s responsible for making decisions around …
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Just wondering who’s in charge of …
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Not sure if you’re the right person, I was just trying to find out who was responsible for …
Step 2: Assess Challenges (when you’re speaking with a decision maker)
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Great, I was wondering what you were looking to accomplish with …
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Awesome, I’m calling because I read XYZ about your company on (website/publication) …
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I saw that you were planning for X initiative, and I was wondering if the issues of ABC have come up as a concern …
From Step 2, you and your salespeople can discover the things you need to know about your prospect to ascertain what type of product or service you offer that may be a good fit. We’ve devoted a whole chapter to what happens in a systemized sales conversation, so we’ll remain focused on the initial conversation for now because it’s in these initial discovery questions where Bulletproof salespeople will spend much of their call time as they further qualify prospects in their pipelines. It’s what happens when a salesperson makes an ask for more time, a meeting, or consideration of purchasing that hope so often enters as a strategy. To replace hope with certainty, we’ll need to prepare for the objections we’re most likely to hear and ensure they are included in the same digital call script we’ve just created.
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