What’s Your Message
Before you can even face your sales world, you need to understand your message and sincerely believe in it. If you try to deliver a presentation that your marketing department created for you in “marketing speak” you’ll surely wind up in a place you don’t want to be. Be clear about your message, in your words. Not the words of the guy upstairs creating the presentation. It needs to have your personal spin so that you can deliver the message time and again, your delivery needs to be compelling and you need to believe in it.
Let’s face it, there are lots of sales professionals out there selling the same thing as you do. There are also lots of customers buying just what you want them buy. So…the trick is getting them to purchase from YOU! You need to separate yourself from the pack. You need to stand out. You need to reach those potential buyers. You need to fill your bucket with real opportunities and you need to reach your quota. The starting point for all of this is your message. Your “Elevator Speech” – think long and hard about what message you want to get out there. Think about the things that your company offers that make you different from the others. Think about the things that you will wrap around what your company offers to make you different from the others. What if you met a prospect at a cocktail party, would you know how to answer the question “What do you do?” . Your elevator is those few sentences perfectly orchestrated to have the prospect say “Hey…tell me more”. And you will….but only after you’ve been through the process of asking questions of the prospect so that you can perfectly understand what his needs are!
So sit back for a moment and think about your message. It’s your personal advertisement of who you are, what you do and how the prospect can benefit from working with you.
Many years ago, when I was building a territory I needed to separate myself from my competitors much like you do every day. So I thought about it. Long and hard. And I realized that if I could tell my prospects that I had proven tools to make their lives easier and to get their jobs done faster and more profitably that they would rely on me and my company. So I set out to craft that message. I remember one quite specific scenario where I was going after a team of inside sales reps that had tremendous influence on where their customers purchased their products. This inside sales team came about due to an acquisition from another company and frankly, they had no idea how their new company functioned, where to get information from internally or how to effectively help their potential customers. I explained that I knew all of those resources and when they were in doubt, just call me and I would get them through it. They ultimately came to rely on my expertise about their own company and procedures and simply told their potential customers to call me for distribution of the products that they were looking for. They even wrote a song about it! To the tune of “Return to Sender” their theme song became “Send it To Dorinda”. I earned their trust…and they helped me reach my quota by referring their customers to me. Great way to build a territory! There’s nothing like making a “warm call” with the referral from someone that both you and your prospect already know. You start out on common ground and the results usually prove themselves in short order.
Ready to create your message? It’s easier said than done so here it goes.
Like most great Ideas start with a blank sheet of paper, and a writing implement of choice. Nothing fancy. It’s your brain that’s going to get the work out.
Now look at all the corporate marketing slogans and mission statements that you have and forget they exist. Unless you work somewhere truly exceptional these types of things, while important, don’t sum up what you really do. They’re nice to have, maybe they make people feel good but imagine walking up to someone at a networking event, conference or cocktail party for that matter and when they ask what you do your reply is something like “I strive to deliver the highest quality products and services to the widget purchasers in the world, while solving world hunger and creating a universal peace ethically caring for my responsibilities.” What would you take away from that conversation…a few thoughts come to mind like delusional, pompous, and of course Jerk.
Get down to business in short bullet points. Write down what you do. Not what you say you do but what you really do. There are probably five or ten things right?. Now imagine you’re putting an ad on during the Super Bowl, you have one chance, a single thirty second spot to change the world and tell them what you do? Do it right and interest is sure to follow. Do it wrong and well the world as you know it is going to end. Ok, so it’s not really that serious but you do need to put some effort into it. Other wise you’ll give an answer like this. “I sell telephones” you might as well be the TV cartoon character Hank Hill who loves to boast that “I sell propane and propane related accessories.” That’s not an elevator speech, no matter how much you love what you do it doesn’t tell anyone how it can help them.
A good elevator speech includes they type of problem your products solve, how it is a benefit to your users so how to use. So instead of saying I sell phones it should go something like “I help companies communicate better with their customers, suppliers and own employees while managing the expense and monitoring productivity levels”
A word of caution about elevator speeches. Don’t fall into the dot com bubble trap of pitching like you’re talking to a venture capitalist unless you are. Other wise tailor your message to what you do and how it can help.
Your elevator speech will open doors for you, if crafted correctly. Keep it short, keep it simple and make sure that it makes your prospect want to know more. Make sure that you say just enough to piqué their curiosity and get them to ask for more information.
TIP: write your message on index cards – by doing this you’ll create a “chart deck” that you can carry with you to practice every time you have a few minutes….perhaps while waiting for an appointment, or while traveling. Keep the cards handy. When you’re making phone calls, you can have them right in front of you to remind yourself of the direction that you want to take the phone call in.
