6 pillars effective_sales_messaging

www.salesnexus.com

Craig Klein

THE 6 PILLARS OF EFFECTIVE

SALES MESSAGING THAT DRIVES GROWTH

Business Growth ebook Series

http://www.salesnexus.com/

www.salesnexus.com Page ii

Table of Contents

Business Growth eBook Series iii

Meet Your Hosts v

Featured Expert—Michael Halper vii

Featured Sponsor—LeadFerret.com ix

The 6 Pillars of Effective Sales Messaging that Drives Growth 1

Sales Messaging 2

Value 3

Qualifying 8

Pain 10

Objections 12

Building Interest 16

Credibility 18

Additional Resources 22

Next Steps 24

www.salesnexus.com Page iii

Business Growth eBook Series

We want you to grow your business. It is really that simple.

In fact, we surround ourselves with companies who share our belief that when we help you grow your busi-ness, everyone wins. We believe that when we help you grow your business, we also help grow communi-ties, families, employers and our customers.

We have created this series of eBooks—in conjunction with a webinar series—to help you expand opportu-nities for growth in your company. This is true even if you are not a SalesNexus customer…even if you use one of our competitors…we want to share what we have found to be useful for business growth.

Many businesses have great products and a great team, yet still struggle to master the strategies and tactics of connecting with their market, standing out from the competition and closing sales. Toward that goal, we have assembled a team of experts to share the best of what they know really works. Nothing is held back or saved only for those who are clients of our individual company. Each eBook is packed with practical steps any business can take immediately without busting the budget.

Below you will find a list of eBooks and webinars in this series. While each eBook builds on what was pre-sented in the eBooks earlier in the series, you can choose to take them in any order. However, we strongly suggest you read the first eBook or attend that webinar to get an understanding of how the information fits all together.

To Your Business Growth,Craig Klein, CEO SalesNexus

http://www.salesnexus.com/resources/webinars/

http://www.salesnexus.com/webinars/the-magic-5-of-content-based-email-marketing-campaigns-that-drive-sales/

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www.salesnexus.com

Craig Klein

THE MAGIC 5 OF CONTENT BASED EMAIL MARKETING

THAT DRIVES SALES

Business Growth ebook Series

The Magic 5 of Content Based Email Marketing that Drives Sales

Held on January 16h, 2013A simple 5 step process to create on-going, automated email cam-

paigns that engage your audience and identify highly qualified prospects.

How to Qualify Sales Leads and Focus on Sales Growth that’s Profitable

Held January 30th, 2013An in-depth look at how to use

simple questioning techniques to determine if a sales lead will purchase and the powerful impact of consistent qualifying.

360 degree View of the Customer Relationship for Business Growth

Held on February 13th, 2013An in-depth look at how strong relationships between customers

and companies drive business growth and the risk of mistaking a customer to sales person relationship with a customer to company relationship.

Building a Successful Marketing and Sales Process by Identifying Your Customer’s “Pain”

Held on January 23rd, 2013An in-depth investigation of how to

identify the emotional circumstances that cause custom-ers to buy from you, how to question prospects to diag-nose their “pains” and build sales processes that win!

Manage a Sales Process of Actions that Lead to Sales Growth

Held on February 6th, 2013An in-depth look at what should be measured in every sales pro-

cess, how to set goals for and measure it and how to manage sales people to achieve business growth.

The 6 Pillars of Effective Sales Messaging that Drives Growth

Held on February 20th, 2013How to communicate what your products and services do for your

customers, get their attention and understand their needs, with Michael Halper, author of “The Cold Calling Equation”

Business Growth Series



http://www.salesnexus.com/webinars/how-to-qualify-sales-leads-and-focus-on-sales-growth-thats-profitable/



http://www.salesnexus.com/webinars/360-degree-view-of-the-customer-relationship-for-business-growth/

http://www.salesnexus.com/webinars/360-degree-view-of-the-customer-relationship-for-business-growth/

http://www.salesnexus.com/webinars/build-a-successful-marketing-and-sales-process/



http://www.salesnexus.com/webinars/manage-a-sales-process-of-actions-that-lead-to-sales-growth/

http://www.salesnexus.com/webinars/manage-a-sales-process-of-actions-that-lead-to-sales-growth/

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Meet Your Hosts

Craig Klein, CEO, SalesNexus.com

As CEO, Craig Klein leads a team that is on a mission to help your business grow. They accomplish this goal by providing an online Customer Relationship Management (CRM) that is fully integrated with an email marketing system. Klein brings more than 18 years sales executive and management experience to design-ing SalesNexus solutions.

SalesNexus is a different kind of CRM and email system for many reasons. Perhaps the most meaningful is the company recognizes that one size will not fit all in business. Since key people of the company come from a sales background, they know how to work with you to find unique solutions specific to you, your business and your customers.

Thousands of sales teams from around the world have discovered that SalesNexus takes the hard work out of selling. That way you can focus on the people part of serving your customers. They know that you enjoy sales because you enjoy people. SalesNexus will maximize the time you spend establishing deep relation-ships with your best customers.

This team feels success when they make marketing and selling easier for you. That is why SalesNexus is hosting this Business Growth series of webinars and eBooks

Don’t forget that SalesNexus offers a 30-day free trial of their program so you can try it out…look around…ask questions to determine if it is the right fit for you. During the free trial period, you can also download your choice of 500 business contacts—with email addresses—at no cost at all via LeadFerret.com. Learn more about LeadFerret below.

http://www.salesnexus.com/resources/webinars/

http://bit.ly/UVaT1j

www.salesnexus.com Page vi

Forrest Cassidy, CEO, LeadFerret.com

Lead Ferret is the world’s first 100% free business-to-business database with complete information. They offer more than 10 million easily searchable B2B contacts—with emails—FREE.

In today’s business environment, it is critical that you use your time in the most time efficient manner pos-sible. The objective of Lead Ferret is to make prospecting and generating leads easier for sales teams, re-cruiters, and small business owners.

The LeadFerret system allows you to spend less time prospecting and more time selling…and that leaves more time to do the things you really love to do.

Learn more about Lead Ferret on a following page.

MEET YOUR HOSTS

http://leadferret.com/

www.salesnexus.com Page vii

Featured Expert—Michael Halper

Michael Halper, CEO, SalesScripter, LLC

Driving improvement in sales organizations is the mission of everything that Michael Halper does profes-sionally. With more than 20 years in frontline sales, marketing and customer service, he brings innovative solutions to all his clients.

We are honored that Halper agreed to share his expertise with us as part of the Business Growth Series. Don’t miss any opportunity to learn from him. In addition to this series, here are a few ways you can get valuable nuggets of sales wisdom from Halper:

• “The Cold Calling Equation”: As author of this groundbreaking book, Halper shares powerful insights into the ‘blood sport’ of cold calling. Sales professionals always resist cold calls. Yet those who mas-ter the art of the cold call have always closed more deals and hit their goals. Cold calling success is NOT about working harder or working more. Instead, it is about using proven, step-by-step tactics to achieve immediate results. In addition, the book will help you make human connections and find more opportunities. Get the book here.

• SalesScripter.com: This web based tool is a complete game changer in the field of sales. SalesS-cripter assists your company in identifying the details you need to create powerful sales messaging. The tool will help develop your sales scripts, email templates, voicemail scripts, qualifying questions, objection responses and more. Try SalesScripter FREE!

http://www.amazon.com/The-Cold-Calling-Equation-Problem/dp/1468173545


http://salesscripter.com/


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• Launch Pad Solutions, LLC: Launch Pad is a training and consulting firm that helps businesses in-crease sales revenue by improving areas of sales prospecting and lead generation:

○ Sales Consulting: Launch Pad works with management to establish sales messaging, processes, and strategy that lead to immediate improvements in results.

○ Sales Training: Training programs that help frontline sales people to improve their ability to ef-fectively prospect. Sales people are able to make immediate improvements due to the effective, yet practical and easy to implement, tactics.

○ Sales Coaching: Launch Pad works with sales professionals and managers on a one-to-one basis to help ensure the right steps are being taken to improve sales prospecting and lead generation.

○ Appointment Setting Service: For businesses that do not want to spend their valuable time on prospecting and working to generate leads, Launch Pad takes over that responsibility through an appointment setting service. Under this model, Launch Pad’s team of telesales resources per-forms prospecting activities and schedule appointments for clients that have outsourced that functional area.

FEATURED EXPERT—MICHAEL HALPER

http://www.coachingyou.org/

http://www.coachingyou.org/sales-consulting-c-2.html

http://www.coachingyou.org/sales-training-c-8.html

http://www.coachingyou.org/sales-coaching-c-4.html

http://www.coachingyou.org/sales-outsourcing-c-7.html

www.salesnexus.com Page ix

Featured Sponsor—LeadFerret.com

Lead Ferret is a sales organization’s most powerful source of new business. Like it says on the Lead Ferret website, when you access this service—it is like adding 10 million+ con-tacts to your address book. The database contains complete information including email addresses…and so much more. It’s free to join, so go check it out.

Throughout this series, we will be showing you how to use this contact information and implement strategies for business growth in an efficient, time-saving and highly profes-sional manner.

If you are a SalesNexus user you can download 500 free contacts a month. You can even take advantage of this free offer during the free trial on SalesNexus.

Since some people say that, “2 minutes on LeadFerret is worth 2 hours on LinkedIn.”— you should take a few minutes to learn more.

Every record in LeadFerret is complete with company information, name, title, address and phone number. You can search by SIC and NACIS codes. You can search by location in several ways, including a map tool.



http://www.salesnexus.com/free-trial/

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The methods we are showing you in this series will demonstrate how to use this robust interface to grow your business. In the first eBook, you will learn how to identify your ideal prospect. You may have a geo-graphical territory or there may be a size of business that fits well with your product/service. You can search in terms of revenue range, industry, department within the company and the title of the individual you should contact.

You simply plug the demographic details into the LeadFerret system. You get a list of target prospects to download into SalesNexus. You have spent much less time finding the right type of person and can now spend more time connecting with high quality prospects and building relationships.

It all fits together with one purpose—to Grow Your Business.

FEATURED SPONSOR—LEADFERRET.COM

THE 6 PILLARS OF EFFECTIVE

SALES MESSAGING THAT DRIVES GROWTH

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THE 6 PILLARS OF EFFECTIVE SALES MESSAGING THAT DRIVES GROWTH

There are 6 pillars in our methodology for building a sales strategy that drives growth. However, two of them have already been covered in detail with eBooks 2 and 3 of this series. Go back and read “Building

a Successful Marketing and Sales Process by Identifying Your Customer’s Pain” and “How to Qualify Sales Leads and Focus on Sales Growth that’s Profitable” if you have not read those yet.

Sales Messaging

We build our sales messaging on the pillars of value, qualify, pain, objections, interest and credibility. If you develop specific mes-saging for each of those six areas, they can then become a solid foundation which you can then build out your entire sales mes-saging strategy on top of those pillars.

DEFINITION: Sales messaging is what you are communicating to your pros-pects. This communication may take place on a cold call, a prospecting call or any introduction to the prospect. A phone call or a face-to-face networking event requires a well-thought-out message. Emails are a part of messaging, whether they are a one-to-one email or a mass email broadcast for marketing purposes.

Sales and marketing are closely aligned. This eBook will address sales messaging, but it could affect your marketing message.



Value

What we mean by value is how you help your clients. As sales people, we often fall into a rut of talking about our products and services—sharing what they do. We need to get above that. We are much more valuable when our message is about how those products or services help the client. That is where we get to a true level of sales effectiveness.

Value is basically an intangible attribute that transfers from you to your clients. Step back and try to get your hands around what this means. On a personal level, you deliver value when you are interacting with a pros-pect and you make them laugh. By making their day brighter you are delivering value. By making the conver-sation somewhat entertaining you are making someone’s day a little easier. When are a good listener, it may seem as if you are not giving them anything…you are just being there. The fact that they can talk to you is delivering value. It is important for you to understand that that same type of value is felt by your prospects.

Value can be many things. Like when you:

• Make someone feel good about interacting with you.

• Help them save time or become more efficient

• Show them ways to automate manual processes to free up time to be more strategic

• Help them make more money or save money.

• Show them how to access valuable information like email addresses from LeadFerret.com

The important thing to remember is that your value is not your product—it is what your product helps your clients to do or achieve and what you personally help your clients do or achieve.



3 Levels of Value

Technical Value

At the lowest level is technical value. Don’t get misled and think about this being only technology. It is sim-ply the level where systems, processes, people exist and typically where improvements can be made. When you help your prospect to make changes that automate manual processes, this is creating an improvement at the technical level. You may be improving performance of systems or performance of people. For exam-ple, SalesNexus helps to improve the performance of sales people. That is a technical value that SalesNexus helps its clients realize.



Business Value

Technical value typically works its way up to create benefits or value at the business level. Examples of busi-ness value are increases in revenue, decreases in costs, and the improvement in the delivery of services. Continuing with the SalesNexus example, it helps make sales people perform better; it creates more sales revenue and profitability. That is business value. When you realize both technical and business value, they combine to impact your prospects on a personal level.

Personal Value

Of course your prospects care about their company—whether they own it or they are a senior manager that has been working there for years. They probably have a tremendous amount of pride and wear the polo shirt with the company logo on the side. They care a lot. But they also care about themselves.

It is natural for individuals to be more interested in their own interests more than anything else. Interests such as career, income, workload, job security, and being able to provide for a family can easily be at the top of an individual’s priorities. Creating improvements in these areas is how you deliver personal value to your prospects.

When you deliver both technical and business value, it will typically work its way up to impact people in the area of bonuses, commissions, recognition, promotions and more. That is how what you sell helps to create personal value.

To help you to figure out the value you offer, we will provide a 7 step process. You can use this matrix as a guide to go through these steps. As we go through these steps, we will use an example of inventory manage-ment software.



Value Identification1. Step 1: Identify a product, service, or feature that you sell. We will enter one of our products, auto

inventory replenishment.

2. Step 2: Identify what the product does. How does auto inventory replenishment function? It auto-matically submits orders to vendors based on inventory levels.

3. Step 3: Identify what benefit this function provides at a technical level. What does that mean on a technical level? It helps decrease the time it takes to place orders.



4. Step 4: Identify what business benefit the technical value will lead to. If we decrease time ordering, what does that mean from a business standpoint? If the business is currently having managers walk around the store every night doing orders, that step can be eliminated. It decreases the need for management staffing time and labor costs.

5. Step 5: Identify the personal benefit that can be realized from the technical and business value de-livered. What does that mean to me if I am the VP of operations—on a personal level? Currently, I must review all orders since they are manually created now. I can stop doing this task and spend more time with my wife and kids.

6. Step 6: Rinse and repeat. We started with a product or feature and mapped out the value that it of-fers. If we only sell one thing, we’ve just identified the core value we offer. It’s likely that you sell more than one product or your product has more than one feature. You can use the matrix to repeat the process for your other products or features.

7. Step 7: Summarize to get to your core value. You may uncover too much information for you to share in a brief conversation with a prospect. So you can summarize the different columns of data to get to a single core value. This is what we came up with for this fictional product:

“The auto inventory replenishment software helps companies manage inventory levels and orders. That leads to improving the ability to decrease inventory and labor cost and improves our prospect’s compensation potential.”

When we talk about SalesScripter.com later, the program includes a wizard that helps you identify all those nuggets of information. When you have these value pieces, you can plug them into the wizard to create a list of value statements. From that list, you can pick the ones that fit your product/service best.



Qualifying

The prospect must be qualified in two areas. One is how well they fit with what you have to offer, the other qualifies them in how likely the prospect is to purchase.

Qualifying is a procedural step in your sales thoroughness. We covered this subject in detail in an earlier eB-ook in this series. Refer to the third eBook in this series, “How to Qualify Sales Leads and Focus on Sales Growth that’s Profitable” to get an in-depth look at qualifying.



Messaging is not just what you say to prospects; it is also what you ask. In fact, in early stages of the sales cycle, you should be asking more questions than talking about yourself and what you offer. A very big part of your sales messaging is your qualification.

We use a 2-step qualifying process.

Soft Qualifying

When we first talk to a prospect, we are really trying to figure out if it makes sense for us to talk at all. Does it make sense for us to meet or put time on each other’s calendar? You will ask questions like: What are you using today? How long have you been using it? How is it working for you? Are you in a contract?

Hard Qualifying

We definitely want to do hard qualifying. You want to know the prospect’s role in the organization. You may ask: What’s the decision making process? Has this project been budgeted? What is the budget range? What happens if you don’t make a purchase? Is there a timeline for the purchase?

They are all good questions that need to be asked. You want to ask them when you have your first meeting or scheduled call. You don’t want to ask hard qualifying questions when you first talk to a prospect.

Structure for Qualifying

• Need to purchase—separate wants from needs• Authority to purchase—are you talking to the decision maker• Ability to purchase—funding standpoint• Intent to purchase—genuine interest in making the purchase from you



Pain

Identify what is not working well for the prospect or could be working better. When you are selling, you need to know the level of pain. Are things great, good, okay or could be better. If there is not a lot of pain, it could be hard for the prospect to end up spending money with you. They may take meetings with you. You may be a super sales person and are so savvy that you get meetings, show demonstrations and the prospect likes all your fancy features.

If the pain is not at a cer-tain level with their cur-rent system, what does that mean to your sale? It means that when it comes time for them to look at your agreement…make a purchase…invest money…make a commit-ment to move forward…they might not do that because there is not enough pain.

Again, we covered this part of the sales process in an earlier eBook. Learn more about uncovering prospect pain in the second eBook, “Building a Successful Marketing & Sales Process by Identifying Your Customer’s Pain.”



There are three levels of pain and they are aligned with the levels of value. At the lowest level is technical pain—processes, systems and people. They are areas where things are slow, broken, manual processes, lack of reliability, poor systems or employee performance.

Technical pain works its way up to impact your prospect at the business level in the area of revenue and costs. For example, SalesNexus may have a prospect that is having sales leads fall through the cracks be-cause they are not effectively worked and tracked. That means missed opportunities. Missed opportunities mean decreased sales revenue and decreased profit.

Again, the pain works itself up to personal pain. The VP of sales with all those missed sales opportunities may have annual sales quotas that are missed. They may be out of a job. We know that is very painful and hits at a very personal level.

Pain isn’t always easy to uncover. Sometimes people don’t want to share what is not working well. There are things you can do to try to uncover pain though. Here are four of the most common tactics, with very reasonable things you can do to get the conversation started about pain.

Four Tactics to Uncover Pain

• Rating questions—ask them how they feel about current situation on a scale 1-10

• Give pain examples—point out the experience of pain you’ve found in clients to open dialogue

• Wish list questions—magic wand questions to uncover what they wish for

• Disqualify—observe that things are going well for them with low or no pain….disqualified



Objections

Your prospects will give objections. They will use them as mini-stop-signs, especially if you are cold calling or prospecting. They will throw objections at you to try to slow the call down or end the call. Prospects will try to take control of the conversation. They can then take it in a direction of their choosing. Objections are really the prospect’s messaging—but for every objection, you can have a response that is part of your mes-saging strategy.

Sales people are guaranteed to run up against objections all the time. So if you are not prepared for the com-mon objections, it’s like an athlete suiting up for the game unprepared. Here are a few common objections. Some of these may look familiar to you:

I’m busy right now…Who are you with?...What is this in regards to? If you are doing outbound cold calling or prospecting, the question about “What this is in regards to?” is something you will hear all the time. Gate-keepers love this one. They are trying to get you to say something that makes you look like a sales person. That way they can say they are not interested.

If you directly answer that question, your response might be, “I’m calling to schedule a meeting and see if you have any needs for what we offer.” That is simply not going to get you anywhere. Instead, have a few tactics for responding to common objections that have a good chance of keeping the call going. If you just simply have a canned response for each one of those common objections, you will immediately improve your results. They may not work every time, but over a large sample of calls, having a prepared response will help.



Handling Responses to Objections

Here are three options you have to handle objections you receive.

Comply

To comply is basically to give in. If they ask you to send information, you respond by just sending them in-formation. The trouble is when they ask for the information simply to get you off the phone. Now you have spent time carefully crafting an email and attachments when there is no real interest at all.

Overcome

Challenging the objection in an attempt to change their mind is generally not going to work. You are basi-cally trying to sell more aggressively. When prospecting, it’s not time to try to overcome an objection. If you are on the phone with someone who doesn’t know you, there is not enough time and attention to overcome an objection. You have about two to five minutes to work with on a cold call.

On the other hand, when you are meeting with the prospect and they have an objection, you might want to overcome it…or at least talk about it. Open the conversation if it is a genuine objection. If it’s something you are not going to be able to resolve, you may need to disqualify the prospect.

For example, if they say they want a lifetime warranty and you cannot offer one, you need to talk about it. Perhaps you might ask, “Do you mind if I ask why you’re asking for a lifetime warranty? We do have better quality than our competition.” That way you can deal with the objection head on. Do that in a meeting when you have the prospect’s attention and you have time on their calendar.



Redirect

A more effective way to handle objections when prospecting is to redirect the objection. You can move the conversation to a new, but maybe related area. You are not completely changing the subject, but you are trying to get the focus away from the objection.

EXAMPLE #1: If you are a salesperson with SalesNexus and get the objection that they are not interested.

A redirect would be to say, “Okay, I understand. Well, if I could ask you real quick, what you are using today for email marketing?” They may say they are using Constant Contact. To continue the conversation your re-sponse might be, “So that is a separate from your current CRM, right?” There are lots of different directions you can continue the conversation from there.

Notice that we’re not talking about the fact that they are not interested anymore. We’re talking about their environment and gathering very valuable information. We now have uncovered some pain because they have two separate systems. If they go back to saying they are not interested, we might be able to overcome the objection because we know a little about their pain.

Objections Map

Developing a matrix of how to respond to common objections will give you the best chance of keeping the call going. You have one column to list all the objections you can anticipate. In the other column, you list the responses that you have scripted out for a response. That is the goal of an objections map. It is not neces-sarily for resolving the objection. It is to keep the conversation going. Use this chart as a tool when you are on the phone making cold calls or prospecting.



SalesScripter will build an Objections Map for you. If you go through the SalesScripter, you will get a number of responses to the common objections.

EXAMPLE #2: Here is an example of making a cold call for SalesScripter and a gatekeeper asks, “What is this in regards to?” Don’t re-spond with, “I want to schedule a meeting with the VP of Sales to talk about what they do in sales messaging.” Instead, respond with a value statement and say something like “The reason I am calling is we help VP’s of Sales to increase lead generation by improving sales messaging.” This objection response can often throw the gatekeeper off because it does not give an answer that they are prepared for. It may not get past the gatekeeper, but it won’t shut him out immediately.

The value statement is much harder to object to because it’s harder for someone to say they don’t want it. If you say “We help businesses improve the number of leads.” The prospect is not likely to say that they don’t want leads.

If you respond with a product based answer, it is easy to quickly say that they don’t need it. When you offer a value to them, it is much easier to keep the conversation going.



Building Interest

There is a lot you can do in your sales messaging to build interest and here are a few very practical and easy to use tactics that you can implement:

Product/Service Description: At a high level you can include some product or service details showing what it is and what it does. For example, SalesNexus is a CRM and email mar-keting program in one system. Even if you are talking about value, you need to communicate what your product is and what it does.

Connect Pain with Value: If you are incorporating all of the pillars, you are communicating the value you offer and you may be identifying the pain the prospect is having. If you can connect the value you have to offer with the pain the pros-pect is having, you stand to get the prospect’s attention and build interest.

Communicate ROI: The main thing that your prospects care about is “What is in it for me?”. Communicat-ing the return on investment and possible the payback period for what they will spend on your product or service will address this question and build interest. If your product/service costs $100,000, when will they get $100,000 back from investing in it? Or what is the multiple they will get in three years?

Ways to Build Interest

• High level product/service details

• Connect pain with value

• Communicate ROI

• Explain differentiation

• Share a client story

• Paint a picture of the future state

• Discuss the impact of doing nothing

• Share company facts



Differentiation: Communicating how you are different is extremely powerful. You need to have clarity around how you differ from your competition and even how you differ from the option to do nothing. Focus on this to trigger interest and momentum.

Share Client Story: There is nothing more powerful than sharing a story. You can talk all day about what the product does—but a client story about how they came to you with a challenge and how it was resolved by your product or service…that has much more power.

Paint a Picture of Future State: To build interest, paint a picture of what the prospect could expect if they purchase from you by describing a potential future state. For example, if you sold a sales training product, you could describe the level of improvement and mastery your prospect could achieve by going through your program. You could paint this picture by describing the increases in sales performance, the increased compensation, the improvements in their career path and personal life, and more.

Discuss the Impact of doing Nothing: An easy to understand example would be about purchasing flood insurance. Someone may think that particular type of insurance is not necessary. If the insurance sales per-son talks about what could happen if there is a bad storm, how often there are freak storms and what cost they would have to pay if the storm happened to them, they are outlining the impact of not doing anything or not making a purchase. If the sales person said, “With your current property if there is a flood storm, you could be out $50-100,000 in damages that you will have to pay out of your pocket. How do you feel about that expense being a possibility?” This tactic gets the prospect to see the impact of doing nothing and bring clarity to what can happen without making a change. This can help to build interest.

Share Company Facts: There is a place for you to exercise your bragging rights by sharing facts and details about your company. Telling the prospect that you have been in business 30 years could build interest. So could the fact that you don’t use offshore resources or you have won award for customer service.



Credibility

Part of your sales messaging can be designed to help establish your credibility. Credibility can help when trying to get past the gatekeeper who is screening you. While they are talking to you, they will typically try to determine if you are friend or foe.

A friend is someone that is already doing business with the company or is known to be okay for them to let in. A foe would be an outsider trying to get in, like a sales person trying to get an appointment. If you are able to present yourself more as a friend than a foe, you will find gatekeepers and target prospects more open to talking and let you in. Establishing a little credibility can help with this and here are some ways to do this:

• Name dropping: If you are talking to a gatekeeper—or a target prospect—name drop other people you have spoken to already. For example, when you say something like “We met with Mary Thomas in accounting”, this presents an image that you are already working with the business and have a certain level of credibility. If you have not met with anyone yet, which can often be the case when prospecting, you can share the people you plan to meet. For example, “We are planning a meeting with Mary Thomas in accounting but want to connect with the Director of HR prior to that. Can you point me in the right direction?”

• Story Telling: Just like we talked about under building interest, people will respond to stories about client experiences with your product/service.

• Lack of Availability: If you have limited quantities, it can lead to the prospect thinking the product/service may be particularly good.

• Lack of Neediness: People like to think you want their business, but when you desperately need their business, it is a totally different story. Communicate that you appreciate the opportunity to earn their business, but desperation will usually kill the opportunity.



• Picture of Consensus: Prospects can feel a sense of assurance if you can paint a picture of a scenario where everybody is buying your product or switching over to your service. Without lying, you can throw out some data that stimulates the herd mentality. It makes people think that you are okay and establishes you as credible.

REMEMBER: You have access to a lot of names, with useful contact data in Lead Ferret. Using this information can make it easy to ask for the right person or to use drop names for credibility. Most of Lead Ferret’s subscribers access information free and only have to pay if they want to download the data. For SalesNexus clients, they can download 500 contact records each and every month—even during the free trial period. No brainer—right?



Connecting to the Magic 5In the first eBook of this series, we talked about the power of the Magic 5. It is important that we tie this information about the pillars back to that concept here. Knowing the six pillars of a sales stategy allows you to create a powerful marketing campaign using email.

A quick review of how this model works:

• Create 5 emails that focus on different pains that your products and services address. (Customer pain is covered in depth in the second eBook of this series.)

• When people click on the links in the emails to read those articles, it triggers a sales response.

• When sales people call the people who have opened the links, they use a series of qualifying questions to determine if the prospect is ready to purchase soon or needs to be nurtured over time. (Re-member, he third eBook explains how to develop qualifying questions.)

• A second campaign using frequently asked questions (FAQ) is sent to those that don’t meet the criteria as a highly qualified buyer. These are based on questions that people typically ask before they buy. It helps the prospect move toward a purchase.



Content Campaign Based on Prospect PainEarlier we talked about how a prospect for SalesNexus may be losing sales opportunities because of not having a system for working and tracking leads. The Magic 5 would start with a content piece addressing specific prospect pain. An email subject line might ask if sales leads are falling through the cracks. Inside the email, a link would be available to take the prospect to the content piece.

Using LeadFerret.com, it is quick and easy to send that email out to 500 or more sales managers. When someone opens the email, it is the first sign they may be interested. When they click the link to the content piece, they are—more or less—raising their hand to say they are interested. It becomes a great opportunity for a conversation with a sales person at SalesNexus.



Additional Resources

A lot of information has been covered in this eBook in a very short period of time. We aren’t going to leave you without additional resources if you are interested in learning more.

In the book, The Cold Calling Equation, each of these pillars discussed in this eBook is covered in more detail with a chapter dedicated to each one. There are actually 20 chapters in the book, so go ahead and get yours on Amazon.

You can also take advantage of a 10-week Sales Prospecting Training Pro-gram from SalesScripter. Send an email to [email protected].

SalesScripter is a web-based tool that asks questions to extract key de-tails about the products or services you sell. It digs deep into questions about the company you represent, the value you offer, the pain you re-solve and the prospects that are likely to purchase from you. The details input into SalesScripter are plugged into a library of scripts, templates and sales tools.

The SalesScripter is actually completely aligned with the pillars discussed in this eBook and in The Cold Calling Equation. If you read through this and think you would like to get your information together in the areas discussed—value, pain, objections, interest, qualifying, etc., then go to SalesScripter. It provides a wizard that will take you through questions and will help you get all of your information together. When you complete the scripter, you will get documents outlining your sales messaging. You will get a list of value statements to use, a list of qualifying questions, an objections map, building interest points, and more.


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Again, the SalesScripter tool works well with Lead Ferret. For example, as you complete the questions, one of the documents will describe your Ideal Prospect. Size, region, industry, title and other important details are ready for you to use. Plug the details of the ideal prospect into Lead Ferret and get a list of people to contact.

The documents are produced by the answers you provide in the web-based tool. Each report is completely custom tailored to your situation.

Some of the questions in this wizard are somewhat thought-provoking, but most of questions are really straight forward and can be answered very quickly. You will get documents that connect your value with the prospects pain, differentiation and ROI statements, cold call scripts, voice mail scripts, first meeting scripts and so much more. You will also get both soft and hard qualifying questions—plus an objections map. Con-tent marketing topics are included to make it easy for you to implement the Magic 5 process of growing your business.

The documents are created as pdf docs that can be shared with your team too. Use it now—Free!



Next Steps

We hope that you’ve benefited from our ebook! We truly want to help you take your business to the next level. If you have questions about how these ideas can best be applied in your business, we’re only a phone call away! Really! Call or email and we’ll do our best to help however we can.

All the best,

Craig KleinCEO, SalesNexus.com713.862.0001

Free Live Training

For hands on instruction on how to write emails, create email templates and build campaigns, join our weekly live training session on Wednesdays at 3pm ET. http://support.salesnexus.com/training/

Sales Growth Webinars and ebooks

In addition to this ebook, we’ve published 6 webinars and ebooks. Access them all, completely free, herehttp://www.salesnexus.com/sales-growth-webinar-series/

30 Day Free Trial

Start your Free, 30 day trial of SalesNexus and transfer 500 LeadFerret.com contacts to email to begin iden-tifying qualified leads for your business today. http://www.salesnexus.com/free-trial/

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