Your messaging, what I often refer to as the “Sales Story,” is your single most important sales weapon because pieces of your story end up in all your other weapons – prospecting call outlines, voicemails, emails, social media profiles and messages, discovery meetings, presentations, and proposals.
YOUR SALES STORY is always critical to your sales success and that’s even more true right now.
Just think for a minute about the business and personal chaos our prospects and customers are attempting to navigate due to Covid Craziness:
- Uncertainty about the direction of the economy (are we recovering or about to collapse?)
- Changes to their work environment (transitioning from in-person to virtual and wondering if/when/how it goes back the other way)
- Worrying about their own business and their customers’ businesses and how the pandemic is wreaking havoc in the markets they serve
- Potentially dealing with either childcare challenges (guessing whether school will remain in-person, virtual, or some hybrid combo and the ramifications to their work lives) or eldercare issues including fear for aging parent’s health, isolation, or depression, and sadness from the forced separation of grandparents from their beloved grandkids
- The deafening political noise and nonsense which is louder than ever as election season heat up
On top of these heavy burdens customers are carrying, how about the fact that almost every buyer is constantly deluged with spammy messages from amateur sellers? Pathetic self-focused pitches fill their LinkedIn message box. And every morning they open email to face a mound of lame automated emails (with Calendly links – my personal pet peeve) asking for their time but offering neither compelling reasons nor value.
Sales Friends, it’s never been more important that we become, what I like to call, conversationally comfortable with compelling talking points from our Sales Story. Sellers need a great story to win big in sales, and when you combine the business and personal stress on our customers with the fact that they’re continually bombarded with awful messaging, it’s absolutely imperative that we raise our story game!
I’ll be back soon with practical tips and powerful help to significantly upgrade your messaging, but for now, it might be helpful to start with a simple, quick self-assessment of the effectiveness of your current messaging/story:
- How confident are you in your message/pitch/value prop/story?
- Are your main story points more focused on your company and your offering/solution, or on the value the customer receives from working with your company or purchasing your offering?
- Is your “story” fulfilling one of its most critical missions – getting you meetings?
- How well does your messaging position you in the prospect’s (or customer’s) mind and is it helping build credibility so buyers are more open to your probing/discovery?
- If you sell a premium product or service, is your story doing its part to justify your premium pricing?
- Are your other sales weapons (from prospecting messages to positioning statements to presentations to proposals) dripping with powerful talking points from your story?
If you answered “no” or “not” to a few of these challenge questions, then there’s no way that you’re optimizing your sales results. Said differently, it’s almost impossible to win big in sales if your sales story isn’t doing what it’s supposed to.
Spend time this week evaluating the effectiveness of your sales weapons and invest some energy into crafting stronger and more customer-focused talking points that will sharpen your messaging. I promise that any effort invested into strengthening YOUR SALES STORY will produce a positive ROI!
