Be a stand up comic and don’t crash!

When I talk to founders who have just got started, I always ask them who they’re selling to, who they’re potential customers are or what industry sector they’re focused on.  Unfortunately, the answer is often an enthusiastic “everyone” or “anyone that’s interested” or “the product applies across multiple industries.” From a sales perspective this is a recipe for disaster and you will crash badly.

You’ve got your first product and you think you’ve got product market fit. Now you need to sell more of it. To do that you need a script.

As I said in last weeks blog (3) The gift of the gab and snake oil salesmen | LinkedIn, you need to tell a story and in order to do that you need a sales conversation. The idea of a script is to ensure that you follow a specific route or map to take your prospect through your sales conversation with a clear goal in mind; to build a relationship so that they want to buy your product as opposed to you selling them your product. There is a subtle difference. To do this effectively you need to control the conversation. A script ensures both that you know where you’re going and you remain in control.

In its most basic form, a script is designed to introduce you and your product to a prospect and to explain all the features and benefits to the prospect in the form of a dialogue- never a monologue! It’s goal it to walk the prospect through all your USPs ( unique selling points) in the form of features and benefits. The difference between an information agent and a sales agent is the ability to explain a benefit to a feature.

If you think back to car salespeople in the 1920s when windscreen wipers were first invented. An information agent explains that the car has a new feature called a  windscreen wiper. A sales agent explains that a windscreen wiper removes rain, water, snow, etc while you are driving so that you can still see where you are going and don’t crash and kill yourself. This is the benefit. One of the biggest mistakes that salespeople make is that they assume that the prospect understands the benefit of the feature without having it explained to them. This is never the case. The script ensures that this misunderstanding does not happen and that all the benefits are explained in a logical and articulate manner.

Another reason for a script is to do with stand up comics. You have started the meeting with the four Es- energy, excitement, emotion and expertise. You must remember that you are not the first person to pitch your prospect. They are desperately trying to work out what you offer and put you into a box that they are familiar with. As part of this they are mentally comparing you to everyone and everything that they have heard about in this area before. Your job is to explain why you are different. One of the ways that you do this is by thinking about stand up comics.  When a stand up goes on stage almost the first thing that they do is make fun of themselves for whatever perceived deficiency or negative attribute they might have. A short comic will joke about their lack of height, one with a strong accent will make comments about no-one understanding them, one that’s overweight will reference it etc This isn’t an act in humility. This is to depower any heckler. By saying out loud anything that a heckler might throw at them they take away the power of the heckler by owning the insult in advance. This is what you need to do with your script.

You control the conversation by bringing on to the table all the positives about your competitors that a prospect is thinking of. You explain why you are different and remove from the prospect’s mind the comparison with a potential competitor. By proactively doing it this way it means that you retain control.. The script explains your USPs but also explains why you are different to anything or anyone out there, especially your potential competitors. It is important not to actually name your competitors as this empowers them in  the prospects mind. This deliberate controlled removal of your competitors in the prospects mind will not mean that there are no objections from the prospect but the more successful you are at doing this the less objections you will have to overcome.

It is a law of sales that every single objection that you get you will have created. Something that you have said or not said, explained or failed to explain correctly will result in every objection that you get. If you have a script then you can start to work out which objections you are getting consistently. This enables you to work out what you are saying that is creating these objections and to refine the script. It is a continual trial and error based directly on prospects’ feedback that allows you to work towards a script that meets you goal and makes people buy your product. A script is always being refined and improved.

 People buy different products for different reasons but groups of people often buy for similar reasons. These are your user groups or customer personas. Without specifically defined user groups you can not build a script. The reason that one user group buys your product will differ from another user group.  This means that there will need to be a shift in which USPs and benefits that you emphasise or the order that you reveal them in and you will need to build specific scripts for specific user groups. Each one will need to be built in the same way with you working out what objections you are creating for each group and how you need to refine the script to overcome them.

This targeted script building is how you start to sell and is key to bootstrapping. It won’t get rid of every objection but, by having a script and focusing on certain groups, you will start to work out where  your product can play and what its most relevant USPs are. How you deal with objections and overcome them is important but first you have to learn how to spot them so we need to look at gorillas and basketballs.. next week’s blog.