As an ad salesperson, you have ‘new’ conversations with new potential clients every day.
But many of these ‘new’ conversations are, in fact, the same conversation — over and over again — with new potential clients.
This makes sense, because the people who are likely to advertise with you all have similar problems, and are looking for similar results from their ads — so they are likely to want to talk to you about the same things as everyone else.
Which means that if you say something to one potential client and it really RESONATES with them ….. it excites them enough to make them keen to buy ….. then you should say the very same thing to ALL your potential clients.
Likewise, if you are saying something to every client and it seems to be badly received by many of them …. STOP saying it!
And the things which you should keep saying, and the things which you should drop can be as small as a couple of words and phrases, through to whole sentences and paragraphs, to entire stories.
We call these things ’scripts’.
Scripts have a bad name with many ad sales people because they (rightly) don’t want to give ‘canned’ presentations — which are learned by heart and given verbatim to every possible prospect they encounter.
But true scripts are NOT like this. They are the COMPONENTS of a sales talk.
Each sales talk is unique, and ‘fitted’ to the client you are speaking to. If your sales talk were a car, then you would have a basic model, but would change the colour, engine, brakes, seating and many other components — depending on what the customer wanted. Each customer would choose the components that appealed to them …. so they’d end up with their own ‘customised’ car …. based on your standard model.
Likewise, from the huge pool of words and phrases you could possibly use in a sales conversation …. you pull certain words and phrases that fit the prospect you are talking to.
Each sales conversation is unique. But is based on the ’standard’ model (the DIPADA model if you sell like we do) and is built with the components of words and phrases that are used over and over.
The components which you use again and again are the ones which work.
If a phrase or story is very persuasive on several clients, then you use it over and over on most clients — until it stops working.
An example?
Many years ago (over twenty) the set-up phrase: “If I could show you how we can do this for you, would you go ahead?” worked well.
It was the phrase we always used during the I (Interest or Idea) phase of the DIPADA conversation. Then EVERYBODY started to use it in ALL phases of a sales talk — and buyers heard it again and again. They knew this was a set-up and cringed (or immediately put up their ’sales defences’ and stopped listening).
So a phrase which used to work — stopped working.
New ones came along.
And for the next few issues, we’ll be looking at words and phrases (scripts) which work for us today.
And we’ll begin with Four ‘Starting off’ scripts which you use when you are finding new prospects and introducing yourself and your publication. You should be able to use these scripts without thinking. They are:
1. Voicemail Script
2. Reaching the Target Script (on an ‘introductory’ call)
3. Gatekeeper Script
4. General Interaction Script
We’ll go into each of these scripts in detail next time.
Posted by roypreece 