Get Your Field Message Right
At Enigin we value our sales people, the guys who convert interest into tangible results. Enigin Distributors globally also need to be able to dot her same and the following post will be a help to them.
Dean Schantz of Corporate Visions, reckons one of the most common reasons that sales professionals fail to turn prospects into customers is a weak or non-existent “field message”.
Your field message is a vital sales tool. What does this tool do, a veritable swiss army knife of a tool at that:
- Your elevator pitch — a conversational technique that sounds out a chance encounter to see whether that person you met is a potential prospect.
- Your cold calling script — a telephone technique to engage a lead in a conversation in order to determine whether or not they’re a qualified lead and, if so, move the sale forward.
Elevator pitches and cold-calling scripts are used at the very beginning of a sales cycle. Field messages are used when you have already qualified the lead and are already involved in the sale. (That’s why they’re called “field messages” — you use them when you’re in the field.)
For example, suppose you’ve started developing an opportunity with a qualified lead and that lead invites you to speak with his boss. The field message is a clean and clear summary of why somebody would be interested in buying from you and your firm.
Novice sales pros often try to use the corporate marketing message for this purpose, but that almost never works because marketing messages are almost always ineffective because they’re written by people who have no experience selling.
Schantz says that an effective field message always contains five elements:
- It communicates what’s unique about the offering. If the role that your firm plays could be played by any of your competitors, your sales message is only selling your product category.
- It communicates why talking to the sales pro is of value. If the sales message would work with any sales rep, there’s no particular reason to buy from you rather than the other guy.
- It speaks to the customer’s concerns. No matter how compelling your story, if the prospect isn’t at the center of it, the prospect isn’t going to care about the message.
- It contains a “defend-able quantitative.” Your sales message must be backed up with a verifiable fact that buttresses any claims that you make.
- It is memorable in some way. You can’t just trot out a cookie-cutter replications of ideas and terms that the customer has heard hundreds of times before.
Needless to say, good field messages are relatively rare but sales professionals who have strong ones, find it relatively easy to convert leads into prospects.
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