In Sales, Words Matter!

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Words can have a negative or positive impact on your sales efforts. Guest author Gary Kurtis shares some examples….

The interrogation with the overhead light:

Sales people are rightfully taught to ask questions to uncover problems. Often this comes across to the customer as an interrogation. Before asking the questions, be sure you have created a comfort level with your customer, and then have the questions be “conversational”. The best questions are thought-provoking, meant to elicit a reply such as “What a great question! No one’s ever asked me that before!” With questions posed in this manner, prospects will be more likely to tell you about their problems.

The 50/50 dilemma:

How many times during the sales cycle do we ask a question or make a statement and not get the answer we are looking for? For example, we say “I am calling to follow up on our proposal”, only to be told “Well, nothing has changed”. (Why ask a question if there is at least a 50% chance you will not get your desired answer?)

Dealing with the competition:

Here are two scenarios we all want to avoid. a)You had a great call leading to an anticipated sale, but the customer goes with your competition. You never had the chance to address your advantages – because you didn’t ask if they were looking at other options!  b) Following another great call, you remember to ask the prospect if they are planning to look at the competition. They reply, “What a great idea! We hadn’t thought about doing that, but it now makes perfect sense.”  Neither scenario is good for you. Rather than suggesting there is competition, once the customer expresses a desire for your solution, simply ask them what next steps they plan to take to have your solution fully approved. (If they do plan on looking at the competition, that will be revealed in their answer.)

Getting the customer to state what they dislike about their current vendor:

Sales people are often taught to ask this question to determine how they can become a better source compared to the current vendor. The problem is most (particularly if they don’t know you), prospects will not automatically open up. In fact, they may become defensive, since it was their decision to select that vendor. Take the high road. Ask your customer what they like about their current vendor. Then ask them what they would improve or add. This technique essentially gives you permission to ask what they don’t like, doing it in a positive way.

Requesting a meeting:

Sales people are given numerous scripts to request a meeting. These are performed by cold calling, phone, email, letters etc. The basic request is to make it about you and your company and having an opportunity to introduce yourself to eventually “earn” your business. In this era of information overload and “pushy” sales people you become part of the noise. A better approach is to identify your differentiation from others, learn what’s most important to your targeted customer and request to have a conversation to share how you helped other similar customers to see if there is a fit.

In sales, the words you use and your choice of questions to ask – matter – a lot!

 

Today’s guest post was contributed by Gary Kurtis, Principal of Sales Tips101. For more information, call (301) 775-1318 or visit https://salestips101.com.

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In Content Marketing, You’ve Gotta Do More Than Rubbing Harder

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Earlier this week, we discussed the importance of infusing the unique personality or “esthetic” of the business owner or professional practitioner into their marketing content in order to “make things happen”. Ironically, the instruction label on a household product reminded me how often this good advice is apparently ignored….  

Preparing for the upcoming Passover holiday, I realized that my silver candlesticks had become tarnished and were in need of polishing. At my favorite hardware store, after selecting a packet of “polishing cloths for fine metal”, I began reading the instructions on the back of the package.. The first of seven bullet points of instructions read as follows (so help me!): “Rub tarnished objects gently. For tough jobs, rub harder.”  

”Writing a blog with relevant content proves to your audience that you’re a knowledgeable resource on the subject,” Mailchimp explains. “The content in your blog posts should be helpful and informational as that shows your customers you understand them and want to help them….How-to’s are a very popular type of blog post, explaining to a reader how to do a specific task.”

“When you teach your readers how to do something, it demonstrates three very important qualities about you and your business: You want to help 2.You can help 3.There is more help where that came from”, Linda Dessau writes on LinkedIn. Instructional posts are educational, offering advice and tops onn tackling either common complaints or niche problems, bigstarcopywriting.com observes. In fact, the authors add, instructional blog posts tend to be more successful than others in increasing landing page visits over time.

The thing to avoid, though, in creating content that helps and instructs, is exemplified by the inst4ructions on my silver polish package: talking down to your audience. (As Prince is quoted as saying “When you don’t talk down to your audience, they can grow with you.”)  The secret to success in instructional content marketing is making complex topics digestible without sounding as if your talking down to the reader.

Do I need the manufacturer to advice me that polishing my candlesticks effectively is simply a matter of rubbing harder? In creating how-to content, the one reaction you never want to elicit from readers is the one I had – “Duh!”

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Grounding Yourself in Purpose

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“Some ideas just stick,” Laura Spence-Ash tells writers in Poets & Writers magazine. It’s important for writers to pay attention and find patterns and concepts that they themselves find pleasing, using those patterns to “find a way forward” in expressing ideas to their readers, the author explains.

“Sticky” ideas are important in content marketing, because they help the different elements – social media posts, blog posts, web pages and newsletters – “fit together” as components in an ongoing strategy. At Say It For You, we use the musical term leitmotifs. “The leitmotif is heard whenever the composer (of, say, an opera) wants the idea of a certain character, place, or concept to come across,” Chloe Rhodes explains in A Certain “Je Ne Sais Quoi.

In planning content marketing strategy for your business or professional practice, one important step, we explain to our clients, is to select four or five themes that are important to your point of view. As their marketing consultants, we will then make sure those themes appear and reappear in all their marketing communications.

Not to be confused with “keyword phrases”, themes express desirable outcomes resulting from successful use of a product, a service, or a methodology. For example, a residential air conditioning firm might use keywords such as “air conditioning”, “HVAC”, and “air conditioning repair”. The recurring themes, in contrast, might be “comfort” and “a healthy home environment”.

When owners express doubt about their ability to keep generating new content, I often remind them of late CEO of Apple Computer, Steve Jobs. Biographer Walter Isaccson noted that Jobs owned more than a hundred black turtlenecks.  Not only was this convenient, but it conveyed Jobs’ signature style. For much the same reason, defining “sticky” concepts about your industry, your products, and your services, helps, not only in keeping content focused and targeted,  but keeping it going! 

“Grounding yourself in purpose” means focusing on the ideas and the phrases that you find “stick in your mind”, on principles so valuable to you that you feel compelled to share them with your audience.  Use those “sticky” word patterns and concepts to “find the way forward”, feeling compelled to share those ideas with readers.

 

 

 

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Blog Posts are Ideas-in-Brief

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“To help busy readers quickly absorb and apply the concepts, the feature-length articles in these collections also include short ‘Idea in Brief’ summaries,” the editors of Harvard Business Review’s Special Issue explain, referring to the “text box” found in each long article..

What are text boxes?
As the Style Manual teaches. in technical or long-form content, text boxes, which sit on the page close to the text they support, are short articles that support the main body of the text. The content in the text box might contain a summary of the topic, examples, or an expansion of ideas in the main text. People tend to scan text boxes before they read the body of the text.

Blog posts as text boxes:

A blog post can summarize the topic:
Lawyerist.com teaches lawyers how to create powerful introductions when arguing a case in court, advising that an opening line must put the motion in the larger context, besides giving the judge a reason to keep reading.

A blog post can give examples illustrating the main message of a business or practice:
The “mapping method” of taking notes on paper can be adapted for blog series, where the content writer explores different aspects of the same topic in a group of three to four individual posts.

A blog post can expand on the ideas within the topic:
Blog content lets you go deeper than your website permits, creating a big, expanding brochure of practical, persona-optimized web content targeted to your market niche. Milie Oscar explains.

Text boxes and “callouts” are not just gimmicks – the main message in an article and the information in the text box must be directly related to one another. In the same way, whichever content an online searcher might encounter first, whether it happens to be the business website itself or an individual blog post, the core two purposes is the same – imparting understanding and forging connections.. “Before you include a text box or callout in your content, consider how it will help people understand or use the information,” Style Manual cautions.

Blog posts are nothing more than “Ideas-in-Brief”.

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Using “Did-You-Knows” to Suggest “Don’t-You-Wants?”

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Did you know that a) Asia is bigger than the moon? b) Alaska is the westernmost, easternmost, and northernmost state in the U.S.? c) Maine is the closest state to Africa? These are just three of the “facts that will change how you look at the world“.

As a blog content writer, I find seemingly “useless” tidbits of information extraordinarily useful for capturing readers’ interest, adding variety and fun. But much more than that, I teach at Say It For You, tidbits can be used to: 1. describe your way of doing business 2. clarify the way one of your products works 3.explain why a service you provide is particularly effective in solving a problem 4. Debunk myths about your business or profession.

For all these reasons, in corporate blogging training sessions, I often recommend including interesting tidbits on topics related to your business (or, if you’re a freelance blog content writer, related to the client’s business). If you can provide information most readers wouldn’t be likely to know, so much the better, because that information helps engage online readers’ interest.

The big caveat, however, when using tidbits and unusual facts is that the information has to be tied to the readers’ problem or need. Why does the business owner or practitioner care about the information? Why will the info potentially make a difference to readers? The secret is creating a clear thought path from the fascinating facts to the benefits online readers stand to gain.

For example, a travel agency blog might use the fact that Maine is the state closest to Africa to promote a tour of Quoddy Head Light, a quaint Maine lighthouse located at the easternmost point of the United States.

A travel agency might also spark interest in travel to Asia using that tidbit about the continent being bigger than the moon. But there could be marketing power in that fact for other enterprises as well. Because the brain perceives the moon as being farther away when it is high in the sky and closer when it is near the horizon, appearing larger when viewed through trees or buildings, Krisztian Komandi blogs in medium.com about the influence of optical illusions on business decisions. A fashion blog can explain how certain fabric cuts make the waist appear more chiseled.

A little-known fact can become the jumping-off point for blog marketing content.

 

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