Steve Richard, co-founder for sales training organization Vorsight, wrote a guest blog article yesterday for sales strategist Chad Levitt’s New Sales Economy Blog.  The article, entitled “11 Sales Tips for Cold Calling and Prospecting,” offered some good insight into making the most out of each and every attempt to get in touch with your potential buyers.  One of the questions that Steve suggests asking yourself is this:

“Do you revisit your talking points periodically to more effectively tell your story and stand out from the vendor noise and static?”

This is a great question!  It makes me wonder how many times prospects hang up on teleprospectors because they do nothing to make themselves unique in terms of their messaging.  There is some interesting discussion going on over at that post, and I think you should take a look at it and join in the conversation.

*Picture credit:  Linda Cronin via Flickr

If you’re somewhere close to my age (35) you may remember a brand of toy cars called Micro Machines.  Micro Machines were pretty much what you’d expect, they were smaller versions of what was considered a normal toy car in the 1980’s.  Micro Machines were basically mini-Matchbox or Hot Wheels cars and they were pretty popular at the time.  The one thing that I remember most about Micro Machines was their commercial’s spokesman, John Moschitta, Jr.  Now, by name alone you probably don’t know who this guy is, but if I told you he was the speed talking voice-over announcer for stuff in the ‘80s, you’re probably nodding your head saying, “Oh yeah – that guy!”  John Moschitta, Jr., according to his Wikipedia entry, held the Guinness World Record for speed talking at 586 words per minute.  That is crazy!  I think it’s great that Moschitta, Jr. was able to find his niche in life in terms of using his talent to do commercials and voice-overs, but I’ll tell you this – he wouldn’t have made a good teleprospector talking that fast!

A teleprospector, or business development rep, who could talk at the speed of Moschitta, Jr., just wouldn’t really find success in B2B lead generation.  Sure, we need BDR’s who are comfortable talking to prospects, just not at that speed.  Your in-house team of lead generators, or your vendor’s team, needs to know how to talk, sure, but more importantly, they need to know how to get your prospects to talk.  You see, it’s one thing to know how to hold a conversation.  Pretty much anyone can do that.  To get a prospect talking and giving your BDR’s information to qualify sales opportunities, that’s a whole other ballgame.  I think if your BDR’s, or the BDR’s who are making calls on your behalf through your vendor, are going to get your prospects talking, they need to be able to do three things: 

1. They need to ask smart questions.
2. They need to ask open ended questions.
3. They need to listen, listen, and listen!

Since the typical target of a teleprospecting campaign begins high, at the C-level, we can agree that those folks are pretty intelligent.  So first, if you want prospects to talk to your BDR’s, then it stands to reason that they need to ask smart questions.  They need to take the time to really understand the technology or the services that their qualifying for.  They need to take that understanding (or their manager needs, too) and use that as a lens with which to understand a prospects need or pain.  Better understanding, better comprehension of how their technology or services solve business problems allows for the ability to ask smarter questions to their prospects.  Look, I’ve been on my fair share of projects where, at their start, I didn’t really grasp the technology that my client was offering.  My questioning skills were at pretty remedial levels because I was afraid to ask deeper probing questions for fear that I wouldn’t be able to hang with the prospect, conversationally speaking.  Now, as those projects aged, and I had made more dials and had more conversations and spent more time with my client understanding their technology, my conversations with prospects improved.  I was able to ask smarter questions; questions that, as Pete Gracey talks about in part two of his eBook Driving Marketing ROI, gets our prospect telling us things we want to hear from them.  Smarter questions = questions that have been forged through the refining process of better technological/product services understanding.  They are questions that give the prospect the hint that your BDR’s know what they’re talking about.

Second, and this is about as basic as it gets, but your BDR’s need to ask open-ended questions.  Let’s all take a trip in our time machines and go back to sixth grade English class for a second – open-ended questions are ones that illicit a response from someone greater than a one word answer.  We’re not looking for “yes” and “no” type questions here.  Your BDR’s need to have, at their disposal, as many open-ended qualification questions as you can put in front of them.  If the goal is to get a prospect talking, what good does it do to have an order taker on the phone qualifying your sales opportunities?  “Got this OS?”  “Don’t you want to save money?” “Do you have money to purchase?” “Are you feeling (insert business pain here)?”  You get the drift.  Maybe in late ‘90s you could have an order taker, but not today.  Spend some time with your BDR’s and develop some great open-ended questions that give your prospects the chance to spill their guts of all of their problems that (hopefully) your technology or services can solve.  It’s so critical that your BDR’s get this one right, folks.  A conversation full of open-ended versus closed-ended questions is the difference between a fully qualified sales opportunity and an opportunity lost.  Here is a list of 30 good open-ended questions from Just Sell that your BDR’s should be using today.

Lastly, if your BDR’s are going to get prospects to talk, they need to listen, listen, and listen.  If everything in real estate hinges on location, location, location, “listening” is its teleprospecting counterpart.  I’ve been on the end of phone conversations listening in to BDR’s who just wouldn’t shut up and let the prospect talk.  They’d spend the majority of the time interrupting the prospect with how our clients could do this for them, and how our clients could do that.  Interrupt a prospect, who by the way, is cursing him-or-herself for actually picking UP your BDR’s phone call, and they’re going to close down faster than ANY restaurant next to Jay’s on Route 28 in West Bridgewater. Yes, it’s a geographical reference, but trust me when I tell you, as soon as their having their Grand Opening, they’re having their Grand Closing.  A couple of weeks ago I asked you if your BDR’s were listening to your prospects, and you can check that out here.  My point here, though, is that if your BDR’s are too busy interrupting your prospects, they’re sending a message that says, “I’m really just in this for me, not to help you.”  Let your prospect feel that for a minute and you’ve lost them.  If your BDR’s are listening, that means they’re giving your prospects time to talk, and THAT, my friends, is what we’re after here – talking prospects.

If you want your prospects to talk with your BDR’s, they need to ask smart, open-ended questions, and then listen.  If your BDR’s are doing that, congrats!  If not, shoot me an email and we can talk about fixing that.

I bet most of you are probably like me – you’ve made countless numbers of cold calls, warm calls, and “Good-God-please-pick-up-the-phone” calls.  And probably just like me, at some point in your teleprospecting career, you’ve used tips and tricks to get a prospect talking with you.  Some work, some don’t.  Regardless of what was successful for getting your prospect talking, getting them to understand why they should be talking with you is paramount.  How do you go about doing this?  How do you take those few precious seconds after saying, “Hi, this is _____” and actually get a prospect to talk with you?  For me, I think it’s all in having a prospect understand why they need to talk with you.

I’ve worked with a bunch of clients who are really good at describing what they do.  They understand the pains that their solutions solve and they have a really good handle on why their target audience wants to talk with them.  If you’ve got your own inside sales prospecting team, or maybe you’ve got a vendor finding sales qualified leads for you, you’ve got to make sure your BDR’s have that messaging down.  Prospects need to understand why they need to talk with them if they’re going to have success passing quality sales opportunities over to your sales team.  The way I see it, there are three ways you can help your BDR’s (and your prospects) out in this area: 

1. Help them understand a prospect’s pain.
2. Help them understand how your solution solves it.
3. Help them to shape their messaging by leading with value.

First, to help your prospects understand why they should talk with your organization, help your BDR’s to understand a prospect’s pain.  This is teleprospecting 101, I know, but because of its importance it needs to be stated.  If your BDR’s do not understand what business pains your target audience has that your solution/service can solve, you’ve got a lot of work to do.  Your BDR’s should be able to understand, at different decision making levels, the pains that each level experiences.  Why might a C-Level prospect be kept up at night about a problem that your service/solution solves?  Her Director?  His Manager?  The end user?  Lots of folks out there have problems – especially your prospects.  Ensuring that your BDR’s understand their problems is going to help them to better qualify prospects, and in turn, pass better sales qualified opportunities.

Second, help your BDR’s to understand how your solution solves your prospects pains.  Its good if your BDR’s know what pains your target market has; its great if they can articulate how your solution/service solves said pains.  What does your solution do for a company?  Why does it make them a better organization?  These are questions that need to be answered for your BDR’s, and answered in such a way that they are able to relay it simply to your prospects.  With greater understanding comes greater levels of conversations with prospects, and the more substantive conversations that they have with prospects, the better your qualified leads will be.  The better the lead, the greater the likelihood that it hits pipeline and closes.  Pete Gracey talks more about this in part one of his eBook, Driving Marketing ROI, and you can read that here.

Lastly, help your BDR’s to shape their messaging by leading with value.  Your BDR’s understand business pains across multiple management levels, and they understand how your product or service alleviates those pains.  Make sure that when they actually get a prospect on the phone, they’re leading with the value that your solutions bring.  No feature dumping…God please, NO feature dumping.  Nobody wants to get a call from a BDR.  There, I said it.  But NOBODY, and I mean NOBODY, wants to get a call from a BDR who’s verbally puking on the phone about all the bells and whistles that his/her product has.  Help your BDR’s (or your vendor’s BDR’s) by working with them to created messaging that leads with your value.  Your prospects will appreciate it!

By following the above steps, you’re letting your prospects understand why they should speak with someone in your organization when your BDR’s call.  When you prospects have better clarification on that, I’m betting that your lead production will increase.  Good luck!

Yesterday, Rebel Brown, Strategist for People Who Know, had a great blog entry in her blog Phoenix Rising.  She makes the point that “Three adjectives and a noun are not a value proposition.”  In other words, “create compelling value propositions.”  I completely agree with her.  I think she’s spot on and I think it speaks to teleprospecting. Rebel talks about using words that matter to customers, keeping the message simple, and applying value.  I couldn’t agree more.  Relating it to teleprospecting, if you’ve got an inside lead generation team, or maybe you’ve outsourced your sales prospecting, you’ve got to make sure that your BDR’s are speaking to prospects on their level.  Our BDR’s have such precious little time when a prospect actually picks up their phone, that we can’t waste that time with (pardon the pun) crap. 

On top of that, the message that BDR’s bring to the market have got to be simple.  Those of us that are writing scripts and creating messaging that BDR’s use on the phones have got to make sure that we’re keeping them simple – to a point.  Simple enough to be understood by the BDR saying it, and simple enough that the prospect on the other end understands and, better yet, knows that we understand that message so well that we’ve simplified it.  This can be tough when talking tech.  Tech can only be simplified so much, but we’ve got to try. 

Lastly, and I think this one is the most important, we’ve got to apply our value.  If our BDR’s are not leading with value, we’re sunk before a telephone receiver is even picked up.  Having a value forward message, one that delivers an impact to an audience that desperately needs to be impacted, is a must.  Rebel makes the point to say, “Asking our audiences to extract the value from generic, buzz-ridden claims is risky at best.”  Need I say more?  Yours, mine, OUR prospects cannot be expected to “get” our value on their own.  It’s our job to make sure they get it, and the only way to do that is lead with value.  What sets you apart from everybody else?  What pains do you solve?  What problems do you fix?  How can you accelerate “blank”?  For me, I owe it to my clients to make sure that their messages are value forward.  For you, whether you do it in-house or outsource, make sure your teleprospecting teams are doing it the same way.

How lame does that title sound, huh?  Almost as lame as what one client told me, regarding how prospects would feel about their product:  “The streets are going to want to marry you!”  You know what I found during that campaign?  The streets didn’t even understand my language.

One of the most vital aspects of any good sales prospecting effort is the script that your business development rep’s are going to use.  The truth is that people are more likely to respond to an email these days than they are pick up the phone, and it is that truth alone that makes having a quality sales prospecting script a must.  While I’m a firm believer that the best way to generate fully qualified leads is through the phone, I also know how difficult that can be if the script that you’re using isn’t good.  It is critical that a good teleprospecting script comprises the following: 

1.  It doesn’t sound “scripted” – You know what its like to get a call with someone trying to sell you something at home, be it a newspaper subscription or digital cable.  They all HAVE this one in common, that they sound scripted.  A good manager will work with his/her BDR’s to ensure that their teleprospecting script doesn’t sound “scripted,” and that it flows well.

2.  It does get to the point – Please, please, please do not product dump!  NOBODY wants to listen to 47 seconds of your BDR babbling about your technology, I can promise you this.  A good script is going to get to point and do it fast.  Tell the prospect why they want to talk with you, not about you.

3.  It does get the prospect talking – This may sound remedial, but you’d be surprised at the number of scripts I look at from client’s that do not end their intro with an open ended question.  One of the most important things that BDR’s can do to ensure a better, more qualified sales opportunity is to ask open ended questions.  We’re trying to, as my colleague Matt described in his blog on the 16^th, paint a picture as to what the opportunity really looks like for our client.  The more a sales prospecting script is loaded with open ended questions, the more we can get prospects talking.

Now, about the clients who told me that “the streets [would] want to marry me”?  The script that I originally got from them was just full of techno-babble and product dumping, and that’s why it wasn’t a hit with “the streets.”  “The streets,” in this instance, were looking for a quick way to separate themselves from me, not marry me.  For now, keep the script real by following the guidelines above, and maybe you’ll get some play that way.