Transcript
Intro:
Hi, everyone. I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Teams podcast, where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate, and keep together highly effective sales teams…teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits.
Along the journey, we also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive you is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So, if you're an ambitious Sales Leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, Stronger Sales Teams is right where you need to be.
Ben Wright:
Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered sales teams. Well, it’s another week, another podcast episode, and there are absolutely times when I am planning out recording for my podcast and I start to wonder what’s my next 10, 20, 30 episodes worth of content sound like? And you almost go into that period of writer’s block where you’re wondering, gee, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to fill those and I’ll be open, right? I’m human, just like everyone that we deal with. Things don’t always flow easily, but as we stand at the moment, I’m very much in a different frame where there is so much happening across my business and the wonderful group of businesses and individuals that I work with that I am absolutely not short of content. So, as I’m sitting down writing and thinking about what are the best topics that I can roll out that I think will give most impact to sales leaders and even more senior sales professionals out there. And by the way, if you’re a junior sales professional looking to step up, then listening to content for senior sales professionals and leaders is exactly the place to be. But when I start to think about where it’s going to add the most value at the moment, I’m finding I’m having to be a little bit discerning in where I spend the time because there is just so much opportunity to learn and grow. With everything that’s happening in the global sales market.
Today, we’re actually going to come from a very different angle to what you would have heard on this podcast before. Really interesting angle for me, and that is actually to talk about the type of sales materials or sales literature that I see teams needing. Right? Not a topic you’d think about covering all that often, but when you sit back and take a backward step and have a look perhaps a little bit more objectively here. Sales materials represent a significant part of how we, as sales teams and sales individuals engage with our customer. In fact, we are often solely judged on the quality of our sales materials, particularly in things like tenders and where we can’t get much time with a customer, or when we have a customer that buys online or purely through the information that they can find on our business, rather than one to one or one to many engagement.
So really, sales literature is absolutely critical in terms of how we not only attract our right customers, but also convert those customers. So today I’d like to go through the three key pieces of sales literature that that for me, every team needs, and this doesn’t for me really matter whether or not you’re selling to end users or whether you’re selling to commercial businesses or perhaps you’re selling to partners. It’s really very much a generic approach from the types of literature you can take that then need to be really specified as you go through how you build them out and how you build the most engagement that you can within your audience. So, I think it doesn’t matter the market you’re in today, there will be a number of ideas that you can roll out around your sales literature over the coming weeks, months, and even this year.
So, we’re going to have a look at three formats here today around literature. And the formats are going to very much take an approach to say, how do we engage our customers is going to be the format number one for sales material, how do we inform them is going to be format number two for sales material. And then how do we inspire them or motivate them to work with, I guess, in particular us. But let’s take a more macro approach here and say, how do we inspire our customers to want to go down the journey that we’re putting in front of them? And that will be our third type of content.
So, we’re going to have engage, inform and inspire when it comes to content. So, let’s get into it and we’re going to start with engaging our customers because I think that really is that first step that we have when it comes to meeting people, particularly in a B2B sense. Whilst this is relevant for every market, those who are in a B2B segment and are really selling, or even your higher value B2C type of segments, when you’re having more than a single meeting with customers, this is where this type of literature is really important.
So, the first one is the piece that I talk about engagement when it comes to sales literature, and that’s all about your baseline presentation deck. So, it’s almost the first meeting introductory pitch deck that we’re going to roll in to meet our customers with, be it face to face, be it virtually whatever it may be, but something that we’re going to use to guide our conversation with our customers. Now, I have worked with hundreds of businesses over the last few years and found that this is. This is the least commonly executed piece of sales literature across the businesses I’ve worked with. And now to be clear here, this means that out of all the businesses I’ve worked with, this is the piece of literature that fewer of them tend to have. That said, it tends to be easy to execute when you get it right, but for many reasons, businesses haven’t been able to actually pull together their initial engagement pitch decks.
So, what does this deck look like for businesses? I’ve seen that use this really well? What they start with here is a broad approach in mind and that says, okay, so when we go to meet our customers for the first time, we need to make sure that we’re doing a blend of engaging them about who we are, but also engaging them in the process that we can go through together. So, this is normally quite a short and sharp pitch deck. Here I’m talking between four and eight slides with a level of customization for every single customer that you work with. Why is it short? Well, for me, this type of sales material is often rolled out during the needs analysis. Right. That early stage first meeting when we’re trying to understand what our potential customer or our prospect is actually looking for. Right. What their pain points are, what the opportunity is, but most importantly, the outcomes that we need to be delivering to them.
So, how I see these pitch decks work in terms of format is really simple. We have a slide that’s about us. Right? Really simple. And by the way, I’ll talk about shuffling the orders of these as we go through today. But we have a slide that’s about us, right? Yeah, generally not so much that motivational type of slide, but it’s that baseline slide that sets the room that gets people level, that says, hey, you is the business you’re talking to. Right? Very much six points. In fact, as we’re talking about all these slides, I really would encourage you to think about it from being six points, six words per point. Right. So, we’re looking at about 36 words maximum per slide. In fact, every single one of these engagement pitch decks that I work with. I don’t think there’s been a time across every single one where I haven’t asked someone to halve the words, right? Being too wordy, it’s really hard not to do, but certainly really, really important that we make sure that we’re getting that message across in a really engaging and clinical fashion. And yes, I did use the word clinical. And the reason I say that is because at this point in time, we just want to be informing our customers about who we are, and we’re going to move on to the important stuff next.
So, first slide here is very much about who we are. And in this slide, I’d always recommend that we’re hitting the most impactful points when it comes to where we create value, right? So, if we’re in a market where we know that building trust is really important, right? We want to be hitting about longevity in the business or size of employees or some type of stability around the business. If we’re in a market where we know that being very progressive with technology is really important, then we want to be making sure that we’re talking about types of patents or types of product leading services or products or opportunities that we have in the market, right? How we’re really driving the market forward. If we’re in a market where relationships are really important, a little bit different to trust, right? We want to be talking about how our business perhaps has a large number of reviews or some type of awards that we’ve won around customer service or even our focus just on customer service.
So, the first slide should be really, really pitched according to the type of market and industry that we’re in. Second slide for me is where I like to talk about the sizzle of the business. This is where we want to get punchy, right? And really get people’s engagement around something that we do that is going to create an outcome for our customers that they potentially or even better couldn’t do themselves. So, I say that again. Slide 2 is where we start to talk about some sizzle of our business, right? And communicating that we can do something for our customers or our prospects that they couldn’t do easily for themselves.
So, this is where we’ll start to talk about if we want to use some theory here, our unique value proposition, right? Or those type of statements that we have out in the market that we know engage interest from our customers. Or if we want to be a little bit more practical here, these are the things that we do really well. So, if we’re a business that’s in the finance market, we want to be talking about super high approval rates, for example, if we’re in the business that’s in the trade market, we want to be talking about quality of work or speed of execution. Right. Or design work. Right. Things that our customers are not going to be able to get easy themselves, but we’ll engage them quickly in that process.
Third slide. So, first slide here is about who we are. Second slide is about our sizzle. So, third slide is all about some of the offers that we have in market. Our products, our services. Right? That’s that really, really functional slide here where we’re saying, hey, we sell surfboards or we provide legal services. Right. Whatever it may be. But some a little bit more depth in terms of what we do. Now, important here because as we’re working through with our customers, we’re very much asking lots of questions here. And this podcast isn’t about how to use these sales pieces of literature. I mean, that requires a whole conversation on its own, but it’s about how we pull them together. So, third slide here is about some more information about our products, services, everything that we do.
Fourth slide. Right, moving on, again, we move. So, we’re moving here from functional into sizzle. So, slide one was about our business. Slide two was about some fantastic outcomes that we get for our customers. Slide 3 was about products and services. Slide 4 is about some social proof. This is where we start to talk about case studies, results, reviews, anything that we’ve done that shows a body of capability and trust that we can have with our customers. And often there’ll be one or two sides here. So, it might be a client, some client brands or logos that we put in there, right? That slide where we have a hundred logos on there, or. And then it might flow into a customer testimonial, or we might have that customer testimonial that moves into a case study. So often you’ll see here, these are slides four and five, right? And then slide six is all about how we can work together. This is the slide where we’ll often leave that blank or have some early ideas we start to think about, okay, so what are the ways that we can drive some value for you and your business? Those key outcomes, those pieces where those little bits of gold that we’re trying to get through these meetings, that really starts to set the scene around what we need to be doing next.
And then the last slide, be it slide 6 or slide 7 here, we’ve free-formed a little bit. This is all about next steps and for me, this is where that always be creating value. That’s my version of ABC or always closing as you really commonly hear it. But for me, this is about where we’re setting the scene around what success looks like. So, we’re engaging our customers to say, okay, if we can do this level of return at this cost or this payback period, or this outcome for the business, or save you this amount of money, right. Or generate this amount of customer interest, then we’ve got a broad speaking, a broad speaking way of working together, right? So essentially what we’re trying to do here is define what the deal looks like. Because once we get that deal written down and on paper, then we just have to go to work pulling it together, right? Pulling it together and encouraging our customers to have some confidence that, that what we’re doing for them will actually land.
So, let’s go through those again. Number one is all about our business. Number two is our sizzle. So, some of those fantastic outcomes or value that we offer, Number three is our product or our service or reasons for customers to engage with us at a more product or service specific level. Number four, and often number five, moving to case studies, testimonials, examples of social proof where people can really see that we have a broad level of capability in the market. Number six, we start to talk about outcomes that we can work on together where we’ll often leave this as a kind of freestyling slide. And then number seven is next steps. So, this all becomes about making sure we’re really clear on what success looks like when we move forward together.
Alright, so that’s the engagement piece when it comes to PC sales literature. I’ve spent a lot of time on that because I think it’s the most important. Once we get engagement with our customers, we get them choosing us early and that is genuinely what we want from our customers. Right? We want to be chosen as early as we possibly can because that then starts to run through our customers because that then helps us with our customers be validating that choice through our sales process rather than simply pitching against other competitors and the customer wondering, am I choosing you or someone else?
Alright, number two is all around informing and this is our essentially our quotation template. Very, very rare that I see a business not have this, but very, very rare that I see a business execute this well. And what I mean is that for smaller and medium sized businesses, we often end up having a Xero or a MYOB or a Service mate or a Scorer, those type of programs, right? Where it’s an automated quotation that’s simply generated straight out. Right now these are hard because we need to be informing our customers of exactly what we’re going to be doing for them. But keeping them engaged in who we are and the successes that we can drive for them is also really important. And this is where I see businesses tend to fall apart a little bit when it comes to that engagement piece because they’re simply just sending through automated quotes and they haven’t spent the time to either maximize what’s available from their system or simply design something that with a little bit of effort, they can export their quotes to and then roll out to their customers.
So, why is it important to have simply more than a quote? Well, for me, everyone you’re competing against is going to have a quote of sorts out there. I think the days of people just emailing out a quote online items, there are fewer and fewer of those happening and we’re seeing more and more people generate system driven quotes. So now it is simply a base level expectation. So, if you’re sending a system generated quote, you’re doing what everyone else is doing. And what I’d expect from there is close rates around what everyone else is getting at best. Right. If you’re not executing other things, then those close rates might be lower. And in the end, we’re in the rat race when it comes to quoting and we’re in the rat race when it comes to getting conversions.
So, for me, the piece here that’s really important, and I’m only going to flick through this one today, is to make sure that we are continually highlighting the outcomes that we are providing for customers. So, the value and the outcomes, but we’re also engaging them.
So, there’s little proof points that are flowing through our quotation templates or our quotations that we present that talk about our capability, our credibility, social proof, how we can make their lives better, be it business or personal, how we can deliver outcomes that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to get themselves. A couple of other things I’ll say around these pieces of sales literature is getting your terms and conditions in there and clear are really important. I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve worked with businesses and the terms and conditions were not clear through the quotation template. Right. Which ended up meaning that when it came to issues later on in service delivery and for the majority of businesses, they do have these, it became a really grey area when it comes to determining what those solutions are going to be.
But the second piece is also being easy to work with when it comes to quote templates. And that’s sending them across in a format that customers are going to be able to read, write, right. So, they’re not going to junk mail. And that comes down to the domains you’re using. It comes down to how they accept your quotations. Right. Today, if you do not offer a digital signature version on your quotation, you are absolutely behind the eight ball, requiring customers to go into Adobe and put their PDF signature in, or print them out and sign it and scan it and send it back. Those days are well past when it comes to ease of quotations. And I can tell you from personal experience, I have had projects that have stopped. That’s right, they’ve stopped. They haven’t gone ahead when I asked for a handwritten signature instead of using digital formats. They are so easy. They also track when our customers are opening our quotations, so they allow us to actually see if they’ve been looked at. Right. And above everything else, it provides a hell of a reduction in administration when it comes to the back of house for sales teams. So, digital signature is just a small thing, but can have a huge impact when it comes to sales quotation templates.
Okay, so number one here was all about engaging. That was our pitch deck. Number two was informing our customer, which is our quotation template. And look, I will say there’s a huge body of work that should be done around quotation templates, including how we present them, the type of, you know, the modality, but also what we might accompany with that quotation template. Be a video summary, be it product samples, be it a whole lot of other things. And this certainly needs a hell of a lot more work. But what I want to be making sure out of today is that you’re at least very clear on the three types of sales literature that I see working out across the hundreds and hundreds of businesses that we’re working with.
Okay, so we’ve engaged with informed, and the last one here is how we inspire our customers. And this one here is also one that I don’t see a lot of businesses do, but most importantly is I don’t see many who do this do it well. And this is all about case studies, social proof, testimonials. It’s having volume, volume of proof around work that you do. And for me, the reason that having a capability statement, which I’m going to call this, having this as part of your template deck is because it allows us to inspire our customers at any point in time, we can pull out one Quote, we can pull out one case study, we can pull out a brand that we’ve worked with and share how we’ve helped these businesses through stories. Some great examples of businesses I’ve seen roll out fantastic capability statements is that they’ll have a 10 page or a 20-page document. I’m really not too concerned about the length of this. But they’ll also have cut out a whole lot of single page case studies or they’ll have a whole lot of single page quotes. Right? And what this allows their salespeople to do is to grab one of those case studies or quotes and apply it to the most specific situation.
So, if you’re in the building game and you’re building a house that is two story, you can pull out two-story houses, or you’ve built a house that’s on a sloping block that has some real challenges, you can pull out that sloping block. If you’re in manufacturing and you’ve made a custom product for one type of customer that’s very similar to who you’re talking to now, you can grab that and roll that into the situation. And by simply being able to talk about work that you’ve done for others and outcomes that you’ve given them, it creates such a powerful opportunity for your customers to trust you. Some other areas I’ve really seen work well when it comes to capability statements is having video documents, right? Where people can just grab them as they need to. It’s having customer referrals ready to go so you can call people or customer sites that you can take people to visit. It’s loading all of the capability statements or your case studies onto iPads, right. Or some type of tablet. When you’re out in front of your customers, you can pull them up and show them, right? In fact, for me, it’s really having a mix in all different types of capability statements or pieces of social proof that allow your customers to recognize what you do.
I was dealing with a customer recently. They’re in airport and they were putting some infrastructure into their airport and they were dealing with two different offers, two different competitors. One really strong brand name had been in the market a long time. The second one, a really strong brand name, had been in the market for also a long time. What the second player was able to do was actually to prove work they’d done at other airports that very specifically related to what this customer was looking for. The other customer, despite being a very similar size, in fact, they’ve actually got more experience in this industry than who they were competing against. They weren’t able to show that specific experience or they didn’t show that specific experience. I suspect they had it. And so, what happened is they didn’t win the deal. Right. The customer that won the deal was the one that could show very specific evidence of use in that exact situation.
Okay, so we’ve got three types of literature there. We’ve got the engaging piece, which is your initial pitch deck, six to eight slides with a very clear focus per slide. Then we’ve got your informing or your information piece of sales literature, which is your quotation template that’s all about making sure that that continues to engage while also informing. And then your third one is your inspirational piece of content or your piece of sales literature. And this is the one that allows you to give your customer some confidence that you know what you’re doing. Get these three right. So engage, inform and inspire. And I think that’s about all you need. I think all the other pieces of content that you have there, and boy, have I seen sales teams with content. You can start to get rid of those. These are the ones that if you’re using and getting right, I think you should expect to be having a really good head start. Of course, how you use them becomes really impactful and we’ll talk about that later on. But if you do want to understand how to expand on these pieces of literature, that’s probably where we need to have a deeper discussion. And look, you know where to find me if you’d like to do that. I love helping people with this and you can get in touch as you need to. But for me, I hope that was an impactful podcast. Very, very different.
Before we go today, a little bit from a personal point of view. So, I’m calling it the Road to Cairns. I’ve decided this week that I’m going to sign up for an Ironman triathlon that’s I think 3.8km swim, 180k ride and 42km or 42.2 marathon at the end. I’ve never done something like this. I’m running in with very little preparation. I think it’s about 11 weeks. I’m going to have to get up and running. I’m a terrible bike rider, done plenty of swimming and enough running along the journey, but it’s going to get really real over the next 12 weeks. So, you’ll hear me sharing lots of that. The business is a part of what we’re doing here. I share a huge amount of my health and fitness journey. So, you’ll hear across the podcast across the next 12 weeks, the Road to Cairns, and I’ll share lots of those journeys. So, for those who have done one, you’re amazing. For those who haven’t done one, I’ll tell you just how bloody hard it is in about 12 weeks’ time.
Alright, everyone. Keep living in a world of possibility and you’ll be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now.
E109 How To Leverage Your Sales Materials to Grow Revenue
