Sales Resources and Tips

The Secret Of Writing Fantastic Sales Letters

Would you like to know the secret of writing fantastic sales letters?

This is a bit of a leading question because no salesperson in their right mind is going to say no and that is exactly the point of this message!

Writing great compelling sales copy is an essential skill for almost every sales role and yet often so little time is given over to teaching these skills.
Often salespeople are just expected to be able to do it with little or no help or guidelines.

So what is great sales writing and what is not?

Well unfortunately so much of what we see today is very defiantly not great, and often it is down right poor. Often it just concentrates on the sellers company, how great they are, how long they have been in business, how many features the product has etc.

An example of this sort of writing came through my door the other day, as you know I do a lot of work with salespeople who work in the food industry, and the industry magazine is called "The Grocer" which I get every week. Inside this weeks Grocer was an insert that had been put in by a company selling toothpaste. The headline and first paragraph on this insert was:

Putting their money where their mouth is:
"Company 'Name' is harnessing the power of 5 great brands in a major £3.65 million oral care promotion which engages consumers in a fun and interesting way and stresses the importance of the mouth."

Now I don't know about you, but I struggled to stay awake long enough to get to the end of this headline, let alone be inspired to take some action.

So the first rule of great sales writing is:
Capture the attention of your audience!

Imagine that your prospect is running away from a giant fireball and as they run they see your sales letter which is so compelling that they actually stop long enough to read it. Not as daft as it sounds because peoples lives today are so busy and hectic that they are quite literally flat out. So what is it that you have written that is so compelling that they will actually stop long enough to read it?

This is the job of your headline which has to be so interesting to your prospect that they are drawn almost magically towards it. How do we achieve this? Well to quote Perry Marshal, the guru of Internet marketing:
"You capture your clients' attention when you enter into the conversation that they are already having in their own head."

What are the conversations that are already going on in the head of your prospect? What are they worried about, what makes them stressed, what wakes them up in a cold sweat at 3am in the morning?

Identify that and you are guaranteed to get their attention!

So in our example from The Grocer, what could they have done instead? Well I would think that one of the major conversations going on in the heads of the independent retailers that this was aimed at is something like:

"How can I get people to shop in my store rather than the brand new Tesco's superstore that has just opened down the road?"

So our headline could be:
"Revealed - The secret of doubling the number of people shopping in your store!"

Now I think you will agree that that is far more compelling than the original.

The absolute masters at this sort of headline are the people that write copy for the front of women's magazines. This is because they operate in a highly competitive market and yet they know that if a woman picks the magazine up she is very likely to buy it. So the copy they write is highly compelling and gets straight into the conversation that women are having in their own heads.

Here are some examples from the front of just one magazine:

"Found! Your Secret Sex Weapons"
"50+ Super Sexy Bikinis from Just £6"
"Hair Miracles - The 30 Best Serums, Shampoos & Straighteners - As Voted by You"

So how do we use this to help us write great headlines?
Well it's called: "The Cosmopolitan Technique"

To do this, get a collection of women's magazines and write out the headlines from the front. Then taking each in turn, see if you can adapt it to fit your product or service.

So in our toothpaste example we could turn:
"Found! Your Secret Sex Weapons"
Into:
"Found! Your Secret Sales Weapons"
Or
"Hair Miracles - The 30 Best Serums, Shampoos & Straighteners - As Voted by You"
Into:
"Sales Miracles - The 5 best ways of getting more customers - As voted by you"

Get the idea?

Bill Robinson
Successful Sales Club

Why many salesmen fail?

Many of you no doubt have been brought up on the old rule of:

“Treat people how you would like to be treated.”

In fact I can still hear my old grandmother saying this to me “Bill! Stop pulling that poor dogs tail, would you like it if I did that to you?”

Now as a way to run your life and deal with people this is not a bad strategy as after all you are hardly likely to go round beating yourself up or stealing your own apple pie from under your own nose!

Understandably, many of us take this idea through in our adult lives to our sales presentations and we put them together and deliver them in the exact same way that we ourselves would like to be sold to. We pick out the things we like and the things that are important to us and we make an effort to emphasise them. This, however, is not a good idea! Why do I say that? Well I am pretty certain that not everyone you deal with will actually want to be sold to the same way as you. In fact if you are really lucky as many as 50% of your prospects want to be sold to in that way although in reality it is probably only 20% to 25% The other 80% or so will want to be sold to in a totally different way, they will have very different ideas as to what is important to them in your product or service. What you think is great might be the absolute pits to them, what you identify as the killer benefits might be of absolutely no interest to them!

Now I know what you are thinking. You are thinking:

“Well that it is all very well Bill, but how do we find out how our prospects want to be sold to?”

The answer to this question is simpler than you think; the answer is to ask them! And yet many salespeople forget this simple task. I myself witnessed an example of this fairly recently when travelling back from delivering a training with a colleague of mine. We were passing through Heathrow, had some time to kill and my colleague desperately needed a new mobile phone as her current one had stopped working that day, so she was already in quite a needy state. We went into one of the stores selling mobile phones where a she started to look at the phones and deals on offer, almost immediately a salesman appeared and started talking to her.

“Oh I see you are looking at the Motorola XYZ, you are really going to love this phone, it's got this and that and this and that...”

He then proceeded to spend the next two minutes downloading everything that he thought was great about this phone. Not once did he ever think to ask what it was that my colleague was looking for. At the end of his pitch my colleague politely put the phone back and rushed out of the store -- Boy did he talk himself out of a sale!

So here are the two most important questions that you will ever use in selling. Here are the two most important questions that will ensure you start to sell to people how they want to be sold to, here are the two most important questions to ensure that you avoid falling into the "downloading" trap.

1. "What is it that you want?"

2. "How will you know when you have got it?"

The first question ensures that you find out what is important to them and the second question tells you the evidence criteria for them to achieve that. Quite simply it tells you the specific benefits that they are looking for.

So, if we were to replay the above example of my colleague in the mobile phone shop the salesman could have said:

“Oh I see you are looking at the Motorola XYZ, do you mind me asking what it is that you want in a mobile phone?"

My colleague might then have replied:

“Well I need a phone that is really reliable."

On hearing this the salesman could then have replied:

"Ok, how will you know when you have got a phone that is really reliable?"

To which my colleague might have replied:

“To be really reliable it needs to have a battery life of at least three days and a really quick charge time."

Now the salesman knows what is important to her, he knows what it is that she needs, so he can now guide her towards the right phone for her and not for him!

Bill Robinson

Your clients don't care about you!

It's shocking, I know, but your clients don't care about you, or your company, or your products. They are not interested in when your company was founded, the number of employees you have, the production techniques you use or the fact that you have just moved to a new site. All they really care about is themselves, all they want to know is what you or your products are going to do for THEM. So why do so many of the sales letters, presentations and pitches that I see on a daily basis fail to grasp this simple fact?

While I sit here writing this article I am looking at "The Grocer" which is the trade magazine for the food industry. Now I know that this is a business to business communication and so probably not the most exciting magazine in the world and yet companies are spending good money to sell their products through this publication. Time and time again all they talk about is themselves, and to prove it here are some examples of the headlines of the adverts contained within it:

"We're proud of our roots..."

"We've bitten into the nibbles sector..."

"Brand new from the brand leader"

and I could go on and on!

All the people reading these adverts want to know is what are these products going to do for them? What will they do for their business? How much more money will they make for them? In fact every customer you talk to is tuned into one radio station:

WIIFM

What
Is
In
It
For
Me

Every time your client reads an advert, or sales letter, sees a presentation or a sales pitch, all they want to know is what is in it for them! In fact there is a saying:

“Clients don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care"

So the question here is how can we show we care about our clients? Well not by talking about ourselves and telling them how fantastic we are! If we are going to show how much we care, we must first understand them, their business and the challenges that they face. In the words of the great Stephen Covey we must:

"Seek first to understand, then to be understood."

Now as salespeople we can do this by asking questions, lots of questions to find out what exactly it is that they want, and having asked these questions really listen to what they are saying and then incorporate this information into our approach.

Bill Robinson

No one is listening to me!

I work with lots and lots of salespeople from many different companies and product types, many of whom are looking to grow their sales via "cold calling". From this one of the most common questions I get asked is along the lines of:

"How can you grab someone's attention on a first call - if they are sure they do not need my product ?"

My guess is that the people they are calling get lots of people calling them trying to sell them something & they will all use roughly the same script - along the lines of:

"Hello Mr Buyer my name is Blah & I represent the Blah company - We sell Blahs & today I have a special offer for you..."

Unfortunately that is about as far as most people get as the buyer has switched off & given their standard reply of "No thank you, not today" as they put the phone down!

To overcome this there are 2 techniques you can use:

The first is something borrowed from the world of hypnosis & it is called "A Pattern Interrupt" - This is where you interrupt the normal pattern of events with something that is totally unexpected, thus jarring the prospect into listening.

I have recently done some work with a retailer along these lines - Now if you think about it the standard pattern when you walk into a shop is that the assistant comes up to you & says:

"Can I help you?" & you reply "No I am just looking. Thank You." - The assistant then slopes off to talk to their mates - Not a great selling opportunity!

So I have taught them to use various pattern interrupts - The most popular are:

Assistant: "Can I help you?"

Customer: "No I am just looking. Thank You."

Assistant: "Yes I know this display is so good that I sometimes just stand and look myself!"

Assistant "Can I help you?"

Customer "No I am just looking. Thank You?"

Assistant "Oh that is good as we are not charging for looking today!"

Both of these usually have the customer burst out laughing, breaking the ice & building rapport.

So my question to you is - What can you use as a pattern interrupt on your calls?

Once you have a few, test them out to see what works best.

The second is similar to the first & comes from a book on Google Adwords written by Perry Marshal:

"You capture the attention of your customer when you enter the conversation already taking place inside her head."

So what are the conversations that are already taking place in your prospects heads? I would hazard a guess that it is not "Oh I must buy some advertising today"

What is keeping them awake at night?
What do they dream about?
What do they crave?

If you can come up with an opening line that firmly enters the conversation already taking place inside their heads then they will listen to you & in itself this is a pattern interrupt!

Recently, I received a "cold call" that went like this:

"Hello my name is Paul & I represent ABC Company"

Unfortunately that was as far as Paul got as I went into the standard "No thank you" and put the phone down - mean I know but I am a busy man!

I then started to think about what Paul could have done to grab my attention and so I went to his company's web site & found that they are a domain name service that are offering the following:

ABC ltd is pleased to announce its latest FREE service. If you are a new start up business or if you are an existing business based in the UK then you can obtain a FREE DOMAIN NAME today for your business

So given that domain names can vary wildly in price, if I was Paul I would have started with something like:

"Hello Mr Robinson, my name is Paul & I want to give you £25!"

Now that would have got my attention!

Bill Robinson

Do you have THE client from hell?

Of course you do! - This is a loaded question because I know that every salesperson on the planet at some point has a client from hell. I know that you have a client that you dread talking to, the client that every time they come on the phone you wonder what attracted you into sales in the first place? The client, who no matter what you try to do, is always a pain to deal with.

So if we all have difficult clients what is the best way of dealing with them? Because like it or not the chances are you are going to have to deal with them. In fact Murphy's Law says they are probably very, very important to your business so telling them to go away is not an option!

The first question to ask yourself is:

“Are they like that with everyone in their lives?”

The chances are that the answer is a resounding NO! I very much doubt that they behave that way with their nearest and dearest and other people that are close to them. So this means that they are behaving like this because they are getting some sort of benefit, either at a conscious or an unconscious level, and really importantly, it usually has nothing to do with you as they behave that way with every salesperson that they come across! They have found that by behaving this way they are getting something they want; it could be attention, recognition, a feeling of importance, or for many other reasons. From a purely psychological point of view people will only do things that give them some sort of positive benefit. They will only change this behaviour when they can get the same or greater benefit by doing something different.

This means that the good news is if we can find out what the benefit is that they are getting from behaving this way then we can help them to discover new ways of behaving and in so doing rapidly increase our sales performance.

To achieve this we have to approach these clients with a completely different mindset to previous meetings. Instead of thinking that they are the client from hell and someone that we hate to deal with, we need to put our detectives hat on and approach them with the view that we are going to find out what is the key driver for them behind this behaviour.

A really useful tool to help you in this quest is having the ability to be able to put yourself in the shoes of your clients and see the world from their perspective. In fact the American Indians have a saying for this process and that is:

"To walk a mile in someone else's moccasins."

So how do you get into their moccasins?

You need to sit down with a blank piece of paper and pen and imagine that you are sitting opposite this difficult client and looking across the table at your "client" write down the answers to the following questions:

What makes it difficult?
What are you thinking and feeling in this relationship?
If you feel challenged, where does this challenge come from?
Is it about your behaviour?
Do you feel your skills and competence are being challenged?
Do you think your beliefs and values are being challenged?

Once you have all the details then imagine yourself floating up out of your body across the table and down into the body of your client, (if it helps you could actually physically get up, walk around and sit on the other side of the table.) When you are happy that you have actually "become" your client sit and imagine that you are seeing an imaginary you as a salesperson sitting opposite. Then taking your pen and paper again write down the answer to the same questions, but from the clients point of view.

Once you have both sets of answers try to identify what you believe is the key driver to your troublesome client's behaviour and then armed with this new insight decide on your new approach.

Now, I know that this sounds a little strange, but what I would say is don't knock it until you have tried it - So go on give it a go, as after all you only have the awful relationship with your client from hell to lose!

In the Successful Sales Club you can find more information about advanced communication skills, sales psychology and NLP (neuro-linguistic programming).

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