MoneyWatch

Write a Great Sales Message in 10 Minutes or Less

By Geoffrey James

Updated on: February 7, 2011 / 2:07 PM EST / MoneyWatch

Here's a simple and reliable reliable way to write a sales message that will actually help you sell. The process should take less than 10 minutes, if you know your customers. Here are the six steps:

STEP #1: Get into the customer's shoes (metaphorically, not literally). Look at what your offering provides from the viewpoint of a typical customer. How does he see the problem that your offering solves?
STEP #2: Start with the phrase: "Our customers hire us to..." and then write down what your offering does for the customer. That's your first sentence.
STEP #3: Start with the phrase: "What's unique about our approach is..." and then write down something that's different than your competition.
STEP #4: Go through the two sentences and examine every word and phrase for jargon and biz-blab. To do this you: "what does this mean, really"? If your mind comes up with a simpler phrase, use that one.
STEP #5: Examine the remaining words to see if you can make the nouns and verbs more emotional and add a concrete example.
STEP #6: Shorten and smooth.

For example, suppose you've been struggling with a sales message like this:

Our sales technology solution enables companies to create more productive sales teams by allowing them to track and analyze opportunities through the sales cycle. We do this through use of a customizable analytical engine that generates pop-over fields.

Awful, eh? Full of techie jargon, weak words, unverifiable promises, and "say whut?" moments. Here's how you create a better one.

STEP #1: Question: What does the customer really want? Answer: to increase the number of deals that they close.
STEP #2: "Our customers hire us to help them increase the number of deals that they close, by making better use of their customer data."
STEP #3: "What's unique about our approach is that we have pop-over fields that analyze the data automatically."
STEP #4: Replace unique passage with: "What unique about our approach is that you can find out what's going on in a sales opportunity simply by moving your mouse cursor over it."
STEP #5: Add "Independent research confirms this reduces training time to almost nothing."

First Draft: "Our customers hire us to help them increase the number of deals that they close, by making better use of their customer data. What unique about our approach is that you can find out what's going on in a sales opportunity simply by moving your mouse cursor over it. Independent research confirms this reduces training time to almost nothing."

STEP 6: Shorten and smooth:

Final Draft: "Our customers increase the number of closed deals through better use of customer data. You can find out what's going on in a sales opportunity by moving your mouse cursor over it. This also makes it very easy to learn, according to independent research."

Voila! A sales message that's far more likely to engage the customer than the piece of crap we started with.

READERS: Need some help with your sales messages? Send me your best shot (click on the "Contact" button by my photo!) and I'll critique it. I may even rewrite if for you, if you ask nicely...

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