Finding the Phrase that Pays: A Crash Course on Sales Scripting

Getting people to hand over their hard-earned cash for stuff they probably don’t need isn’t always easy, and it shouldn’t be left up to chance. There are certain words and phrases that seem to work like magic when it comes to the art of persuasion, and any business can benefit from knowing them. Nowadays, everything is done with research – from the phrase the greeter uses when you come through the door at Wal-Mart to the words used at McDonald’s that get you to mindlessly order the large coke over the small one. You see; each business has a specific customer base with specific needs. And that customer base is studied and analyzed to find the phrases that will motivate them to spend, upgrade, seal a deal…or whatever. This interview with Bill Brodie is all about the science of sales scripting and how you can benefit from using it in every aspect of your HMA consulting business. For example, if you use phrases that business owners want to hear, you’ll be giving yourself an edge. In fact, the right words could make it infinitely easier to land even the toughest of consulting contracts. What you’ll hear in this interview: • How you can use sales scripting to get your foot in the door. • Examples of time-tested phrases that will open and close deals • A four-step pattern HMA consultants can put into a sales script that could be worth thousands • An opening line that storeowners can use to increase the probability of a sale by 300 percent • How to make a sales script for a company • Learn what “Neuro Linguistic Programming” is and how knowing it can give you the upper hand It’s amazing how many people have no idea what sales scripting really is when it’s probably one of the easiest – and most lucrative -- improvements you can make for a business, whether it’s your own or someone else’s. And this interview is like a crash course on how to get started. Enjoy.

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Michael: A consultant, if they’re doing a consultation with a retailer, can give them with that one simple piece of information that can be implemented almost instantaneously and increase their sales 300 percent to the people who are predispositioned to buy in their retail store.

Bill: Exactly.

Michael: That’s powerful.

Music

Hi, this is Michael Senoff with www.HardtoFindSeminars.com I’ve got another interview with Bill Bodri on a subject that you won’t find much about and that is sales scripting. Sales scripting is vital to anything you do when it comes to selling. Now, instead of just winging it, you can use specially tested sales scripted selling sentences to help you in your consulting practice. Bill reveals several wonderful sources on sales scripting tools. There’s a sample here that you can download that I’ve done for HMA consultants. You’ll want to make sure that you check all of these out, and also make sure you get the sales scripting book by Donald Moines, nothing but tested sales scripts. Now, we cover a lot of information in this recording and it’s not the kind of recording you can just hear one time. So, make sure you play it over and over again, and most importantly, make sure you implement it in your marketing practice. Get ready and enjoy.

Michael: I know you’re going to help myself and the HMA consultants and we’re going to talk about something that you don’t see much out there and that is sales training and sales scripting.

Bill: Exactly.

Michael: So, what is sales scripting? And, how is this going to benefit anyone who is trying to sell something whether it’s consulting services or information products to help a business grow or whatever?

Bill: Well, Mike, you know we’re going to have to mix these two topics because there’s an awful lot of stuff now on the Internet on how you should write copy and how you should optimize your website and conversions or what have you, but people still have to sell face to face. And, after you have your USP or your Unique Selling Proposition, one of the first things you can do to increase sales, increase your sales effectiveness is to have sales training, and sales training is basically how you act, what you say, and the exact words you use because words have impact in a sales situation. They can make or break you. The exact words you use is the process of sales scripting, coming up with a script of exact words that you should use when you’re trying to sell something to somebody or trying to persuade them because certain words, and you know this, work better than others.

Michael: This is different than just winging it and going with the flow.

Bill: You should always have sales preparation. There are a lot of people, they don’t like the idea of sales scripting, but that’s okay. I mean, they’re doing consultative selling and things like this where they’re asking questions, but they’re still running through a model of how they should be conducting the sales dialogue in order to sell, but sales scripting is going a step further where you actually find out whether there are certain phrases that help you make a sale.

It’s like in copywriting where you test headlines and you find out that one headline sells ten times more than every other headline for the exact same ad. So, you use it. In sales scripting, there are certain sentences that you might say to people that actually will increase the number of sales for the business.

So, I can kick it right off by giving people one like let’s say you’re a marketing consultant or the bigger store owner. You want to know what sells, what sentence to use to say to people to increase the probability that they’ll buy from you.

Michael: Okay, let’s do it.

Bill: It’s very, very simple. When I ask people in my consulting sessions what that question is, some people would say, “Well, hi how are you doing?” No, it’s not that. And, there’s three different marketers who’ve tested this against 25 or 30 alternative lines. The question that you use when someone comes into your store is, “What brings you into the store today?” Or “What ad brings you into the store today?” That’s how you greet customers.

Michael: Rather than what does typically everyone do?

Bill: Well, they say, “Hi, how are you? What are you looking for?”

Michael: Or, “Can I help you?”

Bill: Yes, “Can I help you?”

Michael: And, what do people say, when you say, “Can I help you?”

Bill: When they say, “Can I help you?” They say, “No, that’s okay. I’m just looking.” Right, the radar goes off, “Oh, he’s trying to sell me.”

Michael: Right, so this has been tested this one scripted sentence when people come into a retail store, and what were some of the results. Do you have any idea?

Bill: Yeah, the results are, in general, this usually increases the number of buyers predisposed to buy by about 300 percent.

Michael: Three hundred percent. So, a consultant if they’re doing a consultation with a retailer can give them with that one simple piece of information that can be implemented almost instantaneously an increase of their sales 300 percent to people who are predispositioned to buy in the retail store?

Bill: Exactly.

Michael: That’s powerful.

Bill: It’s very, very powerful. So, you’re getting all the goodies right away, and this is what sales scripting is. Sales scripting, we’re going to teach you through this little session here why it’s important as well as how you can come up with those sentences. For example, the people who have tested this and there’s three groups that I know who have tested this, tested 25 opening lines. They’ve had each opening line for one day, two days, sometimes even a week, but I’m saying this is the power of words. Ted Nicholas says certain words produce amazing results, and if by magic.

It’s not really what’s said, but often how it’s said that counts. So, if you just say something in the right way, you can increase your sales tremendously sometimes. So, if you’re a marketing consultant you go in and you teach people to start doing that, to start using that one line, and follow them up that way. Then, you can sometimes see sales increasing.

Let’s give your consultants a bunch of tidbits here, all right. There’s a lot of questions that you can use that work in selling. What people should usually do is they should start memorizing and reciting these questions over and over again until they become part of them and then some form of those questions will come out naturally in their conversations.

So, let’s say you’re trying to sell something to somebody, and one of the questions you can ask is, “Well, what is it you’d like me to help you solve or achieve?” Or “What, if anything, are you looking for you haven’t found?” Or “What’s in your current situation that you absolutely do not want to see change?” These are the type of questions that you have to learn to ask in a sales situation.

In sales scripting what you do is you come upon, you write down all the questions like that and go over and over and over again with those. So, that when you’re in a sales situation, you make sure you ask the right questions and in the right way so to get the responses that you want to move the sales forward.

Michael: And, these are tested proven questions similar to “What brings you into the store today?”

Bill: Sure. For instance, questions that might work for closing the sale are a lot of people are notorious for great sales people but they don’t know how to close the sale. So, you can use a sentence like, “Would you like to go ahead and get it started?” Or “Can we go ahead with the paperwork now?” Or “Would you like me to show you how we can get started? May I go ahead and set up everything for you now?” Or “What do we have to do to get everything rolling for you?” That’s just one sentence, but a lot of people they memorize this whole sales talk, but they don’t put any emphasis on memorizing or mastering the one question that would work for closing the sale.

Michael: That reminds me. There’s a book, an old book by, is it Elmer Wheeler, called “Tested Sentences that Sell.”

Bill: Absolutely.

Michael: That was amazing.

Bill: Yes, and we’re going to go over that, but I mean, Elmer Wheeler was a genius and this guy did ten years of research. He opened a laboratory called, “The Word Laboratory” that he tested over 105,000 words and phrases over 19 million people. Let’s say you’re a gas station, and when you and I grew up people would park for gas and people would come. They’d fill your tank and say, “Can I check your oil?” You’d say, “No.” So, one of the gas companies said, “Geez, is there some way we can get people to be predisposed to have us check their oil?”

So, instead of using the sentence, “Can I check your oil?” Elmer Wheeler found out if you use the sentence, “Is your oil at the safe driving level?” Then 85 percent of the people responded with, “Okay, why don’t you check it?”

Michael: Yeah, I think it was for Texaco, don’t quote me, but I think it was just that one sentence that all the gas station attendants asked all over the country, just catapulted their sales of oil.

Bill: Yes, it was an 85 percent launch just from changing the sentence.

Michael: There was another one that I always remembered, and it was the manufacturer of a new laundry pen, a laundry pen where you hang up your clothes and the new manufacturer had a square laundry pen where in the olden days they were round. So, he put this system and did some research and came up through his word laboratory by researching it the one thing that all the sales people would say at the point of purchase was, “They won’t roll when you drop them.” And, that one tested sentence brought a commodity type product with one advantage just blew away the round ones.

Bill: So, the idea of sales scripting is that your marketing consultant would go in to a firm and say, “Do you have sales?” “Yes” “Do you have sales training?” “Yes” “Have you come up with a sales book or test the salesmen?” They’ll look at you like you’re crazy. One little word like that or sentence like that can just catapult sales. What you have to do to discover that is you have to go around and you have to tape record your best sales stars, and you have to see what are they exactly saying, because sometimes it’s a little secret sentence like that. To them, it means nothing, but if everybody else started to use it, then the sales would really, really start growing.

Another one that they use that is used all the time in restaurants is the smart waiter, he doesn’t say, “Would you like wine when your meal’s served?” People just say, “No.” They say, “Would you care to order a red or white wine with your meal?” They give you a choice. That also increases the sales for wine.

McDonald’s, I remember, and a lot of pizza places know this. It’s a very, very simple thing to do. When people say they want a coke for instance, sometimes they’ll say, “Large or small?” Well, a lot of people will say, “Small.” Instead, you change the words to say, “Large one?” Usually you’ll get 70 percent of the people will say yes.

The Elmer Wheeler book is a fantastic start, and you know what he basically says, he said, “Look, you have to build a sales talk through testing.” He saying you’re not coming up with a canned sales talk. You’re coming up with a planned sales talk. He too, he’s like Ted Nicholas. There aren’t magic words, but there is word magic. There is magic in the way you say things. So, Elmer Wheeler was the very first one to come up with this idea of testing what you say for the sales talk versus copywriters. There’s tons of books out there for what you write and how you write things for copywriting purposes for ads and marketing pieces.

Wheeler’s big conclusions were definitely use tested words definitely and especially, Mike, in the first ten seconds.

Michael: Why the first ten seconds?

Bill: Because that’s where you can make a real big impact. That’s were people open up to you or they don’t open up to you.

Michael: Did Bill Brookes do some testing like this, too?

Bill: Bill Brookes also did some a lot of testing with that. He put them up in a set of books called, you can find it at www.thewordsthatsell.com . Bill found that what you say in the opening sentences was often more important than almost anything else that you say, that you don’t mess up the rest of your sales talk. Basically, the whole idea of you want to say it with flowers, and you want to prove it with smiles and y our hand movements and your actions.

Michael: Just give me a little history on the Bill Brookes history because that’s fascinating.

Bill: What Bill did was he had a partner who passed away and what they did was they took a bunch of occupational professions, lets say doctors and lawyers, engineers, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and they really looked at this with a fine tooth comb even for like engineers. They said, “Well, what type of engineer is this? The CEO is he a CEO with a financial background or an engineering background or an accounting background.” The same thing with an entrepreneur. Is the guy a litigating lawyer or is he just an office lawyer?

What they did is they did psychologically profiles on these guys. How are they trained? What’s schooling like? How are they promoted in their industry? And, they found out exact words that you would use to mesh with these guys and the exact words that you don’t want to use if you don’t want to tick them off.

So, for instance, let’s talk about entrepreneurs. Okay, if you wanted to bind with entrepreneurs or deal with them or negotiate with them or whatever, one of the words you can mention or use a lot is cash because entrepreneurs who are starting off, they understand cash. But, you don’t talk about profit too much because that is more of an abstract concept to them.

Bill found out with Tom his partner is that if you want to write something for entrepreneurs you talk about cash, and you talk about chaos because their life is chaos. There’s a thousand things at once going on all the time, and this is the important thing is you have bind with them and bond with them in order to deal with them and market to them. You have to have rapport. So, if you use the right words that match with them and ring bells with them, then you can do a better job in a selling situation.

So, that’s what you would do with entrepreneurs. You would talk about cash instead of profit which is theoretical. They can’t taste profit. They can’t touch it where they can touch cash. You would talk about chaos over marketplace. You can talk about change and all sorts of things like that, but with a CEO you talk about being tested. You talk about proven. You talk about riskless because a lot of guys who are CEOs they are not entrepreneurs. They came up through a very institutional background where they very, very risk adverse.

So, what they did was they came up with these profiles and they’re about 20 or 30 pages each with the right words to use, words you don’t use, and they put them in these little special reports. A lot of people use them for sales and they use them for negotiating and they use them for copywriting, and they were actually written initially for politicians so the politicians knew exactly what to say if they wanted to bond with a particular group of people for votes and things like that.

Michael: That’s why they were written originally?

Bill: Yeah, that’s the original reason for them.

Michael: All right so I’m an HMA consultant. I’ve got an opportunity analysis appointment set up with the CEO of a medium size corporation, and then I can go to thewordsthatsell.com, order the profile for the CEO, look at the words that appeal to him through all this research from Bill Brooke’s partner and have a lot of better chance of building rapport and selling him on my ideas.

Bill: Absolutely, because you’re going to tap into their psychology immediately. You’re going to know immediately what the lingo is and what to say and you’re going to know exactly what to avoid.

Michael: What else will they tell me?

Bill: Oh, they’ll tell you things like what the average income, for instance, of an occupation to see if they can afford your particular product or service. Then, you know how difficult it is to sell it or not sell it – all sorts of stuff like that.

Michael: And, this stuff is really, really tested and accurate?

Bill: Yes, this stuff is pretty, pretty good. One of the things that people need to know is that sometimes you can just structure a sales conversation not just with these words, but there is a general NLP sales structure that you can use to list somebody’s values in a certain way to get compliance in order to help sell, too.

Michael: What is NLP?

Bill: NLP is the field of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and it is a field that people have studied. It’s basically a field of rapid change in human beings, or to help people create rapid change in their lives. There are a lot of NLP experts which have taken those skills and used them for marketing and persuasion purposes, and one of the things that they’ve found is if you know somebody’s values before you’re selling to them, then you can ask in a certain way to get people to be more open to listening to you to possibly making the sale.

So, for instance, let’s say you’re trying to buy a new car. So, there’s a four step process which you would use in NLP and you can work this into your sales scripting. The first question you might ask somebody is what’s most important to you in blank? Okay, what’s most important to you in buying a new car? That’s the first question you would ask. So, as a sales consultant or a marketing consultant, you’d go in and you’d say, “What’s most important to you in blank?” When you go on a vacation, what have you.

Another thing is how do you know when you have a car of good value? Then the third question is, you’re saying, “Well, if I can give you X, would you give me Y?” Or “Would you Y?” Like, “If I could give you a car with a good value or good gas mileage, would you feel comfortable owning or buying it?” Then, the last thing is you’re basically asking them what’s important in the sales transaction? How do you know when you have it? If I could give you that particular characteristic, would you buy it, rent it, lease it, or continue talking with us, or let me meet with your CEO, etc.

The last question you ask is, “What else is most important to you in buying or owning a car?” Or whatever the product or service is.

Michael: Can we do an example with those questions that would relate to a consultant who wants to sell a service? Let’s say they’re talking to the owner of a medium sized business.

Bill: All right.

Michael: How could we fit those questions to that?

Bill: Well, what’s the situation?

Michael: Let’s say I responded to your advertisement about that you’re going to show me how to grow my business without spending more money on advertising. We’re meeting for an opportunity analysis or we’re meeting for the first time before you really ask me all the questions about my business to identify what my needs are.

Bill: Well, let’s say the guy is thinking about hiring marketing consultants because we’d have to take several steps in order to get to this particular conversation right here.

Michael: Okay, so this conversation will come maybe after finding out more about him?

Bill: Yes, you’d have to know what his problem is, what exactly his problems are, what he’s trying to do, etc.

Michael: Okay.

Bill: But, if he was like evaluating four or five marketing consultants, you would say, “Well, what’s most important to you in selecting a marketing consultant for your business?” And, he’ll say, “Well, you know, selecting my marketing consultant has to do this or this.” And, then you say, “Well, how do you know when he’s blah, blah, blah.” And, then you say, “Well, if I be like blah, blah, blah, would you consider?” But, if you don’t have the pre-step ahead of time to get to this, you can’t be asking these questions.

This four step pattern that I’m giving you is worth about, this is worth thousands of dollars if you know how to use it. And, it’s just basically what’s most important to you and how do you know when you have it. If I could give you X, would you Y? and what else is most important to you about buying or owning X, Y, or Z.

If you can put this into a sales script, it’s very, very powerful, and we’re talking about sales scripts and sales training. You know, Mike, there’s just a couple of things a lot of people, sales trainers and marketers, tell you all the time is when you’re teaching people this, you have to tell people follow-up, follow-up on the customers or the prospects that come. Be ready for eight or nine or ten. People who are superstar salesmen, they don’t quit the second time. They keep contacting. They go after these guys again and again and again and again. I just know that most salesmen quit the second time, but a lot of sales will be made after if you keep going to eighth or ninth. A lot of people keep going for the eighth or ninth and then they get the sale because statistically there are certain number of objections that you would get. I believe that is in the seven, eight or nine range.

It’s not always easy, but sales scripting can help you get some of the easy sales and it can help you keep going all the way until you get the eighth or the ninth sale. But, the big thing is in this, remember, in sales training, you always have to ask questions in your selling effort which is why I just taught this four step model. And, you have to sell it’s benefits, not it’s features of a particular product, and always – people think you have to hide any problems with your product or any objections. No, you have to disarm people, bring them up first. Elmer Wheeler found that out. Copywriters have found that out. What you do is you bring them right out in the open whatever might be bad about your product or service, and just say, “Hey, it’s red instead of black, but you know, it doesn’t really matter. The price is cheaper because of that.” They can accept it if you bring it up, because you can always use words to handle the objections that come up, but you also have to use words to handle the objections that are unvoiced.

In sales, remember, always, always offer a choice between two things. That’s a standard rule in selling. Would you like delivery on Monday or would you like it on Wednesday? Would you like two of these or three of these? Because when you give people a choice, they usually choose it. It helps in the sales situation. Then, the normal thing is you always want to structure a sales situation so you get people saying yes all the time so they have rapport and they’re bonding with you.

So, these are just little tidbits that you can use in selling situations that goes back to Sales 101, but a lot of people have never, never had sales training. They don’t know to say, “Look”, for instance, we might be selling widgets, and everybody else is selling widgets. So, what in the world do you get people to buy your widgets? Well, one of the sales lines that a lot of people use, you can call it sales scripting or you can call is smart sales training, is to say, “When you buy my product, there’s one thing you also get that you don’t get with the other guys. You also get me.” So, when you say something like that, and that goes back to NLP. It goes back to sales scripting. It goes back to preemptive marketing, this is the type of thing that it’s just one sentence. If you add it in there, then it could help with your sales.

So, these are all the things that you have to know about when you’re doing sales scripting. You have to know basic sales. You have to know psychology. Always show people two choices, and always try to make it personal.

We talked about Elmer Wheeler, but there was another guy Emmanuel Holiman Julio, he wrote the book The First Hundred Million, and just to show how powerful this is, this guy what he did was he studied a hundred million sales of books. He used to sell these little nickel books, and what you would do is you would order them from a catalog, and you’d have a certain number of books. You could pay a dollar and order twenty of them, something like that. And, what he would do is he’d have these books in this catalog and a lot of times there were books that just wouldn’t sell. So, all he would do is try to change the title of the exact same book and see if that would make it sell.

So, he had a book called The Art of Controversy, and I remember that one. He changed it to How to Argue Logically, and the sales jumped from zero to 30,000 on the book simply from changing the title. He had a book called the Patent Medicine, and he retitled it Truth About Patent Medicine, and he tripled sales, and he found out that when you put in and you see this in Reader’s Digest, articles, you see this in copywriting, headlines everywhere. If you have “The Truth About” or “How-to” or the words “The Facts You Should Know About”, when you add that to a headline or a book title it really, really increases sales which is showing that basically the words you use even though the content is the same, can change the number of sales that you get. It can have a big impact.

So, there’s nothing unethical about what we’re doing here. All we’re doing is coming up with the most pleasing words for people for selling the exact same product. You’re not cheating them or anything like that. It’s the same book. He just changed the title of it, and sales go up.

Now, when you’re doing sale scripting, that same principle holds. For instance, a lot of people when they hear the word “cost” get very upset. So, instead of “cost” or “price” you learn to say “total investment” in your sales talk. It’s a lot smoother, and you’re not jarring anybody, and helps the sales dialogue go through. Instead of “buying” you say “own”. Instead of “contract” because people say, “Oh gosh, a contract”, you say “agreement”.

There’s all sorts of words like that. It’s just basically sales scripting basics that people learn. Instead of “appointment” you call it an appointment a “visit”. Or a “deal” becomes a “package” because people are worried that a deal sounds like it’s low-class, but a package becomes something that is higher-class. So, these are all just basically sales scripting basics that people have to learn, and knowing this is called sales scripting. And, you use this especially in the upselling or the bumping, or when you have a simple suggestion at the point of sale for whether somebody wants to buy a new product or what have you, they will test exactly what words you use. A lot of telemarketers, when you order these videos on TV, order this video for $19.95 or whatever, and you call and you want to buy it. They have exact tested phrases for what to say to people to get them to buy another video for only five dollars more.

Michael: For the upsell?

Bill: Yes, for the upsell, and the test exactly what sentence works. They do all sorts of things. They have people when they’re talking to you smiling and looking at mirrors. They put mirrors on the telemarketers’ desks, the order takers’ desk so that they can see whether they’re smiling or not because people can hear if you’re smiling on the phone, and that actually helps with sales.

So, there’s all sorts of things people have done with this field. They really have gotten down to the nitty gritty with it. I think one of the experts is Donald Moines. He’s really gone into sales scripting for the financial industry because there’s a lot of money in that industry. So, he decided that that’s where he’s going to become a real, real expert, and Donald basically said, “Look, whoever has the best words wins.” And, he’s convinced that, and it’s not because of his business, but it’s because it’s really true that sales scripting is probably the most lucrative, highest return on investment marketing activity you can perform where you can get 700 to 1,000 percent returns on just changing the words that people use for what you say to customers coming into the store, or in copywriting or in your sales dialogue. But, he said basically you have to come up with a script. You’ve got to practice it. You have to rehearse it. You have to write them down. You always have to improve them.

Mike, there’s nothing unethical about this, like I said, because lawyers use this, Presidents use this, not just the best sales people. Everybody who’s career is dependent on words uses this because it’s responsible for their success. Robert Kennedy, what he did was he used to take a look at the way he was holding his hand when he was emphasizing a point. He would practice that over and over again. So, it would look natural. They would do this for words. They would do this for their hairstyle. This is important. This is what people of power do because they know all these things are important. Organized persuasive words have power.

The average salesperson now will have two or three canned responses to objections, but the best people out there, the best salesperson, they have about 15, 20, maybe 30 responses that they know of. They’re not going to use them all, but they have that available for the objections.

Michael: So, could an HMA consultant go into any business and just focus as their expertise as a sales scripting expert and implement that with an existing business and get dramatic returns?

Bill: Absolutely. If it’s the right thing, absolutely, and here’s how you do it. Okay, I’m going to tell you two ways you can do it. Jay Abraham would tell you do this. Gary Halbert would tell you to do this. John Cables would tell you this. What you do is let’s say it’s you or the business owner. Let’s say he has a small shop. Using a tape recorder, you have him start recording all his conversations with the prospects and customers, whether it’s on the phone or in person. Anytime they’re trying to sell to somebody, you would have them record it. Then, you have them transcribe all the recordings or you transcribe it for them.

Michael: We’re taping the number one salesman, right?

Bill: Well, if it’s like a one person shop, it’s them, but if it’s the best, yes absolutely. If you have a room of 100, you get the top two or three of these guys. And, you can break this down to who is best at getting the appointments, who is best at getting data collection, who is best at closing. You can break it up into all sorts of pieces, and find out who is best for this part. For instance, who has the best rate in their firm for getting the sales presentation so you can go visit them? Then, what you do is you would do this sales scripting on them. Who is the best at closing the sale or actually making the sale? Well, the person who gets the interview, might not be the best person for the sale. So, you would break it up. Do you see what I’m saying?

Michael: It’s just like in a telemarketing room, you have different people doing different activities. Some people on the phone who are telemarketing are good at introducing and building a rapport, and then when it comes to the close, they may turn it over to the manager or a closer.

Bill: Exactly. So, everybody is doing what they do best. But, if you want to make it even, that one person has to be Jack of all trades, you find out for each part of the sales process, who’s best at what, and then you record it, transcribe it. Go through the transcript, and improve it. Get rid of all the fluff. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn’t really work – selling points that don’t really help the presentation, but all the benefits and interesting facts, arrange them in such a way that it works, and then basically, you come up with – for instance – a beginning of a sales letter or a partial sales script.

And, I’ve heard people tell me over and over again that they may have telemarketers who are a little dumber than the rest, but who just basically go by the sales book over and over again. They’re the number one or number two salesmen just because their consistent. The consistency, your consistently excellent with that.

Michael: You don’t have to be talented. All you’ve got to be able to do is be able to read.

Bill: Exactly, and I was a salesman, a door to door salesman in college for books for a company. All I did was I memorized their sales script, and I went to the number of people they set per day, and I was the top salesman in my group of a hundred people.

Michael: What were you selling, encyclopedias?

Bill: Yeah, we were selling books door to door down in Beckley, West Virginia. We were selling all sorts of children’s books and things like that. It was a college job, and all I did was I did exactly what they told me to do. I memorized a hundred pages of sales scripting, and I was the only person to do that, and I just stuck with a number of calls per day, and I was the number one salesman, out of my group. And in the whole company, I was in the top one percent of the whole company as well. All I did was – I wasn’t really necessarily good at it – I just followed the sales script.

Michael: Well, I sold my first summer out of college, I sold Cutco Cutlery. I have you heard of Cutco?

Bill: Yeah, sure.

Michael: And, they put you through a training and they have a proven scripted presentation. And, all the salepeople were to do was to take the prospect through that presentation. It was a flip chart type presentation, and it was all scripted. And, I became the number one selling Cutco salesman for the group in my area in Atlanta at that time.

Bill: What was the key to your success?

Michael: I think the key was really calling on the people and just doing the work and following the presentation. It was just work.

Bill: Yeah, to me it became the same thing. It was just work, and I found a lot of people weren’t willing to do the work. They gave me all the tools that were tested for a natural conversion rate, and it was just a matter of the law of averages. If you did the work and saw enough people, you would have this natural conversion rate via the law of averages and you’ll do very well with sales, and that’s how I became number one. I just did the work.

What people do who are really go-getters is they’ll take that natural conversion rate, and then they’ll figure out, “Well, how in the world can I make that a little higher?” You don’t have to worry about that just to begin, just do the hard work and get that natural law of averages conversion rate out there, but most people, they fail on that. They’re focused on, “Well, what magic sentence or this or that.” No, you’ve got to do the hard work.

What you were mentioning before is if you have three or four top sales pros of the company, let’s say it’s pharmaceutical sales or what have you, one thing you can do is you can call them up on the phone and have them try to sell you and record the call. You just basically tape record these guys. Either you go with them if they go out, or if it’s a phone call you tape record them selling to people, and you transcribe the tapes where they actually close the sale. That’s the basis for an initial sales script book.

Sales superstars don’t talk like everybody else. They have a very distinctive form of communication. They know how to build trust with people. They know how to tell stories, get the attention focused, and what you do is you have to tape record that, analyze it and perfect and hone what’s used, the most powerful words by the top sales people. Then, you create a proprietary training for all salespeople.

Mortgage companies use this. Banks use this, and they put together these books, and they put them together on like red paper or blue paper so they can’t be photocopied, because these things are worth millions and millions and millions of dollar.

Michael: And, Donald Moines, he has a sales script book. It’s called, “The Sales Script Book.” I have them available, and there are a couple hundred dollars. If anyone’s interested, please get in touch with me or shoot me an email, but it’s a huge notebook, a three ring binder. All the pages are red, and it’s how to answer any objection. You can use it for your consulting business, or you could use it as something that you can design a sales script book. Use it as a template for whatever industry you’re working in, and you have every objection answered in a proven sales script formula, and it’s been tested and tested. So, anyone interested in that, just get back with me.

Bill: And, you can use that particular book because I have that. You can use that one at the beginning to see, “Hey, how can I change this?” or “What can I use in addition to this?” if you want to create a sales scripting book for a particular industry.

Basically, what you do is, another way you do it is you group up the sales down close together into a room. You close the door, and you start writing down every objection that they get from people. You’ll get ten, fifteen, twenty objections. Then, you should be able to predict, if you’re a salesman, the twenty objections you’re normally going to get.

So, what you can do for a firm, if you really want to help them, you write down all the objections, and then you create a separate piece of paper or a separate section in your script book, because you’re going to create a script book, for that particular firm for each major objections. So, you can always quickly find what you need, and you write down the best responses from the group for each object. You might want to put down in there like little notes for if the customer’s a friendly type or analytical type or fun-loving type, you would use this response. You can make a joke out of it or what have you.

This is what you do when you’re taking a brainstorming session where you’re basically putting everybody together into a room. You shut the door so there’s no distraction, and you get this information out of them, and then you interview a sales superstar. See what they say, and add that into it. Basically, you use that as a basis of coming up with a sales script and then you hone it, you polish it. It’s just like writing advertising copy. It’s hard work. You’ve got to spend time on it, but, wow, Mike, this is worth lots of money because today on the Internet they’re all realizing you put up a webpage and it’s got to convert people. So, it’s what you say that sells.

Michael: Yeah, words.

Bill: And, it’s the words. It’s how you sell it. I mean, the rest of this stuff is how do I get people to the site, and all this other stuff, and it relies on basic psychological discoveries. Always show choices. Raise objections first, like “I know what you’re thinking.” You might be saying to yourself “blank, blank” right now, but bring up the hidden objections and deal with it. Add powerful stories. Go back when you have a sales script. This is what Donald Moines and other people do. What they do is they go back and they add in NLP words to the scripts. For instance, NLP Neuro-Linguistic Programming tells you that some people are auditory thinkers where they’ll say something like, “I hear what you’re saying” or “That sounds right to me.” You see the words hear and sound for some people are like visual words like “Oh, I see where you’re going” or “That looks right.” Kinesthetic people are like, “I feel”. They’re talking about “I feel” or “That doesn’t touch the right nerve.” What you can do is you can take those type of NLP phrases and put them back into the sales dialogue if it’s not there so you have a chance of matching with those type of people as well.

That’s really, really a powerful little secret that I put in there because once again, it’s not just what you say, but how you say it – your speech rate, whether you’re loud, whether you’re using long or short sentences. You’ve got to be sincere. You’ve got to match your voice to the customer. You should be triggering buying emotions. You should be asking questions, “Is this clear to you?” It’s not just like you’re reciting this script, but what it is, is a plan sales talk that you’re coming up with, not a canned one. It has to become personal.

This is basically what you do for sales scripting, and you can do sales scripts for the initial presentation. You can come up with question scripts, objection scripts, data collection scripts, closing scripts – all sorts of things. It doesn’t really matter. Any part of your business process that deals with customers, you can figure out what are the best words to say. For instance, a lot of people have receptionists, and they teach them how to answer the phone.

If you were talking about the written word, to improve it you’re going to look at the world or the realm of copywriting. It’s an art and it’s a science, but in the face to face sales dialogue whether it’s over the phone or the person is right there talking to you, you need sales training for people. The right words to use, coming that and the right sentences to use, etc, and structuring the sales dialogue – that’s called sales scripting.

If you test these words, it comes back to Jay Abraham and all the copywriters, they all say the same thing, you have to basically come up with some stuff and test it, and always try to find something that’s better and better and better. If you can do that, you’ll eventually come up with better sales dialogue and better closing rate and more sales. You’re making it more fun, too. If not, you’re becoming a robot. You’re freeing yourself up. You’re making this a lot more fun. You’re giving yourself a lot more freetime, and you’re able to zero in on what they want really, really, really quickly especially if you ask them, “What is most important to you?” “What else is most important to you?”

What you’re trying to do is help these guys. You’re trying to service them, and if you find a quicker way of satisfying them, getting them what they want, then you’re doing your job versus just trying to sell and push it on them.

So, the whole idea of sales scripting is once again, it’s not you’re jamming things down their throat. You’re just saying things in the most pleasant way, and you’re always asking questions because you’re trying to match and give them what they really, really, really want, but if you say it in the right way. That’s the difference between an open door and a door where they’re not really going to listen to you.

Michael: Bill, this has been extremely helpful, and it’s really emphasized the point to me how important scripting is, and if you could give my HMA consultants some kind of one, two, three plan of how they can at least get started in implementing a sales scripting plan for their consulting business, what would you tell them to do?

Bill: You know, that’s a really good question, Mike. There’s not a lot of information out there. The only information you usually find on this is the high-powered $10,000 seminars, which is probably why I’m working on a book on sales scripting. I think the easiest thing to do is go to Amazon.com, and pick up Donald Moines’ books. He’s got one or two of them. It’s Moines, Donald Moines. Pick-up the Donald Moines’ books just to learn the power of sales scripting.

And, the next thing is after that they can start poking around in the field of NLP. As a marketing consulting, you don’t need to learn it, but you should know about it, and there’s so many books out there. It’s very, very hard to figure out which one would be the best one. Then, you can scoot over to thewordsthatsell.com, and pick-up one particular, the entrepreneur one or the CEO one, one of these little sales profiles, to see how to bond with people.

But, I would focus pretty much on the Donald Moines’ stuff first because that’s pretty much the basis of the idea of sales scripting. It tells you what to say, what not to say. Use words like “investment” instead of “cost”, or “agreement” rather than “contract.” Things like that.

Michael: And, you can pick these books up probably even used for five or ten bucks.

Bill: Yeah, I know, five, ten bucks. Some of them are out of print, but I always pick them up used, and he has this more expensive one that you mentioned. It’s like $150 or $200. I wouldn’t buy it. I would not buy it until you actually had to do a sales scripting contract for people. Then, what you would do is you would pick that up and you would use that as a basis behind the scenes for going through and figuring out how to structure or adding in a number of different situations for people, “What in the world do we say when they say it’s too expensive or the quality is not high enough?” He has some stock answers in there.

Michael: Bill, thank you very much again. We’ve almost got a little series of talks, but the response from the consultants has been great. They’re great, down to earth, information pack subjects that you just can’t find out there, and I really appreciate you doing it.

Bill: Well, I hope they’ve enjoyed this because this is so important and nobody talks about it. You’ve got to know a little bit about salesmanship or sales training, but nobody tells you about sales scripting, and if you can go into a firm and either get them to record the top guys and you analyze it or get them to sit down and come up with a sales script book and get them to use it, the sales go up 20 percent, 30 percent, 50 percent. They paid for your fees.

This stuff is not hard to do. It’s just time consuming. This is just so powerful. I mean the headlines for sales letter, I have headline books. You have headline books. I’ve invested thousand of dollars in headline books for the best headlines. Sales scripting is basically coming up with the headline, with the sentence that you say that just have a really big impact, and keep working over and over again. Then, the one I told you guys is killer. “What brings you into the store today?” That alone will increase sales, if they use it. Remember now, you can teach a lot of people this, and they won’t use it and they’ll say, “Oh, it didn’t work. It wasn’t worth anything.” Well, yeah, they got 100 sales people on the floor, but nobody’s using it, then it starts to work.

Michael: When is your book going to be ready on this?

Bill: It should be out in a couple of months, by the end of the year.

Michael: Well, please let us know when it’s ready. I’ll recommend it to the consultants.

Bill: Good deal.

Michael: All right, Bill, it’s been great again.

Hi, this is Michael Senoff with HardtoFindSeminars.com. That’s the end of our recording on sales scripting. Bill covered an incredible amount of information, and lots of scripts that you can go to the transcripts and pull out and use in your HMA presentations. Please make sure you check back in the HMA University often for new additional recordings, enjoy.