Some of the tactics in the script are explained in Never Split the Difference which I highly recommend for sales but especially negotiation (the article author also mentions the book author, Chris Voss).
The sales script doesn’t seem to have anything nefarious really. Just some tactics to keep the call going and typical early sales qualification to move a prospect to the next stage of a pipeline or out of the pipeline. Typical SDR/BDR work. I’d assume what’s said in later stages is more juicy.
The mildly interesting insight to me is how the call starts with trying to get the prospect to schedule a follow up using an incentive (the market report), before getting into the qualifying questions, which are meant to determine if the prospect is going to be a match for the offer. It makes sense from the standpoint you really want another call scheduled so you don’t get their voicemail and you might lose the opportunity to schedule that later in the call.
I wish the author added text from the actual sale past the qualification stage, but I’m guessing that wasn’t really scripted.
First, great book recommendation: _Never Split the Difference_ is packed with insights about negotiating, bargaining, and generally cooperation and decision-making. Reader: if you haven't, read it.
On starting with incentive before qualification: this is actually quite common. See: Cutco knives, CDs by mail, most current online courses/programs. Heck even startups doing lead gen offering analyses.
This is both what gets people invested (I jump at the free thing, so I'll jump through the rest of hoops now) AND what the seller uses to establish credibility (if they're giving way something this valuable, imagine what else they have!). A gift to someone implies you see them as important/valuable, and people eat that shit up.
There's a lot of ego/insecurity at play in sales. The person being marketed to wanting to feel seen/discovered/worthwhile, and the seller playing into it.
Reminds me of the Tony Robbins recording that made the rounds again recently [1]. Shocking that this stuff works … but it does.
I think this book was 2/5 stars for me max. Way overhyped and indeed, only mostly applicable to some FBI hostage situation negotiators. Even a rather toxic book I'd say, but some small things here or there are admittedly quite useful.
Indeed. A lot of advice is only good when you don't need to maintain a relationship. I had a manager who kept saying variants of "How can I do that?" Within a year multiple people left the team. It works the first few times, but you get sick of that quickly enough.
If you follow his more recent material you get to the core - tactical empathy. While I don’t buy into all the Voss stuff, there is a Zen like quality to the discipline of truly operating the conversation from the POV of the other player while not losing your own grounding on what you want. It’s definitely made a positive impact in my own outcomes & dramatically lowered my rate of failure.
This for example starts with "you expressed interest in xyz stock" or however, I can't exactly remember, but basically it's the followup call to their list of prequalified leads generated from the calls in this article.
The attention grabbing and objection handling pieces are discussed in Never Split the Difference, amongst other ways to negotiate a deal. Basically ask lots of what/how questions until the other party negotiates themselves to your position.
The rest of the script is just qualification questions, which you can find written about everywhere if you look up BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline) and MEDDPICC (Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Paper process, Identify pain, Champion, and Competition).
I wish I had a good book recommendation for qualifying, but it’s the easier part of the sales process: you’re just asking questions and listening, setting yourself up for the next stage. Once you know whether the prospect has a problem you can solve, then you launch into the real sale, generally a presentation or demo tailored to the prospect’s problems and goals.
YC posted a pretty good, compact video on enterprise SaaS sales recently, which explains the typical sales lifecycle at a high level and contains further resources: https://youtu.be/0fKYVl12VTA
No problem! As an outsider to sales myself, I only realized after a friend who does this for a living as an account executive explained to me how much of sales is simply asking good questions and being a good listener. Quite opposite of what I thought sales was and much simpler when you think about it that way. Good luck!
The sales script doesn’t seem to have anything nefarious really. Just some tactics to keep the call going and typical early sales qualification to move a prospect to the next stage of a pipeline or out of the pipeline. Typical SDR/BDR work. I’d assume what’s said in later stages is more juicy.
The mildly interesting insight to me is how the call starts with trying to get the prospect to schedule a follow up using an incentive (the market report), before getting into the qualifying questions, which are meant to determine if the prospect is going to be a match for the offer. It makes sense from the standpoint you really want another call scheduled so you don’t get their voicemail and you might lose the opportunity to schedule that later in the call.
I wish the author added text from the actual sale past the qualification stage, but I’m guessing that wasn’t really scripted.