Sales: Telling your friends what you do

We’ve been doing some training down @ Techlightenment and there are quite a few key things that have come out of it. One of the keys being that what you & your organisation do needs to be easy to understand and memorable.

It tends to be that we over complicate what we do and what the companies we run/work for do when talking to prospects, clients, friends & family. This leads to them forgetting what you do and means that you’re potentially missing out on referrals and risk not properly communicating what you do to your clients & prospects.

So I’ll start with an example which doesn’t really need much explaining as it’s implicit in the title what the roles are and pretty common knowledge.

Obvious
F1 Team: We race to be the beat all the other teams
F1 Mechanic: I keep the car running and help it go faster

If we look at most service based industries however it is not quite as simple.

Less obvious
Managed Hosting Company
We run cutting edge data centers where we keep our lastest technology servers on behalf of our clients. Our system administrators maintain servers, their operating systems, applications and keep them correctly configured.

A better way might be:
We keep some of the biggest and most complicated websites in the world online for [market name here]

Managed Hosting Engineer
I maintain linux servers for our clients and troubleshoot them and help deal with customer support issues.

A better way might be
I help keep very complicated websites stay online 24/7 and tweak them to make them load faster.

There are two key differences here:

• The corrected statements are in terms of clear end client benefit vs what is actually being done
• They are in plain english and and memorable, enough that a friend/prospect could then explain it to their boss..

So if you’re wondering what I’m doing
I help organisations tap into users on social networks and help them get those users as clients, in particular I specialise in social research and client acquisition.

What do you do?

Who are you selling to?

While doing a little bit of research for images for some sales training I’m doing today I came across an article this morning which I felt was particularly worthy of a quick post.

The article is here and what I like about it in particular is that it goes into granular detail around what you should be looking for within the sphere’s of influence and the attributes of the individuals involved..

In particular I like:
Who has a great track record?
Who has a spotty track record?
Who has a solid reputation in the company or community?
Who has a past history with other people here?

It’s really critical to understand who you’re talking to in an organisation and not only their position but also how appreciated they are. These are all things which you can find out by talking to your lead or others within the organisation you’re trying to break into.